Page 107 of So Thirsty

“I do.” He takes my face in his hands to kiss me. He stops to yawn. “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” I say, catching his yawn. “I’m spent.”

“Should we sleep?”

Looking at him, I get a very good idea that I’m almost too shy to speak out loud. Almost. “Could we shower first?”

He grins. His fox grin. His cat-that-got-the-canary grin.

We undress each other. We soap each other, use our hands to create a lather. We look at each other. We kiss each other. We clean each other. It’s an intimacy like I’ve never experienced. Not even in all my years with… Joel.

For a second, I couldn’t even remember his name.

A small part of me wonders if I should feel bad about it, acknowledges that I have yet to process or fully comprehend the loss of that relationship. But most of me is busy washing Henry’s hair.

After we get out of the shower and towel each other off, we get into bed, one bed, and he holds me. His skin is still a little wet.

We lie in nectarous silence for a long time.

Then he says, “Do you want to hear my sad song?”

I nod, then rest my head on his chest, listening to his heart, the steady thump of it.

“I was a prince, once. Centuries ago. Far away from here,” he says, his accent shifting, voice going deeper. “I have seen many battles. Fought many wars. I have killed. I have won. I have lost. I was married to a girl whom I did not choose, did not love, who did not choose me or love me, who died too young. My father was cruel, and my younger brothers resented me. I had no friends whom I could trust. I thought I would die alone on a battlefield. I became this so I would not, so I might prove myself to a kingdom that no longer exists. Be honored by history, which I know now does not remember me. I have spent centuries drifting in the dark, hating who I’d been, unsure of who I’d become.”

He pauses.

“You remind me of what it once felt like to step into sunlight,” he says. “To feel warmth. To experience true brightness. All that’s tangible and intangible.”

It’s the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me, and I wish I knew how to respond. I wish I could believe his words, meet him where he is. I wish I knew how to trust this stranger—all his mischief, all his danger, all his beauty, and the pull between us that could be love.

My throat yearns, not for blood, but for sound, for the right words. I need to say something. I need…

“Thank you,” I tell him. Thank you. Thank you?

He grins a new grin. Not goofy or devious. Despondent. The grin of a man on a sinking ship, admiring the sky.

“Get some sleep,” he says, reaching over to the nightstand and grabbing his cigarettes. “I’m going out to smoke.”

“Okay. All right.”

He gets out of bed, gets dressed, kisses me on the forehead. Then he’s gone, and I’m alone, and I wonder what I should have said to him. Anything but “thank you.”

I close my eyes, and I see Ms. Alice, the skin between her teeth. I hear the echo of her horrible laugh. I remember her blood. The blood in the tumbler. Lee’s blood on Naomi’s lips. The blood of the man at the rest stop. Matthew’s blood, our first victim, left in the woods behind our cottage.

I remember my reflection, the last time I saw it, will ever see it, in the dirty mirror at the lake house. I picture Naomi, imagine her across the hall with Ilie, snorting illicit substances off each other. And Elisa, her curls haloing her face, pulling her sleep mask down over her eyes. Tatiana, sprawled across the bed in her silk pajamas, beautiful and bitchy and maybe even wise.

Perhaps I could hope to fall in love with my future. This future. With these people.

With him. Henry.

If I can get past the guilt and the fear. Accept my thirst.

I open my eyes and stare at the empty cooler at the foot of the bed, weary myself until I drift off to sleep.

—

When I wake up, Henry isn’t beside me. At first, I assume he took the other bed, offended by my tepid response to his romantic declaration comparing me to his fond human memories of sunlight. But once I get the courage to look over, I see he isn’t there. He isn’t in the room at all. I don’t think he ever came back.