Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [140]
I thought about it. “So you mean that since I’m already fighting off normal hunger pangs, that it makes it harder to fight the ardeur?”
He nodded, and his hair slid across his lap again, as if the braid were moving closer to me. “Yes.”
I thought about it, and it seemed utterly logical. “Okay, say you’re right, what do I do? I’m still running late tonight. I’m usually running late.”
“Tonight we go through a drive-up. You get something easy to eat behind the wheel, and I get a salad.”
I frowned at him. “A salad, why? Most drive-up salads suck.”
“I have to eat before I go on tonight.”
“So you’ll be able to control your beast better,” I said.
“Yes.”
“But why a salad? I thought you needed protein.”
“If you were going to take off all your clothes in front of strangers, you’d get a salad, too.”
“One burger a few hours before you go on won’t make you gain weight.”
“No, but it might make me bloat.”
“I thought only girls did that.”
“Nope.”
“So you’re eating a salad so you’ll look good tonight,” I said.
He nodded, and his hair slithered over the edge of his leg and across the gear shift. I had this horrible urge to touch that heavy band of hair. A little voice in my head said, Why not? After what we’d done this afternoon, what’s a little hair touching. Logical, but logic didn’t have much to do with how I acted around Nathaniel.
I clasped my hands together in my lap to keep from touching him, then felt silly. What the hell was I doing anymore? I reached out to that heavy curl of hair and pet it, like it was more intimate to him than it was. The hair was soft and warm. I petted his hair while I talked. “The beast isn’t conflicted about anything, is it?”
“No,” he said, and his voice was both loud and soft in the quiet dark.
I began to pull his braid, gently up from around his body where the end had slid. “It’s not just the hunger for flesh and blood that you fight, is it?”
“No,” he said.
I got to the end of his braid and spilled it into my hands. “I thought that the hunger was the beast. That desire to chase and feed; I thought that was all of it.”
“And now?” he asked.
I stroked the tip of his braid across my palm, and just that made me shiver. My voice was shaky when I said, “Richard always talked about his beast like it was all his baser impulses, you know, lust, sloth, the traditional sins, but to sin implies a knowledge of good and evil. There was no good or evil, there was nothing like normal thought. I hadn’t really understood how all my thoughts are based on things. I’m always thinking about how one thing affects another. The consequences of your actions.” I lifted more of his braid in my arms, and it was like holding a snake, a soft, thick serpent. I gathered his hair into my arms and let myself cuddle it against my body. I was about at the limit for the seat belt, and I wanted to be closer to him. The seat belt stayed.
I hugged an armful of his braid to my chest as I said, “I stopped thinking about the Browns’ grief, their dead son. It wasn’t that I chose to ignore it. I wasn’t being callous, it just never entered my mind. It was just that they hurt me, and I got mad, but mad translated directly to food. If I killed them and ate them, then they couldn’t hurt me anymore, and I was hungry.” I met his eyes on that last word.
Some trick of reflected light made his eyes shine for a moment, like the eyes of a cat in a flashlight’s beam. He turned his head, and it was gone, his eyes lost in shadow again. The turn of his head tugged on his hair, and I had a second to decide whether I would let it go, or keep it. I kept it, and it put a strain down the line of his hair, a strain like pulling on a rope, and knowing it was tied tight.
His voice was a little breathy when he said, “You’re always hungry when you