It's not hard for you and your girlfriend decide who'll be your third. What little the girl’s wearing is skintight, taut against her musculature and baring a core fit for Cirque du Soleil. The drink in her hand seems impossible: she must subsist on green juice and sunlight.

She has everyone's attention. Would have it all the same if she was just sitting down, but she slinks through dancers like a snake on grass, wrapping around necks, melting into touch just long enough to leave them hungry. Makes it a little special when she locks onto both of you. Special, and convenient: hard enough to find someone that will go home with an established dynamic. She pulses in cut-time with the strobe, letting your girlfriend fondle her leg striations. You test her, leaning in across her to kiss your girlfriend. The girl responds by licking up your trachea. She smells of hours of dancing. Your girlfriend cups her tits and you cup her hips and you trip over each other to be the first to suggest going elsewhere.

She offers her place. You'd prefer yours, since there's two of you to make comfortable. She asks how many drinks you've had: what you thought her vodka is just water. You cede.

Her car is nice, latex-shiny outside and real leather within. Plenty of leg room for all to reach under each other's clothes at unfamiliar stoplights. You cozy up your girlfriend’s lap, ill caring where you're being taken to until you step out of the car into an uptown construction site.

Dust permeates the air, sucking club sweat from your skin. You rather expected more luxurious treatment after all that, and you exchange glances with your girlfriend as she steps out of the car. You're about to ask what gives when the girl whips her fingertips into your girlfriend's face.

It takes you six seconds (thrice as many as times she struck, says your startled amygdala) to process the violence of it. Your girlfriend freezes in place. Her eyes peel open in pain. Blood trickles from her nose. Deceptively small bruises blossom on her philtrum, the space between her brows, the notch of her larynx. If she is not dead then she is surely dying. You understand this with the prescientific surety of an animal whose pack is gunned down: the mechanics of it surpass you, but your girlfriend's lifeforce has been denatured.

"What the fuck," your voice cracks.

Wrong move: the girl turns to you. Harsh overhead lights cast her musculature in chiaroscuro. She clicks her tongue like she's forgotten her wallet at home: "Right."

"What," as if by repetition you'll awaken your flight instinct.

The girl, again viperlike, only now when the light catches the sinuous ripple of her shoulders, your adrenaline clenches your heart instead of pooling downward. "Believe me if I told you I'd never had witnesses?", she asks.

You're about to say what again when she raises a hand in your direction. The tips of her index and middle fingers swim in the air, aimed at bodily rudiments you have no recourse to comprehend. You follow their minute motions helplessly. She’s drawing some manner of pattern, a languid cipher of death, if you can just figure out what she did to your girlfriend you can stop her from doing the same to you. But all roads lead inward, to her coils.

"Eighty grand is not so bad for a first real target," she hums. Your eyes snap to hers, and you find her scrutinizing you with half-expectant indifference, like she’s waiting for her tea to cool. At least snipers squint. "Before, I was killing wifebeaters and union leaders. But now witnesses matter. Sigh." She says sigh out loud. "I could erase your memory, you know. Just tap here, here..." with every word she halts a hair's breadth from your skin, heat radiating from her fingertips, "really, you wouldn't just forget tonight, you'd forget her. No grief."

You’re drowning in ice. Your chest runs asynchronously hot, an inverted diving reflex. You try to shake your head, but can’t even turn to look at the body that used to be your girlfriend. “What?”, is, in an access of autonomous fascination, the only honest thing you can say.

“They’re called pressure points. Tiny weaknesses hidden all over your body. Nerve clusters, musculoskeletal tension points, some subtler energy pathways here and there. If I touch them just right, I can, oh, here,” and she jabs the hollow of your sternum. You blink, almost quick enough to flinch. In the time it takes for your eyes to open, she does it again, and you involute.

Your internality collapses between your clavicles. Your lungs seize, blowing shards of imploded soul across your tender inner walls. A singularity grows in your chest, pain with gravitic mass. It mangles you like a car crusher, not homogeneous but a screaming tangle. Your vagus crosstalks your gallbladder. You are flayed and thinning by the second.

From beyond the event horizon, a gentle tap unlocks your self at the root. You gasp. Your kidneys are empty, you’re drenched with fear-sweat and piss all the way to your shoes. Tears evaporate on your cheeks. You don’t even have the energy to fall over.

