Don’t let him die out. Size 8

11-22-25
They met in the last week of October, when the leaves had already given up and the air tasted of smoke and endings.
She was sitting on the low stone wall outside the old library, coat too thin for the cold, reading a book of Neruda by streetlight.  
He had not spoken to anyone in forty-three years.  
He meant only to pass by.  
Instead he stopped, drawn by the small cloud her breath made each time she turned a page, the way her pulse beat visibly at the base of her throat (steady, unafraid, alive).
She looked up.  
“You’re very quiet,” she said.  
“I’ve had practice,” he answered, and it was the first thing he had said aloud since 1981.
Her name was Elodie.  
She laughed easily, even when there was nothing funny.  
She smelled of bergamot and the public pool where she taught children to float.  
She believed in second chances the way other people believe in gravity.
He told her the truth on their third night together, expecting her to run.  
She listened without flinching, then reached across the café table and traced the sharp line of his cheekbone.  
“So you drink blood,” she said softly.  
“Only if you let me,” he whispered.  
She considered this, then turned her wrist palm-up on the tablecloth, an offering and a question.
He never took more than she gave.  
A thimbleful at the inside of her elbow while she read aloud to him.  
A slow sip from the hollow beneath her ear while she slept curled against his cold chest.  
She grew pale the way autumn does (gradually, beautifully, inevitably).
Still, they had months that felt like miracles.
They made love in half-lit rooms, never hurried.  
He undressed her the way one unwraps something sacred, fingertips trembling over buttons and skin.  
She guided his mouth to the places she wanted warmed: the dip of her waist, the soft underside of her breast, the small scar on her thigh from childhood.  
He entered her carefully, reverently, as though her body were the first church he had been allowed inside in centuries.  
She kept her eyes open, always, watching his face as if memorizing the moment pleasure made him almost human.
Afterward she would lay her head over the place where his heart no longer beat and whisper,  
“I can feel you trying.”
Winter arrived early.
One night in January she began to cough, small polite sounds at first, then deeper, wetter.  
The doctors spoke of anemia, of complications, of time.  
He sat beside her hospital bed and held the hand that no longer had strength to hold back.  
When the machines grew loud, she asked him to take the needles out.  
He did, gently, kissing each bruise they left behind.
In the quiet room she asked for the window open so she could smell the snow.  
He opened it.  
She asked him to lie beside her.  
He did, careful not to chill her further.
“Will you stay until I’m gone?”  
“I have nowhere else to be,” he said, and meant it more than he had ever meant anything.
She turned her face to him, already distant.  
“I’m not afraid,” she said.  
“I am,” he answered.
Her pulse slowed beneath his fingertips like a song reaching its final measure.  
He kissed her once (mouth, eyelids, the small hollow at her temple), tasting salt and the faint iron of approaching death.
When her heart stopped, he did not bite.  
He simply held her until the nurses came, until the sky outside turned the color of ash, until her body grew colder than his own.
They buried her on a hillside where wild thyme grows in summer.  
He goes there every dusk.  
He brings no flowers; flowers die too quickly.  
Instead he sits against the headstone and reads Neruda aloud, the same book she held that first night.
Sometimes he presses his palm to the earth and imagines he can still feel the faint warmth of her beneath layers of soil and time.
He has not fed since the night she died.  
He will not feed again.
Love, he learned, is the only wound that kills the vampire.  
And it is a death he finally welcomes.
Size 7