CW: violence, blood, death.

It didn’t come as a surprise when AJ told me she wanted to open our relationship. We’d been an item for four years, but by the middle of the third year the two of us had long since checked out. You could feel it in the air: a static, something pushing us apart. I don’t know why we stayed together, why we wanted to make it work when it so obviously wouldn’t. Maybe it was the rent or maybe it was the fear of being alone. Half the reason we’d gotten together in the first place was because we were tired of loneliness. Maybe we even loved each other.

AJ never hid her attraction to other men and women. It wasn’t rare to catch her eye-fucking a cute bartender on date night, or to come back from the club toilet and find her dancing with someone else. Once, she tried to bring me on board to the whole couple-swapping scene after we met a geeky couple at Comic Con who were cosplaying characters from AJ’s favourite anime. I’d said no then; I was too nervous. AJ says that’s always been my issue.

So, I put up with the wayward glances, with her myriad Instagram followers. I put up with the way she treated me at Peter’s birthday party in the year before we all finished university, when she sank three bottles of red and stumbled into the lips of a varsity rugby player dressed in a shirt that was popping at the seams. Peter tried to console me in his familiar, heavy-handed way: he told me AJ was bad for me, that she was too wild to pin down. When we got home, AJ burst into tears and told me how sorry she was, that she was broken, that she didn’t think she could be fixed, that she didn’t think she was made for just one person.

I said it was okay. Life went on. Peter kept telling me to end things, I continued ignoring him. My doctor signed me up for a course of antidepressants, tiny little capsules that looked like teeth and took the weight out of my chest, like someone reached in and pulled out the worst parts of me. That was okay. I could live like that.

I think AJ preferred me like that, too. She said it was a sign we were broken together. I nodded, feeling like a television between channels, a wanderer through the world, floating through my early twenties without caring. Yes, I thought. Everything she said: Yes. Everything anyone said: Yes.

We were in the car, driving back from the station when she said it, unbuttoning her blazer and taking the slack out of her ponytail. She stank of work, of small, cramped accountancy offices on Fenchurch Street. I worked locally, running the social media campaigns for the council, a boring job that made zero use of my literature degree. I envied the social aspect of AJ’s profession, always going out drinking with colleagues, her breath always warm with booze. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “that maybe we should try something new in our relationship. To bring the love back.”

I stopped at a red light and listened as she reeled off her grand plan, pulling her face taut so that crease lines appeared through her foundation. Her eyes were deep, mournful wells that seemed to say, the only point of this life is to be happy.

I swallowed. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, we can try that.”

Her face unravelled at the seams, the creases slipping away, dimples coming out wide on her cheeks. She leaned over and kissed me on the neck and I caught a whiff of her perfume: something citrusy, oranges or limes. Later that night she rode me with newfound enthusiasm, her hips bucking and fraying and her mouth contorting to make sounds I’d never heard before. There was something else, too. Something new in AJ’s eyes, something wild and red and bloodthirsty that left me feeling like prey, like food. I closed my eyes as I came, too scared to look.

AJ told me not to be a prude. She told me to put myself out there, to talk about my kinks, to meet girls at bars, to fuck them. I downloaded all the dating apps, I followed the socials of a few girls I found attractive from the office. I didn’t match with anyone, I waited for others to swipe first; I even paid for the expensive versions of the apps so I could see exactly who was snooping around my poorly constructed profile. A few girls swiped on me, people who lived nearby, some with pictures of their children in their profiles, which I found odd. I didn’t try to swipe back.

AJ began spending more time away from the flat. She posted frequently to her socials: always with a full face of makeup, long, stylish red wings trailing from her eyes like some Egyptian goddess. She looked radiant, I thought, and she looked happy, really happy. And yet all the time I couldn’t shake the feeling as though I was seeing her for the first time. The look in her eyes was wild, animalistic. Not the eyes of a person, I thought, strangely.

She asked me to stop picking her up at the station after work, and so on my way back from the office I took up the habit of stopping at a dilapidated American-style diner, taking a seat near the fogged-up window with spurting cocks finger-drawn into the condensation. I sat there each night, trembling with whole-body shakes that wouldn’t quit.

I knew what was happening: I knew AJ was in and out of other beds. I knew she was seeing other men, other women. I knew she was having the best sex of her entire life—and why not? I’d agreed to it, I’d said yes (yes, yes, always yes) and if I was any sort of man, I’d venture out myself and start building a proper body count, and when AJ came back late at night, smelling of sweat and sex, maybe we would trade stories while we soaped each other down in the shower.

