Hunger and Longing - Chapter 1

Mark

The girl’s kisses are rough, and the alcohol overwhelms her natural flavor. I can not stress this enough: when you make out with a vampire, trying to taste nice goes a long way towards making us feel up to it.

Still, we are already locked in the club’s bathroom stall (female side, I wouldn’t dare brave the sanitary catastrophe waiting for me on my gender’s own), she is pressing herself against me with barely restrained need and I haven’t gotten laid since Lydia broke up with me—there is no backing off, at this point.

I shove her against the wall with as much force as she had used against me and she moans in my mouth, her trembling lips arousing me further. My right hand runs up her thigh and I have my first surprise of the night.

“I am not wearing any,” with an impish grin, she confirms my discovery—it looks like I have free access.

I take the invitation for what it is and shove my fingers in her already eager slit. Normally, I am a much more foreplay-oriented guy, but when a girl straight up drags you into the bathroom and she doesn’t wear any unmentionables… well, I may be dense, but even I can get thatkind of hint.

Her reaction is even more vocal than I expected, and I have to silence her with another kiss. Her tongue rubs up against mine and I finally start getting into the rhythm of things. Her hands run through my hair and push me towards her neck, making me nibble on it while her hips undulate, fucking herself on my fingers. Her pulse races against my lips—against my teeth—and I feel myself harden. She is swift in claiming that victory.

“Mmmm, it looks like the big bad vampire wants to come out to play.” Her fingers accompany her words and I find myself with my pants around my ankles and my cock in the palm of her hand. She grabs me forcefully, and I let out a low moan that is part grunt. Pleased with my reaction, she flees my own fingers and drops to her knees.

Looking into my eyes, that damned impish grin on her lips as if I was her plaything, she slowly lets her tongue peek out from between her lips. With deliberate slowness, she comes closer and closer to my glans, promising without delivering.

“Say it.” She looks at me, millimeters from making contact and releasing my tension, her grip on my manhood softening to feather-light touches that just make me realize how much I really want this, how much I really want to lose myself in sex and forget about Lydia for a while.

“Say what?” She looks pleased by my answer, and her lips quirk upwards as she gives a poking lick to the underside of my glans. I shudder.

“Say you want me to suck your cock. Say the Lord of the Night wants me to give him a blowjob and blow his mind, all in a single pack.” She laughs, and her breath tickles me in a most intimate way. But she has ruined the mood.

“Really? You haven’t ever read Dracula?” Lydia’s hair tickled my nose as she lazily drew circles on my naked chest. It was almost morning, and I could feel the sun-drowsiness creeping on me even as the afterglow kept me happily inebriated with her scent.

“What’s the point? Do you want me to nitpick how much the novel got wrong with my kind? It would be like Sherlock Holmes trying to stomach an episode of CSI … Miami.” She giggled. She had the most amazing way of doing that simple thing, as if all the girlishness hidden behind her bookworm façade had decided long ago to make an outlet for itself, and that outlet became sound and full-body motion.

“Come on, we are talking about one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time, not a show about dead-baby-comedy one-liners. Surely, you must be curious—I mean, contemporary horror-literature has…” She trailed off, her finger stopping on my chest. When she didn’t think about it, she could fool herself into believing I was just slightly cold; but she knew how much I spent on scalding hot baths, how much I overdressed and the kind of gadgets I stuffed into my clothes just to keep up a thermal illusion, a hint of normalcy. She knew my body was dead.

I felt the familiar temptation, the tugging of her mind’s reluctance on my own psyche and how easy it would be to smother it, to take that tiny seed of a thought and squash it. As always, I decided not to face temptation, and I fled from it to the most comfortable place I knew: Lydia.

I tugged her chin upwards and, without a single word, kissed her. It was a slow kiss, a tender thing made of caresses and longing, and, after few seconds, she became my partner in it. I don’t know when we went further, when the kiss grew into love-making, but the sun was already up when we finally stopped, and Lydia’s smile reminded me of its light, of how radiant it was the last time I could look at it without apprehension.

