The Last Best Tip

…and other vampire tales

Cassandra Duffy

Sapphic Pixie Tales

Other Sapphic Pixie Tales From Cassandra Duffy:

The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head

Astral Liaisons: Lesbians in Space!

Demons of Paradise

Fabled Fang Girls

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any matter whatsoever without the written permission, except in the cases of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, locations, and events are meant to be fictitious. Any similarity between any persons living, dead, or undead is completely coincidental. The events are fictional, although you should feel free to try to re-create anything you think you’re limber enough for, especially if you have a willing partner in crime.

©2011 Cassandra Duffy

Cover Design by Katiie Kissglosse

Edited by Nichole Mauer

Special thanks to Alex Potvin and Rebecca Murphy for their generous loaning of Cami, Brianna, Barry, Melvin, and Lewis.

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

The Last Best Tip

An Eternal Night of Overtime

Haunted House on Top

About the Author

Author’s Note

Crushes, dream jobs, relationships, and apparently strap-ons are funny things. I love funny things. I also like vampire things. Like most ladies right now, I’m a total fang-girl. The phrase “fang-girl” is something I made up to describe female fans of vampires right now. It’s kind of a bastardization of the term “fan-boy” which generally describes young men who are slightly creep fanatics of certain genres of science fiction/video games/comic books. Ladies right now are no less silly in our fan-hood over vampires, so I thought we could use an equally catchy moniker. Let’s revel in our fang-girly-ness!

This is a novella, actually it’s a novella with two short stories attached to it, but even then it shouldn’t be mistaken for a novel. Like most summer trysts, when the heat is too oppressive for a long love-making session, it’s short, intense, hopefully satisfying, and over before you’re likely to succumb to heat stroke.

The characters in the final story are borrowed from a lovely couple who allowed me to use them after I read an advance copy of their upcoming book and begged profusely. I lay no claim to Cami, Brianna, Lewis, or Barry. I want to thank Alex and Becky gratuitously for allowing me to write a story using their lovely intellectual property.

The Last Best Tip

Lucy was starting off her shift tired, which was never a good sign. The oppressive, Midwestern humidity of summer in St. Louis was bound to further exhaust her as the night wore on. Starting out ready to be done could only signal a lousy night to come.

The strip-mall cluster, which was mostly chain restaurants and bars, was perfectly positioned between two cemeteries, a community college, and an upper-middleclass suburb. Across from each other, on the far end of the parking lot, closest to the river, two bars mirrored and faced each other, sharing the fifty or so parking spots at that end of the asphalt expanse.

Lucy locked her car and glanced longingly at the front of the other bar. If she could see Sasha before work, the night might not be a total loss. The other bar, called the Laughing Skeleton, was a vampire bar, not to be confused with a blood bar. Vampire bars were where normal people went to see actual vampires, usually working at the bar, and occasionally get picked up for sex or being nibbled on should a vampire feel so inclined to stalk prey the old fashioned way. Blood bars were where vampires went to drink among their own kind; the living were not permitted in blood bars.

Sasha finally made her appearance, pulling up in her dented, white Miata. The pale, lithe vampire with the messy mop of honey-blond hair looked as miserable as Lucy felt. They exchanged a futile glance and shrug, slowly making their way to the street lamp on the cement divide bisecting the parking lot. It had been nearly a week since they’d last spoken, sharing a drink under the street lamp, trying to decide who had the more irritating clientele. Despite their friendly exchanges and shared misery, Lucy wasn’t remotely interested in a friendship with the vampire; she wanted to jump naked into a steaming sexual frenzy with the other bartender, but simply lacked the nerve to say so. If they grew to become friends after licking every inch of each other’s bodies, so be it, but Lucy definitely didn’t need another commiserating friend—she needed to get laid.

“You look tired,” Sasha said. Her voice was hollow and echoed slightly, like all vampires, and had a hint of a German accent still, even though she’d left Europe more than a century ago.

“Thanks, you look dead,” Lucy replied.

They shared a shy smile. Lucy took the bashful opportunity to dip her head and let her eyes wander over the front of Sasha’s shirt where her 16th century Bavarian peasant girl breasts were immaculately preserved for all time filling out the front of her yellow tank top nicely. Sasha’s breasts were nice in their own right, but something about their perfection after five-hundred years really appealed to Lucy.

“Want to meet back here at three?” Sasha asked, drawing Lucy’s eyes up to hers.

“Sure, I still have the lawn chairs in my trunk.” They typically sat on the chairs, drinking Southern Comfort in Lucy’s case and steer blood in Sasha’s while Sasha telepathically controlled the bugs swirling around the street lamp to fly in interesting patterns. It was an odd unwinding ritual, but Lucy cherished it.

“Actually, I thought we could go somewhere,” Sasha said. “I’ll explain more later.” Sasha leaned in, brushing her breasts against Lucy’s bare arm, to whisper in her ear. Sasha’s breasts were cold against Lucy’s skin, and her breath practically frigid against her ear. “Think of me tonight and I’ll hear you.” It was an odd comment that left Lucy’s mind feeling fuzzy.

She opened her eyes, wondering when she’d closed them, only to find Sasha was back across the parking lot, walking through the front door of the Laughing Skeleton. She’d covered the fifty feet across the crowded parking lot in the time it took Lucy to open her eyes. The comment reverberated in Lucy’s head and she wondered exactly how much of her thought process the vampire would be privy to. As she made her way toward her own bar, a sinking thought occurred to her—most of her thoughts about Sasha while at work involved baby oil and rolling around on rubber sheets, which probably wasn’t what the vampire had meant.

Lucy had thought she was a naturally kinky person, at least until she compared herself to the clientele of her workplace. In the lady’s room of the Swing Set, she dolled herself up a little with a fresh coat of lipstick and spray of vanilla perfume, steeling herself for the night ahead. As with the vampire bar across the way, the Swing Set’s staff was the idealization of what the customers wanted, but couldn’t seem to catch the attention of.

Theories circulated among the entirely gay, five-person night crew of the Swing Set about why swingers did what they did. Lucy and Lara worked the bar while the three men, Toby, Michael, and Gabe roved the floor as mostly-shirtless waiters. By making sure the staff was all Kinsey-Scale sixes, and attractiveness scale nines and tens, the owners of the Swing Set ensured none of the staff was likely to sleep with any of the customers, but the customers would all want to sleep with the staff. Lucy watched the three, rippling, fetish-wear adorned, gay men with their perfect hair, glass-smooth skin, and pristinely trimmed facial hair working the crowd of mostly overweight, entirely middle-aged, Midwestern swinger couples. With how often the older women pinched bottoms and writhed up against the three fabulously gay men, Lucy was glad she had three feet of oak serving bar with copper railing between her and their husbands. The primary theory, and the one Lucy personally subscribed to, was that swingers were sexually charged nerds who didn’t get access to sex at an early enough age, and thus formed loose affiliations like the Swing Set to gain access to other sexually charged people, who all turned out to be other, fairly kinky, nerds. As with her former belief of being kinky, Lucy had once believed she was a nerd; she was less sad to learn that while she might be on the scale, she definitely didn’t qualify in the way most of the swingers did.

She mechanically filled a drink order for Gabe, who seemed to be getting the worst of it that night, and gave him a wan smile when he pleaded with his eyes for mercy before heading back out to the grabby floor. The male wait staff’s theory was that breeders, especially Midwestern breeders, took to boredom in their matrimonial relationships like most coyotes take to claw traps on their legs: they could lie back and accept their doom, gnaw their own limbs/bank accounts off to escape, or try their best to live with a trap stuck to their leg, which was what the Swing Set was supposed to be. Lucy didn’t much care for this gloomy view of marriage; after all, what was the point of fighting so hard for same-sex marriage if it just turned out to be a coyote trap?

A portly fellow with a head picked clean of all hair save a tiny little three-quarters ring around the sides and back, and his oddly shaped wife who was wearing her brightly dyed red hair in pig tails, sauntered up to the bar. If Lucy had to guess, she would have put them in their early fifties, and she wondered exactly how many leather outfits they owned between them because they were wearing a new set of form-fitting fetish-wear that she’d never seen before, and it wasn’t even the first time that week that they’d showed up in something freshly off the rack. The woman was a vodka tonic with extra lime and the man was two fingers of gin on the rocks with a splash of bitters, what the locals called a Hoosier for some reason. They had names, and it would only take a glance at the credit card to know it, but Lucy was fine with thinking of them as their drink orders.

“Is tonight the night you come out from behind the bar and let your hair down?” the wife asked.

“My hair is down,” Lucy said through a forced smile as she mixed their usual drinks.

“There’s a pool running on you,” the husband said with a greasy wink. “We’ll split it with you if you help us win. What do you say to 60/40?”

Lucy’s stomach said retching was the appropriate reaction, but she knew what she was supposed to respond with according to the bar’s code of flirty-but-unavailable… “How much is the pool up to?” she asked perfunctorily.

“500 big ones,” the wife said.

“A 60/40 split on half a grand to…” that was all Lucy managed to get out before Lara came over and saved her.

“How much is the pool up to on me?” Lara asked in her lovely, effervescent voice that spoke to men and women of their favored high school gym teacher—encouraging yet strong.

The correct answer, the one Lucy was supposed to give, was: Let me know when it gets to X number of dollars, where X represented a sum twice or more the value originally given in answer to the ‘how much’ question. Lucy couldn’t tell if she was angrier about the proposed 60/40 split, as if 100% of the money would have made it remotely worth while, or the fact that a room full of three-dozen fairly well-to-do suburbanites could only come up with $500 between all of them when it came to getting into her pants.

Lara had them well in hand, allowing Lucy to take a moment at the opposite end of the bar to compose herself. Lucy watched Lara flirt with both and pull a $20 tip from the $15 bar tab. Lara walked over to Lucy and held out the $20.

“For you,” Lara said with a wry smirk. “You’re worth far more than $500 in my book.”

“So that’s why you’re only offering me $20?” Lucy snarked back.

“Fine, I’ll keep it.”