I stayed at the diner until I knew AJ would be back home, which was late. There was something about the quiet of an empty flat that I couldn’t stand. I must’ve resembled a poor shadow of a human, dry-swallowing antidepressants, not even bothering to wipe the cocks off the glass.

A waitress took pity on me. She approached to ask if I wanted a top up before realising I hadn’t touched the first cup. Then she hovered, on the brink of breaking the ice. I looked up at her and she smiled in the way you might smile at an injured animal, a bless-his-little-heart look. Her hair was all chocolate curls and her face was beautiful. The fluorescent light tinkled from a nametag that said: Rebecca.

“Just like the film,” she said. I blinked at her for one second, two, before she tapped an acrylic-blue nail against her nametag. “Rebecca, the film.”

“I’ve not seen it.”

“It’s old.” She slid into the seat opposite me and set the big thermos of coffee down on the table. Only now did I realise how young she was—a little over eighteen, was my guess, but with a face worn down by life. There was no sparkle to her eyes, no fire, no fear. Just dormancy. “You look miserable. What is it? A divorce? A death?”

“Do I look old enough for a divorce or a death?”

She shrugged. “People die younger and younger every year. Have you heard of all those stories of young men going missing? A few men around here vanished without a trace, London-types. I suppose they all just went to Mauritius or something.” She bit a loose flake of white skin on her lower lip. “I envy them. They don’t have to sit here, chasing kids away from the windows day after day. You know, I asked one of ’em why he was so obsessed with drawing penises. He just laughed at me, laughed in my face.”

“People are terrible,” I said, my voice shot-through with hoarseness. “It’d be better if it was a death or a funeral. But it’s just a relationship.”

“You still got one?”

I said no, I didn’t. It felt liberating to say. Rebecca asked me to stay until she closed the diner, which was after midnight. I messaged AJ to tell her I would be back late. She replied with a single emoji: a winking face.

Rebecca’s place was a small, box-like flat with a potted aloe vera plant and a mattress on the floor in one corner. She said she could only afford the place because her boyfriend still paid half the rent even though he no longer lived there. Rebecca said he’d cheated. It didn’t make sense, she said, to build someone up, just to bring them crashing back down. She fetched a bottle of red from the kitchen counter and we sat on the mattress, drinking. Rebecca told me she’d wanted to be an editor at a publishing house but hadn’t been able to get a position. “They want experience,” she said, “and yet they won’t give you the job, even as an assistant, to get the experience in the first place. It’s dumb.”

We drank in silence for a while before Rebecca set down her glass and pulled herself into me; I could taste the memory of a cigarette on her breath. My glass slipped from my fingers, tumbled off the mattress and spilled onto the floor, leaving a bloody stain on the oak panelling. Rebecca cupped my face and I felt absolved by the trembling of her body in my arms. I thought about the look in her eyes and how it didn’t scare me and I wondered how any of us ended up like this, so bent out of shape and broken beyond belief.

After sex, we shared a cigarette, the little orange ember piercing through the dark, and listened to the silence of the flat, the sounds of the bellowing traffic outside.

“So, your ex,” Rebecca’s voice cut through the quiet. “She was a bitch?”

I don’t have an ex. The words almost leapt out instinctively, but I kept them down. Lying was new to me, but I supposed it had to become part of normality. “I guess so,” I said. “I don’t know. She scared me.”

“That ugly?” Rebecca laughed. “Come on, show us a photo. I want to see.”

I found my phone and navigated to AJ’s Instagram. There were several new photos of her in fancy bars with low lighting and vinyl-covered booths. Whoever she was currently seeing obviously had more money than I did. “Do you see her eyes?”

“Oh, she’s really pretty,” Rebecca said. “What’re you with me for, huh?” She craned her neck forward as she inspected the photo closely. “I see what you mean. The eyes, they look almost red. She looks like something wearing a person’s skin. What the hell did you do to her?”

“What do you mean?”

Rebecca sighed and lit a new cigarette as she told me about her ex-boyfriend, the cheater, who begged to come back and live with her again. He said that he was sorry, that he made a mistake, all that rehearsed crap. When he was drunk—which was often—he said that the girl he slept with, a leggy blonde from his office, wasn’t all that anyway, that her pussy never got wet enough and that she refused to take it up the ass.

Eventually, there was no choice but to cut him off completely. She piled all his stuff together and gave him a weekend to move out, then she stubbed cigarettes out on all the cards he’d ever got her, scorched all the plushies and pawned all the sentimental jewellery. She blocked him on everything and drew cocks over his face in all her scrapbooks. That was it, it was over. And for the best.

