Devour by Grace Harvey
Devour
She is a trickster god with nimble hands, so you want to sleep with her.
A dark smudge on the neon white of the grocery store, figureless in a heavy coat with the collar pulled up, cutting across the edge of her jawline. You see her slip a pair of half-ripe mandarins into her pockets, the carelessness of the action bordering on arrogance.
Her stare is lazy and appraising as it walks the produce section, and, when her gaze snags on yours she tilts her chin upwards in a momentary challenge, willing you to say something about the sloppy shoplifting. When you don’t, she leisurely presses her pointer finger to her lips and suddenly you’re in on this together. Co-conspirators. You take a step closer.
You follow the sound of her boots scuffing on the linoleum through the produce section. Admiring as her fingers graze the edge of the peach, plucking it from the crate and pressing it to her lips. She takes a long, slurping bite and turns back to you with a grin, teeth flecked with orange flesh. The smile is wild and toothy, under the fluorescents she appears vicious.
Her feral smile sends a winding thrill down the links in your spine, reverberating in the pit of your stomach. You look away from her, for a moment, to catch your breath and when you glance back, she’s gone.
So, you abandon your half-completed grocery shopping and instead buy a packet Tally-Hos and the cheapest tobacco even though you’d quit two months ago. You stop to roll yourself a cigarette outside and find her waiting for you, body leant in a bowed line against the grocery store windows. Still grinning, she spits her peach pit into your open palm.
***
Up close the woman is brutal, jaw canine, mouth snarling. She smells of cedar and smoke at the bends of her wrists, like a forest fire.
You roll her a cigarette and in return she shows you how to split open a pomegranate. Working her fingernails under the fruit's skin until the burgundy flesh tears, then splits down the middle like a yawning mouth, the inside full of crimson teeth. The pair of your pluck at the seeds and stick them between your incisors, letting them explode on your tongues.
While the two of you walk to nowhere in particular you tell her about suburbia, as if it’s the most interesting thing about you. Detailing the blue and grey clapboard houses that line the edges of your memory, that make up the borders of your childhood. Entirely unlike the monolith of stone she tells you birthed a creature like her.
And she listens and she laughs, and she stares at your lips like you're something she might consume. You’re thinking about sleeping with her again. Trying to imagine what the sharp juts of bone under her skin might feel like against the pads of your thumbs, the way the slope of her waist might fit against the curve of your palm.
You tell her about summer and blue chlorine swimming pools and leave out the parts about studying the liquid lines of other girls as they moved through the water. About touching yourself on sweaty summer evenings under cotton sheets.
***
It gets late but she remains ever intent on consuming your every word, accepting whatever pieces of yourself you might offer up. You’re pressed shoulder to thigh standing in line for a late-night coffee, a night cap. She tells you her name is Wolf and you're almost certain she’s lying but you still say that it suits her. Because the chip of her front tooth makes it look like a fang, because the way she looks at you reminds you of late-night nature documentaries and predator stares.
While you order two coffees her eyes keep catching on a rounded, dewy Danish filled with sliced apple and yellow custard. So, you tell the boy behind the counter you’ll take that as well even if you can’t really afford it. Wolf splits it with you, smudging custard on your jeans. It makes both of your face’s sticky, leaving tacky fingerprints on the outside of your too hot Styrofoam cups. But it tastes sweet and elicits a low soft noise of contentment from somewhere in the other woman’s chest.
Afterwards you’re still hungry and you’re trying not to look at the way her chest heaves with every thin night air breath, the glitter on her eyelids, the soft space between her jaw and neck. Wondering what it might be like to press your lips, teeth to her pulse point.
The two of you are perch yourselves on the curb while she does your birth chart on a napkin. You keep glancing at the dark flash of underwear between her legs as her skirt rolls up her thighs.
You’re a Gemini moon, you’re thinking about kissing her, you’re thinking about touching yourself in bed later.
She finishes her coffee and yours, you don’t mind.
***
You take Wolf back to your apartment; you cook her dinner with what’s left in the fridge. And the scene is so needlessly domestic your chest aches, it’s like playing house, like voyeurism.
She watches you knead pasta dough and over salt the pesto. While it cooks, she stalks about your apartment, picks things up, puts them down again. You watch her nimble hands, the soft slide of her socked feet on the linoleum wood, the sly way her body flits from one room to the next. She flicks casually through your CD’s, putting one on, taking it out again. Shedding her layers Wolf dances around your living room and the sway of her body is feline.
While the pasta boils, she lets you un-braid her hair, working through the tangles with the damp pads of your fingertips. In the yellow light of your kitchen, you can see the blonde growing in thick at the roots.
The pair of you sit on your tiny patio to eat, bowls balanced in your laps, the stove light playing shadows along your backs. The night-time city is an oil slick, refracting light off every surface and it dapples along Wolf’s cheeks, the slope of her nose, the bow of her lips.
The pair of you work through a bottle of almost-expensive rose, a housewarming gift from your brother a long time ago. Its silver bow now looped around her wrist bone, winking at you every time she motions.
When you lean over to put your empty bowl in hers, fork tines jittering together, she reaches out, tracing a line from the back of your palm to the crease of your elbow, fingernails digging into the soft skin. And you don’t know how to touch her, but you think she wants you too.
You pull away. You want to slip your fingernails underneath her skin, want to know what she tastes like. You want to roll full bellied into bed and press her into the mattress. You want to eat her alive.
