CW: depictions or mentions of frank sexuality, self-harm, suicide, violence, bodily harm, death, cannibalism, blood, gore, and bodily fluids.

Watching Jules claw his way back to life was the hottest thing I’d ever seen.

This was the kind of scene artists immortalized with gold and lapis lazuli illumination, the kind of scene that soared, heaven-seeking, up cathedral vaults, buoyed by choirs of castrati.

One moment, Jules was twitching in a pool of his own blood, and the next, he shuddered back into himself, lips opening like a crescent moon, lacerations pursing closed like kisses, the bruising around his throat softening from gemstone-purple to butterfly-blue. His limbs jerked majestically, a dancer warming up for a show. His chest shuddered with breath, emphasizing the delicate glitter of sweat and arterial spray that beaded the hollow between his pecs.

I wanted to shove my face between those pecs and lick him clean.

Zane and I had snagged a cushy balcony-spot overlooking the main dungeon floor. It offered us an excellent view: The twinks by the Poison Garden turning crimson, the muscle-daddies in the Gladiator Pit wrenching out organs with practiced brutality, the shy couple eyeing the guillotine with curiosity—perverts like us, enjoying their time at the Noose & Dagger convention.

Eyes still on Jules, I whispered to Zane, “I’m going to jizz my pants,” my fingers on his arm python-tight. Zane nodded mutely. His throat was still recovering from our bout of immolation-play. He too, was fixating on the scene before us, watching Jules’s dom drop his garotte and approach with soft words and a damp cloth.

Despite all the erotic stimuli on offer, it was Jules who held my attention. We’d been part of a few restaurant outings this weekend. We’d made out once—a brief, laughter-laden kiss at a vanilla dance party at a local bar. But honestly, I was schoolboy-level crushing on him. Like, awkward-boner-at-inappropriate-times-level crushing on him. Like draw-sickening-hearts-with-our-initials-in-notebooks crushing on him.

It was a nice feeling. I hadn’t felt like that since—since—

Mercifully, Zane interrupted the potential spiral. “You should ask him,” he whispered.

“Ask him what?”

Zane raised an eyebrow.

“Zane! You’ve seen him in action. You’ve seen him. He doesn’t need the likes of me.”

Zane bit my neck. I swatted him away.

“Freak, he chose to hang out with you every day,” Zane said, voice hoarse. “He chose to kiss you at the party at Banana Split. He likes you.”

Were we seriously going on like fourteen-year-olds?

“Should you be talking right now?” I asked. We had literally reduced Zane to ash that morning. I was confident in my skills, but large-scale tissue reconstruction was a slow process, no matter what, and larynxes were the worst.

• • • •

When Abdullah left, he salted his wake.

He claimed the only reason he wasn’t reporting me to the police was that they wouldn’t believe him. He smashed my glassware and flung my tools—tools I’d taught him to use and clean—out the window. He ripped up my books—books we’d painstakingly tracked down together in dingy little stores in Rome and Istanbul. He set fire to all my ingredients—ingredients we’d collected on midnight trips to illicit bazaars in Baghdad and Goa.

He said he’d only been with me—for three years—because he’d been in a dark place, and that he could do so much better than a murderer and monster like me. His laugh was bitter when he told me I should try and find God, “the real one, capital G, not the cartoon in all your books and papers!”

“You’re a freak!” were the last words Abdullah spat at me.

I had to ask my ex-husband Andres to help replace my implements and Zane to help repair my feelings.

Six months later, when Zane suggested Noose & Dagger in nondescript Plumston, Ohio, I was skeptical. “It’ll help!” he said. “You need to put yourself out there again, spark some electricity! Plus, I went to a promotional party the organizers hosted and it was great!”

“Isn’t a convention risky?” I protested. “In Ohio, of all places? What if normies find out and call the cops?”

Zane knew me too well. He recognized when I was fumbling for an excuse.

“Shut up, Freak,” he said gently, “and pack those shiny new tools.”

• • • •

The volunteer screamed.

It was a marvelous scream, a full-throated shriek of pain that burned through his throat and drilled into our brains, a scream that you might paint in the yellows, reds, and gorgeous blues of a sunset on a bridge in Norway.

We all applauded as our instructor laid down his scalpel and began lecturing. “Mindful Flaying” was the best workshop I’d attended so far. The instructor was patient, effusive, and—as a fun bonus—hot. He was a neurosurgeon in his ordinary life. He argued that slow, careful incisions helped you connect with your bottom on an emotional level. My modus operandi rarely relied on the precision of cuts for which he advocated, so it was all highly educational.

As the screams resumed, Zane’s beard tickled my shoulder. “Jules is here.”

Of course I knew Jules was here. Jules was the drop of blood to my shark, the peas under the mattress to my princess. Jules was impossible to overlook or ignore.

“You should—”

“Shut up, Zane.”

