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"And tell me, what's the joy of giving
If you're never pleased?
On my last strength against all
That you believed"
— Champagne Coast by Blood Orange
Night Island, 1985.
The water glittered bright turquoise beyond the island, and teeny weenie yachts cut white lines across its crystalline surface as they gunned for the shoreline. Daniel watched from the balcony of his suite, elbow leant on the glass railing and the stem of a martini glass cradled by his fingers. He was dressed in immaculate clothes, his curls freshly cut and styled with expensive pomade, when a week prior he had slept on a bench in Central Park after getting robbed on his way to an acquaintance's funeral in Greenwich.
The dichotomy would drive any normal man insane, but Daniel was no normal man. He was a vampire's pet thing, has been so for 11 years, give or take, and that kind of role rotted your soul in a myriad of ways.
It went like this: Satin beds and velvet walls in deep, lush jewel tones, palm trees dotting white sidewalks and beautiful gogo dancers dotting the glass tables at his favorite bars and clubs. Neon lights on the exterior of cinemas and rollercoasters. The exhaust from the lights bleed onto the night sky, coating everything in a dreamy, hot haze. Endless nights and endless fun.
It went like this: An Island on the Miami shore, stacks upon stacks of crisp dollar bills in chrome suitcases at his disposal. A skyscraper view with a beautiful pool to match, but he'd rather go skinny dipping and wade through the white sand at shore. VIP sections and private planes; bottle service following him wherever he went. New friends to fuck or to play card games with in the conversation pit, or both. Usually, it was both.
It went like this: Delicate, gentle claws sneaking up his shirt, petal-like lips blowing cold air against the back of his neck. Daniel craned his throat, his white skin already dotted with an array of deep teeth marks.
"Your girlfriend would appreciate it if you gave her a call, I should think," said Armand, prim as ever, but the nip of fangs betrayed him. "She's wondering where you've run off to again."
Daniel grinned at that. Girlfriend, he said. As if Armand didn't seethe at the mere thought of having to share.
"My girlfriend can wait," he replied, just to hear that pleased rumble in the vampire's chest that he kept denying even after all these years. Daniel turned around, pressing his backside to the railing and looking his keeper up and down. He whistled. "Baby, we'll never leave the apartment if you keep dressing like what."
"Oh? Do you find it disagreeable, lover?"
His baby always looked good, but he looked his best when donning rich jewel tones against his deep brown skin. The deep mauve suit was cinched in at his tiny waist with a snakeskin belt, the blouse leaving little to the imagination. Its fabric was smooth and slightly see-through, unbuttoned down to the center of his sternum, showing glimpses of chest hair and a dainty gold chain. Rings decorated his slender fingers, and Daniel wanted to caress each carat with his tongue.
He picked up Armand's hand and pressed his lips to each ring before winking up at him. "It's horrible, Armand."
It startled a pleased laugh from the vampire. Daniel's mood brightened abruptly at the sound of it. He pressed another kiss to Armand's hand, following the line of his vein up to his wrist with his mouth with reverence. The soft skin there was perfumed with a gentle, yet heady scent. Cashmere and tigerlily, he presumed. It clouded his mind and dizzied him the same way the rest of the Island did.
"So, what's the plan for today, boss? Am I watching you skin some mobsters alive?"
"You mustn't worry about that side of business, my love," sighed Armand as Daniel continued to kiss up his arm. "There's a party at the Royale I’d like to attend, but at this rate, you might make me change my mind."
"Would that be so bad?" Daniel asked amidst kisses up his bicep, his shoulder. He took his time with Armand's neck.
He pressed close to his lover's body, drawing attention to the hard length beneath his belt.
The vampire sighed once again. "You are impossible," he admonished as he led Daniel to bed.
After two more hours of the kind of sex that left you floating in space, they somehow managed to stumble their way out of their suite. The hallways of the hotel seemed so long and convoluted while drunk off champagne and god knows what else. They took breaks rolling on the carpeted floor and laughing hysterically about one thing or another, and surely that was the shrooms kicking in. With tears in his eyes and an aching stomach, Daniel looked at an equally zooted, giggling Armand and wondered why it couldn't be like this all the time.
