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Laszlo propped his feet up on what remained of the coffee table, took a long pull on his pipe, and wondered if it had been really necessary for Nadja to ship Guillermo back to the house with her.
He watched as Guillermo’s feeble fingers folded an endless series of miniature white socks with the pompous weariness of a saint. He was laying them out in rows, next to the casual shirts with cheerful slogans and illustrations as well as the more motley array of socks belonging to Guillermo himself. Of course, the Boy’s performing attire could only be entrusted to the services of a professional cleaner; it wouldn’t do to have Guillermo’s typical incompetence muck up the crisp lines necessary for his stagecraft.
Guillermo saw him watching with what he must have assumed was a paternal air. “We’re going to need more socks soon. I’ll have to go to the consignment store and see if they have any shoes a size up,” he sighed, as if any of those things had a bearing on Laszlo.
“At the rate Baby Colin’s growing,” continued Guillermo, with no notice of the fact Laszlo had not prompted him to do so, “he’s going to want a cell phone soon. And he’s going to need one, if he wants to hang out with his friends from yoga.” The fact that the Boy would be outgrowing these friends along with his socks did not seem to enter Guillermo’s mind.
“He’ll be entering those years, I suppose. It happens to every young man. Soon enough he’ll be yearning for the rebellion of the fumes,” Laszlo mused.
“The fumes?” Guillermo asked, a disrespectful eyebrow raised.
“Car fumes and perfumes. Though the latter could be more broadly categorized as ‘colognes’,” Laszlo said.
“Well, he’ll be a little young for that for a while.” Guillermo’s voice struck a note of hesitation. The eyebrow had been lowered, and his eyes as well, to his latest pair of mismatched socks.
Laszlo gave only an ambiguous hmmh in response and tapped at the side of his pipe bowl.
“What.” Guillermo did not speak that as a question, but as a flat utterance of disbelief. Laszlo thought, not for the first time, that Nandor’s tendency to pull his familiars for their service while they were still in their moldable years of clay tended to shape them with unfortunate traces of his blockheaded obstinance. “You think I’m being puritanical about this.”
“No, it’s important for any young boy’s development to learn to dodge the watchful eyes of a prudish schoolmarm.”
Guillermo clattered his teeth together for a moment, as if he were attempting to crack a small nut between his teeth. “I’m not. Don’t say that- I didn’t start dating until I was… but…” he trailed off into a silence that barely veiled the obvious fact that he had never dated at all.
Still folding the clothes, still himself folded over the rows of carefully sorted shirts that would end up stuffed into a dresser drawer or flung onto the floor, Guillermo prickled under Laszlo’s watch. His dark eyes contained the resentful, miserable gaze of an incontinent, toothless toy poodle.
He was as he had been for as long as Laszlo had known him. The same dreary way he seemed to pass through the house like a gray cloud without the audacity to even rain, the same halfhearted busyness of a bee dosed with pesticide and half-wittedly attempting to carry out its tasks, the same moony-eyed self-inflicted martyrdom in hopes of being turned.
There was something strange within him, though, outside even the vampire killer situation. Some specter of confidence clawing within him, as a just-swallowed fish thrashes in the throat of an egret. Perhaps it was invisible to the average choad, but it was obviously visible to the discerning eye of one such as Laszlo.
But any confidence was now thoroughly veiled, for Guillermo had taken a look at himself and seemed to now remember the worn and pilled sweater he had willingly attired himself in that evening. His posture had shrunk back in on itself and he was stuffing the folded clothes back into the basket from which he had drawn them.
That moment, though— Laszlo was a man of great scientific curiosity, especially in the realm of the psychological. As much as he spurned anything that could be classified as “work”, a difficult question presented an unrivaled satisfaction upon unraveling it. And Guillermo was fascinatingly repressed, in a manner almost unseen since the advent of mass-produced pornography. Rifling through his psyche would be like digging into the peat to find a bog body, or opening an unexpected present.
The process would, at the very least, be interesting.
“Do you know what is wrong with you? You are extended far beyond the normal realm of psychological hang-ups. You are a bounty of anxieties of the flesh,” Laszlo said. “No, don’t speak, let me finish. I am not a recklessly charitable man, and I don’t intend to try for a reputation as one. But if you will allow me, I would like to peel back the layers of your psyche to unveil the source of your repression.”
Guillermo sat agog at him for a long moment. It was a deliberate agog-ness, rather than the empty-minded mien he wore most of the time, and it accelerated in intensity as the seconds ticked by, until his astonishment tipped over into speech.
“So you’re saying that you could— you want to cure these… ‘anxieties of the flesh’,” he said, his mouth shaping the last words as if he were letting watermelon seeds drip from his bottom lip into a bowl beneath it— that is to say, no spit to it.
