Page 43 of Hunger

I have come this hour many nights now. The light is never on. The light is off and the curtain is drawn and she's in the bed by the time I climb.

Tonight the light is on.

I climb.

I don't go to the window first. I go to the ledge and I crouch on it. The rosin boxes are gone. Have been gone. Inside the roomI can hear her moving. Soft sounds. She isn't in bed. She's doing something at the desk. I can hear paper rustling. The faint stir of someone awake at midnight in a quiet room.

I wait.

She moves to the bed. The light goes out.

I don't move. I crouch on the four-inch ledge with my back against the brick and I wait. The wind is cutting. The sky is enormous above me. I can wait. I've been waiting for two weeks. I can wait another half hour.

The minutes pass.

I hear her settle. I hear the slight change in her breathing as the waking version of her gives way to the listening version. She isn't asleep. She hasn't been asleep before any of the last three nights I have come here. She's in bed in the dark waiting for me, the same way I'm waiting on the ledge for her.

I work the latch.

The latch gives, and I'm inside. I close the window behind me.

The room is dark. She's in the bed on her back. Her hair fans dark across the pillow. Her breath is slow but not yet deep.

I don't go to the corner, or stand at the foot of the bed.

I go to her.

I lower myself to my knees beside the mattress as I did last night. The room is still and warm. I can hear her heartbeat. It's steady but quick.

I lift my hand, and this time I don't stop it. The long fingers find the loose strand of her hair as they found it last night, and I draw it back from her cheek, the tip of one finger grazing the warm skin as it goes. She doesn't wake. She doesn't move. She's waiting — I can hear it in the quick, shallow pull of her breath,in the heartbeat that hasn't slowed since I came through the window.

I turn my hand so the back of my finger is what touches her, and I trace the arc of her cheekbone, the soft hollow beneath it, the line of her jaw, and she tilts her face up into the contact, a plant turning toward light. Lower, then. The skin of her throat is paler than her face, and when I lay my fingertip in the hollow at the base of it her pulse leaps against me, fast and certain, her whole living heart delivered into the pads of my fingers. I follow the ridge of her collarbone outward, the bone rising and falling under the cloth as her chest lifts, her breath gone short, and I read the shape of what's happening to her as easily as a change in the weather.

I bring my palm to the center of her chest and lay it flat over the thin cotton of her shirt, and the drum of her heart comes up through the fabric into my hand, loud and quick and unhidden. She isn't pretending to sleep. We both know it now. My hand draws down the center of her, over the ribs that rise to meet it, to the soft place low on her stomach where the shirt has ridden up an inch, and the back of my finger finds the bare skin there — warm, impossibly warm, the heat of her gathering under my touch.

She makes a sound. Not a word — a caught breath, the kind a body makes when it's been touched in a way it wants and the thinking part of it has gone quiet. The sound goes through me. I feel it in my ribs and in my hands and in the long centuries-cold place at the base of my spine where the wanting has been building for two weeks, and a sound comes out of me in answer before I know it's coming, low and broken, the sound of a thing that hasn't felt anything in a millennium suddenly feeling all of it at once. I'm ashamed of it. I don't stop.

My hand moves to her hip. I don't lift the blanket — I follow the curve of her through it, the dip of her waist into the swell of herhip, first with my knuckles and then with the whole length of my hand, my palm long enough to rest against the side of her thigh while my fingers curl over the rise of bone. She arches. It's slight — someone not watching would miss it — but I'm watching every part of her, and I know the difference between her stillness and her wanting, and this is wanting. Her hip presses up into my hand. Her chin tilts back. The whole line of her body lengthens for me, asking.

I withdraw my hand and lean back out of the close warm space against the bed, and the cold of the room rushes in to fill it. She turns her face toward me, her eyes still closed.

"Don't stop."

Her voice is small — the voice of someone who's been holding the words a long time, speaking them into the dark without knowing if the dark will answer. I don't move. And then, lower: "Don't stop. Please."

I move.

My hand comes back to her hip and her body rises into it at once, already waiting for me. The backs of my fingers find the curve of her waist, the rise of her ribs through the cotton, the soft underside of her arm where it lies against her side, and everywhere I go she leans into the cold of me as if it's exactly what she's been too warm for. I'm careful. I'm terrified of the claws — I won't let the points of them near her — so I learn her with the backs of my fingers and the flat of my palm and the thin soft edge of my hand, the slight ridge of her hipbone, the soft weight of her breast through the shirt, the place where the muscle wraps the top of her ribs. I don't go beneath the cloth. Not under the hem of her shirt, not past the band of her shorts. The cloth between us is hers to lift, not mine, and she hasn't lifted it — but it doesn't keep me out the way I thought it would. She's warm straight through it. The blood is moving under her skin and I can feel the heat of it everywhere I touch, and herbreath is coming in careful, held exhales now, catching each time my hand finds somewhere new.

I find her wrist and lift her hand from the blanket, turning it over to the soft pale inside I've looked at for three nights and never touched, the faint blue veins close beneath the surface. I lower my mouth to it. I don't put my teeth against her — I press my closed lips to the inside of her wrist and hold them there, and she doesn't pull away. Her pulse comes through into my mouth, the whole alive fast warm drumbeat of her against my lips, and it's the closest I've been to a living heart since the night I rose from a field of the dead. I could stay here until the sun took me. I lift my mouth instead, and lay her hand down gentle against the blanket, and look at her in the dim light through the curtain — her mouth soft, her chest rising and falling, her eyes still closed for me.

I can't stay.

I want to. It's everything in the room. But I have crossed the boundary I set for myself two weeks ago and I have crossed it tonight, and I know what's on the other side of one more inch. I know that if I press my mouth to her throat the way I want to, the warm pulse against my closed lips wouldn't stay closed. I know what's in my mouth. I know what my teeth are.

I won't put my teeth on her. Not tonight. Not when she doesn't know what I am. Not when she hasn't seen me.

I rise from beside the bed.