just technically committed assault and battery. “I wanted to make sure you were real.”
“By biting me?”
“I thought I should try using all my senses.”
I caught myself wondering how much time was left before she had to go to work. “And?”
“This is going to sound weird and like I read far too much poetry, but you taste like—I don’t know—something deep and wild and ancient. It’s …” She slid herself closer. “It’s hard to keep away from.”
It was early enough that we weren’t strictly into the cold light of day yet, but I was becoming increasingly confident that she absolutely should keep away from it. I didn’t quite realise that my mother’s hold over me had got strong enough that you could literally taste it. Still, Penelope was right there, and while I liked to pretend that a night’s sleep led me to make better decisions, it very seldom did. I kissed her.
She didn’t have quite the extreme reaction she’d had the night before—there was always a rush to first contact you could never quite recapture, but she sank into it all the same, pressing herself against me and giving me her fragile, mortal fire.
“I thought you’d have turned to leaves by now,” she told me when she finally broke away. “I’m glad you stayed, though. If I’d woken to find you gone, I’d have always thought I dreamed you.”
I sat up. This whole thing had a coming-to-an-end vibe I didn’t much like but was beginning to see was absolutely necessary. It had been fun. In a life where I was less fucked up and she was less liable to get killed by anything in my world it could have worked. But this was almost certainly going to be a one time deal. “You can dream better, I’m sure.”
“I doubt that. You were—it was—I’ll remember this for a long time.”
So would I, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. “This doesn’t have to—I mean—we could do it again some time.”
“Maybe.” She looked almost sad for a moment, then she turned away and started to fetch fresh clothes from the wardrobe. It would have been irresponsible of me to try to rip them off her again and, unusually, I decided against irresponsible.
“I enjoyed—I had—this was good. Thank you.”
She adjusted her skirt and began buttoning up a new blouse. “Don’t. It was”—she blushed, so deeply I almost felt flattered—“it was my pleasure. Very much my pleasure.”
“But you don’t want to…?”
She retrieved her jacket from the floor, came back to the bed and kissed me again—I could still taste the night before on her lips and she touched me with such passion and hunger that I felt almost shocked. “I don’t think”—she walked away again—“that is, I hardly know you, Kate Kane, but you don’t strike me as the sort of person who’ll be my plus one to the company Christmas party or pick my kids up from school if I’m late on a viewing. You showed me how to fly last night, and I probably can’t explain quite how badly I needed it. But I know where the sun is, and I’d rather keep my wings.”
Picking up her bag from the floor, she came back to the bed and kissed me one last time. Then, with a final lingering glance, she went to work. For about eighteen minutes I toyed with the idea of just waiting around to see if she still felt the same when she got back. But while the best-case scenario of that plan looked enticing, the worst-case scenario involved restraining orders and police cars. Plus there was at least some chance her kids would be home before she was and I did not want to explain to a pair of teenagers why a strange naked woman was wandering around their lovely family home.
I also wasn’t sure I wanted to explain to myself why I’d been naked in that last hypothetical.
I dressed, briefly considered leaving a note but realised I didn’t have a pen, or any paper, and stealing somebody else’s property in order to leave them a thanks for the one-night-stand card was probably at the very least mixed etiquette. So I left the house, and left Brentford. I felt weirdly like crying.
Now things were no longer case-critical I could take the slower overland route back to the centre of town. It meant I was crowded onto buses alongside the sorts of people who travelled on buses—so weirdos who believed that travelling by tube put you at