By Blood We Live Read Online Free Page A

all this take shape around me made me queasy. All this? All what? What
was
this?
    “Did you move out?” I asked her.
    “Of course I didn’t move out. Do you have any idea what this has been like? You told me you’d know if a long sleep was coming. You remember telling me you’d know, right?”
    “I imagine I would have told you,” I said. “I’ve always known before.”
    “Well, you didn’t know this time. I’ve been out of my goddamned mind. Two
years.
I thought you weren’t coming back.” Suddenly she got really angry: “You fucking
promised
me you’d know when it was coming.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I truly am. I
have
always known before. I would never have promised, otherwise. You know that. This must have been awful for you. I’m so sorry.” It was a relief to concentrate on the way she was feeling instead of the way I was. I stood up and went to her. “May I?” I asked. She didn’t respond. She hadn’t decided if she was letting me back in. Me. This. All of it. “Please,” I said.
    She put the drink down and laid the cigarette in the desk’s onyx ashtray. Her hair smelled of Flex shampoo. She had a lot of mascara on. Black eyes full of her mutilated history, full of everything she’d wrapped around her past to make it survivable. I’d saved her and damned her. Therefore with her love for me was always a little hate, with the hate always a little love.
    Very gently I put my arms around her. She let herself be embraced without fully softening. She was still angry. I could feel how much she wanted to rest her forehead on my clavicle. But she didn’t do it. I loved her for that, her loyalty to how angry she was. The small muscles of her backwere determined. I wanted to say to her: I’ll do everything in my power to prevent anything bad happening to you ever again. But I didn’t say that. She doesn’t trust words. Actions got there first with her, violently, prematurely, indelibly. (I had a memory of Niccolo Linario saying: Is it like owning a pet, then, this business of having a human in your life? Like keeping a dog or a talking bird? We were in the low-life streets off the Mercato Vecchio, the air warm and choked with the smell of raw sewage and foully smoking oil lamps. He was new to The Lash, and flabbergasted that I enjoyed a close friendship with an old blind harper I’d picked up from the street and taken to my house, where I cared for him. I’d said to Niccolo: Do you know what it is to embrace a human in tenderness? To feel the racing blood of a body ruled by time? But he’d barely been listening. Too busy eyeing up the laced breasts and ribboned thighs of the night’s blood buffet.)
    “
Are
you all right?” I asked her.
    She didn’t answer.
    “It’s been vile for you. I’m so sorry.”
    She remained resistant in my arms. She was angry with herself for the relief she felt now I was back. In joining her life to mine she’d cut the ties to her kind. It had taken losing me to bring that severance home. It had aged her. She used to run on anger and damage. Now there was sadness, too.
    I kissed her small forehead. She yielded a fraction, but then extricated herself. It was a soft tearing pain to lose the flicker of her mortality, the fluttering angels in her wrists and throat and groin. She retrieved the cigarette and the tumbler and moved out of my reach. Paced away. Halted and turned with her back to one of the bookcases.
    “Do you want me to ask you the questions or not?” she said. Her face was directly parallel to the Grasset first edition of
A la recherche du temps perdu
in thirteen volumes. Of course it was.
    “What is it?” she asked, seeing me registering it.
    “Nothing,” I said. I sat down in the armchair again. “It doesn’t matter.”
    The dark eyes calculated. “Is it the connection thing?”
    “What?”
    “You told me when you drink from someone like that you see connectionsbetween things.” Then, with a note of disgust: “The meaning of