For Whose Dear Sake
I remember it well, the night I met him and the darkened tavern, small and close-confined by twentieth century standards.
I didn't think it was confined then, of course. Nay, or dark. Why, there were tapers aplenty on the twelve long pine tables, casting their flickering light upon drunkards and bawds and the sweating, hard-working serving wenches.
The tapers must have been made from old bacon grease. The lingering smell of their burning mixed with the scent of scorched mutton fat from the carcass roasting over the broad hearth at the back. Through it all, the smell of sweaty bodies and the reek of old, spilled ale wove, like a familiar thread.
I remember all this now. Back then I didn't think about it. Unwashed bodies were the norm, aye, and bacon tapers too.
Besides, I was too excited, rushed, feverish, almost drunk with my own triumph and the unaccustomed setting.
I was a Cambridge divinity student, and I'd come up to London without permission from my masters. Having finished my English translation of Ovid's Amores, I had received enough gold with it to buy a second-hand suit — dark velvet slashed through at the sleeves to show the flame-colored silk commonly called harlot leg, all of it ornamented with more golden buttons at sleeve and down the middle of the doublet, as I'd never seen together in one place before. In a fit of daring, I'd allowed a friend, Tom Watson who lived in London and wrote plays for the theater, to dye my mouse-brown hair to a deep auburn, with ill-smelling henna.
And I had enough money left to buy my supper at a tavern, though a dubious, low-class tavern where writers and actors gathered and such that my pious father — a cobbler and a lay deacon in Canterbury cathedral — would have shuddered to think of my frequenting.
Which was what made my pulse race and my own daring sing like sweet music upon my ears and dazzle, like intoxicating wine, within my veins.
I sat at that tavern table that night and wished for something to happen, something.
It did.
On my second cup of ale, my second bite of stale bread that yet tasted better than anything I could buy in Cambridge buttery, I felt a hand on my shoulder, heard a deep, masculine voice behind me. "Master.... Marlowe? We have common friends."
I turned and beheld the most unusual man I would ever meet in the centuries of life that waited ahead of my unsuspecting self.
He had an elongated face, almost Italian, I'd say.
More Italian yet was the feeling of secretiveness about it, the feeling of closed knowledge that made my pulse pound. I thought of what I'd heard of the city-states of Italy, their murderous feuds, their efficacious secret poisons, their instructed, enlightened leaders who murdered with a smile and stole with a kind word and always, always ended up as the victors. His long face, with its heavy-lidded eyes, reminded me of an inscrutable saint glancing out of a darkened portrait.
He wore a beard, close-trimmed to a point, and a short moustache. Beneath it, his skin was an odd tone of ivory, as if it had been designed to be swarthy but its owner had kept out of the sun for too long. Not to mean he looked unhealthy. His dark-brown eyes shone with enough vitality to shame the most athletic dancer, the most exalted athlete.
I realized I'd been staring into those eyes, and that my pulse had quickened and my face flushed.
The stranger smiled at me, without opening his broad, sensuous lips. "May I sit down?" he asked, looking significantly at the seat next to mine.
"Yes. Yes," I answered, my voice breaking as it hadn't in years.
"Thank you.” He sat down with easy elegance, which made the gesture seem like he'd accepted a throne instead of a poor tavern bench.
He tapped the thick white ceramic mug in front of me and wrinkled his nose.
"Thin ale, master Marlowe?" he asked.
I nodded, not knowing what else to do. Thin the ale might be, but it had more alcohol than anything I'd ever tasted at Cambridge or in the poor, Puritan household to which I'd been born. Enough alcohol to turn my head.
My new friend lifted a hand and, as if he'd shouted or thrown gold, a wench appeared, smiling at him.
"Get my friend some cherris sack," the stranger said. "And make it good."
"Sir," I said, the title coming easily to my tongue. He had all the demeanor of gentility about him. "Sir, it's not needed."
I'd never tasted cherris sack — that fine Spanish wine — before, nor did I know how my brain would react to it.
Already, the thin ale and this man's presence seemed to be acting together to intoxicate me. He smelled of sandalwood, I thought. As he turned to look at me, the black curls that fell to his shoulders moved, revealing a very small golden ring on his left ear lobe.
"You will like it," he said, and smiled again, his closed-lipped smile that seemed to hint at secrets and vast, unfathomable knowledge. "I promise you that."
