Ben faced remarkably light interrogation when he traipsed into the kitchen and found Charlie busy at the skillet, stacks of fish at his side, the vicinity a riotous mess, with Harry Clearwater's Fish Fry dusting every surface.
"You know you're only cooking for two, right?"
"Hah! More for us, more for us."
At some point Charlie assured Ben that he didn't need to know everything little thing. Sure, someone had dropped him off in a car that he didn't recognize. He didn't need to know.
"Renée's gonna be tickled," Charlie assured him, "to hear you been out with friends two days in a row. Just what she wanted. Just what we all wanted, after what happened down in Phoenix on your last day."
"Nothing happened in Phoenix, Dad."
"Okay, okay. I get it. Need your space. We don't gotta talk about it."
Ben let it drop and stuffed himself with fried fish. He watched for bones. Charlie went out to the deep freeze for another stack. Ben had to order him back, to stop cooking fish, to start working on the immense pile he'd already prepared. Charlie insisted the stack wouldn't be enough. Ben told him with all respect that he was nuts.
"They're not gonna eat themselves," Charlie grumbled, but he relented.
"By the way, I have a friend coming over in an hour. Aaron Weber."
Charlie had no interest in why they had a visitor coming. He only wanted to know if the Weber kid would be wanting fish.
"No. I'm giving him dancing lessons. He'll need to be ambulatory."
_____
Edythe didn't need to be in his bedroom to watch over him. She could keep vigil from out in the woods. She could sit under her mossy log, six miles out, and hear his heart without difficulty. Yet there she perched upon his mother's rocking chair, to watch over him and earnestly wish that she could hear his dreams.
She told herself that she needed to burn herself with thirst for his honey-freesia-primrose scent, to acclimate herself for their day tomorrow in school, that she had to train herself to disregard his scent, for his safety, that she must strive to prevent her thirst and bloodlust from being a barrier between them. Yet she knew that she was kidding herself, that the purported need for desensitization had nothing to do with her presence that night upon the rocking chair. Besides, proximity to his scent did not desensitize her. Quite the opposite. His presence inflamed her desire, increased her attraction to him, awakened needs that she didn't understand. Her drives had become a big muddle, a tempest of competing and incomprehensible desires, thirst being just one, an apocryphal footnote as compared to the new imperatives that commanded her attention and set her entire body to trembling. It seemed at times that her thirst was being subsumed gradually by these new and more powerful desires, drives that she did not even have names for, compulsions that beckoned Edythe with innermost promises of ecstasy.
Ben's dreams carried him up and down over precipitous swells, an ocean of turmoil, the water's edge depthless to a thousand leagues, the narrow pearl strand out of reach, the word that he dare not utter, lest reality unravel, dissipate, and disperse to half-forgotten vestiges of memory.
Somehow Edythe came to be kneeling at his bedside.
She placed her head on his pillow, almost close enough for their noses to touch. She wanted so badly to close that distance. He had touched her face with his hand today, his warm rough palm, and the warmth that had coursed through her tasted so sweet that she longed to press her cheek to his face, for just one moment, to relive and preserve forever that tender eternity. They had no peace. His closed eyes twitched restlessly as she watched from inches away, and he whispered her name over and over, plaintive, beseeching.
Edythe wondered if he could feel her presence in his bedroom, but when he twice awoke, he did not find her. The first time, she sensed him coming around and ducked her head off the pillow. He rolled off the other side, kicking the blankets away, and stomped off to the bathroom with a water glass, perhaps irate that he had awoken.
She waited for him to settle down again, and then she carefully covered him with his favorite comforter and an additional quilt.
The second time he awoke, he caught her completely by surprise. She had been just a quarter inch from his face, to thrill with the warm caress of his exhalations on her cheek, which felt like moth wings. His eyes opened, and he looked straight at her. She froze, mortified, but he groaned, pulled a pillow over his head, and rolled onto his stomach.
She couldn't account for his failure to discover her. Perhaps she had been prominent in his dreams, and he misconstrued the apparent apparition inches from his face as a continuation. For whatever reason he settled again effortlessly and whispered her name.
He did not awaken again, though she breathlessly hoped, but he did continue to toss and turn, almost as though her own inner turmoil, her cares, fears, misgivings, projected to his musculature. She wished he would settle down. He needed rest. She had been compounding and amplifying his stress, and the revelatory expurgation of secrets that afternoon had been too much for him, unfair to him, more than any mortal should be asked to endure.
