Chapter 8: Shared Appetite
Joaquin took the path through the treeline at a near-run, the wet ground sucking at his boots, and by the time the shack swam up out of the dark he was breathing hard enough to feel his own pulse in his throat. He had expected to find it black and cold. Instead a wedge of light leaked through the crooked door, and a thin, rhythmic sound reached him before he opened it, steel drawn slow across stone, over and over, the hiss of it steady as a metronome.
He pushed the door open with two fingers.
Marnie knelt on the rotting floorboards with her back to him, auburn curls loose down her spine, and she did not turn around. Her hand moved the whetstone in patient strokes along the edge of her paring knife. Beyond her, on the far side of the room, a woman lay on her side with her wrists and ankles bound behind her, mouth gagged with a strip of someone's shirt, hair fanned across a stain the boards had been carrying for longer than either of them had been coming here. The woman's eyes were closed. The shallow rise and fall of her ribs said she was still in the world.
"You're late," Marnie said, still not turning.
Joaquin let the door creak shut behind him. He straightened, undid the top button of his shirt, and felt the night air settle over his skin like a hand. "Traffic," he said. "Vera wanted dinner. I waited until she was asleep, then I took the long loop around the creek so no one would see me leave the yard."
"Good."
He walked a slow arc until he could see the woman's face. She was young, maybe twenty-six, with a gym-toned build gone slack now, and the dried salt tracks of tears in the dust on her cheeks. He had never met her. That made his chest warm. "Who is she?"
"A snatcher." Marnie tested the edge against her thumbnail. A curl of skin lifted and she wiped the blade across the leather of her skirt. "Thursday. The plaza by the library. She had a stroller in one hand and a baby in the other, and she was walking fast because the mother had turned her back for maybe forty seconds to pay a vendor. I saw the whole thing from the folding table. I followed the stroller to the parking garage and caught her three cars down before she could buckle the child into a car seat she had already lined with a blanket."
"And the baby?"
"Back in the mother's arms before she ever knew to scream. I told her the woman had made a mistake, that the stroller looked like hers. Everyone smiled." Marnie finally turned, and the candlelight caught the freckles scattered across her nose like she had been sprinkled with something. She looked, as she always did in this place, entirely at home. "I told the police nothing. Why would I? They would only have put her in a room with a lawyer and a bail hearing. This way is cleaner."
Joaquin crouched across from her and folded his hands over his knees. The woman's breath hitched, a small animal sound, and one of her eyelids twitched. Still under. For now. "You could have finished it hours ago," he said. "You had all day. You didn't need me."
"No."
"So why didn't you?"
Marnie set the knife down on a folded rag and sat back on her heels. She looked at him the way she looked at a pie crust just before it went in the oven, checking for the thin places. "Because I've eaten alone for twelve years," she said. "Every single one of them. And then you came along and ruined it, and now it tastes like nothing by myself. I wanted this one shared." She tipped her head toward the floor. "I wanted to see your face when she goes."
Something moved through him that had no clean name. He reached out and brushed a curl of hair back from the woman's cheek, and the touch made her stir, a low moan working its way around the gag. Joaquin's pulse climbed. He had been starving all night. Had been starving since the gala, since the black car, since the look Marnie had given him across that bloody mouth of hers. Now the meal was on the floor in front of him and it had been saved for two.
"Can I tell you something?" he said, and rose, and began to work the buckle of his belt loose.
"Sure," Marnie said, watching him with idle curiosity.
He let the leather slide through the loops and coiled it once around his fist, not tight, just a comfort. "Normally I like to break them before I kill them. It makes watching the life leave their eyes much more satisfying."
Marnie's brow furrowed, honest and open. "I don't know what you mean."
"Here. Let me show you." He dropped to his knees beside the woman and took the gag out of her mouth with two fingers, slow, careful, like a man unwrapping something he did not want to tear. The woman's lids fluttered. Her eyes rolled, tried to focus, drifted. Then they found Marnie, and everything in her body seized at once.
"You!" She thrashed against the ropes so hard the chair leg of nothing under her scraped the floor. "You, I told you I was sorry, I promised, I promise I'll never do it again, please don't hurt me, please, I've got a little boy at home, please, I'll do anything, I said I was sorry."
Joaquin caught her chin and turned her face to his, gentle as a nurse. "Oh, don't worry about her just yet. I'm Joaquin. I'm here to help you."
Her breath came in shallow gulps. "Help me? Help me how?"
"Well, first I'm going to untie you, but you have to promise not to run."
"Why would I promise that?"
"Because you see the lady you met earlier over there?" He nodded at Marnie, who had picked the knife back up and did not look confused so much as insulted at being spoken of in the third person. "She has a knife, and she runs cross country for fun. When she inevitably catches you and drags you back in here, you'll be dealing with her. Not me."
