Sleep No More

“Are we just going to keep fucking like animals in the dark?”

He drew back, stunned by the bitterness in her voice.

“Every day you go back to sweet little Lily, but at night you come to me. Everything’s just fine for you, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Don’t lie. You’d keep going like this forever, if I would. Do you think this is all I want? Do you?”

“What do you want me to do? You want me to leave my wife and daughter?”

She looked away from him and stared straight ahead. “Yes.”

He closed his eyes and tried to keep himself together. Cole was right: he had lost his perspective. He had lost his perspective and now Eve had expectations. Reasonable expectations, by any fair standard.

“You can’t do it, can you?” she said.

He wanted to tell her the truth, but he feared her reaction. He wanted to hug her, but she clearly did not want that. She was still shivering despite the comforter, and her teeth still chattered. There was a glass of red wine under the lamp on the end table. He picked it up and held it up to her mouth, but she ignored it. He drained it himself, thankful for the heat in his throat.

“Listen,” he said softly. “We should-”

“I want you to cut me.”

Now she was looking at him, her face almost empty of humanity.

“I can’t do that.”

“You’ve done it before.”

It was true. Once, at Mallory’s request, he had cut her arm during sex. He had done it in the hope that they could somehow uncover the source of the pain that she mutilated herself to alleviate. He used a knife, and the act had brought them closer than he thought human beings could get. But it did not have the desired result.

“I’m not going to cut you.”

She let the comforter fall and held out her arms. The surfaces of both inner forearms had been deeply scratched, by her fingernails, probably. She had bled, but the comforter had wiped most of it away.

“What’s a few more?” she asked. “You don’t know how badly I need it.”

“Why? Why do you need it?”

She grabbed his wrist and pulled him onto the bed. He tried to resist, but she covered his mouth with hers in an almost vicious kiss. She didn’t even try to remove his clothes. She pulled him on top of her, reached down, and freed him from his trousers, her fist closing around him like the hand of a demon. He cried out in pain.

Rolling him over with frantic movements, Eve placed him against her opening and tried to sit down. She wasn’t ready, but she did not intend to wait. She shut her eyes and settled hard upon him.

He cried out again, but Eve made no sound. She began to move with slow insistence that escalated to a blank-faced urgency and left Waters feeling he was not even part of the act. One concentrated minute was all it took, and she finished with facial contortions that looked as though she had lost control of her nerves. When she collapsed upon him, he thought surely she would surrender to sleep at last. But only a few seconds later, she wrapped her arms around his back and, using all her strength, rolled him over in the bed, so that he lay on top of her.

As he looked into her eyes, they went wide, as though a bolt of electricity had shot through her, and he saw something in them he had not seen before: fear.

“What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Shut up,” she hissed, sliding her hands down his back and pushing him deeper. “You’re not done.”

“Eve-”

“Don’t call me that!”

She made claws of her hands and dug them into his pectoral muscles, then locked her heels behind his thighs. The conditioning of the past two weeks took over, and he began to move, his body charged with the energy stored during the twenty-four hours he’d gone without her. With every thrust she urged him on, her hands raking his back. The reciprocal rhythm of her hips drove him toward his peak, but he held himself in abeyance, unsure of what she needed from him.

“Scratch me, Johnny…please.”

“No.”

“I need you to cut me!”

He had never seen Eve this way. Beneath her carnality he had always sensed arrogance, a confidence that she could rule and possess him. Tonight uncertainty clouded her eyes. She was like Mallory fleeing her demons, using sex as an escape. But from what? And why did she want to be cut? Until tonight she had wanted only to be called Mallory. Now there was no mention of that.

“Please,” she begged. “Make me hurt.”

Waters slid his hands beneath her back, set his knees against the mattress, and heaved her up off the bed. Now he had all the leverage, and he yanked her to him or held her back as he chose, driving her mad with hesitations and sudden reversals. She fought only to hold herself against him.

“Please,” she rasped, her breath ragged. “Make me…make her go away.”

Her words registered only as encouragement, their specific meanings lost in the violence of their union. He drove harder, yet still she demanded more, her cries no longer a language but guttural syllables any mammal could understand. He let go his conscious mind and thrashed wildly, as a man pursued senses that his only hope of survival is to battle his way through an unyielding wall before him.

“Make it stop!” she screamed. “Make her stop!”

His heart thundered as it fought to feed his starving tissues, and for an instant his vision faded. Fearing he might faint, he let himself fall forward, pinning her to the mattress. Her fingernails dug into the flesh of his upper arms, and the sudden pain made him open his eyes.

Eve was staring at him as though she had no idea who he was, her mouth frozen in an O that he read as a symbol of a shattering climax. When she began to flail her arms, he used his last reserve of energy to magnify her sensation to the limit, thrashing inside her like a man possessed. Had he not been so lost within the act-or had his partner been someone else-he might have realized he was in one of those situations in which the woman later claims she tried to stop and the man refused. But the idea of Eve stopping sex in medias res was incomprehensible. Her screams of ecstasy were indistinguishable from those of agony. Yet this time, tears were streaming from her eyes.

Her movements became disjointed, as though she were having a seizure rather than an orgasm. In the moment that doubt truly entered Waters’s mind, her spastic movements drove him past the point of no return. All that remained of his conscious mind shot out across light-years of space and time, while the animal in him ejaculated with withering force. Eve faded, flashed, and then his mind went black.

He awoke facedown on the bed, shivering like a wet dog. At some point while he slept, the wind had driven the rain across the balcony and into the suite. The bed was drenched, and him with it. He lay half across Eve, his hips between her legs, his torso to the right of hers. He tried to pull off the wet covers, but the twisted sheet was pinned beneath her.

“Hey,” he said. “Wake up.”

Even before the silence stretched into eternity, he sensed something wrong with her skin. It felt only slightly warmer than the sopping bedclothes. He recoiled and threw himself onto the floor.

At first he could not bear to look at her, to confirm with his cerebral cortex what his medulla already knew. Kneeling beside the tall tester bed, he reached out and placed the tip of his forefinger beneath her jawbone. There was no pulse beneath the bluish skin, only a waxy resilience that had nothing in common with the rich pink tissue he had kissed a short while ago, soft skin animated by thrumming nerves and oxygenated blood.

In death, Eve finally looked her age. The breasts that had piqued Lily’s curiosity now lay flat on her chest like Baggies half-filled with water. Her face was stiller than a statue’s, for statues are sculpted to look alive, and Eve had lost all semblance of life. Her mouth hung open as though gasping for air, and around her eyes were small pinpricks of dark blood. Something ticked in Waters’s brain at this sight, something from a film or novel, and he