I’ve gone too far this time.
Gail’s sleek form glides ahead of me. The moon is so strong tonight. It beams its silver blessing down upon us.
I’m just a girl following another girl, praying she’ll kiss me under the stars.
Gail turns, graceful as a dancer. The look she gives me makes my foot forget how to do the walky thing. I feel all jellied inside, like my soul has curdled. In a good way. In a warm, liquid way.
It’s those eyes. Greener than any eyes have the right to be. Something straight out of a midnight faery tale. How did I get so lucky?
The innocent smell of sugar and sweet things rises from my skin. It’s a scent I can’t seem to get rid of no matter how hard I scrub. The candy floss of it marries with the humid summer air and the spongy earth beneath us.
I stare down at my hands. There’s dirt all up in my fingernails. Damn it.
Everything has to be perfect.
Tonight is the night.
If I have to wait any longer to taste her, I might just die.
“Where you taking me, Emmeline?” Gail asks in her playful kitten voice.
Can I make English things come out my mouth? Make the words? Come on, Emmeline, you can do it. Breathe. Try to think of calming things. Kneading dough. Flooffy cats. Gail running her tongue over that spot just behind my ear where it tingles and—
“Told you,” I manage to force out. God, I sound like a squeaky, oily-faced teenager. “It’s a surprise.”
Gail was made for the moon. I can feel my whole stupid body swooning forward as if magnetised. My Gail with the dream eyes and those slick lips.
Looking at her with my eyes so wide I can almost imagine them drooling, I can’t recall ever having seen her in the daytime. She’s a proper night owl, her skin so fair, so blemishless. Oh, to trace my fingers over her shoulders, that hollow in her neck.
She’s been my dream since we were at school together—I just hadn’t realised it. Hadn’t realised a lot of things about myself until I hit my twenties. Those butterflies I lied to myself about for so many long years.
Everyone picked on Gail. Gail the Pale, is what they called her. What I called her. They’d pull her hood down to annoy her and she’d hurry it back up like her skin burned.
My poor Gail. You’re okay, now. You’re with me. You’ll always be with me, won’t you? Say you’ll be my forever girl.
I let my small rucksack fall to the grass. Beyond this spot, gravestones jut out the ground like crumbling fingertips.
“Was gonna leave this until afterwards, but I could use a drink.” I take out a bottle of white zinfandel and two plastic cups.
Gail slinks her way over to me, takes the bottle, unscrews it. The way her throat moves as she glugs straight from the bottle captivates me. I want to kiss that neck. Place my hand around it.
I take the bottle when she offers it. “Your eyes are green emeralds. A-Anybody ever tell you that before? It’s like looking at a dragon, or something.”
“A dragon? No one’s said that to me before. You’re really something.”
“You’re something more. Cheers.”
I raise the bottle, chug it down, praying the wine will stop my heart and other things from fluttering about so much. I can’t think straight with her looking at me like that.
“Can I…” Gail moves toward me, places a hand on my cheek, draws me near.
You can do anything you want, I almost say, melting on the spot.
The kiss is soft. The kiss is everything. I lean in, begging for more. The bottle hits the ground. The wine flows out and I do not care. Nothing else matters but Gail’s lips on mine.
Take me under the light of the moon. Do with me as you will. Kill me now and do it again and again.
Gail pulls away, looks me in the eyes, moves down to my neck. Her gentle kisses flush me all over with fire, curling my toes.
“No, not yet,” I say, remembering why I brought her here, pushing gently at her bony shoulders. “Calm down there, puddle maker.”
“I want a taste. Just a little nibble.”
She leans in again and I offer my neck, stare at the moon and the fluff of wispy cloud moving across it. I’ve never been so electrically happy.
“I need to show you something.” I step back, bite my lip. “Before someone finds what I’ve done. Ruins it.”
“You’re full of surprises.”
“Right back at you.”
I focus on my hands. Stupid dirt under my nails. I scratch them against the roughness of my jeans, hating the ear-twitching sound that breaks the perfect scene. Even the wind stops sighing through the trees as if waiting for me to stop ruining everything.