Laszlo did not bother to correct his phrasing. If he wanted to think Laszlo’s goals were ameliorative rather than exploratory, then Laszlo saw no need to interfere. “If you are willing to acknowledge that you have them, that’s a start,” he said.
A series of emotions that Laszlo did not care to decipher flickered over Guillermo’s face, as if he was flipping through a roledex of painful memories, of a recent incident, perhaps, if Laszlo were to speculate. “It’s—it’s not that bad. We just… it’s not that I didn’t want to, back in… with… it was just… never the right time...” Guillermo trailed off. His small hands worried at the elastic rim of a sock. “It would be nice, if next time…”
“Well,” Guillermo finished. He looked up at Laszlo. The metaphorical thrashing fish of confidence had returned. “It seemed to work for the Guide.”
In the hullabaloo that accompanied the transformation of the council headquarters into his darling’s bustling center of Staten Island nightlife, quite a few objects had been moved around. It therefore took a bit of time for Guillermo to locate the chair and chaise used in Laszlo’s previous session, and more time still for him to drag them to the emptiest room Laszlo knew of in the club. It was the room set aside for sexual encounters, not that it was labeled as such— his wife had tastes much too refined for such a thing as a designated label bearing some gauche statement such as “Sex Room” as found in some Manhattan nightclubs. Also, they had forgotten.
He did not tell Guillermo that it was the sex room. It would be counterproductive to his mental state at that point in the proceedings.
Finally, they were seated. Guillermo sat at the edge of the long side of the chaise, his posture reminding Laszlo of a staffordshire terrier guarding a door. Metaphorically appropriate, he thought.
The first step of any appointment with a new patient was the intake. Laszlo dipped his quill in its inkwell and settled his scientific notebook in his lap. “Now. Before we proceed, I will require a few brief answers. One: kissing.”
“Well, I had my first kiss when I was twenty, when I was at the Fourth of July thing down by the beach, and I was trying to get her to the parking lot for Nandor. But my first real kiss was, uh. I mean, it depends on how you decide whether something is ‘real’ or not.”
“I don’t believe I have made myself clear. This list is a series of ‘yes or no’ questions. Two: anal sex,” Laszlo said.
Guillermo blinked at him. “Aren’t there usually some steps in between the two?” he asked.
“Not if you play your cards right,” Laszlo replied.
“No. I–” Guillermo took a deep breath. “I have not done that.”
Laszlo marked an X in his notebook. “Three: falling in love.”
“I guess that works as a third step.” Guillermo’s eyes twitched over to the far corner before flicking back over to Laszlo. “I think there’s different kinds of romantic love. I would say my relationship right now is really on the precipice of love, but it could be–” He was stalling.
“A relationship. So there is someone,” Laszlo stated.
“Yes,” Guillermo said, nodding his head in short, twitchy movements, like a novelty bobblehead.
“But no sex. It’s not– I– he said we could take as long as we needed.”
Laszlo took a moment to scratch out a few notes. He had hit what Guillermo obviously believed was his mental bedrock, and so it was from there that they could begin to dig. “I believe that will be enough to get us started,” he said.
“That’s it? Three questions?” Guillermo asked.
“I would say that covers the range of erotic and romantic experiences thoroughly,” Laszlo replied. “I will need you to lay on your back.” Laszlo adopted the firm, paternal tone necessary for the proper handling of patients. He adjusted his notebook in his lap.
“I’ll have to crane my neck to see the pendulum,” Guillermo replied. Everything had to be so fucking difficult with him.
“I don’t care. Do as I say,” Laszlo reiterated.
Guillermo shifted into a lying position, his eyes on Laszlo as he pulled the pendant out of his pocket and allowed it to unfurl, feeling the jolt as each link in the chain slid to bear the weight of the watch.
“Look.” Laszlo swung the pendulum at a steady pace. Guillermo’s eyes followed, the whites waxing and waning slivers of moon around the focused iris. “Upon my orders, you will close your eyes, and you will open your mind to me. Now, close your eyes. You are now standing in a long, dark hallway-“
“No, I’m not,” Guillermo interrupted.
“Well, put yourself in one.”
Hypnosis, as a process, defied metaphor. The simpler commands were the sort of brute force that even Nandor could accomplish, but that sort of overriding of the will differed from the careful unveiling of the repressed mind at play in this appointment. He kept his attention sharp on Guillermo’s face, on how his now-closed eyes moved beneath their lids as he navigated his own interior interiors.
His hands were those of a surgeon’s, precise and poised with a scalpel, and those of a puppeteer with a string tied around each finger. And yet he did not move at all, as he felt the branches of his powers growing into Guillermo’s mind.
