A small black spider sits in the corner above the showerhead.

Emily looks up at the strands of web, gilded with fine droplets of water: why would anything make its home in here?

Hissing water, hot and steady. Steam curls up into her eyes, condenses on her cheeks. Her gun is in the safe. She imagines it lying on its side in the dark, breathing its blood scent as George’s hands move soapsuds across her back. The atmosphere of her blood feels thin, lofty currents infiltrating her joints and making them dizzy. She pulls in a moist breath. His fingers follow the minute curves in her bones. Her head hangs, water dripping off the ends of her hair. She braces her hands against the tiles and leans into them. He reaches around to soap up her belly, the rise and fall of her breath cradled in his fingers.

His chin grazes her shoulder. His breath gets lost in the steam. He lathers up her hips and the blood in her loins pulses tight and hard. She brings the soap up around her breasts, water hitting the side of her face. His fingers slide through hers. He buries his lips in the hot stream coursing down the back of her neck and she closes her eyes, the kiss flowing across the stones of her spine, through the cleft of her buttocks, around the insteps of her feet. Water runs off her nose, sluices between her breasts. Spent soap churns around her toes.

She imagines a little insect drawing loops in the steam, swerving too close to the corner and catching on the bejeweled web: the struggle, the spider skittering closer, all those tiny drops of water falling until they break open.

Emily leans back, learns the topography of his body with blind skin. His body is hard, punctuated by junctures of bone, joints strung with tense yet sensitive muscle. The dark hairs on his forearms flow with the will of the water. He touches her collarbones and the wet weight of her hair pulls the muscles in her neck. His hand slides up beneath her chin, skating across the easy vulnerability of her arched throat. He turns her face to one side. He reaches up, directing the spray onto the front of her body. The water’s pressure beats a flush into her skin.

“Tell me how you were as a teenager,” he murmurs into the moist cup of her ear.

“Raw,” she breathes. “Vulnerable.” Her voice drops into a whisper. “Half-crazy.”

“And now?”

“Hungry.”

He tips her chin back and kisses her water-beaded mouth. She licks runnels of water off his upper lip and his tongue twines with hers. They fall into a steamy breath-torn kiss. Emily pushes his hand down between her legs and the water feels hard against the swelling silk of her lubrication. Her hips move against him, her throat full of faint and rhythmic whimpering. The sound stiffens in the roots of his hair, prickles hot down his spine. He moves his hand, fingers slipping up into her from behind. The intense heat of her cunt enfolds his knuckles. She moans and imagines it like a wound, a hungry slice begging for his fingers, and she spreads her legs, water drumming into the thin layer of water sloshing in the bottom of the tub, like a pool, like rain.

“Push it in all the way,” she murmurs. “Yeah. Yeah.”

He kisses the stream of water flowing over her spine, pushing his fingers up into the slow flexion of her inner muscles. He pushes up, slides out, pushes up slow, easing them in, hard but slow. Emily smells herself, blooming like a marigold in the salt, musky and strong through a curtain of hot water and soap. She leans her forehead between her splayed hands, into the tiles. Her spine ripples. Her ass rocks into the curve of his wrist.

“I wanted it,” she sighs. “I wanted the cut.”

“I know.”

“Wanted it…like a new cunt…wanted my fingers between her ribs,” she pants. “My tongue in her, in her cut. I-I wanted to lick her heart and put my fingers in the ventricles.”

His voice gets raspy. “I know.”

“Oh, George.”

She loosens, getting hotter. He nestles his fingers in her cunt and strokes her asshole with his thumb. Her breath shallows and there’s a quiver, a faint tightening around his knuckles like she wants to hold it in. He touches her clit through streams of water and slicked-down pubic hair. She shivers a little. He strokes the shaft, feeling its tiny pulse. Her body tenses and he feels her slow spasms, the catching in her breath. He takes his fingers out.

Emily shuts off the shower and steps out of the tub on uncertain legs. The mirror is shrouded in fog. George pulls the curtain aside and steps onto the mat and opens the door. Cold air spills in, dissipating loose drifts of billowing steam. Emily’s teeth start to chatter. She yanks a towel down off the shelf and wraps it tight around her shoulders. He slips a hand under her wet hair and kisses her quivering lips. She moves closer, pressing into the heat of his skin. She wraps her arms around his neck. He takes her hair in both hands and squeezes it and her towel soaks up water, gets heavy, slides to the floor. She takes another one and dries her skin. He licks drops of water off his fingertips.

She shakes all over with goosebumps. George moves into the blue dark of the bedroom and pulls all of the windows down, leaving the sashes cracked open just enough to hear the constant roar of the waves. The air outside is raw and cold. Emily tosses her towel into the corner of the drenched bathroom. The harsh overhead light casts Emily’s shadow across the bed. She tugs the blankets apart with shivering hands and burrows down between cool sheets. He crawls into the bed with her, still damp in places, hauling the heavy blankets up around her shoulders. The weight is comforting. As she touches his lips with her pruned fingers, he licks their wrinkled skin.

“Say something to me,” she murmurs.

He pulls her close to his body and breathes into her cheekbone. “I want to kill your Aaron.”

