Burning With You

Wordlessly, I picked up the remote and placed it on the coffee table.

"I hate when you do that," she said.

"What?"

She swept her arms wide, gesturing to the tidy living space. "Everything in order, always. All of Seven Hills is going to suffocate and you're worried about crumbs on your couch and a misplaced remote."

"It's my place," I said, a little puzzled that she thought it was her place to say these things, that she would even feel them deeply enough to lash out like this. "My canned tuna. You want out, that's on you."

"You're a quitter, dude."

The word stung. I hadn't quit anything. My position had been terminated by the forces of Hell. But Hesther didn't know that—any of that. She was just swinging blind. The cabin fever had taken hold. I wasn't immune, either. An unfamiliar part of me wanted to clap back. I toyed with her wedding ring in the pocket of my flannel pj bottoms. Something heinous was on the tip of my tongue. You wanna talk about quitting?

With a series of deep breaths, I brought myself back to the room. She didn't know my circumstances, and I didn't know hers.

"We've done nothing but watch TV for three weeks," I said, slowly. "Do we want to actually get to know each other?"

She huffed, then shrugged an assent.

"This was probably wrong of me, but I wasn't sure you weren't being hasty." I took the ring out of my pocket and placed it tenderly on the table, next to the remote and the Heidegger. In my defense, I was a broke grad student and the idea of throwing away perfectly good jewelry when you could sell it instead rubbed me the wrong way.

She flinched, then shook her head as her eyes watered. "It felt good to throw it away. My first choice in the matter. I had no say. He got the annulment—unconsummated. Couldn't get his dick in me. Four years down the drain."

I looked away, to Yamasato on the TV. I didn't get the full picture, but I didn't need to.

"Sorry."

"Whatever." Her voice was steady, despite the tears. "It was bound to come up eventually."

I wanted nothing more than to retract the ring, to remove it from the table, to return it to the bathroom trash. But picking it up also seemed wrong, so I did nothing. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Do you want to hear about it?"

There didn't seem to be a correct answer. I shrugged right before I belatedly picked up on the mirth in her tone.

"Maybe you can play therapist, or best friend," she said, more obviously joking. "Maybe it'd be good for me to get it all off my chest."

"What's the point if this is what life is?" I borrowed her earlier question in an effort to pick up the joke. My therapist would remind me that we can't predict the future. As the fires continued, though, I'd started doubting my therapist. We were going to die—if not this time, next time, or the time after. Stewardland was doomed. The utility diabolists were winning.

"Well played."

"Really?"

Hesther put a hand on my shoulder. "You're fun. Shoulda been friends back in college, you'd have been a real hit at my department's parties."

"Oh yeah? What'd you study?"

"Philosophy," she said, chipper suddenly. Of course. The good old days, before her husband.

"Funny," I said. "There was a thing we said about philosophy in my department. 'Philosophy is the pursuit of what's true'—"

She cut me off. "No way! Rhetoric?"

"Whoa! No one even knows what that is." I wasn't laying it on thick: it was true. My department didn't exist at most schools.

"Georgeville?"

"Yeah!"

"Me too! Wild. Too bad about the alma mater, eh?"

I gestured to the book on the coffee table. "Not just an alma mater," I grumbled. "I was in the PhD program."

"Oh man." Hesther's hand felt heavier on my shoulder. "Guess we both lost something the day the Gullet opened."

I shuddered under her touch, under the weight of the future. When we got out of here, we'd both have entirely new lives to build. If.

"What's next for you?" I asked.

Her hand was still on my shoulder. I turned to face her. She was so close, tender.

"No fucking clue," she murmured. "Like, what if this is what life is..."

"If this is what life is, I'm just lucky you showed up three weeks ago."

"Shut up, I'm halving your supply."

"Three months with you seems better than six months alone."

Again, not laying it on thick. The idea of being trapped alone for six months terrified me. But I heard the words as they left my mouth, and realized they must have sounded a certain way, only moments before Hesther pulled me into a tight hug.

"You don't know me," she said.

"You barely know me," I replied, wrapping my arms around her. I rested my chin on her shoulder. She smelled good, like my soap. "Trust me, I wouldn't want to be alone with me that long."

"You're not so bad. Sorry I snapped earlier."

"I said worse things."

"Shhhh."

