Chapter 10: The Longest Wait
The engine had been off for an hour and the windshield was sweating on the inside. I kept my hands loose on the wheel and watched the track do what it always did, curving down through the wet grass and then widening into the field above Rosa Quispe's gate. Mist sat low in the roots. Something small moved in the hedge and stopped when it heard nothing worth running from.
The letter lay in the glovebox, folded twice, sitting on a flat of matches and the car's old registration under a dead name. I had read it so many times in the dark that I no longer needed the paper. I knew the second page by heart. I knew which lines I had crossed out and which I had let stand.
The cord under my sternum was pulled tight and angled down the hill. It had been that way for twelve weeks. A line ran from my ribs to a back room with a window, and every hour it shortened by a degree I could not measure and could not ignore. I had told Rosa the waiting was not free. I had not told her what it cost me, because she would have used it and she would have been right to.
The cantina was dark until five. Then a lamp went on behind the kitchen shutter and the light spread in a soft rectangle over the wet stones of the yard. I watched it happen the way I once watched ships come into Lisbon: from a distance, with my hands still, counting something I was afraid to lose.
Rosa crossed the window twice. She banked the stove. Smoke rose off the chimney in a thin, straight column that the morning heat would flatten by nine. The rooster started up behind the shed, then quit, as if it had been told to.
I reached across and touched the glovebox latch without opening it. Two and a half pages. I had written that the cord runs both ways. I had written that I have not slept a full night since the kitchen, which was ten years ago, which is a long time for a man who owns a bed in four countries. I had written that if I lost him I would be weather and not a man.
On the second page I had written the harder sentence, the short one, the one I would have to say with my mouth moving and my voice doing what it does. I had practiced it in the car for two hours last night, at the bend, with the headlights off. It sounded worse every time. It sounded like a man bidding at an auction for something already sold.
At half past six the sky turned the color of wet clay and then of apricots, and I stopped rehearsing. There was no version of the line that would survive being spoken aloud. I would have to say it badly and let it stand.
Henry used to say that I ruin every important thing by arriving early. He said it in 1911 and again when he set the table with two places and watched me move a salad fork eleven millimeters to the right. He was not wrong. I had arrived at the edge of this hundred miles in the ninth week and sat in this same car in the same dark. Rosa had come up the track and found me and sent me back down at six in the morning, and I had gone, because she was holding the door and she had earned the right to hold it.
Now the brace was off. Nine days ago Matteo had taken it off in the back room and Eric had stood up on his own and lifted both arms over his head, and I had heard about it three days later from a man at the fuel station who did not know he was telling me anything. Nine days. I had counted them the way a man counts lashes.
The pump started behind the cantina at seven. Water hit the stones and ran along the gutter to the drain. I heard a bucket, then a laugh, short and low, that I would have known in a crowded hall in any century. My hand closed on the door handle by itself. I made it let go.
Wait, I told myself. One more minute. Then you can open it.
I did not open it.
The door of the cantina came open at eight, and the man who walked out of it was not the man I had carried off a wrecked van on a road north of here.
He had the brace off. His shoulders sat square under the shirt, both the same height, and he rolled them once on the step the way a swimmer does before the water. His right arm hung free. He flexed the fingers and the wrist turned a full circle without a catch in it.
He had put on weight in the right places. The loose charcoal linen shirt he wore did not hide it. He was wider across the chest than he had been in the study, and his forearms had the flat, worked look of a man who had been lifting instead of lying down. Twelve weeks of light tasks, Rosa had said. Light tasks. Someone had been hauling water and turning soil and carrying crates when she was not looking.
The sun came over the ridge and caught him across the face and throat, and he stopped on the step and let it. His skin had gone gold in the heat. Half Italian, half something older than Italy came through his mother, and in that light it turned the color of cut cedar. He tipped his head back and closed his eyes and stood there breathing, and I sat in a car fifty miles inside a promise I had made to a woman with a rifle and watched him do it.
Four hundred and one years, and this was the most beautiful thing I had seen. I want to be precise about that. It was not the beauty of a painting or a face at a window. It was the beauty of a body that had been hurt and had gotten up and was standing in the sun without asking anyone's permission.
He came down the three steps and crossed to the garden bed along the fence. His hair was damp at the back. He had been to the pump and rinsed off his neck, and drops still sat on the collar of the shirt and darkened it in a line. I could see the old white scars on his forearms from this distance, faint, four or five on each, laid across the muscle like tally marks somebody stopped keeping.
He crouched at the bed and pulled a weed and shook the dirt out of it. His knees took the crouch without complaint. He had the braided leather cord on his left wrist, still, the one I had never asked about. He straightened and looked down the field.
He looked directly at the bend where my car sat under the mango trees, and my whole body went still in a way it has not since I was a living man in a doorway in Seville.
