Stainless by Todd Grimson

Author:Todd Grimson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schaffner Press, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

FORTY-THREE

Everything Keith has done so far in relation to Justine he has done because it has come naturally, it has felt right. He has examined his behavior from time to time, to the extent that he is capable of rational thought at this point, and it all seems to make sense, given the unreal circumstance he has come to inhabit as his life.

The sexual attraction to Justine has been slow in coming, although from the first he was curious about her in this way. There’s a certain wantonness she possesses, almost unconsciously, but he does not wish to respond to this. She has exerted power over people so easily, put them under a spell, that Keith from the start has wanted to differentiate himself from one of them, even if this means forever maintaining his distance, turning himself down to match her liquid nitrogen cool. He can do it. They get along well, though, and the very fact that he doesn’t want something from her helped them become closer as time has gone on.

If he has touched her, it has been in a way to test himself, as well as to test her. He needed to touch her to keep faith in her corporeality, to find her … beyond this, he is not intelligible to himself.

When she says that she has wondered whether or not she still has a soul, he feels a great emotion well up inside of him, at the same time that he thinks this is a false question. She may truly believe that she is damned, quite literally damned, but he is so sure he experiences the light from her soul he cannot believe she really imagines seriously that she is soulless.

It is not a modern question, this consideration of the soul. He leaves behind in an instant the nervous irreverence with which one might ordinarily banter about such an unknowable, metaphysical concept—he finds within himself an uneasy but hard-core reverence that he can connect to Justine like a sticky tentacle, answering her need.

He loves her, or he loves the part of her he recognizes, and he can stand the other part, he can expose himself to it, collaborate with it, even if in so doing he is playing catch with death. He forgives himself for his morbid bravado, if that’s what it is. What interests him in Justine is precisely that which is alive, that which is vulnerable, reachable, that which he can be with as another human being, a lost soul maybe, a tiny blink of light that does not want to be forever alone. All the fantastic stuff around them—that she is a vampire, and once died, and has been alive for so very long—he tries not to dwell on any of this, or only to think about it as he must from night to night.

Life is essentially mysterious, and he seeks to accept this. When he and Justine are fucking, the alchemy of their joining creates a new dark world that is

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