Chapter Text
The ballroom where they hold her mother's memorial is named after Armand. It was a donation from Marius to the art museum, paid back in elegant gold lettering above the entranceway—and, she supposes, in the rent-free event space, for Marius’ coffin. It looks much the same as it did at the grand opening, twenty-five years ago: the preparators have hung Marius’ works around the room in temporary installations, to refresh everyone’s memory, and a swarm of guests have spent the night lingering in front of them, pretending to have opinions, getting a little bit drunk. Armand had been twenty-one, at the time, away for college, and Marius had flown her home to attend. She’d spent the night by her mother's side, mostly window dressing, occasionally delivering a few lines about her art history degree. At least with Marius’ friends, no one asked her how she expected to make money with a degree in art history. They were all standing in a box with her name on it. After everyone left, Marius had used her sway as the woman with the money to shoo the museum staff, so she and Armand could have the empty ballroom to themselves. It was huge and magnificent, larger than human scale. Armand had just barely gotten used to living away from home, to playacting as an adult, and the sheer size of the ballroom had made it all seem very distant and unreal, had made Armand feel very small. Alone together, Marius had turned to examine a portrait she’d done when Armand was sixteen, and said, I miss you. Her own younger, gilt-framed face blinked back from on high.
Twenty-five years later, that portrait has returned to the ballroom. Armand spots it in the southeast corner, where it is being studied by a bored-looking man in the same black suit every other bored-looking man is wearing. Armand is keeping vigil near her mother’s coffin, in case anyone needs a Marius stand-in to direct their vague praise towards. Not that Armand looks anything like Marius, as she is continually reminded, by the guests who apparently know enough about Marius to attend her memorial, but not enough to recognize her daughter. One woman had gotten ten whole minutes into a conversation before finally asking Armand how she knew the deceased. “I’m a collector,” Armand had said.
It's nearing the end of the night. The guests are saying their last condolences, taking their last complementary glasses of wine. Armand is tired of talking to them. She wants to go home. She hates being home, right now, the swallowing emptiness of a house that was too big even before Marius died. But at least at home she could be without these eyes. She could stand in the threshold of Marius' empty bedroom, or fall asleep on the floor of her studio, disused since her illness worsened, half-finished paintings still fidgeting impatiently on their easels. She could make imaginary plans to move out.
“Amadeo?” A voice from her left. She glances over and sees an elderly woman, neatly black-dressed, with a cane and a bejeweled lapel pin. Armand recognizes her, vaguely, as a friend of Marius, a fellow artist. “I’m sorry, does anyone still call you that?”
“No one ever did, except my mother. It’s alright.”
“You’ve grown up so much,” she says. She’s looking at her like she’s searching for a teenager, or else for a painting. “Armand, then, is it? I’m so glad to see you're doing well for yourself.”
Armand nods. “Thank you.”
“What are you doing for work these days? You’re a professor? Last I heard, you were getting a PhD.”
“I did. But I’m not teaching. I manage my mother's estate.”
“Of course.” She smiles. She pities Armand, clearly, but a funeral is the proper place for that. “I don’t even know if you remember me. I fell out of touch with Marius quite a long time ago. You must be married with children yourself, by now.”
“No,” says Armand.
“Sure, of course. I didn’t mean to imply—well, you’ve clearly grown into a very capable, successful woman. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.”
Armand isn’t sure what this stranger’s name is. “Okay.”
The woman is watching her very closely. Armand has gotten used to that, with people who knew Marius. She was such a presence, such a memory, they want to see if they can search her out in Armand’s face. Not just familial resemblance—something closer to aura. The Daughter in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. “You know, I’ve wanted to speak to you for some time,” says the woman. “I regret I didn’t find you sooner, I kept meaning to reach out, but—life, you understand. It’s no excuse.”
“That’s alright. Thank you for coming.”
“No, it isn’t. Amadeo—Armand—”
“Amadeo is fine.”
“—I want to apologize,” she says, suddenly. “It has always tormented me, that I never spoke up for you. I should have said something.”
Armand narrows her eyes.
The woman barrels ahead: “We all knew what she was doing. And we looked the other way. Why, I can't say. It doesn't make any sense to me. We were adults, we should have protected you. I don't know why none of us did.” She sounds distressed. Armand is worried she might actually be tearing up. “I regret it deeply. I believe it is the greatest regret of my life.”
“Ma’am,” says Armand. “I don’t know what you mean.”
She blinks. A moment’s silence. “Okay,” she finally says, and she smiles, slightly, uncomfortably. “I understand. I’m overstepping. Maybe this isn’t the time and place. I just—I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. I didn’t know when I would have a chance to see you again.”
