I lay in bed with Leis a long time, his fingers turning in my hair and his head against my neck. Already I felt that he suffered and I didn't, as he labored to breathe and I lay completely still.

"Close your eyes," he told me. "The light hurts them." But the light did not hurt me. There was only the pale light of the moon. It made me pat his hand, and he said, "God, it is coming true. You are the one comforting me."

I asked him what he meant by it.

"When you were a baby, I did not like you. I did not want you between us. I did not think he needed you, could not understand. But he said that I would need you, and I did not believe. He said that a man's child is his only comfort, his only security. It is an old fashioned notion."

"Did he say so?"

"When you cried, he would make me put you inside of my shirt, against my skin, because he could not keep you warm. I kept you against my heart and you would make quiet and sleep. I spent many hours lying upon the couch with you against my breast, breathing deeply. Quinny thought it would make me like you, but I did not want to like you. But I loved you then, when you slept. Will you forgive me for being cold?"

"I never resented it."

"Will you not be yourself a moment and forgive me? I have seen too many terrible things. Comfort me a little forgiveness. If that is the truth, then have at least the goodness to lie."

The sound of a car door slamming had woken me up in the middle of the night, and brief shouting, but I had been drifting back into sleep when my bedroom door opened. When I turned to look I heard, "Sh, hush, we are being very quiet now, do you understand?" so I had turned back over, and felt Leis climb into bed with me. "Will you come quietly?" he had asked me, and when I nodded, said, "Keep breathing. It will be easier."

When his teeth touched me I had cried a little in fear, but kept a cry from passing my lips, shutting my eyes tightly, breathing as steadily as I could. I had got that feeling of instinct, the same that keeps a rabbit still, that my body found itself mortally wounded, and it made me lightheaded. He had me on my side, his arm across my chest, and his body pressed against my back. It took no more than ten minutes, with that feeling of helpless dying, and then he said, "Come. Will you come? I must look at you. It is very important," so he had helped me up, and held my head so that it would not roll back. We are almost the same height. "Come along, petit chou."

He took me into my washroom then, looked for my razor. He looked for nail scissors. He looked for split ends in my hair, and said, "Coo coo," when I whimpered in fear and tried to push on him as he looked for moles on my body with tender fingers. I thought he meant to cut them off, but he only inspected them for hairs. "What will you keep?" he asked me, very quietly, "What hair?" But I didn't have much. He washed me, and when he shaved my face he did not nick me even once. He cut and shaped my nails. He kissed me on the lips. He looked for a razor blade. He said, quietly, "Are you ready? Will you be kind to me or not?"

In my bed he said, "Do not close your eyes," sitting over me, on my hips. It was dark and yet the moon lit him, the familiar yellow hair that I had worshiped as a child, and even the mole beneath his left eye that I had wanted to press my finger against. I reached to touch him, and he leaned forward to let me do it, and I pressed my finger against his mole. He turned his face to my hand and wept a little, kissing my hand, he said, "I'm sorry, little one." I watched him take the razor, and he pressed it just behind his jaw, below the ear, which began to run a rivulet of blood, black against his skin in the pale light. I kissed him as if he were a lover, kissed the wound, and he made soft sounds of weeping, though his eyes were dry. He let me have all that I wanted, and did not struggle against me when I rolled him from my hips and down with me. When he began to shudder, as if gently seizing, I drew away, and even then he lifted his head and looked at me to see if I was all right, lips parted and with his eyes shining from the glaze of a faint. His limbs shook. He lay himself over me, as if tucking me in tightly with his body, as I whimpered from pain, lips firmly pressed together so that my father wouldn't hear and wake up.

So now, in the pale light of morning, Leis lay tucked against my body, and I found myself peaceful, and very unabandoned.

"I forgive you," I said, and pressed my hand to his hair, which I could touch because now he was part of me, and something in me understood that. My lips remembered the roughness of his neck, little hairs invisible to the naked eye.

"I did not want to like you, but I like you very much, and I see that you are more like Quinny than like me, or Laurent, and I think it good. I think it very good. You are flexible but not moldable. You are made of iron inside, like he is. You will not bend. You see things as they are, or you seem to." He sighed deeply and struggled to draw breath back again, which made me sit him up, his hand against my chest in protest. "Lie," he said, "lie still," but he couldn't breathe, lying there like that.

I kissed his shoulder, and he didn't move at that. I kissed his bare skin because I wanted to. I ran my hand over the curve of his spine. I wanted to press my face against his neck and suck upon him, because he was beautiful to me, and I wanted him.

"Fie," he said, when I tried it. "I know you are wanting it, but it is the blood. Have pity upon me, I am in love, and you are my child, though I have not wanted it."

"Just for now," I said, hushed. "Just for right now. Let me have you for right now."

"Do I not know it best," he whispered, "how you will regret it once you leave the room?"

"Laurent told me a story about you once, about how you intoxicated him, how you changed him. How you were naive but too beautiful to resist."

"Oh did he tell you that?" he asked, slipping out of bed and into a black robe thrown over the back of my bedside chair. "Do not try to coerce me into bed. You are disgusting. I am not so innocent anymore," he said, turning and sticking out his tongue at me. "Get up. You do well. I am certain that your body will be sorting itself out soon," he always coos on the word 'soon', "so you can start saying good bye good bye to some daily things. It is time to get out bed."

"What time is it, around nine or so? Can't we stay in bed awhile? Come back here to me."

"You are still trying it. Don't do it in front of your father or he will kill you. It is only six, and the sun is coming. To your eyes, it seems later, but you are seeing differently. You ought to rise when I do. You are in my domain now, instead of me in yours, which does not make any sense. So do as I say," he said, amplifying his accent and his haughtiness, and I had never noticed how cute he could be before. "Come along, petit chou."

I remained still a moment, which made him turn.

"Please spare me, darling. Compared to those I have had, you are not alluring. I have said come along."

He waited while I dressed myself, and combed my hair, and pretended to sneeze in order to hurry me along while I investigated myself in the mirror. I tried to take his arm and he drew it away from me, declaring himself far too smart for the likes of that. And of course at that time, I had no idea how explosive a simple touch could be, and how something as small as the drawing of a fingernail down the forearm can make a man scream, and cause him to weep, and cause him to be your own.

I don't know what I expected to be downstairs. I don't know that I really thought of it at all, but it was just Quinn at the kitchen table with a glass of water that I had left there the previous evening, and a magazine. At my approach, he lifted his head, passed his eyes over me, and looked back at the pages. "And what are you doing today?" he asked, in completely normal voice, completely normal tone.

"I don't know," I said.

"The perfect sort of day," he said, under his breath, reading. "Nothing to do."

"Maybe I'll go out," I told him.

"Maybe not while it is very bright," he whispered, even more quietly.

"No?" I asked.

"No," he mouthed.

I looked around for Leis but he had gone away without a word, folding back into the shadows of the house which were no longer so dark anymore. And so when Quinn began to cry silently, there was nobody to come between us, and I held him.

He never said a word about it. I never heard him say a single word about it. He only wept, and the next day there was a car come for me, and I refused it.

"They may send the entire world after me, and I won't leave you," I told Quinn, who had been listening to me read on the sofa.

He did not say anything to that, but only looked on me with pain, as if he understood a whole world of things that I would never know.