Leash

She punished me for the dawn.

I did not understand it at first. I woke reaching for her and found only cold sheets and the fading taste of dark wine, and I told myself it was nothing, that she had stayed, that something had shifted. I went to work. I came home. I waited.

She did not come back.

A week. Then two. The pull in my blood did not fade. If anything the absence sharpened it, wound it tight, until I could feel her absence like a toothache in the chest. I stood at the window. I walked the wet streets. I went to the bar where we had met and sat on the same stool and drank the same dark drink and waited for a woman I could not name to anyone.

Nothing.

I told myself I was not starving. I was. The marks on my neck ached, not the skin, deeper, the old sweet pull turned to a slow hollow hunger that ate at me from the inside out. I kept my life neat because she liked me tidy. I kept it neat because if she came back I wanted her to find me ready. I kept it neat because the alternative was to admit what I was, kneeling in my own kitchen for a woman who had not asked me to kneel, and I was not ready to admit that to an empty room.

The third week she came.

I was in the shower. I did not hear her. The water was running and I had my head under it and my eyes closed and when I opened them she was standing at the glass, dressed again, buttoned to the throat, watching me the way you watch a stain set into silk.

"You've been waiting," she said.

I did not answer. There was nothing to answer. She could see it on me, in me, the way I had gone still at the sound of her voice, the way my body had already turned toward her before my mind caught up.

"Good," she said. She did not smile. She turned and walked out of the bathroom and I stood under the water and shook and did not follow because I had not been told to.

That was new. The not being told.

She did it again. Came at odd hours, sometimes dressed for some party I would never see, sometimes in nothing but my shirt again, and she would look at me and touch me just enough to wind the hunger tighter and then she would leave, or she would sit across the room and read one of my books and not look at me for an hour, and the whole time I would stand or sit or kneel exactly where I had been when she arrived and I would not move because she had not moved me and I had learned that moving without permission was the thing that cost.

She fed on me twice in that month. Both times quick, clinical, her hand in my hair bending my head to the side and her mouth finding the marks and the white hurt and then gone, and me left on the floor of wherever she had put me with my blood singing and my body wrecked and her already across the room doing something else, reapplying her lipstick, scrolling her phone, as though I were a glass of water she had paused to drain.

I told myself this was what I was to her. Food. A convenience. I told myself it was enough.

It was not enough. We both knew it was not enough. The thing that had happened in the kitchen, the sound she had made, the way her hands had trembled, that had been real, and she was starving it out of both of us, rationing me, keeping me on a leash pulled so tight I could barely breathe, because if she loosened it even a little she would have to look at what I was and she was not ready.

The fourth time she came I was ready for the coldness. I had braced for it. I had rehearsed being nothing, being furniture, being the convenient warm thing in the corner she could use and leave.

She walked in and I knelt without being asked and her hand came down on the top of my head and rested there and I felt her fingers curl into my hair and I heard her breath catch.

"You don't make this easy," she said, very quietly.

I looked up. I should not have. I knew I should not have. But I looked up and her face was not composed. Her jaw was tight. Her eyes were too bright. She looked, for one unguarded second, furious. Not at me. At herself. At the thing in her that wanted to look back down at me and soften.

"Don't," she said.

I did not know what she was forbidding. The looking. The kneeling. The wanting. All of it.

She pulled me up by the hair, none of it gentle this time, and she walked me to the bedroom and put me on the bed and straddled me and held me down by the throat with one cold small hand and looked down at me with that fury still bright in her face.

"You are food," she said. "Do you understand? You are warm and you are willing and you taste like something I have not had in a very long time and that is all you are. That is all this is."

I nodded against her hand. I could not speak. Her grip was not tight enough to stop my breath, only tight enough to remind me she could.

"Say it."

"I'm food."

"Again."

"I'm food. That's all."

Her hand was shaking on my throat. I felt it. She felt that I felt it and her grip tightened and she bent to me and kissed me, hard, punishing, her teeth catching my lip until I tasted copper, and she pulled back and her mouth was red again, mine this time, and she was breathing hard even though she did not need to breathe at all.

"Stop looking at me like that," she said.

"Like what?"

"Like you know."

I did not know. I knew nothing. I was food. I was the willing warm thing in the corner. But I also knew that she was shaking on top of me and that her denial had a crack in it now, hairline, and that the crack was the exact shape of my name in her mouth, and I could feel her wanting to say it, could feel her swallowing it back, and I did not push. I never pushed. I just lay under her and let her hold me down.

She fed. She left. She did not look back.

But her hand on my throat had been shaking. And when I lay in the dark afterward with the white hurt still blooming in my neck and the taste of her mouth still on mine, trying and failing to comprehend.

She was keeping me on the leash because I was food. I was her food.

I closed my eyes. I felt the hunger settle back into me, patient, sure, and beneath it something else, the same something that always came, and I held it very still and very quiet and I waited.