After the Awakening
This was after The Joy of Sex.
I already knew what my body could do.
Now I was learning what it could command.
It started with vampires.
Not the slick ones from TV or the melodramatic teenage heartthrobs that came later. These were Anne Rice's creations--drenched in velvet, speaking in riddles, moving through rooms like they'd been carved from silence.
I found Interview with the Vampire on a shelf I wasn't supposed to reach. A friend's older sister, maybe. Or an aunt's collection pretending to be literary when it was really devotional.
The cover was unremarkable.
But the words inside?
They crawled under my skin.
Devotion in the Dark
I remember the night I began it.
The room was cold. The hallway light cast shapes on the ceiling. I was cocooned in my blanket, the book balanced on my thighs, fingertips already tingling.
It didn't start with sex.
It started with need.
And that's what hooked me.
These vampires didn't ravish.
They chose.
With care. With gravity. Their gaze was a decision. Their touch, a sacrament. And the humans? They didn't resist because they were weak. They yielded because it was inevitable.
It wasn't about blood. Not really.
It was about surrender as design.
Louis, looking at the boy interviewing him--restrained, intense, almost tender.
Lestat, laughing--not out of joy, but out of dominance.
Claudia, tilting her head before she fed--like ritual, not instinct.
Every interaction felt like a chess move wrapped in silk.
And I read with my breath held, like I might miss something sacred if I blinked.
Not Fantasy--Recognition
I wasn't aroused in the way I would later come to understand arousal.
I was possessed.
The devotion.
The hunger.
The unbearable intimacy of being seen--and consumed.
They weren't monsters.
They were priests of longing.
And I wasn't reading them as fantasy.
I was reading them as prophecy.
I didn't want to be bitten.
I wanted to decide when to bite.
Even before I had words like "Domme" or "discipline," I knew: this world made sense. Not because it felt naughty. Because it felt true.
It wasn't the blood.
It was the obedience.
The choreography.
The language of restraint cloaked in desire.
That night, I read until my legs went numb. Until the blanket slipped from my shoulders. Until the candle I wasn't supposed to be burning drowned itself in wax.
And I still wasn't done.
Somewhere between Louis's confession and Lestat's cruelty, I had been marked.
Not as a victim.
As a curator.
Ritual, Not Chaos
Anne Rice didn't write kink.
She wrote devotion.
Her vampires didn't seduce. They watched. They chose. They moved with gravity. Every decision was weighted. Every glance, deliberate. Every silence, architectural.
They didn't fuck.
They fed.
But feeding wasn't survival.
It was communion.
There were no safewords. But there was structure. There was reverent intensity.
It was beautiful. But more than that, it was precise.
And in that precision, I felt something open.
They weren't chaotic. They were disciplined.
They didn't love without structure.
They didn't surrender without being shaped.
And what I craved wasn't chaos.
It was design.
Not submission for spectacle--
Submission for structure.
A gaze that could hold someone in place.
A voice that could direct someone's breath.
A silence that made someone ache before being touched.
Anne Rice gave me that.
She didn't call it Dominance.
But I saw it.
The Book Behind the Curtain
I heard about them in a whisper.
The same way girls whispered about blowjobs, or tampons, or what it meant when a boy "wanted to go further."
"They're not like regular books," someone said. "They're written by Anne Rice, but not under her name."
I stopped breathing.
That night, I scrawled the pseudonym onto a scrap of paper--A. N. Roquelaure--and tucked it into my notebook like contraband.
It took weeks before I found one.
A used bookstore. Dim. Dusty. The kind of place that smelled like typewriter ribbon and mildew. I didn't ask for help. I wandered until I found it:
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty.
My hand trembled as I pulled it from the shelf.
No summary. No image. Just a title. And a price tag.
I paid in cash.
Read it in one night.
Not fast. Not fevered.
Ritually.
From the first page, I knew:
This wasn't fantasy.
This was instruction.
