He nodded. "I am."
"You're being truthful about it."
"Is that a good thing?"
"I love you so much," she said. "So much. It's better that than saying all the correct things, that you realize now we'll be together in this, that you will never lose me now as you might have, that I'll soon be invulnerable to the same things that can't hurt you."
"That's what I should say, what I should think."
"Perhaps. But you don't tell lies, Reuben, except when you have to, and you don't like secrets, and they cause you pain."
"They do. And we are both a secret now, Laura, a very big secret. We are a dangerous secret."
"Look at me."
"I'm trying to do that."
"Just tell me all of it, let it flow."
"You know what it's about," he said. "When I came here, that first night, when I was wandering out there in the grass, the Man Wolf, and I saw you, you were like some tender, innocent being, something purely human and feminine and marvelously vulnerable, standing there on the porch and you were so …"
"Unafraid."
"Yes, but fragile, intensely fragile, and even as I fell in love with you, I was so afraid for you, that you'd open your door like that, to something like me. You didn't know what I was, not really. You had no idea. You thought I was a simple Man of the Wild, you know you did, something out of the heart of the forest that didn't belong in the cities of men, remember that? You made a myth of me. I wanted to enfold you, protect you, save you from yourself, save you from myself!—from your recklessness, I mean your inviting me in as you did."
She seemed to be weighing something. She started to speak but didn't.
"I wanted to just take away all your pain," he said. "And the more I learned of your pain the more I wanted to annihilate it. But of course I couldn't do that. I could only compromise you, bring you halfway into this secret with me."