Beautiful Blood by Lucius Shepard

feeling. Your brain sparked and you had a feeling. You said to yourself, I’ve got to get back with Ludie, back to how things used to be. Even though how you thought things were, that truly wasn’t how they were. You know that, but you want to deny it. You want to hold onto that feeling, because it’s the only one you’ve had lately that has nothing to do with business.”
    Everything she said diminished him. He thought that if she kept talking, he would wind up the size of a homunculus, a tiny man sitting on a vast pillow, a plush island upon which he’d been marooned.
    “I’m a fool, too,” she said. “There was a time I thought I loved you. I knew all the love in me had been dragged out and kicked into the street, but I hung onto that thought. Love was something I could dream about whenever sone foul-smelling bastard was riding me. It was a story I’d been told. A fairytale. But I couldn’t hold on for long. It passed…and your feeling will pass as well. In a week you’ll be consumed with something else.”
    “We’re friends, though, aren’t we?” Rosacher said. “We’re at least friends.”
    “We have a bond, but…”
    “Yes?”
    “I owe you everything, Richard. My life. Money. Freedom.” She tapped the side of her head. “You taught me how to use this, and how to behave like a lady. I’m grateful for that. It’s why I stay. But for that very reason, because you did everything, because you lifted me up from Morningshade, I can’t help resenting you. I still feel owned, owing you so much, and that feeling trumps friendship.”
    “That’s absurd. You don’t owe me a thing, and you don’t have to stay. I can get someone else to manage the books.”
    A wounded look crossed her face. It pleased him to recognize that he could yet hurt her, that she was not without emotion where he was involved.
    “I’ll stay until it’s right to leave. And when I go, it won’t be farther away than the other side of the hill, where I won’t have to look at that damned lizard every time I step out the door.”
    She reached between two pillows, withdrew a lacquered box and put it on the table; she removed from it a pipe with a long, straight stem and a brass bowl, the image of a miniature dragon raised on its surface. “This is what you want. To touch that night again, the night Arthur came into our lives. I think it’s what we both want. Things have gotten crinkly between us and this is what we need to straighten it all out.”
    “Thank you, no.”
    Ludie packed the bowl with a bed of moist tobacco. “Have you forgotten how to play?” She embedded a grayish white pellet of mab in the tobacco. “I think you have. I think you forgot the instant the idea for the business came into your head. One minute you were the Richard I knew. A sweet, intemperate boy. The next, you were acting smooth as a bishop on Sunday morning. Can’t nothing catch on you now, you’re so smooth.”
    She took a match from the box, ignited it with the nail of her thumb, and lit the pipe. Her cheeks hollowed as she drew in smoke. She leaned back amid the pillows, letting smoke trickle out between her parted lips. “Ohh…” she said breathily, and gave a delicate shudder. She closed her eyes for a second and drew in more smoke. After a third lungful, she looked as if she filled out her skin more thoroughly, as if she had ripened all in a moment. Her eyes were brighter, a’dance with gleams.
    “Touch me,” she said, lightly slurring.
    With reluctance, for part of him, the lesser part, wanted to resist this fake, this chemical fraud, he gloved the side of her breast, rubbing the nipple in a circular motion with the ball of his thumb. Her eyelids fluttered down and she bit her lower lip and made a musical noise, barely audible, a noise with which he was most familiar, though he had not heard it for many months. To hear it now affected him strangely. It raised the flag of his desire, yet he also felt a chill, as if her arousal