“You have nothing to apologize to me for,” Armand says, forcefully. She wants to avoid a scene. And this woman is starting to piss her off.
“I can only imagine how difficult this must be for you.”
“Excuse me,” she says, and leaves her there without bothering to make an excuse. The crowd parts for her, instinctually, the way that crowds do when you walk anywhere with enough confidence. Or maybe that’s just something about Armand. She’s planning on taking up residence in a different corner, it’ll be good to make rounds, to bid farewell to different people, but she looks up and realizes she is face-to-face with her own portrait. It startles her. Like she’s being watched. Marius would scold her for lapsing into the superstitious—a portrait cannot watch you. But she has already steered herself towards the exit. She brushes past a cluster of undergrads and out the door.
That woman has some fucking nerve. Belatedly, she becomes aware of the fact that she is angry: her heart is beating quickly, her shoulders are tense, her breath comes heavy. Outside of the museum, the evening air is cool on her face. Tourists cluster at crosswalks, reading maps on their phones. Her heels tick like a clock against the pavement, her tailored black dress pulls her into a clean, sharp downstroke. She’ll do a lap and then she’ll go back in. She plans to go back in. Then she hears music coming out of a nightclub, muffled guitar whining, and she likes the idea of a room with a built-in focal point that isn’t her. So she pulls open the door and she steps inside.
It’s dark. Not very busy. There’s no bouncer, it’s not that kind of bar. It’s the kind of place she would’ve gone as a teenager, for no-questions-asked service. She is mildly aware of how out of place she looks in her expensive black wool and her mingled strands of greying hair. No one with a retirement plan should be allowed past the front door. There’s a tiny stage in the corner, just a platform, less than a foot off the sticky dancefloor, balancing a battered three-piece band. And standing in the center is a girl. She’s the kind of girl who runs the world—pretty, young, blonde. Her tiny black shirt is completely sheer, her legs are painted skin-tight in a layer of shiny red pleather that stretches as she bends her knees and throws her whole body into the crashing beat from the drum kit behind her. Her face shines with eyeshadow and sweat.
Armand knows she made the right decision. No one is looking at her; there is no risk they can see anything besides this girl. This girl who smiles at her captive, captivated audience, a dozen tipsy nobodies, and looks completely happy.
Then she starts to sing. Her voice is lower than Armand expects, a heavy contralto, lips very close to the mic. The lyrics are bad. But the song is okay, if poorly mixed, a little too big for the room. The girl herself is too big for this room—that much is obvious immediately. The corny love poetry coming out of her mouth somehow isn’t quite enough to offset the magnetism of her stage presence. She moves like nothing has ever been denied her. She sings like she’s playing this shitty little stage instead of a stadium because that’s just how she likes it best.
Armand pulls out a barstool, orders a drink, and watches the bartender make it. She lets the song distract her, easier to nurse her snobbery when she’s not looking at the singer directly. It makes her feel a little better. But she can’t help it for long; she looks back to the stage. Melodramatic as the song is, the singer has a shocking earnestness about her, youthful and miserable emotion boiling out of her throat. She looks almost about to cry. Armand is lit with a strange and fierce desire to see it, to watch this girl bring herself to tears onstage. She needs to know how far she will go. She thinks about pulling her hair, the childish fantasy of a playground bully, she wants to hear her yelp. She thinks about biting her. When she starts to imagine where exactly she might put her teeth, she turns back to her drink and pulls out her phone.
She has received a couple of mildly concerned texts, from her contacts at the museum, and from her contracted event staff. Just about everyone is gone. Don't worry about it, we can pack this up without you. The professional yet patronizing tone of speaking to a new-made orphan who also happens to pay your rent. She sends off a few carefully worded texts and then she turns her phone on silent.
The song has ended. Armand glances over to see the singer setting up a collapsible electric keyboard, wedging one of the flimsy legs between a couple of books so it'll stand upright. She's kneeling, inspecting her work, chatting with her guitarist. She throws her head back when she laughs and Armand feels vicious. So she turns around on her barstool, crosses her legs, and she waits for the girl to notice her watching.
The first time, it's just a glance, just a brief meeting of their eyes as she scans the crowd. The second time, it's when she's adjusting her mic so she can sit at the keyboard, and she smiles. The third time, it's just as she's about to start singing, and she holds eye contact, as she leans in, fingers moving across the keys with more confidence and dexterity than Armand would have expected from a child who sings cliché emotional rock ballads about breakups. “I think we'll end with a slow one,” she says, into the mic, looking directly at Armand. “I feel like taking my time.” The piano picks up, and she starts to sing. She grins over her melancholy lyrics, spoiling the effect somewhat. Armand sips her drink.
