Chapter Twelve
Jenny
I wake Sunday morning alone.
The bed is empty beside me but the impression of his body is still there in the sheet, a long cold-warm shape where he lay against me through the night. I lay my hand against it. The sheet is cool but not cold. He's been gone for a while.
He kissed my forehead before he left. I remember the cold press of his closed lips against my hairline in the gray of dawn. I don't remember much else of the last hour I slept, but I remember that.
I lie in bed looking at the ceiling for a long time.
Lisa's door is closed. She came home at some point in the night and I didn't hear her come in. Dee won't be back today — Sunday is Kevin's day, and she won't surface until Monday afternoon when she comes to get clean clothes.
I get up.
The apartment is quiet. The radiator clicks. The thin gray light of a winter Sunday morning fills the kitchen. I make coffee and eat standing at the counter the way I always do.
I don't call my mother.
I'll see her next Sunday. I mailed the postcard. The thought of her opening it sometime this week — the soft sound she'll make when she reads it — sits in my chest in a small warm place that I haven't had a small warm place for in a very long time.
I shower. I don't have to shower — I showered last night before he came — but I shower anyway, slowly, and when I get out I wrap myself in a towel and sit on the closed lid of the toilet for a while, looking at my own reflection in the steamed-over mirror.
There are faint marks on my throat. Not bruises. Lighter than that. The cool ghost of his mouth, maybe — places where the cold pressed into my warm skin and left a faint lingering paleness behind. I touch them. They aren't sore.
I'm sore in other places. Soft sore. Used.
I dress in soft clothes. The black tank top from last night. A pair of loose linen pants. No bra. The fabric of the tank top brushes against the places where his cold mouth has been and the sensation runs through me sharper than I expect.
I take the violin out of the case.
I sit on the rug beside it and I tune it carefully, and I rosin the bow, and I begin to play.
I play scales first. I'm better than I was a week ago. The fingers aren't stiff anymore. The shifting is smoother. I work through scales in three keys, then arpeggios, then double-stops. The motion is settling back into my hands. The training hasn't left me. It's been waiting.
I work through pieces. Bach first — the short preludes from the Sonatas, the ones I learned at thirteen. The Wieniawski I played at sixteen. The fingering comes back in fragments. Things I haven't thought of in years rise out of my fingers and into the room as if they were never gone.
I don't look at the clock.
I'm hours into it when I start the Meditation from Tha?s.
I don't decide to start it. The piece begins under my fingers on its own.
The opening D, the slow rising line, the bow drawing across the string in the long sustained way Massenet wrote — it begins, and I keep going, and I haven't played this piece in three years but I don't need to remember it. It's in me. It's part of how I'm made.
I play the whole of it.
I miss notes. My fingers are still rusty. The shifting in the high passages is uncertain and I stumble on the cadenza. But I play it. I play it for the first time since I stood on the stage in the dark dress and my father stood up in the audience when I was done.
When I finish the room is full of the silence the piece leaves in its wake. The same silence the auditorium had. The same long-held quiet before anything else.
There's a sound outside the window.
I lower the violin.
I cross to the window. The curtain is drawn but I push it aside, and the late afternoon light comes in across me. The sky outside is the color of old gold. The sun is low. It must be an hour from setting.
He's on the ledge.
He's crouched on the four-inch ledge outside my window with his back against the brick and his face turned away from the sky.
The daylight catches him fully. His gray skin is paler than it was last night.
The shadow under his eyes is darker. He looks worn.
He looks reduced. He looks like a creature of the dark caught in a place he wasn't built to be.
He has come to me in the day.
He's chosen to be in the place where he's weakest, on the ledge outside my window in the late afternoon, because the night before I told him to stay and he couldn't wait to see me again.
I unlatch the window.
I push it up.
"Come in."
He moves slowly — slower than he moved last night — and he steps through the window into the room and closes it behind him. He turns to face me.
I see him.
I see him in daylight for the first time.
The gray of his skin isn't uniform. There are paler patches where the skin stretches over bone, darker places where shadow has settled into the hollows.
His face is long and lean. The cheekbones cut high.
