Deja Vu Part Two
Dec. 18th, 2004 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shapinglightFor warnings, rating etc, see previous part. This part also includes substance abuse. Meant to add the note for Part One - not going to apologise for giving Liam the surname 'O'Connor', even though it's been done over and over. It just seems like the obvious one, that 'Connor' would have been a family name somehow or other.
Pairings: this part also includes William/Drusilla
Deja Vu Part Two
As the weeks passed, Liam felt as if he was sinking slowly into a mire from which he would never be able to extricate himself. Every time, when he'd managed to nerve himself up to tell William – or Spike, as he now insisted on being called – that whatever this was between them had to end, he would find his resolve crumbling again the minute the boy walked through the office door with that collar round his neck. He'd had him now in every position he knew on every item of furniture in the room, and he still couldn't get enough of him. William was very eager to please and he proved very adept at cocksucking too, and so very willing to do it.
Liam would stand, bracing himself on the desk, looking down at that curly blond head bobbing up and down at his groin and would find himself wondering how he ever got through the days when he didn't see William; how he'd managed all these years without feeling this supremely talented – and very single-minded - mouth on his cock.
When he asked William where he'd acquired his enviable skill, the boy replied that he'd had a good teacher, and refused to say any more. Liam supposed that it had to have been this mysterious 'vampire' father figure, and could only be grateful to the man, whoever he was. He would go home at the end of each session, having done nothing during it except fuck and allow himself to be wholly overwhelmed by the sensations of ownership and familiarity that the boy evoked in him.
His inhibitions and good sense which he always lost somewhere during that same period of time would return to him with a vengeance on the train, along with a healthy dose of guilt, and as often as not, he'd end up on his knees in front of Francis, his lover's cock in his mouth, almost as soon as he'd shut the front door behind him.
He found that he couldn't give Francis enough attention, that he was desperate to please him in every way. He'd never in his life done so much fucking on one day a week and so much being fucked on all the others. He knew that Francis wasn't happy – that he was suspicious and quite miserable at times, but he persisted in pretending that nothing was wrong; and for a while, Francis let him.
Then, one day, two things happened at once.
*
Liam and William lay exhausted on the consulting room floor. At least, Liam was exhausted. William seemed to be more-or-less insatiable and sometimes got quite impatient with Liam's inability to come more than once in an hour. Liam supposed it was his age catching up with him at last, making it hard to keep up with the youngster, who didn't grow any less demanding as the weeks went by.
He'd learned over time to tease the boy along, stripping him slowly one garment at a time, caressing every inch of his body until he was so over-sensitised, he was practically screaming into Liam's hand over his mouth; then taking his time making him come, forcing him to beg for it, which he did very prettily. And finally, while the boy lay soft and pliant and relaxed, Liam would fuck him slowly and luxuriously as William sucked on his fingers and urged him to do it harder, deeper - deeper; to never stop.
The feeling of power that this gave Liam was an incredible rush, as was the fact that they always ended up with William stark naked apart from his collar, while Liam himself was still almost fully clothed. It wasn't that Liam was ashamed of his body; he knew that he was in pretty good shape for his age, and he went to the gym regularly three times a week to keep it that way. It was more for the sense of control that it gave him, of being the one with the power – although deep inside, he knew that the impression was wholly false, considering the effect that William had on him.
Now Liam held the cool naked body close to him, one arm around William's waist, the other pillowing his own head. William's skin was always surprisingly cool, but he denied ever being cold, claiming that this was quite normal for vampires and Liam shouldn't fuss. Remarks like this had ceased to worry Liam; he'd heard too many of them now and they'd faded into a sort of background chatter – an unwanted, and mostly ignored, reminder that William was supposedly a client.
"I think it's time you came with me to the club to meet Dru," William said, suddenly. "What about tomorrow night?"
"What?" Liam raised his head, which didn't feel very comfortable anyway, staring at William in surprise. "Will – er, Spike, why would you want me to meet your girlfriend? Why would you even want her to know about – about us?"
William grinned in his usual rather sly fashion.
"Look, Liam," he said, "just because you're scared to tell your live-in lover boy about me doesn't mean that I feel the same about my girl. It was her idea, you know, for me to show you the error of your ways, an' that. She wants to see you – misses you too."
"Not sure I want to see her," Liam said.
William's fingers slid inside Liam's un-tucked shirt and began to play idly with his nipples, teasing them to stiffness with his cool touch, making Liam shiver a little.
"Not sure you've got a choice, mate," he said, lightly.
Liam pushed his hand away and sat up.
"What do you mean?" he said, angry, and mentally kicking himself yet again for his monumental folly.
William was smirking at him quite openly now.
"What do you think I mean?" he said. "I don't really have to spell it out, do I? Profes-s-sional miscon-n-duct!" he added, in a teasing, sing-song voice.
Furious both with William and with himself, Liam got to his feet, adjusting his clothes and glaring down at the boy. However, he knew he didn't have a leg to stand on, just as he'd always known that this would happen eventually.
"Done this before, have you?" he asked, bitterly. "You and this woman?"
For answer, William sat up slowly and wrapped his arm round Liam's leg, looking up at him through his lashes, still smirking.
"Don't be like that, Liam," he said. "You never know, you might have fun. Looks like you could do with some, the way you're so desperate for a shag whenever you see me. Lover boy not keeping you satisfied, eh?"
Liam's first impulse on hearing this was to kick William across the room, but he restrained himself firmly. Something told him that the boy would enjoy it too much – knowing that he'd got a rise out of Liam with his words, even though they weren't true.
They weren't. They really weren't. Before Francis, Liam knew that he'd never known what real intimacy was, and he was kicking himself yet again for endangering that intimacy for the sake of this nasty little piece of work, with his angelic face and so very fuckable arse. It wasn’t even like this was the first time he'd got obsessive over a pretty face. It had happened over and over again when he was younger, but he'd thought that, with Francis, he'd finally outgrown it and had put that predatory phase behind him.
Why were things so different this time that he'd been willing to risk everything?
"What is it about you?" he said aloud. "What have you done to me?"
William was still holding his leg, his face solemn now.
"I've done what vampires do," he said. "I've seduced you and got you so hot for me that you'll never be able to give me up – "
"Don't flatter yourself, Spike," Liam said, nastily, trying to put all the contempt he was currently feeling towards the boy into the way he said the ridiculous name. "Just now, I'd give you up in a heartbeat, really I would."
"Just now, maybe," William said. "But what about tomorrow, Liam - and the day after that? Do you really want to live without me? Think about it."
A very vehement 'yes' was on the tip of Liam's tongue, but then William moved his head just slightly and the lamplight in the room caught on the metal buckle of the collar round his neck, accentuating the graceful curve of throat and shoulder, and Liam felt a long, cold shudder run through his body.
William was right. Having had a taste of this boy, Liam knew with a cold, hopeless certainty that he'd never have enough of him and that every man he fucked from now on would always suffer in comparison. He could never give him up, not even for Francis.
"If I come with you tomorrow," he said, "you'll be satisfied, will you? You won't ask me again?"
"'Course not," the boy said. "I won't need to, will I?"
He said this a touch impatiently, as if it should be self-evident, and the words made Liam shiver again.
"All right," he said. "I'll meet you and this woman of yours at your wonderful vampire club tomorrow night. Just tell me where it is."
William gave him an address in a Soho back street, which didn't surprise Liam much. He thought that, as he'd said to Francis, he must have been past the place innumerable times and never noticed it, lost in all the other strip joints and bars and sex shops that cluttered the area. It might not always have been a vampire club, of course. Everything in Soho was mutable.
William was rubbing himself against Liam's leg again, his greedy cock already at half-mast. Liam thought about leaving the boy gagging for it, to teach him a lesson, but in the end – partly because of William's implicit threat, and partly because the boy was simply too beautiful to resist – thought better of it and hauled him to his feet. He sat down in his chair and pulled William onto his knee, marvelling all over again at how the round, plush curves of the boy's backside fit so beautifully into the hollow of his lap, and how familiar it felt to have them there. He toyed with the already drooling cock, swiping his thumb across the slit and rubbing moisture over the head.
"Do you want me to make you come again?" he hissed in the boy's ear, pushing his head to the side so that the white, leather-bound throat was fully exposed. William nodded, panting.
"Well, don't be so stupid as to threaten me ever again, you little shit," Liam said, venomously, and felt a sense almost of despair when all the response this provoked from the boy was an excited in-drawn breath and a full-body shiver.
Liam made him come with a few quick, workmanlike pulls and strokes, then wiped his sticky hand on William's torso, still angry and wanting to humiliate him. William, however, proved un-shockable, as usual, merely inhaling deeply, as if he liked the smell.
"Next time make it your cum, then," he said, grinning and bouncing to his feet to get his clothes. Annoyed at his inability to hit back at the boy and make it count, Liam swatted the retreating backside hard with his hand, making William skip a couple of steps then turn to leer at him cheekily.
"What a big, hard hand you have," he said. "Just like I remember. My bum always did like your hand."
"I think you have me confused with someone else," Liam said, wearily, but William ignored him.
He began to dress, saying:
"We have a bit of a dress code at the club, mate - nothing fancy. Just wear black and you'll be fine – oh, and no crosses or anything stupid like that."
He swung his leather coat round his shoulders and made for the door, looking back once to grin at Liam, with a mixture of anticipation and triumph. He didn't bother to close the door behind him, and Liam heard him talking to Cordelia, asking her out for that drink yet again. To his surprise, he heard her say:
"Okay, then. Just the one, if that's what it'll take to get you to shut up."
"Fucking brilliant!" William said. "See you in a bit, then."
Liam realised that Cordelia was staring at him, as William departed in the other direction. Her eyes challenged him to say something, and he knew in that moment that she'd been aware of what was going on the whole time between him and his client. He wanted to ask her why she'd said nothing, but he couldn't bring himself to do so. It was the same with Francis: don't mention it and perhaps it'll go away.
He walked past her with a muttered 'good night' and went to catch the train home.
*
He could smell the cooking aromas before he even opened the flat door. Francis had been busy. The table in the kitchen was properly set with their best china and glassware and there were candles already lit. Francis was stirring something that smelt incredibly good. He turned as Liam came up behind him and allowed himself to be kissed, but Liam could sense the tension in his lover's body.
"That smells fantastic," he said, to have something to say. "What's the occasion?"
He had a moment's horrible fear that he'd forgotten some kind of anniversary – although Francis was not one to mark such things anyway – and was overwhelmingly relieved when Francis said:
"No occasion. I just felt like spoiling you, love. You work hard all day, listening to people pouring out self-centred shite. You should get some reward for it, don't you think?"
"You're my reward," Liam said, and he really meant it as he said it, just as he always meant it every week when he told Francis how much he loved him a few hours after fucking William. He moved to take Francis in his arms, only to have his lover turn and fix him with a hard, cold stare.
"Am I?" Francis said. "Lately, it hasn't felt like it. It's felt like you were a million miles away a lot of the time."
A fist seemed to grab Liam's heart and begin squeezing it.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I know I've been preoccupied. I'll try to do better, love, I promise."
"Is there something you want to tell me?" Francis asked, and his eyes were pleading – for what, whether lies or the truth, Liam didn't know. He rested his forehead against the smaller man's and held him tight.
"Only that I love you," he said.
Francis allowed him another kiss then, but his eyes were unreadable, and Liam didn't know whether he was relieved or disappointed. He just knew that Francis knew he was lying.
They discussed only banalities over dinner – the day's news, the holiday - then cleared away in almost total silence. Afraid of being overwhelmed by it, Liam switched on the television to see the late news bulletin, only to discover that he'd missed it and the local news for London was already on. There was a long piece about the congestion charge and Ken Livingstone's chances of being re-elected as mayor, and Liam watched it without interest. However, his ears and in fact his whole body, perked up at the next news item.
