There’s something more that he wants to say. I can see it, stuck onthe tip of his tongue, a confession that he considers sharing and then swallows down.
“Why get close to people then?” I ask. “If you get sick too. It seems like you’d benefit most from being more promiscuous, no?”
“Yes, well, that was the strategy for a bit,” he confesses, and I realize that while I’ve long assumed that Julian had a body count a mile long, the reminder that he’s also had five hundred years to build it and a life-extending incentive makes me feel squeamish. Legions have felt what I’ve felt with him. To me, sleeping with him was monumental, life-changing, but for him I was as routine as a decent lunch. I’m still grappling with this realization when Julian adds, “But the transfer is much more efficient when there’s some level of intimacy.”
“Transfer?” I ask, trying to keep my tone even and curious.
“It’s what we call it,” Julian says. “The process.”
I laugh, dropping my head backward against the rest.Process. Transfer. Unassisted.Such passive terms for such violence.
“What a sanitized way to refer to draining years off someone’s life,” I mutter. “Okay. So what about the intimacy. Is it physical? Emotional?”
I don’t turn to look at Julian’s expression, but I imagine he looks glum.
“Both,” Julian supplies. “We need…consent, in a way. The other person has to give of themselves willingly.”
Give yourself to me, he used to tell me in my dreams.Say that you’re mine.
“But they don’t know what they’re consenting to,” I argue. “They don’t know what you’re taking.”
“And that’s the thing,” Julian counters. “Most of the time, they’re too enamored with us to care.”
I swivel to look at him, horrified. “That’sfucked,” I tell Julian.
Julian sucks in his cheeks in something like frustration but doesn’t look away from the road.
“You think I don’t know that?” he says coolly. “You think I’ve lived this long and haven’t questioned the morality of my extended existence?” When I don’t answer, he continues. “We all deal with it in our own ways. It’s been a very long time since I’ve killed anyone outright. I take in small increments, and I tell myself that I do the same damage as a year of smoking cigarettes or a month inhaling polluted air. That I give it back to the world with my money and my service. I don’t do strong attachments, though it would feel better if I did. Rose? She knows this world has never fully punished violent men, so she seeks them out, keeps them under control until they reach late middle age. Whatever life they have left, she transfers, and she considers it a mercy—like putting down a vicious animal.”
It’s twisted, but I have to confess that I can see their logic. Armed with similar abilities, I can’t say with any certainty that I wouldn’t have tried to justify evading my own demise.
“And Leila?” I ask. “The one who wants to kill me?” The one, Rose had said, who considers herself a god?
Julian doesn’t turn from the road.
“Leila doesn’t concern herself as much with such things,” he says.
“What about Alphonse?” I ask. “What happened to him?”
A muscle in Julian’s jaw twitches.
“You already know what happened to Alphonse.”
He turns up the music, as good a conversation ender as any. Petulantly, I slouch in my seat and stare out the window. The road is curveless, the terrain flat, cornfields hidden under a blanket of fresh snow. It feels endless. I cross my arms and watch this world that is so unlikethe one I know whip past me, and think of Brandon, who fell victim to the least human of Julian’s kind.
We don’t speak again for a long time. Julian’s playlists are legendarily erratic, and so I’m not surprised when the genre shifts to classical piano, and my fingers thrum against the door, muscle memory playing along with the track. I fidget like a child: lower the car’s sun visor, snap open the glove compartment. Something within catches my eye. It’s small, postcard sized, and I can see Julian’s looping cursive at the bottom. I squint into the darkness, make out the words:Do you, Sean Sullivan, want to be my, Julian Conrad’s, girlfriend?
Blood rushes to my face, and I slam it shut.
To my relief, Julian doesn’t give any indication that he’s noticed my discovery. His focus remains locked on the road, and I take note of the five o’clock shadow that has emerged on his face. He often shaved at my apartment before leaving to meet his clients. After he left me, I’d kept his accoutrements in their assigned drawer, unable to throw them out: the straight razor he favored but never returned for, the whetstone he used to sharpen it, his brush, his aftershave. I used to lean against the bathroom door and watch him work, seduced by how easily his deft hands handled the blade. Praying he’d use them to handle me instead.
“Is that how it worked with me?”
The question bursts from me before I can stop it, but it gets his attention.
“What do you mean?” he asks gently.
“Was this all just”—my voice is more raw than I’d like, feeble—“suggestion?”