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“You’re home early,” Sally says with a smile as she enters the kitchen.
“Right you are, my love!” Jack replies animatedly. In a single stride, he crosses the kitchen, gathers Sally into his arms, and places a kiss on the crown of her head. After a moment, he pulls out of the embrace and walks back over to the countertop, assembling various objects in a flurry of motion. “You caught me just as I was preparing my extraction vials!”
Sally blinks. “Extraction vials?”
“Ah.” Jack pauses, turns on his heel, and grins widely, displaying two fangs protruding from the top of his hard palate.
Her head tilts. “Your vampire teeth? Don’t they usually retract by themselves?”
“Yes, but they take a little convincing.” Jack holds up one of the aforementioned vials and shakes it. “For them to return to normal size, they have to be drained of all venom first.”
Sally hums and joins him next to the slanted cabinets, watching her husband’s hands move from object to object in rapid succession. Her gaze drifts up to his canine teeth, considering. “Why not bite someone?”
“I suppose I could give it a try,” he replies, never pausing in his frenzied pursuit. “But who? It’s lethal to residents susceptible to poisoning, and then there’s the issue of pain...” he trails off, then adds with a vague hand motion, “This is the only way I have ever circumvented it. Besides, it’s far simpler than finding a willing participant.”
Sally schools her features at the word simpler as she eyes the scattered array of medical equipment covering the work surface. Her fingers fall against the countertop— pinky, ring, middle, pointer— in a nervous habit she developed long before her memories began solidifying. She rarely has requests to voice— rarer still ones of this nature— but Jack has yet to tell her no to any of them, even when she asked him to break tradition by adding more sprigs of mistletoe around the house.
“You have one right here.”
For the first time since Sally returned home, Jack stills completely, eye sockets fixed fully on her and mouth ajar enough to make his fangs look like white bridges between his jaw and the rest of his teeth. The pause stretches between them like an awkwardly sized, ever-growing garland until Sally continues her train of thought. “I can’t feel pain, I can’t be poisoned,” she counted off on her fingers, “and I don’t mind.”
“You would— you would do that for me?”
Sally’s fingers begin to rap against the countertop again before she can will them to stop. “I’d do anything for you, Jack,” she replies quietly. “But— but I understand if you don’t want me to—”
“I do,” he interrupts quickly, phalanges coming to rescue her fabric fingers. “I do, I simply didn’t want to impose.” His thumb soothes the ring of stitching around her wrist.
A shy smile emerges from where Sally had been worrying her bottom lip. “It isn’t an imposition, mon roi. I’m happy to help.” The weightless feeling in her leaves from the soft adoration on his skull is only rivaled when Jack brings her hand forward.
“Then,” he says in an inflection caught between kingly decree and humble request, “come here.”
Sally does as she’s told, stepping toward her husband and allowing herself to be spun around by his gentle guiding. When she’s fully facing away from him, back pressing against his front, she draws the sleeve of her dress down until her shoulder is completely bared to him. The bones of his fingers dust gingerly over her fabric, trail down her temple, curve against her neck, and come to rest just above where a collarbone would go if she had one.
“You’re certain it won’t hurt?”
The timbre of his voice is a blend she’s only ever heard regarding new experiences as a couple: excitement over something new, always excitement, but reservation as well. She can sense it in the way his touch lingers without leading, a quiet sort of restraint that commands attention but not obedience.
She can’t feel pain. He knows this.
The question has a hidden layer beneath its carved orange rind: do you trust me?
“Yes,” she replies. It’s an answer to both. When he doesn’t reply to that, she pulls her curtain of hair over her right shoulder so that none of it is in his way. She feels his hands slide down her sides until they cross around her middle and grasp her hips. His thumbs rub absentminded circles over her dress before slowly coming to a stop.
When his teeth finally meet her shoulder, it isn’t the sharp tips of his fangs that press into the fabric, but the smooth front of them. He drags his row of crooked incisors along her fabric in his version of a kiss, squeezing his hands slightly with each pass. The journey ends with his mouth up next to Sally’s ear. “Ready?”
She nods and tilts her head in reply.
Sally has never been bitten by anything before, but the sensation is comparable to a needle perforation- albeit on a larger scale.
The similarities end at how the tearing of fabric feels.
His tongue presses against her shoulder along with the rest of his teeth, capturing her skin in a way he’s never done previously. In tandem with the way his fingers indent into her hips, she realizes with a jolt of something molten that she’s completely at his mercy: arms pinned to her sides, body tightly embraced, shoulder locked tight. She doesn’t struggle— partly because she trusts Jack, but mostly because the sensation of being caught in a web is a confusingly pleasant one.
When the venom begins to bleed into her stuffing, she struggles to remain upright.
The liquid seeping inside her body is registered in her mind as hot— in the same maddening way Jack’s phalanges on her fabric feel like flames, his tongue on her stitches make her leaves burn, his rough groans at her ministrations turn her body into a bonfire. It’s the type of heat that commands more kindling directly from the source, begs for continued contact, aches when denied its fuel.
His fangs pull out of the twin punctures in one smooth glide, taking the source of the warmth as they leave. Sally shudders once at their absence, then again as Jack exhales a single word against her shoulder: “Oh.”
It sounds as dazed and heady as she feels. Even with only one breathless syllable she can still make out the reverence in his tone. His gaze on her shoulder is as tangible as his body pressed against her, the final anchor mooring her to reality.
When she finally looks down at herself she sees what made him speak: surrounding the bite, the once-pale blue cloth is now dyed a deep shade of violet.
She hears the click of cartilage that signals a swallow and catches the tail-end of his tongue circling a canine. His eye sockets are half-closed— almost drooping— and they shift to inspect the mark in its entirety.
“Do you like it?” Sally asks, feeling the flush on her neck begin to extend outward like ivy.
Suddenly his sockets are wide again, and they snap up to meet her gaze. “I didn’t realize it would stain,” he says hurriedly. “We can get new fabric for you, we may have some extra already—"
“Jack,” she stops his rambling by resting one of her hands on top of his, “do you like it?”
Do you trust me?
He stares at her for a long moment. Just like Jack’s earlier question, this one doesn’t need an answer— Sally already knows what his reply will be. Still, she wants to hear him say it, admit to being proud of the way he’s colored her world, her life, her body.
He swallows again, hard enough that his jaw snaps against his fangs. “Yes.”
A smile edges up the sides of her cheeks at his hoarse admission. “Me too,” she whispers back.
The next morning, Sally turns in front of the mirror, admiring the plum stains adorning the expanse of her fabric. She bites her lip in a half-hearted attempt to quell her smile as Jack appears behind her, already dressed for the day— and teeth returned to a normal size. His fingers come to rest gently around her shoulders and he presses his mouth to her cheek in greeting.
“You look lovely, ma reine.”
“Merci, Jack.” Before he lets go, Sally turns and tugs on his tie to pull him into a kiss. It’s nothing like the desperate, carnal ones they shared between bites, but something softer, calmer, almost pious in its sincerity.
“Is it safe to assume I can dispose of the vials, my dear?” he murmurs against her mouth.
To that question, Sally doesn’t bother giving a reply.
Their matching grins are answer enough.