Lilith's Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life

Lilith awoke in the man's arms, feeling the delicious tickle of his hand running up and down her thigh. At once she was glad, she was grateful...and she was lonely. His attentions had drawn her to enter what she thought of as her life's dream, which had been unfolding as long as she could remember, of an afternoon in a place of perfect joy.

In this part of the dream she is leaving. To do this, she steps beneath a plum tree covered with blossoms, into its fragrant, bee-humming bower. As she leaves, a man lays his fingers on her cheek and touches her tears. He says, "Only an hour." His strong, sweet voice, when she hears it in her dream, makes her glow with the vanishing light of longing.

She'd heard it just now, "Only an hour." It had become for her the watchword of the eons, this enormous hour.

"You are my passionflower," the man breathed into her ear in his own poetry, his slippery, jaunty Arabic.

Instantly, there came a silent riposte, You are my dinner. She gazed at him, thinking that they did not have such complex faces in the long-ago. "Ibrahim," she breathed, "love me." And he did, oh, he really did. His eyes bulged, and his lips hung slack as he pumped away at her. But he also tried to pleasure her, speeding up, slowing down, watching to gauge it in her eyes. And he did see it, because it was there. He was giving her pleasure, enough pleasure to make her feel a most unaccustomed feeling, which was regret.

She had come to feel a certain tenderness toward him. He sang, he told her stories of his youth among the camels, he bragged to her about his little possessions, his auto, his timepiece, the black "business suit" he kept in a bag. "I am a businessman. In Cairo, I am respected. I must wear such a suit."

She felt him swell within her, saw his eyes flicker as he experienced the little death of coitus. Then he sank down upon her, and she enjoyed his weight. Her pleasure in him was not physical. It was, and this was a surprising truth, a pleasure of the heart.

He rolled off, breathing hard. "Oh," he said, "oh, my. Was it so good for you " It could not feel for him as it would with a human woman, but he said nothing, so neither did she. She turned to him and kissed the edge of his beard.

In recent years, she had taken less of an interest in the prey species. At home when she fed, she had come to prefer that they bring it to her wrapped in linen and so trussed that it could not even struggle. She would see only the neck, taste only blood drawn from carefully cleaned skin.