Night’s Edge by Barbara Hambly

help you, and I would’ve come, anyway. But I just couldn’t, ah, skip telling you. Okay?”
    Rue nodded. It was an effort, but somehow Megan caught the motion. “Water would be good,” Rue managed to say.
    In just a moment, Megan was sliding her arm under Rue’s back and helping her sit up a little. There was a glass of cool water at her lips, and Rue sipped gratefully.
    “You need to get up and go to the bathroom?”
    “Yes, please.”
    Megan helped Rue rise. To her relief, Rue discovered she was in the T-shirt and shorts she’d worn the night before. She shuffled to the bathroom. When she was through, she washed her face in the sink and brushed her teeth with a toothbrush she found still encased in a cellophane wrapper. That made her feel a great dealbetter, and she made her way back to the bed with a little more confidence.
    “Megan, I’ll be okay now, if you need to get to work.”
    “You sure, girlfriend? I can stay. I don’t want Sean to be mad at me.”
    “I’m good. Really.”
    “Okay then. It’s four o’clock. Sean ought to be up in about two hours. Maybe you can get some more sleep.”
    “I’ll try. Thank you so much.”
    “Don’t mention it. See you later.”
    Rue had left the light in the bathroom on, and when Megan had gone through the heavy curtain at one end of the room, Rue turned to her silent companion. Sean lay on his back with his hair spread out on the pillow. His lips were slightly parted, his eyes closed, his chest still. The absence of that rising and falling, the tiny motion of life, was very unnerving. Did he know she was there? Did he dream? Was he truly asleep, or was he just held motionless, like a paralysis victim? She’d almost forgotten what they’d fought about. She stroked his hair, kissed his cool lips. She remembered what they’d done together, and a flush suffused her face.
    What Carver had done to her, when he’d attacked her years before, didn’t qualify as sex. It had been an assault, using his sex organ as the weapon. What she’d done with Sean had been real sex, making-love sex. It had been intimate and primal and wonderful. Carver had made her into a shell of a human being overnight. Over the course of a few weeks, Sean had helped her become a full person once more.
    She wasn’t going to chicken out just because he was dead part of the time.
    So, when darkness fell, Rue made sure her arm wasacross his chest, her leg lying over his. Suddenly she knew he was awake. The next second, his body reacted.
    “Good evening to you, too,” she said, startled and intrigued by his instant readiness.
    “Where is Megan?” he asked, his voice still a little fuzzy from sleep.
    “I told her to go. I’m better.”
    His eyes widened as he remembered. “Show me,” he demanded.
    “You seem to be ready for anything,” she said, greatly daring, her hand wandering down his abdomen in a tentative way.
    “I have to see your injuries first,” he said. “I shouldn’t even be…it’s your smell.”
    “Oh?” she tried to sound insulted, failed.
    “Just the smell of you . Your skin, your hair. You make me hard.”
    Not a compliment she’d ever gotten before, but she could see the evidence of the sincerity of it.
    “Okay, check me out,” she said mildly, and lay down. Sean raised himself on one elbow, and his left hand began to turn her face this way and that.
    “It’s my fault,” he said, his voice steady but not exactly calm. “I shouldn’t have stopped to lock up the studio.”
    “The only fault is Carver’s,” she said. “I’ve played that blame game too many years. We don’t need to start it all over again. For the first year after he attacked me, I thought, ‘What if I hadn’t worn that green dress? What if I hadn’t let him hold my hand? Kiss me? Slow dance with me? Was it my fault for looking pretty? Was it my fault for treating him as I would any date I liked? No. It was his fault, for taking a typical teenage evening and turning it into the date