The Reading Lessons (7 page)

“A monster story?” she grumbled upon seeing Hadley’s new purchase. “Does anyone actually fornicate in this book?”

“Worse,” Hadley said. “They bite one another.”

“What’s the fun of that?”

“How about this,” he said. “You read me something from
Ulysses,
and I’ll read you something from my monster book, then we’ll decide which one is more fun.”

“All right,” she said. “But I’m skeptical.”

Lucinda read first, the odd, period-less sentences running into each other in a way that would have been annoying had Lucinda not pantomimed the action for him: 

I’d let him see my garters the new ones and make him turn red looking at him seduce him I know what boys feel...

Hadley swallowed. Dang. He could certainly understand the appeal of garters. He just hoped Spitbone knew what he was talking about. As it was a stormy day, he reached over and tugged the curtain pull, casting the room in darkness. He switched on the flashlight he’d brought along for just this purpose, narrowed the beam on the words, and began to read . . . 

I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.

When he shone the light on Lucinda’s face, she popped her monocle. “Give me that,” she said, grabbing the book. “What does it mean?”

“It means this girl with the sharp teeth is about to drink this fellow’s blood. And I think he wants her to do it.”

“Hadley,” she murmured in a shivery voice. “Where did you get this book?”

“
Pringles
. Should I read another passage?”

“No!” she cried. “I might swoon if you do.”

“Really?” he asked, hopefully.

“The floorboards aren’t safe for a book like this.”

Not in all his days had Hadley ever felt so proud of himself. 

# # #

Next meeting, Lucinda confessed that she could hardly read the words, as they left her so breathless. “You’ll have to read them to me, Hadley,” she said. “Problem is, I’m deathly afraid of what will happen between us if we share such words out loud.”

Hadley knew Lucinda might only be teasing. He gulped anyway. To his way of thinking, it was high time one of their wicked books inspired something wicked.

From then on, when it was dark enough, Hadley would read
Dracula
by flashlight. When it wasn’t dark enough, he’d speak in a gravelly whisper so as to keep the whole thing sinister. 

On the day Harker drove his Kukri knife into the Count’s throat, Hadley grew so excited, he kissed Lucinda.

For years he’d dreamt of kissing her. He could imagine himself doing it any number of ways, but always, in the end, Lucinda kissed him back. Now that it was real, his lips traveled no further than the slope of her cheek, but Hadley kissed that cheek as though it were a pair of open lips. 

Lucinda dried her face on her sleeve. 

“I thought you liked this story,” he mumbled.

“I’ve other things in mind for us.”

“Like what?” he asked, lightly touching her shoulder.

“Hold your horses. It’s only our first time through the book.”

That night, Hadley didn’t sleep a wink. He couldn’t wait to read the book again. 

###

Hadley thought the hunt for the count was the most exciting part of the novel. Lucinda disagreed. She liked to read over and over again about Jonathan Harker’s encounter with the vampire brides. 

“Do you suppose he likes those women, Hadley?” she asked one afternoon, addressing him as though he were suddenly an expert on the desires of men. “Or is he only afraid of them?”

“Both, I think.”

Lucinda fanned her face. “Fear
and
passion? At the same time?” 

“And don’t forget shame,” Hadley said. “If you ask me, Harker doesn’t seem very proud of himself for liking those brides.”

“No wonder he goes mad.”

“No wonder,” Hadley agreed. “I’d rather be Quincey.”

Quincey P. Morris, a slang-talking American, was Hadley’s favorite character in the book. 

Lucinda laughed. “Don’t be silly. No one runs their teeth languorously over Quincey’s skin.”

“No, but Quincey has a bowie knife.”

“Oh, Hadley.” She sighed. Quick as that, it was clear that he was no longer any sort of expert. “You are a baby, aren’t you? One of these days I’m going to have to show you what’s really important.”

The next afternoon, Lucinda stroked the back of Hadley’s neck while he read, the sharp sickle of a lone fingernail dipping down the collar of his shirt to circle the bump at the top of his spine. For a full hour, he didn’t dare move a muscle for fear she’d stop circling. When the last page was done, he closed the book, bent forward, and pressed his lips to the toe of Lucinda’s shoe. 

