Broken into night and day, the seconds themselves cling together in moments adrift on an endless texture of waves. The vastness of the sea simplifies thought: morning is still close or it is far, noontime perches atop the mast, the long golden hours of afternoon gather into an indistinct pile. Dawn, noon, twilight, dark: Emily’s life cut in quarters.

At sunset, she climbs up to the deck. The wind is warm and gentle against the side of her face and she no longer hears the murmuring of the sea except in dreams. It makes her sad.

“Do you ever dream about the people you’ve killed?”
George sits on the deck, a bowl balanced in his lap. He’s still wearing aviator shades. She smells lime juice, garlic, chili peppers afloat in a tang of lime juice and vinegar. “Sometimes.”

Earlier that afternoon, during a brief rainstorm, he caught a tuna. The noise of the capture brought her up out of her nap and she watched him butcher it, the fish still fighting him. He stood over it, shirtless and spattered with blood, the water dripping off his skin. He crouched, the curved knife in his fist, and with a long stroke unzipped the silver skin. The air stank of terrified depths. Emily went below to dry off and imagined him filleting it as she toweled her skin, long strips of red flesh dying beneath a temperamental fall of water.

Now it’s chopped up in the bowl, ice cold, tinted opaque by the acid. All temperate seacoast regions prepare a similar dish. I used to know the names yet I cannot remember a single one.

Emily takes a seat beside him. He hands her a bowl. “Are you dreaming about Aaron?”

She nods and takes it. “Yes. But it’s not…I don’t know.” She shrugs, picking up her fork. “It’s not the way you might think.”

He watches her as he takes a bite. “How do you think I think?”

“That they’re nightmares?”

“Nah. I wouldn’t think that.” He grins. “Not from you.”

She glances at his face. “They’re not sexual either.”

He scratches the back of his head. “That surprises me.”

“He’s just there.” Emily looks out across the sea and the western horizon rocks back and forth. “Just there, like the same extra walking into the background of every scene in a movie.”

George swallows. “It makes all those primitive myths make sense.”

She watches him. “You mean when people who would take the heads of their enemies and burn all their possessions and stuff like that? To assure that the spirit doesn’t hang around and goes to the next world?”

He nods.

Emily spears chili pepper and garlic onto her fork, taking another bite. The flavors mingle on her tongue: strong and mild, advance and retreat. “What do you dream about, when you dream about them?”

“I think about how it might’ve been different. Better. Sometimes, though, it’s like all of them are living in my skin and pushing to get out. Other times it’s like none of it ever happened.” He takes off the shades and tosses them onto the deck. “Just a dream, my whole life. I dream that dream more now that I’m older: I wake up and I’m still seventeen. None of this has happened yet.” He glances at her. “You haven’t happened yet.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“I dream more about being on Nantucket than I ever did before.” The slanting light makes her squint. “I dream about that summer all the time now except it’s not like it really was.”

George puts his bowl down next to his thigh. The wind blows her hair across her face, rattles through the sails. He reaches out and cups the bottom of her bowl.
“Are you almost done?”

“Yes.”

“What is it that you really want to know?”

She looks at him.

“You’re talking around something.”

He crawls around inside the words and tries to get his fingernails underneath her mind. It feels like a sunburn and the peeling that comes after, both sensations at the same time, the angry red pain and the delicate relief: a raw sensation, filled with unbearable tenderness.

“I’m not.” She hooks hair behind her ears. “At least I don’t think I am.”

“You want to know if I’m remorseful?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “You aren’t.”

“So it’s the distance, then. You want to know where the intimacy is.” He puts an arm around her waist. “That’s how you see it, right? In your limited experience? It’s how you see me. Or maybe that’s how you see yourself.”

“Yes. I do want to know that.”

He leans over, speaking close to her ear. “You think your first would’ve been different if it had been a stranger. Right?”

“It would’ve been.” Chili oil burns on her lips. “A stranger is a stranger. Aaron wasn’t a stranger.”

“So there’s built-in meaning.”

She nods. “Yes.”

“With a stranger you have to put it there, if you want it there at all.” He moves loose hair away from her face. “That’s if you need it to be there in the first place.”

She looks at him. “Don’t tell me this is art, and that a victim is like a canvas.”

A corner of his mouth curls up into a smile. “Why not?”

“That isn’t you, it’s too abstract, I just don’t believe it.” She puts the bowl down, a few bits of fish clinging to the smooth curved plastic. “There’s so much order in your life that I can’t believe in you and art at the same time.”

