Free The Last Girl by Kitty Thomas Page A

breathing. I can almost feel the expanding and contraction of the walls. But no, that’s my own breath I’m feeling. I’m grateful to be feeling it. It means I’m still here, still alive.
    Christian grips my shoulder and with one sharp thrust, he’s inside me. I cry out at the pain and the shame of losing my virginity to a monster that only seconds ago my body welcomed and coaxed closer with each undulation of my hips.
    He pulls me off the bed, bending me back against his chest, his arms wrapped around me, his head buried in my neck, breathing me in. Our breath starts to blend into one thing. I don’t know if he’s matching my pace or if I’m matching his, but we are in sync. Despite everything, I have a moment of transcendence. I feel one with everything, and my logical brain isn’t active to tell me how wrong it all is. The pain flowers out like a lotus blossom and then transforms into a deep yearning.
    He is both the disease and the cure.
    With that thought, the transcendent moment fades as quickly as it came on and I spend the next several minutes berating myself for feeling that way with him. He didn’t give me any choices. It’s a cruel joke of the universe that the one person who makes me come alive is himself dead. And evil. His very existence defies all moral laws and all known laws of physics. Yet here he is and here I am, and our bodies keep grinding together. And despite my best efforts not to feel more, a pleasurable sensation is growing inside me. I feel unmade, remade, desecrated, reborn. And I can’t think which of those I wish was untrue the most.
    Despite convincing myself anyone chooses pleasure—at least with pain I don’t have to feel guilt. If I love him inside me then is it still against my will? Does my will exist in even the most abstract sense in this vampire’s home?
    As if in answer, offering me penance for my sins, fangs dig into my throat, taking my breath from me, searing me with another wave of agony. Then it all transforms and I come so hard I nearly pass out. I shout out “Christian” without meaning to. I wonder if I’m going to get in trouble for calling him by his first name, but he only chuckles against my throat as he spills into me.
    Now that the orgasm has passed, I’m scared again. I think about the prostitute, and it’s not an inappropriate moment of arousal, because the moment that aroused me was punctuated later by her death. I hover in limbo, terrified he won’t stop drinking, and I’ll be just like her, just another cold body that served a vampire’s purpose. But he does stop, and a moment later his bleeding wrist is in front of my mouth.
    “Drink.” That word again. In the space of a day it has become the best and worst word in the English language. A word I fear I won’t hear and at the same time fear I’ll hear too often.
    I’m scared about what daily vampire blood will do to me. It doesn’t seem like he took as much as last time, so is it really necessary? I don’t feel weak. Nothing hurts now. Maybe I shouldn’t.
    “C-can’t I just drink every other day? Or when you take too much?”
    He pulls away and spins me to face him, his eyes narrowing. “It’s a gift. You’ll deny me the pleasure of giving my pet gifts?”
    This could go very bad very fast, so I backtrack. “N-no. I’m sorry. Please, that’s not what I meant. I’m just... ” I’m afraid to tell him. The only ace I have to play is the thoughts bound tightly inside my own head. The only thing in me that he can’t get to.
    “Just... ” he prods. His eyes look so angry and black that I can’t think of an appropriate lie, so the truth spills forth in its absence.
    “I’m afraid of what so much vampire blood will do to me.”
    I look away because he knows I’m rejecting what he is. He knows it disgusts me, and in his place, I might be angry about it, too. He can’t help his nature. It’s instinctive. It’s not personal.
    It’s like a tiger or a wolf. Humans don’t