Want

For her the perfect man was one who wanted hard, rough sex - and nothing else. It didn't really matter what he looked like, or how smart he was (in fact, she preferred him not to talk at all). He had to smell good - that was essential - and he had to have a warm bed to take her to (to take her in!). If he was the kind of man who would creep out of her bed at 6 a.m. rather than wake her with a kiss, well, that was what she wanted, what she herself did - mornings were too complicated for her.

She knew many such men. She'd haunted the singles' bars in this city too long now. She even had a little book of names and numbers, men she'd bedded a dozen times, men who'd sleep with her at a moment's notice, if they were free, who'd probably wake up the following day having forgotten her already, men for whom sex was truly meaningless. She despised them, but needed them, humiliated herself by phoning them. Not that a cheesy chat-up line and fumbling in the back of a cab elevated the encounters with men in bars.

Too meaningless. She craved romance. Flirtation, the game of maybe, excited her, made her feel young. She wanted to be desired, to know that her name was on another's lips, her face in another's mind, all the time, not just during the drive to sex. She wanted others to feel that perpetual hunger, that age-old engine of burning need that denied her peace. She wanted them reduced to tears by insatiable desire for her.

She'd had it before. She'd been courted, and fought for (and over), even been worshipped, and for a while, for a few days, for a few years, it was wonderful, intoxicating, she relished it, but always it ended in blood. Sometimes her blood; usually theirs. Passions light fires, and fires burn. Too dangerous. Too painful.

Men fell for her too easily. She used them for sex and they came back for love. Not all, but too many. She loved the love, but couldn't meet its demands. She was too much for one love. To love one man was to kill him - if not today, then tomorrow. And so they collected. Try as she might to deny them, to evade them, they collected about her like bees about a queen; each demanding to be the one; until she wanted to scream with frustration, until she fled to a new city, a new country, cursing love, cursing life, hating men, hating herself; and the cycle continued.

The unbreakable cycle

For it wasn't love that drove her, and it wasn't sex, it was blood. Warm and vital, her food, her life, her fate: blood. Each night a mouthful, or two, gently eased from the veins of her lover while he abandoned himself to the pleasure of her body. A few sips only, a lovebite, teased, seduced, when what she really craved was a hard, rough bite, a flood of blood filling her with ecstasy, giving her peace, if only for a while.