Lucy was about to retract her statement and apologize, but the bill had already disappeared down the front of Lara’s bustier. Lara was an attractive stem—the term arrived at when combining ‘stud’ and ‘femme’—which united attractive masculine and feminine qualities in equal parts. She quite often got requests to fuck both members of a couple with a strap-on. This, like most things, she seemed to take in stride; oh how Lucy envied her cool demeanor, and even cooler spiked purple and black hair.

“How do you do it?” Lucy asked.

“I view it as a business transaction,” Lara explained. “They get to say perverted shit to me, but it has a per-minute rate that has to be paid at the end of the conversation or they get the cold-shoulder next time they come to the bar.”

Lucy pulled herself out of the hiding corner she’d leaned into and returned to her duties. Lara gave her shoulders a reassuring squeeze when she passed bye. “Go get ‘em, tiger,” Lara whispered to her.

The next couple to the bar was tall, gawky, lacking in chin strength, but with an overwhelming abundance of nose. Lucy thought the fact that they were Mr. and Mrs. Crane seemed like a particularly cruel joke for the world to play on them; she also couldn’t get past the fact that two people who looked so much alike would want to marry each other. They both drank chardonnay and they both managed to be shy and lecherous at the same time.

Lucy smiled, the Cranes smiled back. “The usual?”

“We were at the flea market the other day, you know, the one in St. Charles? And we saw the loveliest geisha costume that would be perfect for you?” Mr. Crane said.

“You’re what…a size six?” Mrs. Crane asked.

“Try size four and I’m Chinese.”

“They have geishas in China,” Mr. Crane incorrectly corrected her.

“I’m going on break!” Lucy announced loud enough to let the whole bar know and then stormed off the main floor, through the kitchen, and out the back door. In the relative safety of the alleyway, she leaned against the chain link fence guarding the back of the strip mall from the empty field teenagers used to smoke cigarettes and ride dirt bikes in.

“You’re not thinking about me,” Sasha’s voice echoed through her head.

The trick was surprising, but carried a relaxation with it rather than alarm, which Lucy thought would have been more natural of a reaction to a vampire invading her mind to speak. “I’m having a hard night,” Lucy muttered.

“It’s only been an hour.”

“That’s an hour too long,” Lucy said. “Don’t you get sick of it? The people you can’t stand wanting something from you that you can’t and don’t want to give?”

“Sure, I spend my entire night taking drink orders from people’s necks,” Sasha said. “I don’t know why they think pointing their exposed neck at me will entice me to bite them. That’s not even where I like taking blood from.”

A creeping smile spread across Lucy’s face. “Where do you like taking blood from?”

“If you’re a good girl, go back inside, and don’t get fired tonight, I might show you,” Sasha said. “Think about me, won’t you? Who am I supposed to talk to before and after shifts if you get fired?”

“Okay, but I’m only doing this for you,” Lucy said, dragging herself away from the fence that made her job feel so much like a prison. “And because I can’t pay my rent with dirty looks.”

Lucy returned to the bar. The interior was the schizophrenic combination of every bodice-ripping romance book cover known to man and the scents were a battling mixture of humid Midwestern sweat, candles, and bodies soaked in cologne and perfume. Worst of all, was the couple waiting at the bar for Lucy to take their order. Lara was giving them the cold shoulder because the husband was a tightwad and the wife wasn’t allowed to speak unless granted permission. As much as Lucy hated to admit the origin of her baby oil fantasy of Sasha, the gargantuan gorilla of a man and his diminutive wife were the source. The husband looked like any run-of-the-mill businessman who had taken a little too much time trying to look and act like a professional wrestler, while the wife was petite, mousy, and awkward. The husband had made a pointed comment several weeks back about wanting to see Lucy and his wife strip naked and wrestle on the bed in baby oil—don’t worry, he assured her, they had plastic sheets and they would both get a piece of the prize no matter who won—then he pointed to his crotch as if Lucy couldn’t glean that was the ‘prize’ he’d intended. Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, the dominant role the husband wore in the club was pretty much only for the club. Michael, the lone moustache-adorned waiter, found out that he was a stay-at-home dad and house husband while his wife was a corporate lawyer; apparently the Swing Set was her place to feel weak and protected and his place to not be emasculated by her. Lucy thought this remarkable bit of relationship survivalism should temper her dislike of the duo, but somehow it didn’t.

Lucy made it a few steps toward the bar when something, almost like another presence, came knocking at the door of her mind. She recognized the essence of the intruder as Sasha, and so let her in, but it wasn’t like before where simple words were being exchanged. Sasha had something to show her. She let the vampire redecorate her mind, occupying the same thoughts and space within Lucy’s head. She knew her body was still walking, still going through the motions of taking drink orders, talking to customers, and running credit cards, but it felt far more like she was in the cabin of a great bartending ship on autopilot. Within her mind, she was in a circular bedroom, draped in red silk curtains, with the circular bed from her fantasy covered in the tan plastic sheeting she’d always imagined.

“What is this?” Lucy asked.

“A haven,” Sasha replied, her voice emanating from everywhere at once. “Most of what we do at work can be done with a fraction of our attention. The rest can be here, with me.”

“I won’t randomly stare off into space or set a customer on fire accidentally, will I?”

“No more than usual,” Sasha said with a smirk.

“I see.” Lucy stepped closer to Sasha. Their similar height put them at the exact right level to stare into each others eyes. She was trying to be shy, coquettish even, as though seduction were something she had foisted upon her. Something about the vampire screamed ‘TOP!’ and Lucy was all too happy to play the submissive role in this case even if it wasn’t her preferred position. “What are we supposed to do now?”

Sasha took a look around the room that was Lucy’s mind and smirked with her lips parting just enough to show a glimmer of fang. “This is your mind, but I think I can piece together what direction your fantasy was taking.”

In a flash, Lucy was on the bed, bouncing breathlessly across the rubber-coated mattress. Sasha pounced on top of her, tearing at her clothes with clawed fingers. Her cargo shorts and tank top came away as little more than tissue paper. Lucy grasped as Sasha’s cold, pale body pressed against hers. She was trying to undress her with equal verve, but without the exceptional strength. Sasha’s lips came down to meet hers in a cool, intense embrace. When Lucy’s tongue made its first exploratory dart into Sasha’s mouth, she nicked her tongue on one of the vampire’s fangs, surprised at how long and sharp they had become. She pulled back from the kiss to find her mouth tasting of her own blood. Sasha dove back onto her lips, sucking harshly at her tongue for an intense, almost painful moment.

Driven a little wild, at least that’s what Lucy assumed from the look in her eyes, Sasha finished undressing herself and Lucy with the same unearthly strength expected of vampires. The underwear, bras, and the shorts Sasha was still wearing tore away to leave them naked, squeaking across the rubber bed as they rubbed along each other. Lucy knew what Sasha reached for and her heart thundered in anticipation to feel it. The clear, plastic bottle, filled with clear liquid dangled above her chest. Sasha squeezed a long stream of the pleasant smelling baby oil across her chest. Sasha ran the trail of the slippery coating up and down Lucy’s body, drawing little concentric circles over her stomach that made Lucy writhe. The low light of the room, which seemed to be emanating from everywhere at once, caught on the oil, giving a wet glisten to her tan skin. Sasha rubbed the oil into Lucy’s skin not with her delicate hands, but with her perfectly round, white breasts. The feel of the vampire’s cold, perky breasts rubbing across her body through the slippery oil felt like pure heaven to Lucy. She took the bottle from her and began coating Sasha’s back. Soon they were slipping against each other, easily sliding across the plastic bed, their hair wetted together from the oil. Everything of Sasha’s that Lucy grabbed was slippery and every time their bodies made contact they slid lewdly against one another. Without friction, without an anchor, sex became a fluid act.

Lucy grasped at Sasha’s pert behind only to find it sliding out of her grasp. Sasha pulled at Lucy’s rigid nipples only to have them slip from her fingers with a delicious tingle. The frustration of not being able to gather enough momentum or friction for any real sexual relief began to mount in Lucy. Sasha, sensing the frustration, giggled and slipped away even further, writhing across the bed on her stomach. Lucy pounced onto Sasha’s back, straddling her from behind, spreading her legs wide enough to gain purchase if only by leverage. Her clit, aching for attention, glanced across the slippery curve of Sasha’s ass and the dip to her lower back. Lucy’s body cried out for more of that exact electric sensation. She grasped Sasha by the shoulders, slipping several times before finally getting her hands to hold. She writhed up and down along Sasha’s back, angling her hips, spreading her legs and squeezing them together to rub herself along the oiled vampire. The supple, softness of her ass juxtaposed with the firm musculature of her lower back alternated again and again against Lucy’s tingly clit and outer lips until she was panting in the rhythmic riding of Sasha from behind. To aid in the riding, finally catching on what Lucy was doing, Sasha rolled her hips back up against Lucy with every push down against her until she felt Lucy’s heart thundering against the back of her upper shoulders, and heard the first cries of pleasure.

Lucy became vaguely aware that her physical body was reacting to what she was doing in her mind. She flashed, however briefly, back to the bar where she was climaxing in muted screams without any real evidence for why. The entire bar watched her with rapt attention, but she was too far gone to care about anything but humping herself across Sasha until she climaxed. Finally, she came, with a scream that echoed from the real world through her head. The tickle of her clit across Sasha’s slippery skin quickly became too intense to keep going. She tried to hold onto the oiled vampire, but the vixen beneath her wriggled and giggled until she was free.

“It is almost quitting time,” Sasha whispered huskily.

“I’m not done with you yet,” Lucy muttered through heavy breathing. “I owe you…”

“After work, meet me under our streetlight and I’ll show you where I take my blood,” Sasha said.

The demand sent a tremble through Lucy’s core and she could only nod against Sasha’s shoulder in mental, sexual exhaustion. Returning to reality from the baby oil-lubricated sexual frenzy was a jolt that bordered on uncomfortable. The assembled swingers, who had all found their way to the bar to watch Lucy climaxing for seemingly no reason, plunked down enormous tips for the show, promising her more if she did the same the following night. Lucy, not nearly as embarrassed as she thought she would be, collected the money, said she would see how she felt, and bade them all a good evening. She found the Swing Set crowd was a lot more tolerable when she was mentally fucking the vampire bartender from across the way.

