VAMPIRE ROMANCE: Moonlight Desires Complete Series (Books 1, 2, &3) (Paranormal Romance Collection, Paranormal Shape Shifter Romance With Sex) (Vampire Romance Boxed Set) (4 page)

Moonlight Desires (Book #2)

Chapter One

The boys at Ray Fat's American Auto Fixation and Motors were slammed that day, but Nate went easy on them with his inspections. He gave them plenty of time to make whatever repairs needed with little threat of closing down the shop. Years later, those inspections would come back to haunt them, when the hydraulics on one of the car lifts malfunctioned six months after inspection, letting a Chrysler Town and Country fall onto Santiago, the mechanic working on its front axle. His neck snapped in the wheel well but the coroner noted that the weight of the car would have done him in anyway.

              While it is impossible to deduce what was going through Santiago's unconscious the instant his neck snapped and he lost his ability to get air into his brain; that flash of an instant that for all we know lasts an eon to those in the throes of mortality's natural denouement. The coroner couldn't help but note to Ray Fat that the look on Santiago's face was not one of terror, but a one of serene, postcoital bliss. Ray's disgusted look indicated that he would forget what the coroner said, for both their benefits.

Needless to say, that year would not be Nate's easiest year.

              Today, they squeezed Nate in as early as they could. Insurance covered the full cost of the repair, but the blood on the upholstery would have to get taken care of elsewhere. The shop only had guys on hand to repair the window.

              Nate ran some errands in the rental car, picking up Luke's communion suit from the dry cleaner and stocking back up on some whiskey after he found none in the liquor cabinet. On his way home, he saw a man grilling whole chickens outside of an insurance agency.

              Shana was in the front yard playing with a stray cat. It was grey, patchy, emaciated––proof of the fact that no one in the neighborhood had decided to lay it a milk bowl or some table scraps. This was a more bizarre happening than the guy grilling whole chickens on a sidewalk. Truth was, Nate declared, she seemed fucked up ever since he showed her the broken car window. God knows why.

              The cat chased after a squirrel which had some fur stripped from its tail, baring a long cord of white, connected vertebrae, no wider than a child’s thumb. With the cat gone, Shana felt Nate's gaze. With their eyes in contact, Shana reached into her purse, producing a mass of tin foil. She unwrapped it and munched on the sandwich. Her body was arranged like a mermaid's, beached onshore. Her jaw chewed mechanically, her eyes remained still, staring into Nate.

“What you got there?”

“Eggs and cheese.”

A curt nod indicated Nate’s full attention. “Where from?”

The full mouth emptied backwards down her gullet. “Jim’s? Is that the one next to the Little Cesar’s?”

“That would be Tim’s Meat.”

“Tim’s Meat.”

“Yes.”

The eye contact broke for the first time, Shana gazed at the sandwich.

“First time you got a sandwich there? They keep the egg runny.”

“Yeah, it’s good.”

“Yeah.”

              An idle task would have made this conversation a lot easier to bear, like retrieving Luke’s tiny suit from the hook over the back seat, or examining the window work done by the boys in the shop. Nate did not realize this. Instead he went inside, leaving the suit behind and the window uninspected.

              There was an energy in the house, the energy which typically preceded weddings and formal business gatherings. It constricted Nate’s lungs and rang in his ears at a high pitch. Ambient stress secreted from Suze’s pattering feet, rushing from this to that room; secreted from her hands scavenging for this or that drawer; vibrating from her mouth at low frequencies as fragments of obscenities.

On the far end of the living room, Luke sat in one of the living room’s stiffer chairs. His shirt was buttoned to the throat. One half of his hair was parted, the other half unbrushed. Nate nodded at the boy and the boy maintained a stiff face. “What’s next, she’s gonna pick my boogers?”

“I heard that,” belted Suze from a couple rooms over. “This is for a holy ritual!”

“But it's tomorrow! Why can't you take my picture tomorrow?”

“Just cooperate, you little punk.”

Nate, as he tended to do, chuckled.

              Luke’s cheeks were weighed down with fishing weights. Consternation bent in his narrow brow. “I’ll never be a punk, Mom,” resolved under his breath. Suze rushed in with a spray bottle and Luke winced on sight, like a dog in training.

