Blood Lust

No matter how hard and deep she appeared, there was no trace of her future in the bottom of the whisky tumbler. Twenty-three, smart as hell, very capable and in the prime of her life, Christina Saftner had the distinct feeling that at this point she should at least have settled into the comfortable, everyday routine that seemed the goal of so many people just like her. A loud cheer erupted from somewhere at the back of the bar, and she turned to see a group of women clustered around a pool table. Journalists, all of them. She'd been there too once, in that privileged circle. Now she was an editor and their boss - judged far too serious to be mixing with the likes of them. Chris nudged the glass in the direction of the bartender.

"Another paralyzer," she ordered before draining the glass. If she walked out of here now, there was nowhere else to go but home, and that was the one place she didn't want to face yet. She felt dead, hardened. Terrible thing to admit, but true nonetheless. The very thing that once made her get up in the morning now made her want to pull the covers over her head and scream. At one point, she thought it might be cynicism, brought on by the particularly grim job of being a news editor. At least one fatal story crossed her path every day - murder was a well-paying job in this godforsaken city. In the early hours of the morning, while awake in her bed alone, Chris got the distinct feeling that something in her life had to change for the better, and soon. Unaware - that's how the world must surely feel about her. She no longer covered the murders, felt the trepidation upon arriving at the scene of a crime. Instead, she spent her days in a leather swivel chair, behind a door with a glass panel which reminds her every time she looked up: 'Christina Saftner - Editor.' 

It was slowly but very surely driving her insane. Chris looked up as the barstool next to her scraped the floor, and a woman she guessed to be about twenty-eight took a seat. Her hair was the colour of night in a Poe novel, and in the glow of the bar's fluorescent lights, her skin seemed almost translucent. Chris, honey - you're getting drunk, she thought.

As if on cue, the bartender placed a fresh drink on an already soaked coaster in front of her. "This time, try to actually taste that before you throw it down your gullet," the heavyset woman behind the counter remarked, then added (hands on hips): " That goddamn newsroom is going to run you off a cliff one of these days." Chris shrugged blithely, before catching a flash of her own reflection in the mirror behind the half-full booze bottles. Her dark, somewhat curly shoulder length hair needed a decent cut, and she had to find something that would mask the dark circles underneath her even darker eyes. At least she was fit, thank god for that. Running made her feel free, relaxed and removed from the world she had the misfortune of living in.

One day, she promised herself, she would run and never stop. One day...

"You're a journalist?" Chris glanced sideways as the woman next to her raised a curious eyebrow; a shortcut way of repeating the fore mentioned question. "Used to be. Now I'm merely an editor." "That's better, isn't it?" the woman replied with a slight cock of her head. "Not from where I'm sitting," Chris smirked, as she tasted the drink. "Such self-deprecation," the woman muttered thoughtfully. Chris' smirk turned into a slow smile as she looked at her newfound source of bar-conversation.
From her accent, she guessed the woman to be from one of the finer neighbourhoods New York had to offer. The woman looked at her more intently, with an almost inquisitive nature in her luminescent green eyes. Chris felt the familiar surge of physical attraction course underneath her skin, and then damningly chastised herself. What are you, insane? In the crooked, flat on its head world you live in, you find yourself sitting at a bar and contemplating the best come-on line your drunken mind can possibly bring forth? Chris baby, you've finally lost it.

"Let me guess," the woman contemplated as she twirled her White Russian
first one way then the other in the short tumbler. "All your life, as a Journalist, you've driven yourself to uncover the truth, right the wrongs of an immoral society, let justice speak, blah, blah, and so forth. Now that you're finally what you thought you wanted to be all those years, it's suddenly not enough anymore. Life sure is a slice of shitty pie, isn't it?" Chris felt the potency of the vodka warm her insides, heard more cheers rise from the pool table, and tried to block out the fact that this stranger was hitting the nail right on its head. Somehow, it hurt more when someone else points out to you how wrong a turn your life has taken. There definitely was something to say in defence of self-deprecation. "What are you, a fortune teller?" Chris asked, not sure if she should be insulted by this woman's display of apparent confidential information, or intrigued that she was the first person in years who had the guts to tell it to her face. The woman only smiled and finished the rest of her drink.

Once inside her apartment, Chris felt somewhat out of sync, as if something was pulling at her psyche; something very real, yet unidentifiable. The bravado she displayed half an hour earlier when inviting the stranger back to her home seemed to have deserted her just when she needed it most. She went by the name of Clea, a freelance photographer whose work had appeared in Time Magazine, amongst others. There was something about her, a free-spiritedness Chris once would have recognized in herself. It was that devil-may-care-attitude that finally made Chris give in to her more base needs and invite Clea back to the apartment. Even if it would prove only a minor distraction from her life, and what waited for her the following morning, Chris welcomed the change. At this point, irresponsibility was the least of her problems. 