After wiping down the bar, sweeping up the floor, and counting out the tills, Lucy practically ran from work, ignoring the obvious questions hurled at her by the rest of the staff, too keen on getting to the halo of light beneath the streetlamp to see what else Sasha might have in store for her. When she found the cement divide empty, she wondered if she’d only imagined the orgasm, the fantasy, if she might have finally been hit on one too many times and promptly lost her proverbial marbles. Her doubts melted away when she saw Sasha exiting her own bar, heading in the direction of the streetlamp. She was gone one instant, only to appear behind Lucy. She spun Lucy to press her back against the lamppost. She kissed her intensely, almost a mirror experience of the fantasy with a sharper, cleaner edge of reality to it. Sasha broke the kiss first, although her cold, insistent hands still worked their way up under Lucy’s shirt.

“You’re taller in real life,” Lucy said breathlessly.

“I’m wearing heels and you’re wearing sandals,” Sasha explained.

“So I didn’t imagine it!” Lucy exclaimed.

“You didn’t.” Sasha began pulling up the front of Lucy’s shirt, she wanted to object, to pull them hem back down, but she knew overpowering the vampire would have been pointless to even try, and she couldn’t be bothered to even feign modesty now. If Sasha had asked, Lucy would have stripped naked without a second thought.

“You’re eager,” Lucy giggled, helping Sasha pull up the front of her shirt.

“I hunger for you.” A tiny, jungle-cat growl accompanied the words, sending a shiver up Lucy’s spine that reminded her she was a prey animal in Sasha’s eyes and quite literally in that situation. She didn’t care; she wanted to be bitten, wanted to feed Sasha, wanted to repay the pleasure she’d been shown.

“Taste me,” Lucy cooed.

Sasha’s cool lips tickled across Lucy’s ribs, up toward the bottom edge of her bra. Gently, the vampire pushed up the bottom of the support cup leaving a little gap of soft breast along the side and the stiffer musculature over Lucy’s ribcage. This was where Sasha sunk her fangs, one in each hemisphere, half on the side of her breast, half off. Lucy had expected the sharp little pain, had expected the chilly wetness of her tongue, but hadn’t, couldn’t really, have known the pleasure that would jolt through her at the sensation of being fed upon. The only comparison she could possibly make harkened back to college when she’d broken her leg ice skating. At the hospital, she’d been given morphine to dull the pain; being bitten by Sasha felt nearly identical to a shot of medical-grade morphine. It wasn’t sexual so much as it was astoundingly soothing and pleasant. She floated on the warm cloud of being fed upon, unaware of the world beyond her own tingly skin.

Sasha’s feeding slowed, bringing Lucy back to reality to find she might not have been receiving sexual pleasure from the act, but Sasha clearly had. Her curled lips were smeared with Lucy’s blood, one hand, the one that had pushed up her bra remained under Lucy’s shirt, cupping her breast, but that wasn’t the hand Lucy was interested in. Sasha’s other hand had stuffed its way down the top of her own shorts and seemed to still be working at something although without Sasha’s explicit attention.

“Do you need some help finishing?” Lucy asked, leaning her floating head back against the lamppost.

Sasha glanced down to her own hand and quickly pulled it from its unilateral work on her pussy. “No, I mean, I kind of already finished a few,” Sasha said. The close proximity to feeding allowed a fairly intense blush to shoot across her cheeks. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Mind? If I’d known that was a side-effect, I would have helped.” Lucy lifted Sasha’s formerly busy hand to her mouth and licked at her fingers. The taste was unlike normal women, cleaner, softer, almost like a mouthful of spare change. She shrugged and licked a few more fingers but the fleeting flavor was already gone.

“I had no idea you had this kinky side,” Sasha purred, gently massaging Lucy’s breast still in her other hand. “I also noticed something in your work that might be interesting.”

“Interesting, in my work?” Lucy murmured, losing herself every so slightly in the gentle caresses along her breast.

“In the 1920s, we had a grift called the False Philanthropist,” Sasha explained, her hand never leaving its taunting work at Lucy’s pert breast. “It involves convincing a mark that if they give a little money, it will impress a much wealthier philanthropist to give generously to them; the mark was convinced it was an inside job, that they were in the know, but the beneficiary of their generosity was actually another operative. I believe you have something similar today with a software mogul and an e-mail chain or African princes. Anyway, a Double False Philanthropist is when two marks are set opposite each other, each believing the other to be the wealthy, generous one. They each give, thinking the other is encouraging the first to give more to show generosity to be paid back later in sort of a giving prisoner’s dilemma.”

“My work made you think of that?” Lucy began playing with Sasha’s blond locks as she listened, mentally soaking them in baby oil.

“We could modify the grift, run it on both our respective customer bases.” Sasha pulled her hand out from beneath Lucy’s shirt fairly abruptly and began pacing a bit at the edge of the cement embankment. Lucy sighed at the withdrawn hand and strand of hair she’d been playing with.

“To what end?”

“To make enough money to open our own bar,” Sash said, coming to a stop. “Your customers want new and different sexual experiences, and my customers want to become vampires. If we tell yours that my customers are vampires who want to have sex and tell mine that yours are vampires recruiting converts, we can charge both sides to set up dates.”

“Won’t they figure it out when one side only wants to have sex and neither is undead?”

“We tell your customers to dress and act like vampires to attract my customers, but not to bite or get bitten because vampires view that as a turnoff for sex, and then tell my customers not to have sex with the vampires because vampires don’t like to fuck their food. As long as both sides think denying the other side what they really want will help them get closer to their goal, they’ll all work to accomplish nothing but setting up more dates through us.”

The plan made sense in a nefarious undead Madame sort of way, and Lucy liked the idea of having a secret with Sasha, especially one so requiring of trust and intimacy, but she didn’t know about becoming future business partners and didn’t like the sound of so many boundaries actually existing for vampires between sex and blood-drinking.

“None of that’s true, is it?” Lucy asked.

Sasha rolled her eyes and shook her head. “You could go down on me right now while I suck blood out of your inner thigh if you need proof. It’s a modified 69 called a Drinky-9. If vampires didn’t fuck what they drank from, we’d all starve to death, horny as hell.”

The mental image was jolting and entirely appealing, but Lucy didn’t want Sasha thinking she needed proof. “No, no, I believe you. Maybe later though.” This was always Lucy’s problem, getting too involved too quickly, and then hating herself for months when she found out her idealized girlfriend was actually a complete disaster. Still, she wanted Sasha, she wanted to own her own bar, and she was beginning to not care how she came by either. “Yeah, okay, let’s do it. You pick your richest, I’ll pick my richest, and we’ll reconvene tomorrow night to set things up.”

Sasha smiled, walking toward Lucy with a luscious sway to her hips. “When I saw inside your head, I knew you were special,” she said in a dropped sultry tone. “When I tasted your blood, I knew you would be the one.” As Sasha came closer, Lucy could swear she could smell baby oil. Sasha kissed her briefly on the lips, hauntingly soft and fleeting, before she vanished into the night.

Lucy felt weak in the knees and light-headed, which she chalked up to a loss of blood and being desperately head-over-heels for a vampire. She needed to go home, see if she had any baby oil, and put herself to sleep with a little self-satisfaction. Tomorrow would be a big, lucrative day.

~€~

The following night, Sasha and Lucy met under the streetlamp, exchanged information on their potential clients, and Sasha gave Lucy a brief script to memorize. The memorization, after five years of wasted SAT preparation courses, was a breeze, and Lucy felt more prepared by her single Acting for Non-Majors class than anything else in her life to that point.

After her orgasmic show the prior night, Lucy had everyone’s attention when they came to the bar. She wondered if she wasn’t low-balling herself to offer the fix-up fee at $2,000 per couple, per date. Sasha had been clear on the number though, and Lucy assumed there was a reason. She selected the three irritating couples from the night before: the gin with bitters and vodka tonic, the cranes, and the wrestling role-reversers. With their newly piqued curiosity about vampire kink firmly entrenched by Lucy performing the hell out of Sasha’s script, the six of them wandered over to the vampire bar while three vampire hopefuls headed to the Swing Set to complete the exchange of dates for money.

During the downtime between the first two parts of the grift, Lucy began to feel a little tawdry about the whole thing. It wasn’t pimping precisely; as Sasha had explained it, if they had sex, they were breaking the rules, and that would be on their own heads. Still, it was lying and deceiving for financial gain, which had to be illegal in some sense. Her mind caught on the word illegal, rolling it around, considering it from all angles, holding it up to her morality like an entirely too slutty dress she was considering buying, and then deciding she rather liked the way the word fit. Tawdry, dirty, and illegal were all appealing concepts when paired with Sasha and copious amounts of easy money. Yes, she decided, she really wanted to be as tawdry, dirty, and illegal as possible with Sasha.

The three would-be-vampires strolled into her bar, and Lucy instantly understood Sasha’s position in all this; it was an easily recognizable situation as it perfectly mirrored her own. The trio was as hopelessly devoted to the notion of vampirism as the three couples she’d sent to Sasha were to the notion of being sexy. The two men and one woman were powdered until pale with dyed black hair and the better part of a Hot Topic store split between the three of them. The sheer amount of skull/bat/spider costume jewelry would take hours to remove to get through airport security and probably double that to get it all back on in the proper order. They spotted her and made their skulking way to the bar.

“The fee is $2,000 per person per date, upfront, or the vampires will think you aren’t wealthy enough to sustain yourselves for eternity,” Lucy whispered when they were all huddled around a single stool.

“How mammy dafes will it take?” the taller of the two men asked, slurring his speech a little around the huge fake, plastic fangs he wore.

“It will take however many dates it takes,” Lucy hissed. “You’re dealing with immortal creatures. Human concepts of time and schedule are irrelevant.”

The trio nodded as if they understood implicitly.

