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“I’m not,” she said. “You don’t know how I get when I get triggered.”
“The triggering happens from being in contact with someone who’s going to die?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I want to feed on them, hasten their end. Raven mockers were born into tribes as medicine men or women. We learned healing but when a person was doomed to die, we could end their suffering.”
“So, that’s actually positive, right?”
“Well, if I don’t feed on them then I want to feed on someone else. And it usually ends up being, um…”
“Tommy,” he said. “He lets you feed on him.”
It was quiet.
“Does he like it? Is that it? Is he kind of addicted to your being able to do that to him? I can see how it could be a rush. Does he ask you to do it for him in bed?”
“No.” This was vehement. “I would never do it forfun.”
He sighed quietly.
“I’m not asking you to let me do it to you, because it’s dangerous, and it’s insane, but sometimes, if I get just a little, it takes the edge off, and then I don’t feel, um, I don’t… so, he lets me, and if I start to take too much, he stops me, and—”
“I can do that for you,” he said.
“You don’t even know what it’s like,” she said. “And Iwouldn’tdo it to you. If it happened, I’d go to Tommy.”
“What? No, I don’t want you to do that.”
“We have an understanding, and it’s what we do—”
“No, it’s a sort of intimacy between you, and I want it.” He sat up in the bed. “I want you to give that to me.”
She sat up too. “But it could hurt you. It’s not intimacy. I don’t ever want to hurt you—”
“You won’t,” he said. “I trust you.”
“You shouldn’t,” she snapped.
“But you do it to Tommy.”
“He’s… it’s different with him.”
He nodded, understanding going through him. “You can accept Tommy treating you like shit, because this is the balance, in other words. He doesn’t have to be good to you, because you know sometimes you take advantage of him.”
“That’s not at all the way it is.” She glared at him. “No, I don’t consider relationships transactions like that.”
He shrugged. “Okay.”
“I don’t know why I even told you this.” She dragged a hand over her face.
“You told me because you trust me,” he said. “Don’t you? Because you can feel what this is between us, and you know it’s real, and I’m just saying, ‘Let it be real.’ Give this to me, too. Trust me with this. I don’t want you going to him for anything.”
“It’s not about trusting you, Niles, it’s about trusting myself.”
“I get that, but you’re being ridiculous.”
She pressed her lips into a firm line.
“Okay, I didn’t mean it like that.”
