Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Joseph ordered a Lyft to take him from his house in the Hollywood Hills to the clubs of West Hollywood. It had been ages since he’d been to Boystown, the area of WeHo that was packed with gay bars and restaurants. Having someone else do the driving allowed his mind to drift. He thought about Rafi, of course. He hadn’t stopped thinking about him since that afternoon. In the nearly five hundred years since he’d been turned, Joseph had let very few people get close to him, either physically or emotionally.

Rafaél had only been nine years old when Joseph had rescued him from a vampire attack. It was 1965, and the young Latino boy was an orphan who had slipped through the cracks in the system and was living on the streets of San Francisco. The vampire who was trying to feed on him had been turned as a teenager and was easily scared off, and Joseph, not wanting the shivering child in front of him to think that the world was all monsters, took him in. After feeding and bathing the boy and seeing to his comfort, the child’s story had begun to emerge. His mother had died in childbirth and his father had been drafted off to Vietnam and reported killed in action. Joseph’s heart went out to the orphan, and he used the wealth he had amassed over the centuries to pull strings and adopt Rafaél.

The boy had proven to be remarkably adaptable. Within a year it was clear that he was brilliant and creative. He made friends at school and quickly accelerated to become one of the top students in his class. The existence of vampires was a closely guarded secret, and as humans progressed into the modern age, belief in them had faded into the most remote fringes of conspiracy and myth. Yet Rafaél had been open to learning about Joseph’s life and his true nature, both before and after being turned, and Rafi became his ward, confidant, assistant, and finally business partner.

Rafi was the closest thing Joseph had ever had to a child of his own, and indeed, it felt a little strange for him to now be taking on this fatherly role. Go out. Have fun. Make good decisions. Joseph laughed at the thought.

“What’s funny?” the rideshare driver asked, trying to strike up a friendly conversation.

“Just something my son told me before he went back to the office,” Joseph replied, turning his attention to the man piloting the Ford C-Max down the winding road. He was a typical taxi-driver type. Middle-aged, and Middle Eastern, with a middle-sized belly which probably wasn’t helped by the extra-large Big Gulp he had sitting in the cup holder next to him. Joseph’s heightened senses detected real tobacco and a mix of spices wafting off the man.

He was genial enough, though, and spoke English with only a faint accent, looking at Joseph in the rearview mirror with genuine surprise. “I’m impressed, you don’t look old enough to have a kid who works in an office. What’s your secret?”

Joseph smirked and quoted an old line from a comedian. “I decided to live forever. So far so good.” This got a belly laugh out of the driver. “Also, I moisturize. A lot.” The driver laughed again.

“Good one, bud. I don’t know why I didn’t think to just stop aging. First thing tomorrow, that’s the plan.”

Joseph instinctually leaned forward in his seat and put on a broad smile. “Why put off until tomorrow what you can start today?”

“That is a good point. Okay, no growing old, starting now!” The driver laughed again. Joseph allowed himself a wry chuckle. The car passed Sunset Boulevard, and after a couple of minutes of banal conversation about the weather, the Lyft pulled up in front of Micky’s, a gay bar on Santa Monica Boulevard that had a good mix of dancing, drinks, and go-go boys.

Joseph stepped out of the car, thanked the driver, and turned to survey the sidewalk. Numerous gays made their way to numerous bars to consume copious amounts of alcohol and who knows what else. Nothing caught Joseph’s eye, but the music wafting out of Micky’s open front patio was a pretty good remix of a Kylie Minogue classic, and he could see some underwear-clad boys dancing on the stage inside, so he decided this was the best place to start the evening.

It was only 10:00 PM, so there wasn’t much of a line to get into the club. He flashed his ID, which read Joseph Franz Walter III. He had been just Joseph Franz Walter when driver’s licenses became a thing in the early twentieth century, but eventually he had to kill off that identity and become his own son, and now his own grandson. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to carry on the Walter family name for another generation. It wasn’t a huge deal to change it, legally speaking, and Walter wasn’t even his birth name. Back in the 1500s, when he was human, living in Munich, and a citizen of the Great Holy Roman Empire, his family name was Knoblauch, a fact he had pondered ruefully many times over the centuries. Knoblauch was German for garlic.