Chris locked the front door clumsily. For a moment the two women looked at one another, both presumably waiting for the other to facilitate some sort of action, but not wanting to interrupt the tentative trust which had developed between them in the last few minutes. Chris again realized that there was something about Clea she couldn't quite put her proverbial finger on; an almost tangible calmness and irrelevance to her every action. And she wasn't only imagining these things because of her drunken stupor, that much she knew. 

There was an even more definite and tangible edge of electricity in the air, which made Chris relax and feel the solidness of her own body. Sex was something she's always been comfortable with, never holding herself back, driven to give everything she had no matter what the situation of each encounter. The fact that every relationship Chris ever had ended in tears could always be chalked up to something much more rudimentary: the amount of time her job kept her away from home, insinuations of affairs when she came home late at night, missed Christmases. Physical attraction to someone else was one of the few things that still made her feel alive - human at least. "You have beautiful skin," Clea finally said in the darkness of the corridor. "And you're a very strange woman... but I'd still like to take you to bed," Chris replied, surprised at the unwavering boldness in her voice. 

She felt Clea's hands on her stomach through the Gap T-shirt, the only piece of clean clothing she'd been able to find earlier before heading off to the office. The feel of this strange, beyond enigmatic woman's fingertips touching her sent small bursts of delightful shivers throughout her body, culminating not as was usual only in her groin, but spreading tiny electrical fingers to every extreme ending of her body - fingertips, head, toes. One of Clea's hands found the small of her back; the swell of her more than once complimented buttocks where it finally came to firm rest, pulling Chris into her. She kissed like a woman who commanded time, who didn't exist in the same universe as Chris where wound up watches governed everything, from how long foreplay was supposed to last, to how exactly one should time the imminent arrival of one's orgasm. Her hands pulled at the slip of the long black dress Clea had on, raking it into her one hand until finally she had lifted enough to ease both hands underneath the flimsy material. 

Her skin felt like marble, and Chris had no idea what she should rather concentrate on: that, or Clea's tongue in her mouth, inviting secrets that had been dormant inside her for so very long. Their kiss finally broke and Chris looked down to see one perfect, absolutely blemish free hand slide underneath her T-shirt. Their eyes locked. Clea mocked her defences by cupping one of her breasts lightly, then lowered her head to bite the nipple gently through the stretch fabric. Chris thought she might pass out. More than eroticism or simple wanton horniness overcame her like a thick mist, giving her no choice but to keep still... wait it out. Eyes closed, she was vaguely aware of Clea's lips moving up to her neck, placing the odd kiss here and there which seemed to sear her skin with otherworldly intensity. The hand on the swell of Chris' bum pulled her closer still, then a short, sharp sting as she felt Clea bite into her skin. Chris had never really been into anything remotely sadistic where sex was concerned - her affinities simply did not stretch into that territory. 

Yet as she stood there in the darkness of her own hallway, she could feel Clea bite into her neck again, sharper than the first time, greedier, and by all means much more demanding. Hot, burning desire overcame her every thought, like it sometimes did when she smoked pot alone at home and spent hours revelling in her own body and the sensations it awoke inside of her. In that instant, there was nothing more she wanted than to feel than the sharp, slightly painful sting again - deeper, longer and with more vigour than was probably deemed appropriate. " Do you like that? " she heard Clea whisper just above her. Chris found her voice inappropriate for the occasion and simply nodded, leaning into Clea's neck as if to open herself up to more. Clea obliged her request without hesitation, and this time Chris cried out as she distinctly felt two sharp pricks on the tightly stretched skin of her neck. Clea held onto her tightly; Chris felt the earth dissolve under her feet. At that moment she was somewhere else, and had no inclination to find the apparent lack of solidity underneath her feet strange. There was nothing more she could do but give into the tremors that slowly started to shake her body as Clea sank into her flesh, deeper than she ever thought possible, deeper than she thought decent. The tremors in her body intensified along with Clea's urgent, almost frantic hold on her, and as they built up to a crescendo of what Chris thought to be ecstatic proportions, she felt the definiteness of Clea's teeth sink into her all the way, making her explode violently, pulling at Clea's hair just in order to feel something solid before she passed out, not able to feel much of anything except the long overdue bliss she'd been aching for so long. Chris woke in her bed alone, but for the note next to her bed, there was no sign that someone else had been in her bedroom the night before. 

The handwriting on the piece of paper was the same as the person who wrote it - unknown and secret, entirely inviting. She read the words slowly, out loud to no one but herself. " While unimpressed with yourself, the world thinks otherwise." Chris felt at her neck absently as she replaced the paper on the bedside table. Still tender to the touch, it made her feel alive at last.