Then he turned away and picked up the watering can. He had not seen me. He had seen a car, and cars sit on that track, and the men with questions had come twice in eleven days and he had learned to look at everything and be moved by nothing. He watered the tomatoes left-handed out of long habit, even now, even with the brace gone. The right hand hung at his side with the fingers half curled, as if it still expected the strap.
I put both hands on the wheel and made my chest take a breath. It did not need one. It took one anyway.
I had rehearsed the letter's lines, and every one of them was wrong. Standing in front of him in the yard, I would not say that the cord runs both ways. He knew that. He had told me in a house on a table with his arm strapped to his chest, and I had refused him, and he had gone to Rosa's anyway and done every single thing I asked, which is a kind of obedience I have never received from anyone in four centuries and have no idea what to do with.
What I would say was shorter. What I would say was the second page, the sentence I had written and folded and put in a glovebox because a letter can be burned and a spoken thing cannot.
Teo came out at a quarter past with his shirt untucked and his hair dripping, and said something to Eric across the yard that made him laugh again, that short low laugh. Teo took the watering can and went to the far beds and Eric stood with his hands on his hips and watched the road. He had a smudge of dirt on his cheek and he did not wipe it off. He had stopped caring what he looked like to a road, which is a thing you can only do when you are not waiting for something to come up it.
I watched him squat and turn a plant pot to check the underside, and I watched him scratch his chest through the shirt where the brace had pressed for twelve weeks and left a pale band of skin, and I thought about the night on the rug by the hearth when he asked me to put a hand on the back of his neck and I did, and how the rule he gave himself was that he could ask for it if I was the one who did it, and how I was not standing in that yard.
Rosa came to the doorway and stood with her arms folded. She looked up at the track the same way Eric had and then she looked straight at the mango trees, and she did not wave, and she did not go back inside either. She just stood there with the rue charm hanging behind her in the window and waited to see what I would do.
I got out of the car.
The door shut with a soft, flat sound in the heavy air, and the grass dragged at my legs going down, and the cord under my sternum drew me in like a rope on a winch with the slack gone. Halfway down the field Eric straightened up and turned, because he heard the grass, and because he does not forget.
He stood in the middle of the row with the sun on his face and looked at me across forty feet of wet ground. His chest went up once and did not come down. Neither of us moved. The heat came off the earth between us in a slow, damp shimmer.
Then he set the pot down, and he took one step toward me, and he stopped.
"How long have you been sitting up there?" he said.
"Since you came out," I said.
Eric's jaw worked. He looked past me up the track, at the car under the mangoes, then back at my face, and I watched him finish a sum he did not like.
The laugh he had given Teo was gone. What sat on him now was harder.
"What are you doing here?" he said.
It came out of him like something pulled. It had a splinter in it. I could feel the rest of it under the words, a low steady hum, like an engine running in a cold room; nine days since Matteo cut the brace off, and before that twelve weeks with a window and a road and nobody coming up it. He had needed me. I did not say so.
A man will let you take his body long before he lets you stand over him and explain him to himself. I know that. I learned it late, and I learned it from him.
He crossed his arms. His hands closed on the opposite sleeves and held there.
I held his eyes and let the arms stay crossed. Then I stepped forward.
At the doorway Rosa said something low to Teo. The door shut with a click of the latch, and I heard the two of them cross the boards inside to the window. The boy in front. Rosa behind him with her arms folded. Standing still. Watching.
A witness, I thought. As promised.
I walked a step, and another. The wet grass pulled at my shoes and let them go. The cord under my sternum drew in as I closed the ground, slow, like a rope coming off a winch with all the slack gone.
"I have been at that bend since midnight," I said. "There is a letter in the glovebox. Two and a half pages, folded twice. I wrote it at a farmhouse on the old mission road with a generator running so I could see the paper. I read it in the dark enough times that I don't need it now. So I'll say it."
His arms did not move.
"On the first page I wrote that the cord runs both ways," I said. "I don't need to explain the second half of that. You said it first, on a table, with your arm strapped to your chest. We can agree on it and go on."
Another step. The sun was over the ridge and behind him, so I came up the field with the light in my face. I let him have that. It is easier to be looked at than to look.
"On the second page I wrote that I have not slept a full night since the kitchen," I said. "The kitchen was ten years ago. That is a long time to own beds in four countries and not use one. Henry would say I earned it. He would not be wrong."
A fly crossed his cheek and he did not lift a hand. The smudge of dirt from the garden bed was still on him. He had stopped wiping things off for a road, and he did not wipe it off for me.
"I wrote that if I lost you I would be weather and not a man," I said. "I wrote it, and I sat with it, and I decided not to send it. A letter can be burned. Your hand or someone else's, it makes no difference. Ink is a small thing. So I am here and not in an envelope. That is what I am doing here."
