Reckless: Shades of a Vampire (5 page)

Emma had wondered if she was a whore like those she read about in the Bible – something her father called an abomination of the earth, the type of monster whose otherwise good is washed away completely according to the judgmental by an undiscerning loin.

That would be okay, she had deducted, since the searing burn she felt for Michael felt better than the otherwise melancholy days before she met him that piled up one after another which were neither good, nor bad.

She had wanted him to take her, and she wanted him to do it again, and again, and again.

She never wanted to stop, even if it was wrong.

In the bathtub, she had thought about doing her thing, pretending Michael was there with her. She had touched herself in the water, but it wasn't enough. Emma had looked at the faucet dripping warm water. She had thought of Michael's mouth.

She leaned forward and turned up the water, running her fingers over her nipples, and had leaned her head back against the back of the tub. She had propped her legs on the sides, and thrust her groin toward the faucet.

"Ahhhh," she had sighed, as warm, pulsating water rushed against her pussy.

Emma had seen Michael's face, and imagined him licking her. She had thrust her hips back and forth into the water so that her head sank into the rising tide at the back of the tub. With her ears submerged, Emma had parted her lips with her right hand so it felt like Michael was ravaging her clit with his tongue.

"Michael," she blurted out. "Michael."

She had let out a scream the moment she couldn't take any more, thrusting her pussy into the faucet for one final thrust as her body shimmered.

Bang, bang, bang
, came a knock at the door.

"Emma?" her mother shouted. "Emma? What's going on? Are you okay?"

Emma had quickly sat up in the tub. 

"Yes, mother," she had said. "I'm fine."

Emma had managed to get some sleep that night, but even her sweaty dreams involved vivid images of Michael boring down upon her as she pulled him in so close that he was nearly there, where she had wanted him.

She had known she should feel bad. She just didn't, at all. She had just wanted Michael to take her. She had just wanted Michael to fuck her, and again, and again...

On the Monday morning after that first restless night, Emma had looked for Michael around the barn where he lingered, looking back at her. But he was not there.

Not at seven a.m.

Not at eight a.m.

Not at 10 a.m.

Emma had paced the parsonage grounds, pretending to do chores that she was not doing at all so she should keep a close watch for him.

Emma looked for Michael on the tractor, but it sat idle by the barn.

He wasn’t there, or anywhere on the Denton farm that day.

Still, Emma looked for him, and longed for him.

She longed for touching his skin, smelling his smell, and for feeling his strength grind against her with only the lace of the angels as separation between them. But no matter how hard and often she looked, Michael still was not there that Monday.

And she had looked for Michael on Tuesday, but he was gone. She had done the same on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday -- walking the grounds to give the appearance of work while looking for Michael and simmering in the burn he had left her with.

She had thought crying might relieve some of the tension she felt from his absence.  Yet when she stopped in the shade of the towering oak for a break and tried to let tears out, placing her head in her hands and uttering what sounded like a sob, no tears flowed.

Emma’s dry eyes wanted Michael, and nothing else, or nobody else, would do.

The experience – lusting for him in the barn -- must have broken her in some way, she had thought. Yes, that was it. She was broken – cracked so that fire poured out from her inside the way a crack in the earth lets fiery lava long embedded ooze out, burning up everything in its path.

She was a volcano, with lava to spew.

Emma had contemplated before what it might be like to be intimate with a male so many times before doing her thing. She knew the tingling that had accompanied those thoughts. She knew the release. She just didn’t understand that the real thing, being in the presence of a man, would be so much more powerful 00 unmanageable even.

Waiting until the proper time, when she could sit with a man according to her father’s plan, had been tolerable. She had survived through private time. But then she had smelled Michael. Then she had touched Michael. Then Michael had touched her.

Emma did not know where Michael was, or why he went away. He had only worked at the Denton farm for a week and she thought he planned to be there for the entire summer. She did not care where he went, or why. She just wanted him back. She just wanted him to take her, and take her again, until she had no more want remaining.

