I smiled up at her so widely that my cheeks hurt. Her answering smile was dazzling.
With a deliberately unhurried, sinuous movement, she sank down, curling her legs beneath her. Awkwardly I copied her, till we were sitting facing each other, knees touching, our hands still wrapped together between us.
“So where were we, before I behaved so rudely?”
“I honestly have no idea.”
She smiled, but her face was ashamed. “I think we were talking about why you were afraid, besides the obvious reason.”
“Oh, right.”
“Well?”
I looked down at our hands, turning mine so that the light would glisten across hers.
“How easily frustrated I am,” she sighed.
I looked into her eyes, suddenly realizing that this was every bit as new to her as it was to me. However many years of experience she’d had before we’d met, this was hard for her, too. That made me braver.
“I was afraid… because for, well, obvious reasons, I probably can’t stay with you, can I? And that’s what I want, much more than I should.”
“Yes,” she agreed slowly. “Being with me has never been in your best interest.”
I frowned.
“I should have left that first day and not come back. I should leave now.” She shook her head. “I might have been able to do it then. I don’t know how to do it now.”
“Don’t. Please.”
Her face turned brittle. “Don’t worry. I’m essentially a selfish creature. I crave your company too much to do what I should.”
“Good!”
She glared, carefully extricating her hands from mine and then folding them across her chest. Her voice was harsher when she spoke again.
“You should never forget that it’s not only your company I crave. Never forget that I am more dangerous to you than I am to anyone else.” She stared unseeingly into the forest.
I thought for a moment.
“I don’t think I understand exactly what you mean by that last part.”
She looked back and smiled at me, her unpredictable mood shifting again.
“How do I explain? And without horrifying you?”
Without seeming to think about it, she placed her hand back in mine. I held it tightly. She looked at our hands.
“That’s amazingly pleasant, the warmth.”
A moment passed while she seemed to be arranging her thoughts.
“You know how everyone enjoys different flavors?” she began. “Some people love chocolate ice cream, others prefer strawberry?”
I nodded.
“I apologize for the food analogy—I couldn’t think of another way to explain.”
I grinned and she grinned back, but her smile was rueful.
“You see, every person has their own scent, their own essence.… If you locked an alcoholic in a room full of stale beer, she’d drink it. But she could resist, if she wished to, if she were a recovering alcoholic. Now let’s say you placed in that room a glass of hundred-year-old brandy, the rarest, finest cognac—and filled the room with its warm aroma—how do you think our alcoholic would fare then?”
We sat in silence for a minute, staring into each other’s eyes, trying to read each other’s thoughts.
She broke the silence first.
“Maybe that’s not the right comparison. Maybe it would be too easy to turn down the brandy. Perhaps I should have made our alcoholic a heroin addict instead.”
“So what you’re saying is, I’m your brand of heroin?” I teased, trying to lighten the mood.
She smiled swiftly, seeming to appreciate my effort. “Yes, you are exactly my brand of heroin.”
“Does that happen often?” I asked.
She looked across the treetops, thinking through her response.
“I spoke to my sisters about it.” She still stared into the distance. “To Jessamine, every one of you is much the same. She’s the most recent to join our family. It’s a struggle for her to abstain at all. She hasn’t had time to grow sensitive to the differences in smell, in flavor.” She glanced swiftly at me. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. Look, don’t worry about offending me, or horrifying me, or whatever. That’s the way you think. I can understand, or I can try to at least. Just explain however it makes sense to you.”
She took a deep breath and stared past me.
“So Jessamine wasn’t sure if she’d ever come across someone who was as”—she hesitated, looking for the right word—“appealing as you are to me. Which makes me think not.” Her eyes flickered to me. “She would remember this.”
She looked away again. “El has been on the wagon longer, so to speak, and she understood what I meant. She says twice, for her, once stronger than the other.”
“And for you?”
“Never before this.”
We stared at each other again. This time I broke the silence.
“What did Eleanor do?”
It was the wrong question to ask. She cringed, and her face was suddenly tortured. I waited, but she didn’t add anything.
“Okay, so I guess that was a dumb question.”
She stared at me with eyes that pleaded for understanding. “Even the strongest of us fall off the wagon, don’t we?”
“Are you… asking for my permission?” I whispered. A shiver rolled down my spine that had nothing to do with my freezing hands.