“Where did that come from?” She asked, full of innocence and childish marvel. Full of—and I could feel it, literally feel it—her love for me.

I hesitated. I always did, when deciding whether to tell her how much I wanted her, how much I could make her want me. As always, I fled.

“I guess talking about Dracula turns me on,” I lied, while kissing the top of her head.

She giggled, again, and I could hear the smile in her words: “If it gets me sex like this, I will write my very own doctoral thesis on the Lord of the Night.”

And in that bathroom stall, in the very same club where I met Lydia, the impatient girl whose name I don’t know has decided to coax an answer from me. By sucking the tip of my cock.

“Come on,” suck, “don’t you want,” lick, “more than this?” She swallows my cockhead, madly swirling her tongue around it, the suction daring me to thrust my hips and ram myself into her throat. I twitch forward, and she backs off.

“None of that. Not till you ask for it. Come on, don’t you want me to swallow your whole rod, to lick your balls while you fuck my tight throat? Don’t you want me to swallow around your cockhead and squeeze every last drop of cum you can shoot out?”

Oh yes, I want her to. I want it so bad.

But, unfortunately for her, what I don’t want is to feel like she is playing with me. I don’t want to feel like she is in control. Because she isn’t.

I run my hands through her hair, and none too gently tug her head backward. A whine of protest—whether about my rough treatment or about being deprived of her new favorite popsicle, I’ll never know—starts leaving her throat, but I interrupt her halfway, trapping her in a liplock while my hands take the underside of her thighs and pull her upwards. ‘She isn’t wearing anything’, I remember with half a smirk. And I sink into her.

She gasps. She can’t help it, not the first time she feels like this, filled with meat that is not scorching hot, my hips colliding with hers while I hold her up effortlessly. For a moment, she panics, aware of how strong I really am, how little her teasing and taunting really matter when I decide otherwise. She panics, although unknowingly, because a part of her also feels that her body is not the only one being invaded, and in that moment of openness, when her mind races and broadcasts her muddled emotions, I drink from her panic and her excitement, from her lust and her revulsion, from her desire and her fear. And then, I free her lips, I move my hips, and I make her scream.

I keep her suspended in midair and let gravity push her against me while I start fucking her with all I’ve got. Each time I thrust upwards, her whole body bounces on my cock and a wordless gasp escapes her as I bottom inside of her. And, much as I would like to feel like, for once, I am in control, I fear I am losing it. She tightens around me and her whole body embraces me, her still covered breasts pressing against my chest with heat and sweat, her pussy coiling around my shaft in a way that makes me desperate for another taste even as I pull myself back for the next thrust. I am not in control and neither is she: sex is.

It cannot last. As much as I’d love to keep pounding myself into her till my world is nothing but a couple of messy bodies reeking of each other, I’ve still got some very human limits that I am fast approaching—and one advantage over non-psychic lovers I have, is that I know she isn’t far behind. Maybe I shouldn’t care that much about whether or not a one-night stand leaves this stall satisfied, but hey, my male pride is one of those human emotions I am still trying to hold onto, no matter how fragile it has always been.

So I push her against the wall and I keep her pinned against it with renewed fervor, my hips almost a blur as my movements intensify and make sure her breathing is as erratic as her hold on conscious thought. The girl tries to look into my eyes, to send a wordless message, but her body betrays her as she rolls her eyes back and lets out a howl that signals her orgasm. And I let myself loose.

My consciousness is violently torn apart and a bolt of pure pleasure, of overwhelming sensation, shoots up my spine. I thrust and I push, trying to get even a single millimeter more of me inside of her even as I feel something give, and suddenly I am spasming and twitching, filling her already flooded pussy with my own cum. She kisses me, gasping, and I let her, because her lips block my own words.

Lydia.