Slowly, fearfully, he turned his face and looked up at Lucinda.

“Read it again,” she said. 

###

Hadley celebrated his seventeenth birthday with a surprise smooch delivered courtesy of the new upstairs maid, a girl by the highly promising name of Ethel Lewse. Ethel grabbed him from behind while he was fishing Mr. Browning’s 14 karat gold money clip out of the toilet bowl. Shortly after Lucinda spied the two of them locking lips on the wet bathroom tiles, she gave Hadley a little parchment card with a private birthday message written inside: 

Come to the attic at three a.m. to receive your special gift.

Hadley tip-toed up the butler’s stairs at exactly five till three. His plan was to act like a sleep-walker if anyone caught him up and about. 

Mama barely moved a muscle when he slipped out of bed. She could be suspicious as a fat turkey invited to Thanksgiving dinner, yet she never worried about Lucinda. Lucinda was a Browning; Hadley, a Crump. What could there possibly be to worry about? 

At the end of the hall behind a door with a glass knob was the attic. Moonlight snuck in from a fan-shaped window overhead, striking the knob and scattering tiny bright rays in a dozen different directions.

He made his way with careful, silent steps, expecting a bedroom door to fly open at any second. The staff was not allowed to step silently past bedroom doors at three o’clock in the morning. Hadley could lose his job. He could lose Mama’s job, too. 

The noises were different than the noises one heard in the kitchen at dawn. Snores blasted out of nowhere. The purposeful tick of the clock in the front hall transformed into the gnish-gnash of ratchet teeth chewing forever on the same black moment without going anywhere. Blocks away, a pack of dogs began to bark indignantly. The knob winked at him from across a vast continent of mattress creaks and phlegmy breathing. By the time he reached it, his palm was too slick to turn the thing. 

Panic rose in Hadley’s chest. What if instead of finding his heart’s desire waiting for him in the attic, he found a note written in flower-dotted letters informing him that he was too witless to be in Lucinda’s club? The mere thought of it froze him with indecision. The clock seemed louder. Faster. It was hard to think. Somewhere in the night, a dog tore something into pieces. Hadley used his shirttail to twist the doorknob and prepared himself for disappointment even as he hurried up the stairs.

Indeed, the attic appeared empty. An octagonal beam of white light streamed across the floor. In the beam sat an old velvet lounge like the one Harker described in his journal. 

“Lucinda?” he whispered. “Are you here?”

No one spoke. 

He ran his hand along the spikes of velvet, stirring up little blooms of dust with his fingers. A ceramic clown with a cracked eye watched him from the top of a paint-chipped wardrobe while a beach umbrella poked at his ankle with its rusted tip. There were stacks of photographs, old sewing patterns, and shiny new hatboxes stacked everywhere. And there were mirrors. Too many mirrors. Mirrors enough to scare you with your own warped reflection. 

There was no note.

Hadley checked his daddy’s pocket watch. It was a few minutes after three. Maybe Lucinda was having a hard time sneaking down that long hallway? He sat on the lounge and leaned back. What if she’d been caught? What if he was about to be caught, too? He leapt at every little sound, but nothing came of them. He watched the dust motes to see if brides would appear. At some point, his heart rate slowed, and he drifted off to sleep. 

He dreamt that Lucinda came to the attic with a boning knife hidden in the folds of her dress. “Time for another pact,” she said. “What shall we cut this time? . . . ”

When something touched his leg, he jumped awake. 

His first thought was that it was the knife. Then he was sure it was Mr. Browning. Then he was sure it was Dracula. 

It was Lucinda. 

Her hair hung in buttery waves around her face, and her lips were red as red can be. Hadley was about to ask what she put on them to make them so red when he realized she was wearing a nightgown with nothing underneath. She smiled and gave his knee a squeeze. Something was hanging around her neck. It twirled and caught the moon, blinding him and making him squint. Beneath the dreamy trail of her hand, his muscles tensed like two-by-fours. 

“Relax,” she whispered.

Hadley rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t stop staring at Lucinda. She looked so different. 

“Don’t you like me like this?” she asked.

