Chapter Ten
Jenny
I don't turn off the light when I come home from work on Friday.
I've been thinking about it all day. I've been thinking about what I'd do if he came tonight. I've been thinking about what I'd do if he didn't come.
I shower and change. At the desk in my room, I write my mother a postcard: I'll come for dinner next Sunday. I love you. I sign it. I'll mail it on my way to work tomorrow.
The clock on the desk says eleven-fifty.
I leave the lamp on a moment longer. I sit on the edge of the bed and I look at my own hands in my lap. They aren't shaking. They haven't shaken since Thursday. The shaking has been replaced by something else. A heat. A low steady thrum that lives in my chest and at the base of my spine.
I'm not going to pretend tonight.
I'm not going to lie there with my eyes closed and let myself believe I don't know what's happening. I know what's happening. I've known for a week. I'm tired of pretending I don't know.
I turn off the lamp.
The room goes dark. I get into bed. I lie on my back. The blanket is up to my chest. My hands are at my sides.
I wait.
* * *
Farkas
I rise at full dark and I'm already moving.
I don't sit or pause to think. The day was hard on me — the call to Whitfield in the gray dawn light, the long hours of the sun overhead, the kind of waking sleep that doesn't refresh me but only holds me until I can move again. None of it matters. The dark has come and I'm already in the van.
I drive to her apartment.
The lot is mostly empty when I park half a block down. I cross the street and the parking lot in the cold and I stop at the base of the southeast corner of the building and I look up.
Her light is on.
I have come this hour many nights now. The light is never on. The light is off and the curtain is drawn and she's in the bed by the time I climb.
Tonight the light is on.
I climb.
I don't go to the window first. I go to the ledge and I crouch on it.
The rosin boxes are gone. Have been gone.
Inside the room I can hear her moving. Soft sounds.
She isn't in bed. She's doing something at the desk.
I can hear paper rustling. The faint stir of someone awake at midnight in a quiet room.
I wait.
She moves to the bed. The light goes out.
I don't move. I crouch on the four-inch ledge with my back against the brick and I wait. The wind is cutting. The sky is enormous above me. I can wait. I've been waiting for two weeks. I can wait another half hour.
The minutes pass.
I hear her settle. I hear the slight change in her breathing as the waking version of her gives way to the listening version.
She isn't asleep. She hasn't been asleep before any of the last three nights I have come here.
She's in bed in the dark waiting for me, the same way I'm waiting on the ledge for her.
I work the latch.
The latch gives, and I'm inside. I close the window behind me.
The room is dark. She's in the bed on her back. Her hair fans dark across the pillow. Her breath is slow but not yet deep.
I don't go to the corner, or stand at the foot of the bed.
I go to her.
I lower myself to my knees beside the mattress as I did last night. The room is still and warm. I can hear her heartbeat. It's steady but quick.
I lift my hand, and this time I don't stop it.
The long fingers find the loose strand of her hair as they found it last night, and I draw it back from her cheek, the tip of one finger grazing the warm skin as it goes.
She doesn't wake. She doesn't move. She's waiting — I can hear it in the quick, shallow pull of her breath, in the heartbeat that hasn't slowed since I came through the window.
I turn my hand so the back of my finger is what touches her, and I trace the arc of her cheekbone, the soft hollow beneath it, the line of her jaw, and she tilts her face up into the contact, a plant turning toward light.
Lower, then. The skin of her throat is paler than her face, and when I lay my fingertip in the hollow at the base of it her pulse leaps against me, fast and certain, her whole living heart delivered into the pads of my fingers.
I follow the ridge of her collarbone outward, the bone rising and falling under the cloth as her chest lifts, her breath gone short, and I read the shape of what's happening to her as easily as a change in the weather.
I bring my palm to the center of her chest and lay it flat over the thin cotton of her shirt, and the drum of her heart comes up through the fabric into my hand, loud and quick and unhidden.
She isn't pretending to sleep. We both know it now.
My hand draws down the center of her, over the ribs that rise to meet it, to the soft place low on her stomach where the shirt has ridden up an inch, and the back of my finger finds the bare skin there — warm, impossibly warm, the heat of her gathering under my touch.
She makes a sound. Not a word — a caught breath, the kind a body makes when it's been touched in a way it wants and the thinking part of it has gone quiet.