God, I hate myself when I get this emo.

Both our bodies are covered in her sweat and other excretions—to wit: saliva, Cowper’s fluid, sperm and … oh, a detailed inventory would probably gross me out, and my mood is, although insufferably whiny over my ex, at least slightly improved. Hell, I may even be smiling, if that unfamiliar tightness on the corner of my lips isn’t a grimace.

“That was … whoa.”

“Yeah, once you go fang, you never go back.” She giggles at my idiotic joke, which has always been my own metric to gauge if a woman was or not satisfied in a romp. Of course, seeing as I am now capable of tasting emotions, I should probably drop it. It has sometimes backfired. Spectacularly.

“I could see that being the case,” her hips wiggle a bit around me and my semi-hard member twitches in willingness. “Mmmm, I’d love to go a second round, but…” She wraps her hands around my neck, looking at me with expectation.

“But?” I think I know what comes next. But I hope I am wrong.

“But… Well, you’ve satisfied me, yet I am sure there’s something else you want, something that you need, to feel truly sated.” And with that, she tilts her head, presenting her neck, and something roars inside me even as I feel my vision dim red, even as I feel the hunger take hold of me and draw my mouth ever nearer to her.

And I remember the first time I made love to Lydia.

I had met her in a club, a bookish, shy thing, completely out of her element, with her finger keeping place on a worn copy of ‘Paradise Lost’. It was obvious she was there to see what the big deal was all about, to see if sex with a vampire was all it was cracked up to be, and it was only my luck that made it so I was there that night to capitalize on that chance. We started talking, and I may have or not influenced her to allay her apprehensions on the matter. Soon, we ended up at my place.

I gave her the tour, explaining how the little things—the domotic inventions like the 4K windows that showed an almost life-like exterior (any exterior) or the heat detectors that warned me when I dipped too far below the thermal uncanny valley—made un-life easier, more adjustable to the modern world. I bragged a bit, because, after all, they were my own designs and I would like a girl to have sex with me because she was dazzled with my achievements, not because she was addicted to trashy romance novels. I didn’t know how wrong I was with my assumptions, or how much Lydia had already exceeded my expectations.

Lydia reads. A lot. She takes in words like most people take in air, and, although she has digested plenty of crap (“Haven’t you heard about Sturgeon’s law, Mark? The remaining ten per cent is to die for”), she has little patience for things she knows in advance that won’t measure up to her standards. And that does not only apply to books.

She wanted to try this, to try me, but she would not have accompanied just any Homo Nocturna (or whatever the pseudo-scientific community has taken to calling us nowadays) to his abode. Most of all, because she has a sense of self-preservation, but also because it would be… distasteful. Casual sex is one thing, casual sex with someone you don’t like as a person… She knew she wouldn’t enjoy that, and so, she got to know me. Far more intimately than I would have ever expected.

So, she took in my words, understanding them better than I expected a non-techie to, and she understood what lay beneath them: my need to impress her, to make this personal; and she knew that, even though I would be glad enough to take a petite, bookish redhead in and give her a night to remember, I would later feel that it wasn’t enough—just as she would. We already had a connection, but it was deepening by the second with mutual understanding. Which didn’t mean we did not want to screw each other’s brains out. That was, after all, a really good way to get to know another person.

The conversation naturally came to a stop and we just stood in front of my fake floor to ceiling windows. She looked into my eyes, making me feel as if she was the one capable of peering into my mind, and kissed me for the second time. I forgot to breathe. Literally.

Hunger for her overcame me, and I felt her slight body under the palm of my hands, trembling in anticipation. There was no striptease to tempt each other, to drive us wild with anticipation. Instead, our clothes lay forgotten on the floor, and I have no memory of how they got there. I felt her skin on mine, and what little curiosity I had for her own garments completely vanished.