“Oh it’s just a little water. You’re full of the stuff.” Percussive triggers doused Luke’s scalp. The comb Suze just retrieved was no better than the one before it, and it tugged at the boy’s hair just as hard.

“I’m not full of water. I’m full of organs and bones, and those are full of juice.”

“Tomorrow is no
t
you
r
day. It i
s
ou
r
day. And I swear to the man upstairs that if you–” Suze’s thought halted as Nate drew her attention towards the front door. Some subliminal gesture directed Suze’s gaze to her sister, stumbling in. With Suze's attention shifted away from the boy's head, the hand holding the comb gave its most insistent tug yet. Luke yelped.

“Shana.”

Ravaged by the cosmos, Shana directed her disheveled head towards Suze.

“Shana. You haven’t slept.”

“It’s ok.”

“Shana, you should sleep.”

"Ok, I'll sleep." Yet the way Shana ambled up the stairs, you'd swear she was already mid-dream.

Nate rarely felt awkward. This was one of those times.

"I know sometimes the dynamic between my sister and me perplexes you, sugar. Embrace the thoughts that unsettle you."

Nate always wondered how Suze did it, how she read him like a shrink studying a psych ward patient through two-way glass.

“You want to know what I think?” It didn't matter if Nate wanted to know. "That Tom, he's no good for her and it's tearing her apart. But she sees a whole life ahead of her. The only thing my intervention would do is sow a rift in blood."

"Su, I don't think this is a plain old hurting heart."

              A vibe Suze gave off let Nate know that he knew nothing. Considering himself someone who generally knew nothing, Nate took comfort in the fact that admitting your ignorance is the first step on the road to wisdom. Yet, Nate did not feel wise today. He felt like the whole family had come under some crazy spell. He felt like some hobo's blood was staining the passenger seat of a car he was leasing.

              It was due time to head over to the garage and hammer in some beers with his favorite Saturday drinking buddy: himself. While on his way out, he saw Suze line up a fully dressed Luke in front of the fire place for a nice formal photo. Over his shoulder, he caught a flash from her smartphone camera.

              Despite the high noon sun, Shana was asleep basically as soon as she hit the bed, maybe even a moment before, slipping straight from waking life into slumber land as if consciousness were a low-level window she just fell out of.

Chapter Two

The Red Rocket Diner was empty except for a waitress. There must have been others inside the restaurant, at least back in the kitchen. Someone had to be preparing the food, someone cleaning the dishes. But there was only one sound Shana heard and that was an insistent clicking, like two clocks keeping unsteady time, falling in and out of sync. A man appeared from nowhere with a plate of food. He was dressed in slacks and a white shirt, tie tucked in between buttons. The leather jacket he wore over this ensemble evoked the image, as Shana would later recount, of a Jehovah's Witness who was converted to the faith through some sort of penitentiary outreach initiative.

              The plate held three eggs in their shells, maraschino cherries on top of a biscuit, a Polish sausage, a head of garlic. This wasn't what Shana ordered. She looked up to protest and found the Witness smoking a cigarette.

"You can't––"

              His eyes broke into her and he simply gestured with them downwards. She cracked one egg, covering the biscuit and cherry in orange goop, ingesting the mess in one bite. Chewing, she looked up again. His stare had not adjusted a bit. She cracked the second egg over the Polish and stared at the pink slime running down the meat's encasing. It formed a blob around the underside of the sausage and the very idea of putting any bit of this inside herself was repulsive.

"Come." The man's voice was much too high. He beckoned her with his middle and ring finger. The pinky was missing, yet absorbed all of Shana's attention. The the vinyl cushion on the booth squeaked as the Witness moved in. "Come."

              Blood drained from Shana's head when she stood, inducing a little oxygen-deprived high. She slid into the seat next to him until her bare shoulder touched the man's leather. She found herself totally nude. The man's eyes did not drift to her bush, but remained on the plate of food.

"Have you ever cracked an egg with another?"

