Even better, he was one of the first people to see this place in its current incarnation. The house had been finished only a few weeks before, and the contractors had filled the pool just a day or two ago. There was some kind of party planned in the next few weeks, probably a housewarming, but she got fuzzy on the details as soon as she brought it up, probably because she wasn’t ready to invite him. He’d floated some details about the shitty fund-raiser at the Plimsoll Club that his parents were forcing him to attend in a week, just enough to see if she wanted to be his date, but she’d gotten vague and distant then too.
But none of that mattered in this moment. He was here! Elysium!
She dropped the icy milk carton onto a lounger he could barely make out in the darkness. They were standing on flagstones now.
“Let me get some cups, turn some lights on,” she said, already turning for the house.
He took her gently by the arm and held her in place.
“Don’t leave me . . .” he gently whined.
Her laughter was more breath than anything else, and he couldn’t see her face, just that she had bowed her head slightly to keep their mouths from meeting. Lights meant more chatter, more feelings and more bullshit. The dark promised him the taste of her neck, the heft of her breasts and the heat between her slender thighs.
“It’s too dark,” she whispered.
“What are you afraid of? Snakes?”
“Seriously. Don’t even . . .”
But in her rush to make this point emphatic, she’d lifted her lips to within inches of his, and he seized the moment. Their connection was instant, moist, her mouth yielding, her body going limp as he curved his arms around her back. She was as hungry for this as he was. At least it seemed that way for about three minutes, and then she started to stiffen. He needed to make another move, and fast.
He lightened up on the kissing, allowed her to breathe for a second or two, but he kept his arms wrapped around her as he walked them closer to the pool’s dark edge.
“You don’t have to be afraid of anything,” he whispered. “I’ll protect you from all of it.”
Then he hurled them into the pool.
The water was so cold it hit them with the force of an anvil, and only then did Marshall remember what she’d said about its being fed by some kind of artesian well. But he kept her locked in his embrace, even as she coughed and cursed him and sputtered.
“I’ve got you . . . I’ve got you . . .” he said over and over again, and after trying to pull away from him, she finally relented. When she held to him with fresh childlike desperation, he realized it was her total fear of their dark, rippling surroundings that had sealed her body against his. She would rather cling to him in the freezing cold than dog-paddle a few feet through water she couldn’t see the bottom of.
And so he went back to work, with more force now, attacking her neck, peeling her soaked shirt up above her stomach, palming her breasts and then kneading them, and the whole time he kept waiting for her bone- rattling shivers to come to an end, for the warmth of desire to fill her as it was filling him. But she kept shivering in his arms, no matter what he did to her. And when he went to lift her shirt up over her bra, when her arms became caught halfway overhead inside her soaked sleeves, he realized she wasn’t helping, she was resisting, trying to pull her arms free while kicking herself away from him at the same time.
“Hey,” she said, and her voice was as cool as ice, without a trace of desire in it, and just this simple word told him she was feeling none of what he had just felt. None of the desire, no loss of control.
There was a deep, resounding thud against the stone nearby. Marshall felt it in his chest, then he felt it in his outstretched arms, and realized he’d been the cause of it. In the darkness, he could just make out the white’s of Nikki’s eyes. He had taken her by both shoulders and slammed her head into the side of the pool.
“Marshall,” she said quietly. But there was a trembling edge to her words that sounded like both a question and a challenge. Just by saying his name she was asking him how much further he was going to go.
“Marshall, I’m going to get out of the water now.” Soft, gentle and condescending, like she was talking to a man with a gun. And wasn’t she, in a way? After all, he was taking stock of certain things, like the fact that she’d kept everything between them such a secret. Had she even told anyone she was out there with him? How far away was the nearest neighbor? A ten-minute boat ride?
That’s what it came down to in the end.
He allowed her to slide free of his grip and hoist herself up onto the flagstones. As soon as her feet were on solid ground, she grabbed for the flashlight and wheeled on him. “You son of a—” but the words died in her mouth when she saw what the beam had landed on.
The pool was full of them.
At first he thought it must be some kind of plankton, or maybe even sawdust left over from the construction. But these things weren’t the color of wood, they were the color of skin, and they were everywhere, clustered together in beige clumps that looked like shredded human flesh. And they were drifting through the water with determination, driven by currents he couldn’t feel.
Then darkness descended over him as Nikki took off running, the bouncing beam marking her path toward to the driveway. He could hear the jangle of the keys she’d already pulled from her pocket, could see her furiously wiping her other arm across her shirt, too frightened of him to stop and see how many of the crawly little things from the pool were still clinging to her.
He was still hoisting himself out of the pool when the 4-Runner’s engine sputtered to life and the headlights swung out into the swamp’s darkness and disappeared.
He wiped his arms in the darkness for a few minutes. But he didn’t care. And he didn’t care that she’d just abandoned him either. No, what mattered most to him, what would cling to his soul most forcefully about this night in the days to come, was the realization that he’d allowed her to escape, a realization that now felt as overpowering as discovering you had cancerous tumors all through your body.
Finally he forgot about whatever the pool was full of and just stood there, letting the water run down his body and onto the flagstones. And what steadied his breaths, what chased away his memory of her flashlight beam bouncing off in the direction of her 4-Runner, was a new series of images that came to him unbidden.
Nikki Delongpre was staring up into his eyes as he held her to the mud a few feet away from where he stood now. One hand was around her throat, the other was drawing a paring knife up the length of her torso, slicing the flesh over her breastbone, drawing a red thread past the breasts she had refused to reveal to him. In this vision, Nikki did not scream or cry out or beg for him to stop. Rather, she gazed right into his eyes as a flowing, crimson seam opened in the center of her chest, her stunned, moist-eyed expression radiating a silent, awestruck recognition of his newfound power.
He was not a sick man. A sick man would have craved the sound of her screams, and those did not figure into this little fantasy of his. In fact, he was immensely proud of the cleanliness of this vision, of its lack of common violence, of his own ability to be perfectly content with just this focused display of pure physical dominance and its flowing, unstoppable result.
He tried to apologize, but she wouldn’t let him.
In the days that followed, before he made a decision that changed everything, she vanished wherever he appeared, out a side door in the locker room, into the warren of rooms behind the theater during lunch. The injustice of this began to bore into him more deeply than her rejection of him out in the swamp. It was as if she’d