Emboldened by his neglect to perceive her on the second time that he had awoken, she decided to try something. She felt fairly certain that if he began to rouse, she would hear the changes to his heartbeat and breathing and flee in time to go undetected. She knew that she was pushing her luck, but she had to be closer to him.
She went to the cupboard in the hallway and returned with two additional comforters. She always came into his room naked, in order to enter and move silently, but for what she wanted to do, she would need to insulate him from her skin, or he would detect her coldness and awaken for certain.
She carefully, silently climbed onto his bed, mindful to come into contact with no part of his body, for fear of crushing him. His arms were up around his pillow. She curled up facing him, with her head under his chin, her nose and chin tucked into his chest. Through the wall of comforters he still felt so warm, and even this afternoon on the bench overlooking the lumber gantry, she had not heard his heart so prominently. She put her free arm up over his body, and she slowly let her palm, fingers and forearm come to rest on his side. This might be the closest she would ever come to hugging Benjamin. A stolen hug, to be sure.
Was she a danger to him now, with her cheek pressed to the layers of fabric over his heart? She didn't feel thirst. Desire, yes. He smelled as delicious as ever, but her throat no longer burned. This new desire was something else, and it had no name. It filled her head, her breasts, and the nascent emptiness beneath her stomach most of all.
Not for the first time since she had met Benjamin Swan, she felt her vestigial heart attempting to prime itself on empty air. She couldn't tell her family about that sensation. Not even Carlisle. The follow-up question would be whether vampires could go insane.
For all she knew, he could be in peril now. Their kind transitioned from purposeful cognition to instinct instantaneously. Edythe's conscious self and her instinct contended always for dominance. Yet the monster within Edythe did not thirst. That much, she knew with certainty.
She brooded instead. She desired Benjamin, certainly. But as to whether he was an object of thirst that awaited expression, or of some other desire only now just opening its sepals and coming into bloom, she would have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, Benjamin settled. His muscles went lax. He did not speak. His heart rate slowed, and his temperature dipped by two degrees. She embraced him as though he were fragile as a soap bubble, and he neither spoke nor roused until dawn. The only change, a half hour after she first lay with him, his arm drifted down across their bodies, and his hand came to rest around her waist. Two thick comforters separated them, and yet for the first time in her life she was held in repose by her lover. The monster within Edythe vacillated, confounded, caught up in her turmoil. Good. The monster would just have to suffer with her.
Ten minutes before Ben's alarm, she gently extricated herself from his arms and slipped out of his house. As she ducked out of the window, she heard him speak once more.
"Edythe, please stay."
Leaving him that morning was the hardest thing she ever did.
______
Ben awoke on Thursday an hour ahead of the alarm, on Edythe's parting promise that he would see her today.
Last night she had starred in his dreams, as usual. The climate of his unconsciousness had thrilled with the same soft electricity that had charged the afternoon; he had tossed and turned restlessly, waking often. Dreams and wakefulness had melded together. She had straddled his waist, recumbent upon him, and he had felt her body everywhere at once, as much her ice cold palate and throat as the distension of her hollow stomach as she had gnawed her lip with worry, raising and lowering herself upon him and chanting his name to the rhythm of their loving. Or else she lay on her back, with knees and calves raised and docile, to either side of his hips, and she breathlessly beckoned him as they abandoned themselves to their need and took each other with forceful, indefatigable glee. It was only in the early hours of morning that he finally descended, spent, into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.
He picked himself up out of bed and raced straight downstairs to attend to his workout. He tried to exhaust himself on calisthenics and failed; repetitions came effortlessly to his muscles, enervated by hidden reservoirs.
At dawn he toweled off, painted in a sheen of sweat. He bounded up the basement stairs and through the kitchen with a perfunctory greeting to Charlie as he leapt upstairs to the shower.
Twenty minutes later he bounded down the stairs wearing knee length khaki shorts and a navy blue button shirt to find that Charlie had already gone. He heard the cruiser pulling out onto the narrow road, and he raced for his book bag, determined that he would assert his independence by taking his own truck to school, where he would be waiting to greet her.
He locked the front door, turned, and shook his head with incredulity, because she already blocked him in, the Volvo softly purring.
Ben hustled straight out to her car and hopped in, book bag in hand, saying, "I'd hoped to beat you to school in my truck."
