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Where there are beating hearts and breathing bodies there is blood. Here was young blood, hot blood, blood coursing through the webs of veins that reached out for others in hopes of synchronizing into one pulsing beat of flesh.
Much had been said in the past of the blood that filled this room. Many feared it still. The lights were low, occasionally strobing. The music throbbed through the singular body of clubgoers like the blood itself. Sweat mingled with spilled drink and powder, decorative or otherwise, and clung to muscle and hair and the soles of dancing shoes. Here was all the anonymity in the world and nowhere to hide but the stalls of dark bathrooms heaving with lust. Here was a place both sacred and secular, momentous and mundane. Here you could be anything — even a vampire.
The life itself around him and the hunger curling inside were almost intoxicating enough for the vampire but he sought key and bottle regardless. It was not that he had to — even decades ago when he did it every day, he never had to — but he felt naked without substance, exposed under the blacklight and strobe without something to bring his senses down to levels almost human. Less aware, life moved around him; normally it was the opposite way, stalking through the ever-blooming garden of humanity with an eerie invisibility. Here amidst a kind of his kind, he wished to be seen but did not yet at over a century old know how. Drug and drink were the great equalizers of sensation and so he took to them as the floor shook and bass thrummed through the air, punctuated by blasts of the air cannons above. He was here. He might also have been alive.
The vampire was not out for blood tonight, nor did he need to satisfy thirst of a different kind. He came to dance. He had in his youth danced often and with great joy, many years ago, many more than those surveying him could ever guess. Rarely in his life had he danced alone. Always in step with someone else. Tonight he did not mind to dance alone, though the men around him had other plans, each longing in his own way to be close to the alluring man whose eyelashes cast shadows on his impossibly smooth face, who moved with rhythm and purpose, who allowed himself to be spun in the arms of anyone who dared get close enough to touch.
He enjoyed this game because he knew that he alone set the rules. Awareness of the power within never left his mind even on his most careless nights. It was charming to be pawed at by clueless humans who could sense there was something different about him but figured it was just ethereal beauty. They liked to rope long arms around his waist, liked to breathe in his unusual scent, liked to feel his slender body underneath his expensive clothes, liked to pass him around as he grew predictably bored with each partner. They took no offense; they all knew he was too good for them.
A flash of blond in the crowd that turned heads and suddenly the room went still. Weaving through bodies gone rigid in their erratic poses was a familiar form, caught only in a single glance by Louis, who continued to sway to a now non-existent beat. He let his eyes remain hidden behind fluttering lids and felt of a sudden a new pair of hands grabbing his waist, a sturdy body following his tempo. He brought his arms up to the strong shoulders and breathed deeply, the only sound in the room his inhale and a sharp hum that seemed far away.
Have you been waiting long for an adequate dance partner? The sultry voice murmured in his left ear. He shuddered.
Been doing just fine, he replied, voice low. He was practically speaking into his partner’s neck. Thought you were in New York this week.
A sigh in Louis’ ear. Another shiver that he tried to play off. You know I can’t stay away from home for too long.
Louis caught the truth in the lie: Lestat had never lived in San Francisco. He was speaking entirely about Louis.
As if thawing out, the room came slowly back to sound and motion, and Lestat was spinning Louis around in his arms. Louis’ head fell back against the nape of Lestat’s neck and he relished the tight grip of Lestat’s arms and hands around his own. The music was thunderous again and affected their motion, both with its infectious melody and its bodily force. They rocked against each other, memory flooding a shared but segregated mind, for though so physically close as to give up autonomous being and so mentally proximate as to sense the undiluted vibrational hum of emotion off the other, they could not read each other’s minds. But what created distance also fostered a deep intimacy based on sensation alone. Without the opportunity for telepathic communion and lacking the skill to speak feeling aloud to one another, they grasped at each other using a language all their own. The way they interacted with all others was not possible here — how could they peer into each other’s minds when a barrier prevented it? How could they tell the truth when words failed?
Lestat’s lips pressed against the fold of Louis’ neck. Here was the memory, performed without words spoken or unspoken. Here was the oneness of their being, which was once severed long ago, the wounds of its stitched return still sore, still fresh. Memory sensual. Memory loaded. Memory ripe as the day it was formed, over a century ago, several human lifetimes of touch and word both loving and violent between the mirrored images. A first touch, a first kiss, a first bite, and another years later. Lust. Heartache. Death and rebirth, life surrounding and within a flesh that is cold, cold as the night. Teeth in his neck and the flow of blood and the pulse, the pulse, the pulse of music. Breath. Blood. Life. Death. Heartbeats in sync as they always eventually are.