The woman's gaze flicked between them, back and forth, measuring. She decided. "Fine. I promise."
"Smart choice." He worked the knots loose. Blood rushed back into her wrists and she flexed her fingers, and for one breath he could see her weighing it, the door, the dark, the run. She looked at Marnie's knife and did not move. "Now that you're untied, take off all of your clothes. Bare ass, please."
"What? I thought you were going to help me."
"I am. After you help me."
"Are you going to rape me?"
"God, no." He sounded genuinely wounded by the question. "Please, no more questions. Just do what you're told. That's your only job right now."
Her eyes swept the floor and found a bottle, green glass, half full of something that had stopped being drinkable years ago. She lunged for it and broke it against the wall and turned the jagged neck on Joaquin, and Marnie was already moving to put herself between them before Joaquin simply shook his head at her, once, with a small smile, and she stopped where she was.
He turned back to the woman, still smiling, and closed his hand around the broken end of the bottle until the glass opened his palm in four neat lines. The blood ran down his wrist and dripped to the boards and he barely looked at it. He leaned in to the woman's ear.
"You've got some fight in you. I like that." The breath of it moved the hair at her temple. "Now strip."
The bottle dropped. She took off her clothes while she cried without sound, hiccuping little sobs that never became words, and when she was done she stood there shaking with her arms crossed over herself. "Good," he said. "Now lie down and spread your legs."
She did as she was told. Joaquin watched her knees fall open on the dirty floor and he could feel his own mouth watering, his cock filling, but he did not reach for her. Not yet. "Now you're going to make yourself come over and over again until your hand cramps. Then I'll take over until you're little more than a puddle on the floor. And please, do not bullshit me. Your life truly depends on it."
She nodded and did it, and Marnie understood then, watching from her corner with her knife loose in her fingers, exactly what he had meant by breaking a thing before you killed it. The only question was how long it would take.
Fifteen minutes in, the woman's hand was cramping and she had peaked only three times. Both of them could see she was sensitive, her thighs quivering, her voice gone high and thin. Joaquin did not speak. He simply knelt and put his hand where hers had been, and kept his eyes on her face, and did not look away once.
Another thirty minutes and she was a sobbing wreck. Seven times. Seven, and he had not put anything inside her. Her clit was rubbed raw and bleeding a little and no amount of kicking or punching or scratching bought her a second's pause. Marnie stood and walked the perimeter of the room and came back and stood and watched, and somewhere under the revulsion she recognized the feeling twisting in her gut for what it was, and hated it. She did not want the woman dead because she was filth. She wanted her gone because Joaquin was looking at her like that.
"For the love of god, please stop," the woman wept. "I can't take any more. I can't."
"Come here, Marnie." Joaquin's voice was thick and quiet. "Watch this."
Marnie crossed the floor and knelt at the woman's other side. The snatcher's mind was long gone now, run off somewhere behind her eyes, and all that was left on her face was the ruin of sensation: ecstasy, haze, regret, pleading, all of it at once, all of it for nobody. She was beginning to climb again against her own will, a shudder running through her from the jaw down.
"She's about to come again," Joaquin said, and his eyes came up and found Marnie's across the woman's heaving chest. "Do you want to do the honors?"
"Of course." Marnie's hand tightened on the knife until the handle pressed a line into her palm.
The woman crested with a cry torn out of the bottom of her, and Marnie drew the blade across her throat in one clean stroke, the way she had once taught herself to score the top of a pie.
Blood sheeted up and out and sprayed them both across the face and chest, hot and bright, and Marnie held her there through the last shudder, watching the life leave her eyes the way Joaquin had promised it would be, and it was everything he had said. When the woman was still and the blood had gone from pulsing to seeping, their eyes found each other over the body.
Faces slicked red, mouths parted, chests rising and falling hard, they looked at each other and neither of them smiled. What moved between them had nothing at all to do with the itch.
The blood ran down the hollow of Marnie's throat and gathered in the cotton of her collar, and she did not wipe it away. She stayed on her knees in it for a while, watching the last of the woman's color drain into the boards. The candle guttered, righted itself, and the room settled into the small creak and tick of old wood cooling.
"You were right," Marnie said, thick and breathy, like a woman surfacing from deep water. "That was more than satisfying."
"Mm." Joaquin flexed his cut palm, and the four lines across it had already stopped bleeding.
"Thank you. This one will have a special place in my mind."
"Why?"
She turned her head to look at him, and the blood on her freckles made the freckles look like something grown. "Because it was with you."
For a moment neither of them moved. The words sat in the air between them like something set down on a table, and Joaquin looked at her long enough that she could see him decide something.
