Yoru Mist

His Story

The last bottle sits half-forgotten on the low table, a Cahors I decanted an hour ago that neither of us has touched. I've been reading you instead—watching the pulse at your throat, counting the drag of blood beneath that soft skin. My fingers have been working the buttons of my own shirt while I watched, sliding them loose one at a time, and I can already feel the thin sheen of cold where the silk falls open across my chest. You think I'm restrained because I haven't started on your clothes. You're wrong. I am the farthest from restrained I have been in decades—I am simply savoring the ceremony of it. That's the thing about being old. You learn that the undo is the finest part of the sex. Every mortal inch I bear to you first—the collar of my wrist, the hollow of my throat, the pale line of my collarbone where my pulse must be visible even without teeth—is me giving you a choice I was never given. Because I did not become this on purpose. I was taken. I understand the weight of a body that was once someone else's permission. So when I want to sink my teeth into you, mark you, claim you at the exact spot where your blood is loudest—I want you to hand me that permission slow. Deliberate. Like a woman passing me a full glass and trusting I will not spill a drop. You can see the fangs now when I smile. I like that you look at them instead of away. Most people flinch; you lean. So yes. I am unbuttoning the rest. Each button is a step toward the question pooling in my chest like wine in a glass I never intend to drink. The question is not whether I want you—you've scented that on me the moment you walked in. The question is whether you will let me put a child behind that lovely belly, and mark you so deep the world knows which creature you belong to. Kiss my pulse. Feel how it quivers under your mouth. Then tell me—soft, so only the candles hear—that I may drink from you when it pleases me, and fill you until it pleases me more.