“Do not, under any circumstance, sleep with the vampires,” Lucy continued. “It would be like having sex with a cheeseburger before eating it.” The three made the appropriately grossed-out face, more so among the two men; Lucy wondered if the woman’s reaction might not have been an act, and that she might have eaten an item at one point or other that had functioned as a sex toy—she was glad the script said cheeseburger, because cucumber might have been a little on the nose. “They’re going to look like average, everyday, suburbanites,” Lucy continued. “What better way to blend in with humanity for all eternity than to look like everyone else. Remember, vampirism has only been legal for about ten years.”

The trio grumbled about this grave injustice, and reaffirmed that they were completely behind the creatures of the night achieving fully equal rights someday. As far as Lucy knew the only thing a vampire couldn’t do that a human could was adopt stray animals at the humane society.

“Now that we are all clear on the ground rules, come back tomorrow with the money, and you’ll receive your itinerary,” Lucy said. “If I can give one parting piece of advice, dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” The trio all nodded and smiled like proper little bobble dolls; Lucy suspected by the end of the week they would have enough vampire related paraphernalia to choke an army of Anne Rice’s damned.

The three marks walked back out of the Swing Set heads held high and fake fangs stuffed in their mouth. She felt the cool, tawdry presence of Sasha creep into her mind.

“You should come home with me tonight,” Sasha whispered in her mind. “I want to make you feel dirty in a good way.”

Lucy shivered at both the chilling voice in her head and the naughty words they spoke. “I’m all yours,” Lucy whispered, to Sasha’s great delight.

~€~

Over the next few weeks the grift spread, expanded, and redoubled in effort. Before the leaves started turning that fall, Sasha and Lucy’s little enterprise had netted close to six figures. Surprisingly, none of the couples seemed all that put out by their apparent lack of success. The swingers appeared to enjoy the non-sexual company and the vampire-pretenders flourished under all the personal attention. Lucy theorized that both groups might just have wanted to be the center of attention at one point and everything they were doing, be it vampire chasing or swinging, was to feel noticed and important. She brought the theory to Sasha, who didn’t really seem to care why things were working so well, and proposed they have sex on the cash, which Lucy agreed readily to.

Standing in the bathroom after, staring at herself in the mirror, plucking errant, sweaty $100 bills off her various parts, Lucy began to wonder if her relationship with Sasha might be getting a tad out of control. She craved having Sasha in her head, craved having Sasha’s teeth in her breasts, and craved having Sasha in bed or wherever else they could think to have sex, but she couldn’t really figure out if she even liked Sasha as their conversations usually started with ‘Wanna get naked?’ and ended in ‘Fuck yes! Right there!’ Lucy opened the bathroom door, stood in the threshold leaning against the doorframe, and watched a nude, also covered in a patchwork of money, Sasha collecting up the loot they’d just had sweaty sex on.

“Do you even like me?” Lucy asked, immediately feeling like a catty loser for the tone of voice and the question itself.

“Of course I like you,” Sasha replied without ever losing a beat in her collecting task. “I’ve spent days inside your head loving every part of who you are and how you came to be from your first day of first grade to the week you spent deciding to drop out of college. I like it all.”

Lucy felt a lightning bolt strike her brain to turn on all the lights. Of course Sasha didn’t have to talk to her to know everything about her. She’d passed fifty dates worth of information across to Sasha instantaneously that first night. This weird connection they had wasn’t something organic; it was a vampire trick sharing thoughts and memories across a psychic-link that made Lucy feel like she’d known the vampire forever. Surprisingly, Lucy didn’t feel all that weird about it. In fact, when she considered the mental invasion and connection, she actually rather liked the idea. Immediately after this feeling, she wondered if maybe Sasha hadn’t put that thought in her head as well like so many others.

“You’re bad with money,” Lucy said, picking up on a memory she didn’t think the vampire really wanted her to have. “You’ve always been bad with money.” Only after she made the observation did she realize that the sharing of information apparently had gone both directions.

This stopped Sasha in her work of collecting up close to fifty-thousand dollars in cash. “Yes, but you’re not,” she replied. “In your mind, I saw how well you did in business and math classes before you dropped out of college. You’re a natural at the legitimate stuff and I’m a natural at quick bursts of easy money. We’re perfect for each other.”

“So this is just a business arrangement?” Lucy asked, the catty feeling redoubling on her.

“I’m sorry. Did we not just fuck like bunnies on a pile of money?” Sasha dropped the big armful of cash she had back on the bed and turned a slow, naked, pensive circle acting as though she were looking for someone else who might have done the nasty on the money, but really just to show off her naked form still decorated with Lucy’s sweat and $100 bills.

“Okay, fine, sexual and business…”

“I’m staying at your place, during the day, when I’m vulnerable, I have subsisted almost entirely on your blood for weeks now—this is as intimate as vampire relationships get!”

Lucy knew that statement was close to true, true for their particular situation anyway, but lacking only in Sasha turning Lucy into a vampire as well. They’d discussed it, albeit briefly, and both enjoyed the notion of a vampire being with a human a whole lot more, but still including the caveat of leaving the topic open for discussion down the road.

“You’re right; I’m sorry,” Lucy said quickly. “Anyway, with the two payments from Thursday, we’re well over the startup we need for our bar.”

“Do you want to quit your job first or should I?”

“I love it when we go at the same time,” Lucy said with a flirty smirk.

“Oooooh, me too.”

~€~

Their plan for an upscale lesbian sports bar in the fashion of the great Midwestern sports bars, seemed like a good idea on the surface, and with the abundant startup capital, they were able to do an amazing job of turning a former chain restaurant/grill into a fantastic lesbian facsimile of what might have been a Chicago Bears or St. Louis Cardinals hangout spot. Of course, the best laid plans of vampires and their girlfriends don’t always amount to much. After a month of slow or no business, Lucy and Sasha were wondering if lesbians in the greater St. Louis area just weren’t that into sports.

Lucy leaned forward over the bar, half asleep, head propped up in her hand, vaguely watching Sasha at the basket-shooting game, sinking shot after shot, somewhere on her way to another high score rendered effectively meaningless as vampires probably never missed baskets. This was the other shoe to drop, Lucy decided. The wildly successful grift, the wonderful relationship, the mind-blowing sex, the cathartic quitting of the job she hated, it was all too perfect, and now she knew why—a Midwest lesbian sports bar was apparently a bad way to burn $150,000.

“Easy come, easy go,” Sasha said, apparently hearing Lucy’s grim thoughts. “Think of it as playing with house money. It was never really ours to begin with.”

“It’s just irritating that a swingers club and a vampire bar in a strip mall are both better ideas than ours,” Lucy said. “I thought we were smarter than that.”

“That is exactly the type of thinking that always screwed up my plans,” Sasha said with a laugh. “We’re so alike we even mess things up the same way.”

Lucy’s eyes flicked over to Sasha’s basketball game with herself, not the game in particular, but to Sasha and her painted on jeans. Every little jolt and tensing of the muscles in her legs and ass as she shot baskets was apparent through the tight denim. The repetitive swishing of mini-basketballs passing through the net stopped when Sasha picked up on Lucy’s involuntary thoughts.

“Want to fuck me on the pool table before we have to sell it to pay the lease?” Lucy asked.

“From the second I saw you in that skirt tonight,” Sasha said with a fangy-grin.

Neither Sasha nor Lucy had thought to lock up the bar or turn off the signs; they hadn’t had a customer in days, so they didn’t really think it was necessary to do either. Lucy’s concerns about much of anything completely melted away when Sasha aggressively bent her over the end of the pool table, holding her chest flat against the green felt with her pencil skirt bunched around her waist and panties around her ankles. Sasha’s favored strap-on, which fit beautifully over her slender hips in the tight jeans, had a little arched knob at the top, designed to tickle Lucy’s clit if they were facing each other, but in the bent over, from behind position, actually vibrated and knocked at her backdoor with every powerful thrust her vampire girl made into her. Lucy screamed in delight as Sasha ravaged her, each scream brought either a tug on the back of her ponytail or a sharp swat on her increasingly red behind. It felt like a proper send-off for the pool table nobody had ever used.

Lucy climaxed again for what she thought might have been the fifth time. An aggressive sweat rose on her skin, adding an additional sting to the harshly spanked red of her behind, and she felt her legs weaken to the point of giving out. Sasha, intuiting that Lucy wouldn’t hold herself up much longer, grasped Lucy’s legs, swept them off the floor into her hands and moved her into a modified wheel-barrow position that Lucy knew would leave rug burns from the pool table felt across her forearms, but couldn’t imagine a reason why she would care.

Sweating and exhausted, but nowhere near done with whatever Sasha wanted to do with her on the soon to be departing pool table, Lucy had to wonder why the aggressive thrusting suddenly stopped. She picked her head up from its resting place on her outstretched arm, and glanced up to the doorway where she found essentially every customer they’d had in their little dating racket collected around the entrance, watching the show with bemused grins on their faces.

“Would you like us to come back later?” Mr. Crane asked, his pronounced Adams apple bouncing above the frilly collar of his restoration era vampire shirt.

“No, no, we’re open now,” Lucy said. She made a move to get out of the precarious position of laying stomach-down across a pool table with her legs wrapped around Sasha’s waist.

Sasha pressed a hand to the center of her back, gently, but firmly, holding her in place. “Is this a friendly visit?” Sasha asked, seemingly having no intention of stopping if the angry former marks were planning on being thrown out in short order anyway.

“Of course,” one of the wannabe-vampire boys said. “You guys quit in such spectacularly bitchy fashions that nobody at either of the bars was allowed to even say what became of you.”

“It took us weeks to find out where you’d gone,” the gin-and-bitters drinker said. “Now that we have though, we want to be patrons at your new bar.”

“I have to tell you something,” Lucy said, dropping her forehead back to her folded arms, losing the embarrassment of her compromised position in the overwhelming embarrassment of having to come clean with the fairly nice people who would probably press charges on a really nasty fraud case once they heard the truth. “We were running a scam—none of you are vampires.”