She stroked my hair, and I thoughtlessly mirrored the gesture. We'd spent three weeks together on a couch, always with a few feet of space between us. It felt good to finally touch her, to be touched by her. Part of it was doubtless the gloomy isolation of the soot-choked world. But part of it, an undeniable part of it, was that her body felt good in my arms. Her short hair was soft and springy under my fingers. Our cheeks met, and I leaned deeper into the embrace.

"It's been a long time since I've hugged anyone," she admitted, nuzzling into me. "My ex... he got mad at me."

"Over hugs?"

Neither of us were in a rush to part. I rubbed my temple against her ear.

"Hugs. Kisses. Closeness. He'd get hard, then blame me for not being able to take him."

"And he couldn't just jerk off?" I was getting hard, too—just a little, a natural reaction to the softness of Hesther's body and the chemicals her hug was releasing. But that wasn't her problem.

"He said it was my job."

"Bullshit."

"I know," she breathed. She pulled me tighter. "But that doesn't make it hurt less."

"You deserve the physical intimacy you need," I said, "with no pressure to go beyond the physical intimacy you want."

"You're sweet. Where were you four years ago?"

"Learning this lesson the hard way." I closed my eyes, exes' faces surfacing unbidden. "Can we not go there?"

"Yeah. Sorry I brought it up."

"Don't be. You're great."

"This is great," she said, squirming in my arms.

It was. It really was. I sighed into it, feeling the hug as if it was the first of my life. My erection receded as I adjusted to our new proximity. My mind wandered back to the Heidegger, my eyes following it to lock on the cover of the book. Forcibly, I dragged my gaze up to the TV.

"Hesther?"

"Yeah?"

"Wanna finish that episode?"

"Can we stay like this?"

"Yeah."

She picked up the remote and handed it to me. We turned away from each other slightly, only slightly, so that we could face the TV. We remained more than adjacent, arms around each other's shoulders, hip to hip, her chest pressing softly into my side.

As I tried to press the play button—always a production, with my shitty remote—Hesther leaned up and gave me a chaste peck on the cheek.

#

"Maaaaan." Tokui smiled at his co-panelists. "They really went for it."

Triendl and You burst into giggles as the couch reacted to the latest indignity on Terrace House. Yamasato glowered at us from the wall.

"I'm bored," he said simply, prompting more laughs in the studio.

I looked to Hesther, instinctively. She was fidgeting with the remote.

"Bored?" I asked.

She paused Netflix and stared into my eyes, her face a mirror of my own confusion.

"How did you know?"

"Just seemed like you'd be," I said, unsure if that was the full story. My therapist was trying to help me work on mindfulness practice, but I hadn't seen her in three weeks, and for all I knew, I'd never see her again. We were going to die—if not this time, next time, or the time after. Stewardland was doomed. The utility diabolists were winning.

"It did, didn't it," Hesther murmured.

"But it's not Terrace House that's boring you," I said, tentatively.

"Never."

"So what?"

"I'm... not sure." Hesther looked around the studio apartment. "Us?"

We were... what were we? Friends? Lovers? Hesther felt like an extension of myself. Hesther felt like a stranger.

I left her on the couch, paced around the apartment. "I think I'm missing something, Hesther."

"Can't have gone far, dude, unless you flushed it down the toilet with your jizz. We've been stuck here for three weeks."

"Is it three weeks, Hesther?" I stopped in front of the TV, back to Yamasato's face, frowning at the figure on my couch. "Doesn't it feel like longer?"

"Yeah," she laughed. "Quarantine will do that to you."

"No, no." I waved my hands. "I remember what three weeks of quarantine felt like." I'd felt it before, and before, and before...

"But the Gullet's never opened this close to us till now." Hesther squinted. "Were you in Angels last year?"

I was pretty sure I'd never been to Angels, and that my best friend from kindergarten should know that. I went back to pacing. I peeked in the bathroom, saw Hesther in the mirror.

"Are you a figment of my imagination?"

"Uh, rude." She was wiggling into her jeans, a used condom next to her on the couch.

"Shit."

There had to be something, some explanation. Why had I fucked my ex-girlfriend? I couldn't, for the life of me, remember. And people fuck each other for reasons. Or was it people say things for reasons? Linguistic thought escaped me as I began to break down in the bathroom.

"Breathe?" Hesther suggested in the mirror.