“This way,” I say, “my lovely… flowerness thing.”
Flowerness? The cringe ices away the heat I felt two seconds ago. Stupid, awkward muppet. Why you gotta be like this, Emmeline? Get it together.
“You seem to have lost your tongue,” Gail says. “Need to borrow mine’s?”
When she runs her tongue over her moist lips, my thighs quiver, almost collapse me onto the grass.
The laugh that puffs out of me is all nerves as I walk by her, imploring my nose not to sniff her, doing it anyway. I’m high on this girl. She’s got me good.
“Come on,” I say. “Follow me.”
The ground is uneven and bouncy under my mud-caked Reeboks. I can feel the trees sighing in the breeze, the stone dust smell of the tombstones as we get into the cemetery proper.
You’ve gone too far, Emmeline. What was I thinking, doing all this?
Gail had always been into dark things. Back in school, I remember sitting near her, something inside screaming at me to lean closer, smell her earthy aroma, place my hand on hers. What I’d done instead was join the others in recoiling from the weird girl, hurl names at her. Gail the Pale.
With her fair skin and hair so blond it was almost silver, she didn’t exactly help herself by filling her notebooks with weird symbols, scribbles of sacrifices, demon chants, crosses.
I glance over my shoulder. Her eyes twinkle with sly promise. Beneath those lacy black clothes, I know one entire arm is tattooed with the same symbols and scribbles.
We’re at the spot. The spot where I’d spent far too much time at earlier today. My shoulders still ache. I wonder what they’d say if they found out what I’d been up to. Emmeline, you’ve gone too far. There’s something wrong with you, Emmeline.
Gail places an icy hand on the small of my back, instantly making my lips part, my body turn.
“What is all this?” she says.
She isn’t doing a runner, screaming for help. Not yet.
I move closer to the shallow, rectangular hole with its fresh, chocolaty soil.
“I know you’re into certain things,” I say. “Darkish things. So, I made this for you, for us, to enjoy together. Promise you won’t ever tell anyone what I’ve done?”
This is the moment she leaves me.
The moment she turns her green, green eyes on me like I’m a sticky piece of chewing gum caught on the sole of her Doc Martens.
She stares down at the disturbed, crumbly dirt, a smile rising up one side of her face. The moonlight makes a shadow of her dimple. What a perfect night. Kiss me under a moonlight sky and say you’ll never leave. That I’m always yours.
“You’re something else,” Gail says, coming nearer. “How did you know—” She shakes her head, looks back down at the ground. “I want to nibble on that creamy skin of yours. Taste you. Throw you down right here. Show you … things.”
“You promise?”
“Wanna see?”
“Later.” I breathe out a sigh that feels like I’ve betrayed my own soul. “Why don’t you dig up your present?”
“Present? Starting to feel like Christmas.”
She’s not running. She’s taking a shovel, stabbing it into the ground, throwing dirt into a growing mound. She’s getting into it. Really into it, in fact. Racing, trying to find what a silly girl like me has buried for her in a shallow grave on a moonlit night.
I cast a look at the grave marker. It looks as if it would flake and crumble away at the slightest suggestion of a spade.
Here lies Mary Hollywood. We’ll never forget your gifts.
I can’t help the laugh that trickles out.
The spade thunks wood.
Gail stops, looks down.
“Is that an actual coffin? Emmeline, what did you do here?”
“Why don’t you open it up?”
This is it. You’ve gone too far, Emmeline. She’s gonna throw the spade at me, leaving only the dream of her lips on my neck as I touch myself in the bathtub the rest of my lonely days.
But Gail’s eyes are green fire. Shiny in the dark. Elated. Hungry.
She leans over the hole, sniffs, closes her eyes. “Is this real?”
Without waiting for an answer, she’s down on her hands and knees, prying off the coffin lid. It comes away in splinters as she claws, revealing the shape inside.
“He’s as fresh as I could make him,” I say.
Looking down at the thing I’d spent so long creating, I can see the way the moon plays over the eyes, the mouth, the stringy hair.
