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.It made for a welcome kind of shorthand."What happened to your forehead?" She pointed at the bandage, the yellowing bruise creeping beyond its edges, the ghost of a fading black eye."Did you get that in a fight?""With myself." A soft huff."I had a nightmare, and … you know how I can get." Erin found it hard to sleep with him unless he was so saturated with chemicals that he did not dream; almost anyone would."I had a cast on when it happened.""A cast." She looked him over more closely, lingering across his knuckles, the backs of his pale hands.The ugly fresh scars that slashed and curled their way over the healed bones."I guess that explains the Frankenstein look."So he decided, why not, fill her in on the more important details.Nothing surprised her anymore, if it ever had, and she did not judge.He told her about the initial journey, the fight; told her about Ward Five and Adrienne.He left the more recent developments alone, and Erin never interrupted.She videotaped, though, sitting opposite him at the end of the bed with her camera steadied on both knees, and he was used to this by now.Sometimes it was her way of listening."They tell you anything this time that you didn't already know?" she asked, just a voice behind a camera, not expecting him to say yes — it was apparent in every word.Oh, just business as usual for Clay, they just kept him a little longer for a change."Yeah," and he looked into the camera eye, Erin hidden, patient, trying to find the perfect frame in which to fit him, an angle to capture his essence in all its contradictions, or take what was there and banish it, leaving him neither brute nor human.He exhaled, long and heavy, stale morning breath — or was it afternoon by now? "I'll tell you later."She lowered the camera, mildly disappointed, mildly chiding, mildly amused."You're boring.""I'm tired."Erin reversed ends and stretched out on the bed alongside him, thin rack of bones and curves and layers of clothing still chilled from outside.He looked to the window, saw that it was trying to rain, spatters striking glass in hushed counterpoint to the constant murmur of CNN in the living room.Bare branches swatted helpless and angry in gusts of wind.The sky was gray as iron, cold looking, and if it could care about anything at all it would surely be hostile."How's everybody else?" he asked."The same, I guess.I think you scared Graham.You've never been gone this long, have you? I didn't think so.After a while he just wouldn't talk at all about you being gone.Uncle Twitch was trying to take bets on when you'd show up again.""Did anybody take him up on it?""Just Nina.But that doesn't really count, keeping it between the two of them like that.So, no takers.""Not even you?"She rolled her head over, now face-to-face, glaring with no-nonsense eyes."I was already out sixty-odd bucks for your bills, what do I need to lose more for?""You'll get it back."She glared a little fiercer, yet seemed to have softened somehow, lightly touching her forehead to his; the swelling beneath the bandage throbbed."You could thank me, at least."Erin was right.He knew he was lax when it came to certain words, certain phrases.It wasn't that he did not know gratitude; it was just that it could leave you so indebted."Thank you," he tried anyway, and found it did not kill him.It was enough.Erin expected little, planned for no future, took everything as it came along — a supremely pragmatic outlook in dealing with him.He was fully aware that most women, assuming they could have tolerated him any length of time at all, would now be ready to choke him, and would not necessarily be out of line.It was neither love nor commitment here, on any conventional scale; more a drawing together, as members of some small pack who watched each other's backs, and took care of cauterizing the wounds whenever the need arose.False conceits such as monogamy and exclusivity were of little use.Erin fucked him and she fucked Graham, both on a regular basis, and of the two, it was Graham's heart that seemed to bleed at times over that to which he could never lay sole claim.But no one had ever accused Graham of being too pragmatic; no one had ever accused Erin of not being so.Fucking was also a part of her job description, or at least pretending to.Her face and body were treated well by cameras, and there were a few connected photographers in the area that she knew.She posed with other models for layouts in some of the harder skin magazines on the stands, and the even rawer material available by mail only, or racks in the hard-core shops.She had said she didn't even consider the other models to be sex partners, just other bodies, other props; while there was excitation and insertion high and low, not often was there actual climax, and even less so for her than for the male models.All in all, to Clay it served as no threat.Once or twice, at least, it was probably a good thing to have a relationship in which you knew you were just one more inserter on the assembly line.She lay with him through the afternoon, warm company with whom to weather out the worsening assault of chilly rain at the window, and the continuous barrage of news from television in the next room.Daylight waxed and daylight waned, just that, just light; never a sun
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