Soundtrack
Inner Oceans - Apparition
Chelsea Wolfe - Dragged Out
Low - Words
True Widow - CREEPER
Foreigner - I Want to Know What Love Is
True Widow - FOUR TEETH
Dragged Out
Halloween.
The only day of the year when the spirits of the dead are permitted to roam. That's what she grew up believing. As if there was someone lifting a veil at Halloween dusk and drawing it back down sometime late in the night. A curtain between the living and the dead.
She knows better now.
Things have happened.
She knows it can be nothing more than her mind painting his face in the shreds of passing shadows as she drives back to her dorm for the night, the radio harmfully loud, the windows down so the cold afternoon wind can remind her she is not entirely numb.
Nothing more than imagination conjuring up a presence following her through the parking lot, dashing into darkened hiding places the second she glances behind her.
Nothing more than the dropping degrees tugging up the hair on every inch of her skin.
For spirits' sake, it's still light out.
When she gets in, she drops her purse and her jacket on the floorboards by the door as she slumps her way to the bathroom.
She isn't going to the party.
She does not know how to smile anymore.
She takes a scalding shower and plans to spend the night with a book, a tea cup, silence, solitude…a side of suppression to keep her thoughts light. Maybe a joint will help.
When she steps out dripping on the bare wood floor, she fingers herself a message in the foggy mirror because no one else has been in for a while to say it.
HELLO
Or maybe it is for him, if he walks tonight.
She wipes the word away with one swipe of her hand.
It is a chilling and torturous idea, that he walks tonight. He is dead. Dead dead dead dead dead. And she likes it that way.
She slips into black thermal pajamas and settles shivering into her bed with a history book she's been reading outside of her assignments. The sun casts blinding beams of last desperate light into the room as she lays back, toeing her blanket up over the tops of her feet. Then she leaves her body and enters her book. It has been a fine escape from the gnawing inside her for the last several months.
It is when the quiet overtakes and builds a screaming spiral in her eardrums that she snaps up from her book and swears she can feel it.
And she knows she is going crazy.
But this shameful phantom seizure shaves the edge off of feeling like she's made a terrible mistake.
And she knows it isn't becoming.
But her insides rearrange and her centerfold gapes as though it's taken something in and she'll attest to the world he has become a mass of black air that haunts the void between her thighs.
Of all the living to visit.
Of all business to finish.
She gasps for air and arcs her back until something minor cracks with pleasure and she wants to sob because she can feel it and it can't be real, she can see him doing this and he is not there, she has enveloped the plunder and she cannot push it out.
Her cellphone rings and the ghost gets frightened.
It's gone. Left her hollow.
She sighs.
Straightens up in bed.
Ignores her phone.
Uses the heel of her hand to brush the hair out of her face.
She is sick.
She is not well.
But she has to reassure herself that he is as dead as dead can be.
She is in some kind of daze as she drives out to the field where his remains are buried. The sun is a setting wildfire over the pine tree line and she chases it. She is wholly alone, her phone is off, the radio is on and if he is the air then he whips her frozen. Always with the window down.
Her headlights reflect and glow in the cavorting fog.
She parks and flicks them off, turning herself over to the grey.
Not far from the barn there is a heap of loosened soil. She knows it is there. She helped loosen that soil. She has seen it. She has spat upon it.
She parks the jeep in the back of the barn and the shovel she yanks out of the hatch is not new. She is too often the kind of girl who finds herself digging.
It takes two hours before the tip of her metal finds a new texture of earth and that is his body. Her hands are numb. She should have brought mittens.
She drops the shovel and falls to her knees to brush the dirt from a patch of cloth, and a phthalo green finger. Her fingers tremble and her teeth chatter and the fog blurs the details but she persists at unearthing him.
She screams when she frees his upper half from the clingy grave and the soil glued to his gaping neck frenzies with worms. For a second of weakness he is thrown back to the hollow while terror throttles her.
It is a silly thing, she thinks, to fear the worms above what she is doing, and she sobs at herself. But after a moment she reclaims her determination. She has come too far and dug too deep.
