I had been forbidden from looking in on Leis, and so while the house was empty but for us, I often lay on the sitting room floor. It was cool there, under the high ceiling in the dark, and as spring began to warm, the heat grew hard to bear. Fortunately for the young one, the temperature stole his consciousness from him, and so he did not suffer under the early heat waves of that month. With the curtains drawn and the windows shut, the air fairly shimmered. I thought, if it is very hot, and he sleeps, let me pick myself up off the floor and have a look at him, and so I did that.

I thought, who is L to tell me where and how I may look? I whispered to myself, over and over, brushing my hair and brushing it again, I do not look to like, only look, and so I should do as I desire. The thought would not leave me. I do not look on him for love, let me look. What will he know about it? So when it was very hot, though I had been forbidden it, I crept to the door of his room as often as I could, and looked in.

That yellow room had been Nicky's, and a far better room than mine. It was all gold damask and papered walls, and the window glass unmarked by the blower's pipe. The light in my grey room was murky with that cheaper glass, and though I liked that well enough, Nicky had liked to look out, and when that house was fitted, Laurent could not give Nicky enough, and so the room cost a small fortune to kit. Nicky returned to that room only a few times after Leis was made, and unlike himself, he never said a word about the love affair then, only leaving in the night and disappearing. It hurt me, what emotions I could spare, that he had not tried to take me with him as the other times, and I wondered what I had done to offend him. But these are not useful ruminations to have, and he does not like to talk about those times. Still, I worry about his disappearing again. Why do I write so? What use is it to write this?

Confound you. I do not fear a pen. I stuck my head into that yellow room, door cracked only enough to allow the gap, and observed Leis in the dimness. That there was so unlike the boy I had first spied in the Tuileries. Laurent had washed his hair and scrubbed his skin very patiently, and beneath it he was as pale as milk and yellow blond. The curl of his hair was somewhat loose, and with all of the mats cut out of it, long enough to reach the small of his back. I marveled at him, at the fine line of his strong features, the prominent aquiline nose and small, full lips, the high cheekbones and straightness of his brow. I had not taken him for beautiful, but only for tall and gentle, and I stopped breathing in those times, because when I would try to draw breath in the heated air, it would choke me. I thought that I should never have looked, but kept the picture in my head of him that I knew, because I thought "he is too beautiful for the likes of me" and it hurt me deeply. I carried on as if a man stabbed, crying quietly at my failings, but I could not stop my looking. I am weak by nature. Without Nicky, I was very alone.

But the heat did not last, and as the days cooled off, Laurent came home more often in the early evening to see to Leis, who had become restive. I think that Laurent thought my agony some child's trifle, something to stroke me over and coo about, and while I will not castigate him for it, he did not realize the severity or depth of my disturbance, and the evening in which injury came to me would not have damaged us so deeply had he looked beyond his own nose and seen me as I was.

I had no right to that boy. Though I had followed him long, and knew all of his patterns, and soft gestures, and had memorized the tilt of his head, I had never known him, and any possibility of it had fled at what I had done, and if I had not thought then that God had abandoned me long ago, I would have sought forgiveness at His hand, but there was no forgiving what I had done, and so when I turned in the hall and Leis was there looking upon me, I did nothing to stop it.

I should say that it was a blur, but I remember every moment in detail. I had dressed to go out in dark frock coat and cravat, and had paused only to take a wide brimmed hat from the table at hand. When I turned at the sound of soft footsteps, there he was on Laurent's arm, and the expression on L's face at finding me there was very sour indeed, though nothing at all as compared to the naked fury and witless madness contorting Leis's features beside him. Leis is taller than both of us, and stronger than I was when living, and when he bowled into me, it was like being hit by a kicking charger. He slammed me backwards against the door, which was enough to break blood from my liver and expel it past my lips. He dragged me to the floor with ripping fingers, slashing at my face, and biting at my neck with such ferocious strength that when he tore the linen cravat, he tore the flesh beneath it as well, and wherever that mouth was, pieces of me came away with it. The pain was the pain of being taken apart, and what perhaps lasted half a minute seemed drawn over ten.

In those seconds, my fingers rose to touch him, beautiful, not for me, so good, soft hair, soft touch, and I called to L not to let him destroy me, please, if you have loved me, and when Leis took that from me, tearing my throat, I gurgled like to laugh. What weakness had I done to call on love to save me? I thought, next, prick out my eyes so that I cannot look on you any longer, who drives me mad and causes me to want what is not for me to want, who is weak and full of doubt, of fear, but L's hand had come and pulled that dear heart away. A door shut, and my chin was tilted so far back that all I could see was the color of the front door behind me. I lay there a long time alone.

I remember that after some hours, Laurent did come, and whisper, "I have bound him, peace, peace, I love you, you are the most dear of all of them, do not shut yourself from the world, I shall not live," saying things like this and other like. He pushed the back of his thumb gently to the corners of my eyes, and wiped the tears away pooling there, but I saw how pale he was. He brushed my grasping hands from his hair, because he saw how I looked on him for letting the boy draw his blood so. "You have your own horror, now," he said, "and worry about yourself."