The wench brought a pewter cup filled with red liquid, and he pushed the cup in front of me. "Try it," he said.
You'd think him the serpent tempting Eve. Yet, when I tasted the cup no lightening bolts flew from heaven, no enraged God expelled me from paradise. Not then. Not yet.
The wine filled my mouth with a taste similar to honey but full of alcohol like mead, and I drank it down in a surprised gulp, then another.
My companion smiled. "I told you you'd like it," he said.
I took another sip. My head swam. "You said we had common acquaintances," I said.
He grinned, his close-lipped grin. "A master Watson told me about you. He said you're a most pious divinity student.” An unholy amusement danced in his deep, dark eyes.
The thought that he was laughing at me, at my chosen course of study, filled me with a need to explain. "I'm a scholarship boy," I explained. "My only chance for attending university was to promise to take orders. It is a condition of scholarship."
He was quiet then, and looked at me for a long time, his dark, dark eyes unreadable. "Really?" he asked at last. "Really? And had you not gone to University, what would you have become, Master Marlowe?"
"A cobbler," the word escaped my lips. I would have called it back if I could. I wanted anything, but for this stranger to look at me with the scorn that better-born, students reserved for my origins. I felt my blood flame into my cheeks, but my mouth would not be stopped. "A cobbler like my sire."
He laughed then, throwing his head back. "A cobbler? No. I cannot see you as a cobbler."
He raised his hand again and commanded the wench to refill my empty cup.
The evening slid into a confusion of strong, sweet wine on my tongue, and the stranger's arm encircling my back, the stranger's hand supporting me.
I don't remember leaving the tavern. I don't remember paying.
But I remember the dark interior of a carriage, trundling at full speed on a rutty road, and my new friend sitting by my side on a narrow bench, speaking of Dante and Machiavelli and the lights of the Italian renaissance that shone upon the world in such a dazzling way that they eclipsed the old incense-scented mustiness of the church.
I made what answers I could. I remember that too. I tried to speak knowledgeably, though my head was by then whirling around, with a mingle of the wine I'd drunk, and this man's nearness.
The latter puzzled me, as no man had ever made my pulse race. Nay, no woman either. Raised carefully by a father who wished me in the church, I'd grown up in a world of intellect, quite unused to the pleasures of the flesh.
But something to his smell of sandalwood, something to his soft, glossy dark curls, the velvet of his jacket, even his dark beard intoxicated me. Now and then, when he leaned close to talk to me his hair or beard tickled my own cheek where beard was only starting to appear and made my mind tread upon unwonted pathways and my body tense with an energy I knew not how to release.
Yet he seemed impressed by my barely rational responses. He leaned close and whispered in my ear, "Ah, we are kindred minds, Master Marlowe."
His breath tickled my ear, warm and intimate. I looked out of the corner of my eye, and saw his great dark eyes very close to mine.
For a moment I thought he would kiss me. My vision blurred, while my mind argued, in confusion, that carnal knowledge of another man was illegal, that it could bring death on both of us. Yet, my body desired it oh, so very much.
But he withdrew and presently the carriage stopped. "I believe this is where we part, Master Marlowe."
I felt tears prickle, hot behind my eyes. The wine I'd drunk, the sensitivity of every sense brought on by the man's proximity, filled me with maudlin emotion. "Kit," I whispered. "Call me Kit.” And then, with eager, unstoppable passion, "When will I see you again? I don't even know your name."
He laughed again, his laughter metallic and cold, like a dagger glinting in the moonlight, and yet as coldly sensuous, as coiling and unavoidable as a snake's passion.
"You will see me again, and call me Will. It's as good a name as any," he said. He took my wrist, then, and traced a circle around it with his index finger, slowly.
It shouldn't have been a sensuous gesture but it was. My body responded to it as if he'd embraced me, entire, as if he'd claimed me for his own.
I heard a soft mewl escape my lips, and saw in his eyes an amused sense of mastery. He stopped, with his index finger over my wrist. "You will see me again."
He lifted my wrist to his lips in a sudden movement, and his lips touched my skin. They were very cold, and yet acted upon my body like flame.
My mouth fell open, my jaw went slack, and my eyes half-shut with the pleasure of that small touch.
The mischievous dark eyes smiled at me over the slightly-too-aquiline nose.