Zane did not stay shut up.

“Did you hear about the flash-freezing scene he did last night?” he whispered mere minutes later.

“Wait . . . no.” I’d been busy prepping for my own class the previous night.

“Some of the safety monitors told me that he tied a couple together in the dungeon, dunked them in an inflatable pool, and froze it all solid as they made out. Then he cut off the plastic, set up multicolored lights, and treated the whole thing as a sculpture for folks to admire until the ice melted.”

That was both imaginative and impressive. I rarely did artistic scenes like that. And ice was not something I played with often. The reanimation principles around it were completely different from what I tended to work with.

“Freak, ask him if he’d like to do that to—”

“I am trying to pay attention to the flaying demo, Zane.”

At the end of the workshop, Zane strode his hipster self over to Jules, demanding to know if he was going to attend my class later.

I turned heartblood red, but Jules just nodded enthusiastically. “Bien sûr que oui!” he said, grinning at me. “Je t’ai promis, non?”

I returned his nod shakily. Yes, he had told me he planned on coming, but that had hardly been a promise. Besides, at a convention like N&D, people (who looked) like Jules had a myriad of demands on their time.

Zane blinked in incomprehension, but must’ve got the gist of Jules’s affirmative, because he smiled in satisfaction. “This freak knows everything there is to know about reanimation,” Zane declared, thumping me on the back. “You two should hang out later and talk about his new research. You know he’s a Professor of Religion, right?”

I swear if anybody had immolated Zane right then, I would have feigned complete ignorance of tissue regeneration.

• • • •

After Abdullah left, I wormed my way into the gaps within my couch and mouldered there for months like a lump of forgotten bread. I ignored each and every phone call, text message, or email that scuttled towards me like an unwanted cockroach.

Once, I opened up a half-finished article about biblical marginalia I’d been working on but stared blankly at my notes for so long that my laptop battery died. My existence centered around mediocre pizza, multiple sitcom watchthroughs, and tear-stained jerk-off sessions where all that dribbled out of me was my remaining hope for a brighter future.

A rare moment of energy one night saw me attempting to pull myself out of my funk by gouging out an eyeball with a dessert fork. The bloom of pink pain helped, but I very nearly didn’t bother regrowing it.

Finally, Zane pounded on my door until it was physically impossible for me to ignore, and dragged me to the park for a walk. Then, he brought me over to his house and together, we hanged his latest twink by a knotted silk rope from the basement rafters until he came explosively all over us and stopped twitching.

“You are smart, sexy as fuck, and the friggin’ best reanimator I know,” Zane said, pressing a wet, lemon-scented scented towel to the twink’s corpse.

Zane left it to me to bring the twink back, because Zane was decidedly not the best reanimator I knew. But he was probably the best person.

• • • •

“C’était magnifique!” Jules proclaimed, massaging the reddened skin of his newly regenerated left hand.

Spraying disinfectant on the countertop meat grinder the N&D staff had lent me, I blushed.

“You were magnificent,” I countered, waving thanks at the last stragglers (who all eyed Jules with interest). “You picked it up faster than anyone else in the class.” His nails had come out perfect. People often had trouble with keratin.

Jules shrugged. “I know the basics.” With his accent, it was “bay-zeeks.”

“Are you hungry?” he asked abruptly. “D’you want to have dinner?”

I paused. “With you?”

Jules chuckled. “Ouias, with me, professeur!”

“Is anyone else coming?”

“If you like?”

Err . . .

“I’d love to! But I need to—” I gestured helplessly at the meat grinder, at the blood pooling in the dents on the conference table, at the pile of stained rags in the corner.

“Bien, I help you clean up! Then, we eat!”

We worked quietly for a bit. The staff had asked for equipment and rooms to be left spotless. Jules took to scrubbing blood off tables, chairs, and the floor, while I continued scouring collagen fibres out of the nooks and crannies of the meat grinder.

“One time,” Jules remarked, breaking the silence, “a dom froze my foot and then beat it with a hammer. It was fun, but I had to wait a week before I could walk again. But you—I’ve never seen anyone as talentful at regeneration as you!”

Blushes tend not to show on my skin. I’m too brown. But they’re there.

“It’s cool that you’re a switch, Jules. I’ve never really been able to sub . . . ”

Jules shrugged. “Some days I want to smile into someone’s eyes as I watch life leave them . . . Other days, I want to feel strong hands squeeze my throat deliciously and crush my—” he paused to gesticulate, trying to find the word, “truc—wind tunnel? Windpipe!”

I didn’t think I could relate. I’d never been killed. My ex-husband had shyly offered a few times, even after our divorce. Zane, too, had asked me once: The guy he’d been seeing at the time had nursed a cannibalism fetish and apparently my eyes looked “tasty.”

But it had never felt right. It wasn’t that I doubted their skills. It was just . . .

