Last Night

I pulled out my phone one last time. Miri had texted me, “Have fun you two!!” That was two hours ago. I had replied, “Thank you <3” I stared at those messages. Briefly, I considered scrolling through the rest of our chat log, but then I might not have been able to go through with it, so I turned the phone off, just to be safe, and put it in the glove compartment.

What else was there to do now? I turned on the radio again and then turned it off after just a few seconds; the sound irritated me too much. The cars driving by irritated me, as did the clothes on my body, which suddenly didn’t seem to fit me anymore and felt all wrong against my skin. I shifted in my seat. One breath after another, just like my therapist had shown me—but it didn’t help, not really. It rarely did. I kept twisting my wedding ring, turned it around and around on my finger because there was nothing else to really fidget with. A single rose-colored stone set in a plain gold ring, identical to hers even down to the engraving on the inside. I took it off and dropped it into the cup holder. Did I feel bad about it? Maybe. I don’t know.

I had gotten so thin over the past few years that I got chills even on warm summer nights like this one, when the air feels like a liquid and it’s hard to breathe. My destination was only a short walk away since I had parked almost right in front of her house, but I would have felt naked without my jacket and pulled it tighter around my shoulders as I left the car. The building looked just like she had described in her last e-mail: low and rectangular with a veranda running along one side towards the back. I climbed up the stairs and counted the doors. It was the fourth from the front, second from the back. The name beside the door bell wasn’t the one she had used online, but I had done the same, so I could hardly fault her. My finger hovered over the button. I tried the breathing thing again, but it didn’t work this time either. If I pressed it, it would be final. There would be no going back, no way to undo it. I pressed it.

A couple of seconds later, she opened the door. She looked almost surprised to see me and that was entirely my fault, seeing as I was an hour late or, more honestly, had sat in the car for the last hour. Her look quickly softened into a warm smile. “I’m glad you could still make it,” she said. Her voice was warm and deep, though with a gentle softness I somehow hadn’t expected from the way she wrote. “Come on in.” She held the door open and her eyes followed me as I stepped into her apartment. “Can I take your jacket, Perse?” she asked. Persephone—that’s what I had called myself on the forum. Her name there was Nyx, Queen of the Night. Everyone there used names like that, for obvious reasons.

“No, I’m…” I swallowed. We had talked for, what, months? Since February, at least. And still I felt nervous, as if I were in a stranger’s home, which I technically was after all. “I’m feeling a bit cold.”

“Cold?” She sounded amused. “In this weather? You’re not anemic, are you? That’s gonna make things difficult.” She laughed, but it didn’t feel like a joke. Sweat soaked into my brows, or was it the humidity condensing on my skin? “Come on, let’s make you comfortable.” Gently she took me by the elbow and led me into her living room. It was stylishly decorated, with low tables and a handful of abstract paintings on the walls. It reminded me of my therapist’s office, actually, though I had never seen that at night. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Er, yeah. Water’s fine.”

She looked me up and down, though I didn’t quite understand what she was searching me for. “Alright,” she said eventually. “Water it is. Just make yourself comfortable in the meantime.” I sat down on the sofa and looked around, but there was nothing quite to look at besides the furniture; no tchotchkes, no real personal belongings, not even any books. I almost thought for a second that she might have rented the place, just for tonight, just for our meeting, but then I remembered the several pairs of shoes in the hallway and the jackets. Maybe some people just lived like this: neatly. She put down a glass of water in front of me and two wine glasses besides. “In case you want to have some later,” she clarified. The glass was slippery with condensation and the water just slid down my parched throat without wetting it, like heavy rainfall after a drought. She poured herself a glass of red wine. “So, how are you feeling? Are you excited?”

“Yeah, I g-g-think so, yeah.” I tried to drink more water, but each tiny sip just stung as I forced it down.

“Aww, you still seem pretty nervous,” Nyx said. She scooted closer to me, sitting now right beside me and grabbing my hand. “You were a lot more talkative over text, I have to say. But that’s fine. It’s okay to be nervous. I think it’d be weirder if you weren’t nervous, to be honest. I know I am.” Here she laughed a little more. I could smell a faint note of alcohol in her breath. Had she already been drinking?

“Have you ever done this before?” I asked. The physical contact helped me relax a little. She stroked my back with her other hand and it was as if all those nervous knots in my spine suddenly untied themselves under her touch.