He was to keep the top spinning, rotating so fast that it could not feel its movement across the tabletop. Guillermo was dull in the brain, but in the same manner as a sheep, where sometimes you turned around and he had chewed through the bag of feed. Laszlo couldn’t just yank his thoughts out like his brain was an antique store’s box full of old silk scarves to get at the good stuff. The human mind was fragile and shivering as a plate of gelatin.
With the Guide, the purpose of the pendulum had not been to induce hypnosis but a simple trance-like state. He had not held the same grasp over her mind, and she had not had to submit herself to him as Guillermo was. Laszlo just had to be patient.
“At the end of this hallway, hidden from you is the darkness, is the root of your erotic stagnation. Make your way down the hall.” Laszlo said. He allowed a second for Guillemro’s mental movement to catch up. “You have come to a door.”
“Okay,” Guillermo said, with his typical eloquence.
“Describe it to me,” Laszlo said.
“It’s a wood door.”
Laszlo knew he fucking read pulpy gothic literature of excessive descriptive flourishes, he did not have to be so fucking obtuse. “What does the door say?”
“What?”
“What is written. On the door.”
“Why would there be something on the door?” Guillermo said. His brows scrunched together above his still-closed eyes.
“It should be labeled with something corresponding to the contents. If not on the door, then to the side.”
“It’s not.”
“Open the door,” Laszlo said. “And tell me what you see inside,” he added, to forestall any more of this bullshit.
“It’s another hallway. Wait, no, it’s not. There’s a stage at the end. There’s candles everywhere, hundreds of them. The ceiling is really high, like a cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral, it’s…” Guillermo paused. “I know this place. I’ve thought about it before.”
There was a lull. Guillermo had retreated into himself again, the waters of his mind pulling away from the shore. Laszlo pulled, carefully, as a man attempted to move a gauzy swath of fabric without tearing, with only a fishing hook to grasp it, would. Carefully, carefully. Keep the top spinning. Guillermo continued. “It’s a theater. It’s quiet. It’s like… all the sound in the universe has ascended through the ceiling, and now there’s only silence left behind.
“Are you alone?” Laszlo asked.
“No. There’s a man on the stage. He’s looking at me, and I can tell that his eyes are very dark even from where I’m standing. I’m coming closer, though, but it doesn’t feel like a conscious action. It’s like a compulsion. He’s tall, and he has long, dark hair that flows like silk over his shoulders and chest.”
“I’m closer now. I can see his face. His strong nose, his heavy brow, his full lips. He has his hands outstretched towards me. He has strong hands and long, nimble fingers. I know him. I would know him anywhere.”
Laszlo made a notation on his paper. It seemed this case would be less complex than he thought.
“...Armand,” Guillermo sighed.
Laszlo scratched out the note.
“I’m still walking forward, but I don’t know if I want to be. I’m nervous. I’m right in front of the stage, and I can see a crowd of figures in black cloaks moving towards me. They’re flowing like water. It’s like how only vampires can move.”
“They’re all vampires? And is the man on the stage a vampire?” Laszlo asked.
There was a tug at the end of a thread. Irritation. “Yes. I said it was Armand,” Guillermo said. Like Laszlo was supposed to know who the devil that was.
“And what are the vampires doing?”
“They’re pulling at my clothes.” Unexpectedly forward. “Tearing them off down to my underwear. Well, not my underwear. I’m not looking down, but I know I’m wearing white, the fabric as delicate as lace, and my undershirt is tied at the top with a piece of string.” His shoulders had come up around his ears and his fingers were flexing with nervous feeling. Laszlo was certain of the latter, because he could feel the vibrating miasma of his emotions. And yet, Laszlo would wager that the vibration of trepidation was shot through with the thrill of anticipation, of being far up with a long drop to fall.
“They retreat,” Guillermo said, “and Armand approaches.” A hand moved to hover over the base of his throat, fingertips barely in contact with the bare flesh exposed in the V of his collar. “He extends a hand, caressing the ties of my shirt. He takes the end of one of the ties and pulls it towards him. Slowly, he’s doing it so slowly. The bow falls open, and now my neck is exposed.” His hand lay flat across his neck now. He swallowed. “He turns me by the shoulder to face the crowd– because the seats are full now, an entire audience, they’re all staring as he pulls my undershirt off and my breeches down. I’m naked.” His body squirmed at this, writhing on the chaise like a snake shaking off a chill.
“He turns me again, to face him now, and he takes me into his arms, and my body goes slack against my will. He’s so close,” he sighed. “I can feel his chest against mine, and his arms tight around me, and his hands pressing into my skin.”
A small smile had come onto his face. The change had shifted his furrowed brow into a look of concentration. The hand, previously placed over his neck, had migrated down to tuck itself between his tightly-clenched thighs. Laszlo rubbed his thumb over the face of the pendulum and concentrated. He felt the pull of resistance and had to carefully select its origins from the gnarled web of thoughts and memories—the contents opaque to him, he was not a mind reader after all— to feel where the struggle against his erotic urges had been pulled taut.
