Page 44 of Hunger

I rise slow. I cross to the window in silence and work the latch. I look back at her once before I step out. She hasn't opened her eyes. Her hand is where I laid it on the blanket. Her chest is rising and falling.

I step onto the ledge and close the window behind me.

The cold of the December night is the cold of December. It can't reach me tonight. I'm full of her warmth. The sound she made is still in me. The taste of her pulse against my mouth is still in me.

I climb down. I walk across the lot. I drive home.

I don't go to the room with no windows when I get there. I can't sit. I can't still. I stand in the kitchen of the farmhouse with my hands flat on the table and I look at my hands for a long time. The long fingers. The claws. The pale gray skin.

These are the hands that touched her tonight.

She let them.

I don't know how to be the thing I'm becoming. I've been a creature alone for a thousand years and now I'm something else, something that's been let inside the small warm life of a girl in Nebraska, and I don't know how to do this, how to want her without taking.

I'll learn.

The dawn is coming. I can feel it. I cross to the room with no windows and I sit on the floor and I close my eyes and I let the day take me.

Behind my closed eyes, her hip is rising into my palm.

I have never had a thing to remember in the dark before. I have it now.

Chapter Eleven

Jenny

I wake on Saturday morning with the inside of my wrist still cool.

I know it can't be true. He left hours ago. The cold of his mouth couldn't have lasted through the night. But when I lift my wrist to my face and lay it against my cheek, the skin is cooler than the rest of me, and I don't know if that's real or if my body is keeping the memory of him in a place my mind can't reach.

I lie in bed looking at the ceiling.

I've decided.

I decided in the dark sometime after he left, while I was still listening to the wind against the window and replaying every place his hand had been on me. I decided and I didn't even know I'd decided until I woke up this morning and the decision was already in me like a settled stone.

Tonight I'm going to see him.

I get out of bed and move through my usual Saturday morning.

I mail the postcard to my mother on the way to work.

The shift goes by. Tammy is in a strange mood today — quieter than usual, watching me out of the corner of her eye. She doesn't ask. I'm grateful. There's nothing I could tell her.

Around five she leans on the prep counter and says, "Whatever it is, I hope it's making you happy."

"It is," I say.

She nods, slow, and goes back to the register.

We close at nine. Tammy walks me to my car. She doesn't normally do this. She lifts a hand at the Granada as I get in and stands at her own car for a moment longer than necessary, watching me start the engine. I wave at her. She waves back. She drives away.

The drive home is the drive home. The same streets. The same neighborhoods. The same buildings with the same porch lights on or off.

The apartment is empty when I let myself in. Lisa is at a study session at the library that meets until midnight on Saturdays. Dee is at Kevin's. They won't be home tonight. I have the apartment to myself.

I shower again. I don't know why. I shower again and I scrub my hair and I rinse and I stand under the water for a long time with my eyes closed. I'm not nervous. I'm something else. I'm the way I felt at seventeen the night before my senior recital, when I knew I was going to walk out on a stage and play a piece I'd spent six months on and I had no idea how it'd go. The not-knowing was the whole feeling.