At the Micky’s entrance, Joseph lined up behind a jockish college boy to pay his five-dollar cover. He grinned as the jock got in for free for showing his dick to the doorman. Since he was behind the jock, Joseph couldn’t sneak a peek himself, but he made a mental note of the boy’s face and outfit in case they ran into each other on the dance floor or cruised one another in the bathroom. He felt a slight tinge of hurt when the doorman didn’t make him the same offer. At his actual age, he would have thought that a petty thing like vanity would be a thing of the past, but sometimes he wished he’d been turned when he was ten years younger.

Once inside, Joseph surveyed the place. The layout was fairly mundane, though a fire a few years back had allowed the owners to completely remodel the club with a sleeker, modern flair. The main bar was a chrome rectangle in the middle of the larger room. From the entrance, going left led to a large open patio directly off the sidewalk, and there was another smaller bar for easy drink ordering from outside. To the right was the dance floor (and bathrooms), and on the far side of the bar, a stage was set up for the scantily clad go-go boys, most of them wearing Andrew Christian underwear and shaking their barely covered asses and semi-hard cocks at the patrons in their attempts to earn tips.

Joseph began a circuit of the club. It was the perfect level of crowded; full enough to seem busy, but not packed to the point where you had to push your way through. There was something to be said for denser crowds; it allowed for more casual physical contact, the brushing of butts with hands, which usually led to eye contact, which led to whatever it led to. Now, however, Joseph was able to amble through the varied collection of guys and began a lap around the bar. He waited to buy a drink until he’d made at least one round and decided what he actually wanted to do tonight. Pick up a guy? Dance all night? Both? Neither…?

Now that he was here, he was definitely feeling his libido rising. Joseph had been turned at the age of thirty and was thus forever in that perfect balance of sexual desire and control over that desire.

As he moved around the bar, Joseph felt a shift in his body. His posture unconsciously transitioned into that of a hunter on the prowl. This he remembered from when he was purely human, in his late teens, attending village events where he was expected to seek out young Bavarian women and make them his own. More frequently, though, he would be sneaking away to rendezvous with some Roman soldier who was only a couple of years his senior.

Now, though, Joseph was much more than human. As he floated through the throngs of men, his vampiric senses reached out to give him far more details on the surrounding males than could be afforded by sight alone. He could hear not just their conversations, but their breathing, even their heartbeats. He could smell the mélange of colognes, of course, but could also smell pheromones, blood types, the very hormones coursing through young veins, not to mention which boys were carrying various diseases and infections. He could tell who was here from Santa Monica by the smell of sea salt air on their clothes and hair and who was visiting from the Midwest by the faintest trace of cow manure.

So strong were these senses that Joseph could almost know the very thoughts of humans he focused on. He wasn’t a mind reader, no. Telepathy was not a gift of the turning. But humans were, frankly, awful at hiding their thoughts, so directly did the unconscious mind control the body. These abilities evolved in vampires for hunting, but over the centuries, especially in more recent centuries, they came in useful for seduction. Vampires were not sexless creatures. On the contrary, their blood ran warmer than the average human. This fueled their thirst, but also fired their passions.

On the far side of the bar, Joseph’s attention shifted to the stage on his right, where the go-go boys gyrated. As he passed, he drew the gaze of each of the dancers, and made eye contact with them in turn. They looked at him as a potential tip, of course, but he was used to men and women being drawn to him and staring. Especially in sexually charged environments like this. The dancers’ smells were so alluring he could practically taste the sweat that glistened on their lithe bodies. The first was a buff black guy of around twenty-five. He looked like he lived at the gym; his muscles bulged, and his underwear did little to hide his large semi-hard phallus. Joseph could also smell a cocktail of substances in him. Cocaine and Ecstasy, to fuel his long night of work. Without too much moral judgement, Joseph kept walking.

