“Oh my God, that was amazing!” Sam moaned as she collapsed next to Jordan, heavily panting. Jordan couldn't have said it better herself. They were both on their backs now, hands intertwined, and the world had calmed down around them as their last soft moans of pleasures ebbed into a moment of content silence. The window was half-open, and cool night air was streaming across her skin, giving her goose flesh.

Jordan felt dizzy. Dizzier than she should feel; it was as if she’d been drinking much more than she actually had and despite her spinning head she could feel herself fall into a deep content relaxation as her breathing slowed to match Sam’s.

A deep happiness had settled in her chest like an affectionate kitten, soft and warm and enthusiastically purring: She had just made Sam orgasm! She’d just had sex with Sam! They’d only met today, yet they had kissed and fucked and now they were so close and it was so fucking strange and wonderful. Jordan's pulse accelerated with a sudden rush of excitement and she could hear Sam let out a sensual sigh next to her. There was another noise. A quiet wet noise. Jordan looked at her, and her gaze followed Sam’s arm toward the sound of the sound.

Sam’s hand was between her legs. She was masturbating next to Jordan.

Something welled up in Jordan. Something hot. Sam’s eyes were wide, and she had started to breathe heavily. So heavily. Jordan’s breathing matched Sam’s, and her skin felt suddenly hot. So hot. Between her legs, she felt her own hand working, rubbing. She was masturbating, too. It felt good. It felt exciting. It felt exhilarating!

“Yes!” Sam moaned, and Jordan moaned along with her, less coherently. Yes! They had fucked. Finally! FINALLY! Suddenly, Jordan’s mind was filled with a flurry of hot, excited thoughts. Sam had made her cum! Sam had fucked her. Sam had given her body, and Jordan had given hers. They were one, touching and licking and fucking! An exhilarating sense of excitement gripped her, and she pushed harder against her clit. She was dizzy with lust.

“Yesss,” Jordan moaned. She loved this so much. She was so turned on. She needed this! Only this!

“Yesss,” Sam groaned through gritted teeth, and her hand in Jordan’s hand clenched almost painfully tight.

“I have given my body,” Jordan said, rubbing her clit hard.

“I have given my flesh,” Sam said, her words almost swallowed by her moans. Her eyes were staring at nothing.

“My flesh is willing,” Jordan said, and in her mind, there were pictures of sex and love and togetherness beyond comprehension, beyond even flesh. Mysterious, wondrous love and pleasure, reckless and careless and pure, unbound by shame, unbound by conscience, unbound by pain!

“My flesh is open,” Sam moaned.

“My flesh is open,” Jordan screamed, pushing deep into the wet quivering hole between her legs that was meant to be fucked and penetrated and claimed.

“I am ready to be taken,” Sam squealed, and her body convulsed, and she whimpered and moaned as she came.

“I am ready to be taken,” Jordan said, and the images of love and sex and unity in her mind disgorged themselves into her aching groin, and she came, too.

They lay there for what felt like a whole minute, panting, sweating, without speaking. They weren’t holding hands anymore. Jordan felt suddenly very cold. The air was still with a terrible, leaden silence, and her stomach was sick.

Finally, she found the courage to speak. Her voice was unsteady with fear. “What the fuck was that?” she said, not daring to make eye contact with Sam.

“So it actually happened? You heard that, too? It wasn’t just a fever dream I just had?” Sam said, and her voice sounded as utterly terrified as Jordan felt.

“No. We said that. We... Why did we say that?!”

“I don’t know!” Sam cried, her voice shaky.

Jordan made herself turn on her side to face Sam.

“What the fuck made us do that?!”

Sam was deathly pale. She had her arms crossed in front of her, and her legs were pressed together and drawn up to her belly. “Jordan, I’m scared.” she whimpered.

“Me too,” Jordan said, unable to find anything else to say. Some part of her wanted to be strong for Sam, but she was just as terrified as her. She tentatively took Sam’s hand, unsure if she was doing it to give comfort or if she needed comfort herself. Sam's hand felt weak in hers, and cold. She could feel Sam trembling, and she could swear she could feel the whole bed tremble a tiny bit, too. Another tiny earthquake. What the hell was going on?! All of this was so weird, and now even the wonderful and exhilarating things that had happened felt like they had become part of something deeply, deeply wrong.

"This isn’t normal," Jordan said with shivering voice.

“Yes it is,” Sam said flatly.

Jordan turned her head in surprise. “What?!”

Sam looked suddenly calm. She was staring straight at Jordan, and her grip had tightened. Jordan felt herself gripping back involuntarily. Sam’s hands were suddenly very warm again. They felt good.

