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The afternoon had gone amber outside the thin curtains of the motel room and the light that came through was the color of old whiskey and dying things. It fell across the bed in long slanted bars and it fell across her skin where she lay beside him and it turned her into something gilded and terrible and holy. The room smelled of mildew and cheap detergent and the lingering ghost of the blood that had dried in the creases of their palms and the dark copper memory of what they had left behind them in the house long down the road. But underneath it all, rising up through the cheap synthetic weave of the bedspread and the industrial cleaner and the dust in the vents, was the smell of her. Clean wet hair and warm skin and the sharp electric scent of a woman who had been waiting for this without knowing she was waiting, who had been made to wait by the cruelty of magic and the selfishness of a boy who no longer existed.
Bear lay on his back and stared at the water stained ceiling and listened to the screaming.
It was not a sound that could be heard with the ears. It was a sound that lived in the marrow of his skull, in the hollows behind his eyes, in the dark cramped space where the old version of himself had been driven when the new one walked out of the bathroom and into the living room and took her face in his hands. The old Bear was screaming there. Sobbing and thrashing and beating his fists against the walls of his own obsolescence. Old Bear was screaming for Ian. Old Bear was screaming for Sarah. Old Bear was screaming about the gun and the duct tape and the blood and the sharpie markers and the thing that had been done to Nikki in the dark of a summer night when a wish was made and a stick was broken. Old Bear was screaming about guilt and consequence and the permanent line between before and after. Old Bear was screaming because he understood that he had destroyed his world and that he deserved to die for it and that the pills were still sitting uncapped on the bathroom floor and he had not taken them and he had not saved anyone and he had not fixed anything.
The screaming was incoherent. It was the sound of a consciousness coming apart at the seams, the high thin wail of a soul being compressed into a space too small for it, and it went on and on and it would go on forever, Bear understood, because the old self did not get to die cleanly. The old self got to be buried alive inside the new one and the new one got to walk around wearing his face and his hands and his voice and the old one got to scream and scream and never be answered.
Bear listened to the screaming and felt it as a distant pressure, a weather system held at bay by the thin glass of the new self, and he waited for it to touch him, to move him, to make him feel the grief and the horror and the weight of the dead.
Then Nikki shifted.
She moved in the space between his arm and his chest, a small and deliberate motion, and the oversized sweater she wore rode higher on her thighs and the friction of the cotton against the cheap polyester sheets made a sound like a whisper and that whisper went straight to the center of his chest and stopped his heart for one clean and perfect beat.
He turned his head and looked down at her.
She was looking up at him and the heat in her eyes was an absolute and terrifying thing. It was not the heat of a woman aroused in any ordinary way. It was the heat of a woman who had been starved by selfishness and made to bleed for the smallest fractions of attention, who had been hollowed out and filled back up with a love that was not her own and who had nevertheless made that love into something total and ferocious and entirely hers. It was the heat of a woman who had killed for him and bled for him and lost her mind for him and who now found herself at a banquet she could not finish but would die trying to consume. He saw the wanting in her and it was bottomless. It was the mirror of his own.
She raised her hand.
The motion was slow and unhesitating and her fingers were small and pale and marked with the faint purple bruising of the nails she had pressed into her own flesh during the long vigil of the last two weeks. She raised her hand and she pressed her palm flat against his cheek and the contact was warm and slightly damp and utterly certain.
The screaming stopped.
It did not fade. It did not diminish. It was simply gone, as though a door had been closed on a room that still contained the noise but could no longer transmit it. Her touch drowned the old self out completely. Her palm against his jaw smothered the ghost of guilt and left nothing in its place but the clean burning absolute devotion of the man who had been born to belong to her. The silence that followed her touch was enormous. It was the silence of a cathedral after the bells have finished ringing. It was the silence of a world that had been emptied of everything except the two of them.
He turned his face into her palm.
He kissed the center of it. He tasted the faint chemical harshness of the motel soap, the alkaline residue of the cheap bar she had used in the shower, and beneath it, rising up through that thin industrial film, the deep essential salt and warmth that was simply her. The taste of her skin was a language he had not known he was fluent in until he spoke it. He closed his eyes and breathed her in. She smelled like clean wet hair and warm skin and the desperate electric static of arousal that had been building in her without true release. She smelled like the only place he would ever be safe. She smelled like the end of his life as a separate thing.