Her voice sounded timid and hurt, when she responded, "If you wanted to go to school alone...."
He whirled to see the hurt betrayed by her eyes, and he lightly laughed with reassurance, "No, no, thank you; I just wanted to be faster."
Her frown inverted from convex to concave, and she laughed with relief, admitting, "I'm surprised you want to be with me."
Ben nodded pensively and said, "I thought you might be. You were so sad last night. When we parted. That's why I'm glad we're early for school. I know you wouldn't hurt me."
"You can't know that," she whispered.
"Not on purpose, I mean. Jacob said you only eat animals."
"Drink from them," she said bleakly.
Ben looked askance, the glove compartment, his book bag, the passenger side window, the door lock, his front door, the dark illusion of safety within. He murmured, "But animals. Not people."
"Not lately."
His head shot up, and he stared warily.
She stared at the ceiling and explained, "To us, you're not people." She hastily added, "Not me and you, not as pertains to us, specifically. To me, you're a beautiful person and a beautiful mind, and I adore your soul. Another truth that I don't expect you to believe."
He stared at the house and whispered, "I do believe it. And that's what matters. Can I ask something?"
"Anything," she replied, "and I won't lie to you, but that also means I might not be able to answer. Yet." She glanced up at the rear view mirror and put the car in reverse.
As she backed out, without appearing to look at anything at all, Ben asked, "When you say you haven't drunk... from people... lately..." He was about to ask if she ever had, but she'd implied as much, and the question would likely only sadden her more.
Instead he asked, "You mean lately in terms of... you're sixteen. How long have you been sixteen?"
She put the car in drive and started down the road, an easy glide, barely kissing the speed limit. "That's one I can't tell you yet."
"But you have drank from people."
She stared straight at the road. "I am an apex predator. Humans are my primary food source."
"Is it always fatal?"
She glanced at him, frowning, perhaps to confirm that he hadn't been joking. "Yes. Well... almost always. There are sadists who prolong it. Anyway, yes. I have. Since then I've been a vegetarian, for a very long time."
He looked at her quizzically, and she softly tittered, "Our slang. Vampires are rare, but those of us with gold eyes are rarer, still. We call ourselves vegetarians. The vast majority, who have red eyes, we call carnivores. As a way of distinguishing between lifestyles. Of course the vast majority, the carnivores, merely hold us in contempt.
"Anyway, yes, I've had my fall from grace. And I've been starving myself. Ever since my eyes changed from red back to gold."
"That's so sad."
She looked at him again, nonplussed. "Which part?"
"That you've been starving yourself."
Edythe sighed, "You can sometimes be a rather perplexing person."
"I've heard that before."
"I just bet you have." She chuckled and added, "I say that affectionately, you know. I so much wish I could read your mind, but I'm glad I can't. It's in some ways a curse, but it's also a blessing. That God has granted you your privacy. Even from me."
They parked in the upper lot, in the precise space they had occupied on the morning of the ice storm. The space had been repaved to repair a twelve inch deep impalement of the asphalt by the tree that had shattered on Edythe's palm. She suggested that they sit on the retaining wall and watch the other students arrive. They set their book bags on the hood of the car. Ben put his hands on the wall, crouched, and leapt the five feet, with an assist by his arms, and twirled on a wrist to land sitting.
Edythe stood on the wall beside him.
He muttered, "Jesus," under his breath, and stood to join her.
"You know," he confided, "I asked that stuff about your age, back at the house, because of something Jacob said. He told me you never grow old, which implies you could in fact be any age at all."
Edythe dismissively said, "He's wrong about that. You were right. Superstitious pagans. Everything ages. Even stones. Even the sun."
"But much slower than us."
"Well, yes."
"You just reminded me of something else. I ruled out vampires ages ago on the Internet, because of all the silly Hollywood stuff. Like how you would fry to a crisp in the sun. We're outside right now, but the sun's nowhere in sight. And you're always out of school on sunny days, so now I'm wondering if that part's as ridiculous as I'd assumed."
She shook her head with amusement. "Yeah, you're right. The Hollywood stuff is all silly. The sun can't hurt us. But still, we become... conspicuous... in sunlight, so we stay away from people. We try to blend in."
"But you don't sleep all day in coffins."
She laughed through her closed lips, and then she softly added, "No. Actually, we don't sleep at all."
He sobered up, "You mean, you can't?"