And there: your killer, hands still coiled like a cobra. New terror blossoms in your crotch. Whatever she did to you, she undid just as readily. The bead of summer night moisture that had collected on her forehead is only just down to her jaw.

“Kind of a brutal way to learn,” she shrugs, with null bearing on the indolent poise of her fingers. Her kinesthetics are absolute. “A pure pain point. No real damage, to the body anyway. To spell it out: every second you spend with an intact memory now is another second you’re going to want to forget later.”

“Why do you need my permission?”, you wheeze, as close to lucid as epinephrine gets.

“God, wasn’t the girlfriend some kind of C-suite? You should know basic business. I can’t kill two for the price of one. Drives my rates down.”

Money. There’s one thing your girlfriend left you. You have to stay alive, for the sake of her memory if nothing else.

“What if I pay you not to kill me?”, you offer tremulously.

Her eyes twinkle like digital slot machines. It’s horrible. Such animalic power should not be commandeered by money. And yet: “How much?”

“Everything in my girlfriend’s wallet.” No one carries paper anymore. “PIN code 7215. However much you can get before they cancel her account. Hundreds of thousands?”

She turns. Even her back is ultimatum. Construction halogens give back in detail what they wash out of color: her trapezius meets her shoulders in filigree, sinuous even in an act as cruelly vapid as rummaging through your girlfriend’s pockets where she still stands, rigorous as mortis. It’s better than looking at her corpse.

Your girlfriend’s wallet: debit and credit of the highest order, higher-up business cards (potential targets?), even a few crisp hundreds. She stuffs the wallet proper back in its place, doesn’t take the phone, thank god, you’ll still have photos together. Tossing it on the hood of her car, she says: “Thanks for the payout. You’re still a witness.”

You’ve just begun elaborating some creative argument when she rushes you. Her fingers dig into your prey flesh up to the first knuckle. She was being gentle before, admirably restrained: you understand this now, as your ribcage bends into the force of her blows, an impotent defensive maneuver she vulnerates with rote exactitude. Perspiration mists off her arms. Polyrhythmic thuds resonate out across your intercostals. She sacrifices no alacrity for accuracy, no accuracy for power.

She stops as abruptly as she began, trailing only an echo of thudding flesh. Hematomas flower in the tenderness between your ribs. Less an artist’s canvas, more a blank page under the mechanistic pounding of a typewriter. A numb ache presses on every hematoma, and you hope that will be all.

The ache explodes. Your lung pleura freezes to blistering. With every breath, your bronchioles cavitate, then bloom razors. You inhale cold and exhale colder. This time you do fall to your knees, gripping at the lifeless dust for any suggestion of heat. You hold your breath. It doesn’t take. Your lungs crackle, and you taste sand as she steps closer to you, unassuming sneakers kicking up little clouds with each step. Distant police sirens wreathe her like dawnlight. This suits her: it seems ridiculous that you were at eye level before. Much more right that she towers over you.

“How does that feel?”, she asks.

How do you even begin to answer? “Don’t—”, oh if breathing hurt talking paralyzes you, you grab your chest, on the verge of pulmonary arrest. Doesn’t she know?

As if reading your mind: “There’s, like, hundreds of pressure points. It’s the deck of cards thing. Would take more time than exists to figure out every way to combine them. I don’t get to experiment much. Is this actually hurting you? On a physical level?”

You want, as your lungs fill up with liquid nitrogen, to scream god, yes. Tour voice box is frozen over.

Suddenly there is heat. Her hands are under your armpits, pulling you up to your feet. You lean against her for support. Her skin is silk-soft. She smells hot and divine. You would sob, if you could, when she pulls away. Afterimages of her hands dance in the air, a perverse mirage of hyperoxia. She points her index and middle fingers at still another one of your body’s mysteries.

“I could make it stop. If you let me. But the only way is to hit you here, which would inevitably erase a bit of memory. It won’t be so bad after the first.” She looks down, then frowns. “Are you fucking hard right now?”

You follow her gaze. Yes, you’re sildenafil-hard for the woman that killed the love of your life. You shift as much as your body will let you in an attempt to conceal it. Your girlfriend’s corpse is there, freestanding, in memoriam. Maybe this is what would happen to anyone who met a god, gradual and inevitable obliviation of every value they hold. You gather up the meager reserves of your pain resistance, and plead.