The hand untucked itself from between Guillermo’s legs and began to rub over the burgeoning bulge in his khakis. The tendrils grew further into his mind, as roots finally made headway through cracks in the concrete. Laszlo knew he was sinking further inside himself, into the depths of his hypnosis.
Laszlo kept his voice low. He must tread delicately, insidiously, to not disturb the spider’s thread tapestry Guillermo was weaving in the depths of his mind. “Why don’t you split that zipper?” He murmured. It did not need to be loud enough to actually cross the room; it was being dropped directly into Guillermo’s mind.
His command received no resistance, but was swept into the river’s flow of Guillermo’s thoughts. Lo, the button and zipper were undone with one shaking hand and the elastic seam of his drawers were pulled down to release his hard cock. Not the most impressive example of its form, but Laszlo supposed he himself set an unusually high standard on that front.
The stroking upon his cock seemed to pour forth more from Guillermo’s mind, and he moaned, “His lips are against my neck, and they’re cold yet soft. And he parts them and I feel the points of his fangs, like I’m feeling the core of him beneath. It’s like arousal, like, like someone’s pressed against me in a dark bar and I can feel their… y’know, pressing against me.”
Laszlo doubted Guillermo had ever been pressed up against by an amorous stranger in a dark bar if he couldn’t even bear to utter the word “boner”.
“Then he bites me.”
The words were said with such an intense concentration of lust that it almost startled Laszlo. The entire fantasy seemed concentrated in that one moment, as if it balanced on it like the world on the tip of a pin. It tipped over and the rest of the scene tipped out, how the sensual slide of those fangs into the soft flesh of his neck poured light through his veins in a mingling of pain and ecstasy, how close Armand held him, helpless in his arms like a lover, how those hands wandered over his body, grasping and caressing. The tense silence of the audience, whose eyes he can feel upon him. How his body unconsciously gave itself over to pleasure— and Laszlo would have asked if it were really an unconscious action, if he did not feel trepidation about the fragility of Guillermo’s willingness to spill at this moment.
Verbally spill, rather, for Guillermo’s hand made steady work of his cock as if he were alone in his bedroom. “He pulls out of me, peels himself away from my limp body. Tears himself away. I’m lifted over his head as easily as a blanket, and his two hands turn to many as he passes me to the black-cloaked vampires behind him. I try to catch one last glimpse of him when they’re lowering me to the floor, slowly, like a china doll but the crowd of bodies around me blocks my vision. I can only see them standing over me, their cloaks fluttering around them, before they descend on me, a swarm of hands and—ngh— mouths—“
Laszlo didn’t interrupt, but he did reach into his mind and slow his hand before Guillermo started to finish himself off. Keeping grasp on hypnosis through orgasm was a pain in the ass, and would be especially counterproductive in this particular case. “I can see myself from above for a second as I’m swallowed, and the last of the light is swallowed, too, like I’m sinking beneath water. And then I’m gone.”
Laszlo waited, but Guillermo seemed content to half-heartedly stroke himself and lay there in silence.
“And then?” he prompted.
“That’s about as long as I last,” Guillermo confessed.
Laszlo could feel embarrassment swirling in the stew of his thoughts, a sure sign of the lucidity of the post-orgasm mind setting in, which was exactly what he had been hoping to avoid. He could have him look at the pendulum again, if it only didn’t mean making him open his eyes again. Fortunately, Laszlo was well-versed in psychological theory and bountifully talented in its practice.
“Well then, get up,” he said.
“I can’t,” Guillermo replied. “They took all my blood.”
“Then float. It’s your mind,” Laszlo said. “And float yourself out of that room and back down the hallway and tell me what door you see.”
“Give me a minute,” Guillermo muttered, his brow knitted in concentration as he presumably tried to figure out how to float. “Okay, there’s another door. It’s heavy, with gold inlaid in a lattice and gemstones studding the intersections,” he added before Laszlo needed to prod him. “It’s very heavy. I’m opening it now.”
Guillermo recoiled a bit, and Laszlo pondered whether he’d properly placed his mind on a pathway of the erotic, or if Laszlo was going to have to babysit him through weepy childhood memories. “Sorry, I just got hit with a blast of air when I opened the door. It’s very warm in here. And it smells like perfume.”
He swallowed and continued. “It’s a bedroom— mostly bed, it takes up a lot of the room. It‘s like a canopy bed, except the sides are wooden shutters with cutouts instead of cloth. There’s more gold and gems, and mother of pearl inlay that’s flickering in the light from the candles and the fireplace. The small flames of the candles themselves look like fragments of stone with the way they catch the eye.”