“Come on, Em. There’s the urge and that’s it. It’s no more complicated than needing to eat.” He moves her lank hair away from her shoulder. “Or needing to sleep.” He rests his mouth her neck. “Or getting a hard-on.”

Emily closes her eyes. Kinilaw, she thinks. That’s what the Filipinos call it. “It’s a means to an end, though, isn’t it? For you?”

“The kill itself wears out after awhile. That’s hard for you to understand right now.”

“A person dies and takes their whole world with them,” she murmurs. “Each murder is an Armageddon all its own.”

He traces the outer edge of her ear with this fingertip. “Uh huh.”

“How do you know when you want to do it?” Her hand drifts to the small of his back. “What does it feel like for you?”

He looks into her eyes. “How did you know?”

“My circumstances are different. Aaron was getting too close to the truth. He was in love with me and part of my decision to end him was practical.”

“But not all of it.”

“I don’t want to talk about me.” Her hand curves around his waist. “I want to talk about you.”

“It’s hard to describe in words.”

“What else would you describe it in?”

“It would be easier to show you.”

He palms her inner thigh, squeezes, and the emptiness in his voice moves through her, stirring up images of deserts and other lonely places. The wind comes and it smells of distant rain. Emily pulls up his shirt, touches the new scar. His breath turns in on itself. The ruined skin is soft under her fingers, the sealed stitch holes murmuring: I know you, God of my making. She traces its curve with the edge of her thumb and he strokes the back of her wrist. A subtle shiver unfolds through the muscle beneath. She turns her head and lifts her nose, presses a kiss to his neck. Layers of salt melt into her mouth.

“You wanna watch?” he murmurs.

She nods, burying her face in the animal scent of his oily hair.

“I don’t know what makes a man like me.” He tilts her face, brushing her swollen mouth with his lips. “Theories are attempts to explain the things that make no sense. Like…right now I’m thinking about your tits. I’m thinking about them, and I’m thinking about the last girl that I killed.” He takes a breast into his hand. “She was for you,” he whispers. “Did you like her?”

Her breath skips. “Yeah.”

“Did you want her?”

He kisses her neck and she nods. “Yes.”

“Did you want her more than you want me?” He pushes her legs apart and kneels between them, lifting her baggy white t-shirt. Orange light gleams on her skin. He brings a nipple to his mouth.

“No.” She combs her fingers through his hair. “Not more than I want you.”

“Tell me how you would’ve done it.” The slow ascension of his breath falls onto her chest. “How you would’ve fucked her.”

“I would’ve kissed her mouth first,” she whispers, cradling the back of his head. “Her slack mouth. The coldness of it. I imagine her tasting like an incoming tide.” Emily closes her eyes. “I’d lick her lips first and breathe on them. Warm them a little.”

His hands glide over her breezy hair. His breath falls hot across her mouth. He runs his tongue across her top lip and she gasps. “Like this?” he murmurs, sucking on her bottom lip. “Is that how?”

“Y-Yes.” She shivers. “Yes just like that.”

“What next?”

“Kiss,” she whimpers. “A kiss.”

She lets her mouth go slack. He kisses her, tracing the insides of her softened lips with the tip of his tongue. He tilts her face back and fits his mouth over hers, licks at her flaccid tongue. Emily’s eyelids tremble. Her breath leaves her body in soft bursts.

“What next?”

Her mouth gropes its way to his cheek. “I’d play with her tits.”

George hauls the t-shirt up over her head, dropping it into her lap. He makes his mouth soft and light, a butterfly landing on the curve of her neck. “How?” he murmurs, voice husky. “I need details, Emily.”

“I’d lick the nipples…but they’re cold, they won’t get hard so I have to pinch, I lick them before sucking them.” He breathes on her nipples and she squirms. “I’d suck the whole the whole thing into my mouth and bite.” Emily shudders beneath the patient swirl of his tongue. He nuzzles one wet nipple.

“I’m going to bite,” he whispers.

She nods.

His teeth sink into her areola. She stiffens, crying out at the jolt of life within her, a low moan dragging up the inside of her throat. Her body starts to hum. He flicks his tongue against the little dents. “What else?”

“I’d rub her nipples against my clit,” she whispers.

“So you’d climb over her…” He straddles her lap and on his knees he unzips his shorts. He takes out his hard cock, a long warm string of lubrication sliding off the tip. He gathers it up with his thumb, rubs it into the underside of the head. “And…” He gathers up a breast, molds her nipple into a peak. He moves the slick head of his cock back and forth against the tip. “Like this?”