“No. Not this in particular, at least. But I’ve thought about it so much over the years. And I’ve, let’s say, experimented with my earlier partners quite a lot.” She took a sip of wine from her glass. Her breath was sweet and darkly toxic. “I’m all the more glad to have finally met you when I did. And us living so close together, too. That’s fate, isn’t it?” She let go of my hand and brushed strands of my hair behind my ear, accidentally brushing against my cheek, or maybe not even by accident. It felt so nice and I hated it, but still leaned into her touch, all my reservations being slowly replaced by fearful desire.

“Do you need my car keys?” I asked in order to stall.

“That would probably be for the best, right? Logistically speaking. So I can take care of everything once we’re done. Just put them there on the table.” I did as she told me to. There was so much stuff on my keychain that it landed with a heavy thud. Nyx examined it and fingered a little plush figurine Miri had bought for me years earlier as a lucky charm when I was in the hospital. “Snoopy. Cute.” She turned back to me and traced the outline of my face with her fingers. “You’re also very cute. I mean, I already knew that from the pictures you sent me, but you’re just so much cuter in person.” She chewed on her lips. They were covered in small white flaps of broken skin. “I can say it now, right? I love that fearful look in your eyes. It doesn’t translate into pictures at all, but it’s so hot when you actually see it before you. It just does something for me, you know. Yes, that look, exactly.” I shrunk back from her involuntarily, but her aura drew me in nonetheless. It felt impossible to escape her, impossible not to want to press up against her caressing hands, to grab them in turn and press them into your cheek. “I was always of the opinion that having your partners put up a fight was more rewarding, you know. Seeing them struggle and finally submit as they realize that it’s futile to fight you. But I honestly think I prefer it like this. It’s so much easier for us both to just indulge in the moment, don’t you think? To not waste time playing pretend when we don’t have that long to begin with. We both know what we want, so why hide that we desire it?” She brushed a few strands of hair away from my neck and kissed me on the exposed flesh. I shivered, felt paralyzed. Her hand wandered down towards my leg, stroked my thigh up and down and grabbed onto my hip, pulling me closer to her. She was kissing the soft skin right below my ear and I let a soft moan escape my lips. “You would make such a good thrall,” she whispered right into my ear, warm and humid like the summer night.

* * *

I had asked her if I could use the bathroom before we did it. It was just as tidy as the rest of her apartment—only a handful of long black hairs in the shower drain hinted at anyone actually living here. Maybe she was out most of the day and only came home to sleep. She looked and dressed and behaved as if she were a lawyer or some other fancy job that requires you to be a workaholic. But then again, we had sometimes exchanged e-mails and forum messages all throughout the day, even when she must have been at work—when I should have been at work—so maybe she wasn’t all that busy after all.

Cold water splashed into my face; I hardly felt it at all. I saw the empty ring finger and sensed a pang in my stomach. I tried not to think of her too much, not to let my thoughts wander. But I couldn’t. How could I not think of her with every touch, not imagine her face brushing up against mine instead and think about how I would never feel her again, would not feel her in my final moments? I checked my back pocket for the razor blade I had taken with me, just in case I needed it, just in case something went wrong. I knew what I wanted—I had made my peace with it: I would not leave the apartment alive.

Nyx had already prepared the bedroom. Her bed was large, the bedsheets all white and silky-looking, the pillows bordered with ruffles of lace—so strange and ethereal looking in this otherwise discreet and earthy place. She patted the bedding beside her and I followed her command. “You seem a lot better now,” she said. She turned my face towards hers. “And you’re still sure that you want to go through with this?” I nodded.

“I need to do this,” I said.

She smiled at me, a toothy smile. Her canine teeth were pointy and slightly longer than the rest, done by a cosmetic dentist on the West Coast, she had told me very early on. “I’ve talked to so many women over the years,” she said, “including on that forum, and even on there no one was ever open to it—none except you.” She took my hand into hers and began tracing the veins that stood out in bluish-gray against my taut pale skin. “I’m so glad that we’ve finally met. It’s like a dream come true for me. I’ve dreamed about this, literally dreamed it every night, for so many years now. And it was all worth the wait.” Her fingernails were cut short, but she still left scratches on the back of my hand, pale reddish streaks. “Persephone.” She looked deeply into my eyes. “I’ll make sure you won’t forget it.”