She kneels back down to wrest him from the earth. The suit he wore is browned. The bloodstain on the front of his shirt remains as she remembers it, long and wide and implicating. She can't look too closely at it for the things that crawl across it, but she remembers. And as she takes his knobby fingers into her own she is tempted to rip them off, one by evil one. How they hurt her, how they wronged her, more than once upon a terrible time.
She drags him by the dead hands, cursing him, trying not to listen to his putrefaction slurping from side to side in the sack of his flesh.
The smell is overbearing. She breathes through her mouth to avoid it but she can taste his decay and it makes her tongue retract into her throat. Her stomach seizes.
She vomits a saffron colored compound of foods on his yawning neck hole without meaning to. She cannot see straight for the fetid mist.
The search for his head takes another hour. As hoped though not as expected, it is buried close to the body. She chips a part of his skull off with her shovel by accident but it will not matter.
His head fits perfectly in the bowl of the shovel and she does not need to hold it by the hair. She is more disgusted than proud of herself and more driven than disgusted as she lets the shovel lead the way. When she tips it again over the tarp she has laid out, his head drops with a nauseating thud and crinkle.
It's like playing with a broken doll. She has the open base of his neck meet the rim of its other half. A puzzle. A satisfying repair. One severed vertebrae clocks the other. Shriveled arteries fray useless. His juniper face angers her. Up close she can see that his eyes have been eaten and where they used to gloat from their sockets there now lies a darkness quivering with other life. She can fix that, she thinks. She hopes. Because when he is ready she wants to watch him watching her while she takes back what she has given.
She clasps her hands together, makes herself comfortable on her knees before the pieced corpse, and she closes her eyes.
She knows the words.
She has the power.
It will take much out of her.
It may even kill her, if the irony doesn't first.
But she has thought of this for some time now.
She is hydrated.
She has eaten much fruit today. Crystallized much emotion.
She has wrapped her strength like a string around her finger and she will not leave this barn or this earth until this works.
She supposes the anxiety must have begun the night he was buried. She remembers now and then hearing a shift in his tone.
He rarely was predictable.
She remembers a fleeting sense of hope, before he stopped talking. Hope that maybe he would let her live. She always did feel that curling revolt in her gut when he looked at her; he thought of her naked sometimes.
Perhaps it is why she can never sleep without the phantom cock of what could have been grinding in and out of her soul.
His head was debris before she could find out what he would do. She has since wondered, but it isn't why she's come tonight and she may not even ask.
She supposes she could.
She supposes it still does not matter.
She supposes the primary reason she has come to resurrect him is that she wanted—wants—to kill him herself.
She supposes she should drink a glass of water while she waits.
She supposes she has lost her mind.
It must be midnight when she hears the rustling of the tarp.
She's been waiting in the empty house adjacent to the barn, all lights on. Tapping her fingers.
Having lost herself in a crossword, she jumps at the distant rustle, causing the wooden chair beneath her to scrape rather loudly on the old hardwood floor. The middle of these autumn nights in the country are so quiet. The tarp is an alarm ring. A dinner ding. A service bell. Her dead is rising. He is arriving.
Or is it the wind?
She expects not to find him where she left him. She expects to find the sheet of tarp harrowingly empty, and to turn in panic, see him standing behind her in menace. But she steps out the back door of the barn and the monster she has created lies, broken face down in the damp dirt, still mostly wrapped in the black polyethylene like a holiday blanket. She squints in the dim porch light, having to focus between flickers on and flickers off, gusts of fog and her own tired sight, and what sad stranger is supposed to change these lightbulbs all the way out here anyway? And she sees that he has moved just a little. Just to the left. And his back rises, so subtly, then falls. She thinks she must be imagining it. But the hallucination continues. Again. Again. He breathes.
She has such horrible memories of him. To think that making new ones is possible… Her breath is caught by a low groan emitting from the corpse. Something else is moving beneath his suit jacket…his shoulder blade, as his arm bends beneath him, dragging his long fingers newborn and explorative through the dirt.
She is afraid that she has waited too long. Or not long enough. She is afraid his eyes might not have grown back. He is undercooked. A doughy Christ. Gumby. Clay incubus.
But she is not stupid. She does not stand by and wait much longer than the time it takes to collect her breath and steel her resolve for the taming of her creation. She charges in a tentative way from the porch to his stirring body.
