I kissed your forehead and pulled a small velvet box from my coat pocket. I let the metal and diamonds inside steam for a minute, my heart racing through my chest like a thousand wild horses. Looking to the sky, I quietly repeated your name until it was tattooed on the edge of my lips.

I asked you a question and you didn’t say a word, only smiled and wrapped your arms around me. I could feel the hot sting of your tears on the back of my neck, each droplet of salt and water pelting my skin like rain from heaven.

“The road only starts here,” you said.

We kissed for what felt like days, maybe weeks. Stars invaded the night sky and exploded in single pops of glitter and light. I wrapped a blanket around us, breaths from our weary lungs rising to the air like murmurs from a ghost.

You put your head on my shoulder and told me we’d live forever.

We’d live forever.

*

Fingernails scrape the wooly edges of a blanket much older than me. I manage to raise an arm to the air, force my knees to bend at the joint with a squeaky pop. The voices have been gone for far too long to believe I’m alive but every few seconds the talking head on the television set spits out a clip or phrase that I recognize. Echoes ring in my head, leftover thoughts from a life before my own. I finally sit up and immediately feel the tinge of pain in my back. With a quick motion I flop over to my side, the television in full view. I’m in a hotel room, tacky carpets and curtains that were dropped straight out of the seventies. Whoever knocked me out and dragged me took off my socks and shoes and the carpet feels like a million rogue needles on my soles.

I try to stand up but fall off the bed in slow motion, unrelenting slam of my thigh to the ground. A quick flash of red and my leg throbs, section of flesh where the bullet penetrated now breathing with a shock of pain. Another college try and I’m on my feet, hands scraping the edge of the wall for support. The two figures once floating above me are gone, the only trail left behind a dying light in the corner of the room and an infomercial touting a rotisserie oven. Glow from the television burns my eyes. I lean over and flip the OFF knob, immediate silence filling the room like someone popped my eardrums with a crowbar.

My legs are two wobbly strings of jelly. Each step is that of a child, slow and unwitting. A sliver of light from the bathroom slices my shadow in half and in a few seconds I swing open the door, catch a view of a man in the mirror that looks nothing like me. His beard is scraggly, like that of a dead lion. Eyes are two solemn drops of brown. I wave at the man and he waves back.

A silver reflection radiates from the corner of the sink before I realize that my two captors left a long knife under the rogue droplets of hotel bathroom water. I ignore it for a second, instead turn the cold water knob and give my face a healthy icy splash. It wake me up, the bathroom’s ugly walls now more apparent, the outlines of a dozen dead souls carved into the aging beige plaster. It’s now I realize who I am, what’s brought me to this one place where time stops. I remember Jenna and walking in the city sometime during night, coffee with the detective and a lurching shadow pouncing on me like I was a dying kitten.

A long stream of headlights flash into the room through the thin layer of curtains. It startles me and without thinking I grab the handle of the knife and grip it so tightly that it bonds with my skin. My body is tired but I’m not doing to die here, I’m not going to let my life end without knowing where Jenna is, what she’s been doing for the past six months. The bathroom doorknob is golden and cold. I pull it lightly towards me, let it close and leaving only an inch of rogue hotel light.

The hotel room door opens with a creak, like I’m in a haunted house at a Halloween amusement park. Footsteps graze the carpet with a solemn march before I can hear the person’s breaths only a few feet away. Trails of smoke line the dying light between my body and the bathroom door, familiar scent of cigarettes and sweat. The figure pushes open the door with a quick motion and before I know it I swing the knife with my right hand, plunging it deep into a mound of flesh and bone. Blood spills from the figure like a broken geyser, fizzy spouts of red exploding from the new wound in its chest.

I realize now that the figure is a man, fire of pure rage hidden behind the deepest green of his eyes. Deep breaths and I’ve fallen to the tiled floor, eyes closed and toes stretching so far that they might pop the tendons connecting them to my feet. The man takes dying breath after dying breath before time speeds up again. I’ve just planted a knife into a complete stranger and somehow it feels right. His chest heaves in and out like an angry gorilla, blood now nothing more than a layer of crimson decorating his white t-shirt and blue jeans.

His eyes say a silent prayer, sweet slivers of green darting from side to side as if examining me for scars. I rest my head against the bathroom wall, try to force myself to wake up. This is all too real, a living nightmare that clings to my skull like rotten honey. I reach over and feel the man’s wrist. Surprisingly, he doesn’t pull away and I can tell that he only has a few heartbeats left before he joins the army of the dead.