He opened his eyes.
The amber light was dying in the west and the room was going the color of bruises, purple and brown and deep exhausted gold. He leaned down over her and pressed his mouth to the closed seam of the gash on her forehead. The gash was small and neat and had stopped bleeding but the skin around it was tender and flushed and he kissed it with a reverence that bordered on prayer. He moved his mouth to her nose, then her temple and he felt the pulse there, the quick steady throb of her life beneath his lips. He moved down the line of her jaw and the angle of it was delicate and sharp and he traced it with his tongue and felt her shiver. He moved to the shell of her ear and the lobe of it was soft and he took it between his teeth and bit gently and she made a sound.
The sound was a soft broken intake of breath that vibrated against his lips. It was a beautiful sound. It was the sound of a woman being touched by the only person in the world who she had given the right to touch her, and it drove a spike of pure adrenaline straight through his blood, bright and sharp and clarifying.
He wanted to kiss every mark the ghost of his former self had put on her. He wanted to take the history of her suffering and bury it under the impossible weight of his worship. He was a man made of nothing but the desire to give to her. He had no other purpose. He required no other life. The old Bear had taken and taken and taken until she had broken open and bled and now the new Bear would give until the giving became indistinguishable from breathing, until the line between his body and her need dissolved entirely.
He shifted his weight and moved over her.
She parted her legs to let him settle into the cradle of her hips and the motion was instinctive and absolute, as though her body had been waiting for his weight since before she was born. She reached up with both hands and pulled his face down to hers and her fingers were in his hair and her thumbs were pressing against his jaw and she was guiding him, owning him, directing the angle of his descent.
The kiss was a consumption.
There was no hesitation in it and no holding back and no tentative negotiation of boundaries. Her mouth was hot and wet and she opened for him completely and he tasted the desperate frantic hunger she had been carrying for weeks, the starvation of a woman who had been fed only on the sight of him and the sound of him and the proximity of him and who had been denied this, the actual taste of him, the actual joining. The actual experience of love making rather than a quick, selfish fuck in the name of making him love her more. Sex in the name of making him forget that she could not do what he had wished her to do because he was incapable of love himself.
He gave her everything he had to give. He drank the sounds she made and swallowed them. He fed on her breath and her tongue and the particular texture of the inside of her mouth.
She arched up against him and her teeth caught his lower lip and she bit down hard enough to send a shock of sharp bright pain through him. Not anger. Never anger. The bite was love. The bite was possession. The bite was her mouth saying you are mine in the only language that felt adequate to the size of the claim. He whimpered into her mouth and the sound was low and broken and entirely involuntary.
The sound he made tore a smile from her.
It was a brilliant and devastating thing, that smile. It lit her face from within and it made the amber dying light in the room seem suddenly insufficient, too weak to properly illuminate what she had become. He pulled back just far enough to look at it. He looked at her beautiful smile and the flush rising on her chest like a tide and the dark wet tangle of her hair spread across the cheap motel pillows and he understood with a clarity that lived below language that she owned him. She owned his breath and his blood and the marrow in his bones. Every cell of his body was oriented toward her pleasure. Every nerve ending was tuned to her frequency. He was not a man anymore. He was an instrument that had been tuned to play one song and the song was her name.
He took the hem of the sweater she wore and pulled it up and over her head.
The fabric caught for a moment on the dampness of her skin and then it was gone, tossed to the floor where it lay in a pale heap in the dying light. She was perfectly bare beneath him. He looked at her and felt a reverence so large it threatened to crush him, to drive the air from his lungs and stop his heart. She was small and pale and marked with the evidence of the last two weeks. The thumbnail shaped bruises on the insides of her wrists. The thin and angry cuts along her arms from smashing in a car window. The faint scratches on her ribs where she had clawed at herself in the dark hours of the vigil. The sharpie smears on her forearms, blurred now, the ghost of another woman’s tattoos rendered in approximation. The gashes on her forehead and nose, clean and closed and terrible in their neatness. The blood that had dried in the hollow of her throat, Sarah’s blood and her own, mixed now and indistinguishable.