“We know,” one of the wannabe-vampire girls said. “We figured it out on the first date, but it was all so much fun indulging in the fantasy that none of us wanted to stop.”

Finally, Sasha slipped the strap-on from Lucy and allowed her to regain her feet, smooth down her skirt, and pull up her underwear.

“So you’re not mad?” Sasha asked.

“Only if you say your plan all along wasn’t to open a vampire-themed swingers bar,” the wrestler man said, looking to his diminutive for reassurance.

Lucy opened her mouth to say no, but Sasha quickly clamped her hand over it.

“That’s exactly what we were doing,” Sasha said.

An Eternal Night of Overtime

Barrow, Alaska, well above the Arctic Circle, the furthest north city in America, was by far the worst place Brooke had ever been for work. At 27-years-old, she had thrown too much of her life into the bottomless pit that was her boss, Vendela Myrdal, to not follow through with yet another ridiculous demand.

Born and raised in Torquay, arguably the surf capitol of Australia, Brooke had aspirations, like everyone born in Torquay, of becoming a professional surfer. When that dream fell through, as it most often did, she shifted her focus to bikini fashion design. To truly be in the fashion game, she had to move from Australia to Los Angeles, which was the only obvious choice as the surfing in Milan, New York, and Paris was either non-existent or terrible. This was where she’d met Vendela Myrdal: Ice Queen of Scandinavia, fashionista extraordinaire, and notorious weirdo. To her knowledge, Brooke was the longest lasting personal assistant Vendela had ever had. Her predecessors were rarely, if ever, fired; Brooke suspected the majority quit after a month or so, a few might have stuck it out long enough to be driven insane, and, as Brooke’s plane touched down in Barrow, she suspected the rest probably froze to death or were eaten by caribou.

Brooke was a typical surf city beauty with her short, sandy hair cut into a layered bob, skin uniformly (and likely permanently) baked to a golden brown by time spent in the sun, with half a dozen or so sun-caused beauty marks spread over her body, which tended toward the muscular side of tomboyish—strong shoulders overshadowing athletically small breasts and abdominal muscles obscuring the curvature of her hips, but with marvelously toned, muscular legs, and defined arms. She was the polar opposite of her boss, not only in looks, but also in personality; Brooke’s laidback surfer approach to life clashed often with Vendela’s demand for perfection and precision. At 5’7”, Brooke towered over her boss, who might climb to 5’4” while wearing 5” heels, which she often did, but, unmodified by footwear and clothing, clearly hovered somewhere in the range of five-foot even and around one-hundred pounds.

Brooke didn’t hate her boss, per se, that was, until she stepped off the plane and was struck full in the face by the coldest, driest air she’d ever encountered. She’d read up on Barrow during the interminably long flight. It technically, despite the colossal snow drifts and ice everywhere, was a desert. Another interesting tid-bit she’d learned—Vendela’s private home was the largest foundation-set structure for five-hundred miles; it would also be Brooke’s home from November 18th to January 23rd.

She picked up Vendela’s Range Rover from storage near the airport. Driving the sleek, black SUV through the frozen streets of Barrow, Brooke quickly realized the British-built, ultra-luxury vehicle probably cost more than every other vehicle in the 4,000 person town combined. The road to Vendela’s mansion/compound/fantastically-creepy steel and stone tower had blessedly been plowed, although Brooke was made to understand that such luxuries might vanish at anytime over the next two months. Once inside the cavernous, underground parking structure, empty save for the Range Rover she’d driven in, Brooke held out hope that it would be her last cold, barren experience for awhile; after all, Vendela was an artist, seemed to adore vibrant colors and lush fabrics, surely her home, even one on the furthest edge of arctic hell, would reflect that. As Brooke rode the elevator up to the main floor of the compound, she found she was sorely mistaken. Each room was larger and more barren than the last. Dark stonework or burnished metals comprised the walls and much of the furniture. Brooke couldn’t, even with an astounding amount of imagination, think of anyplace less welcoming or potentially deadlier to the blind or clumsy. Free-standing, spiral staircases, a dozen in all, led up to the various floors from the main hall, which didn’t have a stick of furniture in it excepting an enormous black rug, forty feet by probably twice that, laid out in front of the colossal fireplace dominating one wall. Upon closer inspection, Brooke found the fireplace was not just functional, but apparently pivotal in heating the entire mansion; she also discovered the black rug was comprised of a hundred or so black bear pelts sewn together. Neither discovery was particularly welcome.

The sun was already setting, in late afternoon, by the time Brooke had a roaring fire going in the fireplace and her things tucked away in one of the guestrooms, which was decorated entirely in black marble plates and moose antlers dipped in bronze. Back in the main hall, she warmed herself in front of the fire, or as close as she could get to the fire without melting her hair. She tried very hard not to think of how many dead black bears she’d had to walk over to get to where she was standing.

The front door, which apparently opened seamlessly out of one of the walls, burst inward, and Vendela stormed in, her stiletto heel boots clacking loudly across the marble floors. Her hair was as straight as an arrow, all of uniform length, and long enough to reach a mere hand’s width from her belt. She occasionally wore it in a loose bun or an overly-precise ponytail, but left it free flowing when she wished to think, either brushing it with an antique, silver-handled brush, or combing it with a downright ancient-looking bone pick. Her hair was left down at the moment, her eyes, and much of her face, covered by enormous black sunglasses, and her lithe body poured into thigh-high black boots, black ski pants, and a black turtleneck with a white mink coat wrapped lovingly around her svelte frame. The form-fitting clothing was a vast departure from how Vendela usually dressed; her typical clothing billowed around her with clunky, over-sized jewelry, giving her the appearance of a little girl trying on her mother’s clothing. Brooke much preferred how Vendela looked in the tighter outfit.

“Brooke,” Vendela said, in her truncated, peculiar way of speaking that wasn’t so much of an accent as it was an unnatural cadence. “I need you to…” She often left long, pregnant pauses in her sentences, which were spoken in such a flat, uninflected tone, as to make the endings entirely unforeseeable until she spoke the final few words, which often left Brooke more than a little surprised at the sharp delineations from her expectations to what Vendela actually wanted. “…get my studio lit. And, you should find…a thimble that fits you.”

Through the rest of the evening, and well into the night, Brooke followed Vendela around her studio, hopping from mannequin to mannequin as they brought together the beginnings of Vendela’s fashion line for the following year. Vendela removed only the mink coat, storming through the well-lit studio on her ridiculously unpractical boots, inspecting things through the pitch-black lenses of her oversized sunglasses, and always trailing a wake of expensive, lavender-scented perfume. Brooke, when she wasn’t furiously scribbling down everything Vendela was saying, caught herself falling a little in love with the perfume, and, toward the end of the day, caught herself eyeing Vendela’s compact legs and firm behind in the tight, black, stretchy material of the ski pants.

When they were finally finished, on the pre-dawn side of 3 AM, Brooke stumbled up the spiral staircase to her room and flopped onto her bed. She crawled weakly over the edge of the bed to search through one of her bags for the thick, woolen socks she’d brought to sleep in. Her hand brushed something solid with a smooth, leather-like strap running off it. She fished out the item, gobsmacked when her hand emerged from the bag with her strap-on. The black, ultra-harness with thong back, open crotch, and an 8” pink, pearl silicon dildo was hers alright, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember packing it, or, since she clearly did, why she would. She sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the pink phallus, which looked far more like a Popsicle than a penis, as if it might explain how it got there. When it refused to answer, she tucked it back in her bag and snuggled down beneath the covers, still fully dressed, to dream fitful, cold dreams of Vendela stalking reindeer in her clacking boots and designer sunglasses.

~€~

Brooke awoke late the next day. Vendela wasn’t up yet when she ventured out into the house in search of breakfast. She ate, made a pot of coffee, drank most of it herself, and cleaned the almost entirely stainless steel kitchen before wandering back up to her room when Vendela still wasn’t awake.

Her room, with proper vent flow adjustments on the shafts up the walls from the main fireplace, became toasty, and Brooke decided to take another look at the peculiar stowaway in her bag. She hadn’t been dreaming—her strap-on was right where she tucked it the night before. In an act of ridiculous impetuousness, for which Brooke had no earthly explanation, she stripped naked and pulled on the strap-on, cinching it tight over the curve of her hips. Admiring herself in the full-length mirror, she turned this way and that, cocking her hips to one side or the other, grasping the phallus in one hand and then both, admiring how the black material broke up the tan lines of her skin and how perky the fairly impressive pink dildo looked jutting out from her mound.

Her skin, which was one of her most prized body parts, was already beginning to dry under the frigid, aridity of the arctic weather, and Brooke decided she needed to halt the scaling/flaking process before it started. For a moment, only a brief one, she considered taking the strap-on off to apply the lotion, but the moment passed, and she left it on. For the better part of an hour, she stood in front of the mirror, applying moisturizer to her arms, across her chest, cupping her own lotion-slicked breasts for a moment before moving on to her stomach. She drizzled a stream of the off-white lotion across her firm butt cheeks and along her legs, bending in entirely unwarrantedly sexy ways to rub the lotion in. By the time she’d finished her moisturizing regiment, she was drowsy again, and Vendela still hadn’t awoken.

Barely conscious of what she was doing, Brooke climbed back into bed, lying on her back on top of the covers, to take a quick nap.

~€~

“Brooke,” Vendela’s voice startled her only partially from sleep. “Come down here. I want you to show me…what you’re wearing.”

That couldn’t be right, Brooke thought. She tried to shake off the lingering dream-like qualities of her nap, but she just couldn’t fully shrug off the drowsiness. The question wasn’t the wrong part; in fact, Vendela often asked her that when they were attending functions together that would require Brooke to look fashionable. There was something off about the question or maybe it was the answer that her sleep muddled brain couldn’t quite piece together. Regardless, she slid off the bed, and padded down the stairs in bare feet.

Vendela was standing in front of the colossal, roaring fireplace, facing away from the flames, dressed in a white, silk kimono. For a moment, with how stock still she was standing, it was hard for Brooke to tell if it was actually Vendela or a merely a statue. It wasn’t until her feet hit the fuzzy edge of the vast bearskin rug that she looked down, more interested in the sensation of the fur between her toes, but having the unfortunate side-effect of realizing what she was still wearing.

