Lingerie Shop 2 - Worlds Apart (The Lingerie Shop)

Afflicted with a terrible curse, Katya; a beautiful and eternally young vampire, tries to forget her guilt in alcohol and oblivion, until she discovers a rather interesting man.

The second episode of the Lingerie Shop series of short stories.

A dark, romantic fantasy
copyright © 2013 Trisha Miller.
Book 2 - Worlds Apart
The club was a heaving sea of bodies, pulsating with the heavy, primal thudding of the beat. She could still taste the blood on her lips; smell the strange, dark aroma of it. It made her sad; thinking of a time when she did not need to kill; of a time when she walked in the sunlight… She shuddered: if only it had been different. But it wasn’t and nothing she could do now could turn time back, or redeem her from her darkness. What she needed now was a drink: she didn’t need answers: just oblivion.
The club booze was cheap and unsatisfying, but the barman recognized her as she approached him, and retrieved her chilled bottle of Tokaji from a fridge under the bar. He poured the topaz colored liquid into a thick, cut-crystal glass. She held it to her nose, breathing in the heavy, sweet aroma of a wine that had last seen sunlight in the vineyards of the Carpathian Mountains, in the time of Napoleon. A bottle of that vintage, cost more than the barman earned in a week. She seemed a bit of a snob, but he didn’t dislike her for it: she made a change from the usual drunks and spoiled rich kids and was always polite to him. There was something achingly beautiful about her; something that fascinated him, as she sat there in a black, slinky skirt; like a 1930’s femme fatale, in her usual spot at the end of the bar.
“Oy mate ‘ow about some service?” a geezer, with a shaven head, bellowed over the pounding music, as he waved an empty, plastic, pint glass. The barman took the glass from him, without looking up, and re-filled it with a urine-colored liquid that had last seen sunlight earlier in the year, in a field beside a motorway. “Why don’t I get you a lager?” the geezer says to the femme fatale.
“I can think of several reasons,” she says, and turns her back on him, as he collects his change from the barman. She surveyed the heaving sea of blood-warm bodies with her sad, wise eyes. She had already fed. The desperate desire of the bloodlust had abated, but it had left her with an ache; a sadness. Her dark beauty was no comfort to her: ‘The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet, though to itself it only live and die.’ But there was no more living and dying now; just the ennui of an endless summer, and she’d never, ever have her innocence back.