Emily’s eyes open. “Why?”

He pulls the blankets up around her head. “So you’ll remember him.”

She moves up onto her elbow. “Are you going to do it?”

“I don’t think so.” He moves onto his back.

Emily climbs over him. “Why not?”

He moves the damp hair out of her face. “So he’ll remember me.”

He lifts his head and kisses underneath her jaw. Each touch of his mouth unlaces her a little more. She lets out a long sigh, turning her head, his hands moving over her back. He sucks the skin behind her ear and she fills with tenderness, loosening the junctures of her nerves and bones. Warmth built by lazy friction fills the blankets and works its way toward her cold toes. He rolls her onto her back, dipping his head, brushing his face across her chest. His skin is just starting to roughen, the sharp hairs peeking through. She works her fingers through his cool damp hair down to its warm roots and massages the thick tendons running up from his neck, firm beneath the scalp.

He pushes the covers aside. Her nipple reacts to the cold. He moves his lips over it, just breathing, and then he closes his mouth around it. He licks from inside wet heat. Her breath comes faster.

Emily’s hands slide over his back, fingers spreading. She cradles the crests of his shoulder blades, stunted and buried wings. He trails breath to the other nipple.

“He’s not my Aaron,” she whispers.

George bites down, slow but hard. Loose heat floods her belly. Her breath rises into her throat on tides of salt-scented starlight. It spells out its desire on currents of blood. He looks up at her, eyes gleaming in the shadows. She falls through the doors behind them, buried in the dark, down a long restless corridor of bottomless lust. Beyond that are the spaces between the stars, deep silent rooms where there is no light. Inside his eyes are crushing currents. The petals of her mind brush up against mysterious hunger, dead places, blind formless will, a sharpened desolation dreaming beneath a heart of darkness. The boundaries of her skin vibrate with pain. His teeth are on her nipple, hard enough to just break the skin. The outermost layers giving way to minuscule vessels. Like a seal they break into scarlet upon his lips.

She strokes his hair. The grays mix in with silk, whispering stark memories against the undersides of her fingers. His eyes close and the throbs begin, hot and sharp, like tiny thorns twined up inside her skin. Air quakes inside her lungs.

Emily moves a hand over his cheek. “Do the other one.”

He licks the other nipple. Her pain dulls, lulled to sleep by soft subtle pleasure. He catches it in his teeth, jaw pressing slow, breath puffing hot and quick through his nose. She sighs back into the pillow and goes into herself this time, falling through the trapdoors in her psyche and into a room made of escalating pain. Its walls are woven of nerve-song and dark, no light to make new shadows out of her desire, just the wanting itself, a strange animal curved back on itself. It plucks sensation out of the pain, out of the empty places, hauls things up out of her core on a flood of salt-scented sky. Dead stars drift up around her chin. His teeth break through into a world of blood.

She simmers, both aroused and tranquil. George climbs over her and his kiss tastes like a pistol barrel sliding against the roof of her mouth.

This is my rifle, this is my gun.

She slides a hand between them, feels the thickness of his hard cock. She inhales the metallic taste of his lips, erasing it with her tongue. He pulses against the tight circle of her fingers.

“I want you in me,” she whispers.

This one’s for shooting, this one’s for fun.

She makes a cradle of her thighs. He moves into her and she is waiting, waiting inside herself, loose inside her mind. He touches her on all sides and the climate in her spine wakes up from a dream of storms. Brimstone brews in her bones. She feels him on her skin like pouring rain that wants to turn monsoon. He lifts himself up onto his forearms and looks down into her face. Light from the bathroom breaks on his face, sliding across his mouth, falling into the space between his collarbones. She breathes him, moves into the heat of his body, the dampness on his skin. He runs his fingers along the inside of her arm, touching blue veins like deep rivers in her wrist. She lifts up her neck. He moves forward, up and over, cresting her, pulling back enough to do it hard this time, like an impact.

Her palms move light across his back, so light he can barely stand it.

He ruts hard, fast, plunging deep like he wants it to be over. He puts his face in her hair. The silence fills with the sound of his exertion. Her pelvis is a tectonic plate. His thrusts push her body up into a mountain range. She turns slippery beneath him, mewling like a wild thing. His jaw clenches, once twice, teeth gleaming into the curve of her neck. When he comes it’s a shipwreck. His momentum cracks up on the shoals of her body and shudders, scrunches up, sounds young. She scoops with her hips and holds on to his shoulders, grinding into him until the first of her slow deep spasms begins and echoes in her breath like a voice of shrieking wind. Each contraction is a wave, rolling over her, dragging her under, pulling her down to the bottom of a red darkness. For a handful of ecstatic seconds she is inside her heart, squeezed in throbbing muscle, tumbled about by its laboring chambers. Her ears drown in the rush of her blood. She gasps and rises up through the sharp edge of her body’s pleasure, bobbing on the last spasms. She moans. The cold enters her sweat. She pants.

He pushes himself off her and lands on his back, one forearm draped over his eyes, his throat clawing for air.

Emily looks at the ceiling. She thinks of the spider in the bathroom and watches her neurons fire off, one by one, into the dark.

I need to get out of here.