“Kill me.”

“Pay me.”

“Everything.”

“You already paid that for me to spare you.”

“Hey!” That’s neither of you. You face towards the source of the voice: police, just the one, but armed. “You’re trespassing in private property. Come on, get out. I don’t want to have to take anyone in at this hour.”

They say hope is the enemy of happiness. In two long bounds she’s on the policeman, unfolding on his anatomy before he can clear his holster. Even at distance, the information of her movement is irresistible. You’re subject to vivid and involuntary awareness of her snarling the ganglions in his shoulders, hips, core. He’s just standing now, a second statue in the dust garden, on the verge of grabbing his gun. Cop About To Prove Useful, artist unknown, violence on flesh, 2024.

She plucks the gun from his grip and strides back towards you. You stare. Surely this isn’t it. She wouldn’t finish you off this crudely, she must be saving some perfect last dance to draw your curtain. She lifts the gun and your balls shrink back into your groin.

She presses the steel into your hand. It’s warmer than your insides. Before you can think of anything smart to do, she’s behind you. She would access the fundamental frailties of your spine if you so much as started to turn around. Her palm cups your forearm, guiding it upward. You’re grateful for her body heat, and dejected that you can’t see her, and most of all horrified at what she’s asking of you.

“No. No.”

“It would be payment enough.” Her breath scalds the nape of your neck. “Think about it. If you’re dead you don’t have to feel bad about it.”

“Can’t.” You tremble. She’ll kill you if you attack her but you can, at least, lower the gun.

She stabs into your arm. Your proprioception screams in protest as her fingers pull back your tendons like a bow and release only when there’s a pop.

The cop blanches. His is the face you’ve worn all night: he is trying to scream, and can’t. He only just manages to force his eyes downward, getting the barest look at the edges of his heart’s hole. It is an altogether excellent shot.

Then life leaves him, and along with it, the imposed tension. He slumps without ceremony. Across from him, your dead girlfriend still stands.

The cold has spread from your core to your extremities. Gunsmoke stales the air. “I didn’t,” you choke. “Not me.”

“Oh, quit coping.” You hear the eyeroll in her voice. “You’re going to remember doing that for the rest of your life. I’d know.”

“I paid,” you remember.

“Listen, we can agree that was a shared effort. Which is as good as half payment. And being half-dead wouldn’t do you any favors.”

Staring at the corpse, both corpses, for fortitude, you beg: “Please.”

“Please what?”

For a blessed second, you don’t know what you want. And then, as you freeze to death: “Please make me forget.”

She slips back in front of you. Her hand comes up in a heartbreaking arc, the sight of which, finally, arrests your breathing. Your heart stops mid-pump. Godrays cleanse her hands of impurity. Motes of dust dance around their illusory stillness.

She lances your mind like a boil. Your head jerks back. The sky is starless. There is a sound of rushing water. Heat suffuses your extremities, from the center of your forehead, energizing your core and shooting down to the tips of your toes. Relief hits you in nauseous waves. The heat builds to smothering in your throat. You open your mouth, and release your self in one long exhale.

The girl’s eyes are molten brown. A slow, feline blink. “Tell me one true thing,” she says.

“I love you, I need you,” you answer.

“That’s one extra, which would be bad if we were golfing.” She blades her torso. Some paces behind her lies a man in a growing pool of blood.

So that was the sound, you think, and then: “Oh god, what’s happening?”

“You shot him.”

“What? No.” You would remember.

The girl motions at your hand. Gun, the scent of smoke. You drop it with a despairing yelp, a sound you didn’t know your throat could make. There is no version of you that is capable of doing what you did. But there can be no doubt that you did it.

“You had no choice,” she says, with a comforting hand on your shoulder. “There was a confrontation. Look.”

She turns again, to reveal another corpse, standing? That’s not right. That’s not what dead bodies do. But, as you squint in the light, there are two things you know for sure. One, that is your girlfriend, and two, she is beyond all doubt pale and dead.

“What… what?” Your voice breaks.

“Not your fault. Well, only insofar as you failed to save her. Hey, look at me.”

