He licked my neck and trailed his tongue around down between my breasts as he unbuttoned my blouse, and the smell of his excitement was overpowering, maddening. His pulse beat loudly in the room; I knew I had to have him or lose control, and that would mean losing everything.

I pushed him back and unbuttoned his shirt. He kept looking at me.

“Look at these breasts. I’ve never seen breasts like these before. They’re so . . . they’re so cool, and white. Look how white your skin is.” He took a nipple between his fingers and began to roll it. “Even your nipples are almost white.” He looked at my face. “And your lips. Your lips . . .”

I gently turned him on his back and shed my pants. I straddled his bare chest, feeling his body heat soak endlessly into my warmth-starved legs.

I gripped his hair with both hands and brought the music up to orgasmic pitch, watching his face, loving him so severely that I thought to keep the music there for him forever, and when he closed his eyes, I sank my teeth into his neck, bit through the artery, and suckled.

As his warm blood pumped into my stomach, I knew him. As his blood became mine, I began to own his experiences, his thoughts, desires, aspirations. Pictures ran through my mind as Jack’s life ebbed, and I knew him, from the day of his birth, I knew him, completely.

When the final shudder came and death rattled its cage deep in his chest, I stopped, and kissed his face, his forehead, his nose, his lips. I sat up on his chest and buttoned my blouse, then shook the weeds from my pants and put them back on.

Back at the car, I put his sign and two bags into the garbage bin and then sat in the driver’s seat, digesting my experience. It was incredible. Who would ever have thought that love could have feelings like that, such desperate passions slaked so thoroughly.

I waited, pondering, entertaining myself, enjoying the afterglow, and then I drove off, sated, comfortable, heading again for Wilton. And as I drove, thoughts and memories that had been Jack’s began to tickle my consciousness. Before long, I was barraged by his thoughts, his impressions, his ambitions, his own passions. Even his thoughts of me were now mine to examine. I had no idea that this would happen, that I would know my victims so well that I knew their families, and would grieve with them as they discovered their loss.

Except that I had given him eternal life within me.