He swallowed. I saw it move in his throat under the gold skin. Half Italian, half something older than Italy through his mother, and in that light he looked like he had been standing in a doorway a long time.
I took the last steps. Forty feet became twenty. Twenty became ten. Every step closed the distance and pulled the line in my chest tighter, like a string tuned by a hand coming toward it.
I stopped at arm's length. The smell of him came up off the warm cotton, soap and turned soil and the salt under it. Twelve weeks of light tasks. He had put on weight across the chest and the forearms had gone flat and worked, and he stood the way a man stands when the thing that broke has healed.
"Rosa is at the window," he said.
He said it flat, like weather. But his voice had gone quieter than it was, and it was the first thing out of him since the question. It was a small thing and a large one. He was telling me the room had a witness too.
"Good," I said. "I asked her to be one. She made me promise on a beach that I would come to her gate with her listening and say the whole truth. Half answers get no gate. That is her rule. She has held your door open for twelve weeks and never once asked you to leave. She earned the right to hear it."
His arms came down.
Not all at once. The right first, slow, the fingers uncurling, then the left, and then both hands hung at his sides and did nothing. The linen had drag marks on the sleeves where he had been gripping them.
I had rehearsed the last line for two hours in a dark car at the bend with the headlights off, and every version was wrong. Standing in front of him I found that the rehearsing had been the problem. I said the second page the way I had written it, badly, and let it stand.
"I want you to come with me," I said. "Not as an order. That is the line I wrote in the car and crossed out twice. The first time I wrote it as an order, out of four hundred years of habit, and I crossed it because it was the same sentence I have handed a hundred men and meant nothing by. Then I wrote it as a question and crossed that out too, because I did not want you thinking yes was the only way to keep the peace."
His chest went up once and came down slow.
"Then ask it," he said.
The words came low and even and did not shake. But under them the hum I had felt since the grass started turned over, the engine in the cold room catching.
I almost smiled. I did not. He would have taken it for condescension and it was not that. It was that he had told me the shape of the sentence I owed him, and I owed it clean.
"Eric," I said. "Come with me."
He did not answer with words. He reached out and closed both fists in the front of my coat, hard enough to pull the fabric off my shoulders, and hauled me in the last half step until we stood chest to chest and he had to tilt his head back to keep my eyes. The sun was full on the side of his face and his jaw was set and there was water in his eyes that he was not going to let fall.
"That is the whole truth?" he said.
"Almost," I said. "There is one more line, and I would rather say it with your hands on me than from ten feet away where you can walk off before I finish."
Rosa had not moved from the window. Teo had not moved either. I could feel them both watching, and I did not care, and I think he did not either, because he did not let go of my coat.
"Almost," I said again, lower. "There is one line left. It is the short one. I wrote it on the second page and crossed it out four times."
His fists stayed knotted in my coat. The collar had pulled loose from my shirt and he did not let go to fix it.
"Say it," he said.
I had said a hundred thousand sentences in my life. I had said them in courts and warehouses and on docks in the rain. This one had no floor under it.
"Say it, Andre."
I said it badly. I said, "I love you," and it came out flat, like a man reading a name off a list, and I heard every wrong note in it. It took me four hundred and one years to say that out loud to a living person and it sounded like a receipt.
He did not laugh at it. He looked at me for a second, and then he did the thing I had not prepared for. He shut his eyes and let it land.
"Again," he said.
"I love you."
The second time it had something in it. It came up from under the ribs where the cord sits and it did not shake, because I had stopped trying to make it sound like anything.
He opened his eyes. Water sat in them and did not fall. He was not going to give me that in a yard with a witness at the window and the sun on both our faces.
"Andre," he said.
His hands opened on my coat, then closed again, and he pulled. He stepped in and closed the last half foot between us himself, and his chest pressed flat to mine, and his mouth was close enough that I could feel the heat of it.
"I need you to kiss me," he said.
The word came out of him cracked down the middle. Then quieter, and worse.
"Please."
I put one hand on the side of his jaw. His skin was hot from the sun and there was a smudge of soil on his cheek, and I wiped it off with my thumb, slowly, because I had watched him refuse to do it all morning.
Then I kissed him.
He made a sound in his throat like something giving way. His hands came up off my coat and onto my face, both of them, hard, holding my head still so I could not do anything but this. His mouth opened under mine and I tasted salt and coffee and the mint Rosa keeps in a dish by the door. He kissed the way he does everything, like he had decided and was finished deciding.
At the window I heard Teo start to say something. Rosa said one low word and he stopped. Then the latch clicked and the two of them were gone from the glass, and the yard was just the two of us and the wet grass and the rooster somewhere behind the shed deciding it had opinions after all.
I broke the kiss an inch. "Rosa," I said, against his mouth.
"She heard it," he said. "She counted it. She won't want to watch the rest."