She saw him again five months later, when she’d been crossing at a red light on her way to the diner. It was raining heavily. As she turned against the worst of the rain, she caught his face staring out from a car, the window wipers keeping his reflection fresh. She’d thought about the possibility a million times, situations where she might see him again, and not once did she foresee herself screaming like a banshee and running like a woman possessed. She barrelled into work moments later and came apart in a sobbing mess in the women’s toilets.

“Because he didn’t even look like a person anymore,” Rebecca said. “He looked like a corpse, like he’d died, like some part of him had . . .” She sank into her cigarette. “His eyes were sunk so far into his face and his cheekbones were sticking out through the skin.”

She passed me the smouldering stump of the cigarette and then began to cry, a soft whimpering sound in the dark, like a little girl awoken from her first horrific nightmare. “I’ve never forgotten it,” she said. “Because I felt like I’d done that. Like it was me who ruined him. Like I’d made him into a monster.”

I never saw Rebecca again. We exchanged numbers but neither of us ever messaged each other. I stopped going to the diner, started coming back to the cold of the flat. I thought it was for the best, that after our conversation in the dark it was probable that she wanted to forget all about me and my connection to her terrible past. I deleted all the apps and cancelled the subscriptions. I decided I was bad for people, that, like a magnet, I brought out the worst in them.

AJ messaged me on my lunch break a week later. She wanted me to stay out while she brought a guy home. I stalked the empty, twilit streets, watching cars go past, wondering all the time if I’d look up and see a skeleton at the wheel, or a monster with fangs and many eyes, made of nothing but ectoplasm and hate. I never saw any, because it was just a story after all, because monsters didn’t exist.

AJ was in bed when I got back. “The shower is ready for you,” she grumbled in that half-mushy language of sleep. “Dave is gone.”

“Okay.”

I undressed and stood under the scalding shower water for fifteen minutes before I noticed the red splatter on the ceramic floor of the bathroom. It reminded me of the glass of wine I’d dropped at Rebecca’s, only much darker. I stepped out of the shower and dabbed the towel against the stain. The metallic scent of blood was unmistakable. The smell filled me with rage. I wanted to tell AJ to clean up after herself. But I had the towel in my hands before I knew it and I was wiping in circular motions until the blood was thin and translucent.

AJ was asleep when I clambered into the still-warm bed. She snored loudly and I thought about placing a pillow over her head, about pushing down on it and stopping those snores forever. Monster, I thought. I am the monster, not her.

Monster. The word didn’t leave my head. I slid a hand over the sheets until I felt the warmth of her breath and very carefully parted her lips as I ran a finger across the bottom row of teeth. They were irregularly shaped, some like Stonehenge pieces, others like spearheads.

My finger slipped over an elongated canine, and I felt the skin split. In the dark the cut looked deep and black.

I walked to the kitchen to fetch a plaster, but I struggled to get the medical cupboard open. I tugged against the handle but lacked the strength to swing it open all the way. The blood dribbled from the incision on my finger, making a wet patter on the kitchen floor.

“What are you doing?” AJ asked, appearing in her pyjamas at the corner of the kitchen, rubbing sleep from her eyes. The tiredness evaporated when she saw the blood. “Oh shit, what the hell did you do?” She hurried over and pulled the cupboard open with her pinkie. The box of plasters tumbled onto the floor. AJ sat me down at the dining table, dabbed the blood away from my finger and then wrapped a plaster around the wound. “Could you not open the cupboard?” she said.

“No,” I said. “Felt a bit weak. Probably from the blood. Got too careless when picking hair out the razor.”

“You look thin,” AJ said. “I’ll make a big dinner tomorrow. Lots of iron.” I flinched as she brought my finger to her lips. An image snapped in my head like the pop of a flash camera: a bloody stump, bitten clean from the hand. But she offered a soft kiss, nothing more. “You coming back to bed?”

“In a minute,” I said, and I listened to her feet pad down the hallway, back to the bedroom. I had a head full of folklore that night as I looked up at the framed graduation photo of AJ we kept on the ochre wall facing the kitchen, all the time asking myself, why do you have fangs? Why do you have fangs? Why do you have fangs?

Then there was the splatter of red on the bathroom floor, the smell of blood, the way AJ snored like a giant in a fairy tale. And suddenly I could think of nothing else other than how exhausted a person could get after a good meal.

• • • •

Peter had eventually gotten the hint that I didn’t care about his opinion. I imagine he wrote me off as a lost cause, someone who would spend an entire lifespan beneath the heel of AJ’s stiletto. We stopped talking after university. He got a job in the pharmaceutical industry that let him take frequent trips to visit laboratories in Quebec. He’d moved on, I thought, and good for him. Then two months after AJ and I began our little experiment he messaged me and asked to meet. We met at a local coffee shop in town, the one that had shelves full of beat poetry and made cappuccinos with art in the chocolate powder.