“I'm The Vampire Lestat,” she says, as the song draws to a close. “You know where to find me.”
As tempting as that sounds, Armand will allow The Vampire Lestat to come to her. She waits, as the bartender clicks a Spotify playlist and the bar begins to hum with forgettable background noise. She minds the time. Three minutes, four minutes, five minutes. At six minutes and twenty seconds, someone sits next to her.
“Who died?” Her speaking voice is as low as her singing voice, and she has an accent. Of course she's French.
“My mother.” Armand doesn't look at her directly.
“Come to drown your sorrows?”
“I came for the music.”
She taps her hands on the bar. “And what did you think?”
“Terrible.”
The Vampire Lestat recoils. “You’re a liar. My music is brilliant.”
“Your music is trite, gaudy, and predictable.”
“It's relatable. It's modern with a classic edge.”
“It's a tacky paint job on a played-out premise.”
“You’re a miserable old woman. What do you know about modern?” She doesn't entirely sound like she's joking, a spit of anger on her voice. It was shockingly easy to make her angry. “You probably stopped paying attention to music in 1985.”
“I’m partial to 1785, myself.”
“Me too.” Armand glances over, and The Vampire Lestat grins, and just like that she’s back to flirting. It happens so quickly it makes Armand’s head spin. “Can I buy you a drink?”
Armand gives her cheap clothes a once-over. “Can you?”
“No.” She smiles. “But you could buy me one.”
Armand does. The Vampire Lestat orders something brightly colored and highly alcoholic. When it comes, Armand takes it out of her hand, sets it aside. “She'll have a Sazerac.”
The bartender laughs. “Do we look like we have absinthe?”
“She'll have an Old Fashioned.”
“Even better. I like old-fashioned,” purrs The Vampire Lestat, leaning closer to Armand, reaching over to touch her wrist—no, not her wrist, her watch, running her thumb down the edge of the analogue clock face. Not quite skin on skin. “Can I have the other one, too? Since you already bought it.”
“No.”
“Come on. I promise I'll drink them both.”
Up close, she is sweaty and mildly supernatural. Her face is shaped like it was cut in stone but her skin looks soft, she is still untouched by age. The dark makeup around her eyes heightens the blue of her irises. Her arms are muscular and she moves them liberally, gestures when she speaks, spins through her full range of motion like she's trying to prove that her joints don't click, her legs never fail her. She lives in her body and it always does exactly what she wants it to. Armand has never seen someone so aware of being young who wasn't completely terrified by it. “How old are you?”
“Thirty,” she says. Armand raises an eyebrow. “Twenty-two. Is that a problem?”
“I'm old enough to be your mother. Is that a problem?”
“I won't tell, if you won't.”
“Who would I tell?”
She smiles, sweetly. “My mother.”
“I promise not to get you grounded.”
“Our secret, then.” She drinks too much at once and doesn't wince.
Armand asks, “Why are you ‘The Vampire Lestat’?”
She shrugs. “My name is Lestat, and I'm a vampire.”
“Where are your fangs?”
“Safely stowed. Would you like to see them?”
She would. She would like that very much. She opens her purse and sets a $100 bill on the bar, just to watch Lestat salivate. The bartender starts to get her change, and she waves her hand. She picks up the discarded neon alcoholic atrocity, and heads towards the exit.
Lestat slams back the rest of her drink like it's a cheap beer and lopes after her. She's significantly taller than Armand—at least six feet, a couple inches more in those shoes. Taller than Marius. Armand has always struggled to imagine what Marius would've looked like, as a teenager. She's seen pictures, of course, but it seems very unreal. Even now she has a hard time picturing her mother much older than she had been in Armand's adolescence, though by the end she was well over eighty. She had a frozen quality about her, a way of making the material progression of time seem inconsequential, tiresome at most. In the final years, when her lucidity slipped, and she mistook Armand for a teenager more often than not, it had been surprisingly easy to play along with her delusions. It was plausible to imagine that Armand had never actually gotten any older, that the past three decades were nothing more than a strange, unpleasant dream.
“You saved the drink,” Lestat says, pulling her back to the present. They're walking down the street, Lestat a half-step behind. “Can I have that now?”
Armand dumps the glass against the side of a building.
“You just did that to tease me,” Lestat says. More intrigued than angry.
“Yes.”
“You're mean.”
“Yes.”
Lestat skates in front of her, spins so she's walking backwards. “Where are we going?”
“You'll see.”
“You don't talk much.”
“You talk too much.”
“That's not fair, you've only just met me.”
“And yet.”
“Tell me your life story,” Lestat says. “Do you believe in evil?”
