I wanted to wake covered in bruises, to be marked by her in every way I could. But first I wanted to hear my name. I wanted it to be a sound of pleasure on her tongue, a moan she could not resist.
Before I could draw it from her she clasped my wrists in her hand and pulled so that our bodies fell flush together, her chest heaving against mine.
I met her gaze, wanton and desperate.
“Is this just another way for you to win?” she muttered, gravel in her voice.
I was straddling her, the bones of her hips pressed into my thighs and it took all my strength to find any words at all. “I never wanted to win.” The BAFTAs, after all, had not felt like victory but devastation. “Winning would be an end,” I lowered my lips to her neck and breathed against her. “I wanted to tear at each other’s throats until the end of time.”
I expected her to acquiesce—to arch herself back and allow me to give her all that she craved. But her other hand came to my chin and tilted it to face her. “I’m serious, Nadine. Tell me this isn’t just another effort to conquer.”
“Maybe it is,” I admitted—because I couldn’t deny there was a part of me that wanted her begging, to cry out for me, to fall apart at my hand. But I wanted to come undone for her too. “But it’s a surrender too.”
Her eyes lit. “It is?”
I nodded and she flipped me, was suddenly straddling me as I had been her. “Surrender then,” she said, and traced patterns into my skin, her mouth hot and wet and demanding. “And defeat me. Everything all at once.”
We gave ourselves to each other, claimed each other—every inch felled, every inch won.
———
At the time, I thought we lost ourselves in our pleasure.
At hers, I took her to that daybed right on her terrace,pinned her hands above her head and bound them with her own shoelaces.
She made breakfast the next morning, her hand deft on the knife, cutting and dicing an apple, biting a slice right off the blade. I followed its sharp metal tip into her mouth and then I pushed her onto the counter and fell to my knees before her. And she said she missed the sight; said I was so beautiful just like that as she fisted her fingers in my hair.
I sat while she tried on clothes from my wardrobe, parading them before me and delighting in the show. Finally she slid onto my lap in a skimpy black sundress and I ran my hands up the back of her thigh. I breathed her in. (It was my perfume I could smell on her, Santa Maria Novella. Melograno. Spicy and warm but still a hint of her within it—was that why I’d chosen it?—pomegranate and patchouli, Harper through and through.) And I insisted she give those clothes back right at that very instance.
Harper, Harper, Harper—her name alone was a gasp, a quick stuttering release.
We forgot the world in each other’s skin (and in each other’s words, whispered over crumpled bedsheets, breathed into each other’s hair as we curled around each other at night). But I don’t think welostourselves at all. I think we found ourselves—that terrifying, awful hunger clawing within—and a person who did not fear that depravity but rose to meet it with their own.
A ravenous, vengeful, and utterly beautiful collision.
———
“Ah, it appears my dear husband had debts he deigned not to tell me about,” Harper said. We were sitting in my garden on a corner unit around a low coffee table. She lay across me, her legs draped over my lap as she read the stack of papers, and I focused on applying blossom pink polish to her toes. “The money we took out has police investigating potential loan sharks. They haven’t spoken to me about it though, so do we think the detectives are shit or are the press simply making things up?”
“Wait—is there an official investigation open? I’d hoped it was all just media hysteria.”
“They’re investigating,” she said, voice heavy and serious, though of course that didn’t last long. “Joel was officially declared missing a few weeks ago, and they’ve been hounding me ever since. I’ve been playing it like I don’t care—he cheated on me and ran off, after all. But I’ve started to let some worry creep in so should I escalate it in the face of the loan sharks, because something bad really might have happened to him? Or should I be angry he kept the debt from me?”
I blinked—a little startled by the callousness. I looked at her—the lines around her eyes and the way her nails pressed through the pages of the papers. I knew the way she woke through the night, scrambling from the sheets in panicked heaving breaths before she even opened her eyes.
Harper had always covered her pain with blunt jabs at the cause—so I could see this effort to bludgeon her way through as exactly that.
“Both,” I answered, letting her get away with the facade. “Be messy and complicated, it’ll look less like a performance.”
“But what if they’re not buying it at all?” she asked, an edge of real concern sawing through. “Maybe that’s why the police haven’t asked me about the loans.”
“They’re just collecting information,” I said, keeping my voice low in the face of her panic. “The press reports differing from the police investigation might be beneficial—it shrouds the whole thing in rumor and hearsay. That’s good for us.”
She threw the paper aside and leaned toward me to bury her face in my hair. “None of this is good for us,” she whined.
“You’re going to smudge that polish.”
“I get them done professionally once a week, Nadine,” she said, still nestled in my hair. “Let them smudge,” she dropped her hand to my thigh, drawing small circles across my skin as her hand ran steadily up. “In fact, I can think of some very fun ways we could ruin your fine work.”