Her nipple tingles beneath the velvety friction. Her hands slide up his hips, over rumpled khaki to the smooth warmth of bare skin. She puts her hands up beneath his shirt. “Yeah.”

She kisses the inside of his forearm. He moves a thumb across her cheekbone. “Can you come this way?”

She nods and bites her lip. “Yeah.”

“And then?”

“The wound.” Emily reddens. “I w-wanted to…I’ve always wanted…to lick it.”

“Like it’s a pussy?”

She nods.

“Right…here?” With his fingernail, he scratches a pink line into her left breast. “That the place?”

Goosebumps move through her scalp. “Yeah.”

“Here.” He reaches back and pulls the fishing knife out of its sheath. The dropped curve of his shoulder, the smooth flex of his arm, the breath swelling in his chest, Emily soaks up the movement and wishes for skin, a concert of movement unshielded by clothing. He moves and she feels it in her own body, her flesh mimicking him, the entrainment of her blood. The curved blade grazes her skin. Her breath skips across the air like a stone. Her pupils dilate. His hand picks up a tremor. The blade draws down and her body opens up, blossoms into the pain. “Hold still, baby. That’s it.” The light lengthens into violet dusk. The blade glides over her, held straight by the turn in his wrist. Dark blood wells up. George tosses the knife aside, smears the blood across her belly. Her hips lift up on a rush of breath. Her heart flows into her pelvis. Her cunt constricts. His voice smears into his breath. “It’s just a scratch.”

“George,” she whispers.

He leans over her and presses his tongue to the shallow cut, glides it up the length. Inside the stinging pain she unravels, heat swelling in her. He prints her skin with red kisses. He makes a trail of them to her sticky belly and inside she begins to tremble. The scent of fresh blood stirs up ghosts in her flesh. He takes hold of her restless hips and she thinks of Aaron, a flood of sweetness released in his blood, the harsh motions of his body clinging to life. He pulls off her shorts. George’s tongue inverts the colors, paints pale kisses into the glaze of blood on her skin. She surges, falls back inside her boundaries. Her belly is a floodplain. The constant motion of the ocean rises up through the deck, rocks into the places where it touches her cold skin and climbs into her body, her tidal flesh, the skin tender and awakened by blood. The cut in her chest sings. He finds the river in her cunt and brings his mouth to the rim. She lifts up her hips, guiding her thick scent into the fjords of his face. He moans into her hole.

“Yes.” Emily sighs into the press of his hands. “I would eat her pussy.” Her ankles tremble. “Yes. Like that. Yes.”

George’s fingers lace through hers. She feels tethered to the earth, down through layers of crushing depths to the seabed. His tongue melts through the layers of everything she has ever been.

Her orgasm wells up, sharp and hard, swirling with images of the tuna: its skin is slippery and turned back, the red flesh spilled onto the deck and drowning in the sweet flavor of rain. The rain falls down inside her, bringing with it the taste of mainland flowers and minerals dredged up from the depths of the sea. It is the breath of the tuna, its last exhalation, laced through with a flavor of blood. The sweet ache wells up and spills over, gushing out of her, creeping up to her threshold before it leaps forward and in the hard clench of her cunt she again thinks of the tuna, of its muscular push into the blue water, the labor required to wrestle it up out of the currents. His tongue is the knife. He flays it open, bleeds it hot into his mouth. Her breath backs up in her throat. She holds onto him as she clenches and relaxes, clenches and relaxes. The torrent of spasms slows and she begins to moan.

He moves over her, caught up in the dark, the evidence of her pleasure gleaming on his chin. He takes off his shirt. “I want your skin,” he murmurs, the outlines of the words softening on his tongue and riding his breath, quivering into all the vulnerable spots. His cock skids into her folds, pushes upward, crests the tangled hair of her pubis. She feels the base of it pulse. He reaches down, steers the head, sinks into her body. Her thighs close around him. He thrusts, making her gasp. “Emily,” he whispers, voice rising up through the shaped breath. His face buries itself in her neck. “Emily.” He draws out the syllables, loads them down with murmured smoky sweetness: “Emily.” She arches her throat. He thrusts faster, harder. The sound of the sea rushes into her ears and fills her breath. Her hands skim his sweaty back. Heat fills her palms. He begins to tremble. “You’re my anima,” he groans.

She opens her eyes to a mess of bright stars.