I kissed him. His mouth was Laphroaig-flavoured, but that was fine, that was grist to my mill. His hips pressed against mine, hands tightened on my waist. The heat between us blurred and a little net of electricity settled on my cunt.
Something still restrained him.
‘What?’ I asked, leaning back to get his face into focus.
He kept his hands on me. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked. ‘To do this?’
Anatomically, he meant. He was the sort of guy who’d know how long after having a baby a woman’s parts would be out of action. He’d know because he was the sort of guy who would’ve been in this situation before.
But not with a woman like me.
‘I heal fast,’ I said. ‘Very fast.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Kiss me.’
It was hard not to hurry. If Zoë woke up or Cloquet ignored his instructions and knocked we knew we probably wouldn’t recover. I took down the spare comforter from the wardrobe and spread it on the floor. No chairs, no tables, no up against the wall, no bent over the escritoire or swinging from the ceiling light. Nothing that might increase our chances of fucking it up. This was the other reason it was tough not to hurry: I was in a hurry. The morning’s self-help excluded I hadn’t had sex in over three months. Now, with wulf back at full libidinal tilt, dalliance was the last thing on my mind. I only have sex with women I dislike, Jake had written. To avoid falling in love and killing the beloved. Yes. But this was all right because it wouldn’t be love.
Still standing, I unbuttoned his shirt and pushed it and the jacket off his shoulders. They fell to the floor with a sound that settled us deeper into not needing to say anything. His upper body was understatedly muscled – honest function rather than the confections of the gym – and flecked with little scars like ciphers. Our eyes met, risked lingering, but looked away before the smile that might have sounded a fatal note of mere friendliness. He tugged my blouse out from my jeans and began with the buttons. Got all four undone without time too loudly simmering. The bra, too, hallelujah.
In a great flash of awkward practicality I realised milk might come if he sucked my breasts – but again, he’d know that, and know that I knew. It would either happen or not, and if it did it wouldn’t bother him. He was a creature of easy physical promiscuity, Dionysian without fuss: once his desire was established everything of the body was sacred.
Guilt was available to me, of course, but my human was bigger than it and wulf simply didn’t give a shit. Superficial aesthetics said what I was doing – having sex while my child was in danger – was ugly, but the deeper being dismissed them. There were these necessary dark segues, unarguable with. Even dumb movies these days knew Eros found its way to the borders of grief, loss, longing, boredom, anger, shame – and was given entry. The real danger here wasn’t guilt but sadness. Not just mine (and not just for my son or my failed heart, but for my amputation from normality) but Walker’s too, for whatever long-ago damage he’d wrapped his mix of levity and glitter and sex around.
This was my human, by the way, busy, humanly, with him, Walker, the person. There was the forlorn flame at his centre, the lost boy around which the smiling hidden man had grown that my vestigial romantic was sniffing after, while a later self (with Lauren’s voice) said, No, leave it, it’s nothing to do with you and in any case it’ll ruin him sexually for you just like the little old guy behind the curtain ruins Oz for everyone the first time they see it. So I kissed him, dirtily, and felt through his mouth and his chest under my hands the last threads of his resistance sweetly snapping. He was going to do this, oh yes, surrender to the devious drug. The big taboo – another species – broke negligibly in the end, and let him into warmth, my warmth, me. I could feel his imagination making room for the atrocities, since there was no denying them, since they were there in my skin and in my mouth and in the sly heat of my cunt that he wanted now, oh yes, he wanted, no matter what, no matter what, no matter what.
