theres only me
We ate birthday cake and curled up around one another on the couch, reading. Your body, still exhausted, worked better as the essence of your departed prey slowly flowed into you.
During the ride home I was chatty, jovial. As the evening wore on you watched me become more pensive. The pauses became longer. It was like observing a watch running down.
My decline mirrored the decline of the digesting soul inside you, a coincidence that faintly amused you. You guessed it was my witnessing the consumption of that spirit that caused it.
You knew better than to press me before I was ready. Placing an affectionate kiss on my cheek you slipped away to your bedroom, inviting me to come join you when I was ready. I nodded, casting you a flicker of a smile but then returning to stare at page 149 of the book I was reading, same as I’d been doing for the last twenty minutes.
You wake when you feel your hand being taken. Both of mine hold it, pressing it tightly like I’m afraid you’re going to blow away. I feel like a furnace: your hands are cold at the best of times.
“Mmh… Andrew?” You feel the mattress depress as I sit by your side. “Are you okay?”
I’m staring at you like I’m trying to memorize every inch of your face. In the dark I can’t see as well as you so perhaps I don’t realise that that’s what it looks like I’m doing.
You catch an earthy belch behind your fist and breathe it into the room. It curls around me, colouring the air with a record of your deed.
My mouth opens and closes as I choose and discard supposition, thesis, antithesis: precarious constructions of my attempts to understand and process what you showed me. In the end I can’t do anything other than collapse back to the raw foundation. “Is she gone?”
You can see a pain in my expression you weren’t expecting. Something in the plaintive manner of my speech makes you sit up, supporting your weight on one elbow. I sound broken.
You will not coddle me. I will see you for what you are. That’s how things have always been, and that’s the only way they will continue.
Carefully but clearly you tell me: “Nearly. I’ve been so hungry for so long. I’ve been… taking my time with her.”
My hands tighten around yours. When I flinch, I flinch towards you. “Can you let her go?”
Your sardonic smile is mostly cloaked by the darkness. “I don’t know. Maybe? I won’t, though. Mine.”
The strange, hard lines of this phobia are new and threatening, making me question what you do. But they are softened by small signs of love. When you stake your claim the corners of my eyes crinkle upwards, a microexpression revealing true feelings.
I continue to probe what hurts. “What is it like for her?”
Sometimes the only way over is through.
“She’s stopped screaming,” you say, pushing your back up the headboard and pulling my hand with you as you move. I go pale. Hard to see but your night vision is very good. “I imagine it’s a bit like drowning and a bit like burning. She’s here—” you tap your chest “—surrounded by me, like a swimmer in the ocean. I’m becoming her whole world. There’s nothing else and there won’t ever be, for her.”
“And burning?”
You can’t help a touch of sympathy in your eyes as you stroke my cheek. “What else happens to food? Andrew, why are you asking?”
I press my cheek into your palm like I can hide my face in it. “It’s just… It feels like if souls are real, they should be sacred…”
“You called me goddess.” I dip my head in a nod. “You’ve fed me people. Friends. You knew what would happen. They’re gone now.”
I draw back, suddenly panicked. “The same—?”
“Mmhmm.” The terror on my face as my eyes read an invisible roll of names causes a spasm of pain in your chest, like judgement, like rejection. You react by grabbing my hands and pulling me toward you. I overbalance and end up straddling your belly. With your fingers sliding between mine and clamping us together I can go nowhere. You hear my breathing, shallow and rapid. “Andrew, look at me.” I stare into your eyes. “There is no light at the end of the tunnel. There’s only me.”
I’m utterly frozen. You’re seeing the vulnerable core of me. Way down deep, the driving force of my confidence and inertia and security and neglect is an unacknowledged belief that everything will play out again, that nothing is permanent, that everything can be made right. You have cracked that belief in half by revealing the true and final destruction of those you consume. There is no way to undo that final transubstantiation.
You stare into my eyes, intuit the chasm. If my fear is that everything will fall apart and be lost, you can remind me of the one thing I can count permanent. You bring my hands to your cheeks and repeat yourself, emphasising the words.
“There’s only me.”
