The morning after the lake she’d locked herself in that stale little back room, hazily sucking down cigarette after cigarette. She’d stubbed out the ends on grimy tiles next to faded red symbols stamped on cardboard, and one open-box epiphany later, she finally knew how to get rid of Heather.
Chain-smoking and hacking up phlegm afterwards had done nothing to loosen the decay lodged in her throat.
Marlowe could taste the lake even now, silt-heavy, drilled into her teeth, clogging her throat and choking away the pine-vanilla stench. Her eyes burned from the chemicals and her palm pulsed in heavy throbs. She squeezed her legs together and sucked in air through her teeth, willing the ugly ache in her cunt to subside.
Marlowe’s left hand fisted at the waistband of her shorts and the flushed skin of her stomach blazed against her knuckles.
Heather hadn’t been a bad fuck.
The thought burrowed into Marlowe’s mind, truth-barbed and hated as she dug her left hand into her shorts under scratchy lace. Shitty motels in neighboring towns had been their sin of choice, but sometimes they fogged car windows, leaving sweaty handprints on cracked leather seats, and once—
Marlowe’s lips parted in a strained pant as the pads of her fingers ground clumsily against slick, touch-starved flesh, and she curled her fingers into herself, head hanging, eyes screwed shut.
Once they’d met at a bar and she’d hardly recognized Heather under the layers of eyeshadow and black leather. Piss and water soaked the hem of her skintight dress when Heather had pinned her up against the sink, like her leather jacket was stitched together from flayed convictions and sewn together with the same two fingers buried in Marlowe’s cunt.
Marlowe had hated her more for it. Knowing this is what she could be—whattheycould be.
Her stomach twisted and tightened, hair feverishly plastered across her face and cheeks, but the angle was all wrong and her shorts suffocated her hand and acid burned her nose.
Marlowe’s solution to Heather’s corpse glistened in the bathtub, air exposure darkening it from oilyyellow to a dark, sickly green. Her death wouldn’t be quick. Wouldn’t be clean, like the knife at Pike’s Lake was supposed to be. She’d have to be tactful in luring Heather to her apartment, and packed to leave town once it was over. It would all be over.
Heather would cease to exist, and would take with her that aching bitterness writhing inside of Marlowe like a parasite she couldn’t dig out of her skin.
Wedging her fingers deeper, Marlowe tried to force a release, hips jerkily rocking against her fingers to clear her mind from the throbbing pain of her right hand. She clenched her hand at her side, then pressed it into the biting cold tile. There were only a few seconds of relief before the blistering pain returned and she snatched it away.
Leaving a festering brown smear on the floor, the smell of lake rotted the air.
Marlowe stilled.
Her mouth went dry, bleeding for a taste.
She needed to taste the rot, feel it string on her tongue and clog her throat. She needed it once more, and then she could focus on killing Heather. She needed to taste Pike.
Fingers trembling, Marlowe brought her hand to her mouth, tongue flicking across the fluid leaking from circular teeth marks. Molded fruit, carried on the leatheryslip of an earthworm’s belly. Bloated slick of a fish tossed ashore. Decay webbing the inside of her mouth.
Marlowe swallowed a moan and worked her other hand viciously, wetness soaking through to the floor. She bit and sucked at her palm, fragile skin greasy under her tongue, her lips. Rot dripped and flesh wedged in her teeth.
Acid fumes burned at her nose and lungs and each breath came in short, labored gasps. Marlowe mouthed words against her palm, begging, the muscles in her left hand spasming as the tendons in her right flexed under her teeth.
Pressure built in the pit of her stomach, fueled by fragmented memories of Pike, her hands on Marlowe, her tongue down her throat—
Marlowe shuddered, knees falling apart, cresting.
Acid sizzled on the tile.
Then again, and pinpricks of pain stabbed through her socked feet.
Marlowe’s eyes snapped open.
Webbed hands gripped the tub’s edge. Pike, golden eyes blazing and cutting through Marlowe’s black-spotted vision, slopped acid on the floor as they crawled toward her.
She tipped back from the brink. Her cunt throbbed, empty, as Marlowe scrabbled back. Drawer handles cut into her back.
Vision faded, spots overlapping. Her sight blared back to full color.
Pike dragged a line of festering, sick-green acid behind her. Waterlilies clogged the drain, roots cracking at the foundation and reaching for Marlowe, curling around her ankles like the panic binding her chest.
A rasping sound thrummed in the air between them. Marlowe’s breathing. Desperate, wanting.