I admit I had been tempted, when I saw her standing alone in the crowded club, to play with her for a bit and use her to feed, but my new impulses were completely forgotten in lieu of far more familiar ones. I nibbled on her neck with no thought on the fragrant blood racing beneath my lips. I drank from her lips with hunger for her and nothing else, and I laid her on the bed to drink from a more direct source.

My mouth caressed down her body, briefly pausing atop her soft breasts, almost biting her nipples while caressing them with my tongue, licking between them down the middle line of her torso and laying the softest kisses down her belly. Soon, I was almost at my destination and I felt her anticipation as she drew in a gasp of air. She was eager for it, but I wanted her to be desperate—as I was.

I detoured, softly massaging her inner thighs and kissing each spot that my fingers traced. Her aroma was overpowering, beckoning me to the union of her legs, but I resisted the siren’s call, enjoying the moment and the way her left knee jerked upwards whenever my teasing got too tantalizingly close to my final destination. I was completely absorbed by my task, my mind opening up to glimpses of pleasure broadcast by the beautiful redhead laying in front of me just as my senses drew in every sensation of soft skin and overpowering scent they could process. I didn’t realize it at the time, and it is unbearably sappy to even think about it in these terms, but, even though I still hadn’t properly started to love Lydia, she was making me happy. Just by being there, by enjoying being with me, by feeling pleasure from me, Lydia made me happy. That’s what I miss the most.

She had started crawling up the bed, as if fleeing from a mouth that didn’t deliver what it promised to, and I climbed atop it in pursuit of her, my lips never leaving a pleasurable spot of her body for more than a second of torturing absence. She finally stopped when, both of us completely laid out on the gigantic mattress that I had self-indulgently purchased, I relented and kissed her lower lips.

Her lungs suddenly deflated in an almost scream as I finally tasted her inflamed lips, red with desire, and her body trashed atop my bed in a peak of pleasure that shook her to her core. I couldn’t resist, the tangy flavor flooding my mind as I drew myself upwards and enveloped her clitoris with my lips, lightly sucking on it just as my fingers started probing her readiness, almost as eager to accept them as I was of thrusting them inside her canal. Then, she surprised me.

I must say, surprising a mind reader who is actively tasting your thoughts in search of your most minute reactions is no easy feat. She probably just managed it by accident, flooding me with raw sensation that overpowered the faint whisper of her deliberate thoughts. She probably managed it by accident, yes, but in our time together she perfected the trick—to my endless delight and frustration. In this case, it was the former: I almost had no warning as her hips thrust upwards and sideways and, suddenly, she was laying besides me, her head almost on my hip, her hand and mouth reaching and… Oh. I almost blanked out.

Lydia was, by no means, an expert cocksucker, but I had made her eager. She took me by my root and her mouth engulfed my head, covering me with saliva and scorching heat. I was still attuned to her, and the jolt of excitement she felt as she engulfed me and felt the balance of power shift towards her shoot up my spine, competing for attention with my very own urgent sensations of pleasure and powerlessness. I, once again, forgot to breathe, and that’s the only reason I didn’t smell something until my sight registered it: Lydia’s slit, lips open and dripping honey as her hips undulated, almost touching my face as if she wanted to fuck herself on my lips. I grabbed her ass, my fingers sinking in delightfully soft flesh, and I thrust my tongue inside her.

I don’t know who came first. I really don’t. Normally, I would have been embarrassed about finishing so early, but the way Lydia groaned her pleasure as my cock suddenly discharged between her lips, the taste of her pussy as it shook around my hardened tongue … It was quite clear none of us was disappointed by the experience. And I wasn’t going soft any time soon.

It’s a sad fact of the undead experience that the refractory period is as much of an annoyance to vampires (and their associates) as it is to any human of the male persuasion (and their associates), but I was still quiveringly hard. Something about the situation demanded I didn’t stop and, for once, my body decided not to betray the trust bestowed upon it. Lydia was still shaking—as was I—but she didn’t protest as I spun her body and laid her beneath my own. Her eyes pierced my own and, without blinking, almost drowning in her piercing sea-blue, I sank myself inside of her.

