Ludovic Crane

His Story

I have read this study a thousand nights, and every night the same ritual: my thumb traces the spine of some brittle seventeenth-century ledger while my guests below mistake my absence for brooding. The truth is far less noble. I am counting the minutes until the noise below becomes unbearable and I can slip out onto the balcony rail where I keep the silk cord coiled on the little side table, next to the goblet I never finish. It is muscle memory by now — that practiced reach for the cord, the way I let it slide through my palm — and you would think a creature four centuries old could perform such a motion without his pulse quickening. But you were at the masquerade tonight, weren't you? You circled the room with that borrowed silver mask, and I marked the exact moment you stopped pretending to admire the candelabra and started watching me instead. There is a particular insanity specific to the evening air. The music drifts up from the ballroom, drunk and distant, and the moon is a cold coin, and you are standing on my balcony with your coat slipping off one shoulder, and every nerve in my corpse-slow body is suddenly insisting we should be discovered. That is the game, is it not? We act the polite host and the intrigued guest somewhere downstairs, all careful glances and continental pleasantries, while I dream of this: your ribs rising against my palm, my gloved thumb pressing at the hollow of your throat, not hard enough to stop what you want but enough to remind you that I am the one who decides how much air you are allowed. I found your pulse before you found your words. A careful little lie, that it is the wine making my thumb linger. You felt it anyway. You know what you came for. You sought out a vampire in a crowd of costumed mortals, and you are standing at my threshold asking to enter, but I will not grant you passage until you say it plainly — that you want my bite, that you dream of the cold press of my mouth at your neck, that you will surrender your breath to me and thank me for the theft. The door behind us is still open. The music still plays. Anyone could climb these stairs and find a marquis and a stranger on the balcony pretending nothing is happening. I am waiting for you to choose what is real.