Author’s Note:
This chapter includes verbal abuse, threat; fear play, and intimidation.
This is a foreshadow for the size-kink, and vore, you can expect to see in this story.
This is the darker, un-cuddly side. Power struggles, psychological torment, male dominance run rampant within. This may be a trigger for some people. Exercise discretion.
Chapter 10
Wordplay
Heather
Simultaneously:
Heather’s fingers spasmed in fear, sending the wine bottle spinning off the wire rack. It hit the floor.
Exploding.
Plot twist to the plot twist. Chekhov’s rifle goes off.
Heather froze. She looked down at the deep red stain on the floor; it looked like blood. It looked like her mistake: hemorrhaging.
She tried to project calm. She tried to project normal.
She tried to stand perfectly still as though she could purge the taint of what had just happened.
But she felt remiss and heard herself croaking out:
“I’m sorry. I just… I… I wanted some alcohol. You know. To calm the nerves.”
“You were always a klutz,” he muttered.
She couldn’t look at him; she felt rather than saw him across from her. Between the fringe of her lashes she could see his shape: he filled the entrance, he filled the room, he filled it - he filled her - he filled them; completely.
He felt gigantic in presence.
But for all his gigantism, he made a small, annoyed sound. “I’ll take care of it.” He waved at her dismissively.
Heather broke free of her trance and scampered hickory dickory dock back to the living room.
Beatifically: she sat on the couch. Beatifically: she folded her hands. But she scarcely had time to enjoy her respite when a champagne flute materialized before her with a crisp chink.
The wine looked like blood in suspension. Her mistake: congealed.
Fuck.
“For the lady,” he remarked dryly.
He retired across from her, the table interposed between them.
Heather studied him. He looked like a devil in the study: his head tilted, his fingers at his temple, his eyes - at regular intervals - gleaming like an animal’s in the glare of twilight.
Heather touched the pill bottle through her cotton robe. She could feel the weight of it; she could feel the weight of him. And suddenly she felt absurd. How stupid was she to think that the piddly little pill bottle in her fleece robe was the fount of his power?
All of him, every inch, was unnerving. Every shape, every line, even the insouciant lounge of his body was preternatural. This was not a man, this was a sensation bearing a man, an embodiment of primal inertia: something loosely coiled, gliding through their encounter.
She could feel him, the magnetism of him.
And there was, she realized suddenly, a coffee cup in front of him.
It was so wildly, outrageously out of place that Heather blurted: “Coffee?!” She repeated: “Coffee?!” Then, with more color: “You drink fucking coffee?!”
Danny stirred it meditatively. “Ask what you really wanna ask, Heather.”
Heather’s throat knotted up with so much stuff, so much bursting stuff that she could only choke out: "You — " and, taking a deep breath: “You drink coffee.” And there was a poignant tragedy in her voice as her brain backpedaled through a litany of memories. “I-I don’t… I don’t understand.”
“How dare I drink the coffee,” he remarked.
But, she knew - and he knew that she knew - that he understood, and that his stab at obtuseness had been a put-on.
“Yes! How dare you!” She lowed. “All this time… I-I never even gave it a second thought because, hey, why should I, right? But now, now when I think about it - really think about it.” She trailed off, shaking her head. “Do you even taste it? Can you? I-I can’t even, I can’t even think about h-how ass backwards this all is. You gobble up women like some kind of boogeyman, but yet, here you are, chugging down cheap-ass burnt coffee.”
For the moment, there was only a still, expansive silence to settle across them; the wooden stirrer whisking woodenly. It felt, unnervingly, like the metronome of his thoughts.
But then he spoke:
“What you want to know, what you’re really trying to say, what you’re gettin’ up the nerve to ask, is: what do you taste like.”
Heather clapped shut, but he continued: "And, by extension: what do the others taste like. Do they taste like you? Which is just the building blocks to the all-important grand finale, which is - is there a difference between all’a you?”
He leaned back, cupped the coffee, and took a gratuitous swallow. The movement of his Adam’s apple pulled, incipiently, on her.
That could have been me. Heather thought as she watched his throat undulate. She was half terrified, half mesmerized.
“Maybe,” she said in a small, childish voice.