By telepathic agreement we separated to get our jeans and underwear off, then reconvened, side by side, face to face. I pushed him onto his back and slid on top of him. A little milk had crept out. He neither avoided nor made a fetish of it. To him it was part of the body’s casually sanctified continuum. If he desired you, physically, he desired all of you. It was what the girls in the schoolyard had animally sensed in him as a kid. It was why they’d exempted him. I reached over to my purse, extracted a condom, tore the foil and slithered down his torso. His cock, modest in size but with a lovely lewd optimistic arch, visibly throbbed. Packed with blood, the monster reminded me, with a nudge and a wink and a lick of her teeth – but I was far enough from full moon to shush her. He got up on his elbows. His face was full of life focused on me, the blue-green eyes glimmering, the mouth edging into a less innocent version of its smile. I breathed, open-mouthed on the head of his cock, watched its rhythmic obedience, suffered a mental image of trying to bite clean through it, a mess of flailing blood, Walker screaming. One more cunning look up at him – yes, I know exactly how good this is going to feel – then I took him into my mouth. I felt him swallow, sensed his head tip back – then forward again for another greedy look.
Later. More of this later. For now I was desperate, unequivocal, righteously selfish. I got the condom on without disaster, slid back up his body, took him in one hand, looked down at his wholly seduced and radiantly hungry face, and lowered myself onto his cock.
24
It wasn’t perfect, but it was more than enough for a start. His instincts were good, hands and mouth read the signals, moved more or less to where they were wanted. It was understood between us that the first big expenditure was for me, me, me, all for dreadful me, and he held back and worked with a mixture of gallantry and artisanal concentration to make me come. Not that that – in my state – was any great achievement. It took about three minutes. Then another three, then five, then ten. Then I settled down and could be reasoned with. When he came (we were approximately in the spoons position) all his strength gathered in his hips and chest and his arms wrapped around me and his breath jabbed soft and hot at my ear and a note of tenderness was there at the end like a lovely curlicue and I liked him because there was no disguising the honest male gladness that went from his body out to mine.
‘Holy moly,’ he said, afterwards.
‘That’s my phrase,’ I said.
‘Is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll never use it again.’
‘The way to handle this, by the way, is to not talk about it.’
‘This?’
‘What we’ve just done.’
‘My lips are sealed.’
‘I don’t mean other people. I mean each other.’
‘Got it.’
‘Are you always this biddable?’
‘Well, you know, you’re like a horse whisperer.’
I was thinking of the diaries. (I would often be thinking of the diaries. Perennial bloodless infidelity would be part of my package, for decades. Maybe for ever.) Modern humans talk their love affairs into an early grave, Jake had written. Eros hasn’t got a fucking chance with people yammering at each other about everything the whole time. I think we should talk. No, believe me, we shouldn’t. You want to give love a chance? Find someone you can’t communicate with.
Walker’s cellphone rang. It was his WOCOP insider, Hoyle, with an update. The attempted hit on us in the Hammersmith parking lot was from a couple of loose cannons from the organisation’s Spanish division – get this – on vacation. Murdoch had risked an international meltdown by beating them half to death when he found out. The dead vampire was definitely one of the priests, almost certainly six-hundred-year-old Raphael Cavalcanti, since he’d been logged in London only one week before, but until the remaining (known) priests were accounted for it was impossible to be sure. Meanwhile still no news on Jacqueline and the Disciples. Therefore no news on Lorcan. Which shrivelled me back to my dreary dimensions.
Walker
felt the mood shift. Loudly didn’t ask what the problem was. Part of me was thankful he didn’t, part of me wished he would. I hadn’t told anyone, not even Cloquet, the filthy truth of the kidnapping: that my heart had remained grotesquely neutral, though I’d held him in my arms still warm and wet from birth. You can’t live if you can’t accept what you are, it said in Jake’s last journal, and you can’t accept what you are if you can’t say what you do. The power of naming, as old as Adam.
If I stopped to think about it too long the moment would go.
‘There’s something you should know about me,’ I said. ‘Something else, I mean.’
‘What?’
‘I’m defective.’
‘Defective?’
‘Yes.’
He didn’t say anything. Zoë whimpered for a moment in her sleep, then fell silent again. We were still lying on the comforter on the floor, on our backs now, not touching.