"Never," she murmured, "neither sleep nor dreams." She turned to look at him with a wistful expression. He held her gaze, his eyes trapped in her golden stare. After a few seconds, he'd completely lost his train of thought.
Other students were beginning to arrive. Every single one of them stared at the two figures standing upon the retaining wall, with the forest for a background.
Ben remembered his other thought about the sun. Oddly enough this was the aspect of Edythe that most vexed him: not that she drank blood and might on some level desire his own, but the fact that the sun had the temerity to take her from him, for days on end.
"You said you're conspicuous in the sun, and you have to hide. Conspicuous how?"
She smiled and promised, "I'll show you on the next sunny day."
He muttered, "I could have a long wait."
She rested her head against his arm with a sigh and breathed, "We should be so lucky."
_______
Thursday morning for Ben was a series of impediments all the way to the Band practice room at lunch.
They sat together on the risers again. She watched him eat and asked him why he didn't have a hundred questions. He told her that he had twice that many, but he was happy just to be with her; he'd been waiting for practice period all day, and he didn't want to annoy her with more of the third degree.
"Besides, you must have a question or two for me, or am I really that boring to you?"
She chuckled, "Oh, I have about two hundred myself. Do you mean I get to interrogate you, too?"
He munched on a Saltine and warned, "I don't have any cool powers, like disappearing at will, but you can ask me anything." He held the cracker sleeve out to her.
"For the umpteenth time, no thank you."
Ben snidely mocked, "You're a super-being who can catch trees in your bare hands, and you'd be poisoned to death by a Saltine?"
She glared at him and muttered, "Godsakes." She snatched a cracker from the sleeve, popped it into her mouth, and started chewing with a martyred expression. Her teeth clacked like soft chimes. After a few bites she swallowed, showed him her tongue, and gave him a superior look.
He stared in awe. He impulsively held out his lemonade.
She giggled with a polite wave of her hand.
"Okay," he blurted, "so I have a real question."
"Hold that thought. My turn. Do you miss rock climbing?"
He stopped short and considered, musing, "You're the first person to ask me that, since I got here. That's a great question."
She beamed at him and whispered, "I find you anything but boring."
He breathed, nodding in acknowledgment, yet incredulous all the same. "Uh, okay. Well, yeah. I miss it intensely. It's my favorite sport. It rankles that I've gotten shoehorned into the Ski Team here. I've never been on skis. And I guess it's also beyond irritating that we're surrounded by cliffs and mountains, yet bouldering isn't a sport here."
Edythe became glum on his behalf, though in truth she had never thought much about it. "Forks is not an affluent town," she said. "Football is a potential escape. Rock climbing is not. What was your real question?"
"Well, if you can eat Saltine crackers, I imagine you could eat anything. So why blood?"
She scootched closer and pressed her head to his shoulder. She had worn a bulky sweater to school, and she had left her jacket on, in the hopes of being able to snuggle with him at lunchtime. "Do you mind?" she whispered.
"No, not at all."
She sighed with contentment and softly explained, "I didn't really eat the Saltine. I mean, I did, but I didn't. I won't metabolize it."
"Oh. Strange. You don't vomit it or anything?"
"My body's just indifferent to it. Yes, I'll void it at some point, but there's no need here, certainly. Rather unseemly and indecent. I'm strange and freakish enough."
"I don't think so."
"Sure, but you're insane," she said with a soft chuckle.
"Then, umm, okay. Blood it is."
"Yes, that's it."
"And you don't get tired of it?"
She shrugged and said, "Our senses are much different than yours. There's sufficient variety."
"Only because you eat animals, though. So you're lucky there." He tried hard to be positive and upbeat, but she dashed his encouragement.
"Actually," she said, "there would be variety regardless. As varied as fingerprints or snowflakes."
"Really? I wonder what I would taste like."
She stared at him with a strange expression, while he munched on Saltines. He got through six before he felt the silence and looked up.
"What?"
She whispered, "I do know what you would taste like. And Ben, that's not something you should ever joke about."
"Okay... so, animals versus people. What's that about? In these more enlightened times, vampires have become more compassionate?"
"A precious few have. I'll say this succinctly, because you need to understand it. Ben, we collectively do hunt humans; we collectively don't acknowledge that you're people. We collectively see you as prey. You must hear that, absorb it, and above all, retain and heed it."
He considered this and surmised, "So you and your family are the exceptions?"
"Among a very small minority."
"And I don't suppose you're going to explain that yet?"
