Queermance Anthology, Volume 1 (13 page)

As these words stumbled in a rush from his mouth, Tully couldn't tear his eyes from Sean's. His
gaze beseeched Sean to understand what he'd done, the confusion he'd felt, and forgive him. His gaze
said he didn't know what he would do if Sean didn't.

Instead, Sean looked as though he had expected this conversation all along. He drew his lips in
silently as his gaze lowered. He took the bag from Tully. He didn't say another word, only held the
bag carefully in both hands.

Blood rushed to Tully's face, and he could feel it beating at his temples, louder at his ears. He
hadn't expected this. He hadn't expected anything
like
this. 'Well, what are you? Why do
you-
How
do you do this?'

'A selkie,' Sean said simply. 'I'm a selkie.'

'But- what?' Tully's forehead scrunched up with confusion. He tried to recall half-remembered
pictures of semi-naked figures in myth that he'd found on websites in his teens. 'Aren't selkies an
Irish myth?'

Sean gave that enigmatic smile. 'Many people have travelled from Ireland to Melbourne. Did you
think they came alone?'

Suffused with guilt, and fear, and just plain overwhelmed by the magnitude of
selkies
,
Tully didn't know what to say.

'Uh. Okay.' His expression no doubt said he was struggling. Sean gave him the space to deal with
it. Tully didn't want space. He wanted Sean to hold him, to tell him it would all be alright.

Sean did neither of those things.

When they fell into bed that night, the sex was as passionate as it had been the first time.
Tully clung to Sean, as though afraid to break body contact for even one minute. Sean pulled Tully
to him as though he would memorise every line, detail, muscle and sinew of the Tully's lanky
form.

'Stay,' Tully uttered into the pillow as he came, with closed eyes leaking a tear. He wasn't even
sure if he said it loud enough for Sean to hear. In any case, Sean didn't reply.

They held onto each other afterwards. There wasn't anything left for either of them to say. Tully
tried to keep himself awake as long as he could, but eventually, he slept.

****

When Tully woke sometime around three in the morning, he knew already that Sean was
gone.

Nonetheless, he lay awake and waited for his boyfriend to crawl back in beside him. He was so
sure that he would. Even as his fears told him better, he kept telling himself he was sure. He
was…

As the first hints of dawn crept around the curtains of his bedroom, Tully shifted so that his
back was against the headboard. He was not even remotely tired. Seven o'clock came and went without
any sound of Sean re-entering the house.

Finally, Tully had to accept that it had happened. Sean had left. He had his seal skin back, and
had gone back to the ocean he'd come from. He wasn't coming back.

Tully closed his eyes and felt the sting of tears.

When he opened his eyes, the bedroom doorway was still empty.

With heavy feet, Tully got out of bed and reached for his phone.

'Yeah, I'm not coming into work today,' he said, to the receptionist on the desk. The
receptionist was a portly, older lady with too-large glasses. He could imagine her expression as she
logged his excuse, and wished him to "get better soon".

Tully's voice was still husky from sleep and disuse. He thanked her, and hung up.

He walked into his study, with the movie posters of
Jaws
and the rest on the wall;
memories of recently watched movies. He turned on his computer to write for the first time in weeks.

While it was booting up, he went into the kitchen. Opening the shutters to let the light in,
Tully reached for the percolator. He pulled out a single coffee mug from the cupboard and put it on
the bench, which showed no sign of where another had so briefly been placed beside it.

The man who slipped into the plush booth to sit opposite Lex was slender, although
his was a lithe build that owed more to concentrated physical activity, such as dance or dedicated
running, than the party life of a circuit boy hooked on E or crystal. Lex didn't like crystal -
it made people's blood taste like chalk. Plus, with a potential eternity ahead of him and no studies
on the effects of drugs on vampires
¹
, he didn't have any idea
of what ingesting it second-hand would do to his brain, and he wasn't keen to find out. For all he
knew, it would mean an eternity spent as a gibbering loony wandering the streets and begging for
blood packs - or making fumbling attempts at catching rats or pigeons
²
.