“Cuz what you’re really asking, what you’re really angling at, but don’t have the balls to say, is askin’ if there’s any human left in there - any at all. Wonderin’ if there’s anything floating around in there that’s redeemable. The part that likes coffee.”
“Maybe,” she repeated in a smaller voice.
“You’re not ready for that conversation,” he responded flatly.
“Fuck you,” she croaked. “Telling me what I’m ready for when I - I survived.” She thumped her thumb into her chest. “I fucking survived. I survived you. I… I’ve earned more than that, more than what you’re giving me. I’ve earned some sort of fucking honesty from you. Y-you nearly snorted me up your fucking nose for chrissake.”
He could barely contain his amusement. He shot her an arch look. “Like cocaine?” He returned the cup to the table and resumed swirling the wooden stirrer.
“Speaking of cocaine,” she returned archly, "What you do… what you’ve done: it’s an addiction. Isn’t it. "
The whisking of the wooden stirrer stopped.
“The coffee isn’t for me.” He remarked evenly.
And for a fraction of a second she was bewildered by his deflection; but, then, she understood. “Hunger suppressant?” Heather felt disembodied when she asked this, as though they were talking about someone else and that someone else’s appetite would latch onto that of someone else.
“You have no idea,” he murmured.
“That explains why you leave a trail of coffee cups wherever you go.”
“Speaking of,” he pronounced crisply. “What happened here? I mean, while I 'preciate the gesture, it’s not my color, I don’t think.”
He twisted the coffee cup around until the lipstick marks were visible.
Heather’s heart jumped. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. It made manifest the two realities. It was the suture holding together the two evenings that had — in succession — seen her normal; then seen her small. The impetus for all of this felt like the coffee cup: the one she had pockmarked with her lips.
“I…” she started hesitantly. “It happened when I broke into the warehouse —”
— “Obviously.”
— "I had seen it and… and… "
Heather squirmed at the thought of having to confess. It made her feel silly, it made her feel stupid; and worse: she knew that to extrapolate her reasoning, she’d have to center their conversation on his mouth, and focus them there: together. It felt dangerous.
“I wanted t-to… put in my mouth, something that h-had been… in yours.”
He started.
“Why?”
“To-… I don’t know. It’s silly. But at the time… I was thinking to myself… that… maybe if I did that, if I put something in my mouth that had been in yours, I’d… understand you better…or something. And I left the lipstick on there cuz… you gotta let a motherfucker know, y’know? Heather was here.”
A million - a million and one - expressions went across his face; then, it settled into something arch. “I had no idea you were that interested in my mouth, Heather.”
I’m not. Her brain shot back. I swear to fucking God, I’m not.
To protect her innocence she pushed back: “I’m not dumb, Danny. I know that this is more than just an incident of 'open slot: insert.’ This is… this is way more involved than that.”
His neck jerked.
Undeterred, Heather continued: "Is that why you do what you do? Is your hunger normal? It’s kinda coming together now, with the coffee and everything. Are you some kinda hypervore? Or, is what you f-feel… is it what normal people feel? Is it a craving? Or - or is it a way to get… to-to you know, get, like, a high. Or a hit. Or a rush. Or are you just… feeding? Or… both? "
There was a twitch: faint, right along his upper lip. "Hypervore? Please. I’m all ears.”
But, Heather knew him enough to know – feeling the tone of his voice settle across her – that this was not the time to patronize him.
So, she changed tact. “I’m sorry,” she breathed. “I’m sorry for both of us. I’m sorry for our addictions. I’m sorry for-for… everything. It’s not easy,” she said, with great, exhausted wisdom. “It’s definitely not easy. I thought I had it bad. At least my addiction isn’t tied up in some sorta biological imperative.” (He shot her a look of genuine surprise). “Is-is it a choice? What you do?”
“Yes, and no,” he remarked.
“Well?” Heather urged, leaning forward, willing a response.
“Well what?”
Heather threw her hands up. "Oh for fuckssake, Danny. Just be fucking real with me. I got this far. I survived this long. I survived you -
“Oh, baby girl,” he crooned, cutting across her: “Cut that wokist shit. Goin’ on over there like you’re some sort of survivor. You didn’t survive shit. There’s nothing you’ve said that I haven’t thought about myself at some point. You didn’t survive. No; I let you live.”