Edythe winked.
He gave her a grumpy look that set her to fresh laughter.
"Okay... so, a minute ago you said you know what my blood would taste like"—
"Ben, we need to talk about something else."
"No, I know. I just... I just want to know how you could know that."
She stared at him. She couldn't believe it. This wasn't his fault. He just didn't seem to understand, and something would have to be done about that. She debated rebuffing him more emphatically, but instead she decided that he really needed to hear it.
She told him, "Taste and smell are closely interrelated."
"You can smell my blood?"
"Yes. And nothing more on this, Ben. Not another word. I mean it. Or I'll stand up and go to the cafeteria. For the rest of the hour. Not yet."
Ben huffed, "Can you at least tell me when yet is?"
She smiled and easily said, "Sure. You know what I am. Yet is when you accept me for what I am."'
"I do," he averred.
She shook her head. "You can't possibly know that. Speaking of which, I have a question for you. Must you go to Seattle, or would you mind if we did something different?"
As long as the we part was in, Ben didn't care about anything else. "I'm open to alternatives," he allowed. "The biggest thing on my list was a keyboard for my room, but I can practice here five days a week, so it's not a priority."
"You could always buy a keyboard online."
He shrugged. "I'd need to try it out. See how it feels."
She nodded glumly. "I'm the same way."
"But no worries, really. What do you have in mind? Something fun?"
"Alice says the weather will be nice on Saturday, so"—
"Wait, wait. Your sister, Alice? She's like, what? A meteorologist or something?"
Edythe chuckled and said, "Yeah, right. So I guess I didn't explain that, either. You know how I can read minds? Most of them anyway? Alice has visions. Of things that haven't happened yet. With people, mostly. Both kinds. But she's good with the weather, too. If Alice says the sun will be out, we ditch. She's always right."
Ben murmured, "I figured you were all mind readers. You mean, Alice can do even more than that?"
"No, actually the mindreading thing is just me. We call them talents. It's different for everyone. We take some aspect of ourselves forward from our previous life. Some dominant cognitive trait. For me it was telepathy. I must have been good at understanding people in my first life. Alice must have been skilled at prediction. Soothsaying."
"Do all the others have talents too?"
"Not all. Most have gifts of some kind, but it's only called a talent when it confers some advantage that others would covet. Then it's a talent.
"Anyway, Alice is usually right, so I'll be staying out of the public eye... so we could just hang out together. Find somewhere for alone time."
"And you'll be in the sun?"
"Well, yes," she said, "now you mention it. But it will also be an ideal place to get to the bottom of the other thing. The yet."
"Whether I accept you as you are. I've told you that I do."
Edythe shook her head. "No. It's not a fully informed choice."
He glowered and reminded her, "Saturday morning is one and a half days away. How can that give me enough time to be fully informed?"
"Oh, don't worry. You'll get most of what you need on the day of. It will also give you enough time to tell Charlie that we'll be together for the day."
Ben shook his head stubbornly at the thought of having to explain to Charlie the shambles that his move to Arizona had made of his personal life, and the fragmentation, and his desperate efforts to piece it all back together into a semblance of coherence, and Edythe's role in that. He shook his head, exhaling.
"What?" she asked her shoes. "Are you ashamed of me?"
"What? No! No! How could you think that?"
"I don't know. Why would you not want to tell him I'm with you?"
"Because it's complicated. He knows your father. He even knows of you. He's convinced we saved each other in the ice storm. It's all a big mess. Look, they're already freaking out about all the girls I've ever known who've been 'just friends.' Renée and Charlie are convinced I'm stunted or there's something missing. I'm begging you to let me deal with Charlie at my own pace and take it slow."
She scowled at the rubber surface of the riser between her feet and pleaded, "But Ben, you need to see"—
"Edythe, I don't know what we are. I don't know how to have that conversation with my dad, and I doubt you can help me with that. I'll decide when and how to do it. If there's ever a need, and honestly, what are the odds."
Her eyes were fierce, but she saved her anger for her shoes. He didn't understand that she desperately needed their outing on Saturday to be known. The thought of taking him to that place all day, and being there all day, and he placing himself at her mercy, filled her with terror, and she needed some external motivator, a reminder that come what may, she had no choice but to bring him back. But she couldn't press the point, because he had disarmed her with his admission that they looked at him and perceived most of all his emotional deficits. Edythe, too, was patronized at home, the weak link, the malformed child who had been taken too young, the ungrateful naif who had jilted Terrence after a seventy-plus year courtship.