Gail’s on her knees, jeans dampened from the soil. “You know what I … what I am?”
The question hisses out those beautiful lips with an ache I’d never before heard from her. My heart flutters at the lonely sound.
Take me, I call out silently, with everything in me. Take me now, under the bed of stars and the watching trees.
“You take the first bite,” I say. “If you want to show me how much I mean to you, how far you’re willing to go, bite him.”
“What?”
“Go on. Bite him. You won’t regret it.”
This is the moment, my big idea seen to fruition in the graveyard. My test. Had anyone done this in the history of humankind? Was I the first true weirdo to think this a good idea? Always too far, Emmeline. Always taking it too far.
“Listen,” I start, “it’s just a jo—”
Gail opens her mouth wide, stretching the muscles in her neck. Her head is a blur as she sinks her teeth into the man’s head.
There’s the sound of gnashing, something crumbling.
Gail straightens. Her hands are trembling as she spits and paws at her mouth. Pieces of the man slide down her chest, land by her boots.
“That’s not…” she says, hand over her mouth, gagging, eyes wide.
I look into the hole I’d dug hours earlier, into the small box I’d placed in the fake grave as a makeshift coffin. The man’s face I’d moulded was smooshed in. At its neck, where Gail had sunk her teeth, were layers of red jam and sponge cake. Its vanilla, candy floss scent touches my nose. It’s the same smell that’s lived in my skin these last few years, ever since I opened my cake shop. I’d challenge myself to bake bigger and cooler cakes, getting quite the following on Instagram for my “super realistic” works.
This had been the biggest challenge yet.
And it had paid off.
The thing actually looked like a corpse. Even the headstone was cake.
“My cake’s not that bad, is it?” I ask. “W-What do you think? Do you like it?”
Gail claws at her tongue like it burns. “That’s not … I …”
“Hold on. Did you actually think I would ask you to eat a dead person?”
“Well, you did bring me to a graveyard in the middle of the night.”
“But you … wait. You thought I was serving you a real corpse, and you actually ate it? You’d do that for me?”
She loves me. She’s going to look me in the eye with those green butterfly makers and set her lips on my lips. We’ll move in together and smooch it up on the couch the rest of our days. She’ll be my forever queen and I’ll make her all the cake she can handle.
But she’s not looking at me. The sleekness of her movements is gone as she stands, runs her trembling hands up and down her thighs. She stares at the moon as if in prayer, bites her lip, turns away from me.
“Gail, I’m sorry I went too far. It was stupid. Let’s forget about it. I always go too far.”
Her back quivers. She groans, places her hands over her eyes, shakes out a breath like she’s struggling to keep hold of herself.
“It was just supposed to be a joke. I remembered how much you like dark, weird things, so I thought of the darkest, weirdest trick I could try and, I don’t know … I guess I wanted to show you that I see you. See you for who you really are.”
“Who I am? Who I am? You’ve no idea. You should never have done this. Now I’m—” She drives her nails into the back of her neck so hard that blood trickles down her skin. “You’ve no idea who I am. What I am. How hard it is to stay in control. And you tempt me with this.”
“Would you look at me? Please? I’m sorry. I’ll do anything to make it right.”
“Anything?”
“Anything.” I try to be all sexy, but I sound more like an injured cat. “Just let me look at you. Let’s forget about this, okay? It was stupid of me.”
Gail turns.
The moonlight shines its colours over her lovely, pale face.
Something catches my eye like diamonds twinkling.
I take a step back, stumble over the spade, barely keep myself from landing on my arse.
Two fangs glint out of each side of Gail’s luscious mouth. They grow larger, sharper as she smiles.
“Gail? What are you doing?”
She steps forward, her movements slick as liquid, predatory. “Let me kiss that neck again.”
Shame wheedles its hot way up my neck as I consider proffering it to my love, letting those fangs sink into me, giving her everything.
I back away, palms up. “What are you? Get away. No. Don’t!”
“Just a little nibble is all I need. Just a little nibble.”