She comes as quiet as midnight snow, to fall in a gentle veil upon me.

Our foreplay was the few moments since I heard the deadbolt turn from the wrong side. Each second of anticipation my heart beat stronger, until it was an engine in my chest. By the time she places her cold fingers on my shoulders, my ears throb.

She lays across my back like Elijah, though she is his antithesis. She is naked beneath her cloak, and I beneath the sheets, yet even with our modesty discarded we cannot truly touch. My warm flesh and her cold corpse are not of the same world. Her cheek presses to my ear, but she does not speak. She has said it before. She does not draw breath to waste it.

The penetration is quick and painful – two needles of ice carving vaginal gashes in my neck – but the coitus is bliss. The thrusting and grinding find the vein she seeks, and what has been an ebb of blood becomes an ejaculation. As lovers sharing twin orgasms, we moan an ecstatic chorus.

She is greedy and messy. Her mouth is a goblet, and I am the bottle, but like a drunk she pours sloppy gushes that will be stains and regrets later.

While she is in me I am hers. I am both the whore and the john. I will give her anything for another orgasm, another rush of warm life flowing through the channels in my neck. Something in her saliva is magical – it undoes the damage to my flesh, covers over the traces of her presence – so every swipe of her tongue, every smack of her lips means she must penetrate again. She will pump and gnash and stab into me until I am threadbare, until I lack breath even to groan.

Like a dog she licks her dish clean, and she leaves only bruises. She perches on me like a demon, sits like a succubal breath-stealer in the small of my back, while her glutton tongue churns away the small hours to clean her own lips and fingers.

She leaves as snow melting away under a morning sun. Her parting words hang in the still, twilit air.

“Don’t tell.”