A quick pain surprised me, like twin lancets piercing my wrist, but before I had time to wonder at it, pleasure surged through me such as I'd never felt.
My spine arched, my mouth opened in inarticulate scream, breath caught in my chest, sweat sprang at once from all my pores. My mind stopped.
When I became aware of my surroundings again, the stranger had let go of my wrist and watched me with amused, benevolent eyes. A high flush tinted his cheeks.
"I'm sorry," I said, thinking only I'd disgraced myself with my reaction to his caress.
He smiled. "Nothing to be sorry for, little one.” His hand caressed my newly dyed hair. "Nothing at all."
And like that, the door to the carriage was opened by a coachman and I stepped down on shaky legs. The door closed, the carriage started again, and I was left standing, dazzled and weak, beside a high wall.
In the state I was in, I'd have been neither surprised nor shocked had my seducer let me out in the middle of unpopulated land, as easy prey for highwaymen. But he'd left me beside the gates of Cambridge, and I hastened through them and into my lodgings.
***
I woke up the next morning with my head pounding, my throat dry and my roommate, Marcus Helkins, lecturing me on the sins of wine and loose women.
For a moment I almost laughed and threw his own folly in his face, for I remembered well that no woman had been involved in my sins.
But I was fortunately too tired and too sore to speak.
I'd slept in my shirt and, lumbering up, I slipped into the drab puce wool suit that I wore to classes in Cambridge.
Remembering the night past, I thought what a fool I'd been.
No doubt, my handsome Italian stranger had emptied my purse in the carriage. I could find no other reason for his kindness to me.
But when I checked the purse, I found it overflowing with coin. That and the two, small scabs on my wrist were the only reminders of my night of madness.
And yet already, less than one day past, I longed to see him again.
***
I did not see him for three months. Three months, slowly counted with agonizing monotony.
And then, late at night, while returning from a solitary walk around Cambridge, dreaming of dark strangers and their profane love, I heard a carriage behind me.
Instinctively, with the training of a plebeian boy, I stepped out of the way and knit myself with the wall to allow the wealthy burgher or mighty nobleman to drive by, unmindful of my presence.
But the carriage stopped right beside me. It was a strange carriage, unmarked, with no crest on the door or the dark curtains that veiled its windows. The coachman too was dark and turned his face away from me, as I looked up at him.
The door to the carriage opened. "Kit," a voice all velvet and sandalwood called from the shadows within.
I leapt up on the step. I rushed inside the carriage.
He was inside and received me with open arms, enveloping me in a tight embrace.
That night I knew sins that I lacked names for — all of them pleasing, all of them sweet, all making my body sing and my heart rejoice.
I don't know how many hours I remained in that carriage, nor how far we drove through what must have been country roads.
The carriage jolted and bounced beneath. I knew not where we drove. And yet, I'd never felt so safe and never so happy, naked and innocent in my lover's arms.
After a long time, I sat beside him, naked, his arms still wrapped around me. He wasn't naked and the feel of his velvet sleeves around my naked torso made me shiver — a hot shiver like a feverish seizure.
"Listen," he said. "Listen. You must listen. Last time I took what I shouldn't have, without your permission or your consent. But now I must ask. I am a man like you, Kit, or I was once. I was born long ago--"
"In Italy," I whispered dreamily.
He chuckled and tightened his arms around my body. "No Kit. When I was born Italy didn't exist. Nay, nor Rome. Not even Egypt had grown from a cow-herder outpost to her fabled glory. I was born in a land whose name has been forgotten, as a fisherman's son."
I looked at him, not knowing which should shock me more, that this sophisticated, obviously refined creature was a fisherman's son, or that he claimed to have lived since before Rome.
"How I lived to the age of twenty two matters not. But at twenty two I met a man — he was powerful and rich and worldly, and he told me if I let him drink my blood and feed on me as men feed on meat, he would make it so I'd live forever."
I drew breath and it hurt to breathe. "Forever? But how...."
"Some say we are the spawn of Lilith, the first wife of Adam, that she had sons with that power and the capacity to make the sons of Eve like them. But I don't know. I've lived long enough to doubt Lilith and Eve, and even...it matters not. Whatever we are, we are immortal, provided only we forsake human food and human sun, and feed on the blood of mortals.” His hand, soft and gentle, caressed my hair. "Only uncover your neck and let me feed on the fountain of life there.” His long fingertip trembled, poised over the large vein on the side of my neck. "And after a while I'll perform the ritual that will make you one of us. Then shall we live together for all eternity."