He took my wrist, the left one, the one that has never had a cord on it, and pulled me up the three steps and through the open door of the cantina. The room was dark after the yard. I smelled the stove and the rue charm above the bottles and the pine Rosa uses on the boards. He went past the bar and through the curtain to the back room.
The room had a window over the bed. That was the rule of this room and I had put him here myself. A single bed, a chair with his shirt over the back of it, a jug and bowl on the shelf, and a pair of boots by the door with the mud still on them.
He turned in the middle of the floor and looked at me.
"Take it off," he said.
I took off my coat and hung it on the chair, because the page was not in it. The page was at the farmhouse, in a drawer, under a dead man's name. I had not carried it here. That was the other reason I had driven in early and on my own.
He watched me do it. Then he pulled the linen shirt over his head, one motion, and the smile he gave when it came free was not for me. It was for his own arms lifted over his head without a brace stopping them. Nine days, and he was still enjoying it.
The pale band across his chest had gone to the color of the rest of him. Four marks from the straps had faded to nothing. The old white scars on his forearms stayed, four or five on each side, laid across the muscle like tally marks somebody stopped keeping.
I crossed the room and put my hands on his ribs, both of them, flat, and held them there. I could feel the bone under the muscle, whole now. "Does it hurt?"
"Only when I laugh," he said. "Don't make me laugh."
I bent my head and put my mouth on the top of his shoulder, on the seam of the muscle, and bit down, not breaking skin, just enough that he felt teeth. He breathed out hard and his hand came up into my hair and closed.
"You remember the word," I said into his skin.
"Paper," he said. "I remember the word."
"Say it if you need it."
"I won't need it."
I turned him and walked him back two steps until the back of his knees hit the edge of the bed. He sat. He looked up at me with his chin tilted and his mouth open and his hands going to the buckle of his belt without waiting for permission.
I let him. I watched him work the belt through and pull his trousers down, and he kicked them off onto the floor with the boots and lay back on the bed with one arm behind his head. Twelve weeks of Rosa's cooking and Matteo's water crates. He was wider through the chest and the flat of his stomach had lines on it that had not been there in the study. He knew I was looking. He let me look.
"Come here," he said.
I put one knee on the bed and then the other. I got my shirt off over my head and let it drop. He reached for me and I caught both his wrists and pressed them into the mattress above his head, one over the other, and held them there with one hand, and he let me do that too. His breath changed when I did it.
"You asked me to be held," I said. "Two hours from now I will hold you. Right now you are going to lie there with your hands over your head and let me have you."
I lay there with my wrists crossed above my head and his hand on both of them and I did not pull. I could have. The brace was off, the arm worked, my hands were mine again. He knew it too. That was the whole point of him holding them there.
Above me he had gone still the way he goes still when he is deciding something. His knee was between mine. His shirt was on the floor and his chest was cold when it touched my chest, and I felt the cold and I did not flinch, because I have never flinched at that.
He put his mouth on the side of my throat. Not a bite. Trailing, the flat of his tongue over the tendon, and the hand not holding my wrists came down slow over my ribs, palm flat, fitting the whole cage of them like he was checking a repair.
"Does it hold when I do this?" he said.
"It holds."
"Say it."
"It holds, Andre."
He kissed the base of my throat. I got my chin up to give him room, and then I went further than he asked, because I am tired as hell of being handled like glass. I turned my head all the way to the side and arched, and I let him see the whole line of it, from the jaw down to the collarbone, bare and open under his mouth.
He stopped.
I felt the stop go through him. Every muscle in his back went hard under my free hand, and the noise he made was low, in the chest, not a word. Something in the back of his throat. Like a door that had been oiled shut for four hundred years and had just been forced an inch.
That was what I wanted. Twelve weeks of him being careful with me. Nine days of nobody coming up the road. So I pushed.
"You want to know what I've been thinking about," I said.
"Eric."
"Every night in that room. With the window open and the dogs going and Matteo snoring through the wall." I kept my voice flat. "I thought about the rug. By the hearth that night. You remember what you did to me on that rug."
His jaw moved. His hand tightened on my wrists.
"I remember."
"You put me on the floor and you told me to keep my eyes open," I said. "And you fucked me until I came twice without a hand on me. And there's a thing you do, right at the end, where you get loud. You never get loud for anybody." I turned my head an inch more and let the words come slow. "I want that. Tonight. Not the careful version."
He said nothing. His eyes were on my throat and his pupils had opened up like someone had turned the lights down.
So I said the other thing. The thing I had been saving.
"You had me on a table with my ribs braced telling me no," I said. "So here's what I think. I think you're scared of what happens to you if you stop being careful with me."
His head came up.
"What scared you?" I said. "Can't handle it?"
That did it.
