Return

I lost track of time. The door became my whole world.

I would eat when the food came, mechanical, tasting nothing, and I would rest when my legs would not hold me, and I would stand at the door and put my hand on the handle and listen to the house beyond it for any sound that might be her, footsteps, a voice, the particular quality of silence that meant she was near, and I would find nothing, and I would stand there for an hour, two, three, until my legs gave out, and then I would crawl back to the bed that smelled like her and I would press my face into the pillow and breathe her in until my body shook with it.

The hunger stopped being a thing I felt and became a thing I was. It was not in my stomach or my throat or my blood anymore. It was the architecture of me. The walls of my chest were built from it. The floor of my mind was laid with it. I moved through my days inside it the way a fish moves through water, not separate from it, not aware of it, just saturated.

I stopped eating. The food came and I let it sit and grow cold and the attendants took it away and brought more and I let that sit too. I could not eat. My body did not want food. It wanted something else, something I could not name, something the elder woman's mouth had proved was not just feeding, and I did not understand what that left, and I was too tired and too hungry to chase the understanding, so I let it lie and I grew thinner and weaker and I did not care.

I talked to the door. Not words. Sounds. Small desperate animal sounds that came out of me in the dark hours when the candles were low and the house was silent and the pull in my blood was so loud it woke me from the shallow not-sleep I had fallen into. I would find myself at the door with my forehead against the wood and my hand on the handle and sounds coming out of my mouth that I did not recognize as my own voice, whimpering maybe, or keening, the sound a dog makes tied to a post when its owner has been gone too long.

I did not leave. She had told me to stay and I stayed. But the not leaving became the hardest thing I had ever done. Every hour I stayed was an hour she did not come, and every hour she did not come was proof that I was nothing to her, that the absence was not strategy but indifference, that she had moved on, found another, replaced the broken thing the way you replace anything that costs more to fix than to discard.

I told myself this and I believed it completely and it did not stop me from standing at the door every night and pressing my face into the wood and making the sounds.

She came back on a night like the others.

I was on the floor by the door. I had given up on the bed and the chair. The floor by the door was closest to the rest of the house, closest to her, and I sat there with my back against the wall and my knees drawn up and my head resting on my forearms and I was somewhere between sleeping and not when the handle moved under a hand that was not mine.

I looked up. The door opened. She was there.

Elena.

She looked exactly as she always looked. Composed. Perfect. Dark and still and cold, her hair smooth, her clothes immaculate, her face a mask of elegant disinterest. She stood in the doorway and she looked down at me on the floor and she did not react. Her face did not change. Her body did not soften.

Something in me broke open at the sight of her. The hunger roared up so loud and so total that I could not see for a moment, could not hear, could only feel, the pull in my blood like a rope yanking me toward her, the marks on my neck splitting open and weeping, my whole body straining toward her across the three feet of floor between us. I did not move. She had not told me to move and I sat there shaking against the wall and looked up at her and did not move.

She closed the door behind her.

"Stand up," she said.

I stood. My legs shook. I braced a hand on the wall and I stood and she watched me do it and she did not help.

"You look terrible," she said.

"I know."

"You were told to eat."

"I couldn't."

Her jaw tightened. A flicker. "You couldn't. Or you didn't."

"Both."

She was quiet for a moment. Then she crossed the room to the chair by the window and she sat down, legs crossed, hands on the armrests, and she looked at me standing against the wall and she tilted her head.

"Come here."

I went. I stood in front of her chair and I looked down at her and she looked up at me and the pull between us was so loud I could feel it in my teeth.

"Kneel."

I knelt. My knees hit the floor and the relief of it was so vast it made me dizzy, the relief of being placed, of being put, of being given a position by her, and I knelt in front of her chair and I looked up and I waited.

She studied me. Her eyes moved over my face, my throat, my chest, the way my shirt hung, the knobs of my wrists. She was cataloguing the damage. Assessing the asset.

"You have been needing," she said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"Badly."

"Yes."

"And yet you stayed."

"You told me to."

Something moved behind her eyes. It was there and it was gone. Her hand came to the top of my head and she pressed, not slow, not gentle, and my body went down with it, my hands finding the arms of the chair, and she guided me between her thighs and she did not ask because she did not need to because I was already breathing her in, the cold sweet scent of her so close my mouth watered and my eyes burned and the hunger in my blood roared so loud I could not think.

She pulled her dress up. She was not wearing anything underneath. She put her hand in my hair and she pulled my face to her and she pressed herself against my mouth and she said, "Now."

