She speaks of love. His sweet doctor slavers, licks her teeth; she pulls his long-fingered hand to her breast, begging for transgression, and she speaks of love. The flesh is so soft beneath his palm, tender, slick with blood. He grunts, breathing flame into the split skin of her back, fingers slipping as they dig into her skin. Where lies the limit of love and ravishment, of his giving to her, and she taking from him? Where lies the limit between a man and an animal? The hunter does not know, and he cannot ask. His face is buried in her wounds, her blood in his mouth, in his eyes, a wolf snarling into his white-boned feast. Every mouthful swallowed is a brand new pyre.
It is too late for it, his man-half; now he can give only of a lesser self. A better man would not be here, he would think, if he were still capable of such a thing, would not be as he is now, curled over Miriam’s pale body like a gnarled claw, no more his sweet doctor but mere beast-mate, pliant pound of flesh, less union than violence. That man would have fought back, would have exterted the power of reason, banished animal pulsion. His cock presses insistently against the ravaged small of her back. And she speaks of love.
The hand Miriam has wrapped around her breast kneads hungrily, goaded by her own trembling fingers. The other roves haphazard and indecent down her ribcage to squeeze at her waist, then around to her stomach, that pale chalice where sits her divine power. Drink from me, it says, not a whisper or an invitation but an order howled moonward, one Oswald cannot think to refuse. He can no more accept: the hunter is beyond words and thoughts.
Still, he answers her. Oh, he bears her love, and much more. He bears her devotion, worship, hunger, need. She will bear something for him, too, and its name might be love, and it might be fear, and it might be seed.
And if she wishes for him to eat, so he shall, unhindered and uninhibited. Her hands have unshackled him, let loose the creature he had since managed to repress. The moon will watch; the moon will bathe him as he eats of her with man’s want and with Oedon’s teeth, on and on, until she is bones, until it is done.
Closer, she must be closer, she must be within, his arms about her frail form do not suffice to make them as one and set things right. Fangs sink into the meat of her throat, too sharp, too many, and the noise he huffs against her skin is hoarse and primal, the sound of forgetting one’s name. His tongue presses into the wounds he has punctured as though they were her lips - he wants her mouth, pulls her jaw into his that he may slot his own lips over hers. He wants her cunt. His bony fingers scramble for purchase on bloodslick skin when he presses her into him, heedless of her pain. She has forgotten everything of it; the arteries that pulse against his tongue do so only with lust for flesh - for his flesh. He will drive them to bursting, her veins, when he swallows her heart. The ichor they carry will sate him just as his own will fill her.
He does not wish he were a better man.
