Page 48 of Hunger

She's in only the black tank top now, the strap of which is still down off her shoulder.

I sit back on my heels for a moment and I look at her.

The pale length of her body in the dim light from the window. The spread of her hair beneath her. The curve of her breast where it has come free of the cloth. The flat plane of her stomach. The dark thatch at the center of her, where the heat of her is greatest. The pale soft skin of her thighs.

She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

I've seen the great cities. I've seen the snow on mountain ranges in the dawn light. I've seen things no one alive remembers. None of them are this.

"Farkas." Her voice is faint.

I move.

I lower myself between her thighs and she opens for me without thinking. The heat of her against my face is overwhelming. The smell of her — the deeper smell, the smell of her arousal, the clean wet sweet smell of a body that wants what's about to be given to it — fills my senses.

I lower my mouth to her.

The first contact of my cold mouth against the warm soft heat of her tears a cry out of her, louder than any sound she's made. She claps her own hand over her mouth a half-second too late to catch it. Her hips lift toward me, chasing the cold, and under my palms the long muscles of her thighs have begun to tremble.

I use only the soft parts of my mouth. The flat of my tongue. My lips. Not my teeth. Never that. I taste her. The salt and the sweet and the warm wet heat of her against my mouth, the faint drumbeat of her pulse beneath the skin at the inside of her thigh where my long fingers are pressed.

She comes apart faster than I expect.

It happens in waves. The first one is slight. Her body tightens beneath my mouth, her breath catches, her hips jerk. I don't stop. The second is larger. Her hand in my hair tightens until it's almost pain, and her thighs press together briefly against my shoulders. She makes a high, pretty sound. Wanting.

I don't stop.

Her body opens beneath me — her hips lift up, her back arches off the mattress, her hand comes off my wrist for the first time since she grabbed it and rises into the air above her head and falls onto the pillow beside her face. She's making sounds I've never heard. She's taking what I'm giving her. She's giving herself in return, fully, without anything held back.

When she goes still it's sudden. The body that was tight beneath my mouth softens all at once and the sound she was making fades into a long soft exhale and her hand in my hair loosens.

I lift my face from her.

She's looking at me.

Her face is flushed and her hair is damp at the temples. She's breathing like she's been run to ground, her chest heaving, her pulse still loud enough that I can hear it from here. Her eyes are dark and fixed on me, full of something I don't have a name for.

"Come here," she says.

I go.

I rise from between her thighs and I move up the bed. She turns toward me, her warm body curling around mine. She lays her hand against my chest, over the thin cloth of the coat I haven't taken off, and she closes her eyes.

I put my arm around her.

I don't know how to do this. I haven't held a body to mine in a millennium. But she fits against me as if she's been made for it, and her warmth presses into my side. After a moment of stillness, I lower my face into her hair and close my eyes.

She's asleep within minutes.

I don't move. I lie beside her with her warm body against mine, her breath against the cloth of my coat, her hand on my chest. I listen to her heart slow. I listen to the rhythm of her breathing change from the post-sleep waking of a woman who's just been brought through what I've brought her through to the deeper softer breath of sleep.

I stay.

I stay for hours. The wind is up outside the window and the curtain moves slightly in the draft, and the streetlight throws its pale strip across the floor and partway up the wall. I don't move. I don't want to move. I've been waiting for this for two weeks, for centuries before that, for a thing I didn't know to wait for, and now it's here. Her body is against mine. Her name is in her mouth in her sleep — she murmurs something I can't make out and I think for a moment it might be my name, but I can't be sure.

The dark begins to thin in the east.

I don't want to leave.