CHAPTER 29 #2
He lifts the shift over my head, the way he lifted my camisole on the night of the first feeding, except slower, because we are not in a hurry tonight, and because he is, I think, marking the gesture for himself.
He folds the linen once, twice, and sets it on the bedside chair.
The cobalt pin and the brass pencil are visible from the corner of my eye on the bedside table. The rest is firelight.
He puts me on my back on the white linens. The wool blanket is folded at the foot of the bed in case we want it later. The pillow under my head is the one he has used since 1982; the case is white linen; the linen smells faintly of him.
He kisses the freckle at the corner of my jaw.
I have known, since the first kiss in the library, that he wanted to put his mouth there.
He has had his mouth there twice — once at Ch 7, once at Ch 17 — and tonight is the third time and the last in the inventory of want; after tonight the freckle is part of him, claimed.
His mouth is cool at the lip and warm at the breath.
The kiss is a press of weight on weight.
"I love you, Quinn," he says, low.
I have heard him say it once aloud — the threshold speech in Ch 17, the third thing. I have heard him not say it three other times when he was saying it. I have held the four uses in my hand for ten days like coins I did not spend.
I say: "I know. Say it again at the end."
His mouth moves against my jaw, the lower lip flexing once. He is smiling. I have seen him smile once before, in the library on Christmas Eve, and that was the second time in the book; this is the third.
He kisses me at the mouth. His tongue is cool until he warms; I open for him; he is in.
He is careful at first because he has been careful with me since the night the cobalt pin was on the lobby floor in Ines's blood, and I lift my hand to the back of his head and press his mouth deeper to tell him: stop being careful tonight. He stops.
He kisses me the way he kissed me on Christmas Eve after Hawkes had signed and the audit was finally in mortal record — slowly, with intention; the kiss of a man who has been carrying a ledger for five hundred years and has just set it down.
His hand at my hipbone. His knee between mine.
He kisses down the line of my throat, careful at the right side where the bite-bruise from Ch 17 is gone but the skin remembers; he kisses the bruise-that-isn't; he kisses my sternum; he kisses my left nipple and then the right, slow, the cool of his mouth lifting the skin into pink; he kisses the underside of my left breast where my ribs lift; he kisses the small soft of my belly; he kisses my hip; he kisses the inside of my right thigh.
He comes back up. He puts his mouth at the freckle once more. Three times tonight. He is keeping count of his own gestures.
He enters me slowly.
I am wet from anticipation; I have been wet since I stepped out of the bath.
He goes in inch by inch and I am open for him and I take him to the depth where my body opens against his hipbones, and he stops there at full depth, his weight on his forearms above me, his face six inches from mine, his pale gray eyes fixed and the pupils blown wide already — from this, from me.
He waits a beat at full depth.
His mouth at my throat.
---
## Julian — 16:30
The bite was a discipline. He had bitten her once before, at the carotid line on a Friday night in December, and he had drawn forty milliliters in the longest minute of his life.
Tonight the target volume was thirty; the discipline was the same.
He had been emptied of thirst since six this morning, by Helene's protocol, so that the bite would be a ritual exchange purely. He was steady. He was very steady.
He opened his mouth at the right side of her throat at the carotid line.
The saliva enzyme worked at the surface receptors the way it had the first time — the dilation that was both anesthetic and amplifier; the puncture a slow drawing pressure under the surface.
He set his upper canines through the dermis and waited for the body's yes before he drew.
She arched once under him; her hands at his shoulders. Yes.
He drew.
The first swallow of her blood was the warm-iron clean of her — her A-negative, her one in fifteen, the type the cold-vault databases had been hunting for him since 1924 and that had walked into his boardroom on a rainy Thursday in a dove-gray suit.
He drew a slow mouthful. He counted in his head: ten milliliters, twenty, twenty-five.
He had been counting milliliters since 1547.
The count was a way of staying inside the body of the man he was; the count was a rope. He drew the last five.
She came on the bite. Her hips lifted against his.
The clench of her around him was the first orgasm of the night and it was almost silent — a single hard exhalation against the side of his face, her left hand at the back of his neck, her right hand fisted in the sheet beside her hip.
