Emily lifts her hips, presses them against his thighs. With a slow sigh he brushes his lips against hers and she takes his face in both hands, pulling him down into a kiss. He cradles her breasts and takes the hard nipples into his fingers. She keeps her mouth on his as she moves her hands over the backs of his wrists, kneading the tiny bones together.
“Lay down,” she murmurs. “You’re too tall.”
Aaron lowers himself onto her bed and takes her waist into his hands, pulling her belly to his mouth. She weaves her fingers through his hair and leans back, watching the rise and fall of her skin, the pink of his tongue as it paints hot lines around her navel. He unfastens her jeans. Emily lifts a knee over him and plants it next to his hip. The mattress creaks. He rubs her thighs, palming her buttocks as she straddles him. He pulls down her jeans and kisses the stained line of her cotton knickers. She settles into his lap, pulls his mouth up to hers.
He breaks the kiss and falls backward, pulling her on top of him. Her forearms slide on the cheap bedspread, her mouth landing soft and wet on his jaw. Her pubis digs into his crotch. He holds her close and they kiss, mouths slow and loose. His breath catches in the tumble of her hair and steams up his cheeks. Emily licks the side of his neck, closing her mouth over his pulse, and makes a wet seal. She makes a sweet sound and sucks on the skin. She licks it, bites it, pinches fresh blood into its paleness. He moans and imagines the broken capillaries, a stippled purple stain rising to meet the intensity of her breath, and he reaches between her legs, clasping the crotch of her jeans. He rubs the denim into her writhing heat.
“How,” she murmurs, shifting over him, panting, her lips hanging over him like sweet bruised fruit, “do I love someone like that?”
Aaron draws her down into a hungry kiss. She gives it back, smothering his need in her breathless mouth. She lifts up enough to look at his face: his sleepy eyes, the softness dwelling there. Surrender loosens in his skin and dreams in the corners of his mouth.
She drags her hand out of her purse and drives the blade of the fishing knife into his pulse. His body stiffens. His eyes widen, their dark depths filling to the brim with terrible awareness. Her breath comes faster. With rapt attention she watches a lazy blood bubble rise between his lips. It bursts with a fine spray. He starts to make choking noises. The hilt trembles into the palm of her hand.
She looks into his frantic eyes. “I do it like this.”
Emily draws the blade across his struggling throat. Blood rises high into the air, whipping in a wild arc. It hits the ceiling. It strikes the side of her face, gushes onto her bare and dangling breasts. She turns her face into the diminishing stream and the sensation floods her. Tight hot spurts of it burst in adrenaline shells behind her eyes. Her mouth opens, tasting iron, and she pulls on the slippery handle. The yearning tug of flesh on metal makes her tingle, fresh-carved lips pulling on its leading edge. She shudders at the tightening of her loins. The knife breaks all the seals in his throat. Her face flushes and her body starts to tremble.
Aaron’s body jerks, legs kicking out in a disjointed dance. She grips him with her thighs, pressing her open mouth into his blood-streaked face, whimpering. He twitches. She pants and yanks the knife free, wrapping her hand around the slackened tendons. One of her fingers slips into the wound. There is a sharp hot twinge of pleasure, a clenching. She starts to throb. Hot piss fills the crotch of his jeans and floods the insides of her thighs. The smell mixes in with the copper gunpowder butcher-shop stench of blood. She slips in another finger, the severed flesh loose and slippery underneath the skin. Severed tendons squirm away from the pressure of her touch: still so hot, resistant, loose and heavy, the blood slowed into iron and pulling down, down, down. She snuggles her cunt up to the ridge of his hipbone and nudges, breathing hard, fingers burrowing in and digging for bone. I feel this, read the Braille of your spine, a message no one has deciphered and I’ll lick the skin of your bones, know them, memorize the secret flavor. She whimpers and holds her breath, shivering into a strange superficial orgasm. The butterfly in her cunt beats frantic wings.
She uses the knife to slice off his clothes. She holds the knife in a quivering hand, feels the sound of the fabric slicing deep in her skin. This is like peeling him, she thinks, taking away the worn woven skin to get to the tenderness beneath, the softness, the hairs, a place filled with the ghost of gooseflesh and darkly dreaming sweat. Beneath the clothes he is pale. She wriggles out of her ruined jeans and climbs over him, lowering herself onto the landscape of his body, feeling the still valleys and empty hills mold to her rampant warmth. She catches her breath. Touching him stirs her blood but it’s subtle, riding deep in the pulses of her cunt, climbing up the walls of her quivering darkness to wait. His belly is flat. The hairs whorl into the subtle patterns of a dry streambed. She slides her scarlet fingers over them. The slow unwind of his musculature seeps into the remains of his underwear, thin and pungent. The mingled odors of shit and urine makes her gag.
She thinks of how it burns, the irritation of piss left too long on the skin, a dim memory dancing up from the recesses of her mind: I pissed myself because I couldn’t hold it, my tiny child’s mind too filled with the business of a new day, learning the ins and outs of hours and minutes, but a full diaper was warm and squishy and comforting. This I said to my mother at two years old, not in so many words, but she reassembled my sentences with mother-love and translated them to me through the long ripening years. She uses a towel to clean him. Her mind goes far away and hums to itself as she does this, cleaning his soft penis, smoothing away the dirt from behind his scrotum, the stink clinging to the inside of her nose like a living thing, a small scared trembling thing, big-eyed in the dark, yearning for a respite from its fear. She bends down and kisses the shy crown. She runs her hands over the big slack muscles in his thighs, the thick strong tendons attached to his feet. He has beautiful feet: strong, structured, competent. They are mirrors, microcosms reflecting the rest of his physique.
