What to Buy for the Vamp Who Has Everything

HOLIDAY KISSES:

WHAT TO BUY FOR THE VAMP WHO HAS EVERYTHING A. M. Riley

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What to Buy For the Vamp Who Has Everything A. M. Riley This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Published by Loose Id LLC 870 Market St, Suite 1201 San Francisco CA 94102-2907 www.loose-id.com Copyright © December 2008 by A. M. Riley All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced or shared in any form, including, but not limited to printing, photocopying, faxing, or emailing without prior written permission from Loose Id LLC. ISBN 978-1-59632-853-2 Available in Adobe PDF, HTML, MobiPocket, and MS Reader Printed in the United States of America Editor: Irene D. Williams Cover Artist: April Martinez

What to Buy for the Vamp Who Has Everything The Christmas decorations hang from the streetlights lining Sunset where the Christmas Parade passed a few days ago. Up in North Dakota, where I’m from, the tinsel and candy cane and lights look really pretty lining Main Street, with the cold gray sky and the lumps of snow all over everything. There’s the little party downtown the first night they turn the lights on and the sight of them makes you feel warm and hopeful. Down here, it just looks like more cheap glitz. At the corner of Vine and Sunset, some bozo went and threw his girlfriend’s bra up there and it’s hanging down, too, along with the glitter. They ’ll clean it up soon, don’t worry. Hollywood’s put a lot of effort into cleaning up its image. Maybe the streets are as dangerous as always, but the tourists, they don’t see any signs of it. I’m sitting in the twenty-four-hour Dunkin’ Donuts on Vine, directly across from the Mary Pickford Motion Picture and Cinema Archives. It’s around three a.m. and all you got here in the shop are junkies filling up on sugar to quiet the jones. This is a typical cops’ hangout. And I’m your typical cop, I guess. ’Cept I’m off duty right now. So I’m just a guy with a bag of frosted doughnuts. It’s two for one on the green and red ones and so I’ve got two dozen. They were warm when I bought them, but now they’re not so much ’cause I’ve been sitting here for an hour now. Well, there’s nothing for it. I can’t walk away and truth is I’m dying to cross the street, go around the corner on Fountain to the Archive’s service entrance where I’ve left my car. I bring the big shopping bag out of my trunk, and jog down the three steps to the loading docks. The door’s ajar there, and the alarm has been disabled. Now normally I’d be a little worried about that. Normally I’d be calling this in and waiting for backup. But in this case I know who left the door open and I know why he’s pulled the wires out of the alarm. These film people won’t have to worry about getting burgled. If he’s here. If he’s here. And, see, that’s the reason I was sitting in the Dunkin ’ Donuts for an hour watching some poor kid, who looked like sixteen going on eighty, try to steady his hand enough to down a cup of coffee. It’s not that I’m dreading seeing what’s down in that basement. God, it’s all I can think about some days. It’s that I’m dreading the day I go down there, and he’s absent. Especially lately. Maybe it’s the impending holidays, or maybe it’s something else going on out there that he doesn’t tell me about, but his dark days seem darker of late, and his few light days have been full of shadows. So, with all the familiar anticipation and dread, I trot down the two sets of stairs to the sub-basement. The Academy’s had this building for only a couple years and there are still traces of the former inhabitants. The files in old cabinets from when it was the AIDS care headquarters. Even the slim white boxes of negative from the days when ABC studios ran it. The whole place is like an archeological dig of Hollywood’s history. By the time I get to the third level down, I can smell the ammonia he uses to clean. The lights, hanging from their hooks in the beams, swing back and forth when I pull the chains to turn them on, looking around. “Hello?” A skitter of sound. I’d think it was a rat in any other place. “Adam?” That sound again, a shadow moving in the shadows. My heart ’s in my throat. Maybe it’s him. Maybe it’s my wishful imagination. I tread slowly into the room where the big sofa and the gym mats are. “I brought doughnuts.” My voice echoes a bit. I set the bag down on the table and pull the chain that turns on the table light. I don’t know what it means that more and more these days, I find him sitting here in the dark. And then, in the time it takes for me to blink, he’s standing there. Two feet from me and my heart has time for one great lurch of happiness and shock and then he’s got me in his arms and I’ve got his scent in my nose, his tongue down my throat. It’s hard and fast the first time. He gets me on my knees, my pants down around my thighs, fingers rubbing slick into my hole for only a second before he presses in, arm over my shoulder and around my chest to hold me tight against him while he grunts and punches his dick against my prostate a few hundred thousand times it seems, before I’m panting and keening, my saliva and sweat hitting the mats and he’s groaning and twisting against me and we’re both done for. Then we lay there and he’s still holding me and I can smell the wool of the sweater I brought for him last time and I can hear my own breath, harsh and loud. He lets me go and staggers to his feet. “Sorry,” he says, and reels away. Why he always apologizes, I don’t know. I like what he does to me. Obviously. The evidence of my liking is all over the mat beneath me. So I get my pants back up around my waist and I tuck my dick inside and I find some of the paper towels I’ve brought along with the other supplies and I mop up a bit while he stands over there in the corner. Now we’ve got to go through that awkward period before either one of us gets to talking. Hey, maybe we’re fucking each other but we’re still men. Or at least I’m a man. He’s a…heck if I know what he is nowadays, but he sure as hell is a male one.