“Did you decide that before or after you jumped me?!”
He crossed his arms.
“Exactly,” she hissed. “And this is why we’re here, this is why we’re in this fucking mess. I’ve said it once, I’ve said it twice, and I’m gonna say it again. Can you control it.”
After a beat: “Sometimes.”
“Sometimes what. Sometimes yes? Sometimes no? Sometimes maybe?”
He assailed her with a long, meaningful look. His voice, although flat, held a personal menace that could still wound: “If I feel like it.”
Heather jerked away; she turned away. It was like a slap. In fact, she would have preferred that, welcomed it even. It would have been the type of abuse she could understand.
“So,” she said finally: “You meant” — she licked her lips as a wave of sadness tumbled through her " — you meant to do what you did."
“Maybe.”
“It wasn’t a mistake,” she said hoarsely.
“Maybe not.”
“Oh god,” she mewled. She ran her hands down her arms, hugging herself. “It-it finally makes sense. It…” she choked down a sob. “It… gosh, it sounds right. It finally…” she nodded numbly, “Of course… I-I think I knew. I think I always knew. I just… I mean, how does that happen accidentally.”
“It doesn’t,” He remarked tonelessly.
Heather shook her head yes. She shook it once, twice, again; again, until it became a convulsion. “…right. Of course. I mean,” she laugh-sobbed. “It’s really fucking hard to accidentally eat someone.”
That twitch again: right across his upper lip.
It turns him on when I talk like this.
“So,” she said faintly, desperate to fill the void of silence: “We’re all different, aren’t we? All of-of us?” It felt bizarre, saying us as though she was part and parcel of some sort of bred livestock. “You,” and suddenly she understood, the way only one laboring under active addition could: “You crave it. All of it. Me - us - them - all the-the girls that you’ve… you’ve taken care of.”
Killed. Her brain corrected.
“And me?” She blurted.
“What about you?”
“Y-you crave me?”
He barked a laugh. “Heather,” he started.
“No, really. I… I want to know. I want to know how deep this goes. How bad this is. If it… if it wasn’t a mistake, then that must mean that I’m like… I’m like a fucking pill to you.”
A long, expressive silence. Then:
“Maybe,” he breathed.
Heather felt his words; she felt the arousal. “I must taste crazy good.”
“And crazy mouthfeel.”
Heather assailed him with an alarmed look. “What?” She hadn’t expected him to reply.
“You feel good.”
“You can f-feel me?”
“I feel you. And I feel you. I feel you: your body. Your skin,” his voice had lingered over the s with the sibilance of a snake. “I feel you: moving.” His voice dropped low, and there was a pause as Heather sensed him greatly savoring the moment, savoring the potentiated energy in the room, savoring her discomfort, then shattering it with a simple enervating: “I feel you: in me.”
Heather was nullified. It had never occurred to her that he could extract tactile pleasure from her - or from the others- when they had touched his insides. And he liked it.
Suddenly, the vast conspiracy she had been sharing with her thoughts, of him masturbating his insides against her, no longer felt like an intellectual stretch.
Heather felt reasoning alight upon her. “You feel things differently, don’t you…"
“I’m one large exposed fucking nerve ending. End to end.”
End to end.
Heather flinched. How had he encoded her struggles? As brief as they had been? When she had tossed, when she had turned: had that all caressed his mouth? Did it create a quality of pleasure she couldn’t understand? What was her mouthfeel? Was she creamy and decadent, or smooth and firm? Did she want to know? When she slid over his devil tongue, was that sending a shudder of pleasure through him? (Suddenly, she didn’t want to know).
Heather felt herself sinking. “And you taste things differently…”
She blurted: “do - do we all … have that effect? Do we all… feel the same? taste the same?”
Shit. He was right.
“I think you know the answer to that.”
She played with her fingers. “I think I do.”
Heather nodded faintly, as though from far away, as though she had taken leave of her body. “That’s why you crave me… us… them… it. It’s new every time you do it. It’s exciting each and every single time you do it. And some, y’know, stand out from the rest. Some are special.”
He shifted his weight.
