As he pondered this, Friedrich glanced at the window. The ghostly face of a woman flickered into view. He started, but when he looked again it was gone. “Grandfather?” said Mary. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” said Friedrich. Somewhere in the house, hinges creaked and footsteps fell deftly on old floors, so soft that only he could hear them.
“Just my imagination,” he said. “You know how it is when you’re a very old man. Afraid of the dark.”
***
It was true that Friedrich did not dream while he was asleep, but he did sometimes dream while awake. That night, after Mary had gone, he sat in the parlor, staring at the fresh flowers she’d brought in from the garden, and as he sat he dreamed. In his dream, he stood at the mirror and saw his own reflection again, saw himself as a young man, a young, living man, with a living, virile body, really a man and no longer a monster. He wept for joy.
Turning, he saw Mary, but not Mary as she was today, a girl of sixteen who looked like an apple growing heavy on the branch, but Mary as she might look in ten years still, a Mary whose beauty had matured and turned into something grander. He saw her lying down to sleep, and he crept up to her bedside just as he had done so many times in those bright and dangerous hours just before dawn, those many nights he’d hovered, unseen, by her bedside, waiting to kill her. But now that he was alive again there would never be need to kill at all.
In his dream, Friedrich sat and ran his fingers through Mary’s golden curls. He stared, rapt, at his own hands, no longer the cold, pallid claws that he’d scrabbled with for hundreds of years, but real human hands capable of really feeling. Mary’s hair was as soft as corn silk; he was so taken with it that he did not at first realize he’d woken her up. She batted her eyes at him and smiled, then sat up (the thin sheets sliding down her body, accentuating the lines of it, revealing tempting naked flesh) and threw her arms around his neck. He hesitated before kissing her, thinking still of his dry, pale, corpselike lips and threatening fangs, but as her mouth came to his he remembered that all of that was in the past now, and no sooner was the kiss complete than he forgot everything about his old life, his non-life, and knew only the present, and the feeling of being truly alive.
Mary pulled him down next to her, her limbs wrapping around him, her soft fingers stroking the back of his neck and the line of his collarbone. She murmured his name one syllable at a time, and pressed a tiny kiss against his cheek each time she said it. Friedrich lied on his back, keeping his eyes on the ceiling, afraid to look at her for some reason, until she swung one leg over his body and slid herself over him, mounting him, leaning down over him and smiling, her hair falling around his face like a curtain. He kissed her, and he kissed her, and he kissed her, and he forgot who she was at all. There was some ghost of a recollection, like the faint residue of a dream, but the heat of her lips blasted it away. Now she was just the girl -the woman- who was here with him now.
Friedrich was amazed to feel his own breaths, warm and gentle, and to feel Mary giggle and squirm as they tickled her. He marveled at how his hands moved so gently over her body, his skin and hers feeling alike, his touch as soft and yielding as her flesh. His mouth was warm and wet and she did not flinch from it but instead pressed against him harder as they kissed, her little pink tongue grazing his. She trembled in his arms like a baby bird, heart fluttering. She whispered in his ear, love songs in Turkish, songs so old that even the dust of the man who wrote them must have withered away. And then little Mary nibbled the ridge of his ear, and giggled at his surprise. She pushed him down under her, hands on his shoulders, squeezing his body between her thighs. There was a gleam in her eye.
Mary slid down Friedrich’s body as her mouth opened, kissing his chin and the line of his jaw, then his neck, then the hard sinews of his bare chest. She slid further down, grinding, her legs still splayed around him. Friedrich felt unfamiliar sensations, things not felt nor even remembered in countless decades; the quickening of his pulse, the warming of his flesh, the stirring of desire. He was torn between the urge to seize the girl and curiosity about what she would do if left to her own devices. When he found her positioning herself over him, and when he discovered at the same time as she the eager rigidness of his sex, he barely had time to draw in a breath before she pushed down, impaling herself on him. He heard her gasp and watched her shake, and he was shocked by the sight of blood staining her naked thighs, trickling down. The contrast of crimson on white stirred bad memories, but the hot confines of Mary’s sex pushed them away again.
Mary closed her eyes, bracing herself against him, raising her hips up slowly and holding herself taut above him; she shook all over, but remained in place for a few more seconds before dropping back down. Friedrich gasped and tried to sit up, but Mary pushed him down again; she was stronger than he would have thought. She raised herself up and dropped back down once more. Her brow furrowed and she bit her lip as she flexed her legs and thighs, moving up and down, sliding on him. The heat from the friction of their bodies chafed. Friedrich pushed up against her as she came down, and their movements collided, bodies tangling.
Mary’s small, perfect breasts bounced with the rise and fall of her, and Friedrich, no longer able to contain himself, sat up, fighting off her attempts to push him down, taking them in both hands and squeezing. She moaned, and he watched the muscles of her throat twitch up and down. He kissed the underside of one, amazed at how soft and pliant the flesh was, then smothered it with his mouth, sucking the taut pink nipple between his teeth, daring to bite down, just once, making Mary squeal.
Her whole body was slick with sweat and writhing with exertion, twisting and bucking in response to his every touch. He pulsed inside of her, and the muscles of her sex gripped him back, an unspoken language unifying their movements against and inside one another. She raked her nails across his back, then wrapped her fingers in the long, lustrous black tangle of his hair. The light overhead silhouetted her so that she seemed to glow, or even burn, first gold and then white-hot. He heard the ragged edge on her moans, knowing that the raw, panting breaths she drew were taking their toll on her. He fondled her soft, pliant body, even as she continued to move, almost mechanically, up and down on him, relentless. Finally he seized her by her hair and pulled her back; her neck and back arched, and she cried out again. He pushed her down and off of him, and when she landed he splayed her legs, pressing his mouth between them.
He found the center of her wet and warm, the slightly acrid taste of her body undercut by the intensity of the heat pent up inside of her. She twitched and writhed, almost rolling over, voice thick with lust as Turkish whispers filled the dark corners of the room. His tongue ran up and down the length of her once, then stabbed in, parting her, tasting her, licking back up and finding the sensitive, aching spot that he remembered, dimly, from his time as a young man, back when he was still alive. He flicked it and listened to her shriek, and then he curved his tongue around it, tickling, then flicking harder, then placing the tip forcefully against it and swimming in a circle over its surface. Mary collapsed into fitful little moans and gasps, and Friedrich was rewarded with a chorus of helpless, pleasure-filled cries, the sort he had not heard since…