"Smith-SlowboatMan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Adam)

intoxicating time and I felt better than I had ever remembered feeling in years.

I decided that an after-dinner stroll along the moonlit deck would be nice
before returning to my cabin. I moved slowly, drinking in the warmth of the
night air, listening to the churning of the paddle wheel, feeling the boat slice
through the muddy water of the river.

Johnny leaned against the rail about mid-ship, smoking a pipe. Under the silver
moon his Navy officer's white uniform seemed to glow with a light of its own. I
started to pass him and realized that I needed to stop, to speak to him, to let
him hold me.

He affected me as I imagined I affected my prey when I fed. I was drawn to him
with such intensity that resisting didn't seem possible.

I hesitated and he glanced over at me and laughed, a soft laugh as if he could
read my every thought, as if he knew that I wanted him with me that instant,
without reason, without cause. He just laughed, not at me, but in merriment at
the situation, at the delight, at the beauty of the night.

He laughed easily and for the next twenty years I would enjoy that laugh every
day.

I turned and he was smiling a smile that I will always remember. I learned over
the years that he had the simple ability to smile and light up the darkest
place. He had a smile that many a night I would lose myself in while he told me
story after story after story. I never tired of that smile and that first
exposure to it melted my will. I would be his slave and never care as long as he
kept smiling at me.

"Beautiful evening isn't it?" he said, his voice solid and genuine, like his
smile.

"Now it is," I said. I had to catch my breath even after something that simple.

Again he laughed and made a motion that I should join him at the rail gazing out
over the river and the trees and farmland beyond.

I did, and for twenty years, except to feed on others while he slept, I never
left his side.

THE SMELL of the room pulled me from the past and back to my mission of the
evening. I looked at his weathered, time-beaten form on the bed and felt sadness
and love. A large part of me regretted missing the aging time of his life, of
not sharing that time with him, as I had regretted missing the years before I
met him. But on both I had had no choice. Or I had felt I had had no choice. I
might have been wrong, but it was the choice I had made.

Since the time I left him I had never found another to be my husband. Actually I
never really tried, never really wanted to fill that huge hole in my chest that