And then they were out in the jungle. Expensive European sports cars and ice cream parlors who doubled as drug dealerson the sidewalks, and a perpetually glimmering midnight sky. Armand was getting their car ready for them, so Daniel leant against the wall of the hotel, pulled out a pack of smokes, and began to analyze the people surrounding him.
The Night Island bustled with rich tourists with one or two too many pina coladas in their systems; dirty rich pensioners and money hungry yuppies alike. They were all well dressed and overeager to lose their money inside the casinos and extravagant shopping malls. The working class boy inside him raised his hackles the moment their gaze lingered too long on him, judging him— until Daniel realized that they appraised him with interest. As if Daniel was anything like them. That was undeniably worse.
However, it was the realization that he was like them that made his gut drop to his knees. Wasn't he coddled, too? Didn't he also have a devil on his shoulder who gave him everything he could ever want in life for the small price of his devotion, hollowing his soul out in the process?
Well, everything except the most important thing of all.
"What is wrong, Daniel?" Armand asked him once he had acquired their blood red Ferrari for them.
He sat behind the wheel, window rolled all the way down so he could rest his naked forearm on the edge of it. He looked up at Daniel with a raised brow. Tears for Fears' new studio album played loudly on the stereo. The stuffy night warmth was making Daniel humid in the armpits, in the deepening creases of his palms.
"I need a drink," Daniel said weakly, before crawling into the passenger seat.
Armand proceeded to drive them to the Royale.
The establishment was a mixture of a casino, club, and a strip joint, but a very extravagant one. All the dancers wore iridescent pearls around their necks and cinched around their soft thighs, their tasteful, glimmering heels clacking against marble as they gyrated in their gilded cages. They wore feathered masks, separating them from everyone else. Flutes of wine and martinis shone on the ringed fingers of the customers as they leered up at the dancers like lions around a slab of meat. The Royale was always busy come midnight, and the dancers were only partly why. It stank of opulence and greed, and Daniel didn't like it much, but it was the floor beneath where the real party happened.
The bottom level of the royal resembled more of a cave than a dance floor, but a dance floor it was. Strobelights shone on sweaty bodies who all moved in hypnotic tandem to the experimental rhythm booming from the stereo. Young bloodstreams laced with cocktails of dope and loneliness, as Armand liked to put it.
They found a beautiful stranger made of the very same stuff which always made Armand drool. It didn’t take much convincing for the stranger to follow the two of them into a strange hotel room.
This one had an aquatic theme to it. The walls and furniture were colored in deep shades of blue, and there lay a large aquarium opposite to the bed, right beside Armand's plush armchair. The aquarium was filled with tropical, exotic fishes that you couldn't buy at a regular pet store. The stranger was amazed by the aquarium, the thread count on the bed sheets, and the bottle of iced champagne on the nightstand. He told them he had never been in such a nice hotel room before, much less a suite.
Daniel hadn't blinked an eye. He leant down to snort a line from the pristine glass nightstand. With that familiar burn in his system, he looked Armand straight in his dark eyes and began to undress. Sometimes, it seemed that the Night Island wasn't a home, just an endless swap of hotel rooms and corridors.
Afterwards, when orgasms had been achieved and Armand had made a meal of the stranger, Daniel noticed he wore nothing but Armand's amulet. He attempted to dress himself, but gave up after the herculean task that was to shimmy his pants up past his hips. He abandoned the zipper and belt, and laid upside down on the soiled, plush mattress. He looked at the aquarium. There was a swarm of blind cave fishes, who looked more like little ghosts than living organisms, who swam from one dark corner of the tank to the other. Back and forth, back and forth, until they surely tired out and died.
He registered Armand coming back from the bathroom by the whine of the door opening and his shadow engulfing him whole. He registered him coming closer by the sound of his heels clicking on the marble floor, and his stony weight setting down on the mattress beside him. He radiated a warmth, which had prior been absent.
Armand and Daniel stared at the aquarium in awed silence. Perhaps even a melancholic one.
Eventually, Daniel said, "Do you ever think about San Francisco?"
Silence. Armand's thumb moved over his fine knuckles.
"Yes," he replied, eventually, "do you?"
"All the time," he admitted, but Armand already knew that. "You made me eat your cigarette coated in my own jizz. It was gnarly."