I start putting away the supplies. He’s got a cupboard of sorts over here, bits and pieces he’s dragged up from the bowels of this place. I offered, a few dozen times, to get some wood and some boys down here and put a proper room in. Of course, he’d have none of it. “They’ll ask questions.” “No they won’t, not the boys I’d get.” He doesn’t like it one bit. “Illegals?” “Christ, Adam, what do you care?” But he does care and that’s the glory and the curse of the man. See, me and Adam were both working for the LAPD at one time. But he was a very bad man. A dirty cop, a drug addict, and just generally the worst news you could hope to run into in Los Angeles County. He probably would have gone to jail for it. I might have even been the one unfortunate enough to put him there. If he hadn’t ended up dead. “I don’t need anybody’s help.” Now, all of a sudden inclined to domesticity, Adam starts to help me unload the groceries I’ve brought him. Groceries, sheesh. I sound like my mother. It’s a couple gallons of blood and a quart of gas for that generator of his. A new blanket, coupla car racing magazines, a case of Millers, and, of course, the doughnuts. He takes the opportunity to grab my ass while he’s standing there and I pretend to be shocked. “Stop it, perve, you’ll make me drop the beer.” “It’s been a week.” He says it like it’s just about getting laid, but now I understand some of the edgy way he’s acting. “We’ve been swamped,” I say. “You know, that’s why I gave you the mobile. So you can call.” He doesn’t answer. Adam threw a real fit when I gave him that phone. I only convinced him to keep it because he might need it ‘for police business’. Now he grabs the doughnuts and goes over to the sofa and starts wolfing them down. I’m a good-sized man, but he’s a monster. Over six feet four of fighting muscle. And sexy as hell with that thick brown hair on top and those slanty green eyes. His hands are big and scarred across the knuckles. They dwarf those fancy little doughnuts as he shoves them into his mouth. All sprinkles and frosting down his front and I could just eat him up, the big pig. I come and sit down on the sofa and find excuses to rub up against him. “Gimmee one of those.” I make a grab for the doughnut he’s got in his hand there, and we have a bit of a wrestle until he ’s laughing and spitting doughnut and then he’s kissing me tasting like sweet glaze and Adam. This time it’s slow. He presses me down into the sofa and his mouth moves over me, his hands holding me still while I wriggle and twist around and try to get my dick rubbing up against him. “You cold?” he whispers against my ear when he’s worked off most my clothes and he’s down to licking my belly. I’m panting and groaning but I’m shivering too. “A little.” And he’s up and fetching out the new blanket I’ve brought. It’s one of those Polartek things all covered with Santas and reindeer and he holds it up for a minute, laughing over at me and god, he ’s so fucking gorgeous I could die. Then in a blink he’s back and those laughing eyes are an inch from mine. A hand is intimate with my balls and pushing my legs apart and he ’s getting his dick up in there and lifting my hips, but he’s spread the blanket over me so I won’t be shivering, while he works me onto his cock, pulling at me to keep me hard while he does it. My heels are up on his shoulders, my arms over my head hanging onto the sofa arm and he starts this slow rhythm, looking down at me, eyes darker, and suddenly, I see them. Small white points at the corners of his upper lip. I gasp and he growls and then he’s fucking me hard, the sofa’s rocking, I’m seeing lights and something wonderful starts up deep in my spine and just spreads through my body. I look up and he’s bent over me, growling, those teeth fully extended. He grabs my cock and I’m coming, but I can’t stop watching those teeth. “Huh huh huh.” He’s almost there, I can tell by the vein sticking out on his forehead. He leans against my shoulder. “Huh huh huh.” I can feel the chill wet of what I imagine is a fang against my neck. “A. Dam. Please. Don’t.” I get the words out in little gasps. “Huh huh. Don’t. What.” “Don’t. Bite.” He rears back. First, he has a look of absolute shock, then he winces and shivers, and then his body just takes care of it for him, and he’s coming inside the condom. Yeah, we still use condoms. Nobody’s been too clear about how this thing is transmitted and the new Adam, the one that gives a damn, wants to be safe.

