Jazmine’s Private Collection

Trick, Treat, and the Taste of Him

As told by Jazmine, who is never the one who gets ruined.

Let’s get something straight before we start: I did not open the door for candy. I opened the door because I heard a man’s footsteps on my porch and I wanted to know what I was working with.

Four months that house sat empty. Four months of me hauling boxes and painting walls and hanging candles on my own, and of course the universe waits until the exact night I’m bleeding through my underwear and feral about it to finally send me a neighbor. With a six-pack. And no costume.

Boring man? Boring man. But he had that thing — you know the thing, where a man’s hands are too big for the beer he’s holding and he doesn’t know it. Broad shoulders. Slightly crooked nose. That “guy holding beer” energy that either means safe or means a project, and I had already decided which one I was in the mood for.

So I opened the door in the witch costume, because it was hanging up and because I am not a person who lets a good dress go to waste.

You should have seen his face. That little reset. That flicker where a man’s whole night rearranges itself in his head. Oh. Oh no. Oh yes.

“Trick or treat,” I said.

And then I grabbed his wrist and dragged him inside, because why waste the small talk.

I commit. That’s the thing about me. Whatever I do, I do it all the way — the candles, the cloves, the half-unpacked boxes because I’d rather burn a match than unpack a plate. He walked in and I watched him clock all of it, the mattress on the floor, the drips of wax down the walls, and I watched him decide to be into it. Good boy.

I gave him a cape. A little kid’s vampire cape out of a box. He put it on like a good sport and I thought, yeah, okay, you’ll do.

“You’re a witch,” he said. “What happens when a witch and a vampire meet?”

Bold, for a guy in a cape.

“They bleed each other,” I said.

And I bit his lip.

I don’t plan the bites. The bites just happen. I saw his mouth, and his mouth looked like it needed teeth in it, and then there was blood on my tongue and it was good — that first bright copper pop, that little electric shock of somebody else’s life running into me. His pupils did the thing. His breath caught. And I thought, oh, this one’s not scared.

So I kissed him and drank it off him, and honest to god, if he’d asked me to marry him right then I’d have said yes just to keep the taste.

Day two. That’s what day of my cycle it was. Peak. Heavy, hot, aching — the kind of day where you’re just aware of your whole lower half, where your underwear is a war zone and you can’t stop thinking about something inside you. He slid his hand up under my dress like he had a map and I let him find out the truth with his fingers.

Red. Slick. Wet.

“It’s day two,” I told him. “Peak. Some men get weird about it.”

“Some men are idiots.”

Oh, I liked him.

I put my cunt on his face and told him not to be polite, and he wasn’t. That’s the real test, isn’t it? Not the yes, the appetite. Because a man can say he’s fine with blood, but you find out the truth when it’s running down his chin and he keeps going, keeps swallowing, gets greedier for it. When he pulled his fingers out of me and held them up red to the knuckle and then sucked them like they were dessert —

Yeah. That did something to me.

He had a theory about the biting. He was right, by the way. I’m not a vampire, but if you catch me on day two with a good-smelling man in my living room, I’m not gonna argue with the label either.

I bit his thigh. His hip. His forearm. I’d pull back and look at the little red crescents and the shine on his skin and I’d want to do it again, so I did. And every single time he got harder, which is a problem, because every time he got harder I wanted to sit on it more.

You taste like a meal. I meant it. He did.

No condom. Whatever. The mess was the whole point. If you’re already bleeding you might as well commit to the theme.

When I sank down on him, that first slide, that thick hot give of it — I laughed. Out loud. Because it was exactly what the day had been promising all afternoon. Every nerve I’d been dragging around all day lit up at once and I just sat there for a second with my hands on his chest, breathing, letting him feel it.

“There it is,” I said.

And then I rode him like I had something to prove.

You know how it goes — the candles sweating, the stockings sliding, my tits in his face, blood sneaking down my thigh every time I came down on him. And he watched. God, he watched. That’s the thing that killed me. He watched like he was at a show and he’d paid good money. And when it got on his chest he didn’t wipe it. When I swiped it on my fingers and fed it to him he opened his mouth.

I came the second time with my hand on my own throat because I needed to feel it both ways, and he kept going through it, and then I flopped back and opened my legs and told him exactly what to do about it.

“Finish in me. And look at it while you do.”

He looked. Then he came. Almost like a gentleman.

Then I bit his neck and held it while he went.

That’s the part I’ll remember. Not the sex — the sex was great, the sex was a situation — but the biting. Because he came with his neck in my mouth and my blood and his blood and both of us mixed up on my tongue and I felt his whole pulse stumble like he’d handed me something and hadn’t expected to get it back.

Afterward we lay in the ruin of it. Sheet destroyed. Cape somewhere. My hat had been gone since minute five. Dried red on both of us like we’d been at war and won.

“Are you actually a vampire?” he asked.

“Does it matter?”

“No.”

“Then no.”

He stayed the weekend. Saturday I bit his shoulder so hard it bruised. Sunday I made him breakfast in the stockings and nothing else, and he looked at the little marks on his own arms like a guy checking his bank balance.

Here’s the thing about being a baddie, though — and I’ll say this once:

He thinks he got lucky. He thinks he showed up with a six-pack and charmed the hot new neighbor out of her costume. And that’s fine. Let him think it.

But I heard his footsteps on my porch that night and I put on the dress and I lit the candles and I bit my own lip in the mirror to check the taste, and then I opened the door.

He was always coming inside.

He just doesn’t know it yet.

Now the porch light stays on for him. And that was my idea too.

A Cherry Lane Halloween Confession

— Jazmine