Emma had kept herself busy that week best she could, in his absence, going through the motions of her chores while spending most of her time outside in case he showed back up for work. She had thought about praying for relief from her consumptive affliction but decided against it, thinking God might not like her selfish pleading for lust satisfaction, especially when she was not married.

Especially.

And what would she say on her knees?

“
Dear God, please bring Michael back so he can ravage my loin?
”

Or this, perhaps: “
Please, Dear Lord, grant me another day with Michael so that I can thrust myself into him over and over again.
”

No, prayer delivered honestly would not have worked, she figured.

Instead, Emma had pushed through the week on the fumes of hope fueled by her hunger – hope that he would return, or that he really wasn’t gone at all and that she was in an extended dream. But as one day turned into another, she had felt herself changing with the passing of time. Her yearning for Michael had mounted as the minutes of his absence piled up.

Emma had said few words to her parents during the week, and she abandoned bedtime prayers to focus on keeping the memory of Michael as vivid and fresh as possible.

When she kneeled bedside at night, she had clasped her hands, brought them to her face, closed her eyes and imagined it was Michael near her nose. She had reached for his scent, and begged for his blood-filled veins to pump against her.

By replaying their barn experience over and over in her mind, she had hoped to etch it so deeply that it would be there forever, and she could revisit it again and again, circling her hand around her throbbing pussy thinking of Michael all the while.

Emma had managed to survive the week, until the moment she could not control arrived; the moment that left her facing such a difficult decision now, the one where she reached for the serpent and the serpent lashed back as if it were merely a reflection from a mirror.

Strike!

Emma knew her demanding lust for Michael was not hidden from God, just as she knew her unwillingness to repent was not hidden. She could not deny it to herself, and she did not try denying it to God.

She did not want to repent. She wanted to bathe in the badness.

But now, on the sanctuary floor, Emma’s lust is no longer a secret between she and God, or anybody else for that matter. It is sprawled before her father, her mother, and the only people she knows in the world besides Michael, as she fights to breathe and keep her consciousness on the sanctuary’s plank floor.

Surrounded by the voices, hands, footsteps and prayers echoing through the sanctuary, Emma faces a dilemma – one that she has only an instant to resolve. Emma’s hazy mind calculates by measuring the heightened, anxious cries of her doting mother that she has little time left to make a decision. Otherwise, she will be gone, just like that -- like Uncle Billy and others who carelessly propped the promise of salvation against the hollow wall of gratification.

Emma assesses she has three options.

One) to have any chance at God’s hand in healing from the rattlesnake poison taking her life, she must repent of her sinful lust immediately and walk away from it for good, even though that means expunging her clung-to memory of Michael and the barn. She recalls Luke 13:3 as light for this path: “
I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all perish in the same way.
”

Two) she can avoid repent and pray selfishly for life alone instead, though she’s sure she will die within the hour if she chooses such a path. The serpent has already made its move, she figures, by striking her, so a prayer for life without redemption holds little promise. It would only allow her to go down with a fight for what she wanted – Michael, or at least, the ability to take the memory of Michael with her.

Or, three) if she’s unwilling to repent but also wants a chance at life so she can see Michael again, she figures there is one possible option. Emma assumes that instead of repent she can embrace her lust, pleading for life in the darkness of sin.

She recalls her father explaining before that those who refuse to reject their sin, those who refuse to repent and bask in the forgiveness of God, are walking instead hand in hand with the Devil himself.

A sinner is one thing, her father said often.

The unrepentant sinner is another, he reminded his flock. If they continue to walk the earth, they walk in a fiery sludge the same as death.

“
But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death
,” her father often cited from Revelations 12:8.

Emma does not want to repent because she has never felt so alive as she did with Michael. And Emma does not want to die without seeing Michael again. She wants to live.