Later, he’s cleaning up, and he says, too quietly, “I’d never do that.” “I know.” But it’s useless and I’ve ruined the mood, such as it was. So I may as well bring out the files I’ve brought. He reads over them for a while and then he says. “I knew this Lopez character down in South Central.” “Yeah, I thought you might have run into him.” He turns the file over, thoughtfully. We had a drive-by last week. Couple bystanders. A kid and the young father of a family of two, in addition to the sorry piece of crap gangbanger they were after. We know Lopez called it, if he didn ’t pull the trigger himself. We know because he told people he was gonna just last week. And because ballistics pulled the bullets from the same gun out of another corpse a couple months ago. We couldn’t make that one stick neither. Eyewitness suddenly contracted early onset Alzheimer’s. We all know LA is a bad place, ’specially down in Compton. But a douchebag getting away with four homicides in one year is just completely unacceptable. Now that he’s dead, Adam’s all ethical and shit. He’ll think about this for a long time, I know. But if I hear that Lopez just disappeared and then, maybe his corpse comes bobbing up in the LA river, drained of blood, well, I’ll know what happened. Now Adam’s just sitting at his little table and he’s got that withdrawn look he gets sometimes. I’ll admit that that’s the look that really scares me. It’s that look that makes me afraid to come back here sometimes. Afraid I’ll find myself sliding in a pile of dust or something. Or maybe just standing in the empty room, looking around, getting that feeling you get when a room has been empty for a long time. And the person who was here is never coming back. Sometimes he looks at me like that. Like he’s never coming back. “Adam?” “Yeah?” And he’s making himself smile at me and it doesn’t help much, except I appreciate him making the effort. “So. You know, Christmas.” And now I can’t even describe his expression. Stunned, I guess. And a little cornered, maybe. Like a man who’s forgotten an anniversary only he didn’t even know he HAD an anniversary to forget. “I have the day off,” I tell him. It’s one of the perks of the Shield. One of the few. If you need a fucking day off, you go ahead and you take it. “I can’t…” “What? There’s no law against it, is there? This is fucking America, man. Everybody has a right to celebrate Christmas.” I can’t help it, I want to spend my holiday with him. He’s my man…or…whatever the hell he is. He’s mine and I want to sit with him on Christmas and make merry. “I don’t know.” “Well, I do. I’m coming here and we’re…we’re going out is what we’re doing. Going down to Pershing Square and ice skate or something.” “Ice skate?” He’s laughing at me now. “What, you can’t skate?” It’s good to see him laughing. “Okay, well then maybe we’ll just go have a beer or something but it’s fucking Christmas, man.” “Okay. Okay, Peter. Whatever you say.” “That’s right.” I nod. That’s settled then. “So, what do you want?” “Want?” “For a present, you dope. What do you want for a Christmas present?” This, for some reason, is even more shocking to him than Christmas. He actually stands up and goes to a shadowy part of the big room and just stands there. “I don’t need anything.” Right. What does a guy who lives in a sub-basement and sucks blood for sustenance need? Besides, you know, a life? “I have everything I need, I keep telling you,” he says. Everything a not-vampire needs to be miserable I guess. The guy’s got nothing and he wants nothing. He’s got some idea he doesn’t deserve it. He’s never said so, but it’s so fucking obvious. And this is another reason I hate the dark periods. Sometimes Adam decides he doesn’t even deserve sex, which leaves yours truly jonesing worse than those junkies up on the street. “Well, I’m going to have to pick something out for you on my own then.” He’s drifting in and out of shadow. Disturbed and fluttery like he gets. So I know better and I change the subject.