He reached out and caught a stray curl where it had stuck to her cheek, blood tacky enough to hold it there. His fingers were warm. The touch was almost tender.
Her hand closed around his wrist.
"You shouldn't do that," she said.
"Why not?"
"Because I won't be able to stop myself."
"Neither will I."
She released his wrist and grabbed him by the throat and squeezed. It was not a warning. It was a grip she would have used on prey, thumb in the notch beneath his jaw, fingers closing off the blood before they bothered with the air. His breath cut off in a wet rasp against her palm, and his dark eyes went wide and bright and did not look away from hers, and he did not flinch, did not pull, did not lift a hand to stop her.
"Harder," Joaquin said, or tried to say, the word almost entirely gone under her hand.
She pulled him toward her by the throat and their mouths met and it was not gentle. It was the two of them slamming together the way they had slammed into the old man's wrists and into the snatcher's throat, only this time they were each of them holding the other's life instead of the meat on the floor. Her fingers stayed locked around his neck. His hands came up and closed on her waist and then on her ribs and then in her hair, blood and all, and dragged her in until there was no space left between them.
They went down onto the boards beside the body and did not care that the body was there. Marnie's knee came down in the pooled blood and the wet sound of it did not register. She bit his lower lip and tasted copper she could not attribute to him or to the woman, and he groaned into her mouth and rolled them so she was under him and his weight pressed the air out of her, and his throat was free now but his hand had found her jaw instead and was holding her so his mouth could work down her throat, her collarbone, over the ruined collar of her blouse.
Her nails raked down his back through the thin cotton of his shirt and opened lines of their own, and he arched into the pain instead of away from it, a sound coming out of him that was pure gratitude. That was when she understood that with him it would always be like this, the giving and the taking fused at the root, and that she had spent twelve years killing alone and calling it satisfaction because she had not known what the word meant.
He kissed her again. She bit his lip harder this time and held him there until he made the sound again, and then she hooked a heel around his thigh and used her weight to turn them and put herself on top so his throat was back under her hand.
"Don't you dare be gentle," she said.
"I wouldn't know how."
She laughed, low, into his mouth, and he laughed back, and the laughing turned into something else, and the candle burned down, and the shack did what shacks do. It held them.
Somewhere past the boarded windows the dark got a shade paler, and the room went the color of iron, and Marnie's forearm gave out and she lay on her back on the floor with her chest going and Joaquin sprawled half over her, both of them streaked and bloodied and stinking of it, and the body cooling a few feet away like a coat somebody had taken off. The rotting boards under her shoulder had a nail head in them and she could feel it digging in, and she did not move. Neither did he. They lay there until the cold of the floor had seeped all the way through them and their breathing had slowed to something like normal.
"We can't leave her like this," Marnie said at last, to the ceiling.
"No."
"And we can't stay until morning. Vera."
"Vera can wait." He said it without heat, almost fondly, the way a man says the name of a dog that has stopped being able to bite. "I have time. She goes in for her surgery consult at eleven. She'll want me angry and meek when she gets home, so I'll be there, and I'll be both. She'll never ask where I was." He turned his head on the boards so his eyes found her. "You?"
"Hugh left a text at two. Something about a flight. He'll be gone until Thursday." Marnie sat up, slow, and looked at her hands, and flexed them. "I told him I was staying at the hotel." A small breath of a laugh escaped her, with no mirth in it. "He doesn't ask either."
"You should wash before you drive. There's a spring behind the shack." He got up, wincing as he straightened, and went to the far corner and came back with the same canvas bag he had brought the last time, dropping it at her feet. Inside were a pair of jeans, a dark green sweater, a towel, a bar of laundry soap, and a plastic bag for the clothes she was wearing. He had packed it before he left the house. He had known the whole night how it would end.
Marnie looked at the bag, and then at him, and set her jaw.
"You planned this," she said.
"I hoped for it." He crouched and turned the body onto its back and started to fold the arms over it, crossing the wrists the way he had crossed the old man's. "There's a difference. I pack the bag every time. I never once needed it until the night you showed up in my house with a paring knife and no story."
She considered that. She pulled the sweater out of the bag and unfolded it against herself, and it was her size, and she looked at him again and decided not to say anything about that.
"I'll do the hands," she said, and knelt and took one of the woman's arms from him. Together they worked the limbs into position, wrists crossed, ankles crossed, and laid her at the far wall where the stain was deepest, and there was no particular care in it, but there was no carelessness either. There was the sort of exactness two people use when they have agreed, without ever saying so, to be good at the same thing.
