Chapter Eleven
Jenny
I wake on Saturday morning with the inside of my wrist still cool.
I know it can't be true. He left hours ago.
The cold of his mouth couldn't have lasted through the night.
But when I lift my wrist to my face and lay it against my cheek, the skin is cooler than the rest of me, and I don't know if that's real or if my body is keeping the memory of him in a place my mind can't reach.
I lie in bed looking at the ceiling.
I've decided.
I decided in the dark sometime after he left, while I was still listening to the wind against the window and replaying every place his hand had been on me. I decided and I didn't even know I'd decided until I woke up this morning and the decision was already in me like a settled stone.
Tonight I'm going to see him.
I get out of bed and move through my usual Saturday morning.
I mail the postcard to my mother on the way to work.
The shift goes by. Tammy is in a strange mood today — quieter than usual, watching me out of the corner of her eye. She doesn't ask. I'm grateful. There's nothing I could tell her.
Around five she leans on the prep counter and says, "Whatever it is, I hope it's making you happy."
"It is," I say.
She nods, slow, and goes back to the register.
We close at nine. Tammy walks me to my car. She doesn't normally do this. She lifts a hand at the Granada as I get in and stands at her own car for a moment longer than necessary, watching me start the engine. I wave at her. She waves back. She drives away.
The drive home is the drive home. The same streets. The same neighborhoods. The same buildings with the same porch lights on or off.
The apartment is empty when I let myself in. Lisa is at a study session at the library that meets until midnight on Saturdays. Dee is at Kevin's. They won't be home tonight. I have the apartment to myself.
I shower again. I don't know why. I shower again and I scrub my hair and I rinse and I stand under the water for a long time with my eyes closed.
I'm not nervous. I'm something else. I'm the way I felt at seventeen the night before my senior recital, when I knew I was going to walk out on a stage and play a piece I'd spent six months on and I had no idea how it'd go. The not-knowing was the whole feeling.
I dry my hair. I don't put on the T-shirt and shorts I usually sleep in. I pull on a black tank top and a pair of soft cotton pants, the closest thing I own to sleepwear that I wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen in.
I'm embarrassed even thinking the thought. I don't know what he wears, or if he wears anything, or if it matters.
I sit at the desk for a while. The violin case is on the floor where I left it. The rosin boxes are still stacked on the desk. The jasmine in its cup has lost the last of its petals — they're scattered around the base of the cup like yellow scraps of paper.
I look at the photograph of the cornfield on the spare postcards Lisa keeps. I look at the textbooks I should throw away. I look at the black stone he left on my windshield two weeks ago.
I turn off the lamp.
I get into bed.
I leave the curtain open tonight.
It's something I decided in the shower. The streetlight outside throws a pale strip across the floor and partway up the wall. The room isn't dark — it's dim, soft, the kind of light a person could see by if they wanted to. The kind of light a person could be seen in.
I lie on my back. My hands are at my sides. The blanket is up to my chest. My eyes are closed.
I wait.
He comes earlier tonight. I can feel the shift in the air before I've settled into the listening.
The cold edge enters the room and it isn't slow — it's full presence, sudden, the air around me dropping a degree and then another and then another until the cold is the cold of him. He's here. He has come.
I keep my eyes closed.
The weight settles beside the bed. The mattress shifts under his weight where he kneels against it. I feel him close to me, as I have every other night, only tonight I'm ready.
His finger finds the strand at my cheek. Eases it away. The fingertip grazes my skin. Cold.
I open my eyes.
He freezes.
He's right there.
His face is six inches from mine. The dim light from the window catches him in fragments — the long shape of his cheekbone, the gray of his skin, the hollow above his collarbone where the loose collar of a dark coat hangs open.
His eyes are black. Solid black. They catch the light with the faint sheen of an animal's eyes, reflecting it back without showing the pupil or the iris or any of the things human eyes show.
His mouth is partly open. I can see the teeth.
I have time to be afraid. I have time. The information is there for me — the height of him, the wrongness of his proportions, the gray skin and the black eyes and the impossible long fingers and the teeth.
I'm not afraid.
He starts to pull away.