“Who are you?” I ask, hoping that his eyes will answer for me.

Silence and blood, agonal breaths heralding death from afar.

“Tell me,” I whisper. “Tell me.”

The dying man shakes his head, maybe at me and maybe at my shadow dancing across the bathroom wall.

“Why am I here?”

Nothing.

“Why did you bring me here? Why?” My voice is nothing but an echo bouncing off the four lonely walls of the bathroom. “Why?”

The man looks at me with the look of desperation, the look that transposes time and space. He shakes his head, hand reaching up the sky as if hoping to catch a hanging rope to heaven. With a seeming last burst of life and energy, he pulls the knife out of his chest and tosses it to the floor. It jingles with a tiny boom. A smile finds its way across his face, two rows of stained teeth finding comfort in death. I edge closer to his body, hands gripping the bathroom sink before I find myself standing above him in his last moments on this earth.

The man points at me, blood caked between his fingernails. He opens his mouth for final words before the life in his eye dissipates into a milky cloud.

“You’ll never find her.”

Christopher J. Dwyer is a noir writer who calls Boston his home. His work has appeared in Twisted Tongue Magazine, Pendulum, Colored Chalk, Red Fez, Shalla Magazine, New Horizons, Gold Dust Magazine, Nefarious Muse, and Sex and Murder. His stories have also appeared in several fiction anthologies, including Fried! Fast Food, Slow Deaths, End of Days: An Apocalyptic Anthology, Dead Worlds 5, and more. He can be reached through his official website: www.christopherjdwyer.com. His new novel, When October Falls, is due this spring from Brown Paper Publishing.

When October Falls can be pre-ordered here.

We’re the only bodies on the street this late at night. Jenna looks over and her eyes glimmer with a gray glow. Her fingers find mine and she pulls my hand to the air. Dimples collude in her porcelain face, and I’m afraid that a kiss will crack her skin into a thousand dusty pieces. We reach a set of red brick stairs and she’s the first one to take flight, jet black flats scampering with loud scratches across every step. I follow and take slow steps until I’m standing next to her. The front door of the building is as brown as week-old vomit. She turns the doorknob with a smile and motions for me to follow her.

“Are you tired?” She bites her lower lip.

I raise my eyebrows and wonder what she’ll look like with my cock in her mouth. “Not at all.”

She swishes the blonde locks out of her face, golden strands of hair as curled as the wings of a dead baby swan. She starts up the inner flight of stairs and I follow behind. Her ass sways in tight black jeans, a hypnotic swing that almost makes me trip over my own feet. She reaches the second floor before me and fumbles for keys in her tiny red leather purse. It takes her a few minutes to find the right one.

“I had a great time,” she says, swinging open the apartment door. She tosses her purse on a small wooden stool and flips on the living room lamp.

I nod. “Me too.” Her apartment smells like a funeral home.

She unzips her jacket, slides her thin pale arms out of the sleeves. Three koi fish are tattooed on her left arm. The ink looks fresh, as if the slimy creatures are going to jump off her skin and into the kitchen sink. Jenna lights a cigarette and offers me one. I slip it between dry lips and let her light its tip.

The rest of the apartment is dark, like she can’t afford to pay the electric bill. She turns off the living room lamp and walks into the dreary shadows where I can’t see her. The bedroom light surges on and Jenna’s leaning against the doorframe, tiny pink tongue licking her lips. My hand slithers around her waist and I pull her into me. She smells like paint thinner and chrysanthemums. I part her lips for a kiss but she turns away and hops on the bed. I close the door behind me and the noise is like a coffin slamming shut.

I kneel at the edge of the bed, watch Jenna slip off her tank-top. I place my cigarette at the edge of the nightstand and a revolver of smoke circles the moonlight seeping into the room. My jacket tossed behind me, I kick off my shoes as she unbuckles my belt. She forces me to my back, velvet sheets as smooth as fresh soap. Her kisses are sudden and sweet. The broken edges of her hair tickle my face. She pushes against my crotch with hers and I can see the supple remnants of bite marks on her neck from past suitors. I can remember when we first met and I never pictured myself with her on top of me.

Jenna likes soft-core porn and strawberry ice cream and had lived in the city only a couple years. Her mascara was as green as broccoli stems and I couldn’t help but fall in love in a matter of seconds.

She sits up and lies next to me. “Do it to me like you did with the others. I need it.”

I wince and close my eyes. “I told you before, Jenna. No.”