They dug the grave in the soft ground behind the treeline, under the pines where the roots would take the body fast and the winter would erase the mark of it. Joaquin did most of the digging and Marnie widened the trench with her hands, and by the time they had her in the ground and the lye poured over her, a fine white layer that hissed faintly in the damp, both of them were covered to the elbow in cold clay. Marnie smoothed the last of the earth with the flat of her forearm the way she finished the top of a pie, and neither of them said a word to bless it. There was nothing here worth blessing.
Joaquin straightened, wiped his hands down his thighs, and offered her his palm.
"Come on," he said. "Let's get cleaned up before we head back."
Marnie looked at his dirty hand for a second, then took it. His grip was warm and closed all the way around hers, and he led her around the back of the shack to the spring. It welled up at the base of a granite shelf and ran off in a thin creek, and the water was so cold it looked black. Moonlight came through the branches in scraps and laid a moving skin of silver on the surface.
Joaquin let go of her hand and started on his buttons. Marnie watched him for one heartbeat and then turned her back and did the same.
She kept her eyes on the ground and her hands busy. Boots first. Then the ruined blouse, stiff where the woman's blood had dried in it, and she folded it and set it aside on a rock. The sweater went on the rock too, kept clean. Then the jeans, which had blood at the knee, and the underwear, which she did not look at twice. She could hear him behind her, the rustle of cotton and the small grunt he gave when he peeled the shirt off his cut hand. Neither of them turned.
Marnie walked into the water first.
It took the breath out of her. Cold climbed up her shins and into her knees and then her hips, and she went in to the waist, then the ribs, then her shoulders, until the water sat at her neck. She let it sting. She put her head under once and came up and raked her fingers back through her hair, and it came away smelling of iron and pond mud.
Only then did she turn around.
Joaquin stood at the edge with his clothes in a heap at his feet, and he was not looking at the water or the moon or the trees. He was looking at her. The blood on his chest had dried in a long streak down from his collarbone and his cut palm was open at his side, and his cock stood away from his body, harder than it had been on the floor of the shack, full and dark in the cold air.
Marnie rested her hands on the surface of the water and let him look.
"Come in," she said. "Or are you just going to stand there all night?"
"The view from here is gorgeous."
"Thank you. But you'll catch your death out there if you don't come and wash up."
"Well," Joaquin said, and stepped off the bank, "I will die a happy man."
The water took him to the chest and he sucked a breath through his teeth, but he did not stop until he was close, closer than the spring required, and Marnie had made room at the deep end and he ignored all of it to stand in her space. His knees brushed her knees. His breath was on her forehead. The cold had already tightened his skin all over and Marnie could see every line of the cut palm where it hung at his side in the water.
She picked up the soap off the submerged ledge and worked up a lather in her hands and put them on his chest.
Neither of them said anything about it. She washed him slowly. The dried blood came off in dark ribbons and sank in the water around them, and her palms moved over his sternum and his shoulders and down the ridge of his ribs and back up, and it was more than the job needed by a long way, and she did not stop. He stood still and let her do it with his chin lifted and his eyes on her face.
When she had his chest clean she took his cut hand out of the water and turned it over, and washed the four lines in his palm with her thumb, and he made a low sound in his throat and closed his fingers around hers.
His turn. He took the soap from her and lathered his hands and started at her throat. Her pulse moved against his palm. He washed the blood out of the hollow at the base of her neck and then down the slope of her shoulder and then across her collarbone, and his hands were unhurried, and every pass took a little longer than the pass before it. She stood in the black water under the pines and let him. When his hand came up and cupped the back of her neck to wash the blood out of her hair, she tipped her head into it instead of away.
He rinsed her hair with water wrung out of his own hand. The soap ran down into her eyes and stung and she did not blink.
"Turn around," she said.
He did. She soaped his back and his spine and the long lines her nails had opened in the cotton, now just raised welts that the cold water had closed. She washed his shoulders and the back of his neck and the soft place behind his ear, and when she was done with him he turned back around and pulled her in.
She went. Her arms came up around his neck and his came around her waist and they stood chest to chest in the cold with their foreheads pressed together, breathing the same sour air, and the water moved around them in slow rings. His nose touched her nose. Her thighs came up on either side of his hips and locked there under the surface, and his hands slid down to hold her where she was, one at the small of her back and one low on her ass, and neither of them moved for a while except to breathe.
"We should get back now," she said.
"We should," he said.
Then she felt it. The tip of him, hard and blunt and warm against the inside of her thigh, and it was him and it was not her imagination, and he was bigger than she had expected him to be.
"Is that a gun in your pocket," Marnie said against his mouth, "or are you just happy to see me?"
"I don't have pockets."
She laughed, quiet, and he laughed back, and their breath went into each other's mouths. Then he kissed her, and she kissed him, and that was the end of the joke.