“No.”
“What's your name?”
“My name is Armand.”
As they approach the museum, Armand swerves away from the main entrance, towards a side door, where a security guard is waiting. “I’m here with the event,” she says, hands over her ID—but her staff did their jobs, he was waiting for her. He just nods and buzzes his keycard against the lock. Armand gestures for Lestat to go first.
There's no one inside, save for a few security guards. Lestat flurries like a snowstorm through the empty halls, high-ceilinged, old money. “This rules,” she says, almost shouting. Then she bursts into song—full throated, totally unguarded. Maybe her own song, Armand doesn't recognize it. Her voice echoes and lingers, haunting the space, playing a cluster chord with herself. Armand swears she can feel it reverberate into her bones. Lestat laughs. “I should do a concert here,” she says, delighted.
She doesn't ask how Armand has access, or why she would bring Lestat here. She seems to take for granted that she deserves to be surrounded by beautiful things. It is only natural that she should be swept up by an admirer and granted entrance to wherever she likes.
“I want to look at the paintings,” she says.
“You'll see paintings,” Armand says.
When they arrive at the deserted memorial, Lestat reads the inscription out loud—“The Amadeo Ballroom,”—and sighs, with overblown despondency. “Armand, if I'd known we were going to a ball, I would've worn my best gown. I feel terribly underdressed.”
Armand tries to imagine what Lestat's “best gown” looks like. It probably involves feathers. “It's not a ball. It's a funeral.”
“Ah. Well, then, I'm prepared. Your mother's?”
“Yes.”
“And, for the record, do we like her? Or is this more of a crab rave situation?”
Armand doesn't even try to parse that.
“Are you glad she's dead, I mean.” Armand takes a half-second too long to answer, and Lestat laughs. “Middle-aged with mommy issues? Shouldn't you be too old for that?”
“Mind your tongue, young lady.”
Lestat is ignoring her, looking at the paintings. “I know these. Marius de Romanus.”
“How do you know the art of Marius de Romanus?”
“Rude. You think I'm uncultured?”
“I think you are very stupid.”
Lestat spins around. “You don't know me,” she spits. “Bitch.”
“Language.”
“Was your mother a cunt like you?”
“She was a painter.”
Lestat pauses. Armand gets to watch her realization; by all rights, she should be embarrassed. Instead, an amused smile is forming on her face, like this is the funniest thing she's heard in weeks. She is without an ounce of remorse. “I’ve heard she was a dyke.”
“She had relationships with other women.”
“I think I would've liked to meet her,” she says. “Her paintings are just okay. But she sounds terribly interesting.” Lestat points. “Is that you?”
“Yes.” She's a little surprised. Most people don’t recognize her that quickly, if at all. It’s hard to say why not—Marius was a realist, a hyperrealist of the 20th-century school, and the likeness is good. It just seems unlikely, maybe, too obvious. When she was a doctoral student, she taught an undergrad lecture on contemporary art, and she put one of her own portraits on her slides, delivered dry facts about its creation and influences and provenance, just to see if anyone would notice. If they did, they kept it to themselves. “How did you know?”
“It looks like you,” Lestat says, simply. “How old were you?”
“Sixteen,” she says. In the portrait, she is wearing her school uniform, a starched white shirt and a plaid skirt. Her hair is smooth and shiny, and her mouth is slightly bored, but her eyes are wide and thoughtful. Marius was always able to capture a depth of expression on her face that Armand wouldn’t have otherwise known she was capable of. “But she painted me many times.”
“And is that her?” Lestat points at the coffin.
Armand shakes her head. “Only in symbolism.” Marius was cremated. It would've been more trouble than it was worth to get her body into the museum, guard it, make sure it was properly handled. A closed casket was enough to get the point across. “It’s empty.”
Lestat crosses the room. She moves fast on her long, young legs. Armand hasn't had a reason to move that fast in a long time. She doesn't bother to keep pace, clicking leisurely along behind her. Partially so she can watch: Lestat makes the ballroom look as if it was purpose-built to draw your eye to her specifically, a floaty backdrop of antique creams and sheepish browns to offset her ostentatious black-clad modernity. Armand wonders if these floors have ever before seen platform combat boots. Lestat throws open the lid of the casket, raised on a dais to hip-height, and checks inside. “Crafty.”
“Aren’t you worried I'm going to kill you?”
Lestat leans back against the coffin. “Are you?”
“You shouldn't leave bars alone with strange women. You didn't even ask me for my name.”
“No offense, Armand, but I think I could bench press you. I'm not scared of a bank teller in kitten heels.”
“I’m a professor.”
