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“Things! Life things! I’m going to go get them.” He hopped again, into the other leg of his jeans. “I’ll see you later. This was great. Really, really great. Ten out of ten. Great job.”

“You are running away.”

“I’m walking. Briskly.”

“Lex.”

I sat up. He winced, as if I’d shouted. I kept my voice as low as I could, because I understood, with the clarity of long practice, that I was looking at a frightened animal. A very beautiful, very stubborn, very frightened animal, halfway to the door.

“I will not stop you,” I said. “If you wish to go, go. But I would prefer you did not leave believing that you have to.”

He stood with his back to me and his hand on the doorknob.

“It’s not that,” he said.

“What is it?”

“It’s—” A shaky laugh. “I woke up and I remembered. All of it. And I just— I don’t know how to be a person right now. I don’t know what to do with my face.” He turned around. His eyes were huge. “You must’ve done this a thousand times. You’re— you’re a thousand years old. You’ve had, what, like a hundred lovers? Two hundred? You probably know exactly what to say and I’m standing here in one sock, and I—”

“I have never been with anyone.”

The words came out of me quietly, without preamble. I had not planned them. I had believed I would keep them another century.

Lex stopped.

“What?”

“In all the years of my existence.” I looked at my hands. “I have never lain with anyone. Man, woman, or otherwise. Before last night.”

For a long moment there was no sound in the room but the hum of the radiator.

“That’s not funny,” he said.

“It is not a joke.”

“You were— last night you were—” He waved his hand at the bed, at the rumpled quilt, at me. “You knew stuff!”

“I read a book.”

“That’s not— I mean— Maksim. “ He let go of the doorknob. “You said you researched. I thought you meant, like, you brushed up. I thought it was a humble-brag.”

“It was a humble fact.”

“You’re eleven hundred years old!”

“Yes. I am aware.” I felt a dry smile move across my face and disappear. “I was twenty-six when I was turned. I had been a boy with one girl I liked and no time to say so. Then the wolves. Then the sickness. Then I woke in the dark and found I was a different thing, and that whoever I touched would be at risk.”

I do not tell this story. I do not tell it, and so I found I did not know how it began, and I began it in the middle.

“You must understand. For the first century I was not safe. I could not be certain of my own hands. Hunger and desire are not separate things in my kind. They are the same animal wearing different clothes. To want someone was to want to hurt them, or to have them, and there was no moment in which I could trust the difference. In the first winter I came within a breath of killing two people.” I said it evenly. “I do not speak of them. They are why I have my rule.

“After that I learned control. I learned it with great effort. And I made a promise to myself that I would not put a hand on anyone again, not in anger and not in love, until I was certain. It was a bargain with my own nature. And the trouble was that one is never certain. So the years went by.”

He had sat down on the edge of the bed. He did not seem to know it.

“But you were lonely,” he said.

“Yes.”