It appeared there had been an attempted break-in and some graffiti damage at a very smart house in Portman Terrace, Belgravia, belonging to former super-model Anne LaHaye. The reporter was shown in front of the house, which was a typical Belgravia Georgian mansion, and there was some archive footage of Anne LaHaye in her modelling days, walking down the catwalk, swinging her hips aggressively while she pouted at the camera, wearing something absurdly diaphanous and short, through which her small, almost boyish breasts could be seen quite clearly.
God, she was beautiful, Liam thought - just like her son. He supposed that William's unknown father must have been quite a short man, because he certainly hadn't inherited his mother's height; but apart from that, he might have been her male twin, with the same astonishing cheekbones and long, slim legs and the same startling blue eyes. He watched mesmerised, as the picture changed to one of a tall, elegant woman getting out of a chauffeur-driven car and holding a hand in front of her face to shield it from the cameras as she walked towards her front door. From what little could be seen of her, the years hadn't marked her much. She could have been William's sister, rather than his mother. The door was opened from inside to let her enter and then slammed in the reporters' faces, revealing the house number – 17 – clearly as it did so. There was a scrawl of graffiti across it that read, 'Coming for you soon, bitch!'
Abruptly, the camera returned to the reporter, telling the viewers that Miss LaHaye had declined to be interviewed and that the police were investigating; and then Francis stepped in front of the screen and switched off the television.
"Why are you suddenly so interested in that skinny bitch?" he said, venomously. "You thinking of changing sides in your old age, Liam?"
Liam stared at him in astonishment. Francis was not a woman-hater. He would be the first to tell you that, with five sisters, he couldn't afford to be. It was out of character for him to say something like that and it showed how angry he really was.
"Sorry," Liam muttered. "Not really interested – just watching for the sake of it."
They went to bed early. Francis turned the lamp off at once and they lay in the dark next to each other, neither speaking. At last, unable to bear the silence any longer, Liam turned to take his lover in his arms. Again, Francis let him, but he didn't attempt to cuddle up to Liam, lying quiescent in his embrace. At last, he said:
"Let's go out tomorrow night, Liam. We haven't been clubbing in fucking ages."
"I can't," Liam said, at once. "I have to work late, love, and it's Tuesday. Maybe Friday would be better?"
"Seeing vampire-boy, are you?" Francis said, bitterly.
"No," Liam protested, knowing that he sounded defensive. "It's someone else – a different client."
"You're a crap liar, Liam, you know that?" Francis said, and he sounded weary. "I've been waiting six fucking weeks for you to come clean and tell me you're shagging the little slut. I waited, even though it's not in me nature to be patient, and you keep on lying, and you keep on sounding like what you are – a two-timing whore."
"Oh, God!" Liam lay still. He didn't know what to do or say. Suddenly, Francis sat up and turned the lamp back on.
"What is it about him," he demanded, "that makes him so fucking special? Tell me!"
"You're wrong, you're wrong!" Liam found himself saying – unable to bring himself to admit the truth to Francis, even now he was cornered. It would mean too much. It would mean admitting that he'd allowed himself to be seduced by a boy fifteen years his junior; that he'd allowed William's weird familiarity and his strange infatuation with him to invade every corner of his life and take it over - and destroy everything else in the process.
He couldn't do it, even though he knew it was true.
"If I'm wrong, come out with me tomorrow night. Let me show everyone that you're still mine," Francis said, "that you still want me the most."
Liam understood this for what it was – a sort of peace-offering, an offer to let bygones be bygones, to forget this had all happened and let things go back to normal. He seized on it, knowing that it was more than he deserved.
"All right," he said. "I'll come home after seeing the client and we'll go out – wherever you want to go, love, I promise."
"You'd better mean that," Francis said. "This is your last chance, Liam."
He lay back down on the pillow and folded his arms behind his head. After a moment, he said, bitterly:
"God, when I remember how much other fellas envied me when they knew I'd gone and caught meself Liam O'Connor. If only they knew!"
This was the first Liam had heard of this. Francis had always made out that he, Liam, was the lucky one to have snared Francis Doyle. And in truth, he'd felt lucky, knowing how popular Francis was and how he always had his pick of the cherry boys and of anyone else he fancied, for that matter. Everyone knew that being fucked by Francis was like being ridden to heaven and back - everyone.
Liam hadn't been able to see what Francis saw in him and now – especially now – he still couldn't see it.
"I'm sorry," he said again, even though he still hadn't confessed to anything. "I didn't mean to hurt you."
"I should have listened," Francis said, "to all those sad queers that you'd had before me, and who told me how untouchable you were. You are, Liam. Where the fuck do you go, inside your head?"
"I don't mean to," Liam said, hearing desperation in his own voice now. "I don't mean to go anywhere. I want to be here with you, love. Really I do."
Francis turned to look at him, and his face softened just a little. He reached out and touched Liam's cheek.
"Turn over," he said. "I'm going to fuck you."
Five minutes later, face buried in the pillow and with the slow, delicious burn spreading from his backside through his whole body, Liam felt tears starting to his eyes. In spite of the endearments that Francis was now whispering in his ears, he couldn't help feeling that this was the last time he'd have the opportunity to know this sensation – this total, melting surrender.
Francis might not have admitted it to himself yet, but Liam knew he was as good as finished with him.
He lay quiescent, feeling the smaller man's heated touch on his back and inside his body and the tears leaked from his eyes, making the pillow wet. He clenched his teeth, thinking that maybe it wasn't too late. He could go to the vampire club for an hour then come home and take Francis dancing – and if Francis wanted to pick up some boy himself, then let him. Liam had enough to make up for, and he felt he'd do anything rather than lose this intimacy forever.
"I love you," he said, hopelessly, and felt his lover's kiss between his shoulder-blades.
"Just come home tomorrow night," Francis said.
He came with a sigh and his body relaxed onto Liam's, asleep in moments, with no attempt at any kind of reciprocity. Once he was sure that Francis was deeply asleep, Liam slid out from underneath him very carefully and went into the bathroom to clean himself up. He switched on the shaving light over the mirror and stared at himself. He looked tired, he realised, and his face was thin. Deep inside, he felt hollowed out, and there was a cold knot in his belly that he realised was there all the time now, only loosening a little when he was with William. He didn't what that knot was – whether fear or yearning. He just knew that he wished it would go away and that he could forget he had ever met William Aurelius.
*
When Liam arrived at his office the next day, it was to find the place still locked up. This was unprecedented, as Cordelia arrived punctually at eight-thirty every day and he'd normally find everything ready and the coffee-maker on for his own arrival at nine. Frowning, he fished his keys out of his pocket and unlocked the door, then went through the empty reception area to his office. He picked up the phone, but there was no message from her to say she was sick, or would be delayed for any reason.
He called her home number and got the answer phone, so left a message for her to contact him if she wasn't able to come to work. Afterwards, he flicked through his appointment book and discovered that he was fully booked. There was no option but to divert the phone calls on to the message service and deal later with whatever arose from his being unavailable.
By five-o-clock, when the last client left, Liam was beginning to realise just how indispensable Cordelia was. He felt exhausted and wanted nothing more than to take the train home and stay there. He listened for messages, saved a couple of rather hysterical calls from one of his female clients, who had been trying to reach him all day, to be dealt with tomorrow and deleted all the rest. There was still no word from Cordelia and, when he tried calling her at home again, he once more got the answer phone. It was at this point that his irritation with her began to shade over into concern, as he remembered that she'd been going for a drink with William after work the previous day. He hoped the boy didn't have anything to do with her non-appearance today.
Liam glanced at his watch. He needed to try and be home by seven-thirty if he possibly could, so he hurried to lock up and take the tube to Leicester Square, which was the nearest station to the address William had given him. He'd dressed in black trousers and a black shirt, as William had suggested, and he felt a little self-consciously monochrome as he turned into the side street – not much more than an alley really – where the club was supposed to be.
The entrance, when he found it, proved to lead downstairs to a basement, which didn't surprise Liam much. He'd speculated on the likely décor of the place, and his imagination had it strewn with open coffins and cobwebs sprayed out of an aerosol can, with plastic bats hanging from the ceiling. How likely this was, he didn't know.
At the bottom of the stairs, he was confronted by a thick wooden door with a security grille in it at eye-level. A notice on the door read: 'Private Club: members only.' Liam hesitated for more than a moment – he really, really didn't want to go through that door for all sorts of reasons – but then he gritted his teeth, knowing that he had to do this, and he had to get it over with as quickly as possible, and knocked hard on the door.
The security grille shot open at once and he found a pair of yellow – yellow! – eyes regarding him.
"What do you want?" a belligerent voice asked. "This is a members only club, an' I ain't seen you before. Fuck off."
Shaking slightly and thinking firmly about coloured contact lenses, Liam said:
"I'm here to meet William Aurelius – Spike, that is. He's expecting me. My name is Liam."
He wasn't going to give this freak his surname - that was for sure.
To his surprise, the change in the bouncer, or whatever he was, was immediate.
"Sorry, sorry, master!" he said. "You should have said so at once. Please come in and forgive my rudeness."
Liam blinked at him, surprised, and then the grille slammed shut and he heard the sound of bolts being drawn and a key in a lock. The door swung open, and he stepped through, inching past an enormous, bald-headed man, dressed all in black, who was bowing to him as if he were some kind of royalty.
"Spike is inside," the man said, and he sounded afraid. "Please go through, master, and please, I'm so sorry!"
This abject fawning was so patently absurd that Liam felt like laughing. He relaxed, pleased to discover that the vampire club and its members were proving to be just as ridiculous as he'd always thought they must be.
He went on down a dimly lit corridor with red-painted walls, then pushed through a curtain of black leather strips into a huge underground space – much bigger than he'd been expecting – intersected with metal spiral staircases, leading who knew where, its walls draped in diaphanous black, and full of shadowy figures obscured by a foggy drift of what Liam had to assume was dry ice. Music was playing – something gloomy and Goth-y-sounding, but not too loud, merely adding to the strange, dreamlike ambience.
Liam blinked again in the dim light, trying to make out faces on the figures nearest him. He had the impression that some people were wearing masks, and not very attractive ones at that, which surprised him. He was sure that he'd read somewhere that most vampire cultists idolised physical beauty.
"Liam!" a voice said, behind him. He turned to find himself looking at William. The boy was without his long leather coat, but now he wore leather trousers, tight-fitting as gloves, starkly outlining his crotch, and a shirt of some kind of metallic looking material, silvery-black, almost like chain mail. His eyes were outlined in black eye-liner, while his lips looked red in the dim light, accentuating the pallor of his face, and his hair was ruffled up into soft, pale curls over his head. With the collar on prominent display round his neck, he looked more beautiful than ever.
"Will – er, Spike – " Liam began, only for the boy to lean forward and kiss him on the lips, then to almost swarm up him like a monkey climbing a tree, grinding himself against him, seizing Liam's hands and placing them firmly on his buttocks, over which the black leather was pulled as taut as a second skin. Liam's body responded to William's as it always did and he pulled him closer, kissing him back.
Suddenly, Liam felt a sharp sensation on his lips and the boy fell away from him, laughing a little, mocking him. Liam raised a finger to his mouth and it came away wet. He realised that William had bitten him, and at that moment, the boy opened his own mouth to reveal a set of impressive, and very realistic, white fangs.
"Jesus! What the fuck did you bite me for?" Liam exclaimed, angrily, his brain already frantically trying to work out how he was going to explain the mark to Francis, wild stories dancing round in his head of a client going crazy in the consulting room and having to be sectioned on the spot and dragged away by the men in white coats – after having bitten Liam first.
"Been too long since I had a taste of you. Sorry" William said, not sounding the least bit apologetic. "Let me get you a drink, Liam."
He took Liam's hand in his and led him across the dim room to a bar, past groups of people who seemed to part for him, whispering, and then gather in behind him. The barman was dressed in black, his long grey hair spilling down his back and round pebble shades over his eyes.
"Two Blood Baths, Victor," William said. "The special ones, mind."
"Coming right up, master," the man said, at once, and it seemed to Liam that he was almost touching his forelock as he hurried to obey William.
"What's with all the bowing and scraping?" he whispered, glancing at his watch as he did so and seeing that it was already getting on for seven. He had half an hour, at most.