The next was a slightly beefy guy who reminded Joseph of the boys in his home village. Dark blond hair and slate grey eyes regarded him as he walked past the gyrating dancer. A chest full of trimmed hair led to a treasure trail flowing directly into the leather jock strap he had chosen to don this evening. Joseph detected no illicit drugs in him, but beer was definitely his chemical of choice. A little too much like those boys from home. Joseph moved along. He quickly passed by the skinny twink that was swaying more than dancing, whose eyes had dark circles under them which were counter to his age in the low twenties. Crystal meth was his elected drug, which was a turnoff to Joseph, on par with hair pulled into a man bun.

The fourth and last dancer was interesting, though, and Joseph could see why he had been placed on the end of the stage. It was closest to the front, where passersby could see him from the sidewalk. He was, as far as Joseph could tell, perfect. Somewhere around twenty, probably still in college. Fit and lean, but not overly muscle-bound. The type of body shaped by actual work, or through intense sport, rather than in a gym. If Joseph had to guess, it was a running sport like soccer, or possibly swimming.

The dancer’s blue eyes swept the crowd from under a damp mop of dirty blond hair as he gyrated sensually, and his face wore a perpetual smirk, like he knew a secret none of the patrons or other dancers knew. His gaze slid past Joseph at first but then he did a double take to observe his admirer.

Joseph was no slouch himself. His auburn hair was coifed stylishly over a chiseled clean-shaven face. Intense, dark blue-steel eyes that seemed much older than his thirty-year-old body met with the dancer’s lighter eyes. Joseph stepped up to him, and the go-go boy slowly lowered himself to a squat position and then to his knees and sat on his heels so he could lean over to talk to the older man.

“Hey, stud. Having a good night?” the boy said, his sultry lips close to Joseph’s ear to be heard over the music.

Joseph tilted his head up so his own mouth was close to the boy’s ear. “Better now, handsome. How’s the dancing?”

“Oh, you know, always on the lookout for a nice sugar daddy.” The dancer ran his finger along Joseph’s shoulder, feeling the expensive modal fabric of the T-shirt that hugged his toned torso. The boy had an eye for high fashion, Joseph would give him that. “Five bucks and you can touch my dick. Twenty and you can finger me…”

Oh, Joseph thought, disappointed. I’m the daddy. Well, I guess I don’t know what I expected. Still, Joseph admired the boldness of the probably struggling model. He raised one hand to caress the dancer’s face, locking eye contact. With the other hand, he reached into his front pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. Joseph sensed the other dancers turn their attention his way, but he was using his will to lock the dancer’s mind to him. It was the kind of thing he used to do back when he would feed on humans. Joseph didn’t intend to feed on this boy, of course, and was no longer even interested in him as a sexual conquest, but he still wanted to leave him with something he would remember forever.

Without looking, he leafed off two twenty-dollar bills, putting the rest back in his pocket. He held the bills between his face and the boy’s, which were only inches apart, but the go-go boy’s eyes never left his own. He was trapped. Their minds were linked via Joseph’s gaze, and the dancer was entranced. His mouth parted slightly as Joseph touched the bills to the young man’s chin and slowly traced them down his neck, his chest, his abs, to the waistband of his designer jock strap. Joseph used one finger to lift the elastic away from the dancer’s perfect tight skin, and another finger to push the bills into their new home. He released the waistband with a snap, and the dancer, his attention still rapt, widened his eyes a bit and gasped. A fresh sheen of sweat had broken out across his body and a single rivulet ran down from his temple past his cheek.