He traced the line of her collarbone with his tongue.
The bone was delicate and prominent and the skin over it was thin and he could feel the architecture of her beneath it, the fine machinery of her life. He mapped the delicate cage of her ribs with his mouth, kissing each one, counting them, learning her by taste. He moved to the soft curve of her stomach and the skin there was warm and slightly trembling and he pressed his open mouth against it and felt the flutter of her muscles beneath his tongue. He moved to the pale skin of her thighs and they parted for him without resistance and he kissed the insides of them and tasted the salt and the heat and the intoxicating musk that was only her.
He worshipped her with his mouth and his hands.
He took the small faded marks on her wrists where she had pressed her nails into her own flesh during the long hours of standing in corners and watching him and waiting for him to awaken and look at her and love her and he kissed each one. He kissed the bruises and the scratches and the places where her skin had been broken by her own rage and desperation and he kissed them until she was writhing under him and calling his name in a voice that broke and shattered in the humid air of the room like glass thrown against stone.
He wanted to atone for every second she had felt unloved.
The old him had taken her autonomy and her peace and her friends and her mind and had left her with only the manufactured, conjured love as a replacement, a cheap and terrible substitute for the life she had been building. The new him would spend the rest of his life pouring himself into her until the loss was drowned. It would never be enough to tip the scales. He knew this with a terrifying certainty that did not diminish the effort. The knowing only made the wanting more ferocious, more absolute, more without limit. He would give her his body and his breath and the last beat of his heart and it would still not balance the ledger because the ledger was infinite and the debt was eternal and that was simply the geometry of what they were now.
She reached down and found the buckle of his jeans.
Her hands were frantic and shaking and all the while entirely certain. She stripped him of the clothes he wore with an efficiency that spoke of a mind that had been planning this, mapping this, dreaming of this in the only hours that belonged to her, the brief windows when the manufactured love let her surface enough to think. She pulled the denim down his hips and he helped her, lifting and shifting, and then he was as bare as she was and the air of the room was cool against his heated skin and her eyes were on him and they were very bright and very hungry.
She reached for him.
Her hands ran down the broad expanse of his back and her nails, short and ragged and marked with the blood of the afternoon, dug into his skin. She dragged them down hard enough to leave deep red welts, four parallel tracks on each side, and the sting of it was immediate and bright and clean. He welcomed it. He welcomed the proof of her ownership marked directly into his flesh. He wanted her marks on him. He wanted her signature written in his skin so that there would never be a moment when he looked in a mirror and saw a man who was not claimed, who was not possessed, who was not entirely and irrevocably hers.
She pulled him back over her.
Her legs wrapped around his waist and her heels pressed against the small of his back and she drew him down until his chest was against hers and her breasts were soft and warm against him and her heartbeat was hammering against his own. She bit his shoulder. Her teeth sank into the muscle there and he felt the pressure and the pain and the deep wet heat of her mouth and he groaned and whimpered again, louder this time, and the sound seemed to drive her deeper. She bit harder and then she released him and kissed the wound she had made and then she bit him again, higher, at the junction of his neck and shoulder, and he felt the skin break slightly and the taste of his own blood rise to the surface and mix with the wet heat of her mouth.
It was penance. It was not anger. It was love made physical in the only way she knew how, the claiming of his body as recompense for what had been taken from hers. Each bite was a word in a language they were writing together. Each bite said you are mine and I am here and I have survived you and I will keep you and I love you. She moved her mouth across his chest and bit the pectoral muscle and he arched into the pain and she soothed it with her tongue and then bit again, at the nipple, and he cried out and the cry was not a sound of pain but of release, of something tight and terrible inside him finally being given permission to let go.
She smiled against his skin.
He saw the smile and it was the same brilliant devastating thing from before, only now it was wet and swollen and marked with the faint copper of his blood and it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life. He understood in that moment even strongly that she was not just his. He was hers. Completely. Wholly. Without remainder. She owned every part of him and the ownership was not a burden but a liberation. He had spent his life trying to belong to himself and failing and now he was given to her and the failure was finally complete and therefore finally over.