Peter paid for the drinks and brought them over to our table. Peter looked nothing like the meek, scrawny boy I’d lived with during university. Strong muscles bunched beneath a tight-fitting T-shirt as he moved. His hair was puffed up into a pompadour and his teeth were straight out of a toothpaste advert.

“You’re looking good,” I said as I sipped a chocolate cat from the cappuccino froth.

“Wish I could say the same about you, man. You look like you’re only eating crackerbread.”

I shrugged. “Work is stressful. Maybe I’ll be looking like you soon.”

Peter looked like he didn’t believe a word I said. He sighed and cleared his throat. “It’s about AJ,” he said, straight to the point. “I think there’s something you need to know. I saw her going home with another guy last night. A fat guy, looked like some banker or something. They were holding hands and kissing against a streetlamp and everything. And then they went up into this guy’s place.”

He paused, let the silence sharpen his words.

“I thought you should know,” he said, finally. “But looking at you, I think you already have an idea. I knew she was bad, man, all the way through university I told you she wasn’t good. And that time with that guy in the club at my birthday. I mean, how many more times are you going to let yourself be mugged off?”

“It’s not like that,” I retorted, feeling small and weak. “I know about it. We’ve opened our relationship. I slept with someone too.”

Peter looked like someone had rolled a live grenade at his feet. “You know those things always end up in disasters, right? I don’t know a single person who had a successful open relationship, man. And they’re biased in favour of women too, because of . . . you know . . . society. Are you happy for her to just be fucking fatties on the regular while you’re worrying yourself bone-thin?”

“She can do what she wants. We’re both adults.”

Peter sighed. “If that’s what you think. I’m only trying to look out for you. And it’s dangerous for her to be out, what with people going missing all the time. You ever think about that?” He rubbed a hand over his forehead; I watched the biceps work like pistons. “Look, if I can give you any advice, man,” he said, “it’s this: get out while you can. Sooner or later that girl is gonna kill you.”

When I got home I found AJ in the kitchen, stirring vegetables in a pan. The flat smelled of Asian cuisine: spices and soy sauce and meat sizzling in a wok. She had her hair in a ponytail and she was wearing her casual clothes: joggers and a T-shirt with a faded anime graphic on it. “I took the day off today to try and get some ingredients,” she said, stirring the pan with a wooden spoon. “I’m worried about how thin you’re getting. I forgot that you don’t know how to cook anything other than chicken nuggets, and I’m barely in and—” She ran a hand through her hair. “I’ve been a bad girlfriend.”

“No, you haven’t,” I said, and she moved into my open arms. She fought to find my lips and I recoiled when I tasted blood on her tongue. “Oh, I bit my tongue. Can you tell? I got too excited when I found a decent wok for half price. I guess I’m a proper adult now. Can you fetch me the container from the fridge while I dish up? There’s going to be leftovers.”

I grabbed the handle and heaved, put all my weight into it. The door didn’t budge. It was as though someone had mag-locked the fridge door while I’d been out.

“Oh dear,” AJ said as she brushed me aside and opened the fridge. “You’re getting bad. Go and take a seat.”

We ate in silence. Well, AJ ate. I stirred the food around my plate with my fork. The meat was beef—it looked like beef, but I couldn’t shake Peter’s story about AJ and the fat banker. I couldn’t shake the image of the blood on the bathroom. I told AJ I wasn’t hungry. She didn’t disguise her annoyance, but she didn’t voice it, either.

“I wanted to ask you something,” AJ said while she was washing up. She’d cut a store-bought cheesecake into slices and let me have the largest bit, which I ate slowly and thoughtfully. “About tonight. I was wondering if you could drive me somewhere.”

“To meet a guy,” I said, matter-of-factly.

“Yeah,” AJ replied. “Just to drop me off where he is. He doesn’t drive. Would you do that for me? I know it’s asking a lot and it’s fine if you say no. We could just have a night in and watch a film or something.”

I thought back to what Rebecca had said about making her ex into a monster. I thought about the ways in which other people’s happiness is always our responsibility. I thought about the way AJ looked in those Instagram posts, always so radiant and happier than any time she’d ever been with me. You had to make sure someone else was happy, that was how you kept them from becoming monstrous. That was how you reversed the process.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I can do that.”

