by Jade Eby
Let the police figure out what the Cupid is trying to say.
I can hear them now. “These carvings in the bone could be tribal?”
“No, it’s a sadistic ritual.”
“Wait, maybe it’s a hidden message.”
By now, nothing was left of Maxwell.
Only God knew when the man had died.
Asher had begun with Maxwell’s stomach and then poked holes all down his legs. Torn flesh dotted each thigh. All of his toes sat across from his feet. His arms hung loose and had a checkered pattern down to his elbows.
His face looked like a fresh pound of slaughtered meat, just butchered and newly ground, and sitting on the floor away from his body, just waiting to be cooked.
He gazed at his work and smiled.
Should I leave another message? Sure.
He walked over to Maxwell’s desk and wrote in blood,
“Cupid was here.”
Twelve
Diana
In her dream, Diana rode Asher’s thick cock like a good girl, bouncing up and down on that lovely length that had brought her so much joy. Their reflections danced back in the mirror.
It was such a weird room. A king-sized bed sat in the center of darkness. They were on it, humping hard, making the mattress shake, the box springs creak. Heat swarmed around their sweaty skin.
Breathless, she picked up her speed, her full breasts bouncing. Asher kept his face near them and lapped at her nipples each time they came close to his tongue.
“Yeah. Give me that pussy!” With both hands he gripped her ass and rammed her down on him harder and harder.
“Wait,” she gasped. “Slow down.”
“I love it. I love it.”
“Asher? Slow down.”
He slammed her on him even more, her folds swelling in pain and desire all at the same time. Her head flopped back and forth in the erratic rhythm.
But... oh... oh...
Even with the ache, an orgasm bloomed in her core.
“Take it!” Asher roared.
“Ah!” Pleasure swallowed her body, washing through every inch of her body.
Dizzy, she turned to the mirror and froze as terror stared back at her.
Instead of Asher and her reflections, there was death. It should’ve been two lush bodies grinding against each other.
No.
It was worse.
The reflection displayed two pumping corpses. Two love consumed monsters. Gray flesh decorated both of their bodies. Their faces were just scared and worn skulls. On Diana’s mirror creature, a few black strands hung to her shoulders. Tufts of blond hair scattered across Asher’s dead body.
“The mirror...” Diana blinked and tried to stop Asher.
Growling, he pulled out of her, picked Diana up, and put her on her back. “Touch your toes, Diana.”
“No.” She tried to catch her breath. “Look in the mirror. Something is wrong.”
Fear pumped in her chest.
“Oh my little cat. Are we not curious?” Asher asked with a grin. He clutched her breasts, squeezing. “Touch your toes, darling.”
She sat up, frantically looking from side to side. “Asher, something is wrong. I don’t understand.”
Her voice echoed into the darkness.
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand.”
Kids appeared and then laughed right next to her.
“What the hell?”
The girls sang a song, or maybe it was a riddle? Two little girls with red pig tails, jumped rope right next to the bed.
“Fuck me,” the girls sang as they jumped the rope. “Fuck me hard, Cupid. Make me bleed.”
Bile rose in her throat. “No! Stop saying that. No!”
Diana turned to the mirror, and although the real Diana and Asher stopped having sex, the corpse depictions of them continued to make love. Dust crumbled onto the bed within the mirror. Spider webs draped their ankles and elbows. Jagged groans fled their cracked lips. Roaches crawled over her reflection’s rotting nipples, and Diana swore she felt the creepy things on her own body.
“No!” She batted at her actual breasts, but nothing was there.
“Touch your toes, Diana,” Asher said again.
“Look.” Diana tapped Asher several times and pointed to the mirror. “Something is wrong with our reflections.”
“You’re just so curious. Don’t look that way.”
“I can’t,” Diana countered.
Asher snorted and gestured to both of them. “The mirror shows what it wants to show. This right here. The powerful thing living between us. That is the only thing we should focus on.”
“But the mirror—”
“Ignore it.”
“I can’t!” Diana screamed.
“Fuck me,” the girls giggled and sped up their jump roping. “Fuck me hard, Cupid.”
“Stop saying that!” Diana screamed. “It’s wrong. It’s so wrong.”
“Oh Cupid! Fuck me! Fuck me!”
Diana turned her attention back to Asher and begged, “Get these little girls out of here and make them stop. This is wrong.”
“Or is it right?” Asher held his cock in his hands, and then let go. “Don’t think about those girls or even the mirror. Just. Touch. Those. Toes.”
“Oh, fuck me, Cupid!”
“Everyone, shut up!” Diana held her hands to her ears.
“Fine.” Asher released his cock and crossed his arms around his shoulders. “I’ll be quiet and look into your mirror.”
Diana opened her mouth in shock. The girls and jump rope disappeared. Light appeared above them and bathed the mirror’s surface in a white glow.
“I hate looking at this.” Asher faced the mirror.
Diana slowly rose to stand next to him. “Why?”
“Because it always shows me the truth.” He spit on the ground next to him, and they stood their together, watching the rotting corpses making love.
