Free Need by Todd Gregory

were never well lit, favoring red or black lights. The dance floors always had flashing strobe lights that distorted everything. There was darkness everywhere inside the gay bars—in corners, bathrooms, and stairwells. And gay men were remarkably easy to lure into those dark patches. Gay men were remarkably trusting—willing to leave a bar with a total stranger whose name they didn’t know and go to a place without telling anyone.
    Often, they themselves didn’t know where they were going with the total stranger.
    This made them remarkably easy prey for vampires. Jean-Paul and the others had the ability to hypnotize humans with their eyes and the sheer force of their will. According to them, I was about fifty years away from developing that skill myself.
    I was, as they always reminded me, just a baby vampire.
    But that was fine, really. As long as I could find a dark gay bar, I could always find someone interested enough in my face and body to slip into an unlit corner with and feed from.
    I laughed to myself. It was always about having to wait, wasn’t it? It was the story of my entire life. I’d waited and waited to escape from Alabama and waited to graduate from Ole Miss, and then I became a vampire—the irony being that as a vampire, I still had to wait, but now decades rather than years.
    The wave of nausea passed, and I walked over to the curb, looking across to the Bourbon Pub. The downstairs shutters were already closed, the velvet rope set out for people to queue up and pay their cover charge. A thickly muscled man stood in the open doorway to Oz directly across the street, his arms folded and sunglasses hiding his eyes. Behind him, I could see the defined legs and Day-Glo bikini of a stripper dancing on the bar. What the hell, I thought, making up my mind. I crossed over to Oz, paid my five dollars, and got a hand stamp.
    It was still early in the evening for Oz to be crowded, but there was a decent amount of men inside. There were two strippers on the bar—the one I’d seen from across the street in the bright, glowing yellow bikini and one on the opposite side wearing white. The stripper in yellow had shoulder-length blond hair and a lean, smooth body, and he was kneeling, letting someone touch his smooth chest. He smiled at me over the man’s head, and his left eye closed in a wink. I walked around to the back side of the bar and caught my breath.
    The stripper in white had his back to me. I stared at his broad shoulders and the muscles rippling in his back. He was moving his hips and came around in a dance turn until he was facing me. His head was shaved—so was pretty much his entire body except for a goatee. His chest was heavily muscled, and his abs rippled as he moved his hips back and forth. He smiled and his entire face lit up, dimples deepening in his cheeks. His legs were thickly muscled. And when he turned to move down the bar away from me, I got a good look at one of the most incredibly perfect asses I had ever seen. It was thick and perfectly rounded and solid. The white material of his bikini stretched tightly across the muscles as he walked, flexing and contracting.
    I felt myself growing hard inside my jeans.
    I wanted to fuck him, bury myself inside those beautiful cheeks and tongue his hole until he screamed. I wanted to hold him down while I shoved my cock deep and hard inside his exceptional body.
    And I wanted to taste his blood.
    I walked up to the bar and ordered a beer from the shirtless bartender. I headed over to the back corner where the stripper was coaxing some dollar bills from an older couple. He was kneeling on the bar, muscles rippling in those amazing legs, and as one of the men stroked his leg, placing a dollar bill into the waistband of his white bikini, he made eye contact with me over the man’s head.
    I winked back, not sure he could see me in the gloom. That was when I felt . . . something.
    It was strange, and I stopped