Her hand remained beneath his and his attention was suddenly drawn to his rhythmic caresses against her fingers. They were warm and soft and Damien could almost feel the blood crossing through them, tender and plump. He liked the feeling of the lazy drag across the crevices and boney structures that he was surprised to find. He couldn't remember a time when he had studied a human so closely. The moments of silence between the two went uninterrupted, Damien's thumb wandering over the skin of the young woman's hand and wrist, his eyes pondering how human she was.
After a long period of studying her skin, Damien looked up at Rachel and found her already looking at him with those brown eyes that he noticed more thoroughly. She must have asked him what nervously a handful of times which had warranted no response other than his other hand tentatively touching at her blushing cheeks. She said nothing more and the slight unease of confusion seemed to fade as she let his fingers, cold in comparison to her, brush with inhuman softness across her cheeks, brow, and yes, her lips. He reached up to her and kissed her more gently than he ever had before. There was no hesitation this time, and little regret. Her hand fell into his hair before he knew that she had moved and he was happy to make a side note on how easy it had happened and how effortlessly he let it.
The heat from her lips oozed into his and trickled down his mouth to his chin, where it crept down his throat and over the hard lump in his throat, until the sensation of her kiss began to warm him in a way he couldn't remember feeling, or compare to anything else. It wasn't blood or lust of the flesh, but something other that he had forgotten about entirely. When he had realized this, somewhere in the back labyrinths of his conciousness where words gave way to a more expressions of energy and feeling, he began to understand something he was even more reluctant to than he had been when the realization of his aching heart had been for Rachel all along.
Damien had never felt this after all.
It was something that made his internal tidal pool of guilt swell and flood its banks until it began filling his chest and putting pressure on his lungs. It was something that made him stagger, that broke his contact with Rachel simply from the overwhelming realization of it all.
Lucretia.
Suddenly everything started falling into the places they should have always been in but refused to be. It was then that he recalled the night of his rebirth, when she had taken his blood and his seed as if he were some whore of hers, gouging into his back with claws that could kill without mercy. He saw her hair, her body and remembered feeling the things that had been painstakingly placed there. He saw himself in her bed, in her life. A feeling that he could only figure was what disembodiment felt like carried him as he gazed down at himself in those long years of servitude. Content, or at least for the most part.
She had been his only lover. And she hadn’t been the one that had been found. He was.
In the instant that their lips disconnected, the images needed to be reigned in again. Too much. It was all too much and he still couldn’t sort it all out. He felt the sad smile on his face as he looked at Rachel again. It was all too much.
“So what does this all mean?” He asked rhetorically, knowing that she would have no such answers. Despite all his age and knowledge, Damien still tried to find his black or white answer in a sea of numbers, words, and sounds.
