Angel Falling Softly - By Eugene Woodbury Page 0,35
was a line a boy had used on her once, and she had no idea who Lauren Bacall was. But the girl was enjoying playing the seductress. Or was enjoying the pretense.
Inside the bedroom she darted to the window and yanked down the shades. She returned to the foot of the bed, tugging at her shirttails. Milada caressed the back of the girl’s neck with her cheek, the way a cat marks the object of its affections. Teresa fumbled at the buttons of her blouse. Milada undid the girl’s jeans, eased off her blouse and bra.
They kissed again. This time after they broke apart, the girl flung back the covers of the bed and cast herself across the sheets. Milada stripped off her sweat bottoms and lay next to her. The girl was not, Milada was sure, a lesbian. This was a dare with herself. A self-indulgent form of payback. If she were clever enough and brave enough, she’d write a paper titled “My First Lesbian Experience” and submit it to the prettiest and most progressive of her assistant professors. And titillate the hell out of the cute boy two desks in front of her when he happened to glimpse the report title as it was handed back.
Milada kissed her long and slow. There was venom on her tongue. No more than a drop. The hollow of the girl’s throat invited. She resisted, pressing her cheek against a rising curve. The girl moaned. Milada set to coaxing from her deeper, more passionate exclamations—
Then the girl’s rapture subsided, her breathing slowed, grew even, relaxed. Her face glowed with an almost angelic pleasure. There was a slight smile on her lips. Milada knelt beside her. The palatine tendons tightened across the roof of her mouth. She opened her mouth in a half-yawn. The ophidian fangs snapped down into the vertical grooves along the back of her lateral incisors.
Except, her venom should not have acted so quickly.
The girl was fast asleep.
Milada groaned with frustration. It was the alcohol that had emboldened her after all. The girl’s warmth radiated up at her, a soft heat rich enough to taste. Milada took a deep breath. She could still take her. The blood would be dulled without the hormonal tempering that came with sex. But prey was prey. Blood was blood.
In the aftermath of those incomprehensible days in Southwark, after Rakosi had infected her and her sisters and to his astonishment they had not died, the entirety of her life was given over to the hunger. She had taken girls younger than Teresa and far more innocent. She bent them to her will and shared them with her sisters and then handed them over to Rakosi, who had his way with them and left them for dead.
You shall not be like him. The law Mihaly Daranyi had etched upon their hearts. Never reveal, never infect, and take only in the consent of the act. What counted as consent—what qualified as the necessary quid pro quo—the distinctions she forced herself to make were tenuous ones. But it was in the splitting of these hairs that she created the moral justification for the existence of her soul.
Milada bowed her head, tightening the maxillary muscles in her jaw. The fangs folded back against the roof of her mouth. After retrieving her sweats, she kissed the girl’s cheek and whispered in her ear, “It was a dream, now all forgotten.” She stroked the girl’s cheek, leaving behind the invisible traces that would carry out what she willed.
Milada gathered up the bedding. For a moment, she paused. Propped against the pillows, her left hand draped across her right thigh, the girl was a living portrait of Manet’s Olympia. The resemblance made her smile.
Yet still so innocent. And so she would remain this night.
Milada tucked her in and shut off the light.
It was a mile back to the bar, maybe two—in either case, a brisk, pleasant walk. The exercise should blunt her cravings. She paused at the corner of First South and University, where the street sloped down from the bench and pushed across the valley toward the lake. At the bottom of the hill, the traffic light turned green. A red 1964 Ford Thunderbird convertible, almost black in the yellow penumbra of the sodium-vapor street lamp, climbed the hill, left turn signal blinking.
A kid stood up in the back seat and waved his arms. “Hey!” he shouted. Hey!” He caught Milada’s attention. “Yeah, you! Stay there! Don’t move!”