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Back Woman, Eating Save as PDF
Chapters (19)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Epigraph
  5. Part One
  6. Chapter 1
  7. Chapter 2
  8. Chapter 3
  9. Part Two
  10. Chapter 4
  11. Chapter 5
  12. Chapter 6
  13. Part Three
  14. Chapter 7
  15. Chapter 8
  16. Acknowledgments
  17. A Note on the Cover
  18. About the Author
  19. About the Publisher

“Yeah,” I hear Ben’s voice say.

I can see Ben’s veins up close. I can see his freckles, how none of them are perfect circles, but how they’re all in the shape of little stars. I’ve never touched a human in this way before. I’ve never been touched by a human in this way before. In my chest, I feel a sensation I don’t think I’ve ever felt, my heart pounding, beating extremely hard, pleasingly so; my breathing, which is usually so slow, syncs with Ben’s, so we’re breathing together. I inhale his breath and exhale it and inhale it again. I feel the sharpness of my teeth with my tongue. And then our lips meet.

Part Three

Chapter 7

7

I was thirteen and Ye-Ye had just been over. Mum had been listening to our conversation about Buffy and Angel’s relationship from behind the door, which was open a fraction. “Food and sex mean the same thing to the demon,” my mum told me after Ye-Ye left. “If you ever get too close to a human, you’ll lose control, and your human side will lose its soul, just like in that TV program.”

“What about you and Dad, though? How was I made if that’s true?”

“No questions,” she said. “Inside your body is death.”

The duck blood is coming to an end. My veins are almost empty. I can feel the bird’s death inside me. I can feel sand on my breast and my belly. I can feel waterlogged feathers weighing me down; the bird was just old, it turns out; its vision is cloudy; its tiny heart is slowing down. But, then, Ben moves into its place. And I don’t know what it is. It’s like maybe Ben fits into me perfectly or something, like he fills me completely. Or it’s the temperature difference. Ben’s skin is unfathomably hot; everything inside my body seems to burn. My organs seem to remember what it’s like to be alive and working. Either way, I feel satiated and don’t even feel my hunger; I forget my need to eat entirely. Ben’s neck presents itself to me, right under my nose, right next to my mouth, and I can taste the sweat that has coated it like a film, but the urge to bite isn’t there at all. All it is is a neck, a human neck, and all I am is a human next to it. “Oh my god, you feel so . . . weird,” Ben had said as he went into me. “Like good but so cold . . . what is that?”

“I don’t know,” I’d said in his ear.

He dropped it and, as we went on, he warmed me, and we became just two normal humans; in every part of my body I felt his warmth and took possession of it.