The things that they had in common gradually began to accumulate.
Much as she hated feeling herself doing it, she curtly nodded.
"Thanks," he murmured.
She hissed through her teeth, "I don't like it."
"Neither do I."
______
Edythe abruptly stood and walked to the piano. She took a seat at the bench and ran through some scales. She sighed. Her jacket and sweater sleeves were pulled all the way up to her elbows. Ben watched her stare up at the fluorescents and ignore her hands. He watched and knew she was holding back.
"Am I ever going to really hear you play?"
"Not yet," she said to the ceiling tiles.
Ben glared at her, and she stopped playing entirely. She poised her arms at full stretch, fingers over the keys, as though she were paused.
She quietly pleaded, "Why don't we just play and sing? I sang yesterday. You are the angel in the room, Ben. Shall I play Offertoire?"
He nodded and started on the riser, but she played so sweetly with her deft little hands that he gravitated to the piano. He tried to stay angry at her, but he couldn't do it. She looked at him as she played and smiled her encouragement.
Ben slipped onto the bench as he sang and inadvertently nudged a leg. The entire bench moved a couple inches under Edythe, and he realized as he slowly nudged it back into place that she wasn't sitting on the bench at all. She was balancing over it, essentially on one foot, while playing and working the pedals. He recalled the pneumatics that activated in the wheel wells of the Volvo every time she entered or exited the cabin, and not for the first time he wondered how much she weighed, but he kept the thought to himself and sang the Fauré angelically.
Edythe improvised a segue straight into Ben's other baritone piece, Libera Me. He stood and meandered around the piano, singing as he went. Toward the end of the piece, Edythe peered over the score book, having lost him entirely. She found him on the floor at the end of the piece, sitting against the wall.
They had ten minutes left to the hour, before the bell would ring for Biology.
"May I?" she asked.
He patted the floor tiles at his side.
She sat on the floor beside him. They looked up at the golden underside of the Kawai piano.
He murmured, "I want more than friendship."
Edythe nodded. "Me, too."
He glanced at her, just a moment, and her eyes were focused elsewhere, the Kawai's soundboard. He said, "I know it's virtually impossible."
Edythe nodded again and hugged her knees.
Ben took an extraordinary chance by putting an arm around her shoulders.
She leaned against him gratefully and whispered, "Let me know if you get cold."
He promised her that he would try to be patient about the things that she couldn't tell him. He would need help with the boundaries.
"I've changed my mind," she declared.
He raised both eyebrows with alarm. About what? friendship? wanting more? wanting less? wanting nothing?
She explained, "I think it would be best to tell you one of the 'not yets' preemptively. The paradox. I didn't strictly lie to you last week when I told you that I'd gone backpacking with Emilia. That's just convention for us. When we ditch school or when Carlisle takes personal days from his duties at the hospital, it's for hiking, or camping, or backpacking. Those are the alibis we use. It's second nature."
He nodded with understanding. "Oh, I see. So, you and Emilia were hunting."
"Yes," she said, pleased that he'd made the connection.
He shrugged. "Well, that doesn't seem like a lie at all. It's perfectly understandable."
She smiled thinly and conceded, "But I am being just a little disingenuous, I admit it. After all, if last week I'd told you that we were going hunting, it would have triggered a dozen uncomfortable questions."
He shrugged again and said that it was a distinction, but an insignificant one. "It is still a paradox, though. I mean, why there, if the place is overrun with bears?"
She gave him a wry look, and he paled.
"Wait. You hunt bears?"
She shrugged and muttered, "When we can get them. We have to be careful about clearing them out. There really aren't that many. Campers share them on Facebook and conflate one sighting into a population explosion."
He scowled and couldn't look at her, tiny, emaciated, her hollowed stomach and spindle arms. She rested her head on his shoulder, light as a feather, her hair a gentle caress against him, yet he knew that it wasn't. She was balancing herself against him, not touching him at all.
A battered white contractor's truck smashed through the ceiling and wall, scattered the tables and music stands in its riotous tumble and obliterated Dr. Ustinov's office on its path of destruction.
"How do you hunt bears? I can't even imagine it."
"I'm explaining. It's not something you'd ever be able to see. On Saturday, we're going to be out alone, in the woods. A pretty place that I know. I go there to meditate and be myself. Now, when we hunt— no, when I hunt— when I'm stalking a grizzly bear or a mountain lion"—
"Mountain lions?"