Careless for the fragile state he is in, she slips the toe of her boot underneath his rib and kicks him over onto his back.
And there he is.
She grits her teeth.
His head lolls in follow with his body and if she looks closely enough she can see the skin of his neck has sewn itself. His eyelids flutter over milky globoid clots that have grown in his sockets. Another gargled groan escapes his dry lips.
If he was ever attractive, it isn't now. She almost pities him for it.
She bites her lips as she scowls down at him. For all the thought and rage and mania she has put into this moment, she just does not know what to do with him.
She watches his bloody, dirt-cloddy suit rising too slightly with too ragged of breaths. He is struggling to make use of oxygen, throat bulging with…something. He's choking.
And just as she realizes death will yank him right back if she doesn't help him soon, his wet eyes roll over to see her, beginning to work as eyes should; though opalescent, vague pupils widen in recognition of his resurrector. Facial muscles are activated. Dirt-flecked eyebrows narrow. Lips turn up into what she hopes for his sake will not be a sneer. Instead they close to form the sound of her name.
"B—" he very nearly begins with a whisper, and then he gags and a spasm takes his body.
B is for Begrudging. The manner in which she helps him.
Inside the house, there is a staircase. She does all the work in getting him up it, for he can only stagger as if he's never walked a step before. But he lets her help without even the taunt of a smirk and she has to wonder if he knows who he is. Or where he is. Or what he has done. Or what will be done to him.
His head hangs to heave rattled breaths and each time he coughs it comes with bile stringing small clumps of dirt and passenger worms, a lace of death that has been beaded through his body for the months he has rotted. He leaves a trail of these emissions all the way to the bedroom, to the bathroom, to the porcelain tub where he allows himself to be helped in.
The instant she lets go of him he buckles and slides to a helpless heap.
Hands trembling, she turns knobs until water from above showers him. She watches his eyes close as he accepts it, despite its icy temperature, and his suit blackens with wetness. Brown water flees from where he lies, body beginning to ripple again with another retching of the dirt and the worms.
The suit will have to come off. What hides beneath, she shudders to imagine. But the shear look of him in those clothes, rusted blood on the white button-up, the probable piss and shit of death by now woven in the pants…he can't live again unless he gets clean and she cannot re-kill a half-dead man. She wants very badly to perfect him.
She bends over the tub and, catching too close of a glimpse into his new pupils that are trying desperately to pierce a cobalt glaucomatous film and beseech her, she helps him shrug out of his blazer.
It is putrid, the scent of his stiff suit, and she holds her breath as she unbuttons his shirt.
He doesn't even smirk when she tugs his pants off. It's dirty work and the revulsion she feels toward his rotting clothing is almost metaphysical, so she appreciates his lack of emotion. His flagpole-erect cock, however, causes concern. She doesn't know whether it is an effect of his cadaverousness or a sign that he will be ready to use it soon.
She considers severing it for a moment. It, unlike his fingers, never touched her. But she doesn't want to take many chances tonight.
How he struggles to breathe makes her think it would be cruel. She slops his dripping clothes into a heap on the floor and resolves to at least afford him the respect of looking away from his vulnerable, however impressive, member.
Then the drain chugs. Auburn water rises.
"Fuck, you're disgusting," she says.
There will be a ring around the tub, she just knows it.
She has lost her patience and bashed in the drain with a hammer. Now water, dirt and worms alike run down the pipe with ease and she does not have to struggle withholding the last of her stomach contents each time she looks straight down.
He has gathered strength enough to sit up and lean his head against the side of the tub while she hoses him down with the shower head. It's detachable and high pressure and if she stands on the side of the tub with bare balanced feet she can run a vicious rain back and forth over his still body. Every other swish she sprays his face and he opens his mouth to let the water in.
His naked body is a canvas of healing bruises and grave-sores with a fresh fuchsia scar around his neck. She watches the water rush the dirt from his scalp, down his chest, how he breathes with progressive ease. She can't ignore that his liveliness is in gradual return. It takes one accidental however natural glance at his beaming dick to see the veins have risen and they are bluing with pumping blood. His eyes are relearning how to travel, their murky film fading to hint at crystal blue irises, all his. Her gut forms that familiar curl of a large maggot inside her.