“The bed is covered with pillows, some are thick brocade fabric and others have tassels and beads. They form piles at the corners and obscure parts of the silk sheets. I think they’re silk. It’s before the invention of polyester, so it at least looks like satin, so it would probably be silk…”
Laszlo didn’t need hypnotic presence to feel the roadblock Guillermo was talking around. He pushed carefully. “Something else is on the bed.”
Guillermo paused, swallowed. “Yes. I am. I’m reclining on the pillows and… I’m not wearing any clothes.”
Laszlo thought of the figurative usefulness of the word “naked” in this particular case, and also of the bizarre mental contortions Guillermo must put himself through to sound embarrassed while his cock leaked in the open air.
He had not been able to muster shock at the nude form even in his human years, but Guillermo’s shame turned this simple act of consensual voyeurism into a lurid tableau. Laszlo had the fortune of intruding deliciously on his most private thoughts with only his shrewdness to credit.
If there was to be any credit given to this sort of sexual repression, it gave a delicious furtive quality to the fantasies contained within. It reminded Laszlo of the act of forcing rhubarb, growing it in a dark shed, and the resulting flavor to the vegetable.
“There’s not a lot of light in the room, just the candles and the fireplace, and the shadows stretch long and dramatic across the room. Across everything.”
“He—the me in the room, the one on the bed— looks up when someone opens a door, and he winces at the cold draft, but the door soon shuts and seals them back in the enclosed space. The haze of incense is intoxicating, and the smell of jasmine flowers is there too, like someone has stashed bouquets of them just out of sight.”
“Describe the man. The one who opened the door,” Laszlo ordered.
“He’s tall, clad in armor, with long dark hair. Everything about him seems dark, like he pulled himself out of the shadows in the room. He’s wearing armor, and he has a sword—scimitar, it’s a scimitar— holstered at his side, and thick, heavy-soled boots. He’s looking at me on the bed with a single-minded, dark-eyed intensity that’s so urgent that it’s almost patient.”
Laszlo couldn’t blame Guillermo for the shape of this fantasy; Nandor did tend to lean into the oriental tropes in recounting his conquests, both military and romantic, when lacing honey through his words in an attempt to attract a new lover. Guillermo must have heard plenty of it secondhand.
“I know who he is, because I belong to him,” Guillermo said. His voice was almost a gasp, his hand moving faster. “He strides toward the bed, his boots and his armor and his gloves still on, dragging the darkness of the shadows with him, and I, and I—“
Laszlo cursed his lapse in concentration as Guillermo’s hand stilled with the accompanying spew of semen from his penis. He had to hold carefully to the thread of suspension between their minds. “Tell me more about the scene. Is there anything hung on the walls? Have you been clad in any jewelry?” he asked.
The word jewelry seemed to reroute Guillermo’s mind back into the imagined moment. His brow, gone slack at his release, wrinkled again. “Rings, in gold, but not on every finger, wide bands studded with cut rubies and thin ones dotted with drops of garnet. There’s a thick cuff on one ankle, set with studs of carved onyx, and chains around the other. Delicate chains. Delicate…” Laszlo could feel him sinking back into a fugue under his firm hand. “There are piercings, two thin gold rings, through my nipples, with a thin chain strung between them. They were given to me, put on me,” he said.
“Now, boy, this is your fantasy,” Laszlo ventured. “Anything that’s there has been put there yourself.” He could dance with this psyche, though it possessed two left feet.
Guillermo wavered. “Yes, but… he didn’t care if I wanted them,” he finally said.
A lesser psychologist than Laszlo would have taken that as a dodge, as a deliberate shirking of responsibility for his desires, but Laszlo could see the seed in there, manifesting not as a shirking but as a release from responsibility for his lusts.
“He doesn’t touch the chain. It dangles towards the bed when he turns me over by my hips— like I weigh nothing— and pulls them up until I’m on my knees.”
Guillermo seemed to chew on his words. Laszlo could feel him treading in the current of his mind, too afraid to be swept away in the flow. Just a small push, a delicate tug.
“There’s a plug. I… prepared myself before he came. It has a stone at the base, something precious. He pulls it out, and he pushes himself inside.”
“He’s– I’m– he’s— it’s like a volcano, or an earthquake, because it’s inevitable and unstoppable. He takes me in hand,” and Guillermo was fondling himself as he spoke, wasn’t he, the same hand rubbing his limp cock, “like I’m a sword, or a knife, or a pen, as if he knows exactly how he wants to use me.”
“He pulls my face out of the pillows so I can’t muffle my moans in them, because he wants to hear me, and his hands on my hips are the only thing keeping me on my knees, because they’re sliding over the cool slick silk. I’m sweating, I feel dizzy in the heat and sweet perfume of the room. It’s dark like the candles have gone out, though they haven’t. The world has just dimmed.”