William's hand was on his arm, as if claiming ownership.
"Oh, the name 'Aurelius' has a lot of clout round here," he said, carelessly.
The drinks were brought. Two absurd-looking glass goblets full of some unidentifiable red liquid. It wasn't blood, of course – in fact, it smelt of cranberry juice – but Liam hesitated before putting it to his lips all the same.
"Not afraid, are you?" William said, and he sounded amused.
Irritated, Liam said:
"No, Spike, I'm not afraid. Just not keen on alcohol this early in the evening, that's all."
He sipped the drink and found it reasonably pleasant – mostly red wine, with cranberry juice as he'd guessed, plus some other ingredient he couldn't quite place that tasted oddly metallic.
"Raspberries," William said, blandly, as if reading his mind. "She tasted of raspberries." And before Liam could ask him what on earth he was talking about: "Drink up, mate, and let's go and find Dru."
Liam still had no desire whatsoever to meet William's girlfriend, or whoever the hell this Drusilla woman really was, but he knew he wouldn't get away without doing so first. He followed the boy across the cavernous space – it must be several basements all knocked into one, and he found himself hoping that a structural engineer had looked round it at some point – aware once again of being stared at by people who averted their eyes whenever he looked at them directly, but who bowed to him as if he was someone important when they realised he'd seen them looking. There was a lot of black and crimson, lace and silk and leather, eyes both yellow and red – and a lot of those very ugly masks too – some kind of clever plastic prosthesis, it looked like. And everyone seemed to be sporting the vampire denture sets, just like William.
They were all pretty pathetic, Liam thought, wishing suddenly that he'd discomfited William entirely by bringing Francis with him and that he and his lover could have compared notes afterwards and laughed about the whole thing. He realised, too, that he no longer thought of William as a client in any way, or else he'd have been looking at his surroundings with more attention, trying to get more of a sense of how these trappings underpinned the boy's notion of himself.
As William's therapist, he should probably have come here weeks ago.
He was still sipping his drink. It tasted pretty good, once you got used to the metallic aftertaste. He might even have another before he went home, he thought.
Then, William's voice:
"Dru - princess! Here you are! Look who I've brought."
Liam came back to the present abruptly, to find himself faced with a girl, dressed – unlike anyone else in the club – all in white. She looked ethereal – almost ghostly – in the dim, misty light, her head held proudly on her long slender neck, like a delicate flower on its stem. She was tiny – considerably shorter than William – and childishly slim, her dark hair got up in some strange, old-fashioned style that spilled serpentine tendrils down her neck and back. Her eyes were enormous, and pale blue; frighteningly blank and yet knowing at the same time.
Liam knew at once and with the coldness of absolute certainty, that she was completely insane.
And, like William, she was familiar. Liam tried to grab hold of the memory of when he had seen her before, but it slipped from his clutch, as ephemeral as fog.
The girl – she was older than William, Liam thought, maybe in her mid-twenties – stepped up to him and put a hand on his chest, gazing up at him.
"Ooh," she said. "He's beautiful, Spike, just like I remember. Is he going to stay with us now? Have you worked hard like a good boy and brought him back to us for good?"
"I've tried," William said, his voice full of smug laughter. "He's still got a taste for my arse, Dru, just like you said he would have. You're always right, princess, I should have remembered that."
Then the two of them were kissing, hungrily, as if they hadn't seen each other for a long time, although neither of them let go of Liam for a moment. He felt odd, watching them, as if he was seeing them from far away, through the wrong end of a telescope, and the picture was changing.
Suddenly, he was in a dark bedroom, standing in front of an old-fashioned canopied four-poster bed. The girl, Drusilla, lay spread-eagled on it, her white dress rucked up above her flat belly, her slender legs splayed wide. William stood between her thighs, wholly naked, the muscles in his buttocks clenching and un-clenching as he thrust forward into her, the sound of flesh slapping on flesh loud in the room. Liam could see where William's hands gripped the undersides of the girl's thighs, as if trying to force them even further apart, could see the imprints of his nails in her flesh. Her eyes were closed.
As often happens in dreams, Liam found his role changing from that of voyeur to active participant, and suddenly he was pressing himself against William's smooth, pale back, teasing him open with fingers that were already oily and slick. And then he was pushing forward into the boy, even as the girl beneath them both opened her eyes and smiled, revealing her own ivory fangs, to say:
"That's right, Daddy, fuck us."
Liam swayed slightly on his feet, shaking his head, trying to focus on what was in front of him. It was hard. He felt as if his feet were miles away from his head; as if he was almost floating. William and the girl stood before him now, heads together, cheek to cheek, gazing at him from identical blue eyes. Chilled, caught in that predatory double regard, Liam wondered how he could ever have thought William sane. He and this girl Drusilla were a matched pair, as exotic and inhuman as poisonous serpents.
He shook his head again, trying to clear his mind, to make himself remember that they were just silly children playing games, but somehow, he couldn't do it. His perspective was all wrong.
The girl licked her lips.
"He's coming back to us," she hissed.
Liam grabbed William by the arm and hauled him away from her, shaking him roughly.
"What did you do to me, you little shit?" he shouted, the sudden silence that enveloped the place in the aftermath of his raised voice feeling as close and heavy as a shroud wrapping him round and stifling him. He shook his head yet again, still trying to clear it, belatedly dropping the glass goblet to the ground and hearing it smash. "You put something in my drink, didn't you? What the fuck was it?"
William was smiling up at him, beautiful and sinful and very, very smug.
"Ketamine," he said. "I borrowed some from the zoo when I was down that way yesterday – and another special secret ingredient that I got from a friend. Don't worry mate, you'll be fine tomorrow. I just put enough in to get you all nice and relaxed, so you could enjoy yourself better, yeah?"
Liam pushed him, sending him sprawling to the ground in the midst of the broken glass. He felt full of righteous fury, and at the same time William's face was fading in and out, as if his perception of it was changing somehow. When did the boy put those yellow contacts on? And the crowd that had gathered round them seemed to have fused itself into a collective shadow that whispered and tittered and surged backwards and forwards, nearer and then further away again.
Somewhere –strangely – Liam thought that someone must be praying. At least, he was sure he heard the word 'Angelus', running through the crowd like a Chinese whisper passed from person to person, growing more and more distorted as it went. He wondered at the inappropriateness of a morning prayer in a place like this, and then realised that he'd almost lost his balance, as if his head were too heavy for his body and was dragging him down.
"Oh, God!" he said, and he swayed again slightly and leaned against the balustrade of one of the metal staircases to support himself.
"Has William displeased you, Daddy?" the girl – Drusilla – was saying, her voice strangely distant and yet far too close at the same time, a sibilant whisper in his ears. "He can be a very bad boy. You should punish him, and I can watch."
"No!" Liam said, and then, "Yes!"
Drusilla snapped her fingers and hands came clawing forward at William's prostrate form, dragging him away into their midst. Liam saw his white face in passing, and it was grinning at him, exposing those gleaming fangs, which were stained with red. Something was being pressed into his hands – some kind of leather scourge. Just for a moment, the absurdity of the whole thing overcame Liam again – he felt as if he was caught up in the shooting of an incredibly bad S&M porn movie – and he laughed, only to have Drusilla laugh with him, and the sound of her voice seemed to drive away the last vestiges of reality. He felt as if he was floating in space, anchored to earth only by the sound of her voice, and by the sight of William's naked body, arms held firmly at shoulder height in a sort of cruciform shape by two hulking dark shadows on either side of him.
"Hold him still," Liam heard his voice saying, but it didn't sound like his voice any more. He'd never been that cold – that controlling. "And make him kneel."
The shadow shapes were turning William round and pushing him down. The boy sank gracefully to his knees, arms held now above his head, arching his smooth back towards Liam. His pale skin glowed in the dim light, the cleft between his buttocks, a clutching velvety darkness. Liam felt his cock straining at the front of his trousers, wanting to plunder that darkness and make it bleed.
"Hurt him," came Drusilla's pale whisper in his ear, and he raised the scourge and brought it down hard, a long striping of red whipping across the boy's back, as if someone was cutting it open from within. William screamed, but he didn't struggle.
"Hear how beautifully he screams?" Drusilla said. "Make him bleed for me, Daddy."
And Liam did, raising the scourge again and again, until a criss-cross pattern of lash-marks marred that perfect back and William hung moaning – whether in pleasure or pain, it was impossible to tell - from his captors' grip. It was only then, staring in puzzlement at the damage he had done, head full of whispers and shadows, that Liam realised every tail of the scourge was tipped with metal.
He swayed on his feet again, feeling Drusilla slip past him like a ghost to kneel down behind William and bend to lick the pooling blood from his back. Abruptly, Liam felt sick and he staggered slightly, only to find his own arms captured by hands that held him up and imprisoned him at the same time. He was sweating heavily, his erection painful in its intensity.
And then there was a rush of movement, as his captors hurried him forward, his feet crunching on broken glass, until he was standing right behind William, gazing down at him and at Drusilla, who had slipped round to stand in front of the boy. Again, she snapped her fingers impatiently and William was raised to his feet. Her small, dainty hand tangled into his hair and pulled his head back so that he was gazing up at Liam from below, exposing his pale throat and the collar that bound it. The pupils of his eyes had expanded in the gloom, almost eclipsing the blue entirely and tears tracks marked his cheeks, but he licked his lips and grinned, not looking at all like someone who'd just undergone a painful beating.
"William is sorry, Daddy," Drusilla said, "and now he wants to make it up to you, don't you, William?"
"Yeah, "William said, at once, and his voice still held that note of smug triumph. "Let me make it up to you, Daddy, like a good little boy should."
His thrust his rump backwards into Liam's crotch, and at the same time he groaned. At first, Liam thought it was with the pain in his back, but then he realised that Drusilla had her hand at the boy's crotch and was doing something with it there that had caused his outburst.
William groaned again and thrust forward into Drusilla's waiting hand, and suddenly Liam was overcome by another burst of fury and he tore himself from his captors' grip, desperate to release his cock from its own captivity and sink it into that willing, sinful flesh. There was a buzzing noise in his ears and a kind of film over his eyes, and his brain made no connection between the dripping wetness in William's cleft and the bleeding lash marks on his back. He wasted barely a moment to scissor his fingers before pushing forward and in, his brain hardly registering the high keening note of pain that came from the boy's throat, which was quickly stifled as Liam bent down to take possession of his mouth, while Drusilla's frail-looking arm continued to pump expertly, faster and faster.
All around them, voices were whispering louder and louder, the words unclear, whether encouraging or damning, Liam neither knew nor cared. He felt that hot, tight wetness loosening and tearing around him as he thrust harder and harder, until he came and hands plucked at him again, holding him up, and Drusilla whispered,
"That's my good little boy, come for mummy," while William snarled at her throat and tore at it with his fangs, emptying himself into her hand.
The smell of blood was overwhelming. Abruptly, Liam felt a convulsing in his belly and then his guts seemed to re-arrange themselves and he vomited, burning red liquid spewing from his mouth and nose and out onto the floor. He stood, panting and heaving, feeling as if his body was once more in touch with his brain, staring aghast as William and Drusilla turned again to face him, eyes bright and eager. The girl's mouth was stained with blood – the very same blood that dripped down William's legs to puddle on the floor in its turn. Drusilla raised her hand and beckoned.
"No!" Liam said, suddenly, and he began to back away from them. "What the fuck just happened? What have you done to me?"
He turned, hauling himself up the metal balustrade, mounting the stairs while their pale faces sank away into the foggy darkness beneath him. He heard Drusilla say:
"You told me he would stay! Mummy is very cross, you bad, bad boy!"
And then William's voice, full of lazy self-confidence.
"He'll be back, Dru. Where else can he go now? Who will have him apart from us?"
Liam began to run, stumbling slightly on the steps, almost falling. He told himself it was the drug, and that, just like when drunk, he must be careful not to attract attention to himself and to pretend to be normal. He raised a finger to his lips, shushing himself, absurdly pleased when he remembered to button and zip his flies.