*****

Later I think about it and maybe it’s because I’m a stubborn dick or maybe it’s something more. But suddenly I just make up my mind. I’m going to get Adam something special for Christmas. Something perfect. But what do you get someone like that?

***** Christmas day should dawn white and peaceful. The sound of kid’s feet on the stairs, the squeals of delight, right? And then later, the church bells, the singing. The turkey and the football. I was woken by sirens and two seconds later my cell phone rings. “Yeah?” “Pete? It’s Lenny. We gotta problem, man.” I grab the clock. It’s five a.m. “What’s going on?” “Yeah, Freeway, he’s down on 124th and he hears that Omar’s making a list.” Freeway’s Lenny’s CI. You know even a snitch doesn’t call you at the crack of Christmas morning, unless something serious is going on. “Omar’s in jail.” “No he ain’t. He got some crack addict whore of his to step forward and alibi him. Freeway says Omar’s got a warehouse full of assault rifles.” I’m out of bed and pulling my pants on with both hands while still on the phone. I can hear Lenny starting up his car. Lenny’s got a wife and a couple little kids and he’s still running out of the house at five a.m. on Christmas morning because some homicidal gangbanger down in South Central’s decided to declare war.

***** It’s a good thing we’ve got citizens that fall out on the side of right, more often than not. ’Cause if a coupla them hadn’t, we’d be scraping more bodies off the pavement than the two unfortunate Bloods we’ve ended up with. As it happened, two whole precincts and a S.W.A.T. squad were swarming down Martin Luther King Street by dawn. Add to that some local vigilante ‘Mothers Against Gangs’ or something, and Omar, he tried something but it didn’t go far. And now there’s nothing left but the crying, as they say. And about twenty miles of forms. I’m not out until after six p.m. and it ’s only then I remember that it’s Christmas. And, oh Christ, I get a quick visual of Adam sitting in that dark sub-basement all alone and I’m in my car and calling him and tearing down Vermont Street. Of course he doesn’t pick up. Calls from me don’t constitute a proper ‘police emergency.’ The streets are emptier than after Armageddon at the corner of Fountain and Vine. I park in the loading zone, pop my police vehicle sticker on the rear-view mirror so nobody gives me a ticket, and then I dig everything out of the trunk of the car. “Sorry I’m late, man,” I call as I clomp down the last level of stairs. “Took me all day to chop down this tree.” It’s a little joke, seeing as the tree is about three feet and out of K-mart and obviously fake. The room is pitch black. “Adam?” I leave my stuff at the door and go across to the light. He’s not here, but, besides a little disappointment, I don’t let it bother me. It’s not like he’s got a curfew or something. I put up the tree and plug in the lights and put the packages under the tree. Then I pop open one of the beers I brought and wait. Hour later and I’m starting to worry. I’ve called the mobile twice now. “Hey, bro. You forget me?” I say to the voice mail. I start poking around the room, looking for a clue to his whereabouts and I see the mobile sitting there on a box, turned off. Goddammit, Adam. I pop open a couple more beers and pretty soon I’ve drunk the whole six pack and my thoughts are starting to go something like this: 1. He forgot. You’d think nobody could forget Christmas, but Adam’s living in another reality, so to speak. That’s one of the reasons I gave him that phone. So he could occasionally check the date and time. 2. He’s split. What I misinterpreted as Adam weirded out by Christmas and all things normal and human was really Adam weirded out by boyfriend suddenly wanting too much intimacy. I actually hope this is the case because the other thought is: 3. He’s dust. And now I’m thinking I should have brought two six packs of Millers instead of the one. Because I need a drink. So when I hear big feet coming down the stairs, I’m so relieved, and a little buzzed, too, I’ll admit, that I don’t exercise the caution that any rookie just out of the academy would have had, and I go running out into the stairwell in my stocking feet, and I’m all, “Adam, where the…” Good thing is the guy coming down those stairs didn’t expect to see me anymore than I expected to see him. So by the time he recovers enough to swing his gun around and point it at me, I’m back in the room. He doesn’t turn around and run back up the stairs, but then I don’t expect him to. Because in that second I was looking up at him, I recognized him. And as I slide down the wall and try to bury myself behind the boxes and cabinets and other trash in the