He let go of my wrists and his hand went into my hair, fist closed at the back of my skull, and he pulled my head back until my throat ran in a straight line to my chin and I could not have swallowed if I tried. He put his mouth on my neck and his teeth were there, both points, set against the skin but not in. And he made that sound again, longer, and I swear I felt it in my sternum, right at the knot under the bone where the cord lives.
"That is what you want," he said against my throat. "You want me to lose the leash and take you past the point where I could stop."
"Yes."
"If I bite you, there is no walking it back."
"I know what a bite costs. I've been in that house twelve years."
He laughed. It was not a nice laugh. It came out of him rough and short and it was the first true one I had ever heard him give.
"Then you know nothing," he said. "But you asked."
He turned me over with one hand on my hip and his weight behind it and I went with it, face down into the mattress, and my arm went up under me and took the weight and it did not even ache. Good. Good. He put a knee across the back of my thighs and pinned me flat and I stopped being able to move much, which was fine.
He spit into his hand. I heard it, the wet sound of it, and then his fingers came down between my legs and pushed in without ceremony and the stretch of it was sudden and sharp and I gripped the sheet in both hands and pushed back into it anyway.
"That hard already," he said. "Twelve weeks."
"Twelve weeks."
"Three fingers and you take them without a sound." He worked them in and out slow, curling, and every time he curled them a hot wire went up through my gut and out along my arms. "Where did you learn that patience."
"From you."
He pulled them out and I felt the air on the wet of it, cold, and then he was over me, chest to my back, and I felt the blunt of him settle against me and stop there. Waiting. He was always waiting. He waits like it costs him nothing and I know what it costs him.
"Ask for it," he said.
I turned my face into the sheet and said it into the cotton. "Fuck me."
"Say it right."
"Put it in me, Andre. All of it. Don't make me wait."
He pushed in.
Not gently. One long slow stroke to the hilt, and I felt every inch of the way, the burn and the give and then the deep full weight of him pressed up against something inside me that made my eyes water. I bit the sheet. My hips came off the bed and he held them down and stayed there, all the way in, letting me feel it, and I could feel the pulse in his cock against the wall of me.
"Breathe," he said.
"Shut up."
He pulled out almost all the way and drove back in and I heard myself make a sound I did not authorize. He did it again. Hard. The bed frame hit the wall, and I remembered Rosa was in that house, and I did not give a single fuck, and he did not either, because he did it again, and again, and the pace he set was not careful and was not measured and was not a thing I had ever gotten from him in twelve years.
The sheets were wet under my cheek. The window was open and the heat was already coming in and the smell of the field came in with it, and every time he thrust I slid up the bed an inch and he dragged me back with a hand fisted in my hip.
"You said you wanted all of me," he said, breathing hard now, which he almost never does. "You have no idea what that costs."
"Show me."
"Cocky little fuck."
He got a hand under my jaw and turned my head sideways on the pillow so my face was up off the sheet, and his mouth came down on the side of my neck with the fangs out, and I felt the points drag. Not breaking. Dragging. Following the line of the vein and pressing just enough that I knew exactly where they would go.
"Do it," I said. "Do it, Andre."
"I love you," I said. "Please."
It came out of me wrecked, and I did not care. I begged him with my face turned sideways on the sheet and my hand fisted in the cotton and his cock still buried in me, and I said it again because the first one had not been enough, and I meant both halves of it.
"I love you, Andre. Please."
He made a noise in his throat.
It was not a word. It was lower than a word and older, the sound a lock makes when the part that has been rusted shut for four centuries finally gives. His hand tightened in my hair. His hips went still inside me, one long beat, and I felt him decide.
Then he bit.
Both points went in at once on the left side of my neck, high, under the jaw, and there was a sharp bright flash and then nothing sharp at all. The pain lasted half a second. What came after it was not pain. It was heat, low and syrupy, and it poured out from the two little holes and down through my chest and into my arms and my legs like someone had opened a tap inside me.
Then he pulled, and I understood what everyone in that house had been whispering about for twelve years.
It was not the same as being kissed. It was not the same as coming. It was every nerve I had going off at once, and my mouth opened and a sound came out of me that I have never made before in my life and could not make again if I tried. Loud. High and broken. Something between a yell and a sob, and I heard it hit the walls of that small room and come back. My eyes rolled back in my skull and I stopped being able to see anything but the dark inside my own head.
My body stopped answering me. My hands let go of the sheet. My legs went loose and heavy. He was still buried to the hilt and I could feel every inch of him, the heat of him, the shape of him pressed up against that spot inside me, and my hips rolled back into him without my permission, greedy, stupid, working itself on him while he drank.
He pulled again, mouth sealed tight on my neck, and the pleasure went up a whole register. It was like the best drug I ever took, the one you only get once, in a good year, off a man who does not sell it. It ran up my spine and pooled in my scalp and my teeth ached with it. My cock was leaking into the sheet under me and I had not been touched there once.
