Exhaling in frustration, he leaned up on his elbow. “You know it did, Carrie.”

His answer to my unspoken question should have comforted me, but it didn’t.

I shuffled to the bathroom and snapped on the light. As I stared at my suddenly tired face in the mirror, a tear slid down my cheek.

No, I don’t know. And I don’t know you, either, Nathan. I turned away from my reflection, slightly disgusted with myself.

I didn’t know him any better than I ever had.

Twenty-Two

I Left My Heart in San Francisco

Though I dreaded the fallout from our encounter, the nights that followed were too busy to be very awkward.

During my recovery, Nathan had been feeding me his blood. With nothing to replace what he’d given, he’d seriously drained himself. Combined with the marathon insomnia and the energy he’d expended with me, he could barely get out of bed the next evening.

Luckily, I was able to contact his emergency donor. A perky suburban woman, she graciously dropped off neatly labeled and dated bags of blood. The first night, he was so weak I had to hold his head up so he could drink, but he improved quickly after that.

Ziggy’s room was nearly packed up. Nathan had obviously been splitting his time between caring for me and repressing more memories. The only indication that the kid had ever lived in the apartment at all was the small collection of framed pictures on the bookcase in the living room. I rummaged through the boxes and brought out a few other items, tucking them away in places I knew Nathan would find them later. I wasn’t about to let him forget Ziggy.

Little by little, I began to learn about Nathan’s past. Not that he helped with the process. Occasionally, things would come to me in a flash of intuition from the blood he’d shared with me. That’s how I learned the photograph hidden in the closet was indeed his wedding portrait, and the woman in it was Marianne. She’d been seventeen when they’d wed, and it had been a quickly arranged affair, owing to the bundle of joy that had already been on its way. But she’d lost the baby, and subsequent others, the first sign of the tumors ravaging her organs. The feelings of guilt and desperation that blanketed those memories was too thick to see past at times.

I didn’t go to bed with him again, and neither of us mentioned what had happened before. I slept on the couch for a few days until Nathan recovered and took Ziggy’s things to storage. One day he’d tossed me a clean set of sheets when he returned and said, “Ziggy’s room is all yours.”

Apparently, he wanted me to stay. Though I balked at the fact he hadn’t bothered to ask me if I wanted to, I didn’t argue. There was nowhere else to go, and no other place I felt safe.

After another two weeks, I wondered if Cyrus would ever bother me again. At first, it had been easy to assume he bided his time, waiting for an opportunity to strike. But I knew he wasn’t patient enough to wait a full month.