“What do you mean?” Jordan asked nervously. Her body was suddenly tingling all over. Her nipples felt so sensitive, and her piercings felt strangely hot. She felt like she was missing something. Like she wasn't all there.

“This is normal,” Sam repeated.

“No, it’s—”

“Everything’s as it should be,” Sam said tonelessly. It seemed like she was looking straight through Jordan, or deep into her. She felt her gaze send warm shivers through her.

“Why do you—”

“Everything is as it should be,” Sam said, and her voice seemed to cut into Jordan's thoughts. It gave her pause. She said nothing for a moment. She only felt Sam’s body against hers. Felt her skin, so smooth and soft, and so warm. Beneath it, her hot flesh. Jordan could sense Sam’s heartbeat. She felt her own heartbeat matching it. Her blood felt suddenly thick and hot. So hot. So warm. Like Sam. Sam was so close. So warm. Jordan loved her. She was wonderful. She was saying the truth.

“Yes,” Jordan said flatly, a dim smile on her lips. “Everything is as it should be.”

“Yes,” Sam said. Jordan listened calmly and agreed. A sense of excitement filled her. She was in love. Everything felt warm and soft and correct.

“Yes,” she said without any trace of emotion in her voice. “Let’s not think about it anymore.”

“Yes,” Sam said, her voice her own again. “Forget about it, silly.”

Jordan blinked.

“Forget about what?” she asked, furrowing her brow. She’d just zoned out. She felt like she should definitely do more cardio. She was quite short of breath.

“Don’t know,” Sam said, grinning widely, “I forgot.” God, she was so cute. Jordan loved her so much.

“Can’t have been important then,” Jordan said, smiling back, gently caressing Sam’s back with her fingertips.

Sam shivered adorably, like a little kitten. She screwed her eyes shut and pulled her neck into her shoulders, and let out a small squeal of pleasure. She was adorable. Jordan adored her.

She opened her eyes and looked deeply into Jordan’s. “This is nice.”

“Yes, it is,” Jordan breathed.

“Can I sleep here next to you?”

“Of course you can.”

Tangles of black silk, dark and sticky spiderwebs, veins of black ichor, pulsing, running from one hand to another, connecting hearts, connecting fate. The strands lead her to a memory of home. She is young. She is coming out of the closet.

“Mina?”

Her father, disappointed, scolding her, arguing, screaming at mum in the kitchen across a table topped with half-eaten dinner. She is no longer a daughter of his. As father yells, her mother ignores him. Instead she looks at Mina, and her eyes are black and red and she is smiling wickedly, softly moaning. Her moans resonate and blacken the air, and it is not her mother. It never was. Darkness descends.

“Mina?”

In the deep dark, the moaning woman smiles at her, naked and beautiful, and a great heat radiates from Her as if there were a raging fire burning in Her, and the heat spreads into Mina, and she feels it in her veins, and she looks down, between her legs, and she sees dark tendrils under her naked skin, growing and branching like roots burrowing into her flesh, and she moans, too, from the pleasure it gives her, and­­­­—

“Mina!”

Mina’s eyes opened, and she blinked.

Katie was half-sitting, half-leaning over her, looking slightly concerned. Mina found that she was breathing heavily, and that her sleep shirt clung to her skin, drenched in cold sweat.

“Are you alright?” Katie asked, and Mina hesitated.

She always shared everything with Katie. Her wife was the only person in the world that Mina was even remotely comfortable opening up to. It was one of the things she loved about being in a relationship with her: to be able to release the stress and worries and have someone to listen and understand.

“Yes, I’m fine,” she lied. “Don’t worry about it.”

She wouldn’t tell her. That had been her dream, and not for Katie to know. Not yet. She would understand, once her flesh was—

Mina blinked. She felt strange. Half-asleep and caught up in dream-logic. A deeply strange thought that had already slipped away from her.

“Your boss called. They need you in today,” Katie said, looking understandably disappointed. But Mina knew that Katie didn’t hold any grudges, even if this had been supposed to be their one day of the week they would have been able to spend time together.

“What’s it about?” Mina groaned, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, glancing at the clock on the bedside table. It was 8:30. She’d barely slept five hours. Dawn had just begun to bleach the overcast sky from black into a muddled slate gray.

“Wouldn’t tell,” Katie said, “only that it’s urgent.”

Absurdly, Mina’s mind went straight to earthquakes again. A small obsessive thought in her chest telling her it was the most important thing and that it must be why they had called her. A sense of gravity and significance gripped her for a moment, then evaporated again like a misheard word falling into clarity a few moments after it had been said.

