Page 18 of Love Her Ruin
And Vincent…
He's here.
This Vincent is between a woman’s legs, his body hammering into hers. His shirtsleeves are rolled to the elbows, his pants bunched around his ankles. Each thrust is a vicious, full-body slam that shakes the dining room table the woman lies on, the legs screeching against the tile. He's fucking her with a mechanical, relentless rhythm, the sound wet and tearing.
The woman on the table isn't me. It’s not his dead wife, Evelyn, either.
I make myself look. That's the price of admission to a place like this, the toll the dream space charges for entry. She's young and blonde like I used to be. Her wrists are zip-tied to the table legs above her head, her mouth is taped, and her eyes are open and awake and so far past terror they've come out the other side into something blank and animal.
I don’t know her because she's not real. She's a composite, the sum of every woman Vincent has ever done this to stitched together by his sleeping mind into a single body he can fuck forever.
And he's humming.
He'shumming.
The rage that rises in me is so clean it feels like grace. Something cold. Something with edges.
Vincent hasn't noticed me yet. In the dream, he's the dreamer, and I'm the intruder, and the rules here are mine to bend. This is my territory now, not his.
My bare feet leave the floor. My body rotates, slowly, until I am inverted. My black hair hangs toward the tile like a curtain of ink.
I walk along the ceiling toward him. Each step leaves a footprint, the same bloody-looking prints that climbed the walls of my house.
"Vincent." My voice drops down on him.
He freezes. The humming stops mid-note, and then he turns and looks around.
Then he looks up.
The sound he makes is smaller than a scream, more involuntary, a choked, wet intake of breath. His body jerks backward so hard that the table with the woman on it scrapes all the way to the wall.
His eyes lock on me. “Why areyouhere?”
"Because I want to talk about what you are," I say. “But put your sad little dick away first.”
The dream carries my voice, lets every splinter of wood hear the sound of the woman he raped.
His pupils dilate. His breath stops.
At his silence, at his stillness, I let the cold fire out.
It leaves me in a slow exhalation. It changes our surroundings so that we’re in the church again, but we’re both still locked in our dreams. My breath of winter frosts the pews and crystallizes the holy water in the font and sheets the stained glass in a skin of ice that cracks each painted saint across the face. The temperature in the church plummets, and Vincent's breath clouds.
He tries to stand and finds that the pew has grown around him, the wood softening and flowing up over his thighs, his hips, locking him in place like a man set in amber.
"What…? This is a dream." He thrashes, but the pew holds him. “I can wake up.”
"Go ahead." I spread my hands. The shadows beneath my skin surface, coiling around my wrists and fingers in slow, dark ribbons that catch the stained-glass light and eat it. “Try.”
He squeezes his eyes shut. The effort ripples across his face, the concentration of a man trying to force himself awake through sheer will. His eyelids flutter. His jaw clenches. A vein pulses in his temple.
Nothing happens.
"You’re not safe anywhere, are you?" I tilt my head. The movement feels wrong, feels like my neck bent farther than it should, and I see him register the wrongness, see the first crack of real terror spread across his face as I draw closer, leaving footprints on the frozen ground in my wake. "How does it feel? How does it feel to know that you’re the prey now?"
I step closer. The stone aisle narrows to bring me to him.
His eyes pop open again, wide and terrified. “What do you want?”
