Page 51 of Hunger

I rise on my toes.

I press my mouth to his.

The kiss is the first kiss I've given anyone in two years. His mouth is cold. His lips are thin. They part slightly under mine, as if he's unsure what to do with them — as if he's letting me lead because he doesn't know the right way to do this and has decided to follow.

I open my mouth.

I press my tongue against the seam of his lips. He parts them for me. My tongue slides into the cold of his mouth and the strange wrong heat of nothing — there's no warmth in him, anywhere — and I feel them.

His teeth.

They're sharp. They're sharper than human teeth and there are more of them. The shape of them isn't the shape of teeth I'veknown. I touch the edge of one with the tip of my tongue. The point of it is fine, narrow, the kind of edge that'd cut.

It does.

I feel the sting an instant before I taste the iron. A bright pain at the tip of my tongue. The taste of my own blood — copper, warm, the wetness of it spreading into his mouth.

He groans.

The sound isn't the inhuman broken sound he made last night. This is different. This is a sound of being struck. It comes from somewhere deep in his chest and it shudders out of him into my mouth and his hands rise — they've been at his sides this whole time, his hands have been still at his sides — and they come to my face and frame it, gently, the long cold fingers holding me as if I'm a breakable thing.

He kisses me back.

He does it carefully, careful of the teeth. He moves his mouth against mine and his cold tongue against my warm tongue and he doesn't let the teeth touch me again. He's been waiting. I can feel it. He's been holding the wanting back at the door for a thousand years and now I have unlocked it and he's shaking against me.

I pull back from the kiss.

His eyes are open. His face is inches from mine. He looks at me with the look of something that doesn't know what to do with what it's been given.

"Take off your clothes," I say.

He moves.

He does it fast. There's no hesitation in him now. The coat comes off first — long, dark, the kind of coat I've never seen up close — and he lays it carefully across the back of the chairat the desk. The shirt under it is also dark, and he draws it off over his head in one motion. The trousers and the boots. The undergarments. He does it all in less than a minute and then he's standing in the late afternoon light in the middle of my room, naked, looking at me.

I look at him.

He's long. He's lean. His ribs are visible beneath the gray skin and the bones at his hips are sharp. His shoulders are wide and the muscle on him is the long stringy kind of a man who was made for endurance, not for show.

His body is covered in scars.

There are dozens of them. They run across his chest and his stomach and the long lines of his thighs. Some are slight — the white pinch of an old healed cut. Some are larger — the broad uneven puckers of wounds that should have killed him, that did kill him, that left their record in his flesh when he rose from whatever he rose from. There's a long deep one across his sternum that splits his chest from the hollow at the base of his throat to the bottom of his ribs.

His hands hang at his sides. The long fingers curl loosely. The claws at the ends of them are the same pale gray as his skin, slightly translucent at the tips.

Between his thighs he's a man.

He's hard. He's human-shaped where a man is — long, paler than the rest of him, the same lean line of his body. The strangeness isn't in this part of him. The strangeness is everywhere else.

I take him in.

I take all of him in. The whole long gray strange beautiful frame of him. The creature he is. The man he was. The both ofhim standing in my room waiting for me to decide what to do with him.

I take a step toward him.

I touch his chest.

I lay my palm flat against the long scar that runs down his sternum. The cold of him is the cold I've known. The skin is smooth except where the scar interrupts it. My hand looks small against him.