To Love and to Kill by M. William Phelps

house. He and Emilia went into an empty bedroom. Of that first sexual experience with Emilia, Josh remembered: “This woman rocked my world like no other woman ever has.” He recalled “sleeping with twenty-two women” throughout his life, but none “could hold a candle” to Emilia. She knew her way around a body and how to please a man, Josh insisted.
    â€œEven though she already had three children,” Josh explained, once again not realizing how offensive and narrow-minded he sounded, “she was not hurt in that area. I could not believe she’d had her kids naturally, with everything in as good a shape it was in.”
    Josh had a little taste of Emilia on that night and he was hooked. She had him.
    â€œIt got to the point where every day I got home from work, me and Heather was arguing, I showered and ran to Emilia. . . . I was in lust, like a sixteen-year-old schoolboy.”
    Sex, sex . . . and more sex. Josh could not get enough of Emilia. He had to have her as often as he could. And Emilia was right there, willing and always able to provide him with what he loved.
    According to Josh, it wasn’t until nearly a year after he hooked up with Emilia that Heather confronted him about his leaving the mobile home all the time. Heather had a feeling, he said, that he had been stepping out, but never really said anything. They had been trying to work things out by giving the relationship a chance.
    Still, it wasn’t the dope this time around, menacing the relationship; it was this other woman.
    â€œHeather didn’t know who it was then, only that I was fucking around on her,” Josh recalled.
    Fed up with Josh and his running off to another woman anytime they fought, Heather packed up her things and her kids and went back to Mississippi to go live with her mother. It didn’t matter who it was that Josh was banging; the fact that he was out and about, sleeping with another woman, was enough.
    Heather was done.
    â€œTwo weeks after she was gone, I ended up quitting my job and heading back up to Mississippi because I could not live without seeing my kids,” Josh told me.
    Once again, he chased what he could not have.
    Josh’s youngest was about to turn one. Josh didn’t want to miss his birthday. He needed to be part of the kids’ lives, regardless of what Heather thought or wanted. Yet, he also hoped to reconcile with Heather.
    It took him a few weeks, but Josh got a job while back in his old stomping grounds. He and Heather hooked up once again and seemed to be getting along. He’d left Emilia kind of high and dry; but according to Josh, he didn’t have any sort of deep connection with Emilia besides that unquenchable thirst she put in him for the best sex of his life. There was no agreement between them that they were exclusive, Josh suggested. The relationship with Emilia was always a rebound, or simply a sexual one.
    Problems between Heather and Josh began again because “I was not making any money whatsoever while back home in Mississippi,” Josh said.
    He had been in Mississippi for about five months and decided it was time to go back to Florida. It was late summer 2008 by then. Josh knew he could make more money in Florida; he had developed contacts and knew where to find steady work. Plus, Emilia was in Florida. All that Josh had thought about since being gone was the sex he had been getting from Emilia before he left. As much as he tried to stay away from her, he later claimed, the sex kept calling him back—especially when he and Heather were not getting along. So Josh drove to Florida and went straight over to Emilia’s mother’s house, looking for her.
    Josh said he knocked and knocked. No one answered the door, even though he could tell people were shuffling around inside.
    So he left.
    A few days later, Josh ran into someone he and Emilia knew.
    â€œHave you seen her around?” Josh asked.
    His friend could