I’m feverish and mad, seeing two scenes at once, two versions of him above me, one brimming with love while the other…stalks from the shadows. My ghost comes into focus, a golden light emanating from within, while his shadow—his double—swells with darkness and hunger. The two images bleed into one another until I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
The two men fuck me as though they could be resurrected in sin.
“You’ve got us both, now, my lucky little fox,”my dream-husband slurs.
I remember drowning in the dream. I’m drowning now, in his arms, in this pleasure that reaps me against logic, every invasion of his cock like a scythe cutting me in two.
“Fuck. You’re the heaven I never knew,” E says huskily, oblivious to my fever dream.
“Look at him,”my dream-husband murmurs. “Poor fool, still pretending he’s gentle. Still pretending he doesn’t ruin everything he loves. Too lost to notice he invited me in himself. All that light, all that hope. Disgusting.”
A longahhtears out of me, the size of him crashing through my entire body. A blinding orgasm explodes from that space between my legs with such violence, I stop breathing altogether.
And then I see it.
The dark sky behind the stars. That vast, inky nothingness beyond the light.
Spiraling.
And spiraling.
E’s shadow holds me under the surface of that wide, endless dark.
“Tell me, little fox, does he fuck you the way I do? Does he still ask for permission and hold you till morning? Ask him what he dreams about. Ask him what makes his chest ache for no reason. Deep down, he knows he’s not good enough.”
“Who are you?”I ask, my lips unmoving, this ocean of black buried deep in the cracks of my mind.
“I am every promise he failed to keep and every sin he committed. Every bridge he burned. Every heart he broke. I am the grief he couldn’t survive, and the awful choices he justified. The monster he became one compromise at a time.”His voice lowers beyond loathing, beyond hate.“I am every part of him that he buried, and I find him lacking.”
The hand of my dream-husband closes around my throat.
“Bad news,”he murmurs.“I’m the one who gets you in the end, Max.”
His thumb tilts my chin higher.“Because you’re far too curious to ever give up on meeting me. And he’ll get curious, too. About the man haunting your dreams and satisfying your darkest fantasies. He’ll want answers and grow jealous.”A humorless smile curves his mouth. “Angry.”
I want to find my way back to the light, but my dream-husband is a black hole, and his gravity is inescapable.
“And then, you and I will be reunited.”He bites down on my neck, hard enough to taste my blood.“Enjoy this version of him. It doesn’t survive.”
“Max?” E’s voice echoes from impossibly far away. It cuts through the darkness, barely reaching me. “Max, are you alright? Max!”
E moves frantically beside me, but I can’t see him anymore. I can’t see anything. I rise. I fall. I break the surface of the waking nightmare, only to be dragged under again.
A gasp tears out of my throat, and my eyes fly open. The unbearable pressure of eons of time and space and galaxies delivers me.
The delirium snaps.
“Max!” E presses his palm to my heart, making sure it’s still beating. “What happened? Did I hurt you?”
Shiver after shiver rocks my body as it crashes down from the end-all orgasm. E is invisible again, and I’m not sure if his shadow was ever really in the room with us, or if I imagined the whole thing.
“Where did you go?” he asks.
“I-I don’t know,” I stammer, feeling so cold, my teeth chatter.
He kisses the top of my head, handling me like a precious, fragile thing. “Max, I’m so sorry. I’m here. You’re okay. We’re okay.”
I hide my face in his chest and grip his shoulders tightly. “Maybe that’s what loving a dead man does to a mortal. We should have known there would be consequences.”
