I’ve been feeding from his flesh for weeks. He’s tied, bound to the bedposts as a lunatic within the leathery confines of a straight jacket. It’s the best I could do. It’s a stately house after all, and not a sanitarium.  

I visit him nightly, sometimes more than once. I wait until the servants are deep within their cushioned slumber, and then I tiptoe to the attic room. Oftentimes, I perch like a swallow eyeing his distress like a depraved gaoler.  

I’m evil: as twisted as his bed curtains.  

He knows I’m here. He can smell my perfume, sense my all-seeing, beady eye as it dilates to be fully open, drinking in his roughened nakedness. I could crouch there and look at him forever, trapped within confines – our specialized prison.   

He is mine.  

I can resist him no longer, so I unlock the attic chamber with a key on a loophole. It dangles like a bell. He neither jumps or starts at my grinning face. He stands chained to the four poster bed, lost and cavernous as a beached ship on unknown shores. This is exactly how I like him.  

He sees me, glances up, through his ebony locks – still glossy and decadent. His skin is ageing yet it holds a rugged manliness that makes me hungrier. I salivate with expectation. His chest is a forest where I yearn to place my chilled fingertips, to navigate the rivers of him.  

When he is more compliant, he holds me within his sculptured arms, as a precious egg in a nest, cradling the top of my head into the folds of his sheer, brutal beauty. He is an Adonis.  

The beeswax candles flicker as my skirts shift the light and breeze, altering the ambiance from melancholic to charged electricity; the sexual chemistry swirls, shifts and hollers its crimson scarf from secretive windowpanes. I saunter ever closer to the bed, sashaying my full hips. My breast heave in readiness, pulsating above my corset. I’m alive. Full bloodied. 

I use my nails to stroke and torment his corruptible flesh, watching his rising excitement as it greets its lover. The physical part of him always wants me. I see it in the depth of his charcoal eyes – a flickering flame. He equally hates me, and my control over him, and yet he rises to the occasion, each and every time, like a ravenous fish eyeing a baited maggot.  

A faint hint of a smile shows his arousal. I pull at his bottom lip with my teeth, gently, provocatively. He stands chained and in the palm of my hand. I’m his master and he my slave. I run my serpentine fingers through his waved hair, clutching at roots.  

I whisper fantastical words into his love-drunk ear, pulling at the skin – a little too roughly. He flinches, recoils when the pain is too much. I leave scarlet markings behind as a memento.  

A few seconds pass, until he regains himself and then he slumps forward, presenting himself as a banquet. He allows me to relish its luxuriousness: I suckle honeyed-mead and sugared almonds as I’m tossed and turned with heady desires.  

I swallow him whole, in one patriarchal bite.  

Emma Wells has poetry published with and by: The World’s Greatest Anthology, The League of Poets, The Lake, The Beckindale Poetry Journal, Dreich Magazine, Drunken Pen Writing, Visual Verse, Littoral Magazine, The Pangolin Review, Derailleur Press, Giving Room Magazine, Chronogram and for the Ledbury Poetry Festival. She also has published a number of short stories and her first novel, Shelley’s Sisterhood, is due to be published shortly.