Page 108 of Life and Death

“Not nearly as bad as I imagined it would be. And you?”

“No, that wasn’t . . . bad for me.”

We smiled at each other.

“Here.” She picked up my hand—easily, like she didn’t even have to think about it—and placed it against her cheek. “Do you feel how warm you’ve made me?”

And it was almost warm, her usually icy skin. But I barely noticed, because I was touching her face, something I’d been dreaming and fantasizing about constantly since the first day I’d seen her.

“Don’t move,” I whispered.

No one could be still like a vampire. She closed her eyes and turned into a statue.

I moved even more slowly than she had, careful not to make one unexpected move. I stroked her cheek, let my fingertips graze across her lavender eyelids, the shadows in the hollows under her eyes. I traced the shape of her straight nose, and then, so carefully, her perfect lips. Her lips parted and I could feel her cool breath on my fingertips. I wanted to lean in, to inhale her scent, but I knew that might be too much. If she could control herself, so could I—if only on a much smaller scale.

I tried to move in slow motion so that she could guess everything I would do before I did it. I let my palms slide down the sides of her slender neck, let them rest on her shoulders while my thumbs followed the impossibly fragile curve of her collarbones.

She was much stronger than I was, in so many ways. I seemed to lose control of my hands as they skimmed over the points of her shoulders and down across her sharp shoulder blades. I couldn’t stop myself as my arms wrapped around her, pulling her against my chest again. My hands crossed behind her and wrapped around either side of her waist.

She leaned into me, but that was the only movement. She wasn’t breathing.

So that gave me a time limit.

I bent down to press my face into her hair for one long second, inhaling a deep lungful of her scent. Then I forced myself to peel my hands off her and move away. One of my hands wouldn’t obey completely; it trailed down her arm and settled on her wrist.

“Sorry,” I muttered.

She opened her eyes, and they were hungry. Not in a way to make me afraid, but in a way that made the muscles in the pit of my stomach tighten into knots and sent my pulse hammering through my veins again.

“I wish . . . ,” she whispered, “I wish that you could feel the . . . complexity . . .the confusion . . . I feel. That you could understand.”

She raised her hand to my face, then ran her fingers quickly through my hair.

“Tell me,” I breathed.

“I don’t know if I can. You know, on the one hand, the hunger—the thirst—that, being what I am, I feel for you. And I think you can understand that, to an extent. Though”—and she half-smiled—“as you are not addicted to any illegal substances, you probably can’t empathize completely.

“But . . .” Her fingers touched my lips lightly, and my heart raced. “There are other things I want, other hungers. Hungers I don’t even understand myself.”

“I might understand that better than you think.”

“I’m not used to feeling so human. Is it always like this?”

“For me?” I paused. “No, never. Never before this.”

She put her hands on both sides of my face. “I don’t know how to be close to you. I don’t know if I can.”

I put my hand over hers, then leaned forward slowly till my forehead was touching hers.

“This is enough,” I sighed, closing my eyes.

We sat like that for a moment, and then her fingers moved into my hair. She angled her face up and pressed her lips to my forehead. The rhythm of my pulse exploded into a jagged sprint.

“You’re a lot better at this than you give yourself credit for,” I said when I could speak again.

She leaned away, taking my hands again. “I was born with human instincts—they may be buried deep, but they exist.”

We stared at each other for another immeasurable moment; I wondered if she was as unwilling to move as I was. But the light was fading, the shadows of the trees almost touching us.