Chapter 20: Her Letters

I woke at four in the morning to paper rustling and the lamp turned low.

Lennart sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, naked, with a gray ammunition box open on his knees.

It was full of folded sheets.

Each one was typed, and each had a low "e".

"You kept them," I said, in a voice full of sleep.

"Every one."

"All fifteen months?"

"Sixty-one letters." He lifted the top one. "I never threw away a line."

My heart did something slow and enormous.

I sat up, and the quilt fell to my waist, and the new Mark on my shoulder ached sweetly.

He looked at me, and the page, and me again.

"I want to read you something," he said.

"They're mine. I know what they say."

"You don't know what they do to me."

He set the box aside and stood, and the lamp showed the silver crescent on his shoulder where I had bitten him.

He was already half hard.

"Come to the edge of the bed," he said. "Lie back."

I shifted to the edge, and lay back across the mattress, with my legs hanging off the side and my hair spilling toward the floor.

He stood between my knees with the page in one hand.

He ran his free hand up the inside of my thigh.

"This is from last November," he said.

He read it in his low even voice, the one that carried over a field and never rose.

"Dear L. You said the house is too quiet. Quiet is only a room waiting for someone to put a lamp in it."

I shivered.

His fingers slid into me, easily, still wet from the night.

"I put that lamp on my desk," he said. "I thought, she must be a woman who lights things."

"Lennart."

"Shh. Another."

He took a second page from the box with the hand that wasn't on me.

"January. I wish I could hear you laugh once. I think it would be the best sound I never heard."

He curled his fingers, and I arched.

"I laughed for the first time in months when I read that," he said. "I laughed at the kitchen table, alone, like a madman."

"I know. I heard it."

"What?"

"Through the shop door."

He stopped, startled, and then smiled so wide that it made him look young.

"Of course you did," he said.

He dropped the page on my stomach.

He took his fingers out of me and took himself in his hand.

He lifted my legs and set them round his waist, and I felt the head of his cock nudge against me, hot and blunt.

"March," he said, and picked up another page, holding it high so the light fell across it.

He read as he pushed into me, a slow inch at a time.

"I would like to put my hand on the back of your neck and say nothing at all."

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