Armand looked away in something akin to shame.
"I was."
"Hey, what's with the long face? I'm not shaming you or anything. It was a different time, I get that," replied Daniel, as if he was not flippantly talking about his own torture. "I was just thinking about something you told me back then. You said you'd make me deserving of heaven and all that."
"Yes, and all that. I am afraid I failed. I've spoiled you rotten," Armand mused, and it made Daniel laugh, even if his lungs felt tight.
Curious, he asked, "What does it mean to you, to be deserving of heaven?"
Armand turned to look at him, and his pupils were blown wide. Still high. The vampire tilted his chin, making his curls rustle around his head like a dark halo.
The back of his index finger moved to trace Daniel's jugular, where he was laid out so nice and vulnerable for the devil's taking. It made Daniel swallow thickly. The digit was warm against his skin from the stranger's lifeblood. It made him think of a naked body lying still in a clawfoot bathub, skin growing cold against porcelain and eyes unseeing. Daniel tried to swallow down his jealousy. He failed.
Ignoring his spike of agitation with a grace only possible by years of experience, Armand told him, "The ability to die with enough humility to profess your sins to a power far above you." His fingers wrapped around the amulet, possessive. "When you lie on your deathbed and turn away from God for the sake of vampirism, then you've forsaken yourself once and for all. You are no longer deserving of heaven, or God."
"Fuck God. What's he ever done for anyone?" What has he ever done for you?
"See? I've spoiled you."
"I don't like who I am when you're around," Daniel admitted. Then, laughing again, "But I don't like who I am when you're not around, either. I just can't win, can I?"
Sometimes Daniel felt like he was microdosing on vampirism already. He was sequestered away from humanity and kept on the coast of Miami like a dragon's treasure. It was for his own good, sure, because there was an epidemic killing cocksucking queers like him and despite every major life choice he'd made pointing to the opposite, Daniel didn't want to die, and the Island was safe. But he couldn't help but notice the thread connecting him to regular people wearing thin.
Daniel was rich. Daniel got everything he wanted. Daniel cannot remember the last time he saw the sun rise, except in Armand’s eyes or in the bottom of a whiskey bottle.
He jumped up to his clumsy feet and began to dress. He had to get out of here. Gotta get himself somewhere, anywhere, where human life still held meaning.
"Where are you going, beloved?" Armand asked, watching with wide, guileless eyes as Daniel haphazardly shoved his dress shirt down the waist of his unzipped pants.
"I've got some tapes I need to copywrite, back at the villa," Daniel rambled, "from the funeral— there are stories that need to be told."
He tried to say it matter of factly, but the words sounded choked in his throat. He was on the verge of yet another breakdown, and Armand could tell.
"You've had too much to drink, beloved. Why don't you try to lie down?"
His slim claws curled around Daniel's wrist, softly pulling him towards the bed again. Daniel recoiled. "No! No, I don't wanna lie down. I want to do something, make something out of my life!" he snapped, "I'm thirty two, for fuck's sake, and I'm just wasting away in this pretty cage."
Armand looked hurt. His hand was cradled to his chest, as if it was burnt by the stove.
"This is no cage, Daniel. You can leave whenever you want, as you are so glad to demonstrate from time to time."
"But I always come back, huh? Because I can't live without you," Daniel spat. It sounded more like an accusation than a love declaration, but wasn’t that the same thing?
The vampire narrowed his eyes. "You mean the blood."
"Isn't it the same thing?"
When he got no reply, Daniel shoved his head onto his hands and let out a groan.
"Dont you see? You and the blood are the same! It's the stuff you're made of that I love, even when it fucks me over. Especially when you fuck me over," he stumbled over his words like a drunk, coked out fool. "Who needs communion or God when I have you?"
"You were preparing to leave me just moments ago," Armand pointed out, unimpressed.
Daniel threw his hands up in the air. "Because I don't know what you want! Shit, I don't think you know what you want half the time, either. You want me to be human and live a human life. You want me to die so I can suck God's dick one last time at heaven's pearly gates and beg him for a pass up there, but I am living like a vampire already."
Armand scoffed. "You don't know what it means to be a vampire."