‘When my son was born,’ I said, to the ceiling, ‘I didn’t feel anything for him. There was just a blank space where love should’ve been. Then he was gone.’
He didn’t reply for a while. Nor, thank God, did he try taking my hand or giving me a hug.
‘A lacuna,’ he said, eventually.
‘What?’
‘A lacuna. You know the word?’
In spite of everything a slight irritation because I couldn’t, immediately, remember what it meant. Then I did. A lacuna was a gap or a blank or a blind spot. In manuscripts a missing word or section of text.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I know the word.’
Again he fell silent. Then he said: ‘There’s no comfort.’ Not a question. A diagnosis.
‘There’s no comfort,’ I agreed.
‘Even though you know it was nothing.’
‘Was it nothing?’
‘It was just bad luck that they took him in a lacuna. Sixty seconds later the love might have come flooding in. It’s there for her ladyship.’
It’s there for her ladyship.
Was it? The Devil’s subtlest temptations are the ones you yield to without even knowing you’ve given in. There was footage, which, though I’d shut the bulk of myself off from it while it was happening, made itself available now: me kissing her head and smelling her scalp and talking to her and calling her Sugar or Missy or Toots, which were all names my mother had called me. I’d done all this obliquely, in terrible secret from my hardened Pharaonic heart, all without really looking at my daughter, who was like a little murderer, who, if I did look at her, met all my hidden love with all my exposed failure. Her eyes held all the rights I’d forfeited. She was like God: said nothing, reflected everything I’d done, everything I’d failed to do, everything I was and everything I wasn’t. If I came in from the dreamy periphery of talking and kissing and not looking, if I came, honestly and fully to her, she could look at me so that my love felt like an obscene thing, a greed, a vice, and I got a feeling of falling away from her, thinning, into nothingness. Love turned me to her and turning to her exposed the too-lateness of the love.
‘It wasn’t a lacuna,’ I said. ‘I felt nothing for him because I thought if I did I might kill him. That would’ve been the worst thing. And that’s what we do, our kind. We do the worst thing. Just so you know.’
Our auras lay against each other, allowed the passage of unspoken information. What I’d just told him wouldn’t stop him wanting me. He was drawn to monstrosity greater than his own. He’d long ago stopped looking for anything more than temporarily diverting sex among the normal women of the world. He believed his only chance for depth was with someone more lost or mutant than himself.
‘What about now?’ he asked. ‘Do you think you’re a danger to your children now?’
In the pale pink bedroom with Delilah Snow the wardrobe door had mysteriously opened, and when I’d looked up at the sound I’d been introduced to my reflection in its mirror. A monster with a human baby in its hands. Like the third recurring daydream. Except of course in the third recurring daydream the baby was a werewolf, and it was hanging from the mother monster’s jaws.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
I lay still, existing with what I was, with what people would think of me. There was a superficial or movie-ish impulse to get up and get dressed, disgusted afresh at my talent for carnality where there should just have been visible torment, but I ignored it, let it burn out, leaving only the level of reality that wasn’t interested in the movies, the alleged consensus, the bad script. It wasn’t defiance or self-forgiveness. It was my soul’s weird expansion to accommodate itself, all its opposites and approximations. I thought of how exhausted the God who wasn’t there must be, who’d been doing this from the Beginning, with no end in sight.
We didn’t speak for a while. He didn’t say: Don’t cry. He just waited it out. The hotel hummed gently under our backs. Never underestimate the solace of a quality hotel, Jake had written. It’s like you. Full of ghosts. For the werewolf, natural sympathy of structure.
‘I forgot to tell you,’ Walker said. ‘According to Hoyle, Merryn was working on a new translation of The Book of Remshi.’
Let the other stuff go, for now. Good. I’d said all I was going to say about it. I liked him, bitterly, for sensing it.
‘For Jacqueline?’ I asked.
‘We don’t know. It may have had nothing to do with her. Merryn was a genuine scholar.’
‘Seems a bit of a coincidence, though, doesn’t it?’
