The Better to Hold You by Alisa Sheckley Page A

girl?”
    “Mm,” I said, secure in his arms. After he fell asleep I touched myself between my slippery legs and conjured images stolen from my mother’s old movies: the pretty young witch, writhing in sensual panic with her wrists tied to a stake, as Satan moves in, glistening with red makeup.
    The magazines all tell you to be open and frank about what you want in bed, but this presumes a deeper confidence. I never felt completely certain of what Hunter loved in me. All I had to go by was his image of a young woman as self-possessed as a little nun.
    My mother used to say that she hoped the sex was good, as he was likely to treat me like crap in the near future. Which was why I couldn’t bring myself to ask her about the slave girl business now, even though I was dying to know: Did this mean Hunter was suddenly seeing me differently?
    Or did it mean he wasn’t seeing me at all?
SIX
    Eventually, I had to admit that there was something wrong. But it took me a while. Touch-drunk from all the unaccustomed contact, I found myself able to fall asleep and stay that way for the first time since early adolescence. Forget sleeping pills; I’d discovered the real cure for insomnia—sex-induced coma.
    Hunter started joking that it was usually the man who got tired out after making love. But I wasn’t so much physically exhausted as emotionally satiated. For once in my life, my brain didn’t kick into fretting mode the moment I lay down and closed my eyes. It was almost as though Hunter was taking me over by taking control—or maybe I was just learning to surrender.
    But gradually, I became aware that there was no one sleeping beside me. Hunter’s side of the bed was always empty when I went to sleep and unrumpled when I woke up. I saw signs of late-night feasting in the kitchen—dirty plates piled high in the sink, cardboard take-out containers in the garbage that hadn’t been there the night before. For years, Hunter and I had agreed that he wouldn’t bring meat into the apartment, but now he was binging after midnight on spare ribs and meatball grinders. To my sensitive nose, there was a faint, per sistent smell of dead flesh in our apartment, and even leaving the windows wide open didn’t eradicate it. When I complained, Hunter laughed and said he’d have to remember to leave the garbage outside our front door.
    He didn’t apologize for breaking our agreement, and I didn’t call him on it. I also didn’t ask him why he was suddenly less fastidious about his person, and mine. He no longer avoided making love to me when I had my period—in fact, he reveled in the slippery, transgressive feel of it. While I had to admit that I liked this aspect of his newfound earthiness, I was less thrilled with his new habit of showering only every two or three days. His shaving became erratic as well, and my husband’s dark stubble left red, raw marks on my face and inner thighs.
    At night, I began to have vivid dreams that I could never quite remember. I knew when I first woke up that I had been in the midst of some complex drama, but all the details bled away as I came fully awake. I had vague impressions, though. A night sky in the country, brilliant with stars, the moon a huge, glowing orb until a dark cloud passed over it. My husband, pressing me down on the bed as I whimpered in fear. Malachy in his white lab coat, holding up a half-dead cat and instructing Sam, Lilliana, and Ofer that they were going to have to learn how to kill things. “Start small,” Malachy said, “with something wounded, like this fellow. Then keep challenging yourself. Go for something bigger. Work together to bring it down.” I raised my hand, asking: What about me?
    “You’re the bigger prey, of course,” Malachy explained, and everyone looked at me with renewed interest: Ah, yes, now we see it.
    My inner life, I was discovering, was basically a B movie. Wouldn’t my mother be proud.
    Then, after a week of this, I had a dream that felt