Me and the Devil: A Novel by Nick Tosches

poetry that were held by a magnet to the side of my refrigerator. I knew that she would ask me about them. I embraced her from behind, put one hand over her mouth and the other on her belly. I pressed her to me. Her buttocks felt good against me. I kissed the downy little hairs and skin on the back of her neck and slid my hand down the front of her pants, feeling her silky panties and, through them, the tussock beneath. I worked my hand farther, and she squeezed it with her thighs. I could feel hot breath from her nostrils on my fingers. She began to nibble and lick at them with darts of her tongue. I unbuttoned and unzipped her pants, moved my hand into her panties, then into her. I peered over her shoulder down the front of her sweater to the hidden flesh and shadow of her breasts in white lace, and farther, to the movement of my hand in her open pants.
    She lay naked in my bed, her lower lip between her teeth, her legs spread, her eyes probing mine. Her labia were swollen andwet, rosy pink and glistening. I slipped the head of my cock, no more, into her and dallied a bit. She let loose her lip and breathed from deep within. I dimmed the light, grasped her hips, laid my head between her legs and stared at her hand on herself in the obscuring dark. I ran my fingers, then my tongue along the inside of her upper right thigh, which was unmarked, very close to the scent of her and the muffled accelerating sound of her hand. I opened my mouth, and I sank my teeth and tore. She exhaled with violence, like an ecstasy of storm wind through trees.
    I felt a sudden thick rushing gush of blood that filled my mouth and would not be stopped. Even as I closed my hand over it, the blood rushed through my fingers. We scrambled to our feet in alarm. There was blood everywhere. And still it gushed.
    I wrapped a towel around her thigh, tied the belt from my robe tightly above it. Nothing. The blood flooded and spurted wildly from her. She was pale unto fainting.
    Saint Vincent’s had been shut. I wouldn’t bring a dog to New York Downtown. I called Lenox Hill, told them to send an ambulance. No cab would take us the way she was bleeding.
    “What did you do to her?” the doctor asked me in a tone that accused.
    “I bit her too hard,” I said matter-of-factly. I did not look away from him. “She likes to be bitten. But I bit her too hard.”
    “You severed her femoral artery,” he said. “You could have killed her.” The doctor shook his head slowly.
    They wanted to keep her there awhile after stitching her up. She needed more blood. I went out for a smoke, then went back in to be with her. She looked away from the blood going into her through the catheter in her arm. For a few moments she looked away from me. I stood there.
    “They asked me if I want to press charges,” she said.
    I said nothing. I knew that if she were thinking of pressingcharges, she wouldn’t have told me this. Not the way she did, anyway. I put my hand on her arm and kissed her forehead.
    She later told me that they also asked her if she wanted counseling. She told me that she had thought about it. She told me that she was still thinking about it.
    Her color returned. She began to smile again, to laugh again. I enjoyed buying good wine for her. I wondered if, pouring it unseen and telling her nothing about it, she would find the bottle of Cheval Blanc I had hidden away for her to be special in any way. I wondered what might have happened if I had killed her.
    I thought often of that terrible night in the days and weeks that followed. When I did, a shiver went down my spine and my eyes sometimes closed. That first reinvigorating billow of blood that had filled my mouth and overrun my chin and chest was like nothing I had ever known or imagined. The dangerous rush of blood from her artery had been for me a rush of life. After the events of that night and its aftermath had passed, I felt physically stronger than I had felt in years, and I enjoyed a sense of calm