The mouth is wide. The eyes are the same solid black they were last night, but in this light I can see the shape of them more clearly — the long slant of them, the way the lashes are pale instead of dark.
His hair is dark brown going gray. It's thin and uneven, untended for a long time. His brow is heavy. There's a thin scar at the corner of his jaw — old, a thin pale line — and another at his temple.
He's taller than I remember. He has to bend his head slightly to clear the ceiling near the window.
I'm not afraid of him.
I'm not even surprised by him. I've already seen him in the dim light of moonlight, and what I see now in the sun is the same creature in better detail. Nothing has changed. Only my ability to see has changed.
I step toward him.
He stays where he is.
I close the distance between us. I lift my hand and I lay it against the gray of his cheek.
The skin is cold. Smoother than I expected.
There's a faint texture to it under my palm, like fine paper.
He's gone still under my hand. He's letting me touch him.
He's waiting for me to do whatever I'm going to do.
I rise on my toes.
I press my mouth to his.
The kiss is the first kiss I've given anyone in two years. His mouth is cold. His lips are thin. They part slightly under mine, as if he's unsure what to do with them — as if he's letting me lead because he doesn't know the right way to do this and has decided to follow.
I open my mouth.
I press my tongue against the seam of his lips. He parts them for me. My tongue slides into the cold of his mouth and the strange wrong heat of nothing — there's no warmth in him, anywhere — and I feel them.
His teeth.
They're sharp. They're sharper than human teeth and there are more of them. The shape of them isn't the shape of teeth I've known. I touch the edge of one with the tip of my tongue. The point of it is fine, narrow, the kind of edge that'd cut.
It does.
I feel the sting an instant before I taste the iron. A bright pain at the tip of my tongue. The taste of my own blood — copper, warm, the wetness of it spreading into his mouth.
He groans.
The sound isn't the inhuman broken sound he made last night.
This is different. This is a sound of being struck.
It comes from somewhere deep in his chest and it shudders out of him into my mouth and his hands rise — they've been at his sides this whole time, his hands have been still at his sides — and they come to my face and frame it, gently, the long cold fingers holding me as if I'm a breakable thing.
He kisses me back.
He does it carefully, careful of the teeth.
He moves his mouth against mine and his cold tongue against my warm tongue and he doesn't let the teeth touch me again.
He's been waiting. I can feel it. He's been holding the wanting back at the door for a thousand years and now I have unlocked it and he's shaking against me.
I pull back from the kiss.
His eyes are open. His face is inches from mine. He looks at me with the look of something that doesn't know what to do with what it's been given.
"Take off your clothes," I say.
He moves.
He does it fast. There's no hesitation in him now.
The coat comes off first — long, dark, the kind of coat I've never seen up close — and he lays it carefully across the back of the chair at the desk.
The shirt under it is also dark, and he draws it off over his head in one motion.
The trousers and the boots. The undergarments.
He does it all in less than a minute and then he's standing in the late afternoon light in the middle of my room, naked, looking at me.
I look at him.
He's long. He's lean. His ribs are visible beneath the gray skin and the bones at his hips are sharp. His shoulders are wide and the muscle on him is the long stringy kind of a man who was made for endurance, not for show.
His body is covered in scars.
There are dozens of them. They run across his chest and his stomach and the long lines of his thighs.
Some are slight — the white pinch of an old healed cut.
Some are larger — the broad uneven puckers of wounds that should have killed him, that did kill him, that left their record in his flesh when he rose from whatever he rose from.
There's a long deep one across his sternum that splits his chest from the hollow at the base of his throat to the bottom of his ribs.
His hands hang at his sides. The long fingers curl loosely. The claws at the ends of them are the same pale gray as his skin, slightly translucent at the tips.
Between his thighs he's a man.
He's hard. He's human-shaped where a man is — long, paler than the rest of him, the same lean line of his body. The strangeness isn't in this part of him. The strangeness is everywhere else.
I take him in.
I take all of him in. The whole long gray strange beautiful frame of him. The creature he is. The man he was. The both of him standing in my room waiting for me to decide what to do with him.
I take a step toward him.
I touch his chest.