The moment you do, the fear evaporates. Her gaze is clever, serpentine, her body assured. There is nothing in the world she couldn’t handle. There remains only a soft anxiety, pulsing out of your lumbar spine, which you try to pay no attention to. It makes sense to be a little edgy. Given the circumstances.

“Does the ‘girlfriend’ matter that much?”, she asks. “I mean, how much time do you even remember having with her?”

You rake your memories. Your mind pours over a smooth, hydrophobic, black-scaled core and slides off with the lightest touch.

And then she asks the killing question: “Can she really have mattered more than me?”

“No,” you answer. Snakes entwine in your throat. This guilt will kill you. “But I love her. I don’t get it.”

Her mouth curls in frustration. “Really? Because you’re, like, hard.”

You near jump. You are, she’s right, so tight against your clothes that you don’t know it’d escaped your notice. Maybe it’s the way she consumes your attention. You can’t even keep looking at the bodies like you mean to. It seems important that you grieve, or feel guilt, but you can’t help yourself.

“Focus,” she says. “Would you rather be sad forever, or just move on with me?”

You’re honest as you answer: “I don’t know.”

She jabs your solar plexus. Instantly you remember why you’re so excited: the liquid ease of her movement, power rising from the minute shift of her ankles up to her fingertips. Her beatific effortlessness violates you. You want to kneel in worship. Instead you brace, because she did violate you, and what follows is unreasoning agony, a totalizing break in your integrity.

You are, then, unprepared for what follows. A quivering flame of pleasure bursts from your chest and pools horribly in your crotch. You try to hide from it. Your own squirming almost makes you collapse: your tip shifts wetly against your underwear, weakening your knees, twisting your stomach, eliciting a moan you have no chance of muffling.

“What did you do to me?”, you boggle.

“I think you can figure it out,” she titters, with fleeting amusement. “Got your final answer?”

“Final—” you don’t get to complete your question, she strikes again, same place, more force. Your nerves fuse together, undifferentiated with pleasure save for the point of maximum sensual ingress, at your tip. You almost pass out. You want to pass out, you should by all rights pass out but she’s got you in animate suspension.

“You’ve paid me not to kill you. Unfortunately, that still means you have to choose. I can unburden you. If you give me permission. Do corpses matter more? You picked me for a reason, right?”

Distant memory of an attempted threesome. But that was with your girlfriend. Whatever happened in between, it’s not right that this girl alone bring you to climax. But you’ll die if she doesn’t.

“I can’t,” you stammer.

She hits you with such sharp force that your skin caves in. You go blind. It’s the opposite of an orgasm, a thrilling tension that tenses your skin like bubblegum. Her scent is a predator’s, dark and pitiless. It’s no better when your vision lightens. The pretense of playful interest is gone, replaced with a piercing dullness. She’s through with you.

“Please,” you plead.

Infinitely bored, like she’s been asked this before: “Please what.”

“Please make me choose you.”

Her shoes draw a circle on the dust. She unleashes the momentum of her turn into a hauntingly familiar series of blows up your midline: your throat, just above your lips, the join of your eyebrows. Your soul molds to the press of her fingers. At the apex of her movement, time vaporizes. You stare forever at the underside of her hands, the crease of her palms, the calluses on the pads of her fingers.

You are awash and free of thought. You stare at the trace of light the love of your life’s hands paint in the air as they move away. You wish she would’ve killed you. Every mechanism of your body is primed for it. Your weaknesses exist so she can hurt them. The still night air is torture: you need hands on you, caressing you, destroying you.

“If anyone asked you what happened tonight, would you betray me?” she asks.

“Of course not,” you whimper, “how could I? I love you.”

She sighs in relief: “Okay, good,” and makes to leave.

You start to follow her, and she touches you, for what you will later realize is the last time ever: a disinterested jab to your navel, cold and mechanistic. Your next step takes you to the ground. You writhe, skin afire. There is no release.

“Where are you going?”, you ask, innocent. “What did you do to me?”

She doesn’t answer, just keeps walking.

“Wait. Where are you going? Please wait. Don’t go. Please.” You drag yourself closer by inches. But you don’t even get to see her walk all the way. By the time you’re halfway to where she started, she’s already turned on her car. Luxury wheels pick up gravel. When her dust clears, there are only your corpses.