Offering

I remember more now.

It comes back a little each time. The car. The room with the candles. The others watching. The wine. The cold press of her mouth and the bright white hurt that follows and the way the world goes soft and golden at the edges when she pulls me under.

I used to wake ashamed of how badly I wanted to go back. Now I wake and plan around it. I keep my life neat, my job steady, my fridge full, because she likes me tidy, because the cleaner the surface the faster I can fall when she comes, and she always comes, and I am always already half gone before she knocks.

This time she did not knock.

I came home from work and she was in my apartment, standing at the window where I used to stand, watching the rain with her back to me. She did not turn. I set my bag down and stood in the doorway of my own kitchen and felt the pull in my blood rise up like a tide answering a moon.

"Elena."

"You say my name like a prayer," she said. "Do you know that?"

Her voice did something to the room. The traffic outside went quiet. The fridge stopped humming. I could hear my own heartbeat, fast, too fast, and hers, slow, and the space between them.

She turned, and she was smiling. Not the small private smile from the bar. This one showed teeth and meant it. She was wearing my shirt. Just my shirt, untucked, open at the throat, the hem grazing the tops of her thighs, and she walked toward me barefoot on my kitchen tile with the slow sure grace of something that has never once been chased, only ever chased. She was shorter than me. Smaller in every way. It did not matter. It has never mattered.

"You have questions," she said. She stopped close enough that I could feel the cold coming off her bare skin through the thin cotton. "I can see them behind your eyes."

"I remember the candles. The others. You told me to give it to you. What did I give you?"

She laughed, low, and it rolled through me like warm weather. Her hand came up and she pressed one cold fingertip to the hollow of my throat and I felt my knees go. Not buckle. Soften. I sank without deciding to, slowly, until I was kneeling on my own kitchen floor and looking up at her and she was looking down at me and the smile had not left her face.

"Careful," she murmured. "You're starting to sound like a man who thinks he deserves answers."

Her fingertip traced down from my throat, between my collarbones, down through the open V of my shirt to my sternum, and she left it there, resting, while she watched me from above and I watched her from below and tried to remember how to breathe. She had not answered. She was not going to. The question was part of the game and she was enjoying it.

"You don't fight me," she said. "You never have. Not once. Do you know how rare that is?" She stepped in closer and her cold palm cupped my jaw, tilting my face up to hers. "The willing ones still fight. Some small part of them. You just open. Every time. You open and you look at me and you say my name and you give and give and give."

She bent to me. Her mouth was at my ear, her lips brushing the shell of it, cold and sure, and her breath did not warm my skin because it could not.

"I don't know what to do with you," she whispered, and it sounded, for half a second, less like amusement and more like wonder. Then she caught herself and the smile came back, sharper. "Lucky for both of us, I have centuries to decide."

Her hand slid into my hair, took hold, and pulled. Not hard. Just enough. She drew me upward and I rose the way I had knelt, without deciding to, and she walked me backward, slow, controlled, her eyes on mine the whole way, until the backs of my knees met the chair at the centre of the kitchen table and I sat.

She was on me before I had settled. One knee beside my hip, then the other, and then the cool full length of her settling into my lap, the hem of my shirt riding up her thighs, her hands framing my face. She was light. She was everywhere. She was looking down at me again, and this time when she pressed in I felt her feel it, felt the small pause in her hips when she registered how hard I was, and she did not move away. She pressed down.

"There it is," she said.

She took her time after that. She took her time with everything. Her mouth on my throat, on the old marks, not biting, not yet, just dragging her lips across them slow enough to make me shake. Her hands finding every place that made me gasp and staying there, learning me, owning me, while she rolled her hips in lazy patient circles and held me pinned to the chair not by her weight but by her gaze, by the cold of her palms burning through my shirt, by the cool grind of her against me that kept me exactly where she wanted me. I braced my hands on the seat and let her. I said her name like the prayer she had named. I felt the heat build in me against the cold of her until I thought I would burn alive from the inside out and I did not care, I did not care, I did not care.

When her teeth finally broke skin the white hurt bloomed up through me like light and I came apart against her mouth with my hands fisted in my own shirt she was still half wearing, my hips lifting helplessly into hers, and she held me down while she drank and the room went gold and dark and gold again and somewhere in it I heard her make a sound against my throat that was not hunger.

It was surprise. As if I had done something to her she had not allowed.

She pulled back. Her lips were red. Her eyes were very bright. She looked at me the way you look at a door you have walked through a thousand times that has suddenly opened onto a room you have never seen.

"What are you," she said, very softly.

I could not answer. I was shaking in the chair, undone, and she was still in my lap, and her hands on my skin were trembling, just slightly, just enough to know that whatever I was, whatever I had done to her, she had not decided yet whether it frightened her.

She smoothed my shirt down. She lifted off me in one slow motion. She recovered herself the way only she can, all in one breath, the composure clicking back into place like a lock.

But her hands were still not steady. And she did not leave.

She stayed until dawn. That had never happened before. She stayed curled at the foot of my chair watching me with those bright bright eyes, and when I reached for her she let me take her cold hand, and she did not pull away.

"What are you," she said again, to the dark, and this time it did not sound like a question.

It sounded like the beginning of something neither of us had a name for.