My breath catches in my throat. I’m focused on you like a drowning man focuses on dry land. Despite the turmoil that causes my heart to race the touch of my hands is gentle on your face.
“Andrew, I’m here.”
I glance down over your body. In the darkness I see curves of flesh and fancy I can see deeper, to where the mother is fraying in your fatal embrace. But you will remain, and she will be part of you. When I look back up you see purpose in my eyes again. Good.
“Andrew, tell me I’m here.”
“This is your face.” My thumbs stroke your cheeks, below the eyes. “You always show more emotion than you think and your eyes are like a riptide when you forget to hide it.”
With the gentlest pressure you move my touch over the curve of your jaw. I stroke the sensitive skin of your neck, bringing up goosebumps. “And here?”
“This is your throat. It kills by engulfing and it kills with words.” I seem thoughtful. “But you sing, too, from time to time.”
“Continue. Where is… your friend you introduced to me?”
Almost blind, my hands are left to rediscover and confirm the pit of your throat, your collarbones, the epic rise of your chest. “These are your breasts. When you are naked this big they fall apart from one another, or hang when you bend over, and sometimes I can’t breathe, you look so beautiful and womanly. Freya… Freya is gone, forever, and where she was, there is only you.”
My deep, appreciative exploration of your outsized breasts causes your eye to flutter closed and your hips to shift beneath me. I stroke and stimulate the rise and the sensitive swathe below the ariolae. Before I move on I make you moan as I take one swollen nipple into my mouth, suckling on it and playing with it with my tongue.
“More,” you whisper. “Where are the others?”
“Gone,” I confirm as I crest the dangerous, sinking terrain of your gut. “Destroyed here. Helena, Patrick, Uma, Vicky, the dog-walker in Torquay, three Daniels I’m aware of, Amelie—” you clench at the name “—Yannis, countless others. All gone. Most even burned off as fat, the rest on their way. Still, so much flesh, folding and soft and warm and always, always churning deep inside. Your belly is here instead of them.”
I’m moving down the bed, trailing kisses like breadcrumbs in the trackless expanse of your tummy. I stroke along the fold in which hides your belly button, fondling you there as I trail directly South.
Your large thighs fall obligingly open. The litany of names, my touch, and the weak struggles of the spirit you are sucking like a boiled sweet… All these have left you hot, shining and ready. I inhale your perfume and speak, my lips brushing yours. “Olivia is gone. You fucked her out of existence. She is gone and your cunt is here. Your cunt that gets wet with the thought of devouring us.” I lick firm and decisive along the cleft of your pussy, speaking in between strokes. “You get so much pleasure from killing us and we deserve to give you this pleasure. Oh, please, Raven. Please continue to sacrifice us. We belong inside you.”
Before long I am lost in the taste and sensation of your slick, hot flesh on my tongue. You breathe out the promise: “I will digest her soul when I come.” It does not slow my touch.
We get drunk together on your lust: you touch and grope the excessive swells of your generous body which curves and landslides as your hips rock. I find a dangerous rhythm with my mouth on your clit and just toy with you, building your heat and then backing off as you approach climax, saw-toothing you towards greater heights of pleasure even as you’re driven mad with frustrated desire. My fingers and then hand delve deep into your womanhood, a delicious stretch that echoes the torture of your clit.
“Fucking… let me come!” you demand, twisting on the bed like it’s electrified.
“No,” I say and push you back against the bed with my free hand heavy on your belly. Your desperate pussy twitches, millimetres away from mouth and fist that just seconds ago brought you to the brink of orgasm. The wave retreats again.
“Please! Please let me come!”
“Take a little more for me,” I say. The hand on your belly relaxes and I practically dive head-first into you, licking and fingering with an intensity that threatens to bring the wave crashing down on you right now.
“Hold it,” I instruct, not relenting. Now you hold back the release yourself through sheer force of will. Soon you’re accelerating past the point of no return. The spirit wrapped up inside you starts to crumple as your shuddering soul presses down on her from all directions.
Pleasure saturates you. You’re high on it, drinking it in, flying without tether as your body, mind and soul are simulated in unison. Then, just when it’s unbearable, just when it’s either cry or reach that long sought-after orgasm, I speak.
“Come for me, Raven.”