So like a lowly fool, I pushed forward through the vista, my hand still grasping the wine bottle that I was only just aware I had arrested from those rooms.

Clumsily, I took a generous drink. It was sour within my mouth, but it mattered so little. I was drunk.

I reached his chamber door where I found the brass latch. I met my brow, laden with rain and sweat, to the old scars of wood. It was locked against me.

I called out to him, "Master," in some fragile, quiet desperation, my palm languidly reaching to press the frame.

I knocked, which felt strange and lonely and altogether terrible. "Master. I've come back to you!" I was trying at the latch again.

No reply, that it strained my sullen heart; this murdering silence that brought down my world by my very ears!

     I drank down more wine, and I thought it might spew from me. Miraculously I kept it in.

"Phedré!" I called out in his God given name, which I was not at liberty to use, as it had been strictly forbidden from my saying. But call out his name I did as I demanded he let me in, until, parting company completely from all my better senses, I began to pound upon the door and kick it, for which my payment would be grave.

Let him do it.

    "You open this door to me," I was saying. "or mark me, I'll break it in! I am a man now, and have the strength!"

    Though, I knew those words were empty, as I had always been a waif, but perhaps he liked it much. 

    But I had begun to pace the stones, and in spite of my claim, I was now wailing pitifully like a callow child, for not even my punishment would he be roused! And maddened by that, I turned back.

"I know you saw me in the brothels!" I shouted, wiping my nose now with an aching hand. "Does it pain you? Does it pain you to see me gluten the endowments you spoke of!"

"Answer!"

"Answer!"

    Then I, petrified and weeping, fell miserably to the ground.

    I had imprudently gained a confidence that he would be mine and mine alone, playing the young Adonis in his bed, and in my selfishness, I had properly foiled it all. And it seemed my loneliness felt worse than my guilt, felt worse even than those days I was a damned whore myself.

I came around, my brow upon the wood again.

"I'm a fool," I said finally. "For I am only human and lacking restraint, this restraint that you so remarkably possess as you lay me pressed, keeping from you my begging hands, as to not make for you a proper fountain of my flesh." I sniffed sharply. "Forgive, lest I lie in your bed, alas, that bed, that final bed, so that you may have me forever."

My words made not much sense to me. So morose, them. So forlorn. And I believe it was because I was drunk, and flushed, and so caged within my grief.

That he did not answer me now made me sob wretchedly. I longed for him more than I longed for any woman—the softness that their nature brings. And how I longed now to be folded within his embrace, which was nothing other than exquisite, silken stone, so that I might gaze upon the miracle that was his face, and kiss the hurt from his milky lids.

I no longer cared that he wanted that woman—that Vittoria. It would be years from now. Let him have her to appease only what I found to be slight, so pale to what our flesh would bring. My flesh. My human flesh that he so coveted and possessed with such abandon, which passed through and through my mind now, until it reached my doting lips upon a husk of breath as I said freshly to the air, "You are my Dawn."

Often I had said this to him. During those fleeting times he had those impossible eyes passionately upon me, cupping me in his palm until I was made ravenous and then finally exhausted, finding the most restful sleep amidst sheets, cool and silken.

Alas, defeated and my face brutally wet with tears, I sat with my back upon the door, fully now in a delirium from my drunkenness.

    I looked mindlessly to the bricks before me, and reached for another mouth full of bitter wine. I do not recall meeting it to my lips.

✦

I was awaken the following evening to my head hitting the stones. I opened my eyes to see Phedré standing about me. I looked up at him quietly, with more shame than I could bear. And he, glorious to my eyes more than ever, was silent even still.

But how impossible it seemed to me then that he should grow to be more magnificent, even more of that divine vampire nature that was so mesmerizing to my mortal understanding.

I laid there, praying the earth would take pity upon me and swallow me whole.

Silently, he watched me, those bioluminous, unclouded eyes calm. And at once, I wanted them all about me, greedily taking in my dishabille form.

    And then, finally, he spoke in that clear, whisper-less tone.

"What an exquisite, sorry flesh of bones you are."

"Yes," I answered him.

♱