I felt her flesh parting around mine—accepting, wanting—and her gaze held me the whole time, almost as intense as the hot and wet grasp I felt around me, tightening with every further centimeter. I finally bottomed out, our pelvises mashing together as if wanting to overcome even that final barrier and she, once again, reached upwards and kissed me. As her tongue and mine twirled around each other, we started fucking.

We didn’t make love that night. We both felt too much lust and desire, and what we did can only be described with a four-letter word. Still, the seeds of what we would become were there, and it showed in soft, panting words; in caresses that suddenly slowed down and tasted the other’s skin as if asking for permission, and, most of all, it showed in eyes that held the other’s with an almost unbearable intensity, eyes that demanded and gave. Eyes that wanted.

I closed mine as I hugged Lydia and lifted her body off the mattress, mashing her breasts against my chest and feeling her nipples drag across my skin as I slowly fucked her while sitting back, my arms holding her up in a show of strength that was still new to the both of us. That was the second time I came. This time there was no doubt I was the first one to climax, but Lydia wasn’t far behind.

My mind blanked and I felt myself standing. My vision no longer registered motion and I just had picture-brief glimpses of Lydia’s face, mouth open in a scream that couldn’t overpower the roaring sound between my ears as I emptied myself inside of her, orgasm rushing out of me in liquid fire. My knees buckled and I sank back to my bed, my senses returned in time to capture Lydia’s look of open-mouthed surprise as her own pleasure peaked. With almost no strength left, I managed to keep thrusting my slowly deflating penis inside of her, accompanying her in her own climax. It felt like hours till our hips finally stopped buckling, chasing the ghost of our sensations. It felt like days till we finally recovered the gift of speech.

“That was… wow.”

“Yeah.”

We looked at each other: two obviously smart and educated individuals who had just had what was probably the best sex of their lives, and that was the only thing our well-fucked brains could manage to come up with to commemorate the fact. We couldn’t help it: we laughed our asses off.

It was one of those draining laughs, the ones that leave you breathless and contented, unable and unwilling to come up with anything to follow it up. And, although I couldn’t be left breathless anymore, the contentment was the same I had always felt. This time, I was the one who kissed her.

Warm, lingering, with a promise of more to come. I had started to feel those first hints of something beyond attraction. You know the ones: when your hand finds itself almost reaching to touch that one person, just because it suddenly felt the need of her feel and didn’t bother to contact the more socially aware parts of your mind; or when you do something stupid just to make her look your way, because you’d rather have annoyance on her gaze than it being directed at something other than yourself. Those childish, stupid moments when your hormones flood your brain and make you act like a fool before you realize that, yes, that person is special to you, and you want her by your side as much as possible and, in fact, screw possible with a rusty fork: you want her forever and beyond, and there’s nothing reality can do to convince you that it has any say in the matter.

And then three months go by, and reality tells you that, actually, it may have something to say regarding a certain question.

Fuck reality. With a rusty fork.

But then, still giddy from sex and intimacy, still drunk on sea-blue eyes and sweet skin and riding the wave of euphoria, I could not even begin to conceive of a world where Lydia would not be between my arms, her breathing slowly calming down as she languidly nuzzled the point where my neck meets my shoulder. I was happy, and my mind, still open to her and her reactions, felt her own happiness. I could not ask for more. Or so I thought.

Slowly, we regained hold of our senses and a conversation started. It was composed of sweet nothings, tentative questions and answers that weren’t at all sure that they could improve upon our pleased silence. It was clumsy, filled with words almost said and almost silences that we couldn’t hold long enough for them to be shared. It was, at times, awkward as hell. I loved every second.