“Fuck. Alright. I'm really sorry about this,” Mina said. She kissed Katie for four heartbeats, then got out of bed and made herself ready.

When she got into her car her phone was already ringing again and she knew something bad had happened.

She arrived at the crime scene half an hour later thankful to already have been told most of the grisly details over the phone. The library was cordoned off with yellow police tape, and police cruisers were parked across the lawn in front of it. As Mina entered the library through a row of glass doors a knot of guilt and anxiety seemed to coil up in her as she remembered how she’d been here just hours ago, too tired to properly talk to Miss Kent and notice the signs of distress that were so obvious in hindsight. The murderer had probably lurked just behind that half-open basement door.

But if that was true why hadn’t Miss Kent just told Mina about them? Why had she become so dismissive the moment that other woman had arrived? The logical part of her brain told her that the murder could have been completely unrelated to what she’d witnessed. But a much bigger, much more guttural part of her insisted on a connection. In her chest, next to the unease, was a visceral sense of importance and connectedness that she couldn’t place or explain.

“Detective Park,” said a middle-aged, balding man wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, a rain jacket, and a police badge. David German from homicide. Smart, unassuming, slightly awkward, surprisingly good at karaoke, did his paperwork at the last minute but always on time. Mina didn’t mind him, liked him even.

“You do know that it’s my day off and that I’m not working for homicide?” Mina said as a way of a bad joke. They both knew why she was here. She’d been told on the phone. She was being questioned.

German made an audible breathing sound and a non-committal head movement to acknowledge that he had indeed taken it as a joke, then pointed at the red mess on the floor.

“I’m sorry to have to ask you this, but: When you visited the library, this wasn’t here already?”

Mina looked at Amanda Kent’s dead body. The woman lay in a lake of her own blood on the marble floor. It was smeared in all directions, and there were crimson bootprints all around the rear half of the library, with tables and chairs strewn and scattered all over, reading lamps lying smashed between them. It looked as if a bull had raged in there.

“No,” Mina said. “I heard a scream, and went in to investigate. I found Miss Kent quite alive and with a reasonable explanation for the noise, and then I left.”

Some part of her felt like something was tugging at her. She knew there was a little bit more to it, but she was reluctant to share more than she had to. German didn’t notice it. He simply nodded as if she’d confirmed something he’d been thinking.

“I see,” he said. “That would have been around 2:13 a.m., is that right?”

“Yes. Claire told me you saw the security tapes.”

“Yeah, but there’s only a camera over the librarian’s desk. No cameras in here.”

“So... what rules me out as a suspect?” Mina asked. She couldn’t stop herself. It was the thing nagging at her, keeping her more tight-lipped than she should be. Guilt, suspicion, and a vague sense of doom.

German shrugged and made a vague movement with his head. “Well, First of all, you didn’t leave bloody footprints when you left 5 minutes later. Second of all, you’re a police officer. Third of all, you have no motive. Why would you kill her?”

“Why would anyone?” Mina asked, and there was a moment of silence between them.

“Got me there, Park,” German said finally, scratching his bald spot and squinting down at the violent scene.

“What about the woman that came in after me?”

“Ah, yes, of course. The ridiculously ominous cloaked woman. Prime suspect, obviously. We already sent out her picture to the press. But the fucked up thing is, she never left.”

“What?!”

“There’s only footage of her entering the library at 2:18, and uninterrupted video of the entire time up until 6:35 when Samantha Collins arrived and discovered the body. At no point did that woman leave the library. She never left. The windows don’t open, and the alarmed back exit is still locked, with all keys accounted for.”

“So where is she?” Mina asked.

“No idea. We searched the library twice already. We only found a pair of bloody boots matching the prints halfway between here and the exit. We’ll be trying to get skin samples off of them, but chances are slim. Otherwise, no trace at all. By all accounts, she still has to be here, in the library. This is some Agatha Christie bullshit. I guess we’ll have to post some extra officers around the scene in case she’s hid under the floorboards or something.”

Mina chuckled humorlessly, wanting to make a remark – but something gave her pause. Her heart made a sudden leap when she realized what she’d just missed.

“What did you say was the name of the person that found her?!”

“Samantha Collins. Do you know her?”

Connectedness.

“Fleetingly,” she said, swallowing hard, trying to keep calm. Her heart was fluttering. Her throat felt dry. “I interviewed her about a narcotics case just yesterday.”

“Do you think it’s connected?” German asked, raising his eyebrows.

“No. Not at all.” she lied hurriedly, raising her palms as if to calm someone down. “It’s just a strange coincidence.”