'Hey,' the man said. 'I'm Connor.'

'Lex.'

'I know. Everyone knows who you are.'

Lex smiled, and took a sip of his Bloody Mary
³
. 'Who am I
then?'

'Lex Cranbourne, painter of artwork that sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars to the right
people. I've got a tattoo inspired by one of your pieces.'

'Really? I didn't think I painted anything that would work as a tattoo,' Lex replied softly as
the phrase
the right people
echoed in his head.

'You're kidding, right?' Connor exclaimed, deft fingers unbuttoning his shirt.

'Oh,' Lex said. 'That's one of my very early pieces.'

It was a demonic satyr, or at least, it got called that a lot. In Lex's mind it had been an early
attempt to draw an incubus, taking inspiration from depictions of horned demons in the video games
he used to play. He'd kept the cloven hooves and stubby horns, but given the very male image a
handsome face that was more alluring than evil, although he had tried to give it a certain sparkle
in the eye. The tattoo artist had exaggerated the already large penis on the original drawing, and
on Connor's chest it arced up to touch the incubus' pectorals, stopping just short of Connor's left
nipple. The tattoo also had the barest hint of fangs protruding from the demon's upper lip, which
was definitely not something that Lex had included. He hadn't found fangs sexy then. Actually, he
didn't find them sexy now.

'I've liked your work for a long time,' Connor said. The man's blush would have been almost
unnoticeable in the dim lighting, but Lex's acute senses picked up the change in the air and the
subtle speeding of Connor's heartbeat. Connor was tall, somewhere in excess of six feet, and had
dirty blond hair that was almost buzz-cut short, and the beginnings of evening stubble. Lex's
nostrils flared as he saw a reddish flush spread down Connor's neck to the top of his well-developed
chest. A peppery scent of musk and fresh sweat reached Lex's nostrils and he idly wondered what
Connor would taste like.

In Lex's experience, everyone tasted different. There was the basic metallic taste of blood in
general and a certain syrupy thickness, but from there, flavours differed widely. Some blood aged
well, some did not. Sometimes there were overtones of fruit, or a certain fatty richness or even a
slight hint of spice. It all came down to what each person ate - and by the smell of it, Connor
was a man who liked his Indian food. As his gaze lingered on Connor's chest, he felt his stomach
clench hungrily.

'I have to go,' he said suddenly, downing his drink and rising to his feet. 'I'm sorry, it's not
that I dislike your company, but I'm afraid I'm not good with people these days.'

A soft hand grabbed his fingers before he could walk away and he looked down into Connor's eyes,
seeing the naked longing within. 'If you need a better drink…'

Lex smiled sadly. 'That's the problem. You're more than a drink on legs, Connor, and you should
treat yourself accordingly.' He pulled his hand free before Connor could respond, and pushed his way
through the crowd of adventurers, lost souls and blood fetishists. Stopping only to collect his
jacket from the cloakroom
⁴
, he stepped out into the
crispness of the Melbourne night.

Sucking in the cold air of autumn, he let the smells of sweat, lust and desperation fade from his
mind. Technically he didn't have to breathe - he'd even gone and sat at the bottom of the local
pool for a good hour, waving at people above to show them he was quite fine just to test out the
theory. It was, however, a difficult habit to break, and he found his body reflexively breathed
exactly the same way it had when alive if left to its own devices, almost as if his muscles still
required oxygen to function
⁵
. Of course, with a
heightened sense of smell, breathing was useful for other reasons, such as tracking down prey -
that is, people - and not least of all, speech. It still amazed Lex that even with the evidence
as glaring as his non-reflection in any sort of surface, including SLR cameras and shop windows, the
general public were almost as oblivious to the existence of vampires as they were to the threat of
climate change
⁶
. Sometimes he wondered what else was
out there, hiding in plain sight. And then he wondered if he'd even recognise it if he saw it.