There was a door at the top of the staircase. He pushed in open and found himself in a dark, unfurnished corridor, with empty packing crates piled up along one side. He followed the emergency lighting and came out into the bright glare of a shop; some kind of sex shop, selling fetish wear and bondage gear, appropriately enough.
The assistant behind the counter, who was dressed very like some of the clubbers below, stared at him, but said nothing. In fact, she seemed to shrink back at the sight of him. Liam brushed his clothes down, and pulled his coat tightly around himself, afraid that he was blood-stained. The thought made him remember what he had just done to William, the beautiful ivory back marred forever. God, the boy was sick! Far sicker than he'd ever realised, and, far from helping him, he'd just colluded in his fantasies and physically abused him too.
The memory of blood brought other, and even more chilling, knowledge to mind. What the hell had he been thinking of? All these weeks of being so safe, so careful – the only way in which he had not compromised himself, nor betrayed Francis- and he'd fucked the boy without a condom - torn him. All that blood, mingling and joining in that tight, clinging passage! Who could say what he'd just done to himself?
And his mouth really hurt from where William had bitten him.
For a moment, he thought he was going to be sick again, but he shook the feeling off and pushed his way outside, where the cold night air hit him like an angry fist trying to shake sense into him. He looked at his watch, focusing with difficulty, and realised it was after eight-thirty.
Oh, God! Francis!
Fumbling his cell phone out of his coat pocket, Liam called the flat, only to hear the answer phone message click on. It wasn't the usual 'Liam and Francis can't take your call right now', though. Instead, it was Francis's voice, flat and weary-sounding. "If this is you calling, Liam," he said, "sod you."
And that was it. Tears sprang into Liam's eyes, both of anger and self-disgust. Part of him wanted to run back into the club and beat William and that stupid cunt of his to a pulp, the other part wanted to crawl into a dark corner and howl.
He started walking, not knowing where his feet were taking him.
*
When Liam found himself staring up at the impressive bulk of the Belgravia mansion of Anne LaHaye, he realised that he had no clear memory of how he had ever got there in the first place. The decision to come must have made sense at the time, he supposed, but now he had no idea what his fogged up brain had ever thought it could accomplish. He wasn't William's therapist any more. He was his abuser – his 'daddy'. Even if the source of all William's problems did lie with the woman inside this house, knowing about it now wouldn't help. His career – his life - was over.
Belatedly, he remembered that he hadn't even asked William if he knew what had happened to Cordelia.
Liam rang the bell and waited. After a moment, a voice answered, foreign-sounding, Spanish perhaps, or more likely Filipino:
"Who is it?"
"My name is Liam O'Connor," he said. "I'd like to speak to Miss LaHaye?"
"Miss LaHaye not home," the voice said. "I give her message."
Liam stepped back from the door and looked up, to see a white face staring at him from an upper window. The curtain was drawn back hastily when whoever it was saw him looking.
He tried again. "Can you tell Miss LaHaye I'm her son's therapist," he said, "and I need to speak to her urgently?"
"I already tell you," the voice began, "she not –"
Then a new voice spoke.
"Who are you? What do you want?"
"Miss LaHaye?" Liam asked. "I'm your son's therapist, Liam O'Connor. Please, I need to speak to you."
"I'll come down," she said, "but you can't come in. No one that William knows can ever come in."
Liam waited, rubbing his hands together against the cold, thankful now for the after-effects of the drug which he suspected were still cushioning him from the full impact of what had happened and still making him feel at times that he was almost floating, as if detached from the reality of his situation.
He took a moment to note that the graffiti had already been removed from the door, which once again presented a pristine, shiny surface to the world, the noticing of such details seeming like welcome evidence to him of his own continuing sanity. Then the door opened just a crack, coming to a halt at the length of a very tough-looking security chain. There was the sound of a large dog growling deep in the back of its throat. Liam wondered if it had caught the scent of blood off him.
"What do you want?" Anne LaHaye said, obviously standing just out of sight behind the door. "Why have you come here at this time of night? Did William give you my address?"
"No," Liam assured her. "I saw the news bulletin about the attempted break-in the other night. I wouldn't normally do this, Miss LaHaye, but I'm very concerned about William. I need to talk to you."
She laughed, and Liam realised that she was probably half-drunk.
"I've nothing to say about him," she said. "My son is a very sick boy, Mr O'Connor, in every sense of the word. I haven't seen him for six months and I hope I never see him again. I'll still pay his bills, if that's what you're worried about."
"No-" Liam began to protest, but she didn't give him the chance to finish.
"Do you know how many times he's ruined relationships for me? Five times, that's how many. He always comes up with some way of driving them away – every man I meet. He'd say, "They're not good enough for you, mum. You've got to wait for that one special person." God help me, I thought it was sweet. That was before he tried – before – Oh, why am I talking to you? You're not my therapist. Go away, Mr O'Connor, and please don't come back."
The door began to close.
"Did he rape you?" Liam said. He didn't know where the words came from, they just blurted themselves out.
He didn't think she would answer, but she said, shortly:
"No. He didn't need to."
The door slammed in his face.
*
On the train on the way home, Liam tried to piece things together, but nothing made real sense, even with the help of mind-altering drugs. It was like a horribly incestuous game of Happy Families, with himself roped in to play the role of father. He was chilled by what Anne LaHaye had both told, and not told, him. He'd known that William had had a fraught relationship with his mother, but never suspected anything quite this bad – and who was to say where the fault lay there? – and it chilled him all over again to remember the girl, Drusilla, calling herself William's 'mummy'. No wonder Anne LaHaye hated her. And father issues? Well, the boy had plenty of those, as he'd discovered to his cost over the last couple of months.
The thought struck him suddenly that William had indeed been making his mother wait for the right person to come along and that inside the boy's confused head, that person was Liam himself. What would have happened next? Would William have tried to bring him together with Anne LaHaye in some way – totally at odds with his own nature and sexuality? Or, more likely, since William seemed to have found himself a surrogate mother already in this Drusilla girl, would he have been trying to induce Liam to have sex with her too?
For a moment, Liam almost wanted to. He thought of the slim, frail-looking girl and he just wanted to hurt her; to throw her down and fuck her so brutally she'd scream and beg for mercy. The feeling coursed up through his body like poison and then was gone, leaving him shaken and ashamed. He'd never wanted a woman so much in his life – not since he'd got over the first teenage experiments and discovered how very much girls were not for him – and he'd certainly never wanted to hurt one before.
What was happening to him?
He grew abruptly certain that William recognised no sexual boundaries at all, and couldn’t see why others should do so either. He was busy re-making his family, whether they wanted to co-operate or not.
The train was half-empty, but, as Liam sat slumped in his corner seat, he once again had the sensation of being watched. Quickly, he raised his head, thinking that he'd caught another glimpse of black leather swirling away just out of his line of sight, but it was gone when he looked properly, just like before.
He stood up and gazed round the carriage, but there was no one there, save for a sleeping drunk and a young black couple busy kissing and obviously with no eyes for anyone else.
Liam stared at them a moment, envying them their cocoon of intimacy; then he blinked sleepily, desperate to get home and collapse onto his bed, even though he knew that bed would be empty – now and probably forever.
As William had said, who would want him now?
Even so, when he opened the front door and went in, the emptiness seemed to stand up and hit him in the face. There were no lights on; no cooking smells - total silence save for the central heating boiler humming through its cycle. Liam switched on the hall light and stood for a moment, leaning against the wall. Gradually, his knees gave way and he sank to the floor, putting his head in his hands. Even after all that had happened, he'd half-believed that some miracle might have taken place, that Francis would still be here, waiting, and that he could pour out the whole foul story, and his lover would take him in his arms and say, "I understand. I know you couldn't help it. I'll stand by you."
But of course, he hadn't, because who would?
Liam levered himself up from the floor and staggered into the bathroom. He emptied his bladder into the toilet, noting with detachment that his aim was off and that urine had splattered the upturned seat and even the wall behind it; then turned to wash his hands. For a moment, his stomach seemed to turn over and make another bid to empty its contents, as he found himself staring into the mirror and realised he couldn't see a reflection. He blinked, then realised that this was because the mirror was covered in shaving foam, spelling out the words: "Sod you!"
He turned on the tap and splashed water onto his hands and face, trying to ignore the message. Going into the bedroom, he saw that all the cupboards and drawers were open and Francis's things were already gone. Crawling fully clothed onto the bed, Liam hardly spared a moment to wonder where his lover was sleeping tonight, before he fell deeply unconscious.
*
He woke in the early hours of the morning, feeling desperately sick again, running to the bathroom just in time to vomit up the remaining contents of his stomach. There was very little in it, and he hunched over the toilet, retching miserably, then went into the kitchen to get a glass of water.
For a while, he sat slumped at the kitchen table, sipping from the glass and trying to remember what had happened the previous night and why it was all so hazy. For that matter, where was Francis? He knew he should know, but somehow, the knowledge currently escaped him. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was six-o-clock, so he staggered into the living room and put the television on, thinking that maybe watching the news would help him remember all the things he seemed to have forgotten.
And it did, though not in the way he'd been expecting.
Again, he found himself watching the local news bulletin for London, with a reporter standing on a canal towpath, well-wrapped against the cold, saying: " - the young woman was found shortly after three am this morning by a man out walking his dog on this stretch of the Regent's Park Canal, near London Zoo."
The reporter indicated the stretch of opaque dark water behind him, then continued:
"She was naked and her body was covered in what police say appear to be bite-marks - possibly inflicted by a wild animal of some kind - and suffering from almost total blood-loss. Doctors say that she's lucky to be alive although her condition continues to give great cause for concern and she is still unconscious. Police are hoping to talk to her later, if possible."
The reporter then turned to a policeman standing next to him, looking very grave and stiff, the way policemen being interviewed always seemed to, who said, when prompted: "This was a very serious attack on a defenceless young woman and we would ask anyone with any information to come forward as quickly as possible before the attacker strikes again, and for the public to be extra-vigilant and to call the police if they see anything unusual."
Liam sat, staring at the screen, unable to move. There was an odd, metallic taste in his mouth. Almost total blood loss, they'd said.
He knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the injured girl was Cordelia, and he remembered William saying that the drink had had another 'special ingredient', as well as the ketamine; that he'd got it 'from a friend'. Oh, God! He'd drunk her blood!
The events of the previous night were becoming clear in Liam's mind again, much though he now wished they weren't. He sat, frozen in his chair, panicked thoughts chasing each other round and round his head like the proverbial rat in a maze. His first impulse was to throw a few things in a suitcase and run like hell. He thought briefly of Ireland and Francis and grimaced with the pain of the loss, knowing that he had to put such thoughts behind him forever.
His second thought was that he hadn't actually done anything wrong. He could inform on William and his friends and the boy would end up in Broadmoor, where he probably belonged.
Even as he thought this, the idea seized him that if he sent the police to the vampire club in Soho they would – as in all those clichéd horror movies – find nothing there, and that, in fact, there never had been anything there; that he'd dreamed it all. For a moment, he almost felt that if he wished hard enough it would become truth, but then the cold inescapable reality of what he'd just seen on the television came back to him.
William was out there, sick and dangerous and probably coming for him right now.
He remembered all the times he'd felt like he was being watched on the train, and he realised with absolute certainty that William knew where he lived – had probably known from the first day they'd met. How long would it have been before the boy had turned on Francis and savaged him as he had Cordelia?
He reached for the phone, then hesitated, his panicked brain going off on another tack, asking him frantically to consider what if William was caught? What might he have to say? What else might come out?
What else?
He sat, unable to move -unable to decide. In his head, he heard William's voice saying with that smug, hateful certainty: "Where else can he go now? Who will have him, apart from us?"
He had a sudden sense of William's presence, not far away and getting closer, inexorable and relentless as death; and he didn't know whether it was fear that caused his belly to knot and sweat to break out on his forehead, or anticipation.