But she knew that it wasn’t. She knew it was connected. The earthquake. The murder. She and her. Sam Collins. She just knew. She knew that she had to see her, to touch her and make sure that she was right. To feel that they were connected like she knew they were. To hold her and breathe her in and touch her and hold her and—

“Detective Park?”

Mina blinked. She felt hot, almost feverish.

“What? Sorry, where were we?”

“I’ll need you to give a full statement and write a report. Can you have it on my desk this afternoon?”

“Of course,” she said absent-mindedly. “Anything you need me for, I’m willing to help. Where’s Samantha Collins?”

“She’s with Doctor Ferrier, getting trauma counseling. I think she took her off-campus, to her office. She said that she needs to be away from this place. She’s probably got a point.”

“Thank you,” Mina said tonelessly, already turning away, “you’ve got my number if you need me.”

“Uh... okay. Yeah. Oh.. one more thing, CSI says we’ll also need your shoe size as a formality.”

“Sure,” she said, already walking briskly out of the library.

She felt strange, like her feet were almost carrying her on their own. She had a powerful sense of being carried downstream by an irresistible current of hot water. Her head was swimming with the lack of sleep and the nauseating sight of Miss Kent’s dead body and the overwhelming feeling of being caught up in something bigger than herself. She had to get to the bottom of all of this. This was important.

She had to see Samantha Collins. Then, it would all make sense.

Jordan woke up shivering. The window was still open from last night, and the room had chilled down uncomfortably. She looked over to her side to see Sam’s beautiful face.

The bed next to her was empty.

Jordan’s stomach lurched uncomfortably with a profound sense of disappointment. Sam must have gotten up early. Jordan hadn’t taken her for an early riser. But then, she barely knew her, did she? She groaned, twisting and turning until she was able to reach up above her and slide the bedroom window shut. She was really tired. She felt a lingering sense of stress and fear in the back of her throat, along with shapeless memories of many uncomfortable dreams. She dimly remembered being half-awake most of the night, vividly and badly dreaming. She couldn’t remember what she’d dreamt of, only the anxiety and overwhelming emotions of her nightmares, like a bad aftertaste in her tired mind. She felt like she hadn’t really slept at all. And yet at the same time, she was somehow wide awake now. She made herself get out of bed with a yawn and went to the shared living/cooking/eating-space between her room and Sam’s.

Sam.

Jordan’s heart beat faster as she remembered last night, and there was a brief moment when she almost expected herself to realize what a giant mistake she had made, what a bad idea this had been, and how all the magic would surely be lost in the cold light of day. But it wasn’t. She didn’t. She was excited, overwhelmed, and deeply, truly happy. So happy that she couldn’t believe it. Everything she’d felt yesterday was still there.

She’d fallen in love.

“Sam?” she called out, her chest feeling tight with excited joy, but there was no answer. Jordan gently knocked on Sam’s door. It was only leaned closed. She pushed it open softly.

The room was empty.

Sam was gone.

The floor seemed to fall away beneath her feet for just a moment, and she felt nauseous and dizzy and utterly shaken—before she caught herself.

She’s jogging, she told herself, or at the gym, or at the library, studying! Jordan realized just how little she knew about Sam. They hadn’t even known each other a full day. Jordan didn’t know if Samwas a member of any clubs, or if she visited her family on weekends, or almost anything. I don’t even have her cell, she thought. I can’t even text her to ask her where she is! Why she left! Jordan winced. This shouldn’t be a big deal at all. Why was her heart racing so much? Why was she feeling so incredibly anxious about this?

Sam didn’t leave because of me, she told herself. She didn’t leave because of what had happened between us. She couldn’t have! That couldn’t be it, because if that was true, Jordan might throw up. The thought of Sam not wanting her made her sick, and Jordan pushed it aside. She swallowed, taking a deep breath. She had to calm down! She could feel herself beginning to panic and she knew that she was overreacting. Everything was going to be fine! Everything was going to be fine! She sat down on a kitchen chair, biting her lower lip, nervously drumming her fingers on the table. Sam was going to come back, sooner than later. She'd probably just wanted Jordan to be able to sleep in. It was only 9:50, and they’d been up very late. She’d probably be back within the hour. Jordan should probably just take a shower, eat some breakfast, and look forward to seeing her again.

She tapped her feet, thoughts spiralling messily. There was a clock on the wall, ticking.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

The silence between every tick felt like an eternity.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

Jordan’s was tight. Where could she be? Where?

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

She wanted to kiss her so badly. To smell her hair.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

She needed her.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

She needed her so bad.

Tick, tock, tick—

Jordan got up, dressed herself, and walked out the door.