Page 46 of Hunger

He lowers himself back down.

The bed shifts again under his weight. His wrist is still in my hand. His face hangs just above mine. I can smell him — there's a smell, a faint clean smell, the smell of cold air and something like old paper, the smell of a thing that's been kept in a place where time doesn't move the way it should.

I look at him. Every part of him I can see in the dim light. The hollow at the base of his throat where the coat hangs open. His mouth. I look at the long fingers of the hand that isn't in my grip, the hand that's hanging in the air beside the bed.

I lift my other hand and I take that hand too.

I take both of his hands. I hold them in mine. They're cold and they're wrong — the proportions aren't right, the fingers are too long, the bones are wrong — but they're his, and they're the hands that have touched me, and I've wanted them on me for nights.

I bring his hand to my face.

I press his cold palm against my cheek.

A sound comes out of him. The same low broken sound from last night. The sound of a thing that hasn't been felt in a long time being felt.

I don't let go.

* * *

Farkas

She hasn't let go.

I can't move. The grip of her small warm hand on my wrist is the only thing in my mind. She's seen me — the full of me, the gray skin and the black eyes and the mouth and the teeth — and she hasn't screamed and she hasn't run and she hasn't let go.

She's looking at me.

I don't know how to be looked at. I haven't been looked at in millennia. There's been hunting and feeding and the long silence of being unseen at the edges of human places, but no one has ever turned their face to mine in a lit room and looked at me without flinching.

She isn't flinching.

She takes my hand. She takes both my hands. She lifts the one she holds and presses it against the warm skin of her cheek.

The cold of my palm against her warmth — the heat of her face filling my hand — I make a sound. I can't help it. The sound comes out of me low and broken, the same sound that left me last night when she arched into my touch, the same sound that doesn't belong to anything I've ever been.

She doesn't let go.

She turns her face into my palm. The soft press of her cheek into the curve of my hand. Her eyes close briefly and then open again and her eyes are on my face and she's looking at me, looking at me, like someone studying a thing she's decided to know.

"Who are you?" she says.

Her voice is quiet. She hasn't let go of my other wrist.

I don't know how to speak to her. I've given my voice to other women in the dark of their kitchens at midnight when I was about to take something from them. I haven't given my voice to a woman who was looking at my face and asking me my name.

"Farkas." The sound is rough in my throat. "Farkas. Your Farkas."

She tries the word.

"Farkas."

The sound of my name in her mouth — the soft Korean shape she gives the consonants, the lift at the end — the sound runs through me and lodges in the long quiet place at the base of me that has been filling for two weeks, and it gives way all at once.

I lean my forehead against hers.

I don't know I'm going to do it. The forehead is mine and hers is hers and the soft space between them is the smallest space I have ever shared with another body. Her warmth presses intome through the contact. I close my black eyes and the world contracts to the place where my skin is touching her skin.

She lifts her free hand and slides it into my hair.