“I’m sure.” Lestat sighs, pushes away from the coffin, firing off towards a painting of a grey dog sitting on its haunches, snout angled away from the viewer. “I may be raped and murdered anywhere. I may be raped and murdered in my own home. A beautiful woman wants to take me to a museum. Why should I cloister myself, when I could be here, with you?”
Armand hadn’t said anything about rape. “I am not going to rape and murder you.”
“Exactly.” She runs her finger over the dog's painted ear, which she really shouldn’t do. “I’ve never had sex somewhere this expensive, before,” she says. “I bet you have.”
“I've had sex here, before.”
Lestat frowns, something very petty and childish about it. She grabs a chair that had been stacked against the wall, and drags it back towards the coffin. “You’ve brought other girls here?”
“No,” says Armand. “Just you.”
“Good.” She has the nerve to sound genuinely affronted, like Armand should've known to save herself until Lestat came along. “I like being special.” Then she steps up onto the chair and climbs into the coffin.
Armand feels something spin inside of her. “What are you doing?”
“I told you. I'm a vampire.” Lounging back in the casket, one knee hooked over the side, Lestat grins. Armand could swear for all the world that she can see her fangs.
Armand approaches like a stately mourner. Lestat is swinging her leg, carelessly, her heel knocking in rhythm against the wood. When Armand reaches the coffin, she sets one firm hand against that knee, stilling the motion. Then she picks up Lestat's ankle, delicately, and lifts her leg so she can press her lips to Lestat's leather-clung calf. She's pleased with how easily Lestat bends for her, strong and flexible limbs that contort without effort, without aching joints or disobedient muscles. Lestat seems content to allow it. Armand lifts the leg higher and kisses her ankle—surely she's barely able to feel it, through her boots, but that's part of the point. She's not quite ready to give Lestat what she wants.
Lestat flicks her ankle so the toe of her boot taps impishly against Armand's temple. “Come on in. The water’s fine.”
She does look like a vampire: a thing that is a little more alive than it should be. Or maybe she makes Armand feel rather dead by comparison. Her thick blonde hair splays over her shoulders and brushes the satin-lined edge of the box, something terribly visceral there about the audacity of claiming this grave, Marius' grave, as nothing more than a temporary resting place. All things were built to serve her. Including Armand, maybe—it’s a wild, passing thought that frightens and intrigues her. She wants to be this girl's master, she wants this girl to master her.
She’s not sure this is going to work. She is not so acrobatic as she once was. But she submits to Lestat's impossible confidence. She removes her heels, lines them up on the floor, and then she steps up onto the chair and gingerly lowers herself into the casket, so she is straddling Lestat's hips. Lestat takes her hand to help her, and then her waist, a steadying touch, a surprising thoughtfulness. Almost gentlemanly.
It's a tight fit, but the dais doesn't seem to have any difficulty holding them, and why should it? It was built to hold the weight of human bodies. Still, she's aware that if they move too much, they could go crashing to the ground. Lestat’s hands on her waist smooth experimentally down her hips and over her thighs. Spreading her legs like this forces the narrow skirt of her dress to ruck up her legs in a very undignified way, and there is something horrifically lewd about the thin layer of her sheer tights just barely separating her thighs from Lestat’s leather and mesh and heat and body.
“Are you wearing pantyhose? You are old.” Laying fully in the casket now, underneath Armand like a bride, within the box like a corpse, Lestat slides her hand underneath Armand's skirt. The cold metal of her rings forces Armand into sudden awareness of how hot her skin is, shocked by the sensitivity of her inner thigh, the almost unbearable sensation of Lestat's nails scratching unhurriedly between her legs. She must betray herself, and Lestat must notice, because she laughs. “Christ alive, Armand, when was the last time you got laid?”
“A long time ago,” Armand says, honestly. “A very long time ago.”
“Switch with me,” Lestat says, shifting back up to sitting. “You’re a rich old lady, so I figured you'd want to fuck me, but I need to do community service and get you off. This is elder neglect.”
“I am forty-six.”
“Exactly, you're ancient. And you age faster when you don't fuck. Lay down.”
There is something acutely humiliating about being bossed around by a child. Despite the anger building in her ribcage, Armand obeys. Lestat slides out from under her, presses her down into the satin with a hand on her chest. The simple firmness of the gesture, the easy assumption that Armand will yield, it makes Armand feel weak in a pleasant way, cushioned by the padded casket and shielded by Lestat's body above her, like being buried alive. From this position, Lestat can slide both her hands up Armand's legs and hook her fingers underneath her waistband. The slow drag of the nylon tights peeling across her skin reminds her of being flayed. It feels that way, like Lestat is stripping back the top layer of her flesh, leaving her raw and reactive. She makes an impulsive decision and unzips the side closure of her dress, pulling it off over her head. It's worth it for the wide-eyed groan she gets from Lestat. “How are you not getting laid,” she mutters, distracted from her task, leaving Armand's ankles tangled together. “What do you even have this body for?”