              Still, nothing sounded in the restaurant but that asynchronous tick. The air was stagnant, thick on Shana's bare skin. The man touched Shana's forearm and picked it up, clutching either side with his forefinger and thumb. Her fingers grabbed the narrow end of the egg, his the rounder one. Magnetically linked by this unfertilized embryo, they smacked the egg against the edge of the oblong plate in perfect unison. Opaque red ooze drenched the whole of the garlic head, saturating its papery skin. Shana wished to look her table mate in the eyes, to ease herself by way of some nonverbal explanation, some sign that this did not mean what she thought, whatever it was that she thought. Frankly, she had no idea.

"You would like for me to take you," he said. He still only stared at the garlic.

"Yes," Shana confirmed through a wisp of breath.

"Why would you like for me to take you?"

Shana only swallowed. She could feel the cold of the vinyl booth thanks to the thin dribble of liquid on the underside of her thigh.

"You wish for me to take you because you have never cracked an egg with another before.” The Witness finally looked at her, not examining her bare body, but instead her entire face, taking a mental scan from the chin up as if he planned on sketching this visage later on.

              Shana reached into the a pocket inside the leather jacket and pulled out a fourth egg, this one larger than the others. She placed it in his pinky-less hand and crawled atop the table. She placed herself prone on her hands and knees, as if praying eastwards in a mosque, and took the egg from the Witness's hand. The narrow part of the egg perched perfectly in taut valley cleaving her buttocks.

In anticipation, her breathing turned tonal like some sort of cooing hyena. Yet the table mate simply stared at the plate of fallen food.

"I wish for you to take me." At this command he was inside of her. His legs must have been abnormally long in order get inside of her without lowering her hips at all.

              As he thrust with precise gyrations and the more his member’s pulsations grew mechanical, the more Shana lost herself in this clockwork, the more the egg wobbled back and forth in evermore precarious balance. He hit some spot and steam from Shana's breath fogged the salt shaker right in front of her face.

"Touch me." He vigorously pawed the front of her labia. The egg wobbled more violently. She feared for the unborn life that would be lost were that egg to break. It wobbled more, yet deeper she receded into her own head, into some velvet sauna filling with steam bliss. As rigid as her lover’s remained, his cock seemed to slither every which way, ticking every conceivable corner and even those she could not conceive of. The egg rocked, starting to fall backwards towards his pelvis. She could not bring herself to call "no" aloud. Instead, she let him continue, with the egg growing ever more unsettled. The man machine made the egg finally lose root and start tumbling backwards down her butt. He craned over her to rub her scalp through her hair, to bite her ear lobe. In the process, the egg cracked into her anus and the ooze enveloped their genitalia like a sensual amniotic fluid. She let out an orgasmic roar, a coyote howling at the blood moon. This howl rattled the whole house. Suze ran to Shana's bed, finding her sister writhing in sweat soaked bedsheets, bellowing a sound that was half cry, half climax. Entering the room slowly so as to not induce panic were her sister to wake in that moment, Suze eased onto the side of the bed, planting her hand on Shana's shoulder. The sister's eyes opened but it was damn near a minute before Shana realized she was awake.

"It's dark outside."

"That it is, hun."

"How long was I out?"

"About 11 hours. I think your probably good and rested for the night."

Shana looked at her sister, quickly embarrassed. "That sound... Did I make it in this life? Did it wake Luke?"

"Oh I gave Luke half an Ambien so that he'll be good and rested for tomorrow." Disquiet racked Shana's face. "Hun, I don't think Tom gets the best out of you." Suze played with Shana's bangs, something that had comforted the both of them since they were small. "Now I'm not here to tell you what's best for you, but I'm here when you need to talk about what's best for you, ok?"

Shana nodded. "I need a few, Suze."

              Had Suze not turned behind her as she left the room, Shana's life may have ended up quite different. But that determinate split second transpired as it did and, as she looked back from the closing door, Suze saw two parallel scratches. She immediately knew that they came from teeth, for she saw the same exact ones when Shana was 18. Fury coursed through her veins, but the bile that rose to her throat obstructed the pathway of any words. Instead, she stood for a moment in silence, as her sister snuggled up in the sheets.