That's what my therapist would say. Before the sky blackened, before her office cancelled all upcoming appointments, before the relief that had accompanied the fires. I knew Seven Hills would suffocate eventually, but I breathed easier in the aftermath of the Gullet of Hell opening across the estuary. My anxiety fled my body with the responsibility to read Heidegger's wonky bullshit, and I thought hey, maybe it's okay that I can't see my therapist right now.

I'd been cautioned, of course, mainly through memes, that indispensable source of laypeople's understanding of mental health, that there's a trap people like me fall into.

We start doing better, and we stop going to therapy, and then we let one good habit after the next slide, and next thing we know, we're worse.

Sure enough, my anxiety was here again, strangling me.

"Breathe," I repeated, choking on the word.

"Yeah."

I fought to follow through. I inhaled through my nose, puffing my chest and diaphragm, and held the breath in my lungs for five seconds before slowly pushing it out between my teeth.

"How's that?" Hesther asked.

I took another big breath, and another.

"Better," I said. My body tingled. I stepped back out into the living space. Hesther lay curled up on the couch, dressed only in an oversized t-shirt. "Where were we?"

"Boredom at the end of the world," she said lazily. "Hey, what's on your bucket list?"

"Figuring out what the fuck is going on here," I answered. That felt right.

"I could eat your ass," she offered.

I shook my head. "Have we always talked past each other like this?"

She looked at me with those smoldering hazel eyes. I looked away, instinctively. I'd always thought we were just on the same page, that we mirrored each other's thoughts and feelings. But maybe something darker was at play. Was I projecting? Had I just never really listened to her—had she just never really listened to me?

"Who ARE you?" I asked.

She said something, but I didn't hear it at first. Dizziness hit me suddenly. The softcover Heidegger cushioned my head as I fell to the floor, almost braining myself on the corner of the coffee table. When the wave of disorientation passed and I looked up, Hesther was gone.

As I cast about my apartment for any sign of her, her answer reappeared in my mind, itself another question:

"Who do you need me to be?"

The words rang louder and louder. I realized I was repeating them aloud, screaming them in my empty studio apartment.

"Who do you need me to be?" I cried.

When my throat ran out of words, I just sat in silence on the floor, staring at the front door. I was alone at the end of the world with nothing but Terrace House and an impossibly jumbled memory of my best friend.

I have no idea how much time passed, but a thought occurred to me at some point.

What else, besides the suppression of my anxiety, might have been temporary?

#

"Maaaaan." Tokui smiled at his co-panelists. "They really went for it."

Triendl and You burst into giggles as the couch reacted to the latest indignity on Terrace House. Yamasato glowered at us from the wall.

"I'm bored," he said simply, prompting more laughs in the studio.

"I'm bored," I echoed, fidgeting with the remote.

The sage and citrus candle sputtered.

Hesther snatched the remote from my hand. She paused Netflix and looked at me.

"I was about to say that," she said, incredulous. "You getting cocky?"

"No, mistress." I wasn't sure why I'd said it, either: I wasn't bored. The words just tumbled from my mouth.

Her tail swished back and forth. She was agitated, maybe getting hungry. We'd been watching Terrace House nonstop for something like five hours.

"Hmph."

We were bound by contract. She claimed to be a daughter of Maznarex, who was apparently some venerable hot shot in Hell. Around the first time the Gullet opened in Paradise two years ago, she showed up in my dreams, offering me safety and sanity in exchange for my seed. She was hot. I was single. At the time I hadn't foreseen the fires spreading into the East Estuary, and if I'm being honest, I signed the contract mostly because I wanted to pay the price.

For two years now she'd haunted my studio apartment, controlling my ejaculations and my Netflix queue. Things changed three weeks ago when the lockdown order came in Seven Hills. Georgeville was burning, and Hesther's protection suddenly seemed much more valuable.

"So what?" she asked. "Bored of Terrace House?"

"Never," I said.

"Then what? Speak freely, piglet."

"Honestly, I'm not bored, mistress." I enjoyed her choice of programs. I enjoyed her naked body on the couch next to mine, all curves and wings and spikes. I even enjoyed the new normal: the constant night outside my window, the fact that my only responsibilities were to eat canned tuna and come in Hesther's pussy. I was living a life many would envy. "I don't know why I said that, brainfart or something." A flash of a thought crossed my mind, a fragment of another life: people say things for reasons. I shook it off. Deja vu was a common malfunction. "While I'm speaking freely, why were you going to say you're bored?"

Hesther glared at me, then shrugged. "Humans."

"What about us?"