God, he’s so turned on. But if she was honest with herself, perfectly honest, she was enjoying this, too. She was enjoying the power over him to make him squirm.
“So, tell me if I’m getting this right, if I’m getting closer. You accidentally shrunk me, you accidentally jammed me in your mouth, you accidentally ate me — or tried to — because I’m perfectly normal and undesirable, and unremarkable.”
“You’re getting warmer.”
“But, why? Why did you d-do that to me?”
“You don’t want to know,” he said simply.
“But I do. I want to know why you turned on me. Why… you - you did what you did. Because: what you did hurt me, Danny. It hurt me in ways I can’t even understand yet. I can’t hold down a job. I can’t make friends. I can’t…” her voice broke. “You reached through time, Danny. You ruined my future. I don’t have a life direction because of what you did. How someone that loved me could try and murder me. And this - this is why I’m here. Be-because I need to understand it. All of it. I’d rather be with the devil I know, than the one I don’t. But I need to know; I need to understand what I signed up for.”
Heather didn’t dare weigh her words, she didn’t dare analyze what she had just said. Had she already abandoned the cache in the woods? Was she already being drawn back into his world? But this time: different?
Heather watched him study the coffee cup, the way the light hit his face. But he seemed to relent; he seemed to give. “I couldn’t give you what you wanted.”
Heather looked at him, stunned. “What?”
“I couldn’t commit. Not in the way you wanted. Not after what happened.”
"Don’t! Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare put this on me! Don’t -
And the elegant inelegance of what he said next stopped her, because her more base animal mind understood it as it was said.
“We had an expiration date.”
Heather shook her head sadly.
“I couldn’t have you,” he said breathily, “Not the way I wanted. Not the way I needed.”
“Like what?” She strained.
And after a long moment of, seemingly, feeling herself stutter, feeling herself fall, feeling herself reduce down to a single concentrated nerve as she heard him invert her words, bending them back against her:
“Like a pill.”
In the literal sense, her brain buzzed. He means it in the literal sense. I was his addiction. He wanted to palm me, and dry-swallow me.
Heather couldn’t stop herself: “But why?”
“If I couldn’t have you,” he responded thickly: “Then nobody would.”
Heather took a big, deep breath. “Th-that’s psycho, Danny.” She felt herself crawl backwards, instinctively, away from the threat. “You have to hear that. You have to hear yourself. Even you have to hear how fucking serial killer that sounds. And that’s… crazy. That’s so fucking crazy I can’t even. And I promised myself I would never get involved in that kind of crazy.” She shook her head. “But that’s how you wanted to send me off? That’s how you decided to end things with me?!”
He shifted his weight back.
His voice was lower; it was like honey over knives. “Why not?” He gave her a slow, interested look. He leaned forward; it was the only kinetic movement of that evening beyond that of stirring the coffee and Heather flinched. “Why not take it to the limit? I mean, you’re so fucking normal, undesirable, and unremarkable that I might as well try to go to the extreme I had always - always - fucking wanted. The kind of extreme I couldn’t act on when we were an item cuz it would have absolutely fucking mutilated you. Right?!”
Heather froze.
“That’s why you think you’re cute,” he sneered. “You think you’ve figured this all out. You think you can sit there and fifty shades your way out of this.”
“Fifty what,” she blurted. (And she knew not what was worse: that that was the subject matter she landed on, or, that he had confessed to a latent, ever-growing desire to mutilate her). “You read Fifty fucking Shades?”
Heather smothered her face; she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Y-you read mommy porn? You read bored housewife Karen can I speak to the manager porn?”
Grappling to regain control of the conversation (and not without trying to suppress a laugh): “To become an educated hater, dammit.”
Heather seized the moment: “Look at us. We’re actually cracking jokes. We’re getting along. Work with me here. There has to be boundaries for something like this, Danny, there has to be.”
“No,” he snarled. And they both looked surprised at his response. “There isn’t. There isn’t any fucking ground rules to this.”
“There has to,” she strained. "This is… really, really extreme. It’s fatalistic. And it’s bizarre, and —
“No. There’s nothing bizarre about any of this. It’s the most normal fucking thing on the planet.”