His weight begins to lift from the bed. The hand that was at my cheek begins to draw back. He's been waiting for me to scream, I realize — to recoil, to push him off, to make whatever sound a normal human would make at this moment. He's leaving before I can.
I reach up and grab his wrist.
The wrist is the wrist of something not a man.
It's thin and long and the bones beneath the skin aren't arranged the way bones should be.
My fingers close around it and they don't even meet on the other side.
He goes rigid under my hand. I can feel the strength of him — I know if he wanted to, he could lift me off the bed without using any other part of his body — but he doesn't move.
He's gone completely still under my grip.
"Stay."
The word comes out small. The voice of a person speaking into the dark again, but tonight the dark is right in front of her.
He doesn't move.
I don't let go of his wrist.
His eyes — the solid black of them — are fixed on my face. I can't read what's in them. I can only see that he's looking at me with a kind of intensity that no human has ever looked at me with. The look of a man gazing at the one thing he'd give up the world for.
"Stay," I say again. "Please."
He lowers himself back down.
The bed shifts again under his weight. His wrist is still in my hand.
His face hangs just above mine. I can smell him — there's a smell, a faint clean smell, the smell of cold air and something like old paper, the smell of a thing that's been kept in a place where time doesn't move the way it should.
I look at him. Every part of him I can see in the dim light. The hollow at the base of his throat where the coat hangs open. His mouth. I look at the long fingers of the hand that isn't in my grip, the hand that's hanging in the air beside the bed.
I lift my other hand and I take that hand too.
I take both of his hands. I hold them in mine. They're cold and they're wrong — the proportions aren't right, the fingers are too long, the bones are wrong — but they're his, and they're the hands that have touched me, and I've wanted them on me for nights.
I bring his hand to my face.
I press his cold palm against my cheek.
A sound comes out of him. The same low broken sound from last night. The sound of a thing that hasn't been felt in a long time being felt.
I don't let go.
* * *
Farkas
She hasn't let go.
I can't move. The grip of her small warm hand on my wrist is the only thing in my mind. She's seen me — the full of me, the gray skin and the black eyes and the mouth and the teeth — and she hasn't screamed and she hasn't run and she hasn't let go.
She's looking at me.
I don't know how to be looked at. I haven't been looked at in millennia. There's been hunting and feeding and the long silence of being unseen at the edges of human places, but no one has ever turned their face to mine in a lit room and looked at me without flinching.
She isn't flinching.
She takes my hand. She takes both my hands. She lifts the one she holds and presses it against the warm skin of her cheek.
The cold of my palm against her warmth — the heat of her face filling my hand — I make a sound. I can't help it. The sound comes out of me low and broken, the same sound that left me last night when she arched into my touch, the same sound that doesn't belong to anything I've ever been.
She doesn't let go.
She turns her face into my palm. The soft press of her cheek into the curve of my hand. Her eyes close briefly and then open again and her eyes are on my face and she's looking at me, looking at me, like someone studying a thing she's decided to know.
"Who are you?" she says.
Her voice is quiet. She hasn't let go of my other wrist.
I don't know how to speak to her. I've given my voice to other women in the dark of their kitchens at midnight when I was about to take something from them. I haven't given my voice to a woman who was looking at my face and asking me my name.
"Farkas." The sound is rough in my throat. "Farkas. Your Farkas."
She tries the word.
"Farkas."
The sound of my name in her mouth — the soft Korean shape she gives the consonants, the lift at the end — the sound runs through me and lodges in the long quiet place at the base of me that has been filling for two weeks, and it gives way all at once.
I lean my forehead against hers.
I don't know I'm going to do it. The forehead is mine and hers is hers and the soft space between them is the smallest space I have ever shared with another body.
Her warmth presses into me through the contact.
I close my black eyes and the world contracts to the place where my skin is touching her skin.
She lifts her free hand and slides it into my hair.
The hair on my head is thin and dark and uneven.
I haven't paid attention to my hair in a long time.
Her hand moves through it slowly. Her fingers come to rest at the back of my skull and they hold me there, gently, with the same kind of careful attention she's been giving me since she grabbed my wrist.
"Touch me," she says.