His hips started again.
He never pulled his mouth off me. He fucked me slow and deep while he drank, steady as a machine, and every thrust pushed the blunt head of him into that place inside me and every pull of his throat took another mouthful out of me and sent another wave of that white heat down my arms. My face was wet. I did not know if it was sweat or tears and it did not matter. I could hear the wet sound of his mouth and the wet sound of the bed and Rosa's boards creaking under the floor and none of it was as loud as the blood in my ears.
Open your eyes.
I heard it the way you hear a thought. But it was not mine. It was low and cold and it came from behind my sternum, under the cord, and it did not use my ears at all.
Open your eyes, Eric.
I forced them open. It took everything I had. The room came back in pieces. The window with the light coming in over the sill. My own hands on the mattress. And his head down against the side of my throat, mouth working, and his eyes open and lifted, watching my face.
He did not stop. His hips kept driving, patient and filthy, all the way in and nearly all the way out, and his mouth stayed latched on the vein and drank, and he looked at me the whole time from six inches away like a man reading a ledger he intends to memorize.
I came like that. Untouched, on my stomach, face turned to him, with his teeth in my neck and my blood running down his chin, and it was so hard it hurt, so hard I felt it in my teeth and my knees and the arches of my feet. I shook through it and he did not slow down. He drove me through it and kept going until I was twitching and oversensitive and still pushing back at him.
When he finally came off my neck he did it slowly, dragging his mouth away, and the cold air hit the wet of it and made me hiss. Then I felt his tongue swipe over the two punctures, twice, and the sting went out of them the way a paper cut stops stinging when you put your mouth on it.
He stayed inside me.
I lay there panting into the sheet with my eyes open and the room swimming, and I was aware of my own pulse in a way I never had been, beating everywhere, loud, and then I felt something else underneath it.
Him.
It was the same rope I had carried under my breastbone for years, the one I had called homesickness and heartache and every other thing, the one that had gotten worse in that back room instead of better. Only now it was not pulling one way. It had a beat on the other end of it. I could feel him the way you feel the sea in a shell if you hold it to your ear, except this was not a memory of a sea. It was him. And what was coming down that rope was not hunger and not triumph and not any of the things a man who has just taken what he wants should feel.
It was fear.
Cold, plain, bottomless fear, and it was in him, not me. Four hundred years old and lying chest to chest with a human in a rented room, and I could feel it running in him like a fault line.
I lifted my head off the sheet and turned enough to see him.
"What did you do to me?" I said.
My voice came out rough and low and I barely recognized it.
Andre was braced over me on both arms, and his mouth was still red, and his chest was not moving because it never moves. His pupils had blown so wide there was almost no green left in them. He looked down at me and did not answer for a while.
"I did what you asked," he said.
"That is not what I asked."
"You asked for the bite. You said it twice with my hand in your hair."
"I asked for the bite." I got a knee under myself and turned onto my side, and my whole body complained, and I did not stop. "That is not what this is. I can feel you. In my chest. Down the rope. It has a beat on the other end now and it is beating scared."
Something moved behind his face. That was new too. I could feel it move on the inside of him, the way you feel someone shift their weight on a mattress in the dark.
"Yes," he said.
"So what did you do?"
He pulled out of me, slow, and I felt every inch of the loss, and my thigh twitched. He sat back on his heels between my legs and put one hand flat on his own ribs, over the cord, the same place I touch when it hurts.
"There is a thing the old houses say about the bite," he said. "They say it opens a door one way. The one who is bitten can be found, can be called, can be watched. The one who bites gets nothing back. That is what Lisle thought. That is what the man with the folder counted on."
"And?"
"They are wrong." He said it flat. "It goes both ways. It went both ways before I ever opened my mouth on you tonight. The bite just cut the lock off it."
I stared at him.
"So when I lay in that back room for twelve weeks," I said, "and the thing in my chest got worse every single day, and I did not tell Rosa because I did not want her carrying it."
"I felt it." His hand did not move off his own ribs. "Every night of it. I sat in a farmhouse on the old mission road and felt you ache across fifty miles and I could not come down the hill because I gave my word to a witch with a rifle and I have run out of people whose word I want to break."
"You could have sent the letter."
"Which one?"
"Any of them. Three lines. A note."
"I wrote two and a half pages." He looked at the window. "I read them in the dark until I did not need the paper. I stood in your yard this morning and said half of it to your face. The other half is in a glovebox at the bend. I decided an hour ago I was not giving you paper. I was going to give you the words or nothing."
I sat all the way up. My neck pulled where the two holes were and there was no blood on my fingers when I touched it. He had closed them. I could still feel the seal of it under the skin, two small cold spots like coins left in the sun too long.
"You have given me plenty tonight," I said. "Tell me the rest."
