Part Fifteen
By all rights, the sun should have come up. I was sure that I had lain for hours in this bed with Deadman beside me, making love at wakeful intervals, sleeping now and then with his heavy body half atop mine as it was now.
A long time had passed since I had realized what was happening, and in that time, I believed, I had embraced my doom. I had been right about the implications of sex with this man--I had passed to another state of being, utterly transformed from what I had been, and in attaching my fate to his I had crossed a barrier that kept the world of the living separate from that of the dead. Never again, though he was undead and half demon, would I have the power to part from him.
My heart, unerringly guarded and cold, had opened to him as it never had to any man, and either I was a different person, or I had discovered who I truly was. I had entered into this state of my own free will, but in another sense I had been compelled, because it seemed that everything that had ever happened in my life had pointed me to this night, this bed, this feeling that burned within me and seemed to sear clean all the guilt and foulness of my soul. Free will and destiny intertwined nearly indistinguishably like the bodies of lovers; the night had passed in the ecstasy of existence made meaningful for the first time.
But the room was still dark. I still saw the glow of the lamp on the window that showed the blackness outside. I turned my head, my chin brushing the rider's left forearm which lay across my neck, and looked right into the tattooed eyes of a skull cradled in a wizard's hand. Just above the rider's elbow, a spectral death's-head figure crouched, its long dark hair trailing as it looked over a precipice.
I turned my head farther to the left. My cheek came up against Deadman's ear and sideburn, for his face was pressed into the pillow above my shoulder, possibly in an effort to muffle his deep, resonant snoring. His left leg lay relaxed over both of my thighs, pinning me down with its weight alone, and his loose hair was tangled with mine. Warm in my nostrils, his scent enfolded me, and I closed my eyes for a moment and kissed his arm on the bony lips of the eyed skull.
The rider muttered something in his sleep and turned his face out of the pillow towards me. When his eyes opened inches from mine, he regarded me solemnly for a minute. Strange, acid green; no trick of the light, but a constant reminder of his unhuman nature. The musky, dreaming fancies of sleep began to dissolve, but one thought remained; what was I, that I lay entwined in sensual langour with the dark angel of death?
"Evenin'," he said.
"Uh…hello." Evening? My eyebrows went up.
"You've been asleep for quite a while, girl. All day, matter of fact."
"Oh. That's why it's dark." Something sprang awake in my mind, and I tried to sit up. "The police! I've been lying here all day? They'll have--"
Deadman pulled me down again. "Ain't seen no cops today. And if I did, you wouldn't see 'em for long." I looked at him, and he smiled sideways with a click of his tongue. "Don't you worry none about them, darlin'." He leaned forward and kissed me briefly, then rolled over and sat up, swinging his feet to the floor.
"My Papa never got here?"
"Nope. Probably driving in circles and turnin' his road map inside out. Not like the locals are gonna show him the way to *this* hacienda." He chuckled.
"Um…Deadman?"
"Yeah?" he replied, pulling on a pair of jeans.
"What's your name? Your real name?"
"What?"
"Will you tell me your name?"
He looked at me in some amusement, standing and zipping his fly. "What for…*Irene*?"
"Well…I mean, we've been doing, um, rather intimate things--"
"Don't like fucking a guy when you don't know his name? You ain't generally so particular, darlin'. Least not from what I've been hearin'."
With that shot he opened the bathroom door and went in, leaving me bewildered. I thought I knew how he felt about me; he had expressed it over and over with every touch on my skin, every look in his strange eyes. Did he doubt how I felt about him, or how I could feel about any man? I had to admit he had reason to do so--I began to doubt it myself.
So unfamiliar a feeling, so novel and terrible. I confided and did strange things during sex--might that incredible emotion have been only a queer impostor? It still lingered as a burn in my breast, but perhaps I had imagined it into being.
I had never outright told a man I wanted him or that I loved him. I teased, I glanced, I provoked, and I let myself be taken, but never gave anything back. I liked to pretend I was being forced, because then I expressed nothing of my own desires. I only took a man's desire, played with it, and threw it back in his face.
Could I really have changed so much in one night? Had I really given Deadman my heart and soul? Did I have a heart and soul to give? In this small, shabby bedroom, the events of the night seemed like a dream. I was no authority on emotional attachment, having used physical connection as a substitute for it my entire life. Perhaps Deadman's face and touch had expressed nothing more than his carnal desires.
I sat up and looked for my clothes. They weren't on the floor, but they had been washed and lay folded on a chair at the side of the bed. Knowing that Stephanie had unwillingly done the work, I felt a pang while dressing.
She hadn't asked for her fate. She'd been an ordinary farm girl once, and her brand-new husband had gone into a ditch and taken her and her whole family with him. What had she thought in the last moments of her life? Had she panicked or prayed? Had she felt pain? And what had she thought when her ruined body had been reconstituted and she and all the people she loved most had stood lost and wondering at the side of the road, waiting for the reason for their continued existence to arrive?
When had it sunk in that this was all there was?
Never to have a child while she longed for one, embracing her husband night after sterile night; all the potential life in a young woman's body cut off at the source. No wonder she had soured like curdled milk. It wasn't right that they should linger here neither alive nor truly dead, taking out their pain on each other, but what could be done about it? How could they fight the forces of Hell, and did they even want to?