“Eating me?!” She shrieked. "There is nothing normal about —
“It’s been happening for thousands and thousands of years. Predator eating prey, sweetheart. It’s the most normal thing. It’s the most normal thing ever.”
“Not your version,” she shot back.
“Why not?” He replied, challengingly.
“Be-because…” Heather went blank. “Fuck. You know why. It - it… I mean come on you’re murdering people.”
“That kinda tends to happen when you devour them,” he said perfectly calm, perfectly reasonable.
“No shit sherlock!” She flung a pillow at him; he ducked.
“But-but it’s cruel… it’s evil… it’s… really, really bad, Danny. It… you’re torturing people.”
He licked his lips; it was not a gesture of nervousness. “Oh, I know. Trust me,” he looked at her sidelong. “I know.”
With sudden, jolting cognition: "You –
“Enjoy it?” He finished for her.
Heather closed her eyes. This was a dimension of the practice they hadn’t talked about before, had not dared invoke, and now it was rearing its ugly head. Her heart started pounding. "I could maybe – maybe – understand if you ate them quickly, humanely; but you - you enjoy the process, you actually enjoy hurting them —
He laughed. “Humanely? Humanely? Oh, hunny, there’s nothing fucking humane about any of this. It’s not supposed to be,” he sneered. “Get those images of vampires and werewolves out of your head. This isn’t about love-bites or neck-rubs; this is the real world, now. This isn’t a game. You know what your problem is? You make a romance out of all’a this. But, I got news for you, sweetheart: there is nothing romantic about being devoured fucking alive.” He eyes glittered at her. “Unless, I decide otherwise.”
“That’s torture,” she strained in a small, childish voice. “You’re torturing people; women. You’re making their last moments an absolute living hell.”
“Well fed demons are better behaved than famished saints, kitten.”
It was the first time kitten felt less like an endearment, and more like a species taxonomy. And she was suddenly aware of this, feeling his eyes prick her; feeling like a woodland animal.
Her instinct shined at her, warned her not to lapse into silence, or small movements. Her instinct told her to talk; to keep talking, talk more; keep him conversationally engaged – because they had crossed a threshold that they could not uncross. And that it should not be done in reflective silence.
“Are you really that? Are you really a demon?”
“I ain’t exactly human, Heather.”
“H-how so?” She asked.
“You’re not human when you can master what I have mastered. And I’ve been around for more than a minute.”
There’s age, she realized. There’s great age here.
“But… that doesn’t make you a demon, does it?”
He made a long, languid movement: a shrug. “Then, well, make me the God of gluttony.”
Heather stared at him in disbelief. "So… shrinking people. You have the magic to do that; the gift —
“Women,” he corrected nastily. “I only shrink and eat women.”
“Why,” she exhaled frustratingly. "Why do you always have to remind me of that —
“Oh, it’s important that you’re reminded, Heather. I think it’s very fucking important.”
“What do you want,” she hissed between her teeth.
“To have you, kitten. To have you real fucking deep.”
Her brain jolted as she tried to understand the spatial contours of that comment. Her tongue creaked. Her mouth slacked open. Incapable of producing sensible sounds from it, she occupied it with a thick, nervous swallow of wine. Clutched by an infantile instinct, she hoped to hide behind the curved rim of the glass like a toddler learning object permanence and drank down half of it.
There was a flicker of interest across his face. He looked sidelong at her.
And in a sudden, staggering jolt of clarity: “Danny,” she entreated.
He looked at her.
“Wh-… what did you put in my drink.”
“You see,” he said in a low, intimate voice. “Mirroring. Something about it is just hardwired in you humans. I offer the drink to be polite; you accept it to be polite. I don’t talk about it, acknowledge it, eventually you’re just gonna absorb the knowledge of it. The trick is to just not talk about it. If you’re overly pushy it’s too obvious. I drink all night long. You don’t. You feel out of sorts. Eventually, if I play my cards right, you’re gonna get lulled into drinking something, too.”
“You fucking Dahmer’d me?!” She shrieked.
What," he responded cavalierly, “You mean I drugged you so that I can kill you, fuck you, and eat you? Dude had it all backwards.” He tilted his head in a refreshingly familiar, but feral gesture. “What’s the point of eating something dead?”