"The bite marks the door. Any blood of mine you take would finish the frame." He looked at me then, full, and I watched him force himself to do it. "You asked me to turn you on a table with your ribs braced. I said no and I meant no. That has not changed tonight. What has changed is that you will not be able to lie to me anymore, and I will not be able to lie to you, and I have spent four hundred years being a man who does not get read by anyone."
"So you are afraid I will see you."
"I am afraid you already have." He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and there was my blood on the skin, and he did not look away from it. "Everything I have done since the night your father signed you over, I did in a room with the door shut. You have just stood inside the room."
"I have seen you, Andre. I always have."
He did not move. The mattress dipped where he knelt and the sheet was knotted under my knees and the fly that had gotten in at breakfast hit the screen twice and settled on the sill.
"Say that again," he said.
It was not an order. He did not have one of those left in him tonight. His voice had come out of the bottom of his chest, and it had a crack in it that I put there.
"I have seen you," I said. "Since the second year. Every year since."
He sat back on his heels. There was my blood dried thin at the corner of his mouth and he did not wipe it. His chest did not move, but something under his ribs had gone tight, and I could feel it go, because I could feel everything in him now.
"How."
"Small things." I reached for my shirt on the chair and changed my mind and left it. The room was hot enough. "You drink your coffee with two sugars and you hold the cup by the handle with your little finger up like a man at a tea party. You flinch before a name gets said. Not after. Before. I used to watch for it at the table when a new man came in."
"That is manners."
"You stand in the kitchen at four in the morning," I said. "Henry told me. Fifteen years ago he told me, and I did not believe him, so I got up and checked."
Andre said nothing.
"I came down the back stairs four nights running. You were at the counter with the light off, every time." I turned to face him. "The fourth night you had your hand flat on your own chest. Same spot. Right here."
I put my palm over the knot under my breastbone and held it there.
His eyes went to my hand. He did not deny it.
"So when you tell me you have spent twelve years doing everything in a room with the door shut," I said, "I want you to hear how that sounds from the other side of the door."
"You were twelve years in my house." His jaw moved. "You had a knife under your pillow."
"First six weeks. Then I stopped."
"Why."
"Because I worked out what you were doing." I sat up straight and let the sheet fall and did not bother pulling it back up. "You bought a building in a town you would never visit. You signed it over to a woman who pointed a rifle at you. You gave me a room with a window in it and a name nobody had ever heard of. You did all of that with the door shut, and you think I could not read it off the wall."
He looked at the floor between us. Two boots, mine, with the mud dried gray on the toes.
"You think four hundred years makes you hard to read?" I said.
He laughed again. That same rough, short one, no music in it.
"It makes me practiced," he said.
"Practiced is not the same as hidden." I put my hand on his knee. "You are the worst-hidden man I have ever met. You have been standing in the middle of my life for twelve years with your coat buttoned to the collar and your hands in your pockets, and every single person in that house knew what you were doing. Henry knew. Lisle knew. I have watched you lose an argument to a cook about salt and win one with a man holding a gun."
Andre looked up at me.
"Henry has never won an argument with me."
"He wins all of them," I said. "You just make him say it twice."
The fly went quiet. Somewhere down the lane a dog started up and stopped. The light on the wall had moved a hand's width since we came in.
"What are you actually afraid of?" I said.
He did not answer for a while. I let him have the time. I have let him have a great deal of time.
"That you will look at the whole of it and go," he said finally. "That is the plain version. You have seen the rest of me tonight, the room with the door. That is all of it, Eric. Every person I have killed was standing where I put them. Every kindness I ever did had a debt behind it. You are the only thing in four hundred years I did without a receipt."
I put my hand flat on his chest.
His skin was cool and dry under my palm, the way it always was, and I found the knot under the bone straight away. Same place as mine. Same shape. Mine had been pulling at nothing for ten years. His had been pulling back the whole time, and nobody had thought to tell me.
"I know you can feel it here," I said.
He looked down at my hand on him. The muscle at the corner of his jaw went tight and stayed tight.
"It has a beat on your end now," I said. "Or it always did and I couldn't hear it."
"It always did."
"So when I lay in that back room at night with my hand on my own chest like a fool."
"I felt it." He said it to my hand, not to my face. "Every night. Fifty miles up the road. I sat in a farmhouse that doesn't belong to anybody and felt you through a wall of trees and did not come down the hill."
I kept my hand where it was. Under my fingers there was no pulse. He doesn't keep the habit. But something ran under the bone anyway, slower than a heart, and it moved when I moved and it answered when I touched it.
"Going away and being without you is not an option," I said. "Ever."
Then I made myself hold his eyes.
It was not easy. Green with no bottom to it, and the pupils still blown from what he had done to me an hour ago, and something behind all of it that I had never once been given permission to look at before. I held on anyway. Long enough that the room got loud in my ears. Long enough that he stopped looking at my hand and looked at me.