“Please.” Her voice is calm, like an ocean before a comet strikes its surface and sends a tidal wave across the coast.

“You don’t know what it’s like, Jenna. I was in that meeting for a reason.”

Her fingers massage the tip of my cock. “I’ve dreamed about it, Bryan. The feeling, I’ve heard it’s like a black orgasm. Like shooting fire into your veins.”

Vision fades in and out and I can finally figure out the reason why I’m here. My finger casually drifts from around her head to her panties, tip finding a small river of desire. She wants this more than anything in the world but I can’t do it for her. “No. No. Not going to fucking happen.”

Plump red lips are wrapped around the head of my cock, tongue forcing shockwaves of pleasure throughout my legs. She switches the motion to her right hand. “I want it, Bryan. Please…”

I didn’t want it to come to this. When I met her at the meeting last week, I thought she might be different. Jenna wasn’t going to be one of the women that want to take it to the next level. She was supposed to be the one that kept the passion under control, the one who knew that a mind’s craving wasn’t always good for the body.

“Jenna…” My voice trails off, like my heart stopped beating.

She takes her hand off me and jumps off the bed. Jenna fishes a small black duffel bag from under the mattress frame. She drops it in front of me and looks at me with eyes that could make a man slit his own mother’s throat. “Open it,” she says. “I bought it yesterday.”

I pull up my pants, tight erection bending under my jeans. I zip open the bag and dig a hand into its interior. A wooden handle greets me and when I pull the object out it feels comfortable in my fingers, like putting on the baseball glove I played with in little league. The butcher knife gleams in the glow of a summer moon. It’s been months since I’ve held one and I would have never dreamed that the most beautiful woman in the city would ask me to do this to her.

Jenna’s legs find their way out her panties and she lays stomach-down on the bed. She holds out her left arm, pale flesh stuck out in the open air. “Do it now, Bryan. Now.”

I take a deep breath and walk over to the nightstand, stick the cigarette into my mouth. Nicotine coats my lungs like paint on nursery walls. In the past, I always made this quick. I never wanted the motions to last. Stories bruised and blue are permanently blazed into the back of my mind, like cigarette burns on film reels.

Jenna fingers herself, pastel heart of an ass planted out into the air. Each moan startles me, makes me want to drop the knife and run out of the room. “Bryan, please,” she says, grinding her teeth.

I step on the bed and lean over her, so close that I can smell the shampoo she used this morning to wash her golden hair. Knife handle firmly in my fingers, I hold it against my back while grabbing her left arm. “I’ve waited forever for this,” she says.

Fingernails as pink as a rabbit’s mouth dig into the bedsheets. Jenna continues to rub herself and at any moment she expects to experience something that she’s only dreamed of. Her wrist is tiny, like a child’s. I grip it as hard as I can and bring the knife down. It slices through with ease and a flower of blood shoots across the room like crimson rain. Jenna lets out an apocalyptic scream and flips over, waves of blood shooting from the stump where her left hand used to be connected. The whites of her eyes dissipate into a cloud of smoldering euphoria. I toss the knife to the other side of the bed and sit at the edge of the sheets, stare at the carpeted floor. White blankets look like someone slaughtered a cow and slept with the carcass.

Jenna wriggles in a mix of pain and pleasure beside me. She grabs my side with her only hand and tries to pull me closer to her. The wound bleeds profusely across her chest and abdomen. I give her a single bloody kiss. “Thank you,” she says, lips parted wide enough that her soul could escape.

I stand up and find my t-shirt and jacket. I pick up Jenna’s cordless phone, dial 911 and throw it next to her. I slip my arms into my jacket and slam the bedroom door behind me. Jenna’s bathroom is pure white, as if she’s never used it. Cold water flushes the panic out of my face. I raise my hand to the mirror and watch it tremble. I leave Jenna’s apartment hoping that one day she’ll call me again. I hop down the stairs, stopping at the front door to zip up my jacket. The night stars shudder and smile, like they know what I’ve done.

Christopher J. Dwyer is a writer from Boston. His work has appeared in such publications as Dogmatika, Troubadour 21, Twisted Tongue Magazine, Red Fez, Colored Chalk, Gold Dust Magazine, and various fiction anthologies. He can be reached through his official website: www.christopherdwyer.com.

The man closes his eyes.

“It’s too much for me, Bri,” he says. “I can’t sneak around anymore.”

The first of her tears falls and the man feel the thrush of a thousand knives in his heart. The sun begins to set behind him and he knows that if he doesn’t say another word, she’ll hold him until the last of her breaths.