If she was dreaming, and she really hoped she was considering she was staring straight down at a perky pink phallus and not a lot else, it was the sort of dream she would have welcomed a chainsaw wielding maniac to interrupt. When she looked back up from the embarrassing answer to Vendela’s question, she found Vendela, standing almost toe to toe with her. She didn’t look mad, or confused, or anything really. Her tight features, with a delicate, heart-shaped mouth, razor-thin nose, and naturally slanted ice-blue eyes, were completely unreadable.

Vendela grasped Brooke’s strap-on in one, slender hand, and led her by it into the center of the bearskin rug where the roaring fire cast flickering crimson light and peculiar shadows from the massive iron grate guarding the hearth. The combination of the heat pouring out of the inferno in the fireplace, which was quite possibly large enough to consume a small house, and the intoxicating aroma of Vendela’s perfume started to make Brooke’s head spin. She closed her eyes against the oddly drunken feeling washing over her. When she opened them again, she found Vendela in front of her, on her knees, taking the pearly pink strap-on between her lips. It was really hard to tell how good of a job she was doing with the mock-blowjob until two fingers found their way up between the gap in the crotch of her harness to slip inside her shorn pussy—after that, Brooke decided Vendela was probably doing a masterful job with her mouth.

How things progressed from there became a little fuzzy. Brooke was fairly certain she climaxed from Vendela’s deft fingers and the lewd show of her strap-on blowjob, which was why she assumed she next found herself lying flat on her back, panting and moaning, with Vendela straddling her, riding almost in slow motion, the front of her kimono falling open on occasion to show her perfect white breasts, which might have been carved of marble for the smooth sheen they boasted. When Brooke reached up to touch them as Vendela rode smoothly up and down on her strap-on, she found the breasts ice-cold, but absolutely perfect in every other way.

Her eyes drifted closed, for who knows how long, and when she managed to pry them open again, she was behind Vendela, who had bent over on all fours, legs tightly clenched together with her feet between Brooke’s legs, and her head resting on her outstretched hands, reaching straight forward to grasp the bearskin fur in two, tightly-held fistfuls. Brooke’s hands gripped the delicate curve of Vendela’s hips, again, finding the skin frigid to the touch, pulling her diminutive partner back, while she thrust forward into her with the pink strap-on.

When she faded in and out again, she found herself on top of Vendela, one alabaster leg slung tightly around her lower back and arms spread wide to either side for a stable grip against what was turning out to be a fairly violent ravaging. Her hair, her beautifully straight, perfect hair, splayed across the inky blackness of the fur like a halo of winter sunlight, and, for the first time, Brooke actually noticed how much Vendela seemed to be enjoying herself. She was smiling, sort of anyway, her white lips parted, tongue barely visible and tiny moans escaping with every thrust Brooke made. The smile, which was probably the first she’d ever seen from Vendela, was lovely, even without the sexual undertones of how it came to be there, and Brooke paid extra special attention to it as never to forget what Vendela’s joy looked like.

Brooke’s eyes drifted closed to the sounds of Vendela’s screams of pleasure echoing through the house in a melodic, yet frighteningly high-pitched key.

~€~

For the next several weeks, Brooke awoke naked, in her bed, beneath the covers, with the strap-on folded neatly on the pillow next to her. She spent her mornings alone. When the sun set, earlier and earlier in the afternoon, working its way toward the point in mid-December when it wouldn’t rise at all for a solid month, Vendela awoke, said only a few words to her, and they went back to work. After they’d finished a few more stitches on the fashion line, Vendela would turn out the lights in the studio, go to the fireplace in the main hall, and Brooke would return to her room in a haze. As though operating entirely on muscle memory, she would strip naked, put on the strap-on, and return to Vendela for a dreamlike night of sex, fading in and out as their positions changed, seldom able to utter anything but a moan, and always ending with her eyes closing to the sounds of Vendela’s climactic screams echoing through the mansion.

In the mornings, Brooke could remember pieces, with great difficulty, of specific moments from the blurry night before. The days were getting shorter, lasting only a few hours before sunset, leaving more and more night occupied with work and increasingly long love-making sessions with Vendela. Something remarkable, the only thing she could remember with crystalline certainty, was that Vendela always took care of Brooke’s orgasm first. Sometimes, Brooke was lying on her back, legs spread, Vendela on her hands and knees between her legs, lifting the strap-on with one hand while she held open the harness with the other to lap like a pure-white tigress at a bowl of milk. Other times, it would be the mock-blowjob and fingers. On a scant couple of occasions, Brooke could only be certain of two, Vendela had placed her in a position Brooke had never even heard of. Brooke would be laying on her stomach, hips slightly raised, knees bent with her feet in the air, and Vendela would lie facedown on top of her in the opposite direction, holding Brook’s ankles one in each hand, her legs spread around the back of Brooke’s head, and Vendela’s face craned down to lap at Brooke’s pussy from behind. There was something incredibly thrilling and subservient about the position, how the much smaller woman controlled her body with her weight, held her ankles as she pleased, and pinned Brooke’s arms beneath her shins. Of all the positions Vendela sexually gratified her in, the orgasms from that position were always the strongest.

After a solid month of sex, work, and sleep intermingling, the days shortening until nothing but blackness remained, Brooke finally came to two very important realizations: one, there were only around three, very small windows in the entire mansion, which must have been well over 20,000 square feet, and, two, Vendela didn’t seem to eat or drink anything. There was a third revelation she desperately hoped would happen, which was a definitive answer to whether the sex-filled nights were only dreams or if it was actually happening. She’d thought the answer would become clear, given enough time, but never seemed to turn either direction. She even considered asking Vendela about it; however, whenever she tried to work up the nerve, her mouth would dry out, and she would suddenly become very certain, if only for a few hours, that it definitely was just lusty dreaming conjured up by a mind with little else to stimulate it.

When delicate fingernail marks began appearing on Brooke’s shoulders, back, arms, and thighs, she decided the matter was settled, and didn’t consider asking Vendela anymore. She did, however, begin treating her boss far more like a caring lover than an employer—to which Vendela showed absolutely no response.

~€~

January saw the fashion line coming into beautiful relief, and, to Brooke’s surprise, she saw a little of her own influences in several of the garments. She wasn’t just helping the artist to paint in needle and thread, she was adding a few strokes herself. The clothes were gorgeous, perhaps the best she’d ever seen from Vendela’s very long career…and then that was odd too. Having spent two months fucking Vendela in every which way either of them could imagine, she had never found so much as a crease or a wrinkle, nary a plastic surgery scar anywhere on her body, and yet, nothing drooped, nothing sagged, nothing felt loose to the touch. But she was—Brooke had to do some very rough math considering she didn’t really even know what month contained Vendela’s birthday—at least fifty or sixty, and that would assume her first full fashion line debuted on or around her twentieth birthday. It wasn’t impossible for such a thing to happen, nor was it impossible that a fifty-year-old woman could look as good as Vendela did, it was just so insanely unlikely that Brooke had to add it to the list of crazy realizations she had started back in December.

~€~

“Brooke,” Vendela’s voice jolted Brooke awake in the interminably black bedroom. “Wake up. I want to show you the…hot tub.”

Brooke turned on the lamp next to her bed in time to see Vendela’s pale white feet walking out her door, hair, the color of winter sunlight, floating behind her. For the first time, she felt refreshed, awake, and completely cognizant when Vendela roused her. Something told her to leave the strap-on where it was, to grab just a robe, and follow.

Through winding corridors, her thin, pink bathroom clutched tightly to her chest, Brooke followed the faint, white outline of Vendela, dressed in her silk kimono, twenty or so paces ahead, as they made their way deeper into the mansion’s core, but also with a decidedly upward direction. The hallway, or path, or tunnel, or whatever winding dark space Brooke had walked through for the past ten minutes, finally opened onto an octagonal room with a huge, stone hot tub in the middle. Vendela was standing beside it. She let her kimono drop, her iridescently pale form slipping one toe into the steaming water, followed by a shapely leg, and then the rest of her petite form.

Brooke watched with building lust, having never seen Vendela’s naked body so clearly and thrilling at the possibilities a hot tub might open in their repertoire. She dropped her own robe and followed. The water, indeed the air above the water, teetered on the edge of being uncomfortably hot. When the entire room began rolling toward the ceiling, and the ceiling opened onto the most brilliantly vivid starry night sky Brooke had ever seen, she began to figure out why the hot tub water had to be so hot. The open air of the arctic winter was twenty or thirty below zero, and though the jets in the hot tub swirled the nearly-scalding water in such a way that the air just a few feet above the water remained hot, Brooke knew full-well the water would freeze to her skin in a matter of seconds if she got out of the hot tub when it locked fully into place atop the tallest spire on the already towering mansion.

Brooke huddled, almost entirely submerged, with just enough of her face above the water to breathe through her nose. Vendela, on the other hand, stood in the middle of the hot tub, hands splayed out slightly to her sides, tickling the water, her head thrown back, staring up at the aurora borealis snaking its way across the inky black sky like color-shifting ribbons.

“Brooke,” Vendela said. “I want to give you something—something very, very…bewildering.”

With Vendela’s expert hands to guide her body, made nearly weightless in the bubbling water, Brooke found herself arranged in one of the chiseled seats of the hot tub with her legs spreading around Vendela and her head tilted comfortably back to watch the bands of color and light drifting across the star-filled sky. She felt Vendela’s hands teasing their way up her inner thigh followed closely by soft, heart shaped lips, kissing a trail to her pussy. Brooke gasped, arched her back, which was also a surprisingly comfortable position in the built in seat, and reached a hand down between her legs to gently caress the silky hair along the side of Vendela’s head. Vendela’s small, agile tongue, which Brooke had gotten to know quite well over the past two months, both with her own tongue and almost the entirety of her body, was in rare form that night, as though it were coated in moving silk. The delicate work along her inner lips, the taunting tonguing, and toe-curling flicks across her clit all had a little something extra that Brooke couldn’t quite describe other than to say it felt fluid and smoother than normal.