She wants to live another day to lick the musky droplets from Michael’s neck.

She wants to live another day to wrap her legs around his. She wants to live another day to feel him passionately penetrate her, thrashing responses to her demands.

If she turns to God, in repent, she will be in the hands of her father. If she pleads for life without repent she will be free – from Earth, from her father, but also from Michael.

But if she embraces her sin, her lust, and seeks light in the darkness, then maybe she can have Michael without apology.

Emma hears her mother crying out.

“Jeremiah!” her mother says. “Her pulse is quickening.”

The decision time for Emma is seconds away, she suspects, or she will have no choice at all since option two will be thrust upon her as a selection by default.

“Let’s get her to a hospital!” Jeremiah. “Please.”

“A hospital!” her father shouts back. “Dear God, have mercy on her words.

“No,” he says. “No hospital. Emma is in the care of God’s hands. He will take care of her. He will spare her if that is His will. We can only pray that she is in His light.”

Emma sees flashing lights, and she feels cool air drifting across her cheeks. She thinks of Michael. She replays the Sunday before with him in the barn, remembering his smell, how he felt when she pulled him close, and how she sucked him so close to her lips she could taste his lifeblood.

“I must decide,” she thinks to herself. "One, two, or three."

Emma begins to pray, quietly in her mind. But she focuses her attention on a source she has never turned to before.

“Oh darkness,” she whispers in her mind. “Take me. Take me on the earth as thy own flesh and blood. Leave me with life, here, and now, and I shall leave the light to be with you. I will be yours – a serpent of the flesh.

“Take me,” Emma cries out. “I’m yours.”

The wind rustling outside picks up momentum, gusting through open sanctuary doors. Lightning flashes silently in the distance as a simmering summer storm reveals its identity.

Emma’s pulse is beating erratically. Her breathing becomes laborious.

“Emma, no!” her mother cries, reaching back for Jeremiah’s hand.

“Jeremiah,” says her mother, turning to her husband, and shouting in a curdling shrill. “Do something! Do something!”

The Reverend kneels at his daughter’s right side, gently nudging Emma’s mother over. He places his hand on her forehead. He begins to pray in a firm but measured voice as silence and stillness falls across the sanctuary except for the now-steady breeze blowing through an open doorway.

“Dear heavenly Father, he says, “do unto my daughter as thy will be done. We pray that thy will is that she be with us. But we pray above all that thy will be done.”

Emma’s father places his finger beneath her nostrils.

“She’s not breathing,” he says.

Emma’s mother drops her head into her hands.

She sobs.

“Dear God,” she cries.

Emma’s father looks around the sanctuary. The room is still, and quiet.

“We must fear the serpent,” he father says, looking at the congregation members in the eyes one to another. “We must fear God if we want to live life. God giveth. And God taketh away.”

Emma’s father takes his hands from his daughter. He brings them to his face. He utters a muffled cry.

“No!” he belts out.

Her father reaches for Emma in haste. He puts the palm of his right hand on the base of Emma’s chest, and his left hand on top it. He pumps his hands into her chest and begins counting with the rhythm – one Mississippi, two Mississippi.

He stops at seven, clutches Emma’s jaw, pulls it open, pinches her nostrils, and begins breathing with his mouth into her mouth.

He stops for a breath.

He shouts.

“Come back to me!”

Emma’s mother is pleading as well.

“Come back to us Emma. Oh Dear God. Give us back our Emma!”

Emma blinks.

Her mother gasps.

“Jeremiah!”

Emma coughs back into her father’s face. She sits up, and looks around the room.

“Jeremiah!” her mother cries. “Emma! Emma dear!”

Emma wriggles her fingers, and opens her eyes, one at a time. Her skin is white like a choir robe. Her mouth is foamy from her father’s wet breath. She reaches slowly with her right hand to the bite mark on her neck. She feels a lump, and two holes where the serpent’s fangs pierced her skin.