Page 9 of Breaking the Dark

I invite her back to my apartment imagining that she will say no.

She says yes. Yes.

Suddenly I am poleaxed with doubts. My apartment is clean and neat, but it might be less luxurious than someone with shiny Manhattan dreams might have been imagining.

However, she saunters in, seems pleased with how she finds it, and allows me to take her coat. She tells me it’s nice and touches the spines of my books and admires a framed print of Central Park on my wall that I’ve always wondered about. Is it tacky? But now I am reassured that it is not, because she has told me she likes it.

The effect of her here in my private space is intoxicating.

She sits on my sofa and drinks the wine I pour for her. I put on some music, the sort of music I like, and she laughs when the first bars play and tells me that it’s the sort of thing her mother used to listen to. I take the joke in good humor.

Then she says she has something to tell me.

Something about her.

About who she really is.

She grabs my hands. She squeezes them hard. And she whispers something in my ears no human has ever before heard.

She seems relieved that I have not recoiled. Was she too seized by doubt?

I say, “Why did you tell me?”

She says, “Because I knew you’d understand.”

And then she turns my hand so that my palm is facing up. She runs her fingertips across the soft white skin, sending my blood fizzing, blasting—pumping so hard it makes my vision blur for just one second. She brings the palm up to her lips, her soft, perfect lips, and presses them against it. I feel just the suggestion of suction, of pressure, of my skin being pulled into her mouth, the tip of her tongue running up and down, gentle, fleeting as a feather, and then she brings my index finger into her mouth and sucks it before clamping down on it with hard, sharp teeth, her dark blue eyes never once leaving mine.

She releases my finger from between her bloody teeth and stares hard into my eyes.

“I know who you are,” she says. “I know what you are. I know what you can do. I need you and you need me. You and I were meant to be.”

FOUR

JESSICA LEAVES THE teens as they shuffle into the venue and takes the subway back to Fiftieth, where she heads into the sharp night, the first cold one of the year. She thinks about what she will tell Amber when she sees her tomorrow morning. She has nothing concrete to report. She has seen nothing out of the ordinary tonight, but still, she feels unsettled, she feels strange, and for some reason she feels sad. As she thinks this, she turns the corner two blocks from her apartment, and there’s a small girl standing in front of her, just outside the mini-mart, and it’s the same girl who was standing outside Julius’s apartment the previous morning, the girl with the puffball hair, the silver parka, the stripy tights.

She smiles at Jessica as Jessica passes her.

“You again. Where’s your mom?”

The girl shrugs.

Jessica looks around her, pokes her head around the door of the store, which is empty apart from the clerk, looks across the street and turns back to the little girl. “You all on your own? What’s going on?”

The girl doesn’t reply and Jessica sighs. What the hell is she supposed to do about this?

“Do you live in my building? Where I saw you yesterday? Is that where you live?”

The girl shakes her head.

“So, where do you live? Do you live up there?” She indicates the apartments above the mini-mart.

The girl shakes her head again.

Jessica turns in desperation, looking up and down the street, but there is no one in any direction who seems to be the parent of the child in front of her. She calls to the guy behind the counter, “Hey, any idea whose kid this is? Outside your store?”

The guy slides off his stool and slowly comes to the door. He looks down and then looks at Jessica.

“What kid?”