Vanilla folks never understood us. They saw only “torture” and “horror.” They didn’t see the beauty in crimson blossoming open on pale skin, in the aroma of flesh as it charred coal-black, in the thrashing, liquid gasps of water rushing to fill lungs. But above all, they didn’t see that everything we did—with our knives, with our knotted ropes, with our blood toxins, and our electric saws—all of it sought to achieve intimacy with another human. “When a man breathes his last against my chest,” my kink-mentor had confessed to me a decade ago, “that’s when I feel closest to them.”

I couldn’t just invite any rando to kill me. I mean, I suppose I could, but there would be nothing there, just empty acts of brutality, devoid of emotion, devoid of human connection.

Like, I hurt myself all the time. Often, while jerking off. Hell, I owned a mini-guillotine sized for my cock that I told people was a fancy kitchen implement for carrots. But allowing someone else to offer me pain . . . that was an entire ocean away. That was another world. I would need to have a very specific kind of connection with them. Call me a romantic, but I would need that connection to be like electricity, like lightning, an unstoppable attraction linking the heavens to the earth so irresistibly, that keeping them apart would release an explosion.

I mean, that’s how it was for me. Like faith, like religious certainty, I’m sure kink was different for everyone. It sounded different for Jules.

“Ça va?” Jules words cut into my thoughts, making me start. My fingers slipped over steel blades. Skin parted daintily, shyly, a line of red emerging like a debutante at her first ball. I hissed.

Jules’s eyes widened. Dropping his rag, he reached for my hand. His palm was pink and warm. His touch caught my breath like a noose.

“Je peux?” he asked softly, raising my hand to his lips but waiting for my permission.

I nodded. Yes. Yes, of course he could. In that moment, he could do whatever he wanted.

His eyes, cornflower blue, held my gaze. When his mouth engulfed my finger, I shivered.

He suckled on my finger tenderly, reverently. Lips massaged my flesh. Tongue laved the wound, siphoning away blood. He bit down gently and followed up by running the flat of his tongue along the tender flesh.

The wet sting of it went straight to my groin.

If you asked me at that moment what the filthiest, horniest, sexiest sound in the world was, I would have described the little pop as Jules withdrew from his lips the finger—my finger—that he’d just spent a minute sucking on.

There was a fresh, white scar running down its length.

“Alors, we eat?” Jules asked.

• • • •

My first date after Abdullah left was with a boy named Kent. Built like a dancer, frostbite-coloured eyes, hair I could bury my fingers in.

When we tumbled back to my apartment after drinks, I’d barely shucked off my shirt when Kent pulled out a seven-inch, fixed-blade war knife. I could tell it was new, and that he had no clue how to handle the thing.

“I want you to slit my throat,” he said, eyes eager. “I know you’re one of those . . . god, I wasn’t even sure you were real!” He mimed what he wanted against his neck: Slice, slice.

The first time I’d slit Abdullah’s throat, he’d mouthed, “I love you” as crimson bubbles foamed at his lips. The last time, he’d looked into my eyes with such an intense expression, I’d known—known!—we’d be together forever.

“Can we just play vanilla tonight?” I asked Kent, aware that my voice was cracking.

Kent begged. A lot. On his knees like a penitent sinner, he nuzzled my crotch and begged. I normally liked begging.

But I couldn’t make myself do it.

He swept out of my apartment in a huff. “You don’t have much going for you,” he said, eyes raking down my very average figure as he left. “If you can’t even offer that, you don’t have much to offer at all . . .”

• • • •

“So who is this guy?” I asked. I lay on a bench in one corner of the private room Zane had booked in the dungeon, feet pressed up against a glass tank meant for drowning scenes. The room was washed in a cool, blue light, and the N&D staff had installed discreet speakers that produced the sound of waves. “Have I met him yet at the con?”

Zane paced the room, texting furiously. He made a noncommittal, I’m not-sure-I-heard-but-I-need-to-respond noise. Then his forehead puckered in irritation. “Shit! He’s running late!”

I nodded. “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? To keep you company until he arrives?”

Zane pocketed his phone to give me his full attention. “Enough about that! I want to know how your date went!”

I groaned. “It wasn’t a date, just . . . dinner. Mediocre sushi. We talked. Okay, we talked a lot. Did you know he’s pursuing a doctorate in Glaciology?”

Zane brushed aside my cool factoid. “Did you tell him he’s the hottest man you’ve ever met and that you’d like to carve him up like a Christmas roast?”

“I did not. I told you that in confidence and no one else will ever hear that ridiculous sentiment.”

“Do you think you found that ‘electric connection’ you’re always going on about?”

“I . . . don’t know?”

Zane came up to my bench, grabbed my feet and swung them roughly off the wall of the tank. I yelped in surprise.