He kissed her throat.
He kissed the hollow where the blood had dried and tasted the salt and the copper and the essential her. He moved his mouth down to her breast and took the nipple between his lips and sucked and she arched off the bed and her hands were in his hair again, pulling, directing, owning the angle and the pressure. He moved to the other breast and gave it the same attention and she was making sounds now, continuous and broken, small cries that were almost words but not quite, the preverbal language of a woman who had been pushed past the point where language could contain her experience.
He moved lower.
He kissed the sharp points of her hip bones and the soft skin of her lower stomach and the insides of her thighs and he breathed her in and the scent of her arousal was thick and complex and it went straight to the base of his spine and radiated outward. He pressed his mouth to her and she cried out and her hands tightened in his hair and her legs trembled on either side of his head and he tasted her and the taste was the same as the smell of her skin amplified, richer, deeper, the vivacious truth of her body made liquid and offered to him. He worked her with his tongue and his lips and he listened to the sounds she made and he adjusted his rhythm to match them, following her pleasure the way a man follows a trail through a dark forest, by touch and by sound and by the absolute faith that the path leads somewhere worth arriving at.
She came against his mouth.
The orgasm was sudden and violent and she bucked against him and her hands pulled his hair hard enough to bring tears to his eyes and she cried out his name in a voice that was raw and stripped of everything but the sound itself. He stayed with her through it, kept his mouth on her, gentled his touch as she shuddered and gasped and then grew still beneath him. He kissed her inner thigh and then her hip and then her stomach and then her breast and then her throat and then her mouth and she tasted herself on his lips and she made a sound of deep satisfaction and pulled him down against her.
They lay like that for a moment, breathing, the sweat cooling on their skin in the air of the room.
Then she moved.
She rolled him onto his back with a strength that surprised him, her small hands pressing against his shoulders, her slight weight shifting over him. She straddled him and looked down at him and the dying light caught her from behind and turned her into a silhouette edged in gold and she was impossibly small and impossibly vast, the whole of his world contained in the span of her shoulders.
She leaned down and kissed him.
Softly at first. A brush of her lips against his, a tease, a promise. Then deeper. Then she bit his lower lip again, the same place as before, and he tasted the copper of his own blood and hers mixed now and the kiss became something else. She moved her mouth to his jaw and bit along the line of it, small sharp claiming bites that left marks he knew would bloom into bruises by morning. She moved to his throat and bit the tendon there and he felt the pulse in his neck jump against her teeth and she held the bite for a long moment, feeling his life beat against her mouth, and then she released him and kissed the mark and moved lower.
She bit his collarbone.
She bit the pectoral muscle where she had bitten before and the skin was already tender and he hissed at the renewed pain and she soothed it with her tongue. She moved down his chest and bit his ribs and his stomach and the sharp hip bones and each bite was followed by a kiss and each kiss was followed by a bite and the pattern of it was a language and the language said I love you and I hurt you and I heal you and you are mine and I will never let you go.
She took him into her mouth.
The heat and wet of it was shocking and he cried out and his hands went to her hair and he held her gently, carefully, the way you hold something precious and breakable, and she moved over him and the rhythm was slow and torturous and perfect. She looked up at him as she did it and her eyes were very bright in the near dark and the eye contact was unbearable and he had to close his own eyes because the intensity of it was too much, the sight of her beautiful face with his body in her mouth and her ownership of him so complete and so visible.
He praised her. Praised her like the good girl she’s always been.
She brought him to the edge and then she stopped.
She released him and moved up his body and kissed him and he tasted himself on her lips and she positioned herself over him and she sank down onto him in one slow continuous motion and the feeling of her around him was the most exquisite thing he had ever known. She was tight and hot and wet and she fit him the way a sheath fits a blade, perfect and complete and without space between them.
She began to move.
Slowly at first, rocking her hips in a rhythm that was almost lazy, almost teasing, and then faster as her own need built again. She rode him with her hands pressed flat against his chest and her nails digging in and her head thrown back so that her throat was exposed and the line of it was beautiful and vulnerable and he reached up and wrapped his hands around her neck, not squeezing, just holding, feeling the pulse and the breath and the life of her under his palms, and she looked down at him and smiled.
