Page 49 of Hunger

I have to leave. She doesn't know what the day will do to me. She doesn't need to see it. I want her to wake up alone and to lie in the bed for a moment touching the warm impression I've left in the sheet beside her, and to know that I was here and that I was real and that what happened was real, and to want me back.

I lift my arm gently from around her. I lift my body away from hers, slow, careful not to wake her. She murmurs something and shifts in her sleep and curls further into the warm place where my body was.

I look at her.

I look for a long time.

I lower my mouth to her forehead. I lay my closed lips against her skin. The warmth of her against my mouth one last time before I have to go.

I rise.

I cross to the window and open the latch.

The curtain is still open the way she left it. The dim morning light is finding the room now, just beginning. She's sleeping withher hair loose on the pillow and her hand curled where my body used to be.

I step out onto the ledge.

I close the window behind me.

I climb down.

I drive home through the gray of dawn. The sun is rising as I let myself into the farmhouse. I don't care. I sit on the floor of the room with no windows and I close my eyes and the smell of her is still on my mouth and the warmth of her is still in my chest and I don't know what I'm anymore.

I know what I'll be tonight.

I'll be hers.

Chapter Twelve

Jenny

I wake Sunday morning alone.

The bed is empty beside me but the impression of his body is still there in the sheet, a long cold-warm shape where he lay against me through the night. I lay my hand against it. The sheet is cool but not cold. He's been gone for a while.

He kissed my forehead before he left. I remember the cold press of his closed lips against my hairline in the gray of dawn. I don't remember much else of the last hour I slept, but I remember that.

I lie in bed looking at the ceiling for a long time.

Lisa's door is closed. She came home at some point in the night and I didn't hear her come in. Dee won't be back today — Sunday is Kevin's day, and she won't surface until Monday afternoon when she comes to get clean clothes.

I get up.

The apartment is quiet. The radiator clicks. The thin gray light of a winter Sunday morning fills the kitchen. I make coffee and eat standing at the counter the way I always do.

I don't call my mother.

I'll see her next Sunday. I mailed the postcard. The thought of her opening it sometime this week — the soft sound she'll make when she reads it — sits in my chest in a small warm place that I haven't had a small warm place for in a very long time.

I shower. I don't have to shower — I showered last night before he came — but I shower anyway, slowly, and when I get out I wrap myself in a towel and sit on the closed lid of the toilet for a while, looking at my own reflection in the steamed-over mirror.

There are faint marks on my throat. Not bruises. Lighter than that. The cool ghost of his mouth, maybe — places where the cold pressed into my warm skin and left a faint lingering paleness behind. I touch them. They aren't sore.

I'm sore in other places. Soft sore. Used.

I dress in soft clothes. The black tank top from last night. A pair of loose linen pants. No bra. The fabric of the tank top brushes against the places where his cold mouth has been and the sensation runs through me sharper than I expect.

I take the violin out of the case.