Eternity, and his touch. How could I say no?
My auburn hair had got loose from my pony tail. I reached back and pulled it away from my neck.
"Take what you need," I said.
How can I describe it -- the sweet, impossible pleasure of his teeth on my neck, his tongue lapping at my blood?
Mere physical sensation could not contain it, nor could words encompass it.
It felt as though time had stopped and the world shrank and upon it, enthroned, the two of us reigned as kings — no, as immortal gods.
***
Thus started the sweet years, the happy years, when we lived for each other and thus, twined, seemed to be united for all eternity.
He didn't perform the rites of immortality upon me, but it signified little. I was in no hurry. He said he loved the life in me.
He would always arrive unexpectedly and always at night. When he arrived, whenever and however, I would always be happy and grateful to see him. Even if only a few days had passed since I'd last seen him, it always felt like much too long.
I missed more classes than I should have and, with him, I visited Paris and Venice. He taught me their tongues, also, and Spanish, in long, laughing sessions in his well-appointed rooms in London.
When my graduation came up and I was told that I would not be allowed to receive my Masters degree without taking orders, he told me he would take care of it, and — behold — a letter arrived to the college, from the Queen herself, demanding that I be allowed to graduate with no requirements.
Done with my studies, I lived in London, in Will's rooms, like a drunkard locked in a wine cellar.
The more I had of him the less my satiety and the more enslaved I became.
I loved all about him: his touch, his looks, his soft lips and the fangs beneath.
I can't even tell when he began to be tired of me. I can only say that his eyes stopped shining softly when he looked at me, that his lips no longer sought mine at every moment. Rather he kissed me as a man who, absent, performs an obligation while his mind wanders.
I was then twenty-two and had lost the soft innocence of youth, or even that counterfeit of innocence which youth gives.
***
The boy was young. Probably sixteen or seventeen, thickset, straw-blond, with large, bulging blue eyes. He looked like — and probably was — a farm boy come to London to look for his fortune.
Will had got him stumblingly drunk before he brought him up the stairs to our lodging.
I was in the other room, waiting for Will who'd gone out carousing, visiting taverns, watching bear baiting or cock fighting or some other blood sport. I'd attempted to cool my blood with reading, yet the dullest sermon couldn't stop the pounding in my veins and my longing for him.
I heard the sounds from the bedroom and — aghast — came upon them on the bed, together, locked in embrace, Will's lips on the farm boy's neck.
It is customary, I believe, for mortal lovers of mortal men in such situations to fetch a dagger and kill both offenders. But my lover was not mortal, nor was I his equal.
As rage thundered to my brain so did a strange, resigned submission. He preferred someone else to me, and I should rejoice in his choice for it was for my master's pleasure.
Master.
This was the first time the word crossed my mind and, searingly aware of his power for the first time, I stood in that room in with its brocade-curtained bed, its walls hung with ancient portraits, its every space crammed with priceless antiques.
I stood, and watched Will make love to another, and felt, with shuddering disgust, the completeness of my servitude.
For even then I wanted him, even then I would have done all to have his lips at my neck, his fangs in my veins.
Now and then he looked at me and smiled, an assured smile, as though he knew.
Of course he knew.
Afterwards, when they lay, sweaty and sodden upon the bed, he'd gestured for me, "Kit," he said. "Bring Richard some wine."
And I'd fetched the wine, obediently, for this creature who'd stolen my lover, already knowing that this was not the only one or the last.
Though my heart broke at the thought of leaving Will, I knew I must.
***
The next morning, I left with my meager possessions, sold the few jewels Will had given me during the happy times, and arranged to share rooms in Southwark — the vast, new slums of London — with a starving playwright named Tom Kyd.
And, by necessity and economic imperative, soon I was writing plays like Kyd's. Or not like Kyd's, for mine contained the cold-blooded cruelty I'd tasted at a remove, the swiftness of change, the treacherousness of emotion, all played out upon a stage where God was blind, and no moral right prevailed.
Strangely, my blank verse fell upon London ears like music, and my plays and poems were sought and praised by all. I was proclaimed the Muses' darling, the greatest poet of the age.
