Page 32 of Hunger

I don't stir.

The window begins to gray at its edge. I rise. I look at her one more time — the dim form of her in the half-light, her body small under the blanket, her hair dark against the sheet.

I cross to the window. I open the latch and step out onto the ledge. I close the window behind me and climb down.

I walk to the van and drive home. The dawn is hard on me but I don't feel it as I have the last two mornings. I'm tired in a way I haven't been tired in centuries.

I sit in the room with no windows.

She thanked me.

I close my eyes.

I'll go back tonight.

There's no question anymore.

Chapter Eight

Jenny

I wake Thursday morning and the room is full of weak winter sun.

I haven't woken up to first light in months. My shift schedule has me out of bed before the sun comes up most days, and on the days when I sleep in I usually sleep through to noon and miss the light entirely. The thin gold along the edge of the curtain is a thing I don't remember the look of. I lie in bed letting it sit on my face.

I feel strange. It takes me a while to identify what the strangeness is, and when I do, I almost don't believe it.

I feel rested.

I'm twenty-three years old and I haven't felt rested in two and a half years. The feeling is so unfamiliar that for a few minutes I lie in bed and stare up at the ceiling. The deep weight of being tired that I've been carrying since the second semester of organic chemistry isn't in me this morning. My eyes don'tburn. My shoulders aren't knotted. I'm not bracing against the day before it's started.

I sit up. The blanket falls away. The cool edge that's been in the room every morning this week isn't in the room today. There's only the heat of the radiator and the thin gold light and the clean smell of my own room.

He stayed. The thought arrives before I can stop it. He stayed all night. That's why I slept like this. That's why I'm rested.

I don't know how I know it, and I have no proof. I have only the feeling of having been watched over by something that didn't want to be anywhere else.

I get up.

The violin case is on the floor where I left it last night, lid closed but not latched. The rosin boxes are stacked on the desk. The dying jasmine in its paper cup. The stone. The room looks the way it's looked for days.

I dress and stand at the window with my coffee, looking down at the parking lot where the new snow has crusted around the cars. The light is so pale it's almost blue.

I drive to the mall. The shift starts at noon.

Tammy is at the register when I come in. She's wearing the puffy red coat over her uniform because Dale has done his thing with the thermostat again. She looks up and her eyes narrow.

"What."

"What what?"

"You look different."

"I don't."

"You do." She tilts her head and studies me with the kind of slow attention she usually reserves for figuring out if Marcus islying about brushing his teeth. "You look — I don't know. Less dead."

"Thank you, Tammy."