She mashes his toes together and slips them into her cunt. She hisses breath at the stretching, such unfamiliar topography bulging into her walls. Her womb is heavy. It falls forward inside her and presses up against the inside of her belly, a humid jungle rustling, stirring up a threat of rain that echoes the pounding of her heart. The bone at the base of his big toe bumps into her clit. She saws herself back and forth but it’s not enough. She abandons the foot and tries the hand instead, climbing over the loose sprawled limbs to curl her fingers curled atop his fingers. She rubs her juicy self with the pads of his fingertips. A tight hot spasm goes off deep inside her like a warning, blooming in her mouth; she writhes and struggles, working her hips, her skin glued to his drying blood. She comes with a shift of her spine, a locking down; it’s a slow contraction, her vagina unhinged like the throat of a snake. She arches her neck, throat forming low hollow sounds and pushing them out on long tides of air. She rubs her clit, still pebble-hard and rising up through its slippery nest. The muscles flutter.
The stink muscles its way down into the pit of her stomach.
She gets up off the bed and stumbles to the bathroom, the walls fading in around her, carpet soaking up through her consciousness to cushion the soles of her feet. Her knees skid on the cold linoleum. By the time she’s bent over the toilet even the convulsive grinding roll of vomiting is erotic, her sweat falling off her forehead and into the bowl, her entire body throwing its weight behind what’s left of her lunch and pushing up, up into the back of her throat. Her knees squeeze together. She holds onto the seat and heaves. The contents of her stomach shoot out of her straining mouth and splash into the toilet water. Her nose burns. She coughs and spits, bringing up nothing, hacking bile-tinged mucus into the cloudy water. She leans back on her heels and wipes her mouth. Her sweating skin crawls beneath an itching glaze of blood. She looks at her forearms and sees the sweat melting into the blood, bubbling up through it, smearing at the base of her hairs.
She hits the flush and stands up, looking around the inside of the bathroom. White, generic chrome, too clean for real life. There’s a dirty towel on the floor. She shivers her way into the shower, hot water slanting down a wind-driven rain.
Emily tips her head back. She opens her mouth and lets the water fill it, spilling over the edges, running down her chin. Her mind fills with the sound of rain.
She doesn’t remember washing herself.
She remembers tiptoeing through the hotel room, not making a sound, keeping herself as quiet as possible as she digs through Aaron’s things. She remembers looking for something clean to wear and washing the blood off her flip-flops. She remembers standing in the bathroom, her reflection smudged in the steamed mirror. She remembers thinking about George’s knife, the one she took off him in Texas and left sleeping in the bottom of her purse, waiting there, half-forgotten except in sharp moonlit moments when she’d sit by the window of her townhouse and take it out, loosen it from its sheath and think summers in Nantucket yes and she’d look at it, wondering underneath the humdrum of her thoughts, industrious in her musing, wanting to know where it had been before it found its way into her hand. Is it new? Is the metal virgin? Emily imagines her name etched in ghost runes along the narrow edge of the blade in letters so tiny it would take a magnifying glass to read them. She imagines all the things they whispered into Aaron’s veins.
The knife is dirty now. Used. The blade a little less sharp that it was before. A sliver of its ruthless competency has been exchanged with Aaron’s flesh: an even trade, one swipe for another, a bit of dullness for a deep wound.
Emily stands in the bathroom and thinks about George’s knife. It’s darker outside than it was. Her empty belly rumbles.
She thinks about opening her forearms with the blade but the words mean nothing, hollow, echoing through the sleeping chamber of her lust. They rattle around inside her until they crack. Out of them crawls a deep sweeping hunger, crippling bonds of emotion that slither around her and get tight tight tight until it hurts, oh God there is so much pain, so much need, so much desire. All the want in her world boils up into the roof of her mouth, there is such aching sweetness that she can’t breathe, she can’t think; her tongue wakes up and howls for what it has lost: he is another country full of strange customs I do not understand, here is my token, here is my map, I’m in, I know you from the roots up”and this smell is going to drive me out of this abattoir room. Death stinks but that’s the price and how I wish for water. She closes her eyes. Oh, George. Imagine my hands lifting your knife so I can kiss the blade like an old-time princess. Let me bless your weapon in the dreaming lust of my breath. Her hand tightens up around the handle, knuckles quivering. I’ll write your map to freedom on my body. Taste my cobbled roads. Come into the deep well of my drowning.
Her knees weaken. Her breath quickens. Her womb clenches and thick fragrant fluid runs out of her, slicks up the insides of her thighs. The scent rises into her nose, hot and strong and fresh: salt and brimstone and albumen, desire made flesh.
She puts on Aaron’s clean jeans and a gray t-shirt. She rolls up the cuffs. She hangs the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob.
Okay, then.
She steps into the anonymous hallway.
Okay.