“One hand comes down to tug at the chain, gently, as if he hooked the tip of a single fingernail on it. He’s tugging at it, carefully, sliding his finger along its length and sending shivers down my spine.”
He, He, He. No name, just a repeated refrain. A convenient barrier, a drape hung over a familiar statue to provide plausible deniability.
Laszlo was seized by an idle curiosity whether his body was reacting in coordination with the mental stimulation provided by its owner. Other than the hardening scepter in his small grasp, his form was irritatingly concealed by the thick wool of his sweater. Laszlo gripped the chain of his pendulum and watched as Guillermo’s short fingers made fumbling work sliding the buttons through their wool constraints at his unspoken command.
Unfortunately, Laszlo still could not fucking see whether all of this talk of pulling chains had actually served to perk up his nipples. He suspected Guillermo of wearing an undershirt, because apparently the number of doors he placed on the refrigerated room that was his body was nigh-infinite. But he was certainly fondling himself over those layers, fingers pinched in an unmistakable motion over a nipple as he lazily rolled it between a finger.
“He’s kissing the back of my neck,” Guillermo sighed. “It’s burning me like a brand. I can feel it all the way to my bones, like he’s about to burn the rest of my body down to ash. His breath is hot when he pulls away, and there’s a thread of spit connecting his mouth to my skin, and each pant as he thrusts into me harder and harder– I’ve folded my calves over his, so he can’t stop, because I’m so close– he won’t let me touch myself, I don’t even try, but I don’t need to because it feels– it feels–” he trailed off.
Laszlo could see the sheen of another round of precome on the tip of his cock, but the motion of his hand, already languorous, started to slow. His other hand cradled his breast without any intent to manhandle, as if he were hanging it back up on the wall like a telephone.
“Are you finished?” Laszlo asked
“That’s where it usually ends,” Guillermo admitted sheepishly.
“No follow-up? No winding-down?” Laszlo was brusque, but he could feel the lack of juice left. His hypothesis that Guillermo was the type to skitter away from his fantasies after the well had been pumped dry was proving correct.
“I usually stare at the ceiling for a while,” Guillermo said.
“In that case, let us move on. Now, you have exited this boudoir and gone back into the hallway. You will make your way to the next door,” Laszlo said.
Guillermo grew quiet.
“What’s the matter?” Laszlo asked.
“I don’t see another door,” Guillermo said.
“Well then, what do you see?”
“I don’t see anything. I’m looking down the hallway, and it’s just darkness.”
That was certainly a new development. “It appears we are at a tipping point, Guillermo,” Laszlo proclaimed, speaking up to ensure his voice penetrated through the layer of dull insulation around Guillermo’s inner thoughts. “You now stand on a threshold. Are you ready to open yourself up to the sexual pleasures that this world offers?” He let his volume drop to a husky whisper to pour the honeyed wine of temptation directly into Guillermo’s ears. “Do you have the spine to delve into the darkest depths of your mind, to seek the root of your erotic repression?”
“No, but you’re not going to stop bothering me until I do, are you?” came Guillermo’s insolent reply.
“Yes, now get on with it,” Laszlo said.
“Okay, fine, I’m walking down the hall. I’ve got one hand on the wall, since it’s dark— ow,” Guillermo said.
“What?”
“I hit something,” Guillermo said. “A lamp.”
“From a table.”
“No, it’s a wall lamp,” Guillermo said.
“Well, turn it on then,” Laszlo said.
“Oh, right.” Guillermo, penis still in hand, scrunched up his face, the act of turning on a lamp apparently requiring a great deal of concentration. His brows flew up on his forehead. “Oh! There’s a door. It’s old and worn. Wood. It’s a wood door, but it looks oxidized in places, like copper. The frame around it is thick, and in the top corners it has those carved dahlias like… like the fancy room door…”
Laszlo could feel his trepidation by the mud-like resistance he received to the hypnotic pressure in his next command. “Open the door.”
“It’s locked.”
“I’ve seen you kick down a door, boy, use your legs,” Laszlo said. Guillermo grunted. “Attaboy.”
“Okay, so it’s pretty dark, because there’s only candles and the last embers in the fireplace–” Laszlo sensed a recurring theme “–but facing the fireplace is a wingback chair. There’s a sideboard by the door with a tray on it, holding a cut crystal glass full of blood.”
“I pick up the tray and go to stand by Nandor’s side.”
“He doesn’t look up, but when he puts the glass back his hand lingers, then slides over to drape itself over my wrist. Comfortable. It’s comfortable, and easy, and he doesn’t look at me because he knows I’m there. But… but he tells me, so quietly it won’t be overheard, not because he cares if someone else hears, but because he wants it to be just for me, he tells me how good I’m being for him.”
