Prelude 2: Jesse
Copyright © 2014 by Michael Litzky
Jesse’s mouth nestled around his husband’s warm penis and for this blazing moment, vague worry was pushed away by sweet surrender.
They were basted with sun on a hillside in Contra Loma Regional Park, hidden from the fire road by a fold of crisp golden brown hill. Walter floated beside the big rock with his arms spread so that his groin was just at head height. Jesse squeezed his smooth, hairless ass, wet a finger and pushed it in. His world was Walter’s cock sliding against his palate and the hot flesh squeezing his finger. And when Walter’s song reached a peak, he swallowed every drop like a nursing baby, knees shaking with the intensity of Walter’s climax.
Jesse pulled away and leaned against the serpentine rock, watching his husband undulate in midair, still hard as a rock and incredibly sexy. The empty sadness trickled back in, though he tried to ignore it. Walter would have gotten just as aroused from the sunlight alone, would have come just as hard. There he went again, in fact: spurting like hadn’t just had a mind-blowing orgasm in Jesse’s mouth. And now he was building again.
Sunlight put blood and warmth back into vampires; it seemed to keep them stocked with semen too.
Was there really anything wrong? Walter had always been considerate, and he still was: Jesse felt like a king when Walter brought him breakfast in bed or a cup of green tea in mid-afternoon. Walter was still the best cook in the world; he seemed to have memorized Julia Child. He didn’t eat anymore himself; his cooking was a pure gift.
And good lord, their sex life was cause for celebration now. Walter’s come was as sweet as Earl Grey tea with vanilla syrup and cream. Even trivial things were better: no food going in one end meant the other end held none of those things that used to nauseate him.
Why did he miss the old, exasperating way Walter used to do that bullshit about “On your knees, servant, you shall suck my cock and like it”? Why did he even miss the months of no sex at all just before the Big Change?
His mind leaped back to that night four years before.
In the early days of the vampire storm, they weren’t yet as thick as flies, and people still fell for their simple tricks: the scream of terror, the cry for help. He and Walter had just fallen asleep after an intense processing session about their months of no sex, both still angry but drawing comfort from each other’s bodies.
They woke to a scream of terror and a cry for help.
Walter, always the brave one, jumped out of bed and ran out to help whoever was being mugged or raped or fag-bashed. Ashamed, Jesse dragged himself to the window, telling himself he’d back Walter up if he needed it.
But when Walter appeared in the street and three dark shapes darted from the shadows across the way and grabbed him, Jesse simply stood and watched, terrified, mouth hanging open. Walter fought hard and almost won.
One of the dark shapes fastened its head to his neck and Walter froze, sagged. The next instant, they were dragging him into the shadows across the steep street, already drinking.
Jesse still didn’t really know how he found himself running instead of standing paralyzed. He stopped to rummage in one of the memorabilia drawers and take out Grandma Katie Belle’s gold crucifix. As he hurried to the door, praying for it to burst open and Walter to stagger in, he called on the ghost of his tough-talking little rabble rouser grandmother who got religion late in life.
Opening that solid door was probably the hardest thing he ever did. But he looked ahead at the long years of lonely misery, and he put his hand on the knob.
Dear God, it seemed to take a thousand years for the door to open.
Small and feeling helpless, he walked on cold bare feet down the front steps, eyes flinching as they focused on the vague movements in the darkness under the trees in the empty lot against the hillside.
The only reason he wasn’t killed himself was that there were so few vampires then. By the time he got there, Walter’s drained body lay abandoned against the packed dirt hillside under the grime-crusted city tree. Empty, Jesse looked down at the face he’d been quarreling with an hour before.
Already lonely, tender feet smarting, he dragged the heavy body across the street and up their granite front stairs. Walter’s shoes (where had he found the time to put on his shoes?) thumped over each step.
Exactly as Jesse pulled Walter across the threshold, he came to life. The eyes were empty; he didn’t know Jesse.
A powerful force dragged him back through the open door. Jesse, still holding on, was dragged out of his home along with Walter.
It would have made all sense for him to let go. He could see there was nothing left but a monster. Later, it would seem to him like a miracle that he held on.
And then he was outside, alive and full of blood, with a newly-made vampire in his arms.
Those awful empty eyes looked at him speculatively. Jesse, all his courage used up, closed his eyes, knowing only that he didn’t want the last thing he ever saw to be that look. Waiting for death, he saw Walter as he had loved him, the bright, funny movie buff with the art degree, the world expert on those strange modernistic colored-glass confections from the fifties, the sweetest kisser he ever known. He remembered that mock-BDSM pirate act when they had sex and how it had exasperated him.
The bite never came.
When at last he risked opening his eyes again, Walter was as still as a piece of glass, looking at Jesse with an unfathomable expression.
Without thinking, Jesse put his lips to Walters. Walter had always had the softest lips. This time when he lifted his head, Walter was Walter, but a sad, distant Walter, a person seen through a 1900s stereoscopic viewer.
After that, their journey had been like Sally’s with Lavinia, except that Sally packed it all into a couple of days while it took him months. Slowly, slowly, Walter came back to full life. Again and again he would wake up empty and lost and Jesse would talk him back. Then the chance beam of sunlight through the window had opened them to a world of wonder. Soon Walter was not only present but more than present. He was nearly superhuman.
When they were watching movies or talking about antiques, Walter seemed like he always had. But every time they made love in sunlight, he was a little less like Walter.
Jesse hadn’t shared this with anybody. He wasn’t sure who he could tell. Perhaps Jessica Rainbow, their silver-haired hippy neighbor. He’d always liked her and suspected that she knew Walter was a vampire.
Or maybe he could talk to Sally Yan. She and Lavinia were just amazing, so in love, so great together, so in tune. They seemed to climb every mountain in stride. He was especially in awe of Sally, how she just plunged in and did things that he had to work so hard to do. And she had seemed to sense something wrong even that very first evening when they were talking, just before the horrible ordeal at the plaza where she lost her sister forever.
Jesse’s face softened with pity. Poor Sally. She was still pretty devastated. And the last couple of weeks hadn’t helped, talking to reporters with a stone face, hiding her pain, letting out bit by bit the secrets they had discovered about vampires, honoring Walter’s request not to be “outed” just yet. He shouldn’t go bothering her. But if anyone could tell him what to do with a vampire lover, she could.
Walter arched and ejaculated once more. Jesse sighed. He should be so happy for Walter. And he was, he was! But he knew he’d have to go over and literally pull Walter to the ground before he’d come back to his senses.
When he finally did bring Walter to earth, he made sure a smile was back on his face. Walter opened his eyes and said, “I love you, Buttercup” without noticing anything wrong. Maybe nothing was wrong.
Jesse Casselberger, so good at healing others, didn’t know what to do for himself.