“I’ve always loved you more than I loved him,” she says. “You know that. You can’t look me in the eye and tell me otherwise.”

He pulls her head into his chest and a waft of raspberry cream shampoo strikes him, memories of the morning, memories of his secret world. “Bri, she knows about us. She knows that this has been going on for as long as it has.”

The woman continues to cry. “I’ll leave him, leave this city. I have to be with you, baby.”

He stares ahead, the blue and green blur of passing cars. Standing on this sidewalk, the one where he so many times held her hand, he doesn’t want to leave. He doesn’t want to open the wound of life without her.

“I can’t keep living this way,” he says. “She wants all or nothing from me, Bri. What can I say to that? Do you want me to throw that part of my life away? Do you want me to live on the street, Bri? Tell me.”

She pushes the man away, places a hand across her forehead. Her migraine hints of despair, hints of the days and months and weeks that she thinks he’ll throw away. The woman stares at him.

“I wake up every fucking night next someone that I haven’t loved in years,” she says, “and I’m starting to think that’s what the rest of my life is going to be like.” She begins to walk away, the beginnings of the late spring breeze capturing her hair. The man stands in silence for a moment before running after her. He scoops an arm across her neck, the other around her waist, pulls her in and kisses the top of her ear.

“I don’t want it to be like that,” he says. They stand for three minutes, embracing the soft touch of anguish, hoping that neither will let the other go. He squeezes the cotton of her tank-top, then pats it down with his fingers. “I love you, Bri, more than anyone else than I’ve ever known. It won’t end tonight, I swear.”

She coughs, pulls away from the man, but he won’t let go. She frees herself and sits on the cold pavement of the sidewalk, legs crossed as she bites her fingernails. Small bits of orange polish broken between her teeth.

“I have that feeling in my chest,” she says after spitting part of her fingernail to the ground, “the one where it seems like my heart is burning. The one where even my dreams are on fire.”

The man grips the edge of the lamppost, pushes his back to its sturdy metal. “I’m not going home to her, Bri. Not when I’m feeling like this. Not when I know that I’m close to losing you forever.”

She shakes her head, pulls a finger out of her mouth. “If you really thought that way, we wouldn’t be here tonight. There’d be no struggle, no fighting. All I want is you and what I want isn’t going to happen.”

He peels the light green pieces of dry and cracked paint from the lamppost, squishes them between his fingers. “Bri, I love you. There’s nothing else I can say. It’s not just her that’s weighing on my mind. There’s someone else involved and it’s not an easy situation to deal with.”

She starts to cry again and all he can hear are her sobs, not even the brittle echoes of thunder sway him from seeing her break down. He rubs his hands together, green-tinted dust falling to the floor. The man kneels next to her and gently pulls her arm to his chest.

“I love my son, Bri,” he says. “He deserves a better life than I ever had. I can’t hurt him. I can’t let his life become an unstable mess.”

The woman swings herself over to him, falls into his grasp. “Sometimes I wish that I never met you,” she says. “Sometimes I think that life would be so much easier if I accepted being unhappy.”

The man nods then looks to the sky. “It’s going to rain soon.”

She ignores him, clutches the edge of his shirt. “I need you to do something for me,” she says. “It’s the only way this is going to work.”

He looks down at her, smears of purple mascara in two jagged lines on her cheeks. “No. I’m not even considering that again, Bri. That’s too fucking dangerous.”

He remembers the last time they talked about it, the red glow of a candle on the floor of her living room, an empty bottle of vodka on its side in the middle of the coffee table. The wool blanket pulled halfway over naked and pale body. He didn’t want to hear about it again, but he knew that it was only a matter of time before she brought it up.

She’s silent, picking at the fuzz on his sweater.

“We’d get caught, Bri, I know we would.” The man kisses her on the forehead, aware of the raindrops beginning to fall. “I don’t want to take that chance.”

She returns the kiss, gazes into his tired eyes. “You have to. It’s the only way we’re going to be together,” she says, both of her hands on his face. “I love you.”

He feels the rain beating down on them but doesn’t move. They sit on the sidewalk, wet and ready to give up everything, the storm of desperation raging overhead. He thinks about that night, the glow of the candle in her eyes. There’d be no other way.

“I have to do it,” he says. “I’m going to do it soon, Bri.”

She smiles and bites his bottom lip. “It’s the only way,” she says.

Christopher J. Dwyer is a noir writer from Boston. He can be reached through his official website: www.christopherdwyer.com.