All up in my face, he scolded, “Freak, Jules likes you! He’s built like a Greek sculpture and literally every man here is drooling over him. But he hangs out with you. He wanted to have drinks with you. He kissed you!”

It was hard to explain to anyone, even Zane, how I felt right now about—

“You can’t just wait for something to happen. You need to seize things for yourself! Move on! Abdullah has!”

The words snapped my head up, almost as though he’d yanked my hair. “What?”

“I didn’t want to tell you,” Zane said shaking his head. “Remember the warehouse party I went to last year? The one put on by the N&D organizers to create buzz about this weekend? I told you about it at that hot tub night?”

I nodded dumbly. He’d less “told me about it” and more “mentioned it in passing before abruptly beginning to eat out the guy next to us.”

“You know I didn’t invite you because it was too soon for you. I didn’t trust you to keep your focus. And I’m glad I didn’t because I saw him there.”

“What? Who?”

“Abdullah. He was one of the demo-bottoms at that party. I watched him get zipped up in a sleepsack which then got pumped full of sulphuric acid by one of the pro doms.”

I’ve disemboweled people before. Literally pulled their intestines out of their torso. I’ve never done it to myself because it’s hard to stay conscious long enough to work the reanimation. But in that moment, I thought I knew what it must have felt like.

“I very nearly went up and told them not to reanimate the asshole.”

The party. It had taken place, what, a month after Abdullah left me?

You’re such a freak, Abdullah had said, disgust clouding his eyes like cataracts, words like drills trepanning holes into my skull, letting leak out my trust, my ability to care, to connect, to even function. He’d called me inhuman, a psychopath, a perverted monster who would never know what love meant.

“I was worried he’d actually be here at N&D,” Zane continued, “and I swear to all the gods of pain and torment that if I’d seen him, I would have punched the life out of him and shipped his remains to the Vatican.”

With nothing else to fill the numb emptiness in my belly, I couldn’t help but let laughter wash through me. Canon law absolutely forbade reanimation. The Church had recently declared us literal demons. Sealed with lead and signed by the Episcopus Servus Servorum Dei himself. No body within fifty miles of the Holy See would be reanimated anytime soon, which was actually quite funny because a Papal Brief in 1957—

“Salut mec!”

I froze, Jules’s voice cold-shocking my babbling thoughts into silence.

He stood in the doorway, contrapposto against the doorframe, haloed in azure light, in a sleeveless crop-top stamped with “Bleed for me, bro” in bright, white Helvetica. I barely registered his usually distracting abs or the rolling bulge of his biceps: His grin shone with the radiance of a creationist sun. Que la lumière soit—the first words of God had echoed into the darkness, and I knew then that the light in that proclamation could only have meant Jules’s smile.

“Oh, thank fuck you’re finally here,” Zane cried. “He was about to spiral!”

“What? I wasn’t—wait—you invited him?” I gasped.

“Of course I invited him, Freak! You were being too much of a wuss!”

He directed his attention to Jules and gestured towards me. “My friend thinks you’re the hottest thing alive and would like to spend an evening of depraved ecstasy and agony with you, Mon-sewer Frenchman!”

I nearly choked.

Zane headed towards the door. “I’m heading out. Gonna check out the electric chair. I hear it’s a real antique salvaged from a prison.”

“But . . . your date . . . ?” I asked.

Zane rolled his eyes. “For a scholar, you’re really dense, you know that?”

He gave Jules a bright smile. “Teach my friend that, sometimes, he needs to spark his own lightning.” With that, he sauntered out of the room.

And then it was just the two of us. The sound of an ersatz-ocean underscoring my thudding heart, I reached out to touch the tank’s clear glass. Something cool to warm my frozen innards, something smooth to stabilize me, something hard to soften the knot of anxiety in my throat.

“You—” Jules began at the same time that I started to say, “I’m—”

The peal of his carefree laughter settled over me like a hymnal.

“I was just wanted to tell you,” he said, finally stepping into the room, “that you’re fucking sexy.” His tongue clove the expletive in two; his lips tensed around the vowels, pulling them higher and forward: “FEU-keeng.”

I was good at reanimation. No scratch that—I was FEU-keeng good at reanimation. I could regenerate fully severed limbs in minutes where others took hours. I had taught a class at Noose & Dagger my very first time at the convention. I had reconstituted Zane from a literal pile of his ashes; I could count on one hand the number of people who could accomplish that.

Countless times, I had convinced bleeding, burned, and broken bodies that everything I had done to them was impermanent. That it didn’t matter what state their flesh was in, the thing that made them a person—spirit, soul, animating principle, zest for life, whatever you wanted to call it—was endlessly regenerative, endlessly vital. A body I could break, a person I could not. I literally knitted people back to life through this principle.

I looked at Jules, glowing with unashamed delight and desire. For me.

Time to spark my own lightning.

“Umm . . . Jules? Do you want to murder me?”