corner, I’m pretty worried. That face has been showing up at every roll call in every precinct near Hollywood for the past several weeks. We actually kind of thought he’d found a way north but Georgio Perez is still very much alive and well and hiding out in Hollywood. Where he cut a number of young men up pretty badly before leaving them for dead in various alleys and parking lots. All those FBI and special bulletins must have made the little sociopath pretty nervous, because we’ve had no info that he’s got himself a gun. From behind the stack of boxes, I hear his footsteps over there by the table. The light in the room swings back and forth, like he’s taken a swipe at it. I am unarmed, completely without any resources, and Georgio is walking around the room systematically kicking chairs and boxes aside. I figure I ’ve got one chance and that’s to jump him, and that’s not much of a chance. From what I’ve seen of his crime scenes, I figure talking to the guy won’t work. Then, like the superhero he is, Adam comes crashing down the stairs. Yeah, Georgio plants a slug in him, but that just makes Adam mad, and pretty soon Georgio is screaming and begging while Adam drags him up the stairs. I hear the thump thump thump of it. Then I hear the screaming just stop. Adam comes trotting back down; he’s got barely a hair ruffled. “Oh, Peter.” “I’m fine,” I tell him. I’m shaking all over but, you know, whatever. “Yeah, thanks for keeping him in the room.” There’s blood seeping through Adam’s shirt and he dabs at it with one finger, like it’s jam. “I saw him down on LaBrea and I chased him all the way back.” He frowns. “You should have let me take care of him. You could have been shot.” If I weren’t so relieved to see him, I’d smack him. Adam jerks a thumb towards the ceiling. “I handcuffed him to the railing up top. Where’s my cell phone? I’ll call it in.” Of course, Adam wouldn’t kill him. Maybe bruise him up a bit. Maybe tap him for a pint, but it’s one of Adam’s rules not to kill the humans. “That’s okay, I’ll do it,” I tell him. It’s more complicated when he does, because the investigation stays open. It’s been weird a few times filling out reports about looking for the anonymous citizen while I ’m sitting next to said anonymous citizen and he’s got his hand down my pants. Now Adam’s got that peaceful look he gets from the sucking of blood and the shedding of it. In a couple hours, the rush will wear off and he’ll hit the valley of his high. I don’t want to leave him like that, but I’ve got to take care of the problem upstairs, so I go off and do that. A cruiser shows up right away. Perez is babbling like a lunatic about Adam, but he ’s such a nutcase nobody listens, and the boys carry him off. I’ll be filling out forms all day tomorrow, but for now I go back to the sub-basement. Adam’s frowning at the tree when I come back down. “I drank all the beer, man,” I tell him. “Sorry.” I sit down on the sofa, kind of hard. Unlike Adam, the adrenaline has turned my legs into rubber. I let myself kind of lean sideways and he puts an arm around me and that’s when I let myself feel the relief. He leans over and his mouth is warm and happy and that just feels so good I let go of everything for a few minutes. “Are those presents?” he asks, smiling into my eyes. “Yep.” I rally and gesture towards them. “Open ’em, go ahead.” With a look at me, he hops off the sofa and fetches the three little items. I can’t wrap worth beans but it’s okay because he just shreds the paper anyway. “Nice.” It’s a complete box of Tabasco sauce. I ordered some stuff on the Internet that’s supposed to be the hottest, or at least in the top ten. “Catch the name.” He turns the bottle and reads the label. It’s a measure of his good mood that he actually laughs out loud. “Death” and “After Death”. He likes the book, too. Lately Adam’s had an interest in history. It’s weird to see him curled up at an end of the sofa frowning and scratching his head, nose in a book, but it’s all part of this new Adam. As he opens it and reads the table of contents, I have one of those passing disturbing thoughts. The sort of thought more up Adam’s alley than mine. Maybe he’s thinking he’s gonna be reading about himself one day. “There’s a card, too,” I say, watching him closely as he opens it. He just thinks it’s a Christmas card and I see when he realizes what it is. I see it hit him and then sink in. It sinks in deep; I can see it traverse every layer.