Of course, then came the time of the inevitable separation. I was a one-night stand, and those things tend to get awkward in the morning, and, while I wasn’t in any hurry to get Lydia to leave, I was sure that she wouldn’t be showing up to her job in a mini-skirt and far too uncomfortable heels. At least, not if she didn’t want to break her neck after her first attempt at climbing a step-ladder to reach the books in the high shelves. She needed to go home. And we were stalling.

With a wry smile that conveyed everything, Lydia started getting dressed. I must admit that, as little attention as I had paid to her undressing, I couldn’t be bothered to do anything other than stare as she unrolled her light stockings up her milky white legs; as her pale flesh was cruelly hidden from me button after slow button. It was a manner of reverse striptease, and it was as fascinating as it was frustrating. And then, far too soon, she was done, and she stared up at me awkwardly as I stood naked by my door having been almost gentlemanly in accompanying her.

There was a pause where we were supposed to say goodbye.

“Mark …” She hesitated, and I hoped that her next words would be a variation on ‘can I have your number’, but she, once again, surprised me. “Mark… Are you hungry?”

She wasn’t asking me to have breakfast with her, I knew that much. And I knew it because her mind broadcast uncertainty and fear, because her voice wavered on the word ‘hungry’, but, most of all, because she was a very smart and perceptive woman who had just asked a bloodthirsty monster if he wanted to feed. Of course she was scared: she wasn’t braindead.

But I returned her gaze, looked straight into her sea-blue eyes, and saw she didn’t look away. They say courage isn’t the absence of fear, but the willingness to act in front of it; up until that point in my life, I don’t think I had seen courage. Not the meaningful kind, at least, not the quiet, determined one. I answered her: “Yes, I am. I always am.”

She swallowed. She didn’t blink, she didn’t look away, she didn’t turn towards the door—towards her escape—but she swallowed nervously while looking into my eyes, prodding, searching, and I felt her mind close upon itself with a resolve that was new to my recently acquired tastes, with thoughts tangy with metal and unyielding, smooth firmness. And she cocked her head to the side. And I saw red.

Her clothes felt rough against my naked skin, her breath was scalding and her mind was panicked air and fire swirling around iced determination. I had embraced her, violently mashing her against my body and she was becoming the center of my world, my senses centering themselves on the first person to ever offer me… that. I had subsisted on blood bank donations for almost my entire existence as a vampire, never “hunting,” never taking from others, never since… But here was Lydia, in my grasp. And I wouldn’t let go.

I dipped my head and her scent overwhelmed me. The traces of our passion lingered over her skin, but there was much more than that. There was a hint of dusty old pages and new ink, there was an echo of a home-garden with spearmint and basil, and underneath all the hints and phantoms there was a scent that was purely her, a citric yet sweet aroma that spoke of a love for the sun and laying on green grass, that spoke of long walks accompanied by her thoughts and the words of others running from her eyes to her mind, that spoke of curiosity and quiet daring and earnestness and warm caring.

And I sank my teeth into her.

And Lydia disappeared.

That first moment when my fangs pierced her skin, when her life throbbed and exploded into my mouth, that first moment… That… I have no words.

One moment, she was the center of my world. The next, she wasn’t there, completely eclipsed by what she contained. A drop of blood ran over my tongue and I could taste the possibility of a childhood memory that never was. I swallowed, and that possibility became a thirst for life, a myriad of worlds that could have been, that should have been. And there came the next drop. And the next. And I devoured lives, and worlds and futures and never-pasts. My body and my mind were overwhelmed, but the red thing that had started living inside of me when I was turned was anything but. It was ravenous, and mere worlds wouldn’t sate it. Not while there were more to take.

And then I heard a gasp. For the first time in what felt like eons, something intruded on the ecstasy of marvelous depredation that had overtaken me, something which belonged to a realm far more minuscule yet far nearer than the one I was drowning myself in. The gasp, the noise, was followed by a warm throbbing, and I remembered I had lips and that they were pressed against something soft and yielding. I felt something shudder between my arms, and, at last, a word finally emerged from the maelstrom that I used to call my mind. Lydia.

