But instead, he turned that energy toward me, cradling the top of my head in his palm and handling me like something precious. The strong angles in his face clenched, but his eyes gentled as he focused on my face. I could almost believe he felt the real me when he let out that guttural cry. For one moment we were the same. Broken and hideously strong, all darkness inside.
After, he’d collapsed beside me, pelting my throat and my collarbone with kisses while I held him.It’s okay,I was telling him with my embrace.I’ll keep you safe. I’ll protect you from yourself.
Nervous energy buzzes through my blood even now, and I can’t believe that it’s finally happening. It’s as though we’ve willed each other into existence. To think that every lonely hour of my life, he was here and it was just a matter of finding him.
His mouth is parted, his body prone and trusting beneath me.
Slowly, I stretch my arm out, my fingers grasping at his phone on the bedside table. The brightness of the screen makes me wince. His wallpaper is a photo of the mountains beyond a barren desert, and I think that I’ll suggest a hike sometime.
He doesn’t so much as stir beneath me, and I scroll through his messages. There isn’t much. Alerts about login attempts on his iPad from back in February, arrangements to meet his father for dinner on Christmas Eve, messages of support from friends he’s made at AA, me asking him if he likes water chestnuts for tonight’s stir-fry. And a text from Sadie.
At 12:02 p.m.:Did you send your girlfriend?
His immediate reply:Yes—just want you to be safe.
15
By mid-August, the heat is sweltering. Moody is slumped on a barstool that she’s dragged over to the air conditioner, groaning. “When it’s my turn again,” she says, “we’re going back up north. I’ve always wanted to kill someone in the snow.”
The image is romantic. Blood splayed out upon an untouched field of pure white. Doing it at night would be best, I think. Somewhere under a cloudless sky so that the stars make it bright enough to see. A clean swipe of a serrated blade on a carotid artery.
“The cleanup would be a nightmare,” I say, pouring ice cubes into my glass. Snow has a way of burying things, but when it melts, it leaves them all exposed. The blood won’t wash away—not entirely—and it will be too hard to see what may have been dropped or left behind.
“I want one of those—what are they?—MMA fighters next time,”Moody says. “Mixed martial arts. Really aggressive. Raging mommy issues.”
Moody has three kills under her belt now. Each time, Moody has a vision for the lover she’ll find, and then he manifests as though from a catalog.
“We’ll dye our hair too,” she says. “I miss being blond.”
I feel a twinge in my chest. I’m two months into my time with Edison. More than a third of our time together has passed. I don’t ask my sisters if this grief is normal, if they’ve felt it too. There can be no quantifier. They suspect that I’m hoarding too much of Edison to myself, and so I look for details I can give them, like the hikes we’ve started taking in the mountains. I freeze water bottles for us the night before and wrap them in foil so they’ll stay cold. And I tell them that his stepdaughter has stopped coming around as much, but when she appears, she brings her violin and I follow along on my guitar.
I don’t tell them about the way the sex with him makes me feel, how I can never sleep afterward and how I lie in the darkness studying every inch of him. His thick brows, the curl that falls across his forehead when he sleeps, the way my cheek fits into the slope of his biceps. I don’t tell them that I can’t imagine how the world will make sense without him.
Dread in my stomach when Iris comes downstairs, hair drenched from her shower. She can always sense when I’ve been thinking too much. She reads it on my face like pages from a romance novel.
She sits beside me on the couch, so close her damp arm presses into mine. Fragrant soap, red skin from the scalding water. Unlike Moody, she loves the heat, and she’s radiant, her pink cheeks glowing.
“What’s up, Sis? You feeling all right?” She presses the back of her palm to my forehead, the side of my face. “You’re looking a little glassy.”
“She’s in love,” Moody says, not turning away from the AC as it blows on her face.
I am in love, it’s true. I think of Edison and my knees shake, my chest hurts, my eyes water. It’s like having the flu and winning the lottery every day of my life. I mourn him even though he’s still alive; if I call him right now while he’s at work, he’ll answer on the second ring and I’ll hear the smile in his voice.
Edison is alive.I savor the thought and how it feels for this to be true. We’ll have Christmas together and then I’ll kill him on New Year’s Eve. An hour before midnight, I’ll lead him to bed. I’ll make the most of our last time together. And then I’ll do it. I’m not entirely sure how I’ll make him stop breathing. If I strangle him, he’ll fight me, but I’ll have the advantage because I’ll be sitting on his chest. If I cut his throat, he’ll stare up at me in stunned silence, his mouth puckering and gaping like a fish out of water.
Iris is watching me. She frowns and hands me the glass of ice water I’ve brought to the coffee table. It’s an unspoken offering, her way of trying to console me.
It frightens me the way that Iris can see right through me. She gets up, opens a drawer in the kitchen, and returns wearing Lisa’s wedding band. “Do you want to get ice cream?” she asks me, quietly so that Moody won’t hear over the whirring of the AC.
She’s in rare form today, a doting older sister trying to comfort me rather than lecture me. She’s worried that I’ll end up like her once Edison is dead, hiding under my blanket like it’s a burial shroud and not emerging for weeks and weeks. But it’s different. It’s something that I don’t have words for. I’m already in mourning for Edison and the life we’ll never lead, the conversations we’ll never have.
It will go away, I tell myself. He’ll always be the most special because he’s my first, but he’s only human. Bones and skin.
“Sure,” I say, even though I don’t want ice cream and even though I don’t want to leave this room. It’s because I don’t want to get up that I have to.
I follow Iris outside and I lock the door to make it look like nobody will be home with Jade and Lisa gone.
Dara is lounging on her favorite plastic chair, facing the balcony where she can see everything. She’s playing some game on her phone, but she raises a hand when I wave at her.