I opened her with my tongue. I tasted her, cold and sweet and ancient, and she was already wet, had been wet, maybe since she walked in, maybe since before, and she ground herself against my face with a need that was not patient and was not controlled and was not anything like the composure she wore on top of it. She took it. She took my mouth and she used it the way she used everything, without asking, without hesitating, her hips rolling in sharp desperate circles, her hand fisted in my hair pulling me where she needed me, and I gave it to her, all of it, everything she wanted, my mouth and my tongue and my breath, and I did not care that I could not breathe and I did not care that my knees were splitting on the floor and I did not care that I was hard and aching and ignored because she was using me and she was shaking and the shaking was real.

She was greedy with it. She had been starving this whole time, the same way I had been starving, the absence eating at her the way it ate at me, and she had hidden it behind the mask and the distance and the silence and now she was done hiding and she was taking and her need was raw and urgent and nothing like the cool controlled woman who had sat in the chair a moment ago.

When she came she pulled me into her so hard I could not breathe. Both hands in my hair, wrenching my face against her, her thighs clamping shut around my ears, and the world went silent and dark and there was nothing but her against my mouth and the convulsion of her body and the sound she made above me, muffled by her thighs, distant, and she held me there, held me, held me, grinding through it in sharp jerking circles while my lungs screamed and my vision sparked, and she did not let go until she was finished, until the last wave had rolled through her and her body went slack and her hands loosened and I pulled back gasping, my face soaked, my chest heaving, kneeling on the floor in front of her chair sucking air like a man pulled from deep water.

She looked down at me. Her face was flushed. Her eyes were very bright. She was breathing hard, uneven, those breaths she did not need, and her composure was not back yet, not fully, and for a few seconds she looked at me kneeling between her thighs with her wet on my mouth and her face was open and unguarded and I saw something in it I was not supposed to see.

Then the mask came back. Smooth. Cool. In command. Like nothing had happened.

"You have been a good boy," she said, and the words went through me like electricity and I could not stop the sound that came out of my mouth, small and broken and desperate. She watched my mouth make the sound. She traced the wet of herself across my lower lip with her thumb, slow, back and forth, and her eyes were very bright.

"Stand," she said.

I stood. My legs were shaking so badly I could barely hold myself upright. She stood with me, fluid, effortless, and she put her hands flat on my chest and she walked me backward, step by step, until the back of my knees found the bed and I sat and she followed me down and straddled me, her knees either side of my hips, her hands on my shoulders, her weight nothing and everything.

She did not kiss me.

She put her mouth beside my ear, not touching, and she breathed, and I felt the cold of her against my skin, and she said, "You stayed in this room for me."

"Yes."

"You starved for me."

"Yes."

"You would have died in this room, waiting for me."

"Yes."

Her hands tightened on my shoulders. I felt the tremor run through her, the one she was trying to hide. But her hands were on my bare skin and her hands could not lie.

She pulled back. Her face was the mask again. Perfect. Cold. In command.

"You do not get to finish tonight," she said. "Do you understand."

"Yes, Elena."

"Good."

She leaned in and put her mouth on my throat, on the marks, and my whole body seized, the hunger surging up so loud I thought it would kill me, and she breathed against the marks and I felt them pulse and open and weep and she did not bite. She dragged her lips across them, slow, wet, cold, and I arched up into her and she pressed me down with her hips and she said, "Still."

I went still. I gripped the sheets. She moved her mouth along my throat, along the marks, painting them with her lips, and I could feel them singing, singing for her mouth, and she would not give them her teeth.

Her hands moved down my body. She pulled my shirt over my head and her cold palms mapped my chest, my ribs, the hollows between, and she put her mouth on my collarbone, not biting, just her lips, dragging, her tongue tracing the bone, and every place she touched me burned cold.

She moved lower. Her mouth found my stomach and she traced the lines of muscle and bone that had started to show from the wasting and she followed each one with her tongue and I was hard, had been hard since she walked in, and she could feel it against her and she moved her hips in a slow deliberate circle that dragged a sound out of my chest that I could not control.

She took her time. She touched every part of me with her mouth except the part of me that was begging for it. She traced the bones of my hips with her tongue. She dragged her nails down my sides hard enough to sting. She brought her mouth close, so close I could feel the cold of her breath, and she stopped, and she looked up at me, and she smiled.

"Not tonight," she said.

She climbed off the bed. She straightened her clothes. She looked at me laid out on the sheets, wrecked, shaking, rigid with need, and she tilted her head and she studied me the way she studied everything, with that cool assessing patience, and her face did not change.

"Sleep," she said. "You will need it."

She left. The door closed. I lay in the bed in the dark and my body screamed and the marks throbbed and I did not sleep. I did not sleep for a very long time.