Armand doesn't have a good answer for that. “To be painted,” she says, not exactly a joke. But no one paints her anymore, so she's outgrown herself.
Lestat shrugs. “Well, I'm not a painter,” she says, and moves forward as if to kiss her.
Armand stops her. “Finish your job, Lestat.”
Lestat rolls her eyes, exactly like a scolded teenager. But she does as she's told, freeing Armand's legs. “Move back,” she says.
“Where are your manners?”
“Sorry, Mommy.”
Armand seizes Lestat's face by the jaw. “What was that?”
Lestat bats her eyelashes. “I said, please back up so I have enough room to eat you out.”
Since she said please. Immediately, Lestat leans down to bite Armand's thigh, and doesn't relent, a bruising pain, a dull suction. Lestat is giving her a hickey. It's juvenile and absurd and it feels incredible. When she pulls away, she presses on the new bruise with her thumb, and that feels even better. Lestat has none of the trepidation that Armand might've expected from a younger partner, no fear at all of inadequacy or inexperience. Mostly, she seems like she's enjoying herself. She maneuvers her long limbs in the tight space so she can put her head between Armand's legs, manhandling Armand’s limbs too, when she needs to: she slides her hand under one of her calves and lifts the knee over the edge of the coffin to give herself more room. It's not exactly a show of force, but it's certainly a show of strength. She bites her again, higher on her thigh, as her thumb comes to rest over Armand's clit, and Armand has to grit her teeth, the touch already too much, too direct, too unlikely.
Lestat releases the darkening bruise, ringed with smudges of her burgundy lipstick, looks up at Armand with her mouth half open and her eyes half closed and Armand can't help but reach down to stroke her face, overwhelmed with a need to hold her in the palm of her hand. “Why do you look frightened?” Lestat whispers.
Armand hadn't been aware that she did. “I am not frightened,” she says. “Ought I to be?”
“No. I'm a nice vampire. I only kill bad people.”
“How would you know?” Armand licks her own thumb, and runs it along the lower edge of Lestat's lip, cleaning up the line of the smeared lipstick. “What if I'm a bad person?”
Lestat shrugs. “Then I’d better get to eating you.”
Before Lestat can get any further, Armand slides her hand into Lestat's hair and pulls her face towards her cunt.
When was the last time this was done to her? She used to have sex with men, an ill-advised era of getting fucked by straight men who handled her roughly and didn't leave phone numbers which she would've thrown out anyways. They didn't care to offer and she didn't care to ask. And then she'd stopped doing that, and she hadn't bothered to replace it with anything else. And Marius was getting old, by that point, and sick, and she needed Armand to manage the excessively massive manor house she had lived in until the day she died, to liaise with galleries and organize the calendar and pay the staff and try to care about assets and investments and end up hiring other people to care about assets and investments and nurse her when she was too weak to get out of bed. She'd been too busy, was the point. It was hard work, but it was good to feel useful and necessary. Sex made her feel the same way. She really only needed one or the other.
Somehow she doesn't think Lestat would understand. Something tells her Lestat does not care what is useful, something about the confident, languid pressure of her hand where it holds Armand’s thigh—nothing so utilitarian as restraining her, though it has that effect. Lestat is sensual in a way that Armand associates with television commercials for dark chocolate, or oil paintings. She touches her like she wants to pull something from the surface of her skin.
And her tongue. It's inside of her. Armand almost can't focus on that. It's too much. She finds herself thinking around it, not quite feeling it. Thinking about hands, thinking about Marius. It's only right that she's thinking about Marius. They're laying in her grave. Who was the last person to do this to her? Where were they, and when, and did she like doing it as much as Lestat clearly does? Did she half-convince Armand she really was about to drink her blood?
“You need to relax,” Marius says, except her voice is too low and too French and too alive, so it's Lestat. Armand pulls her up a bit, by her hair, so she can look at her face. Lestat’s eyebrows are crooked. “Ma chère. You're so tense, it’s freaking me out. I'm kind of an empath.”
That helps. Only Lestat would say that. Armand tries to obey. Focuses on mastering her body. She exhales. Relaxes her legs on purpose, and then her shoulders, and finally, with some effort, the tense knot in her abdomen. “Use your fingers,” she says.
Lestat doesn't laugh. Armand had expected her to laugh. Instead, she moves her hand, wordlessly. “Use my fingers? To do what?”