Joseph projected a warmth through his gaze and the dancer’s skin flushed in response. The music fell away and the two became the only thing in each other’s worlds. Joseph moved his hand from the boy’s waistband and down between his legs, across the pouch containing his manhood, which was rapidly swelling, then past the point where the pouch connected to the two straps of fabric that split off to surround his toned ass but left everything in between completely open to the air. Joseph ran his hand up one cheek, relishing the smooth skin over the taut muscle underneath, until his fingers reached the waistband on the dancer’s backside. Then he pulled his hand slowly back, his middle finger naturally falling into the crease between the two mounds.

The boy moaned involuntarily, low and guttural. When Joseph’s finger crossed the pucker of the jock’s hole, he parted his own lips and blew softly into the dancer’s already open mouth, never breaking eye contact. He applied just the slightest pressure to the rosebud of the dancer’s ass, and the boy spasmed in orgasm. His eyes tried to roll back in his head in ecstasy, but they were still locked to Joseph’s, and his pleasure came out as sweat and groans of bliss.

Joseph drew his hand back, across the pouch of the jock, which was now being pushed away from the boy’s body by the straining erection it held, and being soaked through by his ejaculation. He ran his middle finger in a reverse course of the bills he had given. Up the abs, over the still-quivering chest muscles, up the neck, over the chin, and pushed his middle finger into the boy’s mouth, which reflexively clamped down, eagerly sucking on it like a pacifier, and muffling his moans as his orgasm continued to send waves of pleasure through him. The young man could taste his own sweat, musk, and cum on the finger and his mind nearly short-circuited from the sensations overwhelming him.

Joseph pulled the finger out from the soft lips with a quiet pop and another “ohhhh” from the boy. He tilted his head up to bring his mouth back to the dancer’s ear and said matter-of-factly, “You’re welcome. I’m not much of a daddy, though.”

The dancer, his gaze finally released from Joseph’s arresting stare, slumped back on his heels, his head falling back and eyes rolling up, still in the thralls of the most powerful orgasm of his young life.

Joseph stepped away from the dancer and turned from the stage to get a drink at the small bar on the patio. He made his way through a gawking crowd that had formed around him to watch the show, some of them pawing their own erections. They flowed into the empty space in front of the dancer, pulling out bills to offer as tips, and salivating over the still-erect boy whose cum was leaking through the fabric of his jock strap.

For Joseph, it was a relatively empty experience. Something about the boy had turned him off once he actually started talking. He couldn’t put a finger on it, ironically, but something about the willingness to be reliant on someone else made him disinterested. Joseph could certainly afford to take care of some hot young thing, but he tended to like independent, intelligent guys. If that could come in the physical package that the dancer embodied, all the better.

Joseph ordered two fingers of Killepitsch, neat, tipped the cute bartender the cost of the drink just for being pretty, and then completed his circuit of the bar. The crowd had filled out a bit since he’d arrived, and he scoped out the boys in attendance. It was a usual West Hollywood mix. In Joseph’s estimation, Los Angeles had the hottest boys, but the average hotness was lower than other places he’d been. That dichotomy amused him when he thought about it. The boys on average were cuter in Minneapolis when he spent some time there. But perhaps the strong northern European presence just reminded him of his home in Munich.

One thing Joseph loved about Los Angeles was the diversity. He had spent much of his five hundred plus years traveling the world, but here, every part of the planet was represented. Even in this room, around the bar, he spotted a young black man whose skin was such a deep brown it looked like dark chocolate, and a Pakistani guy with a highly elevated sense of style that made him stand out in stark contrast to his more plebeian friends. Joseph knew non-whites had it harder in the gay community, as in the world at large, and didn’t really understand why. When he first ventured away from home (ran away, really, after his transformation), he had been amazed at all the faces that didn’t look like his own. And the bodies… Joseph delighted in the differences he encountered, embracing the chance to experience new things and learn about other cultures.

In recent decades, as the LGBT communities had begun to find their voice, he was dismayed to see that racism still imbued itself into that world. Joseph thought that since they were outcasts from society at large, it was natural to embrace others who were oppressed as well. Instead, too often he saw fear and distrust of the different. He supposed being a vampire was the most different thing of all and would never be something he could live with openly; even if he hadn’t fed on a human in over two centuries.