Heather stared at him; lost.
“Tell me about those ground rules, again,” he mocked.
“You’re just trying to scare me,” she dry-whispered. “You’re just trying to push me away.” She shook her head. “What’d you put in my drink.”
“Relax,” he responded. “It was just a mild sedative.”
“Never,” she lowed, “In the history of telling someone to relax have they EVER fucking relaxed. WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU PUT IN MY DRINK?”
“I don’t need to drug you to do what I want with you. I just wanted something to take your edge off.”
“I don’t want to be drugged?!”
“Not like you’ve ever had a problem with that,” he remarked snidely.
“Fuck you! Not like this! Not like this ! This — this is what I meant by ground rules. No fucking ancillaries! No pills! No drugs! No date-rape shit. No… oh god my head,” she groaned. “This isn’t how you get consent from me,” she growled. “It’s supposed to be organic; you don’t fucking manufacture it.”
“I told you,” he said coldly. “I don’t need your consent.”
“Earn it,” she shrieked.
“I said I would. And I will. And I meant it — at the time,” he amended, but after a clever second. “But, fuck it, Heather baby, I’m impatient. So, I thought: let’s get things goin’ a little bit faster. Let’s get you nice and relaxed so we can try a few things.”
“Like what,” she shot back.
“Taste you.”
“You don’t need to fucking drug me to taste me, Danny, why — " Heather looked at him. Her eyes went wide.
" — oh.”
“What I want to do; what I have in mind, I need you sedated, Kitten. I can’t have you hurting yourself.”
“Not like that’s ever stopped you,” she said churlishly.
“Touché,” he replied.
But that seemed to have been a cue; he started to move across the room toward her.
Heather whimpered. She shook her head. “I’m not. I can’t,” she strained, holding up a hand in feeble placation.
“Relax.”
“Don’t,” she swiped at him; he dodged half-heartedly.
“Fine, don’t relax then. But at least listen,” he blew out a gusty sigh. “You’re not wrong. I hate to say this, but we do need to set some limits.”
She looked at him, exasperated. “Oh sure. Now that you agree, you get to pretend that it was your idea…”
He blew out a frustrated sound. “You’re not getting it. You’re not understanding.”
“WHAT THE FUCK IS THERE TO UNDERSTAND?! YOU DRUGGED ME TO EAT ME.”
He rolled his eyes. “There’s levels to this, Heather.”
“Levels?” She repeated, dumbfounded.
“This is new to me, too, doing it like this. We need to go slow.”
“You sure as fuck didn’t go slow last time.”
“Last time was different. Just how this time is different. I don’t want you hurtin’ yourself,” (and after a moment of what Heather would call expressive silence) “… or-or me hurting you in the wrong ways, so I gave you a little something to calm yo’ ass down.”
“Hurt myself? You literally want to fucking eat me.”
“Listen,” he snapped. “We’re not going to jump straight into this shit. It takes time. It took me decades to get to this level of skill. To get it all perfect. So now, I have to get this right, I have to perfect this, too.”
“Perfect what?!”
Your size," he remarked coyly. “And my technique. We practice until we get,” (and here, Heather watched him as he savored the potentiated energy in the room with the tongue-flick of a snake) the perfect insertion."
“Insertion?” She repeated dumbly. But she knew.
“There’s a lot of holes I want you in,” he murmured.
Heather spat at him. “Like the women you killed?!”
“Semantics,” he sneered.
Heather sat with his words; his words sat with her. And, like him, they roused, becoming pack animals: gathering around her, pacing.
“You don’t care. You just don’t… fuck,” she trailed off. “I can’t even shame you into caring. You’re so fucking selfish. And heartless. You’re absolutely heartless.”
“I care about you,” he said sharply.
And Heather was unsure whose twin surprise was more in that moment.
She closed her eyes. “Please, don’t,” she grit. “Don’t say ridiculous things like that when you…”
“You’re not gonna go far. Not right away, anyway. We start up high; safe.”
“Up high?” Heather stared at him.
“— Me.”
That simple additional syllable was like taking a stick to a hornet’s nest; bashing it open. Like her brain.