‘I know. But even if he was working on it for her, if she found out he was a mole the commission would’ve been revoked. Terminally.’
‘Where is it, anyway?
‘The translation? God knows. Jacqueline’s crew were pretty thorough. WOCOP have been over Merryn’s place since we were there. According to Hoyle they didn’t find so much as a note for the milkman.’
‘Can you get me a copy? I mean not Merryn’s, obviously, just the most widely used one? I feel like I’m flying blind.’
‘From what I remember it’s pretty impenetrable. Mike might have a copy somewhere... Or maybe on disk. I’ll see what I can do.’
Zoë woke up. Reintroduced herself to the world in a short series of burbles, then fell silent, as if waiting for its reply.
I got to my feet. I was the reply. I was the reply she was stuck with.
25
The days that followed were a static ordeal of waiting for the phone to ring, relieved by increasingly good therefore increasingly bad sex with Walker. Around the fourth or fifth time we did it I stopped kidding myself I wasn’t playing with fire. Our understanding was immediate and shocking, mutual intuition that skipped chunks of language without surprise and said, loud and clear: Danger. Ten years ago we would have congratulated ourselves. Now we kept our mouths shut and our eyes averted. Not just because we were older and sufficiently mangled, but because we knew that in our case cause for congratulation was cause for retreat. There was no avoiding it during sex, however, when our eyes met in moments of letting it be what it was: something far more than was good for us. This isn’t safe, is it? No, it isn’t. Don’t stop. Oh God don’t stop.
Post-coitally the Hollywood every American carries insinuated its norms, repeatedly suggested the afterglow scene where I doodled on his chest and asked the history of each of his scars, or told him some endearingly embarrassing story from my girlhood. We ignored it. Silence stopped us slipping into the lousy script, but exposed us to the ominous thrill of how little we needed to say. And despite our efforts prosaic epiphanies ambushed us. Once, getting back into my jeans, I got my foot caught and lost my balance. I didn’t fall over, but went through a Chaplinesque sideways hopping routine which he watched, smiling and saying: Easy there, tiger... easy, which made me laugh for the first time since before Alaska, and which opened another terrible flower of sympathy between us. At some point I’d realised he was shy of saying my name. He called me Miss D, if he had to call me anything. Then once, without thinking, he said, quietly, ‘Talulla?’ when I
was lying on him and the room was dark and he wasn’t sure if I’d fallen asleep. The smart thing would have been for me to pretend I was asleep – but instead I found myself up on one elbow, kissing his mouth, all femalely tender and lit-up by him unguardedly saying my name, unguardedly, that was the thing, it was such a frail brave thing to be unguarded with someone... telling myself the whole time, don’t do this... don’t do this... for God’s sake don’t do this you idiot... and feeling the gap between him and his previous self widening, as if it were a planet he was drifting away from into vast and utterly unknown space. Me.
We carried on not-talking about any of it. Talking about it could only lead to how stupid we’d been to start and how stupid we’d be not to stop. I imagined my mother watching the delicious mess I was making of things. She would have approved, since she was always for life and life was at its best a delicious mess; she would have approved but cut short the honeymoon period of shirking the facts: He’s not a werewolf, Talulla. Which means either make him one or dump him. Otherwise the delicious mess becomes a car-wreck. The question of whether I could Turn a person was, naturally, refreshed, but no less bedevilled by common sense: who in his right mind would thank me for doing it? You couldn’t start a love affair with a more selfish act. A love affair? Hardly, by the measure of mine and Jake’s – but there was potential around us like a massing storm. Superficially we had the strangers-in-a-strange-land myth to draw on, bodies that fit together in expert cooperation, the aphrodisiacal nearness of death and the mesmerising profane turn-on of not being the same species, but beneath all that was my liberating moral bankruptcy and his fall towards someone who (he thought, wrongly) could cut him off from his past once and for all by turning him into Something Else. That was the potential: part of him wanted to be Turned.