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She heard something in his voice, but she wouldn't have called it a whine. She would have called it pain. Cynical, covered over with layers of denial, pain. She simply nodded so he'd go on.
"I shouldn't, but I do. I think I need to, for some reason. It's like picking at a scab, scratching a mosquito bite. I don't do those things anymore. But I talk about her. Way too often. Anytime someone asks me the right question."
She had asked him why he drank if he didn't like the taste. She liked to ask that, it got people to say things they wouldn't otherwise. To open. It let her get their scent, psychologically speaking. She enjoyed playing with her prey. She smiled at him sympathetically.
"It's been two years, and I have someone else now, someone who is better to me than she ever was, who won't leave me the way she did. You'd think I would have stopped talking about her by now, wouldn't you?"
"No," she said softly.
"Why not?"
She shrugged rhetorically. "Why haven't you stopped talking about her?"
"She was... " his voice trailed off. Memory filled his eyes.
She nodded. "That's why," she said.
"It's..." he looked away from her as he continued after a moment's pause. "I like pain. Not like. But I crave it. I'll do anything... talking about her, that's the most painful... thinking about her, remembering, reminding myself, I can bring it all back, it hurts again like it did when it happened... I don't know if that's why. But maybe. Or maybe it's just that she was the first woman I loved since ... the first, I mean. And so beautiful. I can't even remember how beautiful she was. It hurt to look at her. I would stare, I wanted to stare for hours, but it was overwhelming. Beautiful doesn't cover it... like staring at the sun, I thought I'd go blind, stabbing into my eyes, heart, just to look at her. And it isn't just because I loved her. She really was that beautiful. Inhuman."
She looked at him again as he spoke. Not bad looking. Something had drawn her to him. A darkness in his soul. That was what she was always drawn to. But it had to be in an appealing package too. There was a childlike air about him, she thought, a lack of pretense and packaging. A sort of honest naivete along with the darkness. That was what had pulled her in to listen to this old tale he was telling.
"It wasn't really because she was beautiful that I fell in love with her, though. It was because she was kind... and because I was in her power... loyalty came first. Obedience. It wasn't until she got angry at me that I realized..."
She saw his thoughts go in a different direction from his words. She knew what he was telling her with both. The variation fascinated her.
She was a goddess. She spoke to me in my mind... she rescued someone I loved... she helped me when I thought I was beyond help. She flaunted her desirability in front of me, she had so many men craving her, she teased me without mercy. I'd never imagined the feeling. "She told me I couldn't think for myself. I was angry. My fiancee had just been killed." I thought she was dead. I was suicidal. "So I just told her that what I thought for myself was that I loved her. She... she was pleased. Surprised, I mean completely, but pleased. She hadn't realized what she'd done to me when she made me..." he stopped.
Instead of gleaning it from his mind, she asked. "What did she make you do?"
He looked at his hand, folding the nails down so he could examine them along with the palm. He ran the nails along the pad of his thumb slowly. "Have sex with her. Not just me. She had this idea of having three men at once. I kind of wanted to be faithful to my fiancee then. But she didn't let me."
She curled her lip over her lower teeth and bit it softly. "That didn't make you angry?"
"I... yes, angry. And grateful. And guilty. And... once she'd had me it was over, really. I was hooked."
"What about your fiancee?" She knew it was a cruel question. She asked it anyway.
"A mistake. I felt so guilty after I was unfaithful... I thought if I asked the woman I had betrayed to marry me then I'd be able to... to not cheat again. To stay with my fiancee. I should have never proposed. One of the worst things I've ever done to a person."
She listened to his thoughts. Saw the two women, the one who had hurt him, the one who he had hurt. Smiled inwardly at the symmetry. Betrayal held its own revenge.
"So, even though I didn't let myself realize, I was hooked on her already. And after I told her I loved her, she favored me for a while. Not long. Two weeks maybe." The best two weeks of my existence. "By the time that was done I was so in love with her it made every other feeling I'd ever had look like nothing. I'd never felt until I was with her. I haven't felt anything since, either. Not really felt it. You know. It's all fake now. Even when I'm happy. It isn't real. It's just the best I can do. Like something inside me got used up and is gone."
She saw a wistful memory pass by.
"So I hung around after she got tired of me. She tried every trick in the book to get me to go away without actually saying 'go away.' She had to go a lot further than I think she really wanted to to shake my conviction that she loved me back. At least to shake it hard enough that I would admit it was over. Because... I don't know. Love made a fool out of me? Something like that." Because I had to see her. Because I'd rather have her hurt me over and over than let go. At least I could still feel her hurt me, even though I couldn't feel anything else. At least for those moments, I could feel. And now I like pain because it reminds me of her. "Maybe I like pain now because it reminds me of her."
She let his emotions wash over her, drank them in. Coruscating inside her. They fed her deeply. He didn't realize how much of the emotion was still in him, buried. Denied. She did; she felt it; she sucked it in and there was more, and more. Yes, a rich meal. She reached out and put her hand gently over his. If she played this right, this would not be the only time. She smiled.