“Whatever you want,” Armand says, in a fit of impatience. “Figure it out.”
Lestat presses one finger inside of her, lazily, it barely feels like anything. But it's not so overwhelming. “Are you paying attention to me?” Lestat asks. “I'm going to be upset if you're not paying attention to me.” Armand says nothing, just tilts Lestat's head with her grip in her hair and examines her face from another angle, forcing her neck to crane unnaturally. “Ow.”
Armand asks, “Why should it matter if I'm paying attention to you?”
Lestat yanks her head out of Armand's grasp. “Why should it matter? Why should it matter?! Why should a theatre have seats! Why should a gallery turn the lights on! She asks me why it matters!!”
Armand considers. “Do you actually think of it that way?”
“Of course!” Petulant, she frowns. “I’m not going to fuck you if you're going to ignore me.”
Armand is a little amazed, for reasons she can't quite pin down. It seems like a contradiction: Lestat is a raging narcissist; Lestat is flirting with servitude. She would be angry if Armand informed her of that. And Armand sort of wants to make her angry. “So it's approval that you want? You work for me, and I give you your applause? I tell you how good you've been?”
“Jesus, listen to you.” Lestat starts moving her hand again, there's another finger inside of Armand—so apparently this constitutes attention enough to console her sensibilities. “Sure, if you like. I don't turn down compliments. Sounds like maybe you would like me to call you mommy.”
Armand clenches her jaw. “What do you want, Lestat.”
“I want to give you head, I already told you that. Now can you stop trying to flow chart the chain of command and enjoy getting fucked? It's very tedious and besides, I don't like it.”
Lestat is right, of course. She wants to know who's in charge. It is stressing her out, a little, that she doesn't. Even more so that Lestat doesn't care at all. But she just nods. Lestat finally shuts up and licks her cunt, and this time, Armand certainly feels it, she grips the side of the casket, rolls her head back and suddenly remembers where they are, the excessively lofty ceiling above her, the polished wood floors, the paintings. Lestat has braced both her hands on Armand's legs, and the pressure is pleasantly grounding, her black-painted fingernails, short for playing piano or for fucking women. Maybe Armand read her analogy in the wrong direction, before. Maybe it isn't that sex is a performance; maybe playing music is sex. That makes sense to her, somehow, with Lestat sucking her clit. Her eyes wander and land back on the portrait, she hears herself whine and she wishes Lestat would be rougher, the softness of her mouth is maddening. In the portrait, her uniform shirt is slightly wrinkled, her necktie a little askew. Not enough to be dress-coded, but enough that Armand has the irrepressible urge to reach out and straighten it. Lestat exhales cold air. She'll never again be as beautiful as she was in that painting. She pitches her hips up to Lestat's mouth. Her eyeline in the portrait is slightly to the side, away from the viewer, like she can see something you can't. Sharp pain as Lestat pinches the bruise on her leg. Armand is furious that she cannot meet her own eye.
If this keeps going, she is going to orgasm, and having that knowledge feels a little like having a panic attack. She doesn't want it. She doesn't like the idea of Lestat having her so vulnerable. She decides quickly that the easiest thing is to fake it, so Lestat will stop. So she puts her body through the motions: tenses the proper muscles, thrashes a little, moans in a prolonged and unmistakable way. She does a good job.
But Lestat doesn't stop. And Armand doesn’t cry. She tries to bite her tongue but it is impossible to hide any sound in the vast echo of the empty ballroom, hollow like a crypt. She pulls her gaze away from her portrait and finds Lestat's instead. Lestat looks like a dog, with her tongue hanging out of her mouth, blonde hair in her face. “Fangs,” Armand orders. She expects Lestat to bite her thigh again but instead she suddenly unfurls and she is kissing Armand on the lips. All at once her whole body is pressed into Armand's, she can feel Lestat and leather all across her bare skin, body heat and muscle, strong and solid and biting Armand's tongue with belligerent need. The taste of sex is obscene and startling. Armand seizes her by the back of the neck, Lestat's guitar-calloused fingers in her shoulder, gasping into Lestat's teeth.
The real thing is quieter than her performance. It's not actually so bad. Lestat is holding her down without meaning to. Armand realizes she has been hyperventilating, pins and needles in her fingertips, her face, but the weight of Lestat on top of her is not as claustrophobic as she might've thought. It's comforting, in a way. “There,” Lestat says, chewing on her jaw. “My good deed, for the day.”
Lestat's mind turns illicit sex with a stranger into a virtue, and doesn't think twice about it. “Are you waiting for your applause?”
Lestat smiles. Being able to feel her lips move against her skin is a miserable intimacy. “Yes, please.”
