It means her body responds to my voice before her brain catches up.
It means when she touches herself at four in the morning, it's my face she's imagining.
Mycock.
Mycontrol.
Not Ryan fucking Adamson's.
He's not her Helix.
I'mher Helix. I'm the monster in the maze with the dark she hungers for.
I'm the creature that haunts her wettest dreams.
I'm all her shameful sexual fantasies come true.
Me.
Not him.
We are not the same.
And now… I will prove it.
The late morningAugust heat swarms around me. A living, oppressive cloak. The insects in the Tetons this time of year are absolutely insane—mosquitoes the size of quarters, biting flies that draw blood, gnats that swarm in clouds so dense they fill your mouth if you're stupid enough to breathe through it.
It's enough to make a person swear off nature forever, pack up their Gore-Tex and their romanticized notions of wilderness solitude, and retreat to climate-controlled civilization where the only bugs are the occasional cockroach you can crush with your shoe.
But to those of us who actually belong here—who understand that nature isn't a postcard or a wellness retreat, but something ancient and indifferent—it's a minor inconvenience.
An annoyance to be endured with the same patience you'd give to traffic or a tedious board meeting.
You learn to adapt and prepare. Long sleeves even in eighty-degree heat, long pants tucked into your boots like you're dressing for a tick-borne plague. You keep leather work gloves and a wide-brimmed hat with mosquito netting in the back of your Jeep, along with the industrial-strength DEET that probably causes cancer, but definitely prevents you from being eaten alive.
It's the price of admission to this particular cathedral, and you pay it without hesitation because the alternative—soft skin exposed to the wilderness—marks you as prey rather than predator.
You accept that the mountains take their pound of flesh in sweat and blood and itching welts, and you pay it without complaint.
For young men tied to posts and left overnight, however—naked and immobilized, unable to swat, or scratch, or shield themselves from the relentless assault of a thousand tiny mandibles—it's considerably more than inconvenient.
It's torture.
Well. Mild torture. Torture-adjacent, let's call it.
The path from the house to the clearing is about a quarter of a mile of dense forest. It's mostly a deer trail. Some places, it disappears all together. Becoming something to be felt, rather than followed.
Ryan Adamson is right where I left him yesterday afternoon. Sitting down against a tree trunk shoulders cranked behind his back, wrists held together with nylon rope.
Even if I left him clothed, he would still look like this.
Covered in spots of blood, welts, and looking like he lost his mind about ten hours ago.
He should consider himself lucky. Last spring there was a wolf pack up here. A pack that became accustomed to being fed human flesh from this very post. But territory boundaries have changed over the summer, so I guess our boy Ryan here got a pass on being eaten alive.
At least, in that sense.
When I approach, he looks up at me with that dazed, confused stare one only finds on statues of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Eyes rolled back, vacant mind, suffering evident.
