Page 12 of Hunger

I want to. The wanting is a physical thing, a pulling under my skin. I want to brush the hair back from her face. I want to press my hand to her cheek and feel her warmth. I want to put my mouth against her temple and breathe her in.

I don't touch her.

I look at her hands instead. Her fingers are long and careful even in sleep. The nails are short and unpainted. There's a thin white scar on the back of her left hand near the knuckle of her index finger. I don't know where it came from. I'll know one day. I'll know everything about her one day. The thought arrives without warning, fully formed, and I don't flinch from it.

I look around the room. There are clothes on the floor. A stack of textbooks on the desk. A mirror on the dresser. In the corner of the room, leaning against the wall, there's a black case. Rectangular. The corners gone pale where they've been knocked. It's the wrong shape for almost anything except the one thing it is. I don't let myself look at it for long. It belongs to her. She hasn't opened it in some time. The film of dust on the latches tells me that.

I look back at her.

The faint light from the streetlamp shifts. A cloud moving outside. Her face goes dark for a moment and then light returns.She sighs in her sleep and turns her face into the pillow, and her hair shifts loose against her jaw.

I stay there on my knees for a long time. The humidifier hums. The wind outside picks up and presses against the window glass. Her breath rises and falls.

When the sky begins to lighten in the east, I rise.

I don't touch her.

I close the window behind me, easing the latch home, and I climb down.

I have to deal with the body before the sun comes up.

I walk back toward the mall through the empty streets. The desire is still in me. It hasn't lessened. The thought of her face in the dim light has gone somewhere in me where I can't reach it to dismantle it.

I don't want to dismantle it.

Chapter Four

Farkas

Tammy walks across the parking lot at nine-twelve, hunched into her red coat against the wind. She has a habit I haven't noticed before — she touches her car keys to her lips before she puts them in the lock. A small, private gesture. A prayer or a superstition or both.

I take her before she can turn the key.

I don't pull her into the alcove or put my hand over her throat. I step out of the dark behind the Oldsmobile and I'm beside her before she registers me, and I cover her mouth with my palm gently and lower her to the ground beside the rear tire of her own car.

"Be still," I say, quietly, against her ear. I haven't spoken in many months. The sound of my own voice is strange to me. "Be still. You won't be hurt."

She's rigid. Her eyes are wide. Her breath is fast against my palm.

I don't let her see my face. I keep behind her. I tilt her head to the side and find the artery beneath the line of her jaw and I open my mouth and I take what I need.

The blood comes warm and quick. She slumps against me. Her body goes loose. I hold her up so she doesn't strike the asphalt.

Her memories open.

I reach.

This is what I came for. I'm not interested in her boss or her son or her husband from many years ago. I push past the surfaces of Tammy's mind and I begin to search.

She knows Jenny.

She knows her better than anyone. She's worked beside her for eight months. She's watched her come in tired and leave tired. She's been the one to ask her if she's eaten and to push her about her family and to make her laugh on slow Thursday shifts.

I see Jenny through Tammy's eyes again and again. The two of them behind the counter. The two of them in the parking lot at the end of a shift. The two of them in the breakroom, Jenny picking at a sandwich she didn't want, Tammy watching her without seeming to.

There's more.

Conversations. Small fragments. Jenny sayingI dropped out two years ago.Jenny sayingMy father is a doctor in Omaha. My mother is a nurse.Jenny sayingLin. L-I-N.Jenny sayingUniversity of Nebraska. The Lincoln campus.Jenny sayingI don't want to talk about it.Jenny shutting down a conversation she'd started by accident.