"Okay, okay, I get it. You're good at everything," I said.
He shrugged, allowing that, and we both chortled in whispers.
"But how can it be so easy now?" I pressed. "This afternoon... "
"It's not easy," he sighed. "But this afternoon, I was still... undecided. About eating you."
"Mmm... " I nodded, pursing my lips, trying not to drool. Right now I was having a hard time not gobbling him up myself.
"I am sorry about that, it was unforgivable for me to behave so."
"Not unforgivable," I disagreed.
"Thank you." He smiled. "You see," he continued, touching my eyes, looking me up and down, "I wasn't sure if I was strong enough... " His hand drifted from my eyeball to my hand and brought it to his face, nuzzling my palm. "And while there was still that possibility that I might be... overcome"—breathed in the scent of my fingertips—"I was... susceptible. Until I made up my mind that I was strong enough, that there was no possibility at all that I would... that I ever could... "
I'd never seen him struggle so hard for words. I wished that I could lend him some of mine.
"So there's no possibility now?"
"Mind over matter," he repeated, smiling, his teeth bright in the darkness.
"Wow, that was easy," I said.
He threw back his head and laughed, quietly as a whisper, but still exuberantly.289
"Easy for you!" he amended, touching my nose with his fingertip a bit too hard.
And then his face abruptly took on a grave seriousness.
289. In a speaking engagement with the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the author was questioned about why she went with the adverb "quietly" instead of the adjective "quiet." She responded that while she considered it, she felt that adjectives were rarely as dramatic as their adverbial equivalent, citing examples like red vs. redly, kosher vs. kosherly, and hard vs. hardly.