And through it all, even when I stood in a tavern receiving the congratulations of the better minds, my body pounded with need, with remembered craving for those fangs that pierced my heart, those hands that could touch my body with the knowledge of centuries, the soft black curls tickling my face, the immense, all knowing, secretive eyes in which I could drown.
Soon it was noticed that in taverns or brothels, Kit Marlowe remained alone, and people whispered about me and sneered behind their hands at this playwright who obviously preferred painted boys to women.
Not that Will had abandoned me completely. Like a child with a no-longer-prized toy that yet he can't allow to go to another child, he would come and see me, once every few months. Just enough to rekindle the fires, just enough to prove to himself that he could set my soul aflame with a single touch.
And yet I wrote, and in the writing I found a palliative and consolation for Will's absence and sometimes when he visited I didn't offer myself quite so eagerly, didn't seek his attentions with the desperate hunger that he expected — or at least I disguised that hunger when I felt it.
It was one of those days, standing in my small room, looking out my unshuttered window at the pouring rain, that he said, "I think I will write plays, Kit."
I stared at him, uncomprehending.
"If they can like of your rough constructions, they'll love mine," he said, and grinned. His fangs glinted by the moonlight.
Kyd was away for the night, I didn't know where. Will always arranged for Kyd to be gone when he visited, though I knew not how he did it, since pious, credulous Kyd would not know something like Will. His bed, empty in the moonlight, made me think of how famous, how big Kyd had been — how his Spanish Tragedy had been thought the best theater could achieve, until my play — Tamburlaine — knocked his castle into ashes.
Will laughed, softly. "If your plays can bring you such pleasure, I must try them. It ought to be easy for me."
Easy for him and soon, soon, my supplanted plays would be forgotten.
"Perhaps I owe it to the name," Will said. And looked at my blank face, with a small, sly grin. "I met Will Shakespeare while you were at Cambridge. Just before I met you. An aspiring playwright, newly come to London, having left wife and children in Stratford-upon-Avon. I seduced him. It wasn't hard. But he broke too easily. He submitted too completely. One day, by accident, I drank too much. I drank too deep. He died in my arms.” Will grinned at me. "I took his name, and perhaps I should ensure his name is indeed on playbills."
He smiled at me, but all I could see was that other Will Shakespeare, the real one, dead so long ago and no one knowing, dead of those glittering fangs, those soft lips, that lapping tongue.
I envied him most heartily.
***
Will did write plays, of course. He was not a man to threaten in vain. And he knew how much pain he could extract from my defeat, and how I'd berate myself in silence for my loss.
But he didn't know what force remained in me.
Nor did I.
His taking over the stage and taking from me the one consolation for my dreary existence, woke me as from a long dream into a naked, relentless nightmare.
I could no longer go back home. My taint was obvious, or so it felt. I had been marked by the creature of the night. My father would sense it in me, hear it in my every word.
I could not take orders. That too had been stolen by my immortal lover.
As for the poetry that had so relieved my fears and my boredom and allowed me enough to live on, that too was now gone, sneered at, disdained by theater owners when compared to Will Shakespeare's immortal poetry, his fiery words that compassed all stations in life, all times, with the same graceful ease.
Oh, sometimes he got confused. It's too easy, as I've found, to get confused when you've lived those many centuries. Cities and names ran together in his plays, centuries overlapped.
But, thought by thought, his characters ran true, and word per word his words glittered while mine fell to earth like dull pebbles.
Desperate, insane with rage and jealousy and envy, I plunged into a world of intrigue, a world of espionage. I spied on the Catholics for the Queen, on the Queen for the Catholics, on the Scots for the Spaniards and on the Spaniards for the Scots.
I need not say more. It is in all the history books; look it up. The miserable years, the arrests, the assassinations, the plots. All with which I tainted my soul and in which I wallowed like a pig in the mud that yet cools not its hide.
Late at night, in taverns, I started speaking. I hardly know all I said, but it was enough, should a government informer have taken it down, to convict me many times over of many crimes.
Will didn't come to see me after six months. Nor a year. Nor a year and a half.
Once, at a theater, I glimpsed him sitting beside a fair, delicate youth in expensive velvet, and smiling and laughing upon him. But when I climbed up the steps to those seats, they were not there. He'd spotted me and left.
I drank more and more and, maddened by wine and loneliness, I started talking of the things Will had told me — the drinking of blood, the civilizations that men knew nothing of and that extended far beyond the church-approved six thousand years Earth was supposed to have existed.