* * *
In Asher’s bedroom, Diana woke up in darkness, drenched in sweat. Silk sheets stuck to her skin. Her hair lay all over her head. Her heart boomed in her chest so loud she couldn’t hear anything else. Asher’s last words from the dream rang loud in her head.
“Because it always shows me the truth.”
“Jesus!” She jumped out of bed and touched her body, every inch, scared that the roaches were still crawling all over her. “What the hell was that?”
Her throat was raw and the skin beneath her eyes stiffened with dried tears. Dreams like that tended to gnaw at the day. She knew she’d think about the details all morning, and continue to ponder them by the afternoon. Once the evening came, she’d be nervous about closing her eyes and falling back to sleep.
“Dreams reveal truths.” Her grandmother would pat her head and hug her tight, before sending a little Diana right back to bed when she was younger. “Don’t you ever forget that, girl. Dreams say the things that the heart won’t listen to, and the brain is too hard-headed to grasp.”
Since she’d discovered Asher was Cupid, her worlds of slumber had shifted to dark and dreary landscapes full of disturbing things.
What is my heart trying to tell me? Oh what am I even saying? Now is not the time to worry about dreams.
Yet, common sense tugged at the back of her head. Her dreams weren’t reality, and she didn’t possess any supernatural powers where she fell asleep and saw things in the future. No. She had no talent for sorcery.
However, Diana never ignored her dreams. They’d gotten her out of some pretty difficult spots.
They’d also gotten her in trouble too.
At ten years old, Diana fell asleep and in the dream chased a copper-colored pixie out into her backyard.
“Dig,” the pixie had begged, while glitter spilled from the sides of her lips. “Dig and you will find your future.”
The next morning, Diana did as the pixie ordered. She dug all day, but it wasn’t her future in front of her. Instead, Diana
discovered her babysitter’s dead body.
That dirty space behind her house had always been her favorite place to dig. Somehow, the dirt stayed cooled during the hot summers. In winter, snowmen sat ontop wooden horses, embarked on noble adventures, and scaled ice castles just like the great Don Quixote. She’d read that novel so many times in that same patch of yard. Who couldn’t love a man who consumed so many chivalrous novels that he lost all of his sanity and set out on a quest to undo the injustices of the world?
The pixie had said, “Dig and you will find your future.”
In the end, had the creature been right or wrong? Did any of it even matter? Diana the child, had believed that she’d discover treasure. Instead, she found a dead body. Hadn’t Diana been digging up dead bodies the rest of her life, in some way or the other?
And her yard.
Had it just been a regular place? Maybe, she would’ve never dug up the dead body in the first place? Maybe it was all some odd coincidence that a pixie would come to her and then the next thing, such a strange thing occurred.
She never told a soul about the dream. Everyone always knew that she found her babysitter, but no one knew about the dream.
But that patch of land. That dirty space behind her house. For some reason Gabby’s killer had chosen to dump the teenaged babysitter there. It had always been a great place to dig. People dropped loose change. Diana had found other treasures too—long gemmed earrings, tattered pages from porn mags, and two turquoise rocks that glinted under the sun.
Due to a dream, she dug more than she ever would have.
For hours, Diana shoveled, broke the soil, lifted it up, slung it to the side, and started all over again. Never stopping. Never getting sidetracked. She just shoveled and did so some more.
By the afternoon, she saw something that froze her stiff. A gray hand greeted her eyes. Copper rings sat on three fingers, reminding Diana of Gabby’s jewelry.
“Dig and you will find your future.”
Upon spotting Gabby’s corpse, Diana didn’t alert her parents—two people that had been fighting all morning over her father’s recent lack of work. Diana didn’t tell a neighbor or go grab a friend. Her being the odd girl in most situations, it never gave her much opportunity to ever make friends.
“This must be the future,” Diana had thought.
And so, Diana had been the one to find the dead body, so she’d been the one to call the police.
And through tear-blurred eyes, at ten years old, Diana had been the one to watch her father get arrested for Gabby’s murder. She’d also been the one to hold her mother as she fell to the ground and cried.
One thing Diana hadn’t realized at such a young age was that a dead white girl in a poor, black man’s yard, didn’t trigger court-approved justice in the eyes of society.
Yet, Diana had been the one to hide the guilt of his death deep inside of her, never allowing it to escape, never washing her hands of her father’s blood.
A week later, the police found Gabby’s actual killer three houses down from Diana’s home. And she never saw the copper pixie again.
The first summer after her dad’s murder, Diana stayed in South Carolina with her grandmother.
And the odd dreams returned. One night she swam in a dark world with bloody water. The next day, she saved her grandmother’s drowning black kitten. Granted, the little furry creature hung around the pond behind the house, every day, and didn’t look like he could swim at all. It would’ve only been a matter of time before the poor thing crept along the branches near the pond, and fell in.
“No, girl. Always listen to your dreams,” Her grandmother had said the day she saved her cat.
Perhaps that’s when she had transformed into her very own version of the kitten. A curious, black cat.
Whenever Diana scraped her knee, her grandmother would always rub the dirt away from her legs, hold Diana tight in her arms and whisper, “What don’t kill a child, makes that little one stronger. And you girl are a mountain, so high I know you can see God’s glory high above the clouds, and so strong, there ain’t nothing that’s going to knock my baby down.”