His thigh tremored beneath her fingers. “I like you,” he said. When she touched her mouth to his, Hadley smelled peach blossoms out of season.
This is it,
he thought.
At long last, my life is about to start.

“You’re shaking, Hadley. Are you scared?”

Hadley wasn’t scared. He longed to grab Lucinda and pull her down on the lounge with him. 

“Such wicked passion,” she said, clucking her tongue. “You ought to be ashamed.”

Hadley wasn’t ashamed either. He would have married Lucinda in an instant, if that was what she wanted. But she only wanted him to want her.

Her hot tongue-tip wiggled up the hill of his Adam’s Apple and glided down the other side. “Hadley,” she said. “You look good enough to eat.”

There was something in those bright blue monkey-flower eyes that did, at last, put the fear of God in Hadley. Quick as that, her necklace arced past his face and tore into his neck. It was the tiger tooth. 

Jesus God!
he thought.
She gonna kill me for kissing Ethel.

Lucinda’s mouth slid in the blood as she tried to seal the gash with her lips. Before Hadley could fully grasp what was happening, she began to suck.

“What’re you doing?” he said, kicking his feet and trying to squirm away. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”

Lucinda sucked harder, as if she knew differently. 

In his frantic mind, he saw himself pressing his forehead to her forehead over a beloved book. He felt her fingers running circles around the knobs of his spine. He smelled her flowery skin. Hurting him on his birthday after their first kiss was a betrayal worse than any other he could imagine. It sickened him. 

“I know you, Hadley,” she said, scrapping his hair up in her fist and drinking more deeply. “You matched me breath for breath when they put their teeth on him.”

“That wasn’t real, Lucinda.”

“It is now.” She looked him straight in the eye, her red lips redder than before thanks to the smear of his blood. 

“But you’re hurting me,” he said. 

Lucinda smiled. “I know.”

When she did it again, a terrible fire branched out beneath his skin, knotting and sluicing like an extra set of veins. That his first taste of pleasure should come amid such exquisite pain confused his every nerve. He bucked away from it. He bucked against it. Fight or give in, these strange veins of pain found new places to rush and surge and flood. Lucinda clamped down on his neck so hard, she sucked him straight through to the other side of hell . . . and that place wasn’t hell at all.

It was hell’s opposite. 

###

Hadley was in bad shape. No matter how carefully they bandaged his throat, his skin split open if he moved at all. 

“I might die,” he told her testily. It was the next day and they had gone into the smokehouse so Lucinda could try to stop the bleeding. The darkness smelled of blood and ham. Worse still, Lucinda’s nursing was about as gentle as a cat hauling.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” she said, poking the wound with rough fingers. 

“
I’m
dramatic? You know, most people make love
differently, Lucinda.”

“How would you know? Anyway, we aren’t
most
people. Oh Hadley, just thinking about it . . . have you been thinking about it?”

Heck, if he could think about anything else.

A slant of sunlight squeezed in through the door, and Hadley watched Lucinda’s tongue flicker along her lip. “All this blood is making me want to do it again.”

“We better not,” he said, but he leaned forward and kissed the spot her tongue had just wet.

Lucinda peeled back the bandage and ran her teeth up and down his neck. Hadley began to shake. He didn’t understand what was happening to him. Lucinda’s painful affections made him feel special, but they also made him furious. On the one hand, she was letting him kiss her now and that was very nice. On the other, he’d been bleeding steady for a full day. 

This could not be good.

Her mouth sought out his cut and kissed it softly. The spot was so tender with pain, Hadley felt like he might pass out. She need only pull a few sips into her mouth, and he was on his knees, hurling once more into that bright and blinding place on the other side of Hell. 

That was how he thought of it, for surely the tortuous heights she brought him to could not be the Pearly Gates. God played no part in such a soul-wrecking act. There could be only one explanation then: Lucinda was sending him to an eviler side of hell. And Hadley realized that he liked it too much to make her stop.

###

In the following days, his neck failed to heal because neither of them could leave it be. Lucinda said she craved him and Hadley, who had never been craved by anyone, could not help but respond with a mix of dread and ecstasy.