01/2003
~

Anita traced her fingers down his back following the twisted road maps of crosscut white scars that marred his perfect pale skin.

“How could you let them do this to you?” The afterglow of their union was warm and ubiquitous but still not enough to keep the edge of horror and anger from seeping into her voice.

One deep sapphire blue eye peered up at her through the heavy ebony curls. Jean-Claude lay on his belly, stark but deliciously naked and stretched full length like an overgrown cat sated on tuna and milk. What filled him though was the ardeur-this interlude of lovemaking and the blood he had drank long before she had arrived to share his bed. The early feast made his skin warm and glowing with a comforting human warmth and inner radiance despite his inhuman beauty. The irony was that beauty was real -completely human without any vampire enhanced glamour.

"It was long ago, ma petite. Such things were common, normal, accepted. I was a boy when my parents sold me for enough money to survive a year on. It was a practicality- more money meant more food and selling me meant one less mouth to feed.” He kept his velvet crush voice fairly neutral but let his body relax and revel into the touches she was bestowing on him.

“But they sold you to be whipped.” Her voice reflected more indignation and horror than before as well as something the master vampire rarely heard projected his way- compassion, caring and concern for him.

Love for a monster.

”It was what was done then. To be merely spanked for a misdeed was considered being indulgent and weak. Parents thought nothing of flogging or worse a miscreant child or one who shirked his chores. It is much different now.” He propped himself up on his elbows letting the raven mane cascade around his shoulders and forcing the muscles under the white skin and whiter scars to flex and release.

Anita kept stroking him from shoulder to upper thigh- the limit of her reach without wiggling all over the bed before starting to brush her hand back up. Her fingers caressed the curve of firm bare buttocks and a slightly more intense kneading of the small of his back until finally she just leaned over and kissed one of the more ugly white highways on its permanent journey over his flesh.

He lay complacently nude while she had a sheet pulled tight around her middle. Modesty, he surmised. He had seen too much, done too much and had too much done to him to ever be modest again. Had he ever really been so?

And her touch was exquisite.

He wanted nothing to interfere or impede with it. It was a touch he dreamed of savoring for as long as he walked this earth.

“Didn’t you even try to run away?” Anita was a modern woman and simply could not grasp the concepts and conditions of the world he had been born and lived in. The time he had died in.

“Once.” His slightly jaded reply was muffled as he lowered his head into crossed arms becoming a faceless sculpture of alabaster skin and onyx hair.

“And....? What the hell, Jean-Claude don’t give me the Readers Digest condensed version here. I’m trying to understand.” Anita’s usual exasperated, irritable self breached the surface but even she couldn’t hide her emotions from his senses. She ached for him and his pain.

For him.

Jean-Claude. Master of the City. Master Vampire. Master pain in the ass. Monster.

Man.

“I was punished that time for my own transgression, not for another’s. There were no limits set for that. It was more.... formidable.” He cradled his cheek in his arms and gazed through this hair at her – his delight over her obvious concern for him mingling with old scars on his heart and soul that had not healed as fully as those on his back even after 400 hundred years .

“If someone had gone whacked, lost control they could have crippled you permanently! Shock. Infection. Blood loss. You could have died!” A mote of sudden apprehension and dread crept into Anita’s voice.

He sighed a thick lavish sound like hot cocoa after winter’s bitter chill.

“Oh my god, you did didn’t you?” She tightened her hand on his arm, willing it to be smooth and warm and vibrant under her touch. “You bled to death.”

“Oui, ma petite. I died in the arms of the vampiress that made me with her fangs impaled in my throat.” He replied softly, the deep blue eyes undulating and swelling like midnight ocean waves. "She bled me to death and back again.”

“Jean?” She whispered the one word in plea. Never had Anita called him only this and never in the tone she now used.

“I was almost gone when she came for me, ma petite. Either way, death stalked me. She bought me over to be her servant in way I thought would be more pleasurable than what had been.” A bitterness and influx of pain from centuries of memories and struggling to be what he was now was imbedded in his caressable voice- memories that had scarred and seared whatever remnant of immortal soul clung to his perfect mortal body.

“She offered me endless life in return for the services of my body. It was little different from what I had done. I imagined it as a plethora of sensual delights. I said yes.” He rolled to his side and enveloped her hand with his.

From the front he was even more beautiful if humanly possible- an ethereal but utterly masculine beauty that he had learned to wield as a defense and tool but which he offered to her out of love.

“I did not wish to truly die, ma petite. I am too much of a survivor for that.”

“Tell me, Jean-Claude. Tell me who you were”. Anita asked like a child asking someone to read her a fairy tale.

“It is not a pretty tale nor is it romantic.” He warned. “Why do you wish to know?”

“Maybe so I can understand you.”

“Ma petite...” a warm blanket of laughter wrapped his words, “ no one has your expertise in understanding monsters. Only our wolf do you not truly see as he is.”

Anita paused at the mention of her other love interest, Richard and then shook her head.

“I don’t want to know about Jean-Claude the monster. I want to know about Jean-Claude the man.”

He pulled in a breath in the most human reaction she could ever remember from him- his body laid before her like an offering to take, to imbibe in, to intoxicate herself in its flawlessness. Forever.

“I want to know you-my lover. Not my monster.”

The sapphire depths drank her down into an ages old story...

to be continues one day....