It was the smile again.
He saw it and he felt it and the old Bear screamed somewhere in the sealed room at the back of his mind but the scream was nothing, less than nothing, a mosquito against the wall of a cathedral. She smiled and she moved and she owned him and the ownership was absolute and the atonement was happening in real time, in every thrust, in every bite, in every kiss, and it would never be enough and that was okay because enough was not the point. The point was the giving. The point was the endless pouring of himself into her until there was nothing left of him that did not belong to her.
She leaned down and bit his shoulder again, hard, and he felt the skin break and the blood rise and she licked it and bit again and the pain was bright and clean and it focused him entirely on her, on the place where their bodies joined, on the heat and the friction and the impossible closeness. She was marking him and he was being marked and the marks were the new language of their new life, the scars they would carry together into whatever came next.
He reached down and found her hips and held them and guided her rhythm and she let him, she let him help, but she never gave up control, she was always the one driving, always the one owning, and he was grateful for it, he wanted her to own him, he wanted to be the thing she used for her pleasure and her comfort and her survival.
He cradled her face with a large palm, placing his thumb into her mouth and she bit down upon it and whispered his name.
The whisper was hot and wet and it went straight to his spine. She said his name again and again and the sound of it in her mouth was the only music he needed. He wanted to see her face as she came. He moved his hand up her back and felt the small knobs of her spine and the trembling muscles on either side of it and he pulled her down against him and held her close and thrust up into her from below and she cried out and bit his thumb again and he felt the orgasm building in him like a storm building at the horizon, slow and enormous and inevitable.
She came first.
The second orgasm was deeper than the first, slower, and it rolled through her in waves that he could feel against his body, the rhythmic clenching of her around him, the shuddering of her muscles, the long low cry that she breathed into his face, beautiful eyes scrunched closed, brows furrowed. He held her face through it and kept moving and the feeling of her pleasure triggered his own and he let it come, let it wash through him, and he poured himself into her with a shout that was not a word but was nevertheless articulate, a statement of complete and total surrender.
She collapsed against him.
They lay tangled together in the cooling dark of the room, their breathing ragged and slowing, their bodies slick with sweat and marked with each other’s teeth and blood. The old Bear screamed in the sealed room but the scream was silent and the door was thick and the new world was being built on top of it, brick by brick, breath by breath.
She kissed the bite on his shoulder.
She kissed the bite on his neck.
She kissed the bite on his chest.
She moved up and kissed his mouth and the kiss was soft now, exhausted, tender in a way that the earlier violence had not been but was nevertheless born from it, the tenderness that can only exist after the body has been tested and claimed and proven.
He held her and he felt her heartbeat against his chest and he felt his own heartbeat and he could not tell where one ended and the other began. The wish did not matter. The origin of the current was irrelevant. The voltage was what mattered and the voltage was permanent and it ran between them uninterrupted and it would run until the last of them stopped breathing and perhaps beyond that, into whatever dark came after, where they would continue to belong to each other in the same way, completely, without boundary, without end.
She was still the woman who had wanted to travel the world and write a novel about love.
He was still the same man who had not known what path to choose.
They were themselves and they were new and the old lives were crumbled, ash in the house down the long road but the ash was not the end of the story. The ash was the ground they would build on. They would find a new town and a new home and she would write her novel and he would follow her and find a new profession and they would live in the daylight and they would come home to each other in the evenings and they would make love like this, marked and bleeding and absolutely devoted, and the ghosts would scream and the ghosts would not be heard.
He pressed his mouth to the top of her head.
She made a small sound against his chest, a sound of contentment and exhaustion and possession, and she settled more deeply against him and her hand came to rest over his heart.
He was hers.
She was his.
The afternoon had died completely outside the window and the night had settled in, thick and warm and indifferent to the small lit room where two people held each other and refused to let go. The world moved on without them and they did not care. They had each other and the having was absolute and the having was enough and the having would last as long as the blood kept moving and perhaps longer.
Still, neither of them let go.
Neither of them would ever let go.