I heard Frankie whisper, “Daddy, I’m horny.”
He said, “It’s three a.m. I have work in the morning.”
She said, “I might have to watch a movie in the living room or something,” whispering so the baby didn’t wake up. Her whisper cloyed its way into my chest. My heart rate spiked with the thrill of voyeurism, like I was witnessing something I wasn’t supposed to.
The weight of her body left the bed and I heard the soft pads of her feet move to the hallway. The milklight of early morning melted through the blinds in the bedroom. I stroked the new skin of the foxglove tattoo between my thighs, the scar rippling gently like silk.
Matt rolled over to me. His breath was hot and slept in, heavy and milky like the light. He pressed his lips against my neck, pushing harder with his mouth until his lips opened up beneath the weight. I felt the hardness of his front teeth against my skin. He bit a little and said, “L.”
I moved myself up against his body and made a noise like I was sleeping, a soft mm sound.
“I want to see the color of your blood again,” he said in between a whisper and hum.
He said, “I really like you, Lilith.”
His hands crept around my waist, the whole of my backside lying perfectly into the whole of his front side. My back curved against his chest, his stomach, my ass in his crotch, down to the warmth of his thighs against mine. I tried to get us to fit closer and he pulled me in tight. What it feels like to be held close to the ribs.
I mumbled a little. The riled-up beating of my heart went into my lungs and throat and ears, but I kept my eyes closed. I wouldn’t let my voice betray me. When I responded, I wanted him to know I was aware of what he was doing and that I was okay with it, as if this slight betrayal wasn’t anything unusual at all. I whispered back, “I really like you too, Matt.”
His body pressed harder, fitting his knees into the crook of my own.
“No, girl,” he whispered. “I don’t think you understand.”
I turned my head around to look at him. He wasn’t smiling, not even smirking. He wasn’t staring at my third-eye spot. He was staring directly into my eyes. I was close enough that I could see the way his eyes moved back and forth between my right eye and left, reading my face for a response. His tenderness was both jarring and intoxicating, and felt like a glimpse into the private life he had built with Frankie. I envied it desperately even as I had his full attention, a deep sucking desire to hold his words inside of me—words that Frankie would never know—and tongue them gently in the soft tissues of my gut as if those words, his tenderness, might one day disappear. Matt had told me there were nine tenets in Satanism and that the first of these was indulgence, the fifth one being vengeance. Maybe that holy fear was letting go of self-judgment, of accepting what was an innate truth about human behavior, that we are just animal, nothing more. In all of us, there is light and there is dark. We feed that dark part of ourselves through daily actions, and a syntax builds to create the person you become.
I figured it would be the closest to inside each other we’d ever get. The real inside, not vagina inside. The inside with all the guts and glory, where the fear and love lives. There’s something about closing another person out that hardens what you have. We lay there embryonic. You and me against your girlfriend. You and me against the mother of your child.
That’s why Frankie named me Lilith. She saw me for who I was, the dark and rotten feminine.
I was the bad woman.
It was predictable.
Perhaps because it was much easier than being good.
In their bed, Matt and I alone, I turned all the way around to face him, my knees between his. I grabbed his hands and placed them on my ribs, wanted to feel him squeeze so I couldn’t breathe. I moved back and forth with my hips slightly and he moved a hand to my mouth. I tilted my chin down and sucked on the tip of his finger.
“You’re the devil,” I said.
“The devil isn’t real,” Matt said. “Black magic and all of that, it’s not real.”
The dawn was creeping in, a soft shade of pastel blue that washed across Matt’s pale skin.
“What do you mean, like animal sacrifices and shit?”
“Well, yeah,” he said. “Satanism isn’t really about that. It’s about the dark shit, the untouched parts of your mind.”
“The places where the light don’t touch,” I said.
“It’s experiencing for yourself the bad things you’ve done to others.”
Some erotic feeling in me stirred and then flowered. I felt powerful, predatory and scared.
That’s what drew me into Matt’s embrace: acceptance of the dark part of myself, the rejection of the light. The pale blue surrounded us, our bodies an illuminated text in the milk light bed. We were there, alone. This is what it would be like to be just us.
The toilet flushed from the hallway and I remembered Frankie. Matt took his hand back. The baby stirred in his crib. I turned away and pretended to be asleep.
The day after, I showed up to Jenny’s house with a bottle of vodka and pills in my backpack. I ran from my car to her front door and knocked frantically.
Jenny’s neighborhood was in a place I wouldn’t walk around alone at night, next to the oldest Wal-Mart in Colorado Springs. She opened the creaking screen door and let me in.
“I have something to tell you,” I blurted out breathlessly.
“What’s going on?”
I took the crumpled bag of liquor out of my backpack and handed it to her. We moved
