Page 52 of Hunger

He doesn't move.

I trace the scar with my fingertip. From the top to the bottom. The full length of it. I touch each of the smaller scars across his chest — the round pucker of what was once a stab wound, the long line of what must have been a blade across his ribs. I don't ask. He'll tell me when he tells me.

I drop my hand lower. I touch his stomach, the hard plane of it, the cold ridges of his ribs under my palm. They don't rise and fall, because he isn't breathing.

I lift his hand.

I take it carefully. I turn it over in mine. I look at the long fingers, the way they're made — the proportions, the bones at the knuckles, the smooth gray of the skin between them. I look at the claws. I run the pad of my finger along the underside of one. It doesn't cut me. It's sharp only at the tip. The sides of it are smooth.

He's been holding still for me.

I look up at his face. His expression hasn't changed but his eyes are dark and his mouth is slightly open and I can see him holding himself in check.

I let go of his hand.

I step closer to him. I tilt my face up.

"Now you," I say. "Now your turn."

He breaks.

It's the only word for it. The hold he's been keeping on himself for two weeks gives way all at once, and his hands come to me and his mouth comes to me and I'm gathered against him before I know I've been moved. The cold of his whole long body presses against the warm of mine through the thin black tank top. His face is in my hair. He's breathing me in. Long deep pulls of breath against the side of my throat. His nose against the skin behind my ear. The cold of his face moving across the warm of mine.

He's starving.

I feel it in the way he holds me. The hands at my back aren't the careful hands of last night. They're pressing me to him with the strength of a creature that's been alone for too long and has finally found something it can't bear to be away from again.

His mouth is everywhere.

He starts at my hairline. He moves down. His lips find my temple. The corner of my eye. The hollow at the side of my jaw. He kisses the line of my jaw, slow, mouth open, the cool of his tongue meeting the warm of my skin in the wet places where his mouth lingers. He moves to my throat. He spends a long time at my throat. The pulse hammering under his mouth, the soft sounds I'm making, the way he keeps his closed lips against the place where my heartbeat is loudest.

He lifts my arms.

He pulls the tank top off over my head and lets it fall to the floor. The cold air finds my breasts and my nipples tighten before his mouth does. He drops his mouth to my collarbone. He kisses the curve of it. He moves down. His mouth finds mybreast — the soft underside first, the way he's approaching, and then his cold lips close around my nipple and I make a sound.

He doesn't rush.

He spends time on me. The other breast. The hollow at the bottom of my ribs. The soft place where my waist curves into my hip. He kneels on the floor in front of me to do this. His face moves across my belly. He presses his open mouth to the soft skin below my navel. His tongue traces the line of my hip and I feel my own hips press forward into him without my having decided to do it.

He pulls the loose pants down.

I step out of them.

I'm naked in the late afternoon light. The sun outside the window has gone the orange of just before setting. The light through the open curtain falls across my body and across him kneeling in front of me, and he looks up at me, and his black eyes flash the dull shine of an animal's caught in headlights, and I almost forget to keep breathing.

He kisses the inside of my thigh.

The cold of his mouth on the warm soft skin there — the place where the heat of me is gathered, just inches above where his face is now — I make a sound and my knees almost give.

He stands.

He stands in one long motion and he lifts me — lifts me, my whole body, as if I weigh nothing in his hands — and he carries me to the bed and lays me down on my back. He moves over me. His cold has stopped being strange to me. The weight of him is barely a weight at all. He's dense, denser than a person should be at his size, but the way he holds himself above me is so careful that I don't feel any of it. He's balancing on his arms.

He looks at me.

His face hovers above mine. The black eyes. The thin mouth. The teeth I can't see now because his mouth is closed.

"Tell me," he says.