Moonlight. Dapples and Doppelgangers. In moonlight, it's all too easy to 'give in', as if the moonlight cuts a circle in reality that is infinitesimally other. Just other. Just enough to be outside.
Outside in moonlight.
You're pleasantly high on your own efforts to get drunk, even if the alcohol hasn't so much kicked you in the gut as tickled the back of your throat. Scratchy tickling. With nails. But impotent anyway.
You're pleasantly wound up on the mood, the music, the moonlight. All those 'm' words. There's another 'm' word that's wound you up but you don't want to think it. You don't even want to know the word exists. Because that's a label. And labels are reality- the word made Man.
The world's still trying to get rid of labels and you grin to yourself at the memory of the cute little thing in the sixties who robustly declared that he wasn't gay because 'gay' was a label.
A Rose by any other name. Rose Red and Snow White. Wicked Stepmothers too, but oh, the wicked stepmother is out tonight with the girls and the other 'm' word is sitting across from you and staring at the moonlight cutting squares into the fabric of your carpet.
The 'm' word.
The 'l' word.
You test it on your tongue. 'Lesbians'. It doesn't give you a buzz. It used to, oh yeah, it used to when it wasn't politically incorrect to assume that lesbians were really only sexy women filling in time before a nice, big cock.
Lesbians.
Not gay. No, not gay. The little thing in the sixties- he'd barely been five foot nothing- had protested and protested and protested until you sank your teeth into his arm and sucked the living daylights out of him.
It was night before his eyes focused again. And you watched indulgently while he scavenged up his clothes with the dawn.
Your eyes rest on the 'm' word as he drinks in the moonlight, chin cupped in his hand, and you think of The Thinker. 'M' thinks too much. Albeit fully dressed and not in public.
You've told him so many times- live a little, move on, get over it, get on with it, give into it. Give into it being more to the point. Give into it all.
Even as you think it, as your thoughts twist and turn down the familiar paths, you turn away from it and away from him.
What price this lunacy? Give in to what? An hour. One night. You'd get- what? The 'm' word? You'd get another 'm' word too, and no mistake. You'd get a memory. And the other will walk out the door and he wouldn't do impressions of Rodin's great sculpture in your highrise offices ever again.
Well, not until the wicked stepmother persuaded him that it was nothing more than an interlude.
You shudder at the thought of what the wicked stepmother will do to you if it ever comes to that. And then you feel bad. You don't care enough to dislike her and, in your own way, you quite like her. For a human, she's cute. Bright as day. All sunny curls and morning sky eyes. Lots of life in her veins.
Your brain slips backwards down the slippery slope and you take one last searching glance at your companion.
Has he tasted her? He must have, by now. You haven't seen her in a while so you can't tell and the undead Rodin before you hasn't said anything very much about the matter. But he's had a secretive little smile on his lips lately and there aren't many options on consideration of what might have put it there.
You're an intelligent vampire. You've figured it out.
You look away. You reach for the glass. The Thinker breaks from his musings and glimmers a little smile at you and you know it would be so damn easy to slip in under his guard when he least expects it.
But you step away and get the next bottle. You make some slight remark about something else. The moonlight cuts its squares into the carpet, yes, into the very fabric of your shared realities. But tellingly, neither of you ever sits in the moonlight.