Joseph returned his attention to the bar and its patrons. So far, no one had caught his eye. There were lots of groups but not a lot of single boys. Not that that really mattered. If he wanted someone who was out with friends, it was only a tad more difficult to convince them to break off and join him for the night. He headed to the dance floor in the back.

The music was a good blend of gay pop remixes, heavy on the bass and the Britney, and Joseph felt it permeate into his body. He sipped his drink, a blood-red liquor, and tasted the complex mix of fruit, spice, and alcohol as he watched the bodies sway and groove on the dance floor. It was too early for shirts to start coming off, but the dancers all moved in rhythm to the thumping beat, and Joseph felt himself swaying along with them, his shoulders moving to the tempo and then his hips, back and forth. He hadn’t danced in some time, and the pure pleasure of it came flooding back. He set the remainder of his drink on a ledge along the wall and glided onto the dance floor.

Movement overtook his body, and he allowed the music to hypnotize him. He closed his eyes for several seconds, just concentrating on feeling the beat inside him, and when he opened them he unfocused his vision slightly to let the effect of the laser lights, strobes, and mirror ball create a kaleidoscope of light all around him. Before too long, his dancing style took on a more deliberate form, reaching his arms up and across his body, grabbing an invisible rope and pulling it back, spinning a one-eighty on the bass dip, and freezing everything just before the key change sent him into the floor on a full squat that took a few beats to rise back up, his ass thrust out behind him on the way. Joseph danced for an hour, without a trace of fatigue or even sweat. He had energy to burn and the joy he was feeling at the movement, while sensing other bodies doing the same thing around him, made him forget everything outside of this dance floor.

Then he opened his eyes and saw him. A boy, a man, dancing just to his left. Something about him arrested Joseph’s attention. He was exquisitely handsome in a boy-next-door kind of way. Dark brown, almost black, hair styled classically over a face that appeared to be late twenties, with a darker complexion that seemed Latino, but not obviously so, Joseph guessed Cuban ancestry. The boy’s shirt was off, and his body was drool-worthy. He would have fit in perfectly with the hottest go-go boys. His pecs and abs were defined but not so cut you wished he’d eat a sandwich or something. And his skin was totally smooth, with a sheen of sweat from his movements.

The guy felt Joseph’s gaze. Their eyes met. The boy almost immediately broke the eye contact with a sheepish smile that made Joseph’s groin flush with heat. He had entirely forgotten his desire to make a conquest tonight, but now he not only remembered, but suspected he had his choice picked out. He kept looking casually at the boy as they danced, and after a few seconds, the boy’s light brown eyes darted back to meet with Joseph’s blue ones. The man smiled again, showing off two rows of perfect teeth, and Joseph moved in. At six foot one, he was only an inch or so taller than the other guy, so he didn’t have to bend over to talk in his ear.

“Hi. I’m Joseph.” The music was loud and thumping and the crowd had grown denser, which meant he practically had to shout in the guy’s ear.

“David,” he shouted back. “And you’re wearing way too many clothes, Joseph.” The boy took a step back, bumping into another dancer, and gave Joseph a once-over as if to confirm this. He brought his gaze up and cocked a single eyebrow.

Joseph laughed good-naturedly. It was true, at some point in the last fifteen minutes most of the dancers on the floor had lost their shirts, and he hadn’t even noticed. He crossed his arms over his stomach to grab his own tee at the bottom and removed his shirt in one smooth motion. Joseph’s body was not skinny, but not muscular, either. His liquid diet meant he was thin and toned. His smooth skin seemed vacuum-sealed to his musculature with almost no fat, so as he danced in front of David, every movement of his abs and hips could be seen flexing with the beat. His low-cut designer jeans revealed the alluring V-shape that pointed directly to his groin. He had a small treasure trail that began at his belly button and led tantalizingly down into his pants. He cocked his own eyebrows at David, who raised his chin and mouthed “better” in response.