“Great.” She kissed me on the forehead and hurried down the hallway to get changed, reappearing ten minutes later in a lacy bodysuit and a pair of faux-leather trousers that accentuated the curves of her ass. Something primal stirred within me; fuck me instead, I wanted to say, you don’t need another man. You have me. But when she asked, “Ready to go?” I said what I always said.

It was a late night in winter and the darkness was deep, broken only by the lights from nearby villages and cities. AJ sat in the backseat, playing with her hair, now out of a ponytail and tumbling back behind elfin ears, her face illuminated by the glow of her phone like a narrator in a fireside ghost story. In the rear mirror, I caught the hellfire glow of her eyes: tinged red, feral and bloodthirsty.

We stopped in the town square, which was crowded with punters spilling out from the bars, stumbling into one another’s arms, into hedges to vomit, into police cars. “He’s on his way,” AJ said, finally setting her phone down. “Thanks for doing this.” Then she yawned, her jaw spreading wide, and I caught her fangs in the mirror, each one the length of a finger.

“I said he could meet me here,” AJ said. “Then I’ll get out. Can you open a window a crack? I need a smoke to calm my nerves.”

A silhouette formed in the town-square, gaining features as it moved through the liquid dark, becoming whole, becoming a person. Whoever it was, I thought, I would tell them to run for their life, just like Rebecca had done. I opened my mouth to yell and closed it when I saw the thick plates of Peter’s chest swaying as he moved. He slipped into the car and the vehicle swelled with the potent stench of his aftershave.

“You know, I still feel weird about doing this while you’re in a relationship,” Peter said as the door clicked shut behind him. I didn’t even breathe. “Can you not just end things? Is that not easier?”

“I don’t know. My boyfriend is in the front. You can ask him.”

Peter’s eyes leapt into the rear-view mirror. The colour drained from his face. “Oh fuck.” He grabbed the door handle, but I mashed a finger onto the child-lock. “Dude, I’m sorry. I tried to get you out of this. I don’t want to do anything, I just want to . . .”

“Drive,” AJ commanded.

I drove. The streetlights blurred around us. We were going so fast. Nothing seemed to matter anymore; the entire world had shrunk down to fit inside my car, and now here we were, the last three people who really mattered, trading each other’s breath.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Just drive. I’m going to do it while you’re driving. I’ve always wanted to do that.”

“Man, just stop the car,” Peter pleaded. “She told me it was a fucking Uber. You’re driving so fast. I’m sorry, my . . .”

AJ pounced on him, smushed her face into his. I listened to the wet sounds of their backseat kiss. We pulled out onto an empty stretch of road and I averted my eyes from the world hurtling around me to see AJ pinning Peter down with one hand and using her free hand to tear her clothes off, her nails tearing fabric to ribbons.

“JUST FUCKING KISS ME BACK,” AJ screamed. Her voice was demonic. Four people talking at once, a chorus of hell. She raked her hand over Peter’s T-shirt and his tight muscle-fit pinged off and hit the roof, revealing a trail of deep red twine drawn across his chest. He screamed, but AJ muffled it with another kiss. She pushed him into the seat and swept her naked body onto his lap. I saw the curve of her ass again, saw the tumble of her hair. The moonlight sketched out the vertebrae of her back, too many, I thought, like multiple spines coiled up inside her, bone-snakes squirming under the skin.

Peter’s hand came from the left and planted a resounding slap across AJ’s face. She laughed, a sound like machinery. “I like it rough.” Then she turned to see me in the mirror and smiled. “Keep driving, baby. I’m so nearly done.”

I watched it happen. Her mouth extended, became full of teeth. She tore Peter’s face from his head, leaving it looking like a bit-open fruit. Somehow, Peter continued to scream as AJ fit the rest of him into her mouth, every little piece. It was over in a matter of seconds, once Peter stopped making any sound at all. Then there was the sound of liquid pooling off the backseats, off the windows, dripping onto the floormats. AJ rolled over onto her back and rubbed the blood around her nipples. “That was so much fun,” she said again in that voice that sounded discordant and otherworldly.

It occurred to me that I could end it all right then, I could jackknife the car sideways, ram it into a streetlight, bust the bonnet and break both our skulls. But I kept the car going forwards, gripping the wheel firmly to stop my hands shaking. “Will you do that to me?” My voice was wafer thin.

Her smile split her face apart, travelled up toward her eyes. “Maybe if you’re lucky,” she said, as she sucked the flesh from her talons. “For now, I just need you to keep driving. Can you do that for me?”

I let the car slow to a crawl. Up ahead, a red light blazed in the dark; it was a busy night and the crossing was packed with shapes. I wondered what would happen when the car finally stuttered to a stop, what those shapes would do when they glanced into the car as they crossed, what it was they would see.