She is further antagonized by his silence. He appears to have forgotten how to speak.
"How do you feel," she grinds out with less feeling than a rock.
His eyes laze up at her and his mouth opens a crack, his lips spread to show teeth and she waits for them to shape an answer. He breathes and pushes out a sound, though it seems to halt in the back of his throat and all she can hear is a squeak. He looks confused. Frustrated.
"Don't worry," she says, "I don't really care."
When he is clean, his hands have mastered gripping. She holds onto his arms as he stands and he mirrors her. Big weak hands wrap around her thin forearms and traumas past are invited to the forefront of her brain. She digs her fingernails into his springy flesh with intent to puncture, evoking a gasp from him that startles her.
She can't get used to his vulnerability.
Her cheap attack causes him to bang his second foot against the tub as he steps out and his other foot slips. He has to catch himself on her tense frame, his dead weight and his proximity assaulting, but she firms her grasp on his wet skin and holds him up.
She notices his softened cock is wiggling against her belly as she helps him regain balance. His eyes drift over hers, almost apologetically but she knows him better than to believe he is sorry for it. His breath fans her mouth. So does his gaze.
Heat rises to her cheeks and forehead.
It's painful to watch him eat.
All she could find in the kitchen was a cold can of Campbell's chicken noodle soup and she didn't bother to heat it up after cracking it open.
He can hardly keep himself sitting upright at the table. He spills most of his spoonfuls on the table, or his lap. The towel wrapped around his waist is getting disgusting and she can't stop staring with lost focus.
"Do you know where you are?" she asks, just trying to keep herself awake.
His facial muscles and eyes move to indicate he understands the question and is thinking about his answer, but for whatever reason the answer never arrives. She wonders how long it will take for his verbal skills to return.
"Do you remember what happened to you?"
This time he huffs while he chews his cold soup with his mouth open and it seems she has struck a nerve. It's an answer in itself.
Cruelly she rests her chin on the heel of her palm, bats her lashes and whispers.
"Did you miss me?"
She doesn't know what's gotten into her or why she keeps talking to him. She knows he doesn't care for her taunting. She knows he can't respond. She doesn't really want him to either. It just feels strange to share so many hours with another being and not speak.
To fill his gaps in the conversation, she thinks of the ways she could kill him when the time is right. Though watching him struggle with simple tasks like feeding himself makes her worry that the time may not come as soon as she wants it to. Dawn will be approaching within just a few hours and it won't be fair to smite this crippled zombie.
Impatient, she gives all her breath into a thick sigh and throws her head back against her chair. Her eyelids ache. Her mind grows more blank through the seeming hours of his slow and slovenly soup-eating. She lets her eyes close. She wants to see the darkness for just a minute. She wants to be nothing for just a second.
When she lifts her head and opens her eyes, she swears it was only a minute. She felt no relaxation, she had not slept, she had not dreamt of anything but the thoughts she was certain were conscious. The lamp above the table sears her eyes and she has to blink the brightness out. In between blinks she notices, with utter horror, that the chair across from her is empty.
He can't have gone far.
Not with that gait.
Not without clothes.
Not without her permission.
She gets to her feet and tries to be both quick and mindful of how the floorboards creak. She has no idea how much time has passed. Hair stands at attention on the nape of her neck. She can hear her heart beating loud as a funeral drum in her ears. And patters. Thunder cracks outside and slows to a low rumble as it bowls around the sky. She can hear it circling around up there through the barn's weak structure. Rain attacks the roof. His grave will be mud.
Cautiously. Anxiously. She toes her way to the staircase. Carefully. Breathlessly.
An iron sound rattles through the walls and she whips her head around. Either her shovel has a will of its own or he is trying to play a game with her.
She reroutes through the dim hall and to the door outside. Her bare foot steps out onto the porch and before she sees him coming, the world has flipped on its side. She is aware of the ringing pain on the back of her skull before she returns to the backside of her eyelids, to the darkness and to the nothing.