His brain seemed to be shutting down again, so that all he could see was that beautiful debauched face, tear-streaked and eager, wanting him - wanting him so much that it was prepared to kill to get him, and he wondered what else William might be capable of.
There was a knock on the door.
THE END
Pairings: this part also includes William/Drusilla
Deja Vu Part Two
As the weeks passed, Liam felt as if he was sinking slowly into a mire from which he would never be able to extricate himself. Every time, when he'd managed to nerve himself up to tell William – or Spike, as he now insisted on being called – that whatever this was between them had to end, he would find his resolve crumbling again the minute the boy walked through the office door with that collar round his neck. He'd had him now in every position he knew on every item of furniture in the room, and he still couldn't get enough of him. William was very eager to please and he proved very adept at cocksucking too, and so very willing to do it.
Liam would stand, bracing himself on the desk, looking down at that curly blond head bobbing up and down at his groin and would find himself wondering how he ever got through the days when he didn't see William; how he'd managed all these years without feeling this supremely talented – and very single-minded - mouth on his cock.
When he asked William where he'd acquired his enviable skill, the boy replied that he'd had a good teacher, and refused to say any more. Liam supposed that it had to have been this mysterious 'vampire' father figure, and could only be grateful to the man, whoever he was. He would go home at the end of each session, having done nothing during it except fuck and allow himself to be wholly overwhelmed by the sensations of ownership and familiarity that the boy evoked in him.
His inhibitions and good sense which he always lost somewhere during that same period of time would return to him with a vengeance on the train, along with a healthy dose of guilt, and as often as not, he'd end up on his knees in front of Francis, his lover's cock in his mouth, almost as soon as he'd shut the front door behind him.
He found that he couldn't give Francis enough attention, that he was desperate to please him in every way. He'd never in his life done so much fucking on one day a week and so much being fucked on all the others. He knew that Francis wasn't happy – that he was suspicious and quite miserable at times, but he persisted in pretending that nothing was wrong; and for a while, Francis let him.
Then, one day, two things happened at once.
Liam and William lay exhausted on the consulting room floor. At least, Liam was exhausted. William seemed to be more-or-less insatiable and sometimes got quite impatient with Liam's inability to come more than once in an hour. Liam supposed it was his age catching up with him at last, making it hard to keep up with the youngster, who didn't grow any less demanding as the weeks went by.
He'd learned over time to tease the boy along, stripping him slowly one garment at a time, caressing every inch of his body until he was so over-sensitised, he was practically screaming into Liam's hand over his mouth; then taking his time making him come, forcing him to beg for it, which he did very prettily. And finally, while the boy lay soft and pliant and relaxed, Liam would fuck him slowly and luxuriously as William sucked on his fingers and urged him to do it harder, deeper - deeper; to never stop.
The feeling of power that this gave Liam was an incredible rush, as was the fact that they always ended up with William stark naked apart from his collar, while Liam himself was still almost fully clothed. It wasn't that Liam was ashamed of his body; he knew that he was in pretty good shape for his age, and he went to the gym regularly three times a week to keep it that way. It was more for the sense of control that it gave him, of being the one with the power – although deep inside, he knew that the impression was wholly false, considering the effect that William had on him.
Now Liam held the cool naked body close to him, one arm around William's waist, the other pillowing his own head. William's skin was always surprisingly cool, but he denied ever being cold, claiming that this was quite normal for vampires and Liam shouldn't fuss. Remarks like this had ceased to worry Liam; he'd heard too many of them now and they'd faded into a sort of background chatter – an unwanted, and mostly ignored, reminder that William was supposedly a client.
"I think it's time you came with me to the club to meet Dru," William said, suddenly. "What about tomorrow night?"
"What?" Liam raised his head, which didn't feel very comfortable anyway, staring at William in surprise. "Will – er, Spike, why would you want me to meet your girlfriend? Why would you even want her to know about – about us?"
William grinned in his usual rather sly fashion.
"Look, Liam," he said, "just because you're scared to tell your live-in lover boy about me doesn't mean that I feel the same about my girl. It was her idea, you know, for me to show you the error of your ways, an' that. She wants to see you – misses you too."
"Not sure I want to see her," Liam said.
William's fingers slid inside Liam's un-tucked shirt and began to play idly with his nipples, teasing them to stiffness with his cool touch, making Liam shiver a little.
"Not sure you've got a choice, mate," he said, lightly.
Liam pushed his hand away and sat up.
"What do you mean?" he said, angry, and mentally kicking himself yet again for his monumental folly.
William was smirking at him quite openly now.
"What do you think I mean?" he said. "I don't really have to spell it out, do I? Profes-s-sional miscon-n-duct!" he added, in a teasing, sing-song voice.
Furious both with William and with himself, Liam got to his feet, adjusting his clothes and glaring down at the boy. However, he knew he didn't have a leg to stand on, just as he'd always known that this would happen eventually.
"Done this before, have you?" he asked, bitterly. "You and this woman?"
For answer, William sat up slowly and wrapped his arm round Liam's leg, looking up at him through his lashes, still smirking.
"Don't be like that, Liam," he said. "You never know, you might have fun. Looks like you could do with some, the way you're so desperate for a shag whenever you see me. Lover boy not keeping you satisfied, eh?"
Liam's first impulse on hearing this was to kick William across the room, but he restrained himself firmly. Something told him that the boy would enjoy it too much – knowing that he'd got a rise out of Liam with his words, even though they weren't true.
They weren't. They really weren't. Before Francis, Liam knew that he'd never known what real intimacy was, and he was kicking himself yet again for endangering that intimacy for the sake of this nasty little piece of work, with his angelic face and so very fuckable arse. It wasn’t even like this was the first time he'd got obsessive over a pretty face. It had happened over and over again when he was younger, but he'd thought that, with Francis, he'd finally outgrown it and had put that predatory phase behind him.
Why were things so different this time that he'd been willing to risk everything?
"What is it about you?" he said aloud. "What have you done to me?"
William was still holding his leg, his face solemn now.
"I've done what vampires do," he said. "I've seduced you and got you so hot for me that you'll never be able to give me up – "
"Don't flatter yourself, Spike," Liam said, nastily, trying to put all the contempt he was currently feeling towards the boy into the way he said the ridiculous name. "Just now, I'd give you up in a heartbeat, really I would."
"Just now, maybe," William said. "But what about tomorrow, Liam - and the day after that? Do you really want to live without me? Think about it."
A very vehement 'yes' was on the tip of Liam's tongue, but then William moved his head just slightly and the lamplight in the room caught on the metal buckle of the collar round his neck, accentuating the graceful curve of throat and shoulder, and Liam felt a long, cold shudder run through his body.
William was right. Having had a taste of this boy, Liam knew with a cold, hopeless certainty that he'd never have enough of him and that every man he fucked from now on would always suffer in comparison. He could never give him up, not even for Francis.
"If I come with you tomorrow," he said, "you'll be satisfied, will you? You won't ask me again?"
"'Course not," the boy said. "I won't need to, will I?"
He said this a touch impatiently, as if it should be self-evident, and the words made Liam shiver again.
"All right," he said. "I'll meet you and this woman of yours at your wonderful vampire club tomorrow night. Just tell me where it is."
William gave him an address in a Soho back street, which didn't surprise Liam much. He thought that, as he'd said to Francis, he must have been past the place innumerable times and never noticed it, lost in all the other strip joints and bars and sex shops that cluttered the area. It might not always have been a vampire club, of course. Everything in Soho was mutable.
William was rubbing himself against Liam's leg again, his greedy cock already at half-mast. Liam thought about leaving the boy gagging for it, to teach him a lesson, but in the end – partly because of William's implicit threat, and partly because the boy was simply too beautiful to resist – thought better of it and hauled him to his feet. He sat down in his chair and pulled William onto his knee, marvelling all over again at how the round, plush curves of the boy's backside fit so beautifully into the hollow of his lap, and how familiar it felt to have them there. He toyed with the already drooling cock, swiping his thumb across the slit and rubbing moisture over the head.
"Do you want me to make you come again?" he hissed in the boy's ear, pushing his head to the side so that the white, leather-bound throat was fully exposed. William nodded, panting.
"Well, don't be so stupid as to threaten me ever again, you little shit," Liam said, venomously, and felt a sense almost of despair when all the response this provoked from the boy was an excited in-drawn breath and a full-body shiver.
Liam made him come with a few quick, workmanlike pulls and strokes, then wiped his sticky hand on William's torso, still angry and wanting to humiliate him. William, however, proved un-shockable, as usual, merely inhaling deeply, as if he liked the smell.
"Next time make it your cum, then," he said, grinning and bouncing to his feet to get his clothes. Annoyed at his inability to hit back at the boy and make it count, Liam swatted the retreating backside hard with his hand, making William skip a couple of steps then turn to leer at him cheekily.
"What a big, hard hand you have," he said. "Just like I remember. My bum always did like your hand."
"I think you have me confused with someone else," Liam said, wearily, but William ignored him.
He began to dress, saying:
"We have a bit of a dress code at the club, mate - nothing fancy. Just wear black and you'll be fine – oh, and no crosses or anything stupid like that."
He swung his leather coat round his shoulders and made for the door, looking back once to grin at Liam, with a mixture of anticipation and triumph. He didn't bother to close the door behind him, and Liam heard him talking to Cordelia, asking her out for that drink yet again. To his surprise, he heard her say:
"Okay, then. Just the one, if that's what it'll take to get you to shut up."
"Fucking brilliant!" William said. "See you in a bit, then."
Liam realised that Cordelia was staring at him, as William departed in the other direction. Her eyes challenged him to say something, and he knew in that moment that she'd been aware of what was going on the whole time between him and his client. He wanted to ask her why she'd said nothing, but he couldn't bring himself to do so. It was the same with Francis: don't mention it and perhaps it'll go away.
He walked past her with a muttered 'good night' and went to catch the train home.
He could smell the cooking aromas before he even opened the flat door. Francis had been busy. The table in the kitchen was properly set with their best china and glassware and there were candles already lit. Francis was stirring something that smelt incredibly good. He turned as Liam came up behind him and allowed himself to be kissed, but Liam could sense the tension in his lover's body.
"That smells fantastic," he said, to have something to say. "What's the occasion?"
He had a moment's horrible fear that he'd forgotten some kind of anniversary – although Francis was not one to mark such things anyway – and was overwhelmingly relieved when Francis said:
"No occasion. I just felt like spoiling you, love. You work hard all day, listening to people pouring out self-centred shite. You should get some reward for it, don't you think?"
"You're my reward," Liam said, and he really meant it as he said it, just as he always meant it every week when he told Francis how much he loved him a few hours after fucking William. He moved to take Francis in his arms, only to have his lover turn and fix him with a hard, cold stare.
"Am I?" Francis said. "Lately, it hasn't felt like it. It's felt like you were a million miles away a lot of the time."
A fist seemed to grab Liam's heart and begin squeezing it.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I know I've been preoccupied. I'll try to do better, love, I promise."
"Is there something you want to tell me?" Francis asked, and his eyes were pleading – for what, whether lies or the truth, Liam didn't know. He rested his forehead against the smaller man's and held him tight.
"Only that I love you," he said.
Francis allowed him another kiss then, but his eyes were unreadable, and Liam didn't know whether he was relieved or disappointed. He just knew that Francis knew he was lying.
They discussed only banalities over dinner – the day's news, the holiday - then cleared away in almost total silence. Afraid of being overwhelmed by it, Liam switched on the television to see the late news bulletin, only to discover that he'd missed it and the local news for London was already on. There was a long piece about the congestion charge and Ken Livingstone's chances of being re-elected as mayor, and Liam watched it without interest. However, his ears and in fact his whole body, perked up at the next news item.
It appeared there had been an attempted break-in and some graffiti damage at a very smart house in Portman Terrace, Belgravia, belonging to former super-model Anne LaHaye. The reporter was shown in front of the house, which was a typical Belgravia Georgian mansion, and there was some archive footage of Anne LaHaye in her modelling days, walking down the catwalk, swinging her hips aggressively while she pouted at the camera, wearing something absurdly diaphanous and short, through which her small, almost boyish breasts could be seen quite clearly.