And the uncountable possibilities were surpassed by that single fact.

She became an anchor that steadied me, a handhold that allowed me to climb out of my swirling frenzy. She became real, and far more substantial than anything that had overwhelmed me a few seconds ago. And I came back to myself. I should have been afraid, afraid of what I had almost done, of how easy it would have been to let myself keep taking until there was nothing left—and, of course, a part of me was—but, for the first time in months, I was sated, rid of a thirst and a hunger I never knew were gnawing at my sanity. I was composed, filled with a deep satisfaction, an almost… peace. I smiled, and realized that my lips were still pressed against a slender neck.

I licked at her wound, sensually dragging the tip of my tongue between the taut muscles that pulsed beneath her skin, up the ridge of her jawbone and, finally, prodding between her gasping lips, I received unspoken permission and I kissed her as deeply as I could.

She stayed the night.

She left while I was asleep, the sun depriving me of strength and consciousness and, just as I was rousing myself, I heard the bell of my door ringing and I opened it to find an auburn-haired girl smiling uncertainly, an overstuffed backpack hanging off her left shoulder and a budding potted plant precariously balanced against her hip..

And then began the happiest three months of my life.

Or unlife, if you want to be picky about it, but that bar wasn’t that hard to beat.

You see, it’s not only that I fell for Lydia as fast as I did. It also isn’t that, thanks to my mental snooping, I was quite certain that the feelings were completely mutual. What really made that night a turning point for me was that, for the first time since I became what I am, somebody really trusted me. Not because I was still human in their eyes, and not because they didn’t understand the risks. Not because they felt there was no danger, but because, in spite of the danger, in spite of me no longer being human, Lydia believed that I was still me. That I wouldn’t willingly hurt her. That I was… worth the risk.

And here, in the bathroom stalls of the same club where I met that red-haired bundle of quiet energy, that shining mind that always wanders across a thousand and one worlds—where I seduced and was seduced in such a complete way—this other redhead has dared intrude on that memory, offering without understanding, playing a part for a thrill that she doesn’t know could get her killed.

So I lean against her, intruding on her space, and I let my mouth softly drag against the edges of her ear. She shudders with anticipation, expecting the fabled vampire’s kiss, and, for a fleeting moment, my unguarded mind tastes her post-coital bliss being shoved apart by a new thrill that makes her breath hitch. And then I speak those three little words that a man so rarely says to a woman he just fucked:

“You bloody idiot.”

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And here it is, the third Chef’s choice. This is definitely a Patreon exclusive, and I would ask you not to comment on it outside of here and the Discord, because… *sigh*

I’ve had this thing unfinished for about two years.

The story is that, quite some time ago, I wrote the script for a porn game. I had to adhere to a few basic concepts (it was when True Blood was in vogue, in case it wasn’t clear), and my original concept was repurposed to fit the guidelines more strictly. Still, something about the characters stayed with me, and I thought about how their lives would have gone after the game, how the world would be like, in which ways it would actually be original.

Cue a few years, and I decided to give them a continuation.

The original producer agreed to make a free game from the first chapter to promote the novel if I ever finished it, but, well, the thing is, I’ve never written a novel, and I’m dangerously… let’s just say perfectionistic. Or a bit of a coward. One of those two.

I didn’t know if I had it in me to write a full novel, and I always had something more urgent to do, something more immediately important.

And so two years passed. And this first chapter still weighs on me.

So… I have to thank all of you. Because your trust and comments these past couple of months, since I started posting regularly and opened this Patreon, have made me realize how much I’d been holding back all these years, how much more I could give, how much more I could grow.

How much more I could offer.

So, this is the third Chef’s choice for the month, and what I offer: something that I could regret, brought back to life. My first original novel.

I will keep posting chapters on Patreon, and, when I finish it, I will publish it.

I promise.

And I thank you.