scared you didnt exist

Allison tried to be a good host but emotion and blood loss left her brutally drained. She was adamant that you take her double bed, so right now she’s crashing on roommate Daniel’s.

I hold the towel as you step out of a long, hot shower. It just about wraps around you but doesn’t really overlap. You tamp yourself somewhat dry and then content yourself with air-drying. Your hair goes up in another towel.

The towels have sparkly flying unicorns on anime-bright backgrounds. This might change how we feel about Allison. Maybe they’re ironic?

“Do you understand her?” you ask, a little exasperated. “You two have a weird sibling thing going on. Why is her heart’s desire to be food? Or to feed me everyone she knows?”

“Are you going to force that?” I interject. You give a one-shouldered shrug and hand me your body-towel to hang for drying. I do so but Raven, it’s cruel to make me look away from your body. The taut bulge of a mostly-liquefied human being serves as a centerpiece in possibly the most beautiful human form that has ever walked the earth. You are excess and softness and erotic curves. The way your thighs brush together and your bum shifts as you walk could bring a grown adult to tears. “… You going to answer my question?”

I was staring. It takes a moment to remember what you asked. “Ah. Um. I could say yes, I do, but I’d probably just be projecting.”

To the bedroom, and thence to the bed. I surprise you by jumping on first and lying against the headboard. I open up arms to indicate that you should snuggle back against me. You do, wiggling your hips to walk up the bed for a nice, tight snuggle.

If I weren’t so tall and broad I’d have no hope. As it stands I can just about make you feel like the little spoon. My arms loop under your boobs, resting upon a stomach still processing the coarser structures of Fern’s dissolving body. My thighs clamp either side of yours, sharing my dry body heat with your slightly damp. You’re always cooler than me. It feels so natural that you should even drain heat from me.

I kiss your shoulder and you sigh, relaxing into me. It takes a little conscious effort to keep my breathing light and regular. “You in a contemplative mood?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s being hooked up to the EEG and having Allison be able to say ’this is hunger’. It made me think about what is going on in your heads. I make sense.”

My arms are long enough that my hands can roam a little over your belly. While my clamped thighs and shoulders still let me be a warm hug-cocoon, I slowly knead the upper reaches of your digestive system. Under inches of smothering fat, a curved bone might be a fragment of skull. Fern’s EEG wouldn’t tell us much right now, her brain having been cheerfully rendered to fatty acids by your brutally efficient digestive juices. You release a meaty burp and I kiss your shoulder again.

“Well, like I say, I can’t speak for Allison. But for my part, … I spent my whole life hoping and praying you would exist.

“I found people who would play pred. But when they stopped, they weren’t still predators.” I pause to think. “One of them isn’t anything anymore. You ate her.”

“Your… wife? She was fat. I liked her. You should have more fat wives to feed me.”

I nibble your shoulder in punishment but you can’t miss the shiver of pleasure you cause to run from head to toe. “I’ll get right on that.

“But as I was saying. Something in me knew you must exist. I needed someone who could take something good and make it part of her. For me, but for everyone. It’s too sad for someone to live a life as good as they can and then just die at the end. But if you soak them up then they never end, you take everything. It’s too sad for someone to suffer without recourse. But if you burn them, they won’t ever feel pain again.

“I was scared you didn’t exist.” My massaging hands halt in a sudden tightening of my hold. It inadvertently causes a shift of some large bones in your tummy. You squidge your belly underneath my hands to place the trochanter of a femur in my grasp and I come around enough to slowly crush it with the aid of your abdominal flexing. A sound like tearing wood announces the reduction in the size of the largest part of Fern’s remains.

“I do exist.”

“I know. And I’m so fucking happy. Rey, I don’t—” I halt, trying to get control of the emotion in my voice. “I don’t know what I would do without you. You are the most important person conceivable. I would do literally anything for you.” A pause. “I’ll feed you my childhood sweetheart. I’ll feed you my family. I’ll protect and soothe you when they give you indigestion.”

You remain tight-lipped at the suggestion, only craning to look me in the eye. I stare back, evenly.

“Your hunger is sacred. What you did to Fern, I want to help you do to every man, woman and child on this earth. Then I wanna, I don’t know, help you pierce heaven. Suck the marrow of God.” I smirk, acknowledging my own insignificance and inability to actually help with such eschatological projects.

“I’ll give my life. To you or for you. Whichever. You give everything meaning. There’s nothing more I could ever hope to do.”

“You’re being silly,” you say, but gently. Now you kiss me. A bubble of gas passes up, a postcard from messy biological hell into a sweet, satisfied bedroom moment. It takes like fear and blood and sharp, brutal satisfaction. “I still don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t explain properly. I don’t understand you either. I just… needed you to be here.” Another squeeze. We both listen to a slow, wandering growl somewhere low in your belly, feeling like it vibrates against your pelvis. Your prey must be just beginning to tickle your colon. The thought makes you wet but you’re too exhausted to do anything about it.

“Well, I need you, too. All of you. Men, women and children.” You grin up at me and I rumble out a laugh.

“There’s no way you can be so cute and also an extinction event.”

You seem pleased and a little blushy at the compliment, which doesn’t change my mind about the cute thing.

At some point I’m going to have to go sleep on the couch. Allison’s bed is pretty much swamped by you and the human being your body is destroying. But we steal as many moments as we can in between your feed and the necessity of sleep, each finding security and comfort in the presence of the other.

I can’t believe how lucky I am.