Excerpt: Untitled

She raises her head, suddenly, in the moments after their lovemaking has finished: her face is very white in the blackness of the room, her mouth very red, and here and now of all evers she does not look a bit human except in the shape. “What is this,” she says, almost curiously, “this need of yours to shorten a name, to trammel it in familiarity?”

Rue is not interested in philosophy just now. He wants very badly to kiss her throat, to have her hair winging out on his chest again, to lie in the utter stillness of her while his limbs remember how it is they are supposed to work again. He wonders if she notices the beating of his heart, and what the sound means to her – if it is an echo, if it reminds. He wonders what it is that she might still remember, of the before-days. “I don’t know,” he says stupidly. “Don’t you remember? About… names, at all?”

“That is why we have brought you,” she says. “It is your job to do the remembering for us.”

“Rey,” he whispers, and pulls her down to him again, but he can see the not-look on her face that on a human face might be a wrinkle of the forehead, a knitting together of her brows.

“Your kind are all so quick,” she says, but she is speaking into the side of his face now; he can feel her mouth and the hum of her words just below his ear. “So concerned with the passing of time and how you must not waste it that even a name is considered to fill too much space in the little fleeting wind that is this life you hold so dearly.”

“Well,” he says, and again philosophy is not so much what is on his mind when he can taste the weird incense tang of her skin – her moon-white shoulder is close to his mouth; he can hear his breath echo against it – “it is short, you know, when you’re looking at it from – your perspective – ”

He would really rather not talk so much now. He finds her mouth, the rich coldness of it, like new velvet, the glitter of her teeth – He finds the not-breathing very curious, and sometimes he feels as though he is breathing for the both of them; and yet at other times he is self-conscious of the movements of his lungs, as though it is something faintly illicit and not to be spoken of.

He is exploring unmapped territory, he thinks, and for a moment there is an obscure knife of fear at his spine.

“Stop,” she says, and the thought and the fear slip quietly away to wait in some long dark hall for when he might need to call upon them again, which is probably never…

He kisses her swiftly and fiercely, and thinks about how he is going to die, and even long before that the boy in this bed beneath the ground in a world made of a hundred crumbled civilisations is going to die and shed his skin to reveal someone else entirely, and yet she is always frozen in this now which is the same as yesterday and a hundred or a thousand years ago – he does not know, really, how old she is – and he does not want to become different people and forget her, which is a tremendous loss of control which he must curb the very moment he is able…

“Rey,” he says again, reflexively, in a sound like a sigh and like a hymn and like a cry –

“That is not my name,” she murmurs into his mouth – he is breathing for the both of them again – but if she can be amused, then it is amusement he can taste in her voice, and if she can be fond –