If I had been as I am now, and knew about the body, I would have asked him not to move me from the hall, because I had been torn so deeply at the throat that a fist could fit inside, and could not move my limbs. Laurent touched the back of my head and reported on a lacework of cracks in my skull, and lamented loudly at the darting of my eyes, as if I could not see him. But I felt cold tow him, because as damaged as my body was, he had been drawn on so hard that the little capillaries in his face had begun to bleed beneath his skin, and great blood bruises had bloomed on his body. He tried to cover them with powder, and then white lead tincture, but they were of the deepest purple, and he did not know yet how to paint those away. I could not speak to him about it, and he accused me of self-righteousness, and spurned my bedside, which hurt me in turn. At first, it was just that we were so bitter at one another.

I convalesced for three days, thankful for the cool weather, but upset with myself for that thankfulness. Laurent said to me, "It is very boring to want to suffer so," and shook his head. He was sitting at my bedside, and fiddling with the starched lace at his collar. I took his hand against his will and held it, tightly.

He looked over at me in the dimness, fingers loose in my grip. "You are hurting me," he said, without interest. He had powder caked on his already pale skin, all of one shade except for points made by a hot pencil, and a subtle tinting at cheeks, eyelids, and lips. Though it was no longer the fashionable look at court, the new mode being far more ostentatious and overdrawn, he still favored it, and I did as well. My fingers crept up his wrist. I felt rough punctures, half healed and raw, a scattering of them, and I pulled. Laurent could not resist, weakened by the repeated drawing of his blood.

My vocal cords had been severed by the younger one's teeth, and so I could not speak, but I pushed up his sleeve, the velvet of his coat, the unpretended luxury of his white linen, and found his arm colored like a polluted river. I touched the bites with my fingertips, counting them, ten, fifteen, twenty.

"I have felt your judgment already," L whispered, trying to pull his arm back, "I have felt it these now two hundred years. Judgment judgment. Where is my sympathy for your condition? Is it on my arm? Cry not. Is it pity that you are feeling? For you are a cold thing, without heart, to judge me for what I do. Prideful toad."

I watched his arm muscles working against my grip beneath his blood bruised skin.

"Unhand me. You are a wretch of lye-broken flesh." After a time, he made a sound like a trapped fox, a dying child's keen, and gave up, lying back on the bed such that his hair fell across my face.

My other hand found his neck and stroked him, and I wondered, why your arm? Why not your neck? for is not the neck the bite of love? and I know now that perhaps he heard me think it, but I did not know that he could hear certain of my thoughts then, because he kept quiet about it. At the time I thought it a coincidence that he spoke to me of love, in the dim light of the candle guttering at my bedside.

"You will not know what it feels like, good heart," he said to me, softly, doing me one of his gentle nips of an insult, "for love to change you in an instant." He relaxed under my stroking, and his tone softened. "I only meant to help him die."

I rested my hand against his throat, the hard protuberance of his adam's apple, the soft flesh beneath his pointed chin, and felt him swallow against the pressure.

"If you bite at the neck, darling, do you not know this? there is beauty, but that little death of the swoon on its heels. To bite at the wrist, how delicious to flex the fingers and be alert to the biter's pleasure. He makes me cry as like to die. I will tell you it to torture you, as you hold me captive in so many ways, but also so that you know the truth. He holds my name in his mouth as if it were delicate. In his mind is the idea of my goodness, and innocence, and I would hold onto it until it is true, and he is precious for that. There is an idea of me in him, and that would be enough were it not even for his charms."

I continued to stroke him and he sighed under my fingertips, pushing his head back against the sheet.

"His nature is such that he will not be crushed by hardship. He has told me about his life. I think that he will endure well, and remain as sweet as he is. His regard enfolds me in its warmth, and I think that I would do anything he asks if he would only think on me so well."

I thought him foolish, and that the way it hurt me lit his love for that boy aflame, and that like any light too hot, it would put itself out quickly as if it had never been. Such were my thoughts selfish then, and myself willfully blind. My anger was like blackening parchment paper, physically painful, and continuously burning, though at so early a stage, not terribly unpleasant. The little slights drew blood, like the pecking of birds. After feeling so little for so long, our bickering, which passed the hours, could at times feel good fun.

I think, at what point, at what point did it go too far? I wonder, was it the threshing of my body? and I do not think so. For I liked it, and the delicious absolution of guilt violence towards one's body brings, and the lingering sense of confident righteousness. I think that until the promise was made, it was all words, and the wounds all superficial. When the promise was made to swear away all others but one alone, all drew black as black could be. And until then, what did it matter that I had come completely unhinged? And who would know, or care? You see, because until then, it could all be explained away by the first flush of love, which is obsession, and the idea that he had truly found another to occupy his soul, his very spirit, was not real.