All their unworthy eyes kept their unholy sights on my red dress that day, like all others. A single, rich, attractive woman who has but no care in this wretched world for a thing but herself… It is something a man cannot resist. For, conquering her would be an act of absolute power and domination. Silly how they act, men, their carnal desires, and their brutal ambitions. Yet on the first sight of blood, their grotesque fantasy subsides and they squeal like the little hamsters they ought to be. I expected nothing to catch my eyes on the day of the Chardaine ball, for none of them were worthy enough to even be my squealing prey. And yet he came at me with wild aspirations and almost idiotic confidence. The man in a mint green suit, with blonde unkempt hair, and stark brown eyes. That was when I first met Lloyd.
Under that chandelier, we exchanged sights with such vicious fervor for one another before he asked my cold hands for a dance. The blonde man had such obvious desires and yet my hand went willingly in his direction. Around us shone a thousand golden lights, and above us shone a monument of human greed, and yet in our eyes at that moment we could see nothing but the other. The world ceased to exist, the music seemed to stop, and the floor seemed to sink. It was at that moment when our feet made ripples in the pool of silence that surrounded us that I yearned to taste his lips for the first time… not brimmed by my craving for his blood, but by my craving for his unholy love.
He took me by the arms, and then by the body. I closed my eyes and never opened them since. As our naked bodies made a painting that would put Picasso to shame, our carnal love grew ever wilder, ever stronger, ever deeper. But he didn’t know the woman he loved, for she was hiding under the magical spell of his enthralling love. Her eyes opened, her desires returned, and the smell of blood instilled on her scarlet nose, a woman he had never experienced.
Over the many weeks that followed, he would see me as the enchanting mistress of my lonely mansion, falling ever so more in love with him than any other. As his eyes closed in the bed, exhausted by the lust we have for one another, mine opened with a virtuous lust for another. I painted my desires red while he swept away in the black night that followed one another, oblivious of the woman that woke beside him day after another.
“Lloyd,” I asked one day as I leaned on the satin diwan under the comfort of my victorian roof. “What is the deepest desire you have?” His head rested between my hands, as he sat on the floor, with my lips hovering around his shivering ears.
Lifting his head to mine, he said, “You,”
Without letting me say another word, he took me then and there… and I didn’t utter another syllable till he was done pleasuring me with his own silence. “Oh, Lloyd… Do you really love me?” I asked as I once again tied the robe he methodically removed.
“I do,” he replied, intertwining his hand with mine.
Once again hovering into his ears I whispered, “Then come… I’ll show you my deepest desire,”
Dragging his welcome hands through the ancient castle walls of my harbor, I smiled hoping he would be the one… the only one who could understand. I stopped at the door past which no human but me has seen and lived to tell the tale. A wooden armory, locked by the grandest of locksmiths, with a key that covered my entire palm twice. I looked back at him to measure the face that left the hall and found it still mesmerized by the sight of my green eyes. My breaths began to falter with pleasure, my heart began to sprint at the prospect.
“Come in,” I invited him to the home beneath my home.
Lloyd descended the steps slowly, as I brightened the lamps that would cast his way towards our holy matrimony. At the base of the wooden spiral, when I turned on the light towards my hall of desires, his footsteps faltered to a freeze. I could not see his face, I could not hear his breath, and I could not feel his heart beating in the air from his chest. Lloyd stood silently, staring at the atelier my passions come alive.
“Is it not beautiful?” I asked him, barely able to control my heavy breaths. How could it not be? I had arranged all my knives, from the scalpel to the carver in an orderly manner, where not a drop from my previous hunt existed on them. My artistic tools stood kept in a glass display, on a satin cushion, from smallest to largest, as shiny as the day I brought them here. Beyond which I had laid the most exquisite of collections, an anatomical museum. On the right of which laid the models for which even doctors would applaud the precision, made by the finest craftsmen in all of Europe. A true masterpiece of biological art. And on the left were the shelves where I practiced my artform… My trophies kept in a beguiling manner, colored in jars sealed from the outside world, in colors that branded all of the spectra. For a moment I stood in awe, as I do every time I descend these stairs, just as Lloyd stood before me.
“Do you like it?” I asked him. His legs were trembling with excitement… His body perspiring with astonishment. “This is me,” I confessed truly.
Finally, his legs moved forward, through my museum of desires. His eyes never leant left or right, only straight towards the plastic barrier that I kept separate.
“Do you want to see past it?” I asked feverishly.
He took his trembling fingers and moved the frosted curtain away from his face. Revealing the metal table upon which I perform my bloodsoaked artwork… I could feel my body losing control, as the breaths from my lips took form as a white cloud in front of me.
“Lloyd… you’re not saying anything,” I said to his hind as I had for the past ten silent minutes. “Do you not love me anymore?”
He turned back, his face paler than the arctic, his hands trembling like the storm of Huracan bay. Yet, he extended his wide arms to me and told in the shrillest of voices, “More than anything,”
“Oh, my love,” I ran into his arms, and his hands covered all around me, still trembling, still cold. “I love you, Lloyd. I knew you’d understand. I knew that only you would,” I repeated to him, and then kissed his blue lips with a mighty passion. Somewhere between this heated act, we were about to engage in, I dropped it, the knife that habituated in the palm of my hand. And with its every clink on the hard granite floor, I realized… He is the only man I could love truly… He is the only one who understands… He is a charm that will stay close to my chest… and he would not be a prey upon that table of mine… Yet.