Vendela hadn’t ever said as much, their lovemaking sessions always transpiring without so much as a word from either of them, but Brooke had long ago come to the conclusion, that Vendela not only enjoyed going down on her, but that she put the same artistic verve into it that she did with designing and sewing clothing. Brooke felt her first orgasm as a tremble, between her belly button and her clit, spread out from there slowly, at first, before shooting like lightening up her spine and down her legs in an intense, rolling wave. Her scream of pleasure dissipated into the frigid, Alaskan air. Vendela continued, teased open Brooke’s lips with two finger tips, adding a nudging pinky knuckle beneath her throbbing clit to give traction when she pressed her tongue flat across the top and forced the hood back. Her second orgasm came quickly, only a few swipes from Vendela’s talented tongue, when countered by her deft pinky, and Brooke was writhing in the steamy water as though on fire.

Brooke’s heart pounded in her chest in an adrenaline-fueled way she hadn’t even managed when riding twenty-foot curls in waters teaming with great white sharks. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t catch her breath, couldn’t come down from the euphoric high brought about by Vendela’s near thirty-minute tongue bath of her now entirely too sensitive pussy…but then, that was weird too.

Brooke looked down to the entirely submerged Vendela, who, with her winter sunlight hair drifting beneath the water like bands of gold and her artistically white curves floating just above the bottom, must have been breathing water for the better part of the last half-hour. Brooke grabbed her by the arms and pulled her face out of the water. A few wet, errant strands of hair fell across Vendela’s vacant features—they looked at each other blankly.

“What the hell…?” Brooke asked incredulously, when Vendela refused to speak first.

“Brooke,” Vendela said. “I told you I was going to show you something…confusing.” She slid up Brooke’s body and planted a long, lingering, chlorine flavored kiss on her lips.

Brooke pulled away, not in revulsion, but more because the kiss was muddling her thinking, and making her want to do things to Vendela that wouldn’t necessarily involve getting any sort of explanation, although might involve some mild forms of spanking.

“You taste like pool water.”

“Yeah,” Vendela said. “So does everything…down there.”

Things started making a lot more sense, all the little mysteries and revelations, along with the enormous freak-out of how Vendela had held her breath around ten or twenty times longer than was humanly possible, when Brooke saw Vendela’s fangs extending. She thought she saw the sun coming up for the first time in more than a month, breaking through the faint fog clinging to the glacial mountains far to the east, winter sun, like Vendela’s hair, as the hot tub descended back into the blackness of the mansion, and Vendela submerged herself in the water between Brooke’s legs.

She couldn’t quite say what she expected as the ceiling closed above her, giving her one last glimpse of the sky graying with the coming dawn, but Brooke wasn’t remotely surprised when she felt the pressure, followed by a stabbing pain as Vendela’s fangs sank into her inner thigh.

Haunted House on Top

Cami, who had been having fewer and fewer crazy episodes as of late, felt optimistic about Halloween despite the possible catastrophic mixing of schizophrenia and costumes. It was her first Halloween with her long distance girlfriend, Brianna, who would be driving down from New York for the occasion, as Cami had driven up for most other holidays to that point; being the only vampire in the relationship, it did only seem fitting that Cami be the one to decide on how they celebrated all hallows eve. Her Atrociously Gay Best Friend Forever, a.k.a. AGBFF, Lewis said he knew of a haunted house in old Alexandria that might be fun. He wasn’t going until much later, a hot date of his own, as he’d put it, but he’d sent the directions to her along with the password they would need to get in.

Lewis had also been the one to go costume shopping with her. Being a Napoleonic era vampire, with tastes in clothing toward the flamboyant, Lewis knew all of the best costume shops that were period accurate and open after dark. To his great disappointment, Cami had selected a Wonder Woman costume. Putting the costume on at home, alone, on Halloween night, Cami began to see the source of Lewis’s many complaints with the plan. She was thin, far too thin for her modest breasts to fill out the top of the one piece costume, and, while her legs did look smashing in the knee-high boots, the star-spangled backside of the costume seemed to have designs on finding its way up her behind. He said she would spend the evening picking patriotic wedgies, but she hadn’t quite followed what he meant by it until that point.

“Double-sided tape,” Melvin said from her perch on the edge of the bathtub. She was Cami’s second demon companion, a squat, round frog, covered in spikes, roughly the size of a basketball with an old woman’s voice that didn’t sound too dissimilar from Betty White.

“No, I’m Wonder Woman,” Cami replied, admiring the way the shiny material clung to her lithe curves. When she turned to examine the back, she had to grasp the blue fabric to pull it away from the center it was inching toward.

“She means for you to tape your costume to your ass, dummy,” Barry said from his higher perch on the tank of the toilet. He was her original demon, a product of her psychotic break, looking like the unholy spawn of a Chihuahua and a goat that was then dressed in footy pajamas and dipped in road tar.

Cami took the advice, and tape, from Melvin successfully anchoring the backside of her costume to her own backside. With her golden bracers in place, her lasso on her hip, and headband holding back her shoulder-length black hair, she felt as ready as she could. Without a reflection in the mirror, she couldn’t be sure if she looked properly wondrous, but her two demons said she looked like a slutty American flag, which was precisely what she was going for. Cami finished applying her blood-red lipstick when the doorbell rang.

With a quick jog down the stairs, she flung the front door open to find Brianna on the steps dressed in what looked like a highly-impractical leather, armored dress. Brianna, who had been buxom before college, had put on just enough weight in her first year at university to be lusciously curvy in exciting new ways. Her long, thick Latina hair had been straightened to fall around her shoulders, although Cami’s attention gravitated toward the copious mounds of tan cleavage pushing out the top of the dress.

“That’s such a great…um…what are you?” Cami asked.

“Xena, Warrior Princess.” Brianna held up the little metal ring (which was actually plastic) on the side of her belt as if that would make it all clear. “From the TV show?”

“I’ve been dead and crazy for most of the last hundred years without access to a TV until very recently,” Cami said by way of explanation, “but if this is what a warrior princess looks like, I need to start watching.”

“The costume fit better in high school.”

“I like the way it fits now.”

They shared a knowing smile.

The drive, which was only a few blocks from Cami’s inherited estate, took a little longer than expected as Cami kept having to restrain herself from crawling across the Range Rover’s center console to sit on Brianna’s lap. When Brianna finally pointed out that Cami could survive a car accident that would likely kill her human girlfriend, Cami remained on her side of the car, with only her left hand making teasing trips over to stroke Brianna’s luscious thighs.

Once parked in front of the haunted house, which looked remarkably like any other house in the row of old colonials in the Tudor style, Cami unclipped her seatbelt and hopped across onto Brianna’s lap, straddling her in a fairly athletic maneuver. Cradling Brianna’s face between her hands, Cami kissed her, her lips cold and urgent against Brianna’s until her mouth opened far enough for Cami’s tongue to seek out Brianna’s tongue ring. Brianna’s hands found their way to Cami’s thinly clothed ass, caressing it gently until she heard the crinkle of tape. Letting Cami slide back a little out of her grasp, Brianna ended up honking the horn with Cami’s butt. They both had to break the kiss to giggle.

“Do you have tape on your ass?” Brianna asked.

“It’s intentional and necessary, I assure you,” Cami replied.

“Is there tape anywhere else I should know about?”

Cami feigned a pondering pose and shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of, but I’m beginning to think I should have used some on my chest as well.” She shifted a little, re-adjusting the front of the Wonder Woman costume to make sure it concealed her breasts.

With the moment ruined by double-sided tape crinkles and ass-on-horn honking, they decided to head up to the house, linking arms as they walked up the front steps of the allegedly haunted abode, which was clearly labeled haunted house by the large banner above the door, but had none of the campy trappings they were expecting. Nobody waited to take their tickets, no costumed thrill-seekers milled around the front, and aside from the porch light the entire house seemed to be dark.

“This doesn’t look right,” Brianna said. “Are you sure we have the right address?”

“It was your GPS that brought us here; you tell me?” Cami held back from knocking on the door when she realized Brianna had taken several steps back. “Don’t worry; you have an immortal creature of the night with some sort of golden rope thing here to protect you.” Cami held out the lasso to show Brianna how on top of the situation she was.

“That’s a lasso.”

“What does it do?” Cami asked.

“Supposedly makes people tell the truth.”

Cami inspected the lasso, which looked like ordinary rope spray-painted gold. Exotic things could come in ordinary packages, she supposed. Taking Brianna by the hand, she knocked on the door with a resounding echo following as if she’d banged on an entirely empty drum. A small, wooden slat in the door slid open.

“Password?” a disembodied voice, not definitively male or female, asked from the other side of the door.

“Carbuncle,” Cami and Brianna said in unison.

The door opened on an empty hallway. They both took a few tentative steps into the house, far enough to look around behind the opened door, expecting to find their greeter hiding, but the space was as empty as the rest of the tastefully appointed house from what they could tell. Before they could even give each other a concerned glance, the door slammed behind them.

“Is this vampire stuff?” Brianna asked, clinging to Cami’s side.

“It might be,” Cami said. “I’m not really aware of what all stuff we can do.”

Loud, thrumming, dance music beckoned them away from the dimly lit entryway deeper into the darkness of the house, down a hall draped with black sheets hanging on the walls, into a crowded dance club replete with flashing strobes, bass-driven beats, and close to a hundred shadowy figures dancing to rave music. The normalcy of the scene set them both at ease, and Brianna practically dragged Cami into the throng to dance. Pushing deep into the crush of bodies, they found a spot open enough to dance so long as they did so nearly in each other’s shoes. Cami removed the lasso from her belt and slung it around Brianna’s waist, holding her close as they writhed against each other in time with the music.

The scent of lemon poppy-seed muffins rose to Cami’s nose when she nuzzled in closer to Brianna. It was the scent of her blood, her desire, the part of Cami’s predatory, vampire attraction that drew her to Brianna in the first place. With Brianna’s ample breasts brushing up against hers with every shift and move to the music, Cami felt an undeniable lust rising not just between her legs, but in her fangs as well.