She exhaled sharply, gestured eastward, crossed and uncrossed her legs. She dropped her phone between us on the couch. The screen wasn't locked, and I could see that her newsfeed was full of Buzzfeed articles about the diabolists' plans for Georgeville. "You always blame your problems on others."

I nodded. "We do."

"Ugh. Alright piglet, enough chitchat. Get in these guts."

I wasted no time. With efficient movements, I cast off my robe, dropped to my knees on the floor with my back to the TV, lined my cock up with Hesther's vulva, and pushed forward. She never needed foreplay or lube, and I never needed time to get hard. Her magic took care of everything. After two years, we fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces. And it always felt amazing. We weren't fucking, really. It wasn't about intimacy or pleasure or anything like that. I was just sticking it in, and she was just making me feel good enough to spurt.

I lay back on the couch after, sweating and breathing heavily, not from physical exertion—I'd only thrust a handful of times—but from Hesther's draining of my energy.

Hesther resumed the episode of Terrace House. The panel of comedians on the TV continued their colorful commentary on the antics in the house. I barely registered any of it. My head was swimming, and besides, it all felt so familiar.

"We watch this one already?" I asked.

"No."

I closed my eyes. I felt so tired. That wasn't new, but my mind wandered further than normal. I considered the future. Hesther was bound to guarantee my safety and sanity, but what did that mean? I'd never asked for any clarification, satisfied with my end of the bargain. It was common wisdom that the Gullet would close eventually, but there was no proof that it would. What if the fires never ceased, if the sky never cleared? Seven Hills would suffocate. I was going to die—if not this time, next time, or the time after. Stewardland was doomed. The utility diabolists were winning.

"This is the shit I'm talking about," Hesther grumbled. "Do you hear yourself?"

I snapped out of my reverie. "I was talking?"

"Utility diabolists, blah blah blah. You buy this Gullet of Hell bullshit?"

I wanted to say "no, mistress," because she looked mad, but I wasn't sure what she meant, so I just kept my mouth closed.

"You're perfectly capable of ruining a planet or two on your own."

"Certainly."

"Dad's working his ass off to manage his division. You think he'd waste his time and power answering the prayers of some random corporate assholes?"

"Noooo?" I had no idea what Emperor Maznarex cared about, nor what he was capable of.

Hesther rolled her eyes. "Eat my ass, piglet."

"Gladly, mistress."

She mounted my face, shoved her asshole against my lips. I stuck out my tongue, swirled it around. This wasn't fucking, either. It was closer to masturbation for Hesther. Something between that and training an unruly pet. I didn't mind. Her good mood was worth a rim job or ten, and I enjoyed her ass in my face.

As she ground down on me, she spoke on in an unimpassioned tone. "You're boring, piglet. Sometimes I wish you'd resist me a bit."

I'd tried explaining consent to her, and the fact that it was good for both of us that I was eager to serve. On multiple occasions. But it was like water off a duck's back. She'd tried to explain to me that she was a demon, that demons were all about torment. But I didn't understand her any more than she understood me.

I lapped away hungrily at her ass. I couldn't see, but I heard her fingers frantically mussing her labia. I felt her wetness spraying across my chest as she came. I was hard again, and she mounted me in reverse cowgirl and had her second dinner, milking my cock deep in her pussy.

"You know, mistress," I said, a brief nap later, "if I bore you so, you could exit our contract. Find more exciting jizz."

"Hmph."

A new episode of Terrace House was playing on the TV. Hesther was idly flicking at one of her nipples with the tip of her tail.

I noticed the remote on the floor, so I picked it up and placed it carefully on the coffee table next to my copy of Heidegger.

"I hate when you do that," Hesther said.

"What?"

She swept her arms wide, gesturing to the tidy living space. "Everything in order, always. All of Seven Hills is going to suffocate and you're worried about crumbs on your couch and a misplaced remote."

"Hesther?" I asked.

"What?"

She seemed different. I'd never heard her express concern for Seven Hills, or any human community. And I wasn't supposed to use her name. But she seemed uncharacteristically unbothered by that, and uncharacteristically upset with my tidiness.

"This is a weird dream," I said.

She shrugged. "Just like, calm down, dude."

"Dude?" I blinked. I'd been Hesther's "piglet" for two years. The only people who called me "dude" were the bros I had before I decided bros sucked at a frat party sophomore year. That was, what, six years ago? "Who ARE you?"

Hesther turned from the TV, a dazed expression on her face.