He shook his head.
‘I’m a person, a woman,’ I raved at him. ‘You’ve used me and used me and you’ve given me nothing. You’ve made me break a lifetime of habits—reading until all hours, coming to you in the rain and on Sunday—you don’t talk to me, you don’t look at me, you don’t know anything about me and you don’t care. You put some sort of a spell on me that I couldn’t break. And when you’re finished, you say, „Don’t come back.”‘
‘Do I have to give something back because I took something?’
‘People do.’
He gave that short, interested hum. ‘What do you want me to give you? I ain’t got anything.’
I moved away from him. I felt… I don’t know what I felt. After a time I said, ‘I don’t know.’
He shrugged and turned. I fairly leaped at him, dragging him back. ‘I want you to—’
‘Well, damn it, what?’
I couldn’t look at him; I could hardly speak. ‘I don’t know. There’s something, but I don’t know what it is. It’s something that—I couldn’t say if I knew it.’ When he began to shake his head, I took his arms again. ‘You’ve read the books out of me; can’t you read the… the me out of me?’
‘I ain’t never tried.’ He held my face up and stepped close. ‘Here,’ he said.