God, she was beautiful, Liam thought - just like her son. He supposed that William's unknown father must have been quite a short man, because he certainly hadn't inherited his mother's height; but apart from that, he might have been her male twin, with the same astonishing cheekbones and long, slim legs and the same startling blue eyes. He watched mesmerised, as the picture changed to one of a tall, elegant woman getting out of a chauffeur-driven car and holding a hand in front of her face to shield it from the cameras as she walked towards her front door. From what little could be seen of her, the years hadn't marked her much. She could have been William's sister, rather than his mother. The door was opened from inside to let her enter and then slammed in the reporters' faces, revealing the house number – 17 – clearly as it did so. There was a scrawl of graffiti across it that read, 'Coming for you soon, bitch!'
Abruptly, the camera returned to the reporter, telling the viewers that Miss LaHaye had declined to be interviewed and that the police were investigating; and then Francis stepped in front of the screen and switched off the television.
"Why are you suddenly so interested in that skinny bitch?" he said, venomously. "You thinking of changing sides in your old age, Liam?"
Liam stared at him in astonishment. Francis was not a woman-hater. He would be the first to tell you that, with five sisters, he couldn't afford to be. It was out of character for him to say something like that and it showed how angry he really was.
"Sorry," Liam muttered. "Not really interested – just watching for the sake of it."
They went to bed early. Francis turned the lamp off at once and they lay in the dark next to each other, neither speaking. At last, unable to bear the silence any longer, Liam turned to take his lover in his arms. Again, Francis let him, but he didn't attempt to cuddle up to Liam, lying quiescent in his embrace. At last, he said:
"Let's go out tomorrow night, Liam. We haven't been clubbing in fucking ages."
"I can't," Liam said, at once. "I have to work late, love, and it's Tuesday. Maybe Friday would be better?"
"Seeing vampire-boy, are you?" Francis said, bitterly.
"No," Liam protested, knowing that he sounded defensive. "It's someone else – a different client."
"You're a crap liar, Liam, you know that?" Francis said, and he sounded weary. "I've been waiting six fucking weeks for you to come clean and tell me you're shagging the little slut. I waited, even though it's not in me nature to be patient, and you keep on lying, and you keep on sounding like what you are – a two-timing whore."
"Oh, God!" Liam lay still. He didn't know what to do or say. Suddenly, Francis sat up and turned the lamp back on.
"What is it about him," he demanded, "that makes him so fucking special? Tell me!"
"You're wrong, you're wrong!" Liam found himself saying – unable to bring himself to admit the truth to Francis, even now he was cornered. It would mean too much. It would mean admitting that he'd allowed himself to be seduced by a boy fifteen years his junior; that he'd allowed William's weird familiarity and his strange infatuation with him to invade every corner of his life and take it over - and destroy everything else in the process.
He couldn't do it, even though he knew it was true.
"If I'm wrong, come out with me tomorrow night. Let me show everyone that you're still mine," Francis said, "that you still want me the most."
Liam understood this for what it was – a sort of peace-offering, an offer to let bygones be bygones, to forget this had all happened and let things go back to normal. He seized on it, knowing that it was more than he deserved.
"All right," he said. "I'll come home after seeing the client and we'll go out – wherever you want to go, love, I promise."
"You'd better mean that," Francis said. "This is your last chance, Liam."
He lay back down on the pillow and folded his arms behind his head. After a moment, he said, bitterly:
"God, when I remember how much other fellas envied me when they knew I'd gone and caught meself Liam O'Connor. If only they knew!"
This was the first Liam had heard of this. Francis had always made out that he, Liam, was the lucky one to have snared Francis Doyle. And in truth, he'd felt lucky, knowing how popular Francis was and how he always had his pick of the cherry boys and of anyone else he fancied, for that matter. Everyone knew that being fucked by Francis was like being ridden to heaven and back - everyone.
Liam hadn't been able to see what Francis saw in him and now – especially now – he still couldn't see it.
"I'm sorry," he said again, even though he still hadn't confessed to anything. "I didn't mean to hurt you."
"I should have listened," Francis said, "to all those sad queers that you'd had before me, and who told me how untouchable you were. You are, Liam. Where the fuck do you go, inside your head?"
"I don't mean to," Liam said, hearing desperation in his own voice now. "I don't mean to go anywhere. I want to be here with you, love. Really I do."
Francis turned to look at him, and his face softened just a little. He reached out and touched Liam's cheek.
"Turn over," he said. "I'm going to fuck you."
Five minutes later, face buried in the pillow and with the slow, delicious burn spreading from his backside through his whole body, Liam felt tears starting to his eyes. In spite of the endearments that Francis was now whispering in his ears, he couldn't help feeling that this was the last time he'd have the opportunity to know this sensation – this total, melting surrender.
Francis might not have admitted it to himself yet, but Liam knew he was as good as finished with him.
He lay quiescent, feeling the smaller man's heated touch on his back and inside his body and the tears leaked from his eyes, making the pillow wet. He clenched his teeth, thinking that maybe it wasn't too late. He could go to the vampire club for an hour then come home and take Francis dancing – and if Francis wanted to pick up some boy himself, then let him. Liam had enough to make up for, and he felt he'd do anything rather than lose this intimacy forever.
"I love you," he said, hopelessly, and felt his lover's kiss between his shoulder-blades.
"Just come home tomorrow night," Francis said.
He came with a sigh and his body relaxed onto Liam's, asleep in moments, with no attempt at any kind of reciprocity. Once he was sure that Francis was deeply asleep, Liam slid out from underneath him very carefully and went into the bathroom to clean himself up. He switched on the shaving light over the mirror and stared at himself. He looked tired, he realised, and his face was thin. Deep inside, he felt hollowed out, and there was a cold knot in his belly that he realised was there all the time now, only loosening a little when he was with William. He didn't what that knot was – whether fear or yearning. He just knew that he wished it would go away and that he could forget he had ever met William Aurelius.
When Liam arrived at his office the next day, it was to find the place still locked up. This was unprecedented, as Cordelia arrived punctually at eight-thirty every day and he'd normally find everything ready and the coffee-maker on for his own arrival at nine. Frowning, he fished his keys out of his pocket and unlocked the door, then went through the empty reception area to his office. He picked up the phone, but there was no message from her to say she was sick, or would be delayed for any reason.
He called her home number and got the answer phone, so left a message for her to contact him if she wasn't able to come to work. Afterwards, he flicked through his appointment book and discovered that he was fully booked. There was no option but to divert the phone calls on to the message service and deal later with whatever arose from his being unavailable.
By five-o-clock, when the last client left, Liam was beginning to realise just how indispensable Cordelia was. He felt exhausted and wanted nothing more than to take the train home and stay there. He listened for messages, saved a couple of rather hysterical calls from one of his female clients, who had been trying to reach him all day, to be dealt with tomorrow and deleted all the rest. There was still no word from Cordelia and, when he tried calling her at home again, he once more got the answer phone. It was at this point that his irritation with her began to shade over into concern, as he remembered that she'd been going for a drink with William after work the previous day. He hoped the boy didn't have anything to do with her non-appearance today.
Liam glanced at his watch. He needed to try and be home by seven-thirty if he possibly could, so he hurried to lock up and take the tube to Leicester Square, which was the nearest station to the address William had given him. He'd dressed in black trousers and a black shirt, as William had suggested, and he felt a little self-consciously monochrome as he turned into the side street – not much more than an alley really – where the club was supposed to be.
The entrance, when he found it, proved to lead downstairs to a basement, which didn't surprise Liam much. He'd speculated on the likely décor of the place, and his imagination had it strewn with open coffins and cobwebs sprayed out of an aerosol can, with plastic bats hanging from the ceiling. How likely this was, he didn't know.
At the bottom of the stairs, he was confronted by a thick wooden door with a security grille in it at eye-level. A notice on the door read: 'Private Club: members only.' Liam hesitated for more than a moment – he really, really didn't want to go through that door for all sorts of reasons – but then he gritted his teeth, knowing that he had to do this, and he had to get it over with as quickly as possible, and knocked hard on the door.
The security grille shot open at once and he found a pair of yellow – yellow! – eyes regarding him.
"What do you want?" a belligerent voice asked. "This is a members only club, an' I ain't seen you before. Fuck off."
Shaking slightly and thinking firmly about coloured contact lenses, Liam said:
"I'm here to meet William Aurelius – Spike, that is. He's expecting me. My name is Liam."
He wasn't going to give this freak his surname - that was for sure.
To his surprise, the change in the bouncer, or whatever he was, was immediate.
"Sorry, sorry, master!" he said. "You should have said so at once. Please come in and forgive my rudeness."
Liam blinked at him, surprised, and then the grille slammed shut and he heard the sound of bolts being drawn and a key in a lock. The door swung open, and he stepped through, inching past an enormous, bald-headed man, dressed all in black, who was bowing to him as if he were some kind of royalty.
"Spike is inside," the man said, and he sounded afraid. "Please go through, master, and please, I'm so sorry!"
This abject fawning was so patently absurd that Liam felt like laughing. He relaxed, pleased to discover that the vampire club and its members were proving to be just as ridiculous as he'd always thought they must be.
He went on down a dimly lit corridor with red-painted walls, then pushed through a curtain of black leather strips into a huge underground space – much bigger than he'd been expecting – intersected with metal spiral staircases, leading who knew where, its walls draped in diaphanous black, and full of shadowy figures obscured by a foggy drift of what Liam had to assume was dry ice. Music was playing – something gloomy and Goth-y-sounding, but not too loud, merely adding to the strange, dreamlike ambience.
Liam blinked again in the dim light, trying to make out faces on the figures nearest him. He had the impression that some people were wearing masks, and not very attractive ones at that, which surprised him. He was sure that he'd read somewhere that most vampire cultists idolised physical beauty.
"Liam!" a voice said, behind him. He turned to find himself looking at William. The boy was without his long leather coat, but now he wore leather trousers, tight-fitting as gloves, starkly outlining his crotch, and a shirt of some kind of metallic looking material, silvery-black, almost like chain mail. His eyes were outlined in black eye-liner, while his lips looked red in the dim light, accentuating the pallor of his face, and his hair was ruffled up into soft, pale curls over his head. With the collar on prominent display round his neck, he looked more beautiful than ever.
"Will – er, Spike – " Liam began, only for the boy to lean forward and kiss him on the lips, then to almost swarm up him like a monkey climbing a tree, grinding himself against him, seizing Liam's hands and placing them firmly on his buttocks, over which the black leather was pulled as taut as a second skin. Liam's body responded to William's as it always did and he pulled him closer, kissing him back.
Suddenly, Liam felt a sharp sensation on his lips and the boy fell away from him, laughing a little, mocking him. Liam raised a finger to his mouth and it came away wet. He realised that William had bitten him, and at that moment, the boy opened his own mouth to reveal a set of impressive, and very realistic, white fangs.
"Jesus! What the fuck did you bite me for?" Liam exclaimed, angrily, his brain already frantically trying to work out how he was going to explain the mark to Francis, wild stories dancing round in his head of a client going crazy in the consulting room and having to be sectioned on the spot and dragged away by the men in white coats – after having bitten Liam first.
"Been too long since I had a taste of you. Sorry" William said, not sounding the least bit apologetic. "Let me get you a drink, Liam."
He took Liam's hand in his and led him across the dim room to a bar, past groups of people who seemed to part for him, whispering, and then gather in behind him. The barman was dressed in black, his long grey hair spilling down his back and round pebble shades over his eyes.
"Two Blood Baths, Victor," William said. "The special ones, mind."
"Coming right up, master," the man said, at once, and it seemed to Liam that he was almost touching his forelock as he hurried to obey William.
"What's with all the bowing and scraping?" he whispered, glancing at his watch as he did so and seeing that it was already getting on for seven. He had half an hour, at most.
William's hand was on his arm, as if claiming ownership.
"Oh, the name 'Aurelius' has a lot of clout round here," he said, carelessly.
