Jasper looked down on the printed page, his lip curling in disgust. "Is she serious?" he asked, reading the syllabus from his first philosophy class again. The professor had included a pre-class assignment:
Write about your darkest desires and regrets but don't quote another philosopher. I want to read your own thoughts and confessions. Extra points given for poetry.
Alice, standing behind him, rested her chin on his shoulder and scanned what had made her tall Texan so upset.
He tilted his head toward her. While he might have some innate ability to calm others, she was his balm, with a scent like...starlight. At least, that's what he always thought of when he was with her—cool yet vibrant, exciting and still comforting. She was everything.
"You can do it," she encouraged him. "You have the soul of a poet."
"But the history of a serial killer," he reminded her, explaining his reticence. "What does she want, my body count in couplets, a sonnet to blood, what?"
Poor, tortured darling, Alice said to herself, perching on his lap and studying his face, eternally young, except for his gold-toned eyes.
If she looked at him long enough, she could imagine how they'd been in his original youth, a soft, cloudy blue that had never seen blood nor terror nor scheming.
They'd been the mark of an ephemeral innocence that he couldn't have kept, even without his vampire fate. He'd never quite understood that—that their kind wasn't the source of all despair, and he might have suffered guilt for his actions as a Confederate soldier, as surely as he did for his years as Maria's icy general.
She kissed his perpetually smooth cheek and hopped up, reminding him of a butterfly taking flight. "Don't let her beat you, my love," she said, thinking not so much of the professor, as the blood and soul-sucking woman who had come before her. She tucked a strand of her short, sleek black hair behind her ear. "You'll think of something." Jasper watched as she flitted out of the room, the loveliest of the undead.
He returned his gaze to the challenge issued in a Tahoma font. You won't beat me, he mentally sneered at the young professor. He'd seen her in the hallway on registration day, as blonde as he, himself, slightly plump and bouncy, bursting with what he envied most—life.
Why should she want to hear dark desires and confessions, except, perhaps, she's not capable of them herself.
A wicked grin settled across his mouth, as he prepared to give the teacher a lesson...
The Cycle
by Jasper Whitlock Hale
Hunger is an entity
It demands and commands and compels
one to do unheard of things,
all to achieve...Satisfaction,
which is elusive and impossible
when one denies his greatest desire to live with his conscience
in a half-state to stave guilt and self-contempt,
which is an element, as surely as oxygen,
which is unnecessary, when one can't breathe
without the stench of remembered, gory repasts
that refuel the hunger...
He studied his blank verse. Did he come too close to a reveal, not close enough? Alice's face and wisdom danced in his mind and with an even more evil grin, he added:
You can't understand this, Doc
So why should I dredge up the muck?
My life, you might surmise,
Before love, it's no surprise,
Was dark desires, regrets, and one long suck
Not bad, but needs more emotion.
I want to feel your hunger—C+