The back of Hellhound was unimpressively suburban, with a large concrete lot of free evening
parking allowing residents to drive in to the Northcote area and walk a very short distance to the
quickly gentrifying High Street, with its still-perceived-as-trendy eateries and
holding-onto-its-grungy-atmosphere social club. Would-be celebrity chefs boasting credentials had
opened restaurants such as the Fat Duck, vying for foot traffic with organic Mexican restaurants run
by Egyptians, and an old, masculine, charcoal grill steakhouse that served American style
portions
⁷
. Like Brunswick before it, the boho crowd
were moving on, pushing further north as the yuppies moved in, seeking to surround themselves with
the artistry and happy-go-lucky attitudes they had eschewed to move up the corporate ladder. It was
a vain attempt to capture and absorb the essence of artistry and community that they'd long given up
on cultivating within themselves.

Of course, once the yuppies moved in they pushed up the prices and the artists moved out, leaving
busy, tree-lined suburbs with bustling cafes that shut after lunch and live music venues that shut
down after noise complaints from their neighbours who had to get up in the morning for a six am
start, snaking into the city in their BMWs for an early workout as they chased the dream of having
it all.

Sometimes, Lex felt that yuppies were like vampires, sucking the life out of the places they
yearned towards but of which they would only ever be observers
by definition
. Sometimes, he
felt that vampires were yuppies, ruining everything they touched even as their very essence was held
up to society as the pinnacle of achievement
⁸
. And how
people wanted it. The immortality, the eternal youth, the rabid sex lives
⁹
- everything was glamorised and lauded as desirable. The aristocracy
of the night, the ultimate loner sitting in the corner watching the world go by as the little
problems of mere mortals fell away with the slow and stately march of the centuries.

Sometimes, Lex felt that someone ought to tell screenwriters and aspiring novelists that the
little problems of mere mortals refused to go away in undeath, and the thought of them lingering for
centuries was still one he found difficult to face. Snarling, he punched the nearby wall, sending
his fist a good three inches into the now crumbled brick. The crack of masonry made him pause
immediately, hoping the noise would be masked by the sounds of Celtic Electronica that were
filtering out from the Northcote Social Club, or at least that no-one would bother to investigate a
one-off noise and chalk it up to fireworks or roving thugs invading from Scumshine out west.

'Did that make you feel better?'

Or the opposite could happen, of course.

It was Connor, naturally. Lex could just make out the spicy scent of him over the sharp smell of
fresh blood.

'Not really, no.' Lex said, pulling his hand carefully from the wall and examining the cracks
that now radiated from the impact area. It would probably be okay.

'You're bleeding.'

'Doesn't matter,' Lex said, looking at the broken skin and oozing flesh of his knuckles. He could
almost see a tendon if he flexed his fingers just right. Brushing the brick dust from his hand, he
picked away the larger fragments and then licked his wounds, watching as the skin healed over almost
instantly.

'Impressive.'

'Really?' Lex asked, finally turning to find Connor standing just outside the illumination cast
by a small security light, a shadow within a shadow. 'You knew it would happen.'

'But I've never seen it before. What's it like?'

Lex only needed two strides to reach Connor and his hands slammed into the wall either side of
the man's head almost before he'd finished speaking
¹⁰
. 'What makes you so sure you want to know?'

Connor shrugged. 'I like to live dangerously.'

'I could rip out your throat right now and you'd bleed out in minutes - less,' Lex growled.
'It would be painful, it would be frightening and you wouldn't rise again in a better, stronger
form. You'd just be dead. And it would be meaningless. You won't have joined with a greater power,
you won't feel a rush of dark enlightenment, you won't awaken to a higher purpose and you wouldn't
be remembered. You'd be a meal for a lonely, pathetic guy who had a bad night, happens to drink
blood and yours won't actually make his any better. Your death would be painful, messy and
meaningless. Do you get that?'

Connor leaned back against the brick wall amidst the dumpsters that smelled of stomach-churning
food in various stages of decay, closed his eyes and lifted his chin. 'Go on then,' he said.

'You can't do it, can you?' he asked moments later, while Lex was still staring at him in shock.
A slender finger reached out and poked him in the sternum. 'Somewhere in there you just won't let
yourself.'