The drinks were brought. Two absurd-looking glass goblets full of some unidentifiable red liquid. It wasn't blood, of course – in fact, it smelt of cranberry juice – but Liam hesitated before putting it to his lips all the same.
"Not afraid, are you?" William said, and he sounded amused.
Irritated, Liam said:
"No, Spike, I'm not afraid. Just not keen on alcohol this early in the evening, that's all."
He sipped the drink and found it reasonably pleasant – mostly red wine, with cranberry juice as he'd guessed, plus some other ingredient he couldn't quite place that tasted oddly metallic.
"Raspberries," William said, blandly, as if reading his mind. "She tasted of raspberries." And before Liam could ask him what on earth he was talking about: "Drink up, mate, and let's go and find Dru."
Liam still had no desire whatsoever to meet William's girlfriend, or whoever the hell this Drusilla woman really was, but he knew he wouldn't get away without doing so first. He followed the boy across the cavernous space – it must be several basements all knocked into one, and he found himself hoping that a structural engineer had looked round it at some point – aware once again of being stared at by people who averted their eyes whenever he looked at them directly, but who bowed to him as if he was someone important when they realised he'd seen them looking. There was a lot of black and crimson, lace and silk and leather, eyes both yellow and red – and a lot of those very ugly masks too – some kind of clever plastic prosthesis, it looked like. And everyone seemed to be sporting the vampire denture sets, just like William.
They were all pretty pathetic, Liam thought, wishing suddenly that he'd discomfited William entirely by bringing Francis with him and that he and his lover could have compared notes afterwards and laughed about the whole thing. He realised, too, that he no longer thought of William as a client in any way, or else he'd have been looking at his surroundings with more attention, trying to get more of a sense of how these trappings underpinned the boy's notion of himself.
As William's therapist, he should probably have come here weeks ago.
He was still sipping his drink. It tasted pretty good, once you got used to the metallic aftertaste. He might even have another before he went home, he thought.
Then, William's voice:
"Dru - princess! Here you are! Look who I've brought."
Liam came back to the present abruptly, to find himself faced with a girl, dressed – unlike anyone else in the club – all in white. She looked ethereal – almost ghostly – in the dim, misty light, her head held proudly on her long slender neck, like a delicate flower on its stem. She was tiny – considerably shorter than William – and childishly slim, her dark hair got up in some strange, old-fashioned style that spilled serpentine tendrils down her neck and back. Her eyes were enormous, and pale blue; frighteningly blank and yet knowing at the same time.
Liam knew at once and with the coldness of absolute certainty, that she was completely insane.
And, like William, she was familiar. Liam tried to grab hold of the memory of when he had seen her before, but it slipped from his clutch, as ephemeral as fog.
The girl – she was older than William, Liam thought, maybe in her mid-twenties – stepped up to him and put a hand on his chest, gazing up at him.
"Ooh," she said. "He's beautiful, Spike, just like I remember. Is he going to stay with us now? Have you worked hard like a good boy and brought him back to us for good?"
"I've tried," William said, his voice full of smug laughter. "He's still got a taste for my arse, Dru, just like you said he would have. You're always right, princess, I should have remembered that."
Then the two of them were kissing, hungrily, as if they hadn't seen each other for a long time, although neither of them let go of Liam for a moment. He felt odd, watching them, as if he was seeing them from far away, through the wrong end of a telescope, and the picture was changing.
Suddenly, he was in a dark bedroom, standing in front of an old-fashioned canopied four-poster bed. The girl, Drusilla, lay spread-eagled on it, her white dress rucked up above her flat belly, her slender legs splayed wide. William stood between her thighs, wholly naked, the muscles in his buttocks clenching and un-clenching as he thrust forward into her, the sound of flesh slapping on flesh loud in the room. Liam could see where William's hands gripped the undersides of the girl's thighs, as if trying to force them even further apart, could see the imprints of his nails in her flesh. Her eyes were closed.
As often happens in dreams, Liam found his role changing from that of voyeur to active participant, and suddenly he was pressing himself against William's smooth, pale back, teasing him open with fingers that were already oily and slick. And then he was pushing forward into the boy, even as the girl beneath them both opened her eyes and smiled, revealing her own ivory fangs, to say:
"That's right, Daddy, fuck us."
Liam swayed slightly on his feet, shaking his head, trying to focus on what was in front of him. It was hard. He felt as if his feet were miles away from his head; as if he was almost floating. William and the girl stood before him now, heads together, cheek to cheek, gazing at him from identical blue eyes. Chilled, caught in that predatory double regard, Liam wondered how he could ever have thought William sane. He and this girl Drusilla were a matched pair, as exotic and inhuman as poisonous serpents.
He shook his head again, trying to clear his mind, to make himself remember that they were just silly children playing games, but somehow, he couldn't do it. His perspective was all wrong.
The girl licked her lips.
"He's coming back to us," she hissed.
Liam grabbed William by the arm and hauled him away from her, shaking him roughly.
"What did you do to me, you little shit?" he shouted, the sudden silence that enveloped the place in the aftermath of his raised voice feeling as close and heavy as a shroud wrapping him round and stifling him. He shook his head yet again, still trying to clear it, belatedly dropping the glass goblet to the ground and hearing it smash. "You put something in my drink, didn't you? What the fuck was it?"
William was smiling up at him, beautiful and sinful and very, very smug.
"Ketamine," he said. "I borrowed some from the zoo when I was down that way yesterday – and another special secret ingredient that I got from a friend. Don't worry mate, you'll be fine tomorrow. I just put enough in to get you all nice and relaxed, so you could enjoy yourself better, yeah?"
Liam pushed him, sending him sprawling to the ground in the midst of the broken glass. He felt full of righteous fury, and at the same time William's face was fading in and out, as if his perception of it was changing somehow. When did the boy put those yellow contacts on? And the crowd that had gathered round them seemed to have fused itself into a collective shadow that whispered and tittered and surged backwards and forwards, nearer and then further away again.
Somewhere –strangely – Liam thought that someone must be praying. At least, he was sure he heard the word 'Angelus', running through the crowd like a Chinese whisper passed from person to person, growing more and more distorted as it went. He wondered at the inappropriateness of a morning prayer in a place like this, and then realised that he'd almost lost his balance, as if his head were too heavy for his body and was dragging him down.
"Oh, God!" he said, and he swayed again slightly and leaned against the balustrade of one of the metal staircases to support himself.
"Has William displeased you, Daddy?" the girl – Drusilla – was saying, her voice strangely distant and yet far too close at the same time, a sibilant whisper in his ears. "He can be a very bad boy. You should punish him, and I can watch."
"No!" Liam said, and then, "Yes!"
Drusilla snapped her fingers and hands came clawing forward at William's prostrate form, dragging him away into their midst. Liam saw his white face in passing, and it was grinning at him, exposing those gleaming fangs, which were stained with red. Something was being pressed into his hands – some kind of leather scourge. Just for a moment, the absurdity of the whole thing overcame Liam again – he felt as if he was caught up in the shooting of an incredibly bad S&M porn movie – and he laughed, only to have Drusilla laugh with him, and the sound of her voice seemed to drive away the last vestiges of reality. He felt as if he was floating in space, anchored to earth only by the sound of her voice, and by the sight of William's naked body, arms held firmly at shoulder height in a sort of cruciform shape by two hulking dark shadows on either side of him.
"Hold him still," Liam heard his voice saying, but it didn't sound like his voice any more. He'd never been that cold – that controlling. "And make him kneel."
The shadow shapes were turning William round and pushing him down. The boy sank gracefully to his knees, arms held now above his head, arching his smooth back towards Liam. His pale skin glowed in the dim light, the cleft between his buttocks, a clutching velvety darkness. Liam felt his cock straining at the front of his trousers, wanting to plunder that darkness and make it bleed.
"Hurt him," came Drusilla's pale whisper in his ear, and he raised the scourge and brought it down hard, a long striping of red whipping across the boy's back, as if someone was cutting it open from within. William screamed, but he didn't struggle.
"Hear how beautifully he screams?" Drusilla said. "Make him bleed for me, Daddy."
And Liam did, raising the scourge again and again, until a criss-cross pattern of lash-marks marred that perfect back and William hung moaning – whether in pleasure or pain, it was impossible to tell - from his captors' grip. It was only then, staring in puzzlement at the damage he had done, head full of whispers and shadows, that Liam realised every tail of the scourge was tipped with metal.
He swayed on his feet again, feeling Drusilla slip past him like a ghost to kneel down behind William and bend to lick the pooling blood from his back. Abruptly, Liam felt sick and he staggered slightly, only to find his own arms captured by hands that held him up and imprisoned him at the same time. He was sweating heavily, his erection painful in its intensity.
And then there was a rush of movement, as his captors hurried him forward, his feet crunching on broken glass, until he was standing right behind William, gazing down at him and at Drusilla, who had slipped round to stand in front of the boy. Again, she snapped her fingers impatiently and William was raised to his feet. Her small, dainty hand tangled into his hair and pulled his head back so that he was gazing up at Liam from below, exposing his pale throat and the collar that bound it. The pupils of his eyes had expanded in the gloom, almost eclipsing the blue entirely and tears tracks marked his cheeks, but he licked his lips and grinned, not looking at all like someone who'd just undergone a painful beating.
"William is sorry, Daddy," Drusilla said, "and now he wants to make it up to you, don't you, William?"
"Yeah, "William said, at once, and his voice still held that note of smug triumph. "Let me make it up to you, Daddy, like a good little boy should."
His thrust his rump backwards into Liam's crotch, and at the same time he groaned. At first, Liam thought it was with the pain in his back, but then he realised that Drusilla had her hand at the boy's crotch and was doing something with it there that had caused his outburst.
William groaned again and thrust forward into Drusilla's waiting hand, and suddenly Liam was overcome by another burst of fury and he tore himself from his captors' grip, desperate to release his cock from its own captivity and sink it into that willing, sinful flesh. There was a buzzing noise in his ears and a kind of film over his eyes, and his brain made no connection between the dripping wetness in William's cleft and the bleeding lash marks on his back. He wasted barely a moment to scissor his fingers before pushing forward and in, his brain hardly registering the high keening note of pain that came from the boy's throat, which was quickly stifled as Liam bent down to take possession of his mouth, while Drusilla's frail-looking arm continued to pump expertly, faster and faster.
All around them, voices were whispering louder and louder, the words unclear, whether encouraging or damning, Liam neither knew nor cared. He felt that hot, tight wetness loosening and tearing around him as he thrust harder and harder, until he came and hands plucked at him again, holding him up, and Drusilla whispered,
"That's my good little boy, come for mummy," while William snarled at her throat and tore at it with his fangs, emptying himself into her hand.
The smell of blood was overwhelming. Abruptly, Liam felt a convulsing in his belly and then his guts seemed to re-arrange themselves and he vomited, burning red liquid spewing from his mouth and nose and out onto the floor. He stood, panting and heaving, feeling as if his body was once more in touch with his brain, staring aghast as William and Drusilla turned again to face him, eyes bright and eager. The girl's mouth was stained with blood – the very same blood that dripped down William's legs to puddle on the floor in its turn. Drusilla raised her hand and beckoned.
"No!" Liam said, suddenly, and he began to back away from them. "What the fuck just happened? What have you done to me?"
He turned, hauling himself up the metal balustrade, mounting the stairs while their pale faces sank away into the foggy darkness beneath him. He heard Drusilla say:
"You told me he would stay! Mummy is very cross, you bad, bad boy!"
And then William's voice, full of lazy self-confidence.
"He'll be back, Dru. Where else can he go now? Who will have him apart from us?"
Liam began to run, stumbling slightly on the steps, almost falling. He told himself it was the drug, and that, just like when drunk, he must be careful not to attract attention to himself and to pretend to be normal. He raised a finger to his lips, shushing himself, absurdly pleased when he remembered to button and zip his flies.
There was a door at the top of the staircase. He pushed in open and found himself in a dark, unfurnished corridor, with empty packing crates piled up along one side. He followed the emergency lighting and came out into the bright glare of a shop; some kind of sex shop, selling fetish wear and bondage gear, appropriately enough.