“I don’t know how long I stand there, until my wrists ache from holding the tray, until I’m about to take root like a tree, staring into the embers of the fire, his thumb rubbing against my wrist.”
Guillermo, hand still stroking himself, was squirming on the chaise like a slug exposed to salt. His voice had become weak and threadbare, and a thin sheen of sweat had broken out over his brow. Yet the words flowed out of him like a hole in a dam.
“His hand tightens, and I know what it means when his thumb traces towards the base of my own. He doesn’t have to say anything, because I know,” he moaned. “I put the tray down and get on my knees, and I crawl over to him.”
Guillermo certainly didn’t vacuum often enough to be pulling a maneuver like that without forethought, but Laszlo supposed competence was part of this fantasy.
“I unfasten his belt and unzip his pants and pull him out,” Guillermo said.
“Pull out his what?” Laszlo asked. He had to floss the teeth of Guillermo’s brain thoroughly and leave no repression unscoured.
“His cock. He’s not hard, but I take him—his cock— into my mouth and swallow him down completely, even when my throat hurts and my eyes water.”
“He threads his fingers through my hair and lets them rest there. I can feel his satisfaction with me. There’s nothing else in the world,” Guillermo panted, “and it’s like I’ve dissolved. There’s nothing else but him. I’ve closed my eyes and his cock in my mouth and his thighs beneath my hands are the only thing telling me that the world exists, all I need to know.”
“He gets hard as I swallow him, and I can feel it getting even bigger. It’s stretching my jaw, and I’m drooling because I can’t close my mouth or swallow well. I’m like a toy for him, a fleshlight with his hand on the back of my head pushing me down.”
“And fuck, he’s grateful, he loves that I will do this for him, that I’ll do this for him as long as he wants. It’s like sinking in a warm bath every time he strokes my hair.”
“Now tell me,” Laszlo asked, slipping in between the spurts of erotic imagining that Guillermo was ejecting, “are you hard in this fantasy?”
“I guess?” Guillermo replied, his tone one of complete befuddlement that the question would even matter.
“Never mind that then. Where do you go from here?”
“I crawl from between his legs and spread myself across his lap. Then he trails his fingertips up the side of my neck and I let my head fall to the side so he can have as much of it to touch as he wants. His other hand is opening the top buttons on my shirt, pushing the fabric aside as if pulling open a bridal veil–” here Guillermo seemed to luxuriate in the comparison rather than skirt around its implications, words falling from his mouth easily, airily like flower petals– “he kisses my neck, and I can feel the tips of his fangs against my skin.”
Raw anticipation seemed to roil through Guillermo’s body, as if in a dark hallway in a horror talkie in the moments before the monster resolved itself out of the gloom. He was thrusting hard up into his hand, so hard that his back arched off the chaise, creating a hollow sliver between himself and the cushion.
“His arm is around my waist, like a steel bar, so big and strong, gripping me in place against his chest.. Not because he thinks I’ll escape but because he wants to keep me in place, wants to keep me,” Guillermo whined. Laszlo underlined the “Daddy issues?” scribbled on his notepad.
The words kept coming, frantically bubbling out of him like foam overspilling a champagne coupe. “He sinks his fangs in and bites, and the wound stings and it burns as he starts to suck and I can feel his groan rattle through my body, it’s the only movement besides my heart beating and the bobbing of his throat as he drinks. He’s draining me like a blood bag, the cold in my fingers is spreading up my arms as I’m drained, as he drinks the blood that belongs to him, because I belong to him, it leaves my capillaries curled and dry under his greedy attention, his fangs–”
“No, the dagger, the razor he keeps in the box on his bureau– the one I shave him with every night– drawn across my throat so he can press his tongue inside the wound and chase the leaking blood dripping down my neck and let my body bleed out like a fountain and the world loses its sharp edges my blood fills his veins and it feels like indifference and it feels like love and hunger and my body drains empty for him to put his hands inside and reshape me into what pleases him— to take me from my old self and into something more loved—“
Guillermo was unraveling himself like a piece of ancient linen, shredded into scraps of thread, letting himself pour out with the words from his mouth and the blood in his imaginary neck as he hurtled towards oblivion.
“And, ah, is a turning the next step in this scenario?” Laszlo asked.
Guillermo turned his head to look at Laszlo with the speed of a stone gargoyle stretching its neck. His eyes had rolled back into his head so only a dark lunula of iris showed beside the stark whites. “Does it matter?” he answered, with surprisingly lucidity.
