As with many men’s first, I was in a state of euphoric confusion. Starting things off was a showing of human skulls. The stall tactic was excruciation itself, made only greater when they all found a way to tumble out of my fumbling arms. Aside from the stock insecurities of adolescence, the aroma of my lab—a thing I’d grown so accustomed to that my nose could almost omit decay—burst into my face as if it were the first time ever smelling a corpse. Surely, she would take flight up my stairs, this creature sitting on a table so covered in macabre. Most women would have stopped at the cellar door, yet she began to undress in the stench and shadow.

Never taking her eyes off of me, she undressed as she had so many times before.

Her buttocks rested on the edge of the table. Her dress was shed with the flick of a leg. Her arms were locked at the elbow, hands gripping the edge. Her mouth hung open, bee-stung lips moist and shining in the candlelight.

The candlelight itself; a thing between those shelves and pillars as familiar to me as portraits on a wall. On this night, though, the light gave birth to shapes that danced as if spectators to an enchantress…and me, standing awkwardly with a handful of skulls.

She curled a finger: come hither. I dropped the skulls again. My eyes were locked on a soft and sideways grimace. A faint patch of hair above it wanted to be smelled, and I walked closer, into the gap that her legs had made.

She gripped the back of my head with one hand and my small boyish buttocks with the other. “Show me you’re your father’s son,” she said, showing her teeth. As she pulled me closer I felt like an animal caught in one of my snares—almost.

Our lips met, and she had my trousers off and my horned member grasped before I could even realize her perfume didn’t overwhelm the odors that I’d momentarily forgotten. A cacophony of little pops and squishes erupted when I pressed her back against the table. I thought she was going to go berserk, but to my amazement, and to my delight, she smiled. We rolled off the table and onto the floor.

When our needs had been met, we stood up and looked at the other. She was still smiling; that girly side of hers having returned, save for the fact that she now looked like a recently feasted ghoul. I must have been a sight to see too, relishing the mixture of sex and death that was to become my adult life.