My madness had its effect. He came for me.
In an alley, late at night, while I staggered home, full of wine and dizzy with my own pain, I found strong arms around me. "You shouldn't have talked, Kit," he said.
I felt his lips at my neck, soft fangs piercing my skin, and I thought to die of bliss and to faint of terror.
I knew, oh, I knew full well that he would drain me empty of blood, drain me dead as he had that Will Shakespeare whose name he'd taken.
But I didn't care. Or maybe that was what I'd longed for all along. To die in bliss, in my true love's arms.
My sight blurred, my legs grew week. Only his strong arms held me up, while my life passed onto his tongue, onto his well beloved body, and the smell of sandalwood surrounded me in an aromatic dream.
He would have killed me then, I knew it, but, at the very edge of death, while my breath labored in and out of my chest, I heard steps and a voice calling, "Holla, what's here?"
Will turned around. He said something.
He let go of my neck. I felt unbearable loneliness as I fell to the ground, the world growing dim around me.
"Oh, y'll not fool us," one of the men's voices said. "You're a cursed thing, ye are."
They spoke in thick Scottish accents, and I know not who they were. But they told Will they knew all about his kind, that they'd been searching for him throughout London.
I don't know what happened next, or how he left them or them him.
I know I woke next morning, alone and half-dead on the mud of the alley.
How I made my way home, I do not know, nor can I describe how harsh sunlight felt in my eyes, how painful every step, how aching and horrible every breath.
In a well, in a courtyard, I drank three buckets full of water and poured the rest over my head.
Thus awakened, my preservation instinct asserted itself. I needed to get out of the country, go somewhere where Will would not think of seeking me out, find a different name, a different occupation, and be someone else. Someone else allowed to live a normal life.
Gathering what little money I had, in the safety of sunlight, I made my way to Mistress Bull's house in Deptford. This was a secret service safe house and there I thought to find some mission that would take me abroad.
I'd forgotten how brazen and how loose my tongue had got of late. I'd forgotten how dangerous I'd become for a branch of the government that thrived on secrecy.
Three men — Nicholas Skeres, Robert Poley and Ingram Frizer met me at that house, and engineered some plot, some appearance of a quarrel.
I only realized what was happening when my own dagger, in Ingram Frizer's hand, pierced my left eye.
I fell down dead — or at least was taken for dead by all, even the coroner who examined me.
***
I woke beside a grave, which two grave diggers were working, while talking humorously.
"I hear he was a poet, pray," one of them said. "Aye the toast of London."
"He doesn't look like a poet to me, for it is this, see, that all men in death are carrion."
I heard them, and realized they thought me dead.
My left eye was blinded, but out of the right I saw the night sky above, dark blue with pinpoints of stars.
I crawled away from my intended grave, wondering how I'd survived such a sure attack.
It wasn't till many weeks after, when my fear of light increased, my phobia of all food grew, that I realized what Will had done to me — draining me almost to death but not quite must be what I needed — what I required — to become a vampire.
I took my unwanted gift of eternal life and vanished.
***
These last four hundred years I've been rich and poor, powerful and powerless.
I've never been happy.
Oh, I'm immortal, but I never grew used to drinking victims' blood. I do it because I must as the dog must howl to the moon, but never have I found in it that satisfaction I felt when his teeth pierced my skin.
My longing for him is such that recently I've gotten careless. I've dyed my hair auburn again. I've allowed myself to be photographed in nightclubs and fashionable restaurants, allowed my chosen name to be bandied about in society, my address known.
I've even, with the excuse of a medieval fair, posed in renaissance attire.
Today all my efforts came to fruition. I got an e-mail from Will.
"Hello Kit," it reads. "Meet me in Stratford on Avon, Tuesday a week, by the tomb."
It's not signed, nor does it need to be. Amazing how vampires have adapted to new technology, and amazing how the computer's cold screen seems infused with Will's personality, his unwavering command.
I will go, of course, and by that tomb -- where, who knows which poor sod is buried under the name of Will Shakespeare — I shall meet my destiny.
Will shall come for me, and when he asks me to consent to his fangs in my neck, his lips drinking my life, I shall bare my neck, and I shall say, "Take all you want."
For what's immortality without joy, and what joy is there, if I can't be Will's?