“Do you have to tell me the truth now?” Cami whispered into Brianna’s ear, nuzzling ever closer into her thick, brown hair.

“Whatever you want to ask,” Brianna replied breathlessly.

“Do you want me to bite you, right here, right now?” Cami whispered even closer to Brianna’s neck, letting her slowly extending fangs brush against the soft skin just below Brianna’s ear.

“Yes, and I don’t care who sees,” Brianna practically purred in response.

Cami cradled the back of Brianna’s head and let her teeth sink in slowly, thrilling at the immediate splash of hot blood across her tongue. Brianna stiffened for a split second before curling into Cami’s embrace. She wrapped one arm around her vampire lover’s shoulder for stability, but let the other roam up and down Cami’s side for a moment, moving past the playful petting stage to cup one of her breasts, caressing the firm mound eagerly through the top of her Wonder Woman costume.

With her bloodlust satiated, at least in part, and her more provincial lust building from Brianna’s caresses, Cami broke away from the bite, gasping, although she didn’t actually need to draw breath, immediately looking for a place they might go for some much-needed privacy. Instead, what she found was that they were embracing on an entirely empty dance floor. The strobe lights shut off, the music faded, and the room, which they once had thought a vibrant rave scene, actually appeared to be a Victorian sitting room dimly lit with a smattering of oil lamps and candles.

“Um…” Cami said, feeling a little stupid for not thinking of something better to say.

Brianna opened her eyes and jumped, twisting in Cami’s arms, not to escape, but to perhaps burrow in closer. “What the fuck?!”

Cami could kick herself for not thinking to say what Brianna had just said—it so perfectly described the situation with such an economy of words.

“We should probably go back out the way we came.” Cami turned in a slow circle to try to remember which way they’d come in, but found the room didn’t actually seem to have any doors or windows, just larger paintings where one might reasonably assume a door or window should go. “That’s odd. I could have sworn we came in through a door.”

“What the fuck?!”

“You said that already.”

“I thought it bore repeating.”

Cami slipped from Brianna’s reluctant grasp, leaving her, for the moment, to stand in the middle of the room, while Cami made her way to one of the paintings of a doorway to give it closer inspection. “I could have sworn we came in through here,” Cami said.

“Your sense of direction is shit,” Barry said from the location Cami was almost entirely certain she’d left Brianna.

She whirled around to find the foot-tall rat dog/goat/road tar demon standing in Brianna’s spot and the Latina Warrior Princess nowhere in sight. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Fuck if I know,” Barry threw up two exasperated claw hands. “It’s not like I teleported here on purpose. You’re not frightened, are you?”

“Of course not,” Cami said dismissively. “I’m a badass, undead bitch.”

“You’re also the moron who just lost your girlfriend.”

“That too.”

“There’s good news though,” Barry said with a little hop.

“Which is…?”

“There’s a door behind you now.”

Cami turned to find the painting of a door had indeed materialized into an actual door. When she turned to thank Barry, she found the spot completely empty. When she turned back to the door, she nearly jumped out of her skin coming face to face with an upside down, dangling rat dog/goat/road tar demon who had secured himself to the top of the door’s molding by his spiked tail.

“Scared you!” Barry chortled.

“Did not.” Cami brushed passed him into the hallway putting a sternness to her step that might hide how much he’d startled her. The hallway looked to go on for miles with no end in sight. The more she walked, the further it stretched, until she turned to head back to the room and found it too had been replaced with just more hallway. The same handful of pictures on the walls, the same antique wall-hugging tables, and the same oil lamps repeated again and again for as long as she could see in either direction.

“Barry? Brianna?” Cami called down the hallway. When no answer came, she tried, “Carbuncle?”

When no answer came, she decided to inspect one of the paintings, which, in her slightly muddled logic, might have been what caused Barry to appear in the first place. The three pictures next to the table were portraits of three fairly ugly, moderately obese, and unhappy looking women, who, by the set of their eyes, dimple in their chin, and slope of their nose, were likely sisters.

“Oh my God, I’m so happy to see you.” Brianna immediately pressed into Cami’s back, wrapping her hands around her waist, and nearly knocking Cami face-first into the wall.

“The pictures do work!” Cami exclaimed.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said shyly, “I’m happy to see you too.”

Cami reached her hands down to place them over Brianna’s around her waist, but her girlfriend moved them away first, taking Cami’s hands and positioning them with palms flat against the wall. Before Cami could protest, she felt Brianna’s hot breath along her bare shoulders and neck, followed closely by pillowy lips. Cami murmured a half-hearted protest, but didn’t move for fear it might be heeded. Brianna’s hands made their way up Cami’s sides, across to her stomach, and cupped both her breasts with firm, eager fingers. She ventured a glance over her shoulder, Brianna’s lips came away to meet hers in a soft kiss, sweet enough to distract Cami from the hands slowly pulling down the front of her costume to liberate her perky, alabaster breasts. When Brianna’s fingers pinched lightly over her nipples, dragging them to stiff attention, Cami broke the kiss to let out a little “eep” of pleasure. A little more teasing, and some meaningful pressing of Brianna’s heaving breasts into her back, drew the apparently desired result from Cami of arching her back; Brianna’s hands immediately moved from her breasts, to intertwine fingers through the hair at the back of Cami’s head, pulling her head back ever so slightly to hold her firmly in the arched pose.

The question of tops and bottoms flashed through Cami’s mind. To that point, there really hadn’t been a whole lot of either taking charge, which had left their sex-life a little vanilla in places Cami might have hoped for kink and a little less defined than she had come to know from previous lovers. If she were to be honest, and it was kind of hard not to be with her head pulled back by her hair, she really wanted to be topped; this desire, against her wishes, poured out from her mouth in a long, wet, “yessssss.”

Brianna, standing directly behind her now, apparently took the utterance for complete submission to the act. Cami could feel Brianna’s thumb running flat along her back, caressing the space between her cheeks until the silky material of her costume pressed ever so slightly between them, with her hand making its way down to the thin material barely covering Cami’s now fully interested soft lips. Brianna’s soft fingers caressed her through the costume with her thumb held back to make slow passes along the same line it had been traveling in the crevice of Cami’s behind. Each stroke brought Cami’s already taut body to more acute arousal until Brianna could apparently feel the hard little bead she’d been searching for.

When her fingers played across it, even through the material, Cami groaned in the unabashed way only true pleasure could conjure. Brianna pushed her forward against the wall, letting Cami rest her forehead on the scant space between the portraits of the three sisters. She could feel the paintings watch them, their eyes straining to the center to look down Cami’s back to what was being done to her, and she didn’t care; moreover, part of her wanted to give the stuffy old women in the pictures a show, so she leaned into it, or, more precisely, leaned back into Brianna.

Slowly at first, Brianna put her hand into a riding motion with Cami moving her hips in time, the hand in her hair acting as the reins. The desire for a gallop rose in her until she was eagerly pushing herself against the familiar hand, struggling against the rider’s pull on her hair, and bucking herself toward the hot, tingly finish line. Brianna responded with control, slowing her pace, to create a teasing longing that drove Cami to squirm. The delicious agony of being drawn back from the brink of climax didn’t go without a few pained whimpers from Cami, which seemed to thrill her lover even more. Cami could hear Brianna breathing heavier, feel the warmth of her body flooding across the short distance between them, and smell the overpowering scent of lemon poppy-seed muffins with an undeniable undertone of Brianna’s own growing wetness.

When Cami had calmed just enough to feel an iota of control over herself again, Brianna’s fingers pushed aside the bottom of Cami’s costume to the soft, eager pussy below. With Brianna’s fore and middle finger on opposite sides of Cami’s clit, like a little cigarette, any move Cami made back and forth stroked her closer and closer to the climax she’d already been denied once. On her second attempt, moving her hips in the most pleasing rhythm she could find, Brianna seemed more eager than her for things to build toward a slippery, satisfying conclusion. She tugged lightly on Cami’s hair, giving her a meaningful bump of her hips against Cami’s behind, until they settled into an ever-growing rocking motion, pushing closer and closer to the edge.

Cami couldn’t tell if she threw her head back or if Brianna pulled it, but she found herself arched at the point of climax to let out a long, loud scream of primal pleasure, her green eyes opened to narrow slits, just enough to spot lewd smiles spreading across the lips of the three sisters in the paintings. When her head fell forward in the slow tremors of aftershock orgasms, as she’d come to call them, she felt the full warmth of Brianna’s body press up against her back and the hot, eager breath of her lover cascading across her shoulder and neck, setting a few strands of her black hair to flutter.

To their right, Cami heard a door panel slide open, and someone ask for a password. “Carbuncle,” a familiar French-accented voice on the other side of the door said, and the front door flew open on them with Lewis and half-a-dozen other costumed vampires standing on the porch looking in.

Cami pulled up the front of her costume, not before accidentally giving a brief flash of white breasts to the crowd while Brianna pulled the bottom of Cami’s costume back into place although there was little doubt, from the obvious wet spot and wrinkles, what had been going on.

“We can come back in an hour,” Lewis said, “if you two still need more time.”

Cami gave Brianna a worried look. Her girlfriend flushed red from exertion simply blushed and shrugged. “We were just leaving,” Cami said. She ventured a glance over her shoulder on the way out to the portraits of the three sisters. One of them winked at her.

About the Author

Cassandra Duffy spent most of her childhood being precocious, which stopped being entertaining or impressive when she grew into an adult, at which point she had to start being precious. She writes a free-lance sex advice column found in various lesbian magazines, and has written a handful of short story collections and novels found on her website at http://cassandra-duffy.com/. She lives and writes in Orange County with her partner and soul mate Nichole and their two cats: Dragon and Josephine. She encourages readers to contact her at LizDarkling@Gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @SapphicPixie

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

The Last Best Tip

An Eternal Night of Overtime

Haunted House on Top

About the Author

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

The Last Best Tip

An Eternal Night of Overtime

Haunted House on Top

About the Author