She kissed me, kissed me, sucked at my lips, bit into them and pushed her tongue down my throat without regard for what I wanted and I tried not to think about it too much, tried not to think about anything but to give myself over to her, to want it too and sink into it until it was only flesh pressing on flesh, soft and wet and warm. Her hands searched for my hips and pulled at my shirt, dragging it over my head in one skilled motion. She looked me all over, her eyes filled with hunger. “I didn’t know you were this serious about it,” she said and grabbed my scar-filled arm. “You know, I made one of my exes cut herself in front of me. Her whole leg looked like this. I encouraged her to do it and then I licked the blood out of her wounds. Sometimes I also fed it to her.” She turned my arm this way and that, dragged her fingers all along my forearms, tracing all those faded cuts with her fingernails, all the way from my elbow to the big one right at the wrist, still blue and pink after all those years. Without another word she lifted my hand and kissed it, right on the cut, the one that should have been the final tally mark in that long list of failures. “Don’t worry,” she whispered and smiled softly and those words and all the ones she didn’t even have to say made me let go and melt into her arms as she kissed me and I kissed her back again and again.

She pushed my body down onto the duvet and crawled on top of me, losing her blouse along the way. Her face buried itself in the side of my neck and she started sucking ferociously on my skin, all the while fingering herself, letting out moans that were stifled by the bony mass of my body. I had told myself I wouldn’t enjoy it, that I would try to put up a fight, but that was a promise made hours ago and I hadn’t felt desire like this, desire for me, in so many years and when I heard her pleasured sounds right next to my ear, my hands moved on their own and I forgot what I had told myself; I felt guilty, but that only made me want it more and I surrendered to my feelings.

“Are you ready now?” she asked. Her smooth hair had gotten all tousled. Thin strands of spit were trailing from her chapped lips onto my face.

“Yes,” I whispered. Tears pooled in the corners of my eyes, stinging, burning. “Please.”

“You really want this?”

“Yes. I need this.”

“Then beg for it. Beg for me to take you.”

“Please,” I let out in one sobbing moan as my eyes filled with tears. “I need this so bad. I need you to kill me, please.”

She grabbed me by the throat, pressing down on my carotids till I could feel the blood struggling against the pressure of her grip, could feel it rushing through my head as it became louder than anything else, louder than my thoughts even. Her teeth touched the side of my neck, her breath hot as fire as she pressed closer, readjusted herself and bit down, slowly, forcefully, till she broke skin and I could feel my blood leaking into her mouth, could hear that sucking-spraying sound it made with each pump of my heart as my veins began to empty and it gushed onto her face, felt her sucking the life out of me and myself fall into deep red nothingness.

* * *

It was like waking up from anesthesia. Everything came slowly into view, like the curtain being lifted on a stage while the lights turn on and the actors walk on all in slow motion. I didn’t even notice the sounds at first, only the bright fluorescent lights above the hospital bed that hurt my eyes to look at but that I couldn’t look away from, so when I finally heard the sounds of all the machines and people talking somewhere out in the hallway, it was like emerging from water. “How are you?” Miri asked me. Her face was swollen red; she had been crying a lot.

“It hurts.” I tried to say. My words came out as weak croaks. She got up from her chair beside the bed and hugged me, pressed down a little too hard on my body and sobbed into my messy hair. “I’m sorry,” I said. I could barely even lift a hand to comfort her without grimacing from the pain.

Miri took my face into her hands. “No.” She was just openly crying now. “No, it’s alright.” I might have cried too—I don’t know; I felt nothing in those moments besides pain and red-hot guilt. “You’re going to be alright. We’ll make it through this.”

“How did you—“

“I texted Lisa to ask her if you two were having fun at the show, but then she said she didn’t know what I was talking about. I’m sorry I looked at your laptop. I just got paranoid and worried. I’m so sorry.” She hugged me again and stroked my hair.

“I tried to hurt you,” I said. My whole throat was on fire.

“You didn’t.” She took my hand, pressed it, stopped her tears. “We made it through this once already. And I’ll always be by your side, in sickness and in health; I promised you that.” She let out a laugh, that kind of laugh of desperation that is reserved for the sad and grieving. Tears welled up in the depths of my head and my throat seized; I coughed so hard I thought I would throw up my lungs. “I’ll get you some water,” Miri said after I had managed to calm down again.

As I felt her warmth slowly leave my hand, I felt sick to my stomach with guilt. I could never go back to her. Every movement of my body hurt as I propped myself up, but I had to reach my back pocket before Miri came back and I prayed that they hadn’t taken the razor blade.