The sound goes through me. I feel it in my ribs and in my hands and in the long centuries-cold place at the base of my spine where the wanting has been building for two weeks, and a sound comes out of me in answer before I know it's coming, low and broken, the sound of a thing that hasn't felt anything in a millennium suddenly feeling all of it at once. I'm ashamed of it. I don't stop.
My hand moves to her hip. I don't lift the blanket — I follow the curve of her through it, the dip of her waist into the swell of her hip, first with my knuckles and then with the whole length of my hand, my palm long enough to rest against the side of her thigh while my fingers curl over the rise of bone.
She arches. It's slight — someone not watching would miss it — but I'm watching every part of her, and I know the difference between her stillness and her wanting, and this is wanting.
Her hip presses up into my hand. Her chin tilts back.
The whole line of her body lengthens for me, asking.
I withdraw my hand and lean back out of the close warm space against the bed, and the cold of the room rushes in to fill it. She turns her face toward me, her eyes still closed.
"Don't stop."
Her voice is small — the voice of someone who's been holding the words a long time, speaking them into the dark without knowing if the dark will answer. I don't move. And then, lower: "Don't stop. Please."
I move.
My hand comes back to her hip and her body rises into it at once, already waiting for me.
The backs of my fingers find the curve of her waist, the rise of her ribs through the cotton, the soft underside of her arm where it lies against her side, and everywhere I go she leans into the cold of me as if it's exactly what she's been too warm for.
I'm careful. I'm terrified of the claws — I won't let the points of them near her — so I learn her with the backs of my fingers and the flat of my palm and the thin soft edge of my hand, the slight ridge of her hipbone, the soft weight of her breast through the shirt, the place where the muscle wraps the top of her ribs.
I don't go beneath the cloth. Not under the hem of her shirt, not past the band of her shorts.
The cloth between us is hers to lift, not mine, and she hasn't lifted it — but it doesn't keep me out the way I thought it would.
She's warm straight through it. The blood is moving under her skin and I can feel the heat of it everywhere I touch, and her breath is coming in careful, held exhales now, catching each time my hand finds somewhere new.
I find her wrist and lift her hand from the blanket, turning it over to the soft pale inside I've looked at for three nights and never touched, the faint blue veins close beneath the surface.
I lower my mouth to it. I don't put my teeth against her — I press my closed lips to the inside of her wrist and hold them there, and she doesn't pull away.
Her pulse comes through into my mouth, the whole alive fast warm drumbeat of her against my lips, and it's the closest I've been to a living heart since the night I rose from a field of the dead.
I could stay here until the sun took me.
I lift my mouth instead, and lay her hand down gentle against the blanket, and look at her in the dim light through the curtain — her mouth soft, her chest rising and falling, her eyes still closed for me.
I can't stay.
I want to. It's everything in the room. But I have crossed the boundary I set for myself two weeks ago and I have crossed it tonight, and I know what's on the other side of one more inch.
I know that if I press my mouth to her throat the way I want to, the warm pulse against my closed lips wouldn't stay closed.
I know what's in my mouth. I know what my teeth are.
I won't put my teeth on her. Not tonight. Not when she doesn't know what I am. Not when she hasn't seen me.
I rise from beside the bed.
I rise slow. I cross to the window in silence and work the latch. I look back at her once before I step out. She hasn't opened her eyes. Her hand is where I laid it on the blanket. Her chest is rising and falling.
I step onto the ledge and close the window behind me.
The cold of the December night is the cold of December. It can't reach me tonight. I'm full of her warmth. The sound she made is still in me. The taste of her pulse against my mouth is still in me.
I climb down. I walk across the lot. I drive home.
I don't go to the room with no windows when I get there. I can't sit. I can't still. I stand in the kitchen of the farmhouse with my hands flat on the table and I look at my hands for a long time. The long fingers. The claws. The pale gray skin.
These are the hands that touched her tonight.
She let them.
I don't know how to be the thing I'm becoming. I've been a creature alone for a thousand years and now I'm something else, something that's been let inside the small warm life of a girl in Nebraska, and I don't know how to do this, how to want her without taking.
I'll learn.
The dawn is coming. I can feel it. I cross to the room with no windows and I sit on the floor and I close my eyes and I let the day take me.
Behind my closed eyes, her hip is rising into my palm.
I have never had a thing to remember in the dark before. I have it now.