It's the rain pelting her cheeks that brings her back. One second she sees black, the next she sees indigo. The sky opening up. The rainfall from a new angle. Beads of water plod into her wide open eyes, followed by a migration of dark blotches that crosses her field of vision like a flock of ominous birds. She can see it in slow motion, flying overhead, getting larger. Getting closer. The migration falls over her face, moist and earthy, stinging her eyes, rolling in clumps down her cheeks.
Soil.
She struggles to sit up from the soft bed she has been lain upon, finding that it sheds from her frame as she moves. She shakes her head frantically through another helping of soil and feels for her own fingers.
She snaps her head up towards the sky again and sees him standing high above her, an angular silhouette against the waning crescent moon.
He's wearing her small fleece jacket and holding her shovel with new strength, swinging it with intimidating control. As the shovel swings another slew of soil comes cascading down upon her.
He is burying her alive.
"No!" she chokes out into the white noise of the weather. How can she have lost?
She can't.
She won't.
She will not lose this.
She pushes herself up on her stiff wet feet, toes curling into the mud that his grave has become. To her relief he has not had the time to dig deeper and the grave is still shallow. She clings to the nearest wall of earth and digs her fingers in to climb out.
Adrenaline has her moving imprecisely and she slips more than once as rainfall and shovels of dirt wash her back down. When she feels that she has finally gotten a good grip on level ground, he himself leaps down into the narrow pit.
He points the shovel out at her like a shotgun, rusted tip bound for her skull. He keeps hunched and his eyes lidded low and he does not appear to care for negotiation.
"You can't do this to me," she says calmly. "I brought you back."
She speedily ducks and makes a grab for the shovel's handle as it swings in her direction. Her hands wrap around the splintering wood and she pulls. She can hear him grunting as he yanks back impossibly hard and the handle is wrenched from her grip.
But he tosses the shovel aside. She's made her creation angry.
His force is not anticipated. It's as if his muscles hadn't just spent months wasting away, inactive, drooping. And they look as alive. She turns to face his attack and he shoves her shoulders into the wall of the grave. His abdominal muscles tighten visibly as he pins her back.
"Don't," she pleads, voice cracking softly. She isn't about to drop to her knees and beg but she isn't in a position to make demands either. She wills her body forward against his hold, reinforcing his strength. He is immoveable.
Those eyes.
She shudders when she forces herself to look into them. Brand new blues. Same as they ever were. Dancing with havoc and still…something in them she can't deny.
The panic throbs from between her thighs, cues a rise of bile in her stomach up to her knocking chest. For a millisecond she entertains the idea of distracting him. Of letting the neck of her thermal top slide further down her collarbone. Of giving flesh and blood to the phantom cock that screws her sanity. Of what would it be like? and how would that feel?
He sees it in her. The look. A thought running away with the guard in her eyes. He lowers his gaze the length of her shivering body and brings it, threateningly, back up as he takes her in.
She uses the opportunity to knee him in the balls. She doesn't know if it will have any effect on him but his body shrinks against her as though she has debilitated him.
She wrenches herself around in the cage of his relaxing arms and digs her fingers back into the earth with feeling, kicking off with her feet and clinging with the entirety of her body as she climbs. She is aware of him growling, panting and coming back to composure but she refuses to let this be real any longer. Clutch after clutch she rises to the top of the grave, gnarling her fingers into safer ground and clawing and pulling and crawling and surviving and she can feel the wind fresh off the flat ground rushing to welcome her back.
Then something cold, fleshy and strong wraps around her ankle and pulls.
She cries out and digs her elbows into the ground, working all her abs, everything she has to propel herself forward. She kicks her foot to shake him off, she tugs and thrashes, fingers grasping for something sturdy but the world is wet and slippery and everything her hands touch lets her go, traitorous. Soon the corner of the earth is knocking the wind out of her body sliding backward and she's being yanked down vertical mud.
He's got her.
And when he has her, things have changed. He's locking his arms around her body and his mouth around her lips like a vacuum for her life. With all the rain pounding down she can hardly breathe through her nose, and much worse is trying to make sense of what he thinks he's doing with their mouths. Her heart clobbers against her sternum and he holds her so tight she's certain her ribs will snap. But it will be a happier death the sooner she dies.