The assistant behind the counter, who was dressed very like some of the clubbers below, stared at him, but said nothing. In fact, she seemed to shrink back at the sight of him. Liam brushed his clothes down, and pulled his coat tightly around himself, afraid that he was blood-stained. The thought made him remember what he had just done to William, the beautiful ivory back marred forever. God, the boy was sick! Far sicker than he'd ever realised, and, far from helping him, he'd just colluded in his fantasies and physically abused him too.
The memory of blood brought other, and even more chilling, knowledge to mind. What the hell had he been thinking of? All these weeks of being so safe, so careful – the only way in which he had not compromised himself, nor betrayed Francis- and he'd fucked the boy without a condom - torn him. All that blood, mingling and joining in that tight, clinging passage! Who could say what he'd just done to himself?
And his mouth really hurt from where William had bitten him.
For a moment, he thought he was going to be sick again, but he shook the feeling off and pushed his way outside, where the cold night air hit him like an angry fist trying to shake sense into him. He looked at his watch, focusing with difficulty, and realised it was after eight-thirty.
Oh, God! Francis!
Fumbling his cell phone out of his coat pocket, Liam called the flat, only to hear the answer phone message click on. It wasn't the usual 'Liam and Francis can't take your call right now', though. Instead, it was Francis's voice, flat and weary-sounding. "If this is you calling, Liam," he said, "sod you."
And that was it. Tears sprang into Liam's eyes, both of anger and self-disgust. Part of him wanted to run back into the club and beat William and that stupid cunt of his to a pulp, the other part wanted to crawl into a dark corner and howl.
He started walking, not knowing where his feet were taking him.
When Liam found himself staring up at the impressive bulk of the Belgravia mansion of Anne LaHaye, he realised that he had no clear memory of how he had ever got there in the first place. The decision to come must have made sense at the time, he supposed, but now he had no idea what his fogged up brain had ever thought it could accomplish. He wasn't William's therapist any more. He was his abuser – his 'daddy'. Even if the source of all William's problems did lie with the woman inside this house, knowing about it now wouldn't help. His career – his life - was over.
Belatedly, he remembered that he hadn't even asked William if he knew what had happened to Cordelia.
Liam rang the bell and waited. After a moment, a voice answered, foreign-sounding, Spanish perhaps, or more likely Filipino:
"Who is it?"
"My name is Liam O'Connor," he said. "I'd like to speak to Miss LaHaye?"
"Miss LaHaye not home," the voice said. "I give her message."
Liam stepped back from the door and looked up, to see a white face staring at him from an upper window. The curtain was drawn back hastily when whoever it was saw him looking.
He tried again. "Can you tell Miss LaHaye I'm her son's therapist," he said, "and I need to speak to her urgently?"
"I already tell you," the voice began, "she not –"
Then a new voice spoke.
"Who are you? What do you want?"
"Miss LaHaye?" Liam asked. "I'm your son's therapist, Liam O'Connor. Please, I need to speak to you."
"I'll come down," she said, "but you can't come in. No one that William knows can ever come in."
Liam waited, rubbing his hands together against the cold, thankful now for the after-effects of the drug which he suspected were still cushioning him from the full impact of what had happened and still making him feel at times that he was almost floating, as if detached from the reality of his situation.
He took a moment to note that the graffiti had already been removed from the door, which once again presented a pristine, shiny surface to the world, the noticing of such details seeming like welcome evidence to him of his own continuing sanity. Then the door opened just a crack, coming to a halt at the length of a very tough-looking security chain. There was the sound of a large dog growling deep in the back of its throat. Liam wondered if it had caught the scent of blood off him.
"What do you want?" Anne LaHaye said, obviously standing just out of sight behind the door. "Why have you come here at this time of night? Did William give you my address?"
"No," Liam assured her. "I saw the news bulletin about the attempted break-in the other night. I wouldn't normally do this, Miss LaHaye, but I'm very concerned about William. I need to talk to you."
She laughed, and Liam realised that she was probably half-drunk.
"I've nothing to say about him," she said. "My son is a very sick boy, Mr O'Connor, in every sense of the word. I haven't seen him for six months and I hope I never see him again. I'll still pay his bills, if that's what you're worried about."
"No-" Liam began to protest, but she didn't give him the chance to finish.
"Do you know how many times he's ruined relationships for me? Five times, that's how many. He always comes up with some way of driving them away – every man I meet. He'd say, "They're not good enough for you, mum. You've got to wait for that one special person." God help me, I thought it was sweet. That was before he tried – before – Oh, why am I talking to you? You're not my therapist. Go away, Mr O'Connor, and please don't come back."
The door began to close.
"Did he rape you?" Liam said. He didn't know where the words came from, they just blurted themselves out.
He didn't think she would answer, but she said, shortly:
"No. He didn't need to."
The door slammed in his face.
On the train on the way home, Liam tried to piece things together, but nothing made real sense, even with the help of mind-altering drugs. It was like a horribly incestuous game of Happy Families, with himself roped in to play the role of father. He was chilled by what Anne LaHaye had both told, and not told, him. He'd known that William had had a fraught relationship with his mother, but never suspected anything quite this bad – and who was to say where the fault lay there? – and it chilled him all over again to remember the girl, Drusilla, calling herself William's 'mummy'. No wonder Anne LaHaye hated her. And father issues? Well, the boy had plenty of those, as he'd discovered to his cost over the last couple of months.
The thought struck him suddenly that William had indeed been making his mother wait for the right person to come along and that inside the boy's confused head, that person was Liam himself. What would have happened next? Would William have tried to bring him together with Anne LaHaye in some way – totally at odds with his own nature and sexuality? Or, more likely, since William seemed to have found himself a surrogate mother already in this Drusilla girl, would he have been trying to induce Liam to have sex with her too?
For a moment, Liam almost wanted to. He thought of the slim, frail-looking girl and he just wanted to hurt her; to throw her down and fuck her so brutally she'd scream and beg for mercy. The feeling coursed up through his body like poison and then was gone, leaving him shaken and ashamed. He'd never wanted a woman so much in his life – not since he'd got over the first teenage experiments and discovered how very much girls were not for him – and he'd certainly never wanted to hurt one before.
What was happening to him?
He grew abruptly certain that William recognised no sexual boundaries at all, and couldn’t see why others should do so either. He was busy re-making his family, whether they wanted to co-operate or not.
The train was half-empty, but, as Liam sat slumped in his corner seat, he once again had the sensation of being watched. Quickly, he raised his head, thinking that he'd caught another glimpse of black leather swirling away just out of his line of sight, but it was gone when he looked properly, just like before.
He stood up and gazed round the carriage, but there was no one there, save for a sleeping drunk and a young black couple busy kissing and obviously with no eyes for anyone else.
Liam stared at them a moment, envying them their cocoon of intimacy; then he blinked sleepily, desperate to get home and collapse onto his bed, even though he knew that bed would be empty – now and probably forever.
As William had said, who would want him now?
Even so, when he opened the front door and went in, the emptiness seemed to stand up and hit him in the face. There were no lights on; no cooking smells - total silence save for the central heating boiler humming through its cycle. Liam switched on the hall light and stood for a moment, leaning against the wall. Gradually, his knees gave way and he sank to the floor, putting his head in his hands. Even after all that had happened, he'd half-believed that some miracle might have taken place, that Francis would still be here, waiting, and that he could pour out the whole foul story, and his lover would take him in his arms and say, "I understand. I know you couldn't help it. I'll stand by you."
But of course, he hadn't, because who would?
Liam levered himself up from the floor and staggered into the bathroom. He emptied his bladder into the toilet, noting with detachment that his aim was off and that urine had splattered the upturned seat and even the wall behind it; then turned to wash his hands. For a moment, his stomach seemed to turn over and make another bid to empty its contents, as he found himself staring into the mirror and realised he couldn't see a reflection. He blinked, then realised that this was because the mirror was covered in shaving foam, spelling out the words: "Sod you!"
He turned on the tap and splashed water onto his hands and face, trying to ignore the message. Going into the bedroom, he saw that all the cupboards and drawers were open and Francis's things were already gone. Crawling fully clothed onto the bed, Liam hardly spared a moment to wonder where his lover was sleeping tonight, before he fell deeply unconscious.
He woke in the early hours of the morning, feeling desperately sick again, running to the bathroom just in time to vomit up the remaining contents of his stomach. There was very little in it, and he hunched over the toilet, retching miserably, then went into the kitchen to get a glass of water.
For a while, he sat slumped at the kitchen table, sipping from the glass and trying to remember what had happened the previous night and why it was all so hazy. For that matter, where was Francis? He knew he should know, but somehow, the knowledge currently escaped him. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was six-o-clock, so he staggered into the living room and put the television on, thinking that maybe watching the news would help him remember all the things he seemed to have forgotten.
And it did, though not in the way he'd been expecting.
Again, he found himself watching the local news bulletin for London, with a reporter standing on a canal towpath, well-wrapped against the cold, saying: " - the young woman was found shortly after three am this morning by a man out walking his dog on this stretch of the Regent's Park Canal, near London Zoo."
The reporter indicated the stretch of opaque dark water behind him, then continued:
"She was naked and her body was covered in what police say appear to be bite-marks - possibly inflicted by a wild animal of some kind - and suffering from almost total blood-loss. Doctors say that she's lucky to be alive although her condition continues to give great cause for concern and she is still unconscious. Police are hoping to talk to her later, if possible."
The reporter then turned to a policeman standing next to him, looking very grave and stiff, the way policemen being interviewed always seemed to, who said, when prompted: "This was a very serious attack on a defenceless young woman and we would ask anyone with any information to come forward as quickly as possible before the attacker strikes again, and for the public to be extra-vigilant and to call the police if they see anything unusual."
Liam sat, staring at the screen, unable to move. There was an odd, metallic taste in his mouth. Almost total blood loss, they'd said.
He knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the injured girl was Cordelia, and he remembered William saying that the drink had had another 'special ingredient', as well as the ketamine; that he'd got it 'from a friend'. Oh, God! He'd drunk her blood!
The events of the previous night were becoming clear in Liam's mind again, much though he now wished they weren't. He sat, frozen in his chair, panicked thoughts chasing each other round and round his head like the proverbial rat in a maze. His first impulse was to throw a few things in a suitcase and run like hell. He thought briefly of Ireland and Francis and grimaced with the pain of the loss, knowing that he had to put such thoughts behind him forever.
His second thought was that he hadn't actually done anything wrong. He could inform on William and his friends and the boy would end up in Broadmoor, where he probably belonged.
Even as he thought this, the idea seized him that if he sent the police to the vampire club in Soho they would – as in all those clichéd horror movies – find nothing there, and that, in fact, there never had been anything there; that he'd dreamed it all. For a moment, he almost felt that if he wished hard enough it would become truth, but then the cold inescapable reality of what he'd just seen on the television came back to him.
William was out there, sick and dangerous and probably coming for him right now.
He remembered all the times he'd felt like he was being watched on the train, and he realised with absolute certainty that William knew where he lived – had probably known from the first day they'd met. How long would it have been before the boy had turned on Francis and savaged him as he had Cordelia?
He reached for the phone, then hesitated, his panicked brain going off on another tack, asking him frantically to consider what if William was caught? What might he have to say? What else might come out?
What else?
He sat, unable to move -unable to decide. In his head, he heard William's voice saying with that smug, hateful certainty: "Where else can he go now? Who will have him, apart from us?"
He had a sudden sense of William's presence, not far away and getting closer, inexorable and relentless as death; and he didn't know whether it was fear that caused his belly to knot and sweat to break out on his forehead, or anticipation.
His brain seemed to be shutting down again, so that all he could see was that beautiful debauched face, tear-streaked and eager, wanting him - wanting him so much that it was prepared to kill to get him, and he wondered what else William might be capable of.
There was a knock on the door.
THE END
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Date: 2004-12-19 11:52 am (UTC)Thanks very much for the feedback.