It was like the dreams and her grandmother were trying to prepare her for something more. Every time the kind woman declared Diana’s strength, a brick thickened within Diana’s flesh, fire heated her blood and roared in her ears. She would curl those little fingers and bite away the pain of her father’s death and all the wrongs of the world—racist police officers and dead babysitters.
And so, Diana grew into a mad woman, obsessed with bringing justice into society, but never truly seeing the reality of the world around her.
What was this dream trying to tell me? Two rotting corpses humping each other in the mirror? Is that really us? Or is that just what my heart sees? And what about those little girls saying all of those nasty things?
Diana ran her fingers through her hair as if she could comb all of the craziness out of her mind, just by touching her head.
Forget about the dream.
“Asher?” She looked around the empty room, found her robe, got up, and put it on. “Asher?”
Where did he go?
Still feeling a bit exhausted, Diana went into the bathroom and stood in there for a few seconds, taking the décor all in. This was the first time she’d actually taken the time to study Asher’s style. All the other days she’d been either so overcome with curiosity of Cupid or fear of Asher.
White paint covered the walls. The bathroom’s space was the size of a master bedroom. A huge hot tub sat in the center with marble steps and gold fixtures. A big shower stood on the side. His and her sinks lay opposite. Around the back was a vanity table with shelves full of toiletries. Other than that, nothing else stood out. There was nothing personal in his space that said, Asher. Not any little funny photos or notes, neither a cherished saying near the vanity table or a quirky framed picture above the toilet.
Just white, gold emptiness.
I wonder if he feels alone in here. Hell, I wonder if he feels alone all over this huge mansion.
She entered the shower, not sure if she had the time in the day to just sit back in a hot tub and pretend everything was alright.
I have to clean up, find Asher, and figure out what’s going to happen next.
Warm water poured down over her head, drenching her hair and streaming down her skin. Perfect. For those few minutes, she could pretend that everything was normal, that the relaxing moment of water slipping against flesh was the most exciting thing that would happen that evening.
Months ago that was her life. She woke up in the morning, masturbated in the shower, ate breakfast, went into work, read a book, did research, wrote until her fingers numbed, returned home, ate dinner, and then masturbated in the shower. That was her life every day. It began and ended with the same outcomes. Boredom and this sense of hunger for something more filling her chest.
Since Asher had entered her life, the shower was the only moment in the day where she could catch her breath, and there was no need for masturbation, with the way he imprinted himself onto her each time.
Asher filled her day with fear and tossed in surprises in the evenings. He was a sick magician. Tricks escaped from under his wicked sleeves, and she sat there clapping like a dreamy audience. There was no doubt that every future day would keep her heart pumping blood erratically. Everything about him intrigued her—those piercing eyes and wicked past, his hunger for vengeance and his chivalrous need to protect her.
Most of the time she shivered in both fear and lust.
When his gaze hit her, a rush ran through her—she had to blink through the sensations, wiggle her toes to keep her balance, and close her fingers in and out just to make sure she hadn’t been transported to another realm somewhere off in the universe where a relationship with Cupid could work out in a happy ending.
What happened? Yesterday, I sat in his bed frozen and scared, now I’m... in love or walking toward that way, and wondering how we... or
rather... he is going to handle Maxwell. Wondering how long I have to wait to see him again.
Wait. Am I…
Yes.
I think I might be…
There was no more denying it. And she didn’t give a rat’s ass what people thought. Lust and love and fear and hope have no time limits. She may have lost Neil just a few weeks ago, but he’d been dead to her for years. She’d already buried the part of him that she once loved the fifth time she saw him fucking their real estate agent on the granite countertop of their new home. The one they were supposed to share together. In joyous matrimony.
Joyous, my ass.
People get off on judging—she was guilty of it herself—but no one can predict how or when they fall. She was certain of that now. She was falling in love with him. So much had happened, and somehow it all had accelerated the intimacy between them.
I’m falling for him.
In the shower, she hugged herself. Warm water continued to swarm all over her skin.
I can’t see myself without him.
What would that mean for their future? She closed her eyes, leaned back into the glass wall, and let her body fall deep into the hot shower. Steam rose all around her and fogged the bathroom.
Her dream flashed in her head—dying lovers on a bed. They could care less about the spiders and roaches all on them. They paid no mind to the nasty-mouthed girls. All the corpses yearned to do was make love. It was like they were lost, but not yet dead. Rotting, yet alive, they fed off of the passion pushing out of their mouths.
Are we really those two sex-crazed corpses?
A click sounded in the bathroom. Diana opened her eyes, right as the shower door slid open and a nude Asher stepped in.
Steam rose around his nakedness. Fog slid along chiseled muscles and blurred out the view of her sexy god.
Asher served as a dream himself.
A dark and lush one.
The image of him staring at her in the shower all could have been another lovely dream. Steam swarmed around him. Hot water sprayed on his skin as well as hers. He hadn’t even said one word yet, but her body woke up—her nipples stiffened, cunt moistened, legs vibrated just knowing that they’d be caressed with skilled fingers.