Hardly able to squirm, she relaxes into his grip and hopes he squeezes her harder than a child squeezes a kitten. She hopes her neck pops, she hopes her ribs collapse on her vital organs, she hopes he sucks the light out from her mouth before this can go anywhere else.
And then his tongue is prying desperately at her locked lips, lathering the warm saliva that had carried the insects out from his corpse not three hours ago.
So mortified, she sinks into him.
She gives up.
Tears of fury blend with the raindrops on her cheekbones and she lets his tongue wheedle in between her lips.
Maybe he's high on it, but he staggers.
Her body is held so stiffly she has to follow, her feet playing an impossible game of catch-up with the legs they're attached to. His tongue prods at hers and she can taste his death, bitter like the seeds of a grapefruit, pungent as a brown peach, briny with the aftertaste of Campbell's chicken noodle soup.
Her hands, useless otherwise, take hold of the fibers in the towel around his waist, looking for something to steady the way they reel together. He widens his mouth until his teeth knock into hers, an unpleasant collision needed in order to stretch his craving tongue into the back of her throat. He licks back and forth along the roof of her mouth until he can reach her tonsils and she gags.
He will eat her alive, she fears. And she knows, now that something of emotion has manifested itself in his walking corpse, he is in there. The one who has haunted her. And he has wanted this. And by the thrumming shame in her heart, by the fearful excitement embalming her, she wonders if he isn't alone. She wonders if what she feels when she lies down at night is morbid curiosity, so powerful it has at last transcended all veils between Halloween and the rest of the sorry year, between living and dead, between death and oblivion.
She has brought him here, after all.
His surprise is evident when she bucks up and instead of fighting molds herself to his body. His tongue retracts from her throat. She gasps and squelches for air, unable to fill her lungs with it for how he crushes her torso between his biceps. He exits her mouth altogether simply to touch noses and stare dumbstruck right into her eyes while he presses his forehead to hers. And even though she can't breathe it's this kind of affection she can never seem to find among the living, and she trembles with anticipation.
His acrid breath is growing warmer on her face and she wishes she had also brushed his teeth, but a part of his towel has become hard against her belly and she suspects he will not let her drag him back through the house. She did not imagine this was where Halloween would take her but his regrown brain is thinking of it and his revived body is accommodating and his soul is still balancing precariously between her world and hell but she can't say much different for herself these days.
She feels his brain veins pumping against her forehead. His eyes fall closed as he leans all his weight, leading her steps until her back again meets the wall of the grave, gentler now. His arms relax around her body and she fights the urge to throw another fitful escape attempt.
Hands slow as death begin to search her pelvis.
She doesn't understand how he can hunger this way so soon after resurrection. But she grows to realize it is more about conquer than it is about pleasure. This is not recreation or procreation. It is not creative. It is destructive.
The first to be destroyed is the skin of her breast, when he drops his head to snatch a mouthful of fat from her chest. She howls up at the sky, for he has pierced through the cotton of her shirt and through her skin to where the blood runs healthily beneath. As if he hungers for it. And when she steals herself a handful of his hair, she sees his jawbones working the bite, beckoning blood from the veins of her breast like juice from a stubborn fruit. And no matter how hard she pulls his hair he won't relent. For a minute.
When he loosens his bite, it's to her loud relief. She feels somewhat drained when his head leaves her heart but she's better now, she thinks. Now that he's let go and the chomp is over she feels that she can get used to him harming her a few more times before she ends him, and maybe get off on it. Because if pleasure in pain is anything, it's them.
His fingers, grimy with dirt, claw beneath the waistband of her thermal pajama pants without a care for cleanliness or manners. She wonders how long it has been since he's torn the bottoms off of any woman. Not counting the time he's spent in the ground, it has to have been a long, long time.
She moves her wet fists to clench the fabric of her jacket on his shoulders to pull the edges out, to pull the whole thing off, to pull him toward as the jacket slips down his arms and to the ground. She exposes him to the rain rolling down his muscles, along tendrils of hair and down his gaunt face, and replaces her hands around the back of his scarred neck, allowing herself to be proud of her work.
