“I’m sorry I finished so soon.”
“It’s just beginning,” I say, as I kiss my way back down your body, until I reach your knickers. Didn’t try to cover herself up, though. No, she said, I don’t want to sleep anymore anyway, not now. And, maybe, one last, to old Mrs B, to tell her that she can blooming well do her own bloody bouquets from now on. Mam was the only person who’d held me like that, I started to explain, but that only made me cry harder. I was looking for you, I said, I thought you’d left. I thought back to Da and his woman and how he never even mentioned Mam anymore. I slid in through her bedroom window and fed from her as she slept; not too much, not so much as to do her lasting harm, but she wouldn’t have the energy to be nasty for a few days. “Why have you been…tracking me?”
“Yes, that.” He smiled. There was no furniture but windows all the way down to the floor on two sides. Often I’d had to take drastic action when I hadn’t wanted to. “…a passport,” he said eventually, “as well as a driver’s licence, registration, and insurance papers for this car.
