Thinking back, you’ve almost killed me on a number of occasions. My system now recognises shock as a friend: I can cope with losing more blood than anyone else I know. Sometimes when you’re away, I curl up and think about this occasion, recounted as it happened. You are as thin as I’ve ever seen you. Not emaciated, but your lines are sharp and your hands are always cold. You drank a club-goer half to death two days ago and he left a visible swell beneath your ribs.

I’m seriously worried that I haven’t heard from you for a while, now. I’m this close to making a rash decision for which I might pay dearly. But frankly, a life without you does not feel worth living. I distract myself with various projects, but sometimes simply find myself daydreaming about you. Here’s one little recollection, recounted as it happened. It’s been a while since I studied here, but I still know the campus inside out.

The thunder is punishing. Stuffy evening heat pushed you out of your airless home, and then a cloudburst chased you into the shadow of an oak tree. Lightning flashed with vindictive regularity even when the rain let up. Now, petrichor, the smell of earth after rain, leaps up from the earth in this small park. Suddenly the air is fresh and clear. Even though the lightning still strobes through the clouds you feel peaceful.

A couple of weeks after my wife I still couldn’t sleep, my mind churning over what I’d seen and rerendering it in infinite variations. You smiled and called it cute; would kiss my forehead or indulge my passions as your mood saw fit. Two weeks later the stars aligned. I knew what I wanted. I told you I would feed you, and that there were special rules. You challenged me to Crash Team Racing for it and I lost fifty-three rounds in a row.

A quick retcon in the following closing paras: … Your spirit brutalises hers as you fuck yourself. You tear her in half and fold her into you again and again so she can’t tell where she ends and you begin. When the blood is gone you cum, and the violence of your pleasure threatens to fall on her like a tidal wave and crush her from existence. But you hold back, keeping her like a still-life inside you.

Once, you fasted for a week. I think you had located a grimoire, or finally had an epiphany. It’s a bit of a blur. Here’s what I remember. “Hunger will help,” you explain, stroking your fingers through my hair. I lie with my head in your lap listening to your tummy gurgle around an amount of blood that was life-threatening to me, a pleasant lunch for you. “The entities I will be dealing with are bound and starving, but still very powerful.

Here’s something you don’t know about me. Every Friday I receive an email from myself reminding me to tell a system somewhere in the cloud that I am alive. A couple of keytaps suffice, typed into an appropriately configured terminal: curl https://138.2.2.18/heartbeat People use such dead-man’s switches for all sorts of things, often punitive. A hacker somewhere might leave a weapon aimed at the systems of a company she’s extorting, a credible threat-of-last-resort against retaliation.

She had raised a complaint against you, got your line manager involved. Your every instinct told you to end her but the rules of your Role prevented it. You were widely regarded as being on thin ice in any Role after the business with the nuns. So you stood in the office, façade of anxiety being fuelled by tears not of contrition but of humiliation and rage. You took it for months.

You’re busy in your books again. I’m worried, so I try to keep busy too. The Arabic diagram keeps defeating me but I can write the name of God, now, so there’s that. And what is the significance of all those numbers? 7 14 112 17? Searching the Web brings up Qur’an translations, at least after the sites about Pampers nappies… But is that really the Arabic symbol for addition, underlining the name of Allah?

While you work in your room, riding a boost due to Trixie’s generosity, let’s revisit another episode from our history. I’ve been thinking about what I would sacrifice for you—what I have sacrificed for you. I manipulated ten people to give you their blood as part of a diet, some of whom have now given all. I encouraged a child to jump into waters so you could drown him in your undertow.