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of his lip. “How does your mouth feel now?”
    “The corners are drawn down. The feeling is contempt.”
    “Can you let the contempt speak?”
    He got up and went to stand at the window, positioning himself slightly to one side as if to stay hidden from the street below.
    “Edward,” she said.
    He looked back at her. “Humans are my food. I draw the life out of their veins. Sometimes I kill them. I am greater than they are. Yet I must spend my time thinking about their habits and their drives, scheming to avoid the dangers they pose—I hate them.”
    She felt the hatred like a dry heat radiating from him. God, he really lived all this! She had tapped into a furnace of feeling. And now? The sensation of triumph wavered, and she grabbed at a next move: hit him with reality now, while he’s burning.
    “What about blood banks?” she said. “Your food is commercially available, so why all the complication and danger of the hunt?”
    “You mean I might turn my efforts to piling up a fortune and buying blood by the case? That would certainly make for an easier, less risky life in the short run. I could fit quite comfortably into modern society if I became just another consumer.
    “However, I prefer to keep the mechanics of my survival firmly in my own hands. After all, I can’t afford to lose my hunting skills. In two hundred years there may be no blood banks, but I will still need my food.”
    Jesus, you set him a hurdle and he just flies over it. Are there no weaknesses in all this, has he no blind spots? Look at his tension—go back to that. Floria said, “What do you feel now in your body?”
    “Tightness.” He pressed his spread fingers to his abdomen.
    “What are you doing with your hands?”
    “I put my hands to my stomach.”
    “Can you speak for your stomach?”
    “ ‘Feed me or die,’ ” he snarled.
    Elated again, she closed in: “And for yourself, in answer?”
    “ ‘Will you never be satisfied?’ ” He glared at her. “You shouldn’t seduce me into quarreling with the terms of my own existence!”
    “Your stomach is your existence,” she paraphrased.
    “The gut determines,” he said harshly. “That first, everything else after.”
    “Say, ‘I resent . . . ’ ”
    He held to a tense silence.
    “ ‘I resent the power of my gut over my life,’ ” she said for him.
    He stood with an abrupt motion and glanced at his watch, an elegant flash of slim silver on his wrist.
    “Enough,” he said.
    * * *
    That night at home she began a set of notes that would never enter his file at the office, notes toward the proposed book.
    Couldn’t do it, couldn’t get properly into the sex thing with him. Everything shoots off in all directions. His vampire concept so thoroughly worked out, find myself half believing sometimes—my own childish fantasy-response to his powerful death-avoidance, contact-avoidance fantasy. Lose professional distance every time—is that what scares me about him? Don’t really want to shatter his delusion (my life a mess, what right to tear down others’ patterns?)—so see it as real? Wonder how much of “vampirism” he acts out, how far, how often. Something attractive in his purely selfish, predatory stance—the lure of the great outlaw.
    *
    Told me today quite coolly about a man he killed recently—inadvertently—by drinking too much from him. Is it fantasy? Of course—the victim, he thinks, was a college student. Breathes there a professor who hasn’t dreamed of murdering some representative youth, retaliation for years of classroom frustration?
    Speaks of teaching with acerbic humor—amuses him to work at cultivating the minds of those he regards strictly as bodies, containers of his sustenance. He shows the alienness of full-blown psychopathology, poor bastard, plus clean-cut logic. Suggested he find another job (assuming his delusion at least in part related to pressures at Cayslin); his fantasy-persona, the vampire, more realistic than I about