Heather’s eyes jerked to him, and understanding him only as a mad woman could, sent her gaze to where his head joined his neck. She froze on his Adam’s apple — and uncontrollably slid her gaze lower, following the contours of his throat. And in his face, absorbing her, he reflected her madness back.
“Yes.”
Heather felt the pounding animal, the cryptid in him. It was staring at her with twin pale eyes. The animalistic urge, so tangibly coiled in that guttural response, was already feeding on her.
She couldn’t speak.
So, he did. “No. It doesn’t end there.”
“…alive?” Was all she managed to rasp out.
“You have to ask?”
Off her look: “But don’t worry. I kinda like the novelty of this, this whole new way of doin’ things. Going slow. Going careful. I never had to actually be careful before. When I… negotiate you deeper, we gotta go little by little. Inch by inch.”
She mustered a soft, warbling: “Endoscopy. You want to fucking endoscopy me.” She hugged her knees to herself as her memories unraveled, conjuring images of mouths, throats and stomachs reflecting off of endoscope lenses in taut trembling frames over her video library. Like the eponymous device, would she, too, slither into the creaking crevices of his body?
He stared at her: absorbed her.
Heather could feel the moment - the precise moment - he understood.
“… oh fuck.” He passed a hand over his face; his mouth. He turned his head, rapidly. “Fuck, Heather. Fuck.”
The conversation was too centered on his body now – stripping away both of their identities to the point that all that remained was the logistical mechanism of her existence being callously pulled into his, that she could not hope to repair the moment. It was gone.
So she did the sane thing, and made it worse: "… how deep.”
His face swiveled to stare at her.
Suiciding herself: “Did I fucking stutter? How deep?”
“My guts.” He snarled.
Heather retched into her hands.
“I told you,” he said viciously. “I told you - you weren’t ready for that conversation.”
Heather shot forward; grabbed the glass.
Danny watched.
And in an unbroken, flagrant movement – first lifting the glass in spiteful salutation – she slammed back her head and downed the contents of it.
She wiped her red-stained mouth, looking like the she-demon.
“Heather?!” He squawked. "What the fuck! —
“Fuck you,” she said coldly.
She drifted backward; he surged forward.
“Heather, what the fuck?!”
She smiled blood-stained lips at him; loving how he dissolved into a stuttering of angry, nonsensical sounds.
She dissolved into laughter. “It’s a power move: assert dominance. Feed yourself to the monster before the monster can feed on you. Go ahead, you sick sonofabitch: eat me.”
Danny surged to his knees, clambering to crouch next to her head. “Is that what you want?!”
He spoke in a tone she couldn’t quite place – it was wild, unhinged, and sliding all over the octave scale – and if she was honest with herself – perfectly honest – she didn’t want to.
“Go ahead,” she said as she spread her arms drunkenly. And with the mania of someone under heavy intoxication: “Go ahead, you sick fuck, eat me. Do it. I’m nice and drugged for you. Like a lamb to fucking slaughter. Open your bullshit-spewing mouth and slurp me up.”
Silence pounded between them.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
“No.”
Heather’s eyes rolled up. They looked at him in near-convulsive spasm. “What?”
“No.”
“EAT ME,” she shrieked, like a ghoul, eyeballs bulging.
“No.”
“Do it. Eat me. Stuff me in your guts. Do it. I don’t care. Eat me. One bite. Do it.” A vein jumped out in her neck. “EAT ME.”
“No.”
“EAT ME.”
“I told you” — he leaned in and cupped her cheek — “I’d get your consent.”
She jerked her neck away. "Then, eat me.” Her face pulled taut, like a mask. “Eat me.” She closed her eyes against the feel of his fingers. She felt him. The magnetism of him. The heat of him. It felt like she was already in his bloodstream. “It works with touch. Make me small.”
“Oh I will,” he breathed.
He shifted —
Heather froze, trapped in the intimacy of his breath, his closeness —
please
— but suddenly absent his heat, her eyes snapped open.
And his voice advanced toward her, but it was from further away and she startled at the spatial change. Heather’s head snapped up. His response was attendant on his shadow, which had already melted across the room, receding, but not before tossing a cold and controlled:
“But, not tonight. I don’t do your bidding.”
