Page 45 of Hunger

I dry my hair. I don't put on the T-shirt and shorts I usually sleep in. I pull on a black tank top and a pair of soft cotton pants, the closest thing I own to sleepwear that I wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen in.

I'm embarrassed even thinking the thought. I don't know what he wears, or if he wears anything, or if it matters.

I sit at the desk for a while. The violin case is on the floor where I left it. The rosin boxes are still stacked on the desk. The jasmine in its cup has lost the last of its petals — they're scattered around the base of the cup like yellow scraps of paper.

I look at the photograph of the cornfield on the spare postcards Lisa keeps. I look at the textbooks I should throw away. I look at the black stone he left on my windshield two weeks ago.

I turn off the lamp.

I get into bed.

I leave the curtain open tonight.

It's something I decided in the shower. The streetlight outside throws a pale strip across the floor and partway up the wall. The room isn't dark — it's dim, soft, the kind of light a person could see by if they wanted to. The kind of light a person could be seen in.

I lie on my back. My hands are at my sides. The blanket is up to my chest. My eyes are closed.

I wait.

He comes earlier tonight. I can feel the shift in the air before I've settled into the listening. The cold edge enters the room and it isn't slow — it's full presence, sudden, the air around me dropping a degree and then another and then another until the cold is the cold of him. He's here. He has come.

I keep my eyes closed.

The weight settles beside the bed. The mattress shifts under his weight where he kneels against it. I feel him close to me, as I have every other night, only tonight I'm ready.

His finger finds the strand at my cheek. Eases it away. The fingertip grazes my skin. Cold.

I open my eyes.

He freezes.

He's right there.

His face is six inches from mine. The dim light from the window catches him in fragments — the long shape of his cheekbone, the gray of his skin, the hollow above his collarbone where the loose collar of a dark coat hangs open. His eyes are black. Solid black. They catch the light with the faint sheen of an animal's eyes, reflecting it back without showing the pupil or the iris or any of the things human eyes show. His mouth is partly open. I can see the teeth.

I have time to be afraid. I have time. The information is there for me — the height of him, the wrongness of his proportions, the gray skin and the black eyes and the impossible long fingers and the teeth.

I'm not afraid.

He starts to pull away.

His weight begins to lift from the bed. The hand that was at my cheek begins to draw back. He's been waiting for me to scream, I realize — to recoil, to push him off, to make whatever sound a normal human would make at this moment. He's leaving before I can.

I reach up and grab his wrist.

The wrist is the wrist of something not a man. It's thin and long and the bones beneath the skin aren't arranged the way bones should be. My fingers close around it and they don't even meet on the other side. He goes rigid under my hand. I can feel the strength of him — I know if he wanted to, he could lift me off the bed without using any other part of his body — but he doesn't move. He's gone completely still under my grip.

"Stay."

The word comes out small. The voice of a person speaking into the dark again, but tonight the dark is right in front of her.

He doesn't move.

I don't let go of his wrist.

His eyes — the solid black of them — are fixed on my face. I can't read what's in them. I can only see that he's looking at me with a kind of intensity that no human has ever looked at me with. The look of a man gazing at the one thing he'd give up the world for.

"Stay," I say again. "Please."