“You did very well,” Armand says. It comes easily enough. She is not at all the motherly type, but she makes a decent schoolmaster. “You're a very promising young girl.”
“I know. And you'll come around to my music, too.” Armand realizes that Lestat is rolling her hips against her leg—almost absentmindedly, almost like Armand has nothing to do with it. She likes it terribly. “Fucking in a coffin was on my bucket list, by the way.”
“Write a song about it.”
“Maybe I will. Bend your knee.”
“I don't remember giving you permission.”
“Tell me to stop.”
Armand bends her knee.
“Thanks. This'll only take a minute.” It's easier to relax like this, Lestat taking what she wants without bothering to ask, not expecting anything from her, it gives her a moment to take a breath. And she likes watching Lestat work for it. “When you had sex here before,” Lestat says, her nose in the crook of Armand's neck. “Was it with Marius?”
Armand doesn't move. “Why would you say that?”
“Just a guess,” Lestat says, casually. “Was it?”
“Yes.” Who would Lestat tell? Who would believe her? “It was. Does that upset you?”
Lestat shrugs. “Was it rape?”
“No.”
“I’m not judging.” She's still thrusting her hips, jerking off on Armand while she makes conversation. “You guys aren't even really related, are you? She was old as fuck, that'd be one hell of a geriatric pregnancy.”
“She adopted me as a teenager.”
“Did she wait to fuck you?”
“No.”
“Yikes.” Lestat raises her head just enough to glance aside. Not looking away—looking at the portrait. “Sorry.”
She is the second person tonight to apologize to Armand for what Marius was to her. This apology doesn't anger her, in the same way. It is so simple. For all Lestat's dramatics, she chooses this moment to be so incredibly straightforward. “I've never told anyone that before.”
Lestat hums, momentarily distracted by her own pleasure. “I adore a secret,” she finally says, breathless.
“You're very strange, Lestat.”
“You're the one who fucked your mom.”
Armand should feel something—shame, probably. When she was young, she had wished that she was Marius' real daughter, born from her, carrying a piece of her in that way. But the relationship they’d had was the closest they could get, real in a tangible way, a way she can remember with her body. There is a pride in looking around at these paintings and knowing that she is inside of them. She doesn't expect Lestat to understand. But this reaction is also not what she expected. Lestat hasn't fled in disgust, hasn't called the police. Lestat hasn't accused her of lying. “You don't have to be sorry. It's over. And she's dead.”
Lestat moans, her hips jerk wildly a few times and then she makes an ugly, open mouthed, totally unselfconscious noise into Armand's skin. And then she collapses, catching her breath. “Sorry. What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay.” Lestat kisses her again—who told her she could do that?—and then sits up, clambering out of the coffin. “I’d better get home before sunrise. You’re paying for my Uber.”
“Okay.”
“I'll book it on your phone. Then you'll have my address, so you know where to pick me up tomorrow night.”
“For what?”
“For dinner, before my show. I'm playing another gig.”
Armand wants to call her arrogant, wants to punish her for her disrespect, wants to put her in her place. “It’s in my purse.”
Lestat fishes out the phone, holds it up to Armand to unlock, which she does. “You have a bunch of missed calls.”
“I disappeared from my mother's memorial service.”
“Yeah, well, fuck her. No pun intended.” The first person Armand has ever told, and it took her all of five minutes to turn it into a joke. Lestat taps, for a few minutes, and they lapse into silence. Armand takes another moment to just look at her: tousled, shiny, hyperreal. Up to this point, Armand had assumed that mostly everyone was the same amount of real, had the same human amount of physical influence over the universe. Lestat bends the air around her. Eventually, she passes Armand the phone. “My carriage awaits. Try to wear something a little less dreary tomorrow, okay? You'll kill the vibe.”
“Goodnight, The Vampire Lestat.”
“Actually, you can borrow my clothes.” Lestat is walking backwards, towards the exit. She pauses to swing around in front of the portrait, silhouetting herself. “Did you actually look like this?”
“I believe so.”
“Freaky. You got way hotter.” Lestat reaches up and touches it, brushes her hand carelessly over the canvas, risking the longevity of the finish with exposure to the oils on her skin. “Alright. Uber. Call me.” And she's gone.
Armand lays down in her mother's coffin. Maybe she should fall asleep here. Let them find her, naked and defiled. Maybe she should close the lid, and maybe they won't want to open it, they'll assume the weight is a corpse and they'll just bury her alive. Lestat has saved herself in Armand's phone as “hot goth chick 🧛♀️”, and sent herself a text—for Armand, but arriving from Armand's number, a bit of ventriloquy: congrats on outliving her!!