Then I had to look away.
I looked at the window instead. The fly was still on the sill. The sheet was twisted under my knees and there was sweat drying in the small of my back and the light on the plaster had moved a hand's width since we came in here. Downstairs somebody set a crate down on the floor, and a chair scraped, and I heard Rosa's voice and could not make out one word of it.
I wiped my face with the heel of my hand and sat back on my heels. My stomach was tacky where I had finished on the sheet and I did not care enough to reach for the shirt.
"Three days," I said.
He looked at me.
"The change." I turned the words over to make sure they were the ones I wanted. "When does it start taking over. When do you do it."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he shifted his weight off the mattress and picked my shirt up off the chair and laid it across the foot of the bed, which was such a small thing that it took me a second to notice he had done it at all.
"Three nights," he said. "Tonight does not count, because you have lost enough blood to make a bad decision twice as fast as usual, and I would rather you did the math with a full body."
"Three nights."
"On the third night, in a place I control, with the thing you have to read read first, in front of your witch." He sat down on the edge of the mattress and put his feet on the boards. "I open a wrist. You drink until I tell you to stop. If you don't stop when I tell you, you will kill me, and then you will be alone in a jungle with a new hunger and nobody who knows how to feed it."
"Is that the cost?"
"That is a piece of the cost." He looked at the wall. "The rest goes with the page. You read it standing. Then I answer the question you put to me on that table and I tell you the whole of what it means to be what I am and what it will mean to stand next to it. Then you drink, or you don't."
"And if I don't."
"Then you go back to the bar and slice limes left-handed and I go north and kill a man in a green folder, and he never finds the door, because there isn't one."
He said it flat, like a man reading a train schedule. I watched him do it and felt the lie come off him like heat off asphalt. Not a lie. A hedge. He had put the option in my mouth because he thought he had to, and he was braced for me to take it.
"You'll start to notice things sooner," he said.
"Sooner than three nights."
"By tomorrow night. The light will hurt a little in the afternoons. Sounds will get loud. Rosa will drop a glass and you will flinch before it breaks. You will sleep in the day if you let yourself, and you will be hungry in a way you do not have a name for yet."
"Hungry how."
"Not for food." He glanced at me and then away. "You will smell people in a room before you see them. You will know what they had for breakfast and you will know when one of them has cut himself shaving two floors down. I would keep you out of the kitchen tomorrow if I could."
I sat with that. Down in the cantina the chair scraped again. Somebody laughed, and it was Teo, and I heard the whole shape of it, the way it started and the way it went tinny at the end, and I had never heard a laugh in pieces before.
"Stop doing that," he said.
"Doing what."
He turned on the mattress to face me properly.
"Whenever I go quiet, you decide you have said something stupid that you should not have said." His voice had gone lower, the way it does when he is making himself say a thing out loud instead of writing it. "You did it in the study, and you did it on the couch, and you just did it now with your hand on the floor and your mouth shut. When I go silent, it is not because you have made a mistake."
"Then what is it."
"I am silent because you say things to me, and I cannot work out why the universe thought I was worth hearing them." He said it without ornament, without a hand raised to soften it. "That is all. That is the whole of it. Four hundred years and I still do not have an answer for it."
The words sat in the room between us. I did not have anything to put on top of them. I have said a lot of things in the last hour and most of them came out of me sideways, but I could not think of one line he had given me that cost him like that one.
I was still working out what to say when I smelled it.
It came off him in a wave. Sweet and dark and terrible, like iron left in the sun until it went soft. It was in the air between us and it was in the back of my throat and it was on his mouth, where my blood had dried thin at the corner, and my mouth came alive with water before my brain caught up to it.
My teeth ached. Every one of them, up in the roots, a dull throb like when you bite down on ice.
He watched me find it. He did not move a hand to help and he did not move one to stop me.
"There," he said. "That is the first one."
I leaned in and put my mouth on his.
He had my blood on his tongue and I tasted it, hot and copper and wrong, and the ache in my teeth got sharper and worse and I did not pull back. His hand came up and closed at the back of my neck, over the two small cold spots he had left there, and the cord under my breastbone went taut and warm, and there was a beat on both ends of it now.
He broke it off first. He put his forehead on mine and stayed there, and his chest did not move at all, the way it never does, and I could feel him deciding something inside himself with me pressed against it.
"Three nights," I said against his mouth.
"Three nights." His hand stayed where it was. "Eat something first. Build your own blood up before you take mine. Rosa has eggs and there is a heel of bread in the tin."
"She's going to know."
"She has known since the beach." He leaned back and looked at me, and this time neither of us looked away. "She will smell it on you tomorrow and she will sit you down at the bar and ask you in her own language, and you will have to answer her before you answer me. That is the order it goes in. I am not moving on that."