He doesn’t say anything, just nods and puts the card back in the envelope. I hope I haven’t blown it. “We can go see it next month,” I say. “That’s how long it’ll take for the engraver to finish it.” “Yeah.” “If you want, of course. If you don’t…” “Yeah, I’d like to see it. Thanks.” The mausoleum at Forest Lawn has a room just for cops. It’s the sort of thing the old Adam would have made fun of, but I guessed this new Adam might go for it. They’d never found his body because, well, duh. But he was declared legally dead. And now his name will rest with his fellows. It ’s the sort of thing I’ll want some day. Which is why I bought the little box next to Adam’s. Not telling him that, though. Least not today. And then he looks up and his eyes are bright and he’s fully there in a good way. Not distant or fuzzy. “Thanks a lot, Peter.” He reaches into his back pocket. “I got you something, too.” I am so completely surprised I just take the card and don’t do anything. “Open it.” It’s your typical Hallmark card. Some joke about a reindeer and Santa that I can’t remember because at the bottom he’s signed it. “Merry Christmas. Love. Adam.” I read it again. Now, you gotta understand, there are words that Adam uses and then there are words that he doesn’t. The man swears like a marine. Well, actually he WAS a marine so that would figure. “Love. Adam.” Damn, I don’t know what to say. Where to look. I can’t look up from the card. So he just takes it from my hand and he sets all the gifts and wrapping over there on the floor and he takes my face in his hands and pushes me down on the sofa and sticks his tongue down my throat. It’s just what I needed. Now he has his arm around me and his face buried in my neck again. It’s his favorite place to be, I think sometimes, and I go with it. Big strong arms around me. Low voice growling meaningless things in my ear. Slow and easy is Adam’s way most the time. The urgency comes of his need, his fear. The loneliness. Slow and easy, mouths soft against each other, tongues pressing together. He breaks and his eyes are dark and glowing. “You taste like vanilla.” “My aunt’s cookies,” I tell him. “There’s some in the refrigerator.” His gaze rolls to the little fridge. Guilt, longing. “I wish you didn’t have to take care of me.” “I don’t have to Adam. I want to.” Anything you want, Adam. His hand has been traveling up and down my ribs, rucking the shirt as it goes. Now it slides underneath, feeling me, my belly, my chest, fingers over my nipples. His eyes on mine and I wonder if he can feel my heart straining, hear my breath speeding up. Well, of course he can, but he probably thinks I’m just horny. He’s grinning at me now. Yeah, he’s evil. He lifts my shirt off, lowers my zipper. Tasting my cock like it ’s a raspberry popsicle on a hot summer day. He buries his face in my balls and I arch and moan. Our pants are open and he holds his weight with his arms as he moves against me; our cocks bump and slide together. He watches me as I arch again, pressing into me. I’m tired and emotional and I’ve got the self-control of a rabbit when I’m like that. His eyes are glowing green as they stare into mine and I come. I help him, my hand knows his rhythm and those eyes keep watching me, unblinking, until the moment when he ducks his head, shuddering. Hiding himself from me in his orgasm. We lie entwined around each other for some time after and I think how sometimes it ’s just a few days, sometimes it’s a whole week, but its all about this moment, laying in his arms. Quiescent and as peaceful as he ever gets. “Merry Christmas,” I whisper against his ear. A rumbling agreement, fingers touching my lips. “Best Christmas I ever had,” he tells me. A lump in my throat surprises me. God, what would I do without him? “Me, too, buddy,” I whisper back.

THE END

A. M. Riley A. M. Riley is a film editor and sometime poet, living and working in Los Angeles, with an interest in paranormal, erotica, and anything that tests established boundaries. Find out more about the author by visiting http://www.amriley.net/.