He leaves her waistband no more than six inches down her thighs, leaving no room for movement or cooperation or resistance of any kind. Let alone ease. His hand slips into the darkness. She feels him feeling her, cold, damp and rough fingers smoothing along her inner thigh, his thumb assessing the stretch of panty fabric protecting her and she swallows hard. She hears his breath shallowing and he glares into her eyes.
Can he know how ready she is for him?
She feels his other hand fidgeting between their hips, and then the towel falls to his feet and he's pushing immediately. There is no need for him to peel down her panties. His cock enters the darkness, hard tip pressing up against shielding cotton and he keeps the pressure, banging his hips into hers as though he's already inside, and she can feel him through the fibers of her underwear spreading her open, begging for entry, until it wears the fabric.
The stitching weakens with tearing little knits.
He pops through like a battering ram.
She gasps.
His shaft has shot straight inside.
He's inside. He's inside her.
He has to thrust upward to get any further with her thighs so close together, but he does it in a hurry. And she can feel his arrowhead spreading her apart, she can feel her vessel moistening to its aid, she can feel those throbbing veins around his girth worming at her entrance.
It feels good. He feels good in there like she never would have guessed and she curses herself for letting him go to waste. She considers for the first time tonight not going through with all she has planned. For a little more of this. For this even once more. She can train him. He can adapt. He can function like the rest of society someday. Old traumas can be traded for new screams at ceilings while he repents, metamorphosed, between her legs.
He can change.
By the time she's gritting her teeth and wincing through a painful climax, they're sliding, writhing, to the floor of the grave. A wonder if she bleeds from his harsh thrusting nags in the back of her thoughts. Some kind of infection has surely been contracted.
Coming down from the guilty throe she notices by accident, because she's forgotten it existed, the tossed aside shovel a safe three or four feet from her right arm. He still bucks against her with one hand in the mud and the other squeezing desperation into her trachea. She's been mirroring him, holding on for life to his Adam's apple so that when he pants into her face he wheezes, but he doesn't seem to mind being choked by her. On the contrary, his eyes laze backward through their sockets. Either she is finally killing him or he's fallen in love.
Maybe it's both, she thinks with a flutter in her heart.
But now that her breath is caught and her cunt has grown tight and weary around his stalling fuck, she feels it again. What brought her here. Thirst for something that will wash her pain, that thick, black molasses ever-dripping, ever-embittering, from her spirit.
She has to fight him for it. The control.
But with some feigned affection…his head pulled down and her rough dehydrated lips skimmed across his jawbone, an urgent kiss on his neck, an impassioned buck of the hips that drills his manhood even deeper…she manages to flip him.
He rests his head back into the muck, watching her with his mouth hanging open, bottom teeth baring as he breathes. Though her body is exhausted she humors him for a moment. She lays her hands over his biceps as he splays them out in surrender and she lifts her hips up, sliding to the end of him, and lowers herself back down to take him fully in. She can see his jaw crooking in ecstasy, feel his chest swelling below her, his cock twitching within.
This is the moment.
She leans.
She hopes her insides feel too good for him to notice.
Far to her side she grasps.
He has closed his eyes in rapture when she straightens out atop him. She has what she wants and the enemy where she wants him. It's a courtesy that she allows him to ride most of climax out. She grips her shovel where the wood meets the steel and holds it poised in the air above her head. The sweat coating her skin runs cold. Fingers fidget in their grip. He pulses inside her. Hot ejaculate collects comfortably in her core and she is warmed. She grinds her teeth. She will have to take something for that later.
His eyes flutter open, glazed. She doesn't wait for him to focus, or to stop coming, or to speak the first words that are about to arrive by his mumbling lips. The scar around his neck has just begun fading and it's such a shame.
November dawns as she drives away from the barn. The rain stopped some time ago and the ginger horizon is clear, the morning air dewy as it whirls through the rolled down windows, sifting through her greasy hair. She turns a dial on the dash, cutting in and out of morning talk shows and blips of beats until she finds something with enough bass to vibrate her heart.
There's still soil lodged far beneath her fingernails. Blisters sting her palms from filling in the grave. Her throat is scratchy, tight, dry. She'll have a cold for two weeks at least.
Next Halloween will be even better, she thinks with a smile so wide it makes her dry lips bleed.