She came once, hard, and her body shuddered the long shudder of a body that had been waiting for this for ten days and had not let on.
He released the bite. He did not lick it closed yet. The puncture was small; the blood was sealing already at the dermal edge under the saliva enzyme; he had time.
He lifted his head.
She lifted his left forearm to her mouth.
Her eyes on his.
He nodded.
---
## Eliza — 16:42
The brand is on the inside of his left forearm.
Four inches, six-spoked, the silver wheel of the Order of the Wheel, burned into him on a Compostela morning four hundred and seventy-seven years ago by a priest with a heated convent coin.
I have seen it twice. I have kissed it once. I have not bitten it.
Tonight I bite it.
I lift his forearm to my mouth. The skin of the brand has been silver-gray and dull every other time I have seen it.
Tonight it is paler than that and almost warm, almost pink at the rim, as if a thing that has been ice for five centuries has decided to be metal again — and metal, before it is ice, is the temperature of the hand that holds it.
I meet his eyes.
He nods.
His pupils are black to the rim. He is at the edge of his own discipline, and he is not asking me to be careful. He has waited five hundred years for a mouth that would put teeth on this scar in love. He waited for mine.
I close my teeth on the brand.
The silver scar tissue of the wheel is hard.
My teeth — human teeth, A-negative blood, twenty-nine years old, the molars and canines my mother paid the orthodontist for in 2008 — close on the scar.
I bite down. My jaw aches once, the way it ached when I bit through the apple skin at the bottom of my eighth-grade lunch.
The scar tissue yields. The scar tissue yields. Yields.
It bleeds.
Red.
Red. Human red, where the silver of the suppressed wound should have been, where the dull lymph-shine Helene described to me on Sunday should have surfaced.
The red of a body that has decided, after five hundred years, that the wound is allowed to be a wound.
The red wells at the four punctures my teeth have made on the inside of his forearm; it pools across the silver scar tissue of the wheel; the wheel goes dark for the first time. Six spokes flooded with red.
The blood is in my mouth.
His blood. Darker than mine; denser; the iron taste foreign at the first beat — like a coin warmed in another hand and pressed against my tongue — and then in the second beat the iron taste is clean copper-warm, the same warmth as the rim of a kitchen pan after the stove has been on.
I swallow once. Ten milliliters. I swallow again.
Twenty. Helene told me to count in my head; she did not need to; my body counts.
I swallow the last ten and the volume is thirty.
I close my mouth on the brand and I hold.
His blood is in me.
My blood is in him.
His weight at full depth inside me.
The clasp closes at the sternum.
It is a small clean shut of a thing that has been open.
Helene had given me the medical word in English — closure — and the Italian — chiusura — and the operational metaphor, which was hers, the clasp at the sternum.
I had nodded politely on Sunday morning and made a note.
The note was insufficient. The clasp closes at the sternum of both bodies. I feel it in mine.
I feel it in his — a second click, a beat-and-a-half after mine, the way two locks turn in a single door. The cold his body has carried since 1547 has been a draft under the door. The door closes. The draft stops.
He says, low at my ear: "Yes."
I say, lower than that, against the inside of his forearm: "Yes."
He finishes inside me at the closing. The pulse of him against my walls is the second click of the lock.
I come a second time at the closing — a slower wave than the bite, deeper, that lifts at my hips and travels up the spine and breaks at the sternum at the same point where the clasp has closed.
I come around him and on him and through him.
My mouth is on the brand. His blood is in my mouth.
We are still.
---
## Julian — 16:57
He had no name for what had just happened.
He had read the council's medical formula, in three languages, since 1924; he had attended two bond ceremonies in person and four by witness-record; he had known what the clasp at the sternum meant the way a sailor knew what the bell at four meant. Knowledge had not prepared him.
The cold under his sternum that had been the resident of his body since 1547 was gone.
Gone in a single quiet shut. The brand on his forearm was not cold.
The brand was warm, the way a wound is warm when it has begun to heal — the small competent heat of new tissue at work.
He could feel her teeth-marks at the rim of the wheel.
He could feel the red of his own blood on her mouth against his skin.