Phillip moved fast. Faster than I think any of us could have gambled he’d go even with his quarterback history. With that much muscle, you expected to see the machinery move: his physique bunching for motion, creating momentum. But Phillip poured across the room: six gliding steps and Lin suddenly was pincered between him and a wall, head ricocheting from the impact.
“The fuck are you doing?” I shouted, lunging for Phillip’s arm.
He glared at me then. And his eyes were cold, so cold your heart would freeze in that blue.
“You’re right,” he said. Phillip, we all knew, had his universal script. “I’m above that.”
“But not above sleeping with someone else’s wife.” Lin collared his own neck with a hand and rubbed his Adam’s apple after Phillip had let him go, smile enduring as a bad habit.
“I didn’t sleep with Talia.”
“Sure,” said Lin, strolling out then—finally—and the house devoured his footsteps. Silence leaned into us, a conspiring friend. I looked up at Phillip. He stood stooped with two fists balled-up at his sides, teeth gritted, breath bleeding in trails.
“Hey.”
A sidelong look but no sound yet otherwise.
“Hey,” I said again. “The fuck was that?”
His rage began to slough as he spoke. “I don’t know. I lost my temper. That asshole does it to me all the time. I think I can keep my shit together but something about Lin just makes me want to punch a wall.”
Phillip wiped his tongue along the edge of a tooth, hands raised for me to see, the palms cut with half-moons from his nails.
“You know that’s what he’s like, though.”
“I don’t know how you put up with him.” Phillip kept going, his internal monologue, as always, so loud it couldn’t ever make space for collaboration. “He’s a piece of shit.”
“Is he right, though?”
“What?”
“Is he right?” I said, and the house breathed in, swallowing half the candles, making a mess of the dark. “About you and Talia.”
“You sound like you want it to be,” came the reply, too slow for it to be innocent of Lin’s insinuations, air filtered through Phillip’s teeth in a languid hiss. At least there was no more anger, that part of him thankfully exhumed. His countenance, badly lit, was grave but harmless.
“I don’t have an opinion on this.”
“Why’d you ask?”
“Because you nearly beat someone to death over it.”
“It didn’t have anything to do with that. Like I said, it’s just Lin gets under my skin.” He exhaled, tectonic in its release. “I should go apologize to him, though. You’re right. I don’t fucking know what came over me.”
I said nothing until Phillip’s footsteps died away, and then turned, and I— Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu.
A female voice, solicitous and sweet. Distantly, the brain stem screeched, stress hormones wailing at my motor system, demanding I run, run now, escape into the sanctuary of multiplicity, disappear into the waiting herd, do anything so long as I remove myself from probable harm, anything just go, go now.
But my limbs would not concede to their urging.
Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu.
She—I pictured a girl, smaller than me, younger, black hair pouring from a widow’s peak—repeated, this time with more insistence. I felt molars close over my earlobe, felt a tongue trace its circumference. Her breath was damp, warm.
Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu.
What. The word pebbled in my throat, cold and dead. Haltingly, head full of static, I lurched stiff-legged towards the mirror. This was a dream. This was not a dream. This was a haunting, a possession, and any second now, I’d cut my throat, the first casualty of the night.
After all, isn’t that the foremost commandment in the scripture of horror? They who are queer, deviant, tattooed, tongue-pierced Other must always die first. The slurred remnants of my consciousness chewed on the thought as my eyes slid across the mirror, my stomach clenched.
So many thoughts. None of them anything but a knee-jerk distraction.
I stared into the brass and there she was, Jesus fuck. Standing behind me, chin braced against my shoulder, arms laced around my waist. Fingers snarled in my shirt, their grip possessive. She was so close, yet somehow, I couldn’t make out her face.
No.
That wasn’t right.
My vision was just fine. It was my brain. My brain wouldn’t inventory its observations, would not process and sustain any memory of her face, retain anything but the red of her rosebud mouth, the lacquered black of her hair. Her hands moved. Her fingers sunk into the grooves between my ribs, squeezed. I gasped at the pressure and, in answer, she made animal noises, soothing and sweet. The light plunged through the gap between her lips, and there was only ink and the smell of vinegar, only black