"Please just listen. This is important. When I'm hunting, I'm not like this. A kind of bloodlust takes over, and I become a machine. My body can hunt without me. My body doesn't strictly require my conscious participation. I lose control of myself. I lose the ability to reason, or to know right from wrong, or even to know what it is that I'm killing. I sometimes don't even know that I have killed. Until after the bloodlust cools, and my consciousness returns, and the carcass is at my feet."
Ben whispered, "So you're saying... killing for you is sort of like a dream?"
She sadly admitted, "Even less than that. We are really only superficially similar, Ben. I hope to explain that, too. I've been telling you that I'm dangerous, and this friendship has been your choice, much as I have yearned for it, much as I am grateful for every moment you give me, much as your denial would be heartbreaking, much as your acceptance is also heartbreaking."
Ben shuddered against the wall, with tiny Edythe balancing beside him, wringing her clenched fingers, cords of wire and bone, unadorned silver-white nails, remarkably thick, like the edges of incisors. He stared at her hard sharp nails, whispered, "So if we were to cross the path of an animal— like a bear or a wolf"—
She rolled her head with a moan and stared up at a corner of the room. "It wouldn't even take that. You're in grave danger, anytime we're alone."
He shook. "Even now?"
"We're surrounded by people. We're not really alone. The walls of this room for you confer the illusion of privacy. For me it's not the same. Even without my telepathy, I can hear them, smell them all around us. We're surrounded by spectators. It's a riotous din. To me, we're sitting on a dais at the bottom of a deep packed amphitheater, and that helps to some extent, to dampen my carnal desires."
"Because they'd witness the crime?"
Edythe breathed and shuddered. "Not so much that. My body sees the spectators more as competitors for my kill. But yes, their presence has a suppressing influence, yet only to a point. Even the audience wouldn't make much difference, if I were thirsty enough or my kill were appealing enough. I'm perfectly capable of defending my kill, you see. Even here, now, surrounded by witnesses, you are in danger. Where we'll be on Saturday, a quiet place where I have my mind to myself and blessed silence... in that pretty, tranquil place where even your mind would be a void to me and the only sound would be your heartbeat... well, it needs to be your choice. Ben, to me, you are the most beautiful light in my existence, and I couldn't even imagine harming you. To my body, you are prey."
Ben sighed and muttered, "I'm going to have a hard time in Biology. It's three minutes to the bell."
"We can ditch it."
"No, no, it's good. Can we talk some more? After school?"
"Of course, Ben," she promised with a grateful smile. "We'll have more time this afternoon. No Choir today. If you'd like that."
"I would. And I promise I'll decide. About Saturday."
She nodded with thin lips, biting down hard, and with a shudder she breathed, "Thank you."
She took her head off his shoulder and he went to glance down at her, but he blinked, disconcerted, because she was already standing.
He shook his head clear.
Edythe absently extended a pale small hand, fingers pressed close together.
He impulsively raised his hand to hers. Without bending or even planting a small foot for leverage, while standing perfectly straight, feet together, she lifted him straight off the ground, up onto his feet. He weighed two hundred eleven pounds. Edythe was an impossibly rigid fulcrum. She had hauled him to his feet as though she herself were cemented to the floor. Her tiny hand dropped away, and he pinioned his arms to balance himself upright. She looked at him wistfully as he gaped at her, and she shook her head with recognition. She had flubbed again. She did it too much around him. She so easily forgot herself, her practiced human tics. And he was too observant, so much more penetrating than most of the others.
"Do you mind if I ask..." he began, as they went for their book bags.
With defeat she whispered, "I know what you're going to ask. Sure, go ahead."
"Don't take this the wrong way... it's just that guys aren't supposed to ask girls this question"—
"Girls?"
"You know what I mean. It's just, I've seen enough to appreciate that you must be incredibly strong. But you can't suspend physics, can you?"
She smiled with a wistful shrug. "Not an angel. One hundred percent natural. Just like you."
"Right. And some of the things I've seen you do... you'd need leverage, too. And momentum. And also little things, like the way your car adjusts for you, and the way you always seem to be balanced over me when we touch"—
The bell rang. They had three minutes to cross the quad to Building Four and Bio Lab.
"Ben, I weigh three hundred ninety-eight pounds."
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