Fancy A Quickie?

Blood Is Thicker Than Heroin

JAMES trembled feverishly as he knocked at his dealer's door. He knew the insane price for his fix but he was desperate, so excruciatingly dependent on his next hit that any cost was worth it.

The beautiful young woman answered the door and sighed. Her eyes folded with sadness and disappointment as she beheld the clammy, shaking shell of a man before her.

"You're here for another?" she asked sadly.

"Please- yes, I need... I need more. Just one more, please," he stammered before she moved back to admit him.

"You know the price?" she asked softly.

"Yes, but it's only this one time, then I'll get clean, I swear," James promised quickly without paying heed to his own words.

"Very well. Come here," she instructed with resignation. He sat on the chair she had indicated and she withdrew a syringe loaded with murky, brown heroin from a box in the kitchen. He nearly jumped off his seat in greedy expectation.

"You do this now and once you've pulled round I'll take my payment. But after that I am blacklisting you from every dealer in the city. You won't take so much as a paracetamol without permission," she said in a business-like tone, "and you'll be going to rehab. You have too much of a future to waste it on drugs. And I... I care about you too much to let you become this shell of the man I love."

His burning red eyes managed to focus on her.

"I'm sorry. I know I've let you down, I don't love you any less-" James began.

"-You just can't control your addiction, I get it," she interrupted. "Get shooting, then."

As James lay on her couch, eyes rolled back in a blissful, satiating high, she couldn't believe what she had to do to him. It was the only way he'd ever learn but damn, it hurt.

She was a drug dealer but she extracted payment in a non-conventional way: she drank their blood because she also happened to be a vampire. If customers couldn't pay she fed on them because 1) they never did it again, 2) it made easy feeding for her and 3) who would believe it coming from a user?

But she broke her one rule and fell in love with a human, and regrettably his addiction had become increasingly worse over the course of a year. She blamed herself; if she hadn't supplied him in the first instance it wouldn't have developed this way. He went from a handsome, intelligent stoner to be quivering, high-functioning addict who needed a shot to manage a work day.

When he awoke she would drink his blood and taste the horrid, bitter tang of the heroin in his system. Then she would send him to rehab, ban all of her contacts from selling to him and cut him out of her inmortal life. It hurt too much to be around him, knowing that she'd watch him be strong and funny and healthy again, only to die forty years later anyway.

Perhaps there was a way to be together but she was bound by eternity, and eternity was a lonely master.

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