Insiders dish that after the cheating scandal with Rupert Sanders broke, Kristen confided to pals that the married man gave her more sexual pleasure than her live-in boyfriend of three years. —Star, print edition
Insiders dish that after the cheating scandal with Rupert Sanders broke, Kristen confided to pals that the married man gave her more sexual pleasure than her live-in boyfriend of three years. —Star, print edition
Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson had only just sat down to cocktails in the dining room of their friend’s Los Feliz guest house when the familiar electricity lit up between them. A selection of exotic hors d’ouevres were on the table, but Rob was the only tender morsel she wanted to feast on. It was good to see him. It had been a long while, with the tabloids playing fast and loose with their futures. Kristen had grown up under the spotlight’s glare, but it was nothing compared to the scrutiny of past weeks.
Now Rob was returned to her, nervously fidgeting in his seat, refolding his napkin in his lap. She felt her heart start to beat faster, her hunger rising at the sight of him. Kristen crossed her legs underneath the table to contain herself, reaching for the crystal stem of her wine glass. She tipped dark red liquid into her mouth and swallowed deep, taking long intoxicating draws.
“I’m so glad you called,” Rob was saying. “I knew you would. I told everyone else they didn’t know you like I do. Tell me all of this has been a lie and we can — ”
“Oh, Rob,” Kristen exclaimed, twirling the glass between her fingers. “Of course it is true that we are soul mates. How can it be otherwise?” They had met playing star-crossed lovers on a multi-billion-dollar movie franchise, their chemistry undeniable, their fan base insistent: The relationship must be real. They had adopted a dog.
“You must understand, Rob, darling, that I’ve been doing research,” she said. She gestured with the goblet in hand. “How can I play a vixen, if I do not know the part? How do I play a heartbreaker if I do not break hearts?”
Kristin leaned back. Rob had tilted in too close, and “that smell of someone you love” filled her flaring nostrils. She tried not to breathe him in, but it had been some days, and he was as intoxicating as her drink. He bore the fresh aroma of high tea. She could scent that he had been with no other since they broke up, since the pictures with Rupert first leaked. He was so resplendently innocent to her jaded gaze that she gaped at him, her signature apathy snapped.
“Let’s go to the bedroom,” she commanded, standing up. Alone at last in the guest house’s ecru-carpeted, neutral-walled, beige-bedspreaded master room (Hollywood people prefer blank décor, to match the vacancy of their souls and blond of their hair) Kristen came alive, pouncing on Rob. He was caught and met her, breathing hard. The muscles of his white marble shoulder ran together to a spot at the neck made for blood-sucking. Should she drink from him at last, tonight? She could hear the way blood was rushing under his skin, waiting for her to prick a vein.
Because the papers had it all wrong. All this time Kristen, not Rob, who was one of the undead, a shadow in the night, a vampire. Unbound by the laws of common man, unmoved by the courtesies of the day. Even as the bloodlust made her head spin, she laughed a little on the inside. The signs had been in plain sight all along: Her pale skin, her daytime bedhead, the fact that she never smiles and thus nobody knows what her teeth look like. Her famously hunched shoulders, curved from millennia of lying in coffin, because there are no lumbar-supporting Sleep Number mattresses for the undead. Who, other than a blood-starved desperate, would get in bed with weird old Rupert Sanders? His aged blood like a fine Cabernet to her. It had given her so much pleasure — better than anything Rob could give her, if only because she could not bear to steal her boyfriend’s vitality.
“Kristen, whoa,” Rob said, mouthing at her slight bosom. “Shouldn’t we talk about all that has transpired between us?”
She promised that they would, later, but now was about the pale sunless limbs of their bodies realigning and reacquainting with each other. Kristen kissed him deeply, then let her head fall back as his lips mapped a trail from her mouth to her shoulder, and beyond, lying with his tongue under her arm, under her arm, just the way she liked it.
She curved her arm up over her head and let him taste her there. He was lucky she was too far gone to bite him the way her teeth ached to. Their bodies remembered the way they had writhed again and again for the Twilight love scenes, so they tried to be more graceful than that. Kristen mounted Rob as Bella Swan would have climbed onto Jacob Black, had the narrative allowed it.
Tangled up together, they elected to stay together. It was good like this, with Rob grounded and Kristen attached at the throat; this is how they were meant to be. They slid together on the table, and she did not blood him, remembering all the reporters outside. She could have made him immortal, one to creep and crawl with the creatures of the night, but at the last she held off. She cradled Rob against her, the promise of their eternal love in the locket that pressed between their bodies, but she did not make him vampire. Not tonight. She would enjoy his puppy-dog eyes and sweet human purity a while longer.
He was relaxed by the end, chilled out, spread across the taupe damask sheets. “So we’re good for the press junket?” Rob murmured, lips to the pink shell of her ear, and she nodded against him. She fought down her inhuman hunger. Lived with it. Her Converse shoes were still on.
“We’re good,” said Kristen, hiding away her bloodlust; and they went toward the time of Twilight press together, as God and Joseph Smith intended.
Amelia Casey is a romance novelist. Her most recent book, Taken by the Highwayman, makes Lady Anabel Mayward quiver.