"I'm a leech on the working class' resources. I'm leeching on you." He laughed, but it was a dry, brittle sound. "I don't see the sun, I barely eat and sleep, I only talk and fuck people so you can eat them."
To this, Armand had no response.
"And when I interview people, what do I do it for? I don't do it for their sake. I do it for my own sake. I love it. I feed on it. I tear through their lives and dig into their pain even when they don't want me to— simply because I need to know every detail. How is that all that different from when you drain them of their blood?"
Here, Armand found it in himself to argue. "It is not the same at all. Motive notwithstanding, the mortals you interview find catharsis in your listening ear."
"The mortals you drain find catharsis in your fangs, too."
The corner of Armand's lips curled downwards.
"Not always."
Daniel smiled, rueful. "Same here."
At this, Armand put his fingers to his temple and sighed.
"What is it that you are trying to prove? That you are already a vampire, metaphorically speaking? Beloved, I am too intoxicated for your mad rambling," he slurred. He sounded both too young and too old for this conversation.
And maybe it was all just mad rambling. Maybe Daniel had gone insane after San Francisco and kidnapped this pretty boy with a hefty trust fund to roleplay as his vampire captor, who even gave a shit anymore. Nothing made sense anyways. This Island and its endless ocean and drink and money was not only tearing what's left of his mind apart, but his morals, too.
Everything that was going on here from the white collar crime to the overconsumption of money and goods went against everything he stood for. He pinched the bridge of his nose, tore his fingers through his stiff curls. Even the insane amount of money spent on the fucking pomade could have gone for the poor dying out in the street, but no, it was all over his hair and grubby, undeserving fingers. When did he let love stand in the way of who he was as a person?
But he still got down on his knees and wrapped his arms around Armand's calves, hugging them close. Like a broken clock, Daniel began to beg.
"I'm telling you I'd be a fucking great vampire, and I think you already know it, too, but it doesn't matter because you still won't turn me."
Armand began to run his hands through his hair.
"You wouldn't be a great vampire, Daniel. As fluctuating as your human morals are, they would still get in the way and make you as miserable as you are now."
It was not his first time hearing these words. That didn’t mean it hurt any less.
He laughed, and Daniel himself could hear the manic edge. "Ah, I see: this is a test. See how much of my journalistic ethics I am willing to throw away just to sit at your feet. Are you God, Armand? Are you trying to make me deserving of you? Have I failed by staying undeserving, too human, or is it your fault for not shaping me properly to begin with?
What should I tell God at the gates, huh: sorry I did all that shit, I was too busy begging for demon cock to donate to the poor or pull my head out of my ass. You think that stern fucker will let that fly? He let the goddamn flood happen! The Holocaust, the Armenian genocide— he greenlit all that shit that killed my ancestors for way less than what I've done— I’m your compliance to a dozen murders, for fuck’s sake! I'm doomed, Armand, you doomed me. Maybe you ought to take some responsibility for once in your life, admit that you've fucked it all up."
Something flashed in his amber eyes. Daniel didn't know what, but it made him regret his drugged ranting immensely. Before he could coax tears to his eyes and beg for forgiveness, that smidge of vulnerability was tucked away once again. Armand's blank facial expression appeared, and Daniel knew at that sobering moment he screwed it all up.
"You already resent me now," said Armand, sounding numb. As if he was reading off a script he had heard ages ago and memorized by heart. "How can I trust you won't hate me completely by the turn of the millennium?"
Daniel's lip trembled despite his best efforts to remain stone faced. "You don't trust me?"
"You haven't given me a reason to,” Armand replied coldly.
Daniel hugged him even closer. "I love you."
"I'm sure."
"But I do," he said, sniffling.
Armand clenched his jaw and looked away. "You wouldn't ask this of me if you loved me."
Daniel rested his face onto the nook between Armand's knees, hiding himself away from the world. A tear or two stung his eye. He closed his lids down on them and let the wetness soak through the expensive fabric of Armand's pants. "And you wouldn't treat me this way if you loved me, either."
The confession hurt on its way out. It dropped an anvil in his stomach and sunk him deeper into misery, but it was all for naught. Daniel knew very well that it was always his most genuine, gutwrenching words which lent themselves to deaf ears, and they did so once again.