Laszlo could feel that hollowness inside of him, deep down where the hooks of Laszlo’s hypnosis extended into the dark pit of his mind. The connecting threads had strengthened to iron chains, and Laszlo could feel the rattling along their lengths as the force of Guillermo’s desire pulled at them. It was a sinkhole of shame, a whirlpool of desire, a massive static charge of horny energy with nowhere to go.
Laszlo’s hypnotic power was of great enough strength that he did not need to resort to superfluous gestures, but he thought a single crook of the finger was a suitable punctuation of his intentions.
Guillermo’s torso moved with gratifying acquiescence, his back arching as it rolled up off the chaise and his head lolling on his shoulder. He wobbled to his feet with the unconscious insight of a sleepwalker. Though asleep he was not, it did not matter much; the boundary between his conscious mind was as walled off as if he had been in deep slumber. Laszlo could feel the core of him, his very essence, burning, and he knew it to be an erotic one.
Guillermo’s movements towards Laszlo took on the properties of both an intoxicated stagger and a purposeful stride until he stood before him. Then it was a simple spread of the legs and a slide into straddling Laszlo’s lap with the practiced ease of a pious boy kneeling to pray. Laszlo set his notebook aside before it could get in the way.
With his unfocused eyes and his wet lips, he appeared to Laszlo’s eyes as a virgin whore. An egg, split open, never to be repaired. Crack the shell and split the yolk for good measure, thought Laszlo. “Open those buttons” he said. He had no need to voice the command, but he enjoyed the feeling of voicing it, the same satisfying stretch as flexing his fingers, or pouring wine from the bottle directly into an open, waiting mouth.
And so, the top buttons were opened, revealing a gap of skin between the starched white lines of the shirt, almost floral in its parting. Like the slit of a calla lily, one of his favorite flowers with regards to vaginal metaphors.
Laszlo slid a finger around the edge of the collar and scratched a nail down the side of that warm throat to bring the blood to the surface, though he could smell the flush of blood that had already flooded his face and neck. His body was quite the bipole of blood flow, between his face and his cock.
Guillermo’s head fell obediently to one side, exposing the line of his neck. The skin was soft, indicative of attention to lotion after each shave, of a constant anticipation of being bitten. The chemical scent of aftershave tickled Laszlo’s nose. He had been up close and personal with enough necks to recognize the modern off-the-shelf tang of boring aftershaves. But beneath it, so unexpected that he imagined for a second that Guillermo’s fantasies had materialized in the flesh, was the faint scent of incense, surely carried in from Nandor’s room. Laszlo recognized the symbolic importance but decided not to comment.
Laszlo looked into Guillermo’s eyes, liquid and glassy like a taxidermied elk. He pressed his lips against his neck and curled his lips back to press fangs against skin. Guillermo moaned pathetically and Laszlo could feel it vibrate through the chords of his throat. He knew Guillermo was existing in a halfway sort-of consciousness, his perception of the real world caught in the thick goo of hypnosis as the scenarios of his imagination played out in a miniature crystalline diorama inside.
The hazy fugue of awareness slowed his reception to Laszlo’s bite. His fangs sunk into flesh like butter, soft and creamy. No human food could quite replicate the contrast of biting through smooth fat and fibrous tissue to finally puncture the flow of blood and drink its outpouring.
Laszlo held Guillermo in place when he began to squirm. He savored the flow of virgin blood, that impeccable metallic ring that rattled its chime down to his fingertips. It tasted like droit du seigneur.
He twisted his mouth to get at a better angle, heedless of the pain it might cause Guillermo. Guillermo moaned and nearly dislodged Laszlo with a sudden, hard snap of his hips. Laszlo had been so thoroughly distracted by the rich taste of success that he failed to regard the subsequent twitches until the scent of semen reached his nose and the accompanying droplets splattered over his waistcoat.
Nandor would complain if Laszlo finished off his familiar, but he could not begrudge him one final swig as Guillermo’s moan of completion rose in pitch until it had transformed into a whine of sudden self-awareness as the hypnosis dissipated like the fog it was.
“Oh God,” Guillermo swore. Laszlo hissed and yanked his fangs out. He was pleased to see Guillermo wince and clap a hand over his wound as he stumbled back out of Laszlo’s lap. It served him right, using foul language like that.
Guillermo stuffed himself back into his pants and attempted to wipe the cum off his sweater, only succeeding in smearing it around and getting it all over his hands. He was blinking, dusting the place clean of Laszlo’s retreating hypnotic threads. Laszlo had put down the scalpel, more or less sutured the gaping wound, and he was ready to deliver the diagnosis.
“Well, Guillermo, after careful consideration, I think I know what is at the root of your multitudinous dysfunctions.”
“What?”
“You are severely sexually repressed and you have a fetish for being bitten by a vampire,” Laszlo said. “You should work on that.”
Judging by the expression on Guillermo’s face, he needed some time to properly process Laszlo’s wisdom.