They closed the gap between them and grabbed each other’s hips, grinning and looking lustfully into each other’s eyes. Their groins pressed together as their bare torsos touched, and they instinctively offset their feet so they could get as close as possible, each placing their left foot between the other’s feet. Being similar heights, their heads were positioned perfectly to speak in each other’s left ear.

“You’re really sexy,” Joseph said over the music.

“You’re hot as fuck,” David said at the same time.

The synchronicity caused them both to laugh, Joseph throwing his head back, while David buried his face in his new dance partner’s neck to stifle his outburst. They were both already semi-hard, but David took the opportunity to lick Joseph’s neck up to his ear, and lightly nibbled his earlobe as they ground into each other with the beat, and semi became mostly. Joseph’s hands moved from David’s hips to his ass, squeezing the jeans-covered muscle, while David’s fingertips slid to Joseph’s lower back and up his spine. All the while they moved and grooved to the music.

Joseph pulled back a little to look at his dance partner. He hadn’t even turned on his vampiric charm, but the young man was already entranced, and Joseph had to admit he was smitten in return. There was something about him that seemed to offer a little more than most boys Joseph encountered in West Hollywood. A hint of intelligence behind the eyes. Joseph found that he really wanted to talk to him. Get to know him a little before getting completely naked. Just a little, though. He really wanted to get naked as soon as possible. They could cuddle and talk after if they wanted to.

He pulled his head back enough to make eye contact. “You want to get out of here?”

David smirked the cutest smirk that Joseph had seen in two decades and gave Joseph a brief up and down before replying, “Desperately.”

The pair exited Micky’s onto the Santa Monica Boulevard sidewalk into a throng of gays going from one club to another or waiting to get into the one Joseph and David had just left. Joseph pulled out his phone to get a Lyft, but David pushed his hand away and pulled him in for a kiss, his six-foot-tall frame matching Joseph’s nicely. The pair kissed softly in front of all the other gays, but the gaggle quickly ceased to exist for them, and the relative quiet of being outside of the club somehow made the kiss more intense. Their arms wrapped around each other’s bodies, and their mouths pushed together passionately, tongues playing a delicate game of tag.

After a minute or two, David broke the kiss to catch his breath. “Wow,” he panted.

“Yeah,” Joseph replied lustily, and with just a hint of surprise, added, “Right?”

David reached his hand up to touch Joseph’s face, running a finger along his left eyebrow and back across his temple and through his sweat-damp hair. “You’re really good at that,” he said, looking into Joseph’s blue eyes, before glancing down at his own crotch and admitting, “I don’t think I’ve ever been this hard in public.”

“Do you want to stay in public, or…?” Joseph held up his phone.

“Definitely not. My place or yours?” David asked, pulling closer to Joseph and speaking seductively into his ear, “I’m only a few blocks down, on Kings. It’s walkable.”

Joseph didn’t want to take the boy back to his place. It wasn’t that he never did. In fact, sometimes he used the large house in the Hollywood Hills to his sexual advantage. It added an allure to the experience for most of the models and wannabe-actor types he found in West Hollywood and bedded, and the display of wealth tended to get them really hot in the pants.

But this one … he didn’t want this one to know he was rich. It’s stupid, Joseph thought to himself. It’s not like I’m going to get into a relationship or anything. Still, though … it felt different for this gorgeous man to be so into him without knowing of his means, and without him applying any of his vampiric charm. It felt good.

“Your place. I’m a bit of a drive.” He put his phone away. He’d have been happy to call a Lyft for them, but walking a few blocks was better than standing around waiting for a ride to take them five blocks.

“Come on, then, before I rip your clothes off right here in the street.” David grabbed Joseph’s hand and led him away from the thump thump thump of Micky’s and the neighboring clubs and up the colorfully lit exuberance of Santa Monica Boulevard.