My Love Is Consumption

Devi’s hands are full of something as she climbs up from the lower floors, absently flicking through what look like photos. Tess watches her. Devi pauses, in the middle of the room, and then as if Tess’s stare has just reminded her of something important, she looks up.

“Let me get your opinion real quick,” she says. “I need fresh eyes on this. I’ve been staring at them for hours and I think my retinas are about to collapse.” She shuffles up the pictures and spreads them like a magician, pick a card, any card. Tess’s heart gives a hammer kick in her chest.

In the photographs, Tess finds the shape Nny laid out against the sheets of some bed—in each of the photographs fanned out between Devi’s hands, a shot of Nny, his naked skin stretched tight over his bones, limbs loose or folded. Nothing about them makes sense. Beneath the lens of the camera, he is ethereal and not quite alive. She can’t look away from the one at the center, a closeup shot, her heart skittering in her chest. His face is tilted away from the camera, his remaining eye unfocused, hair mussed and plastered to his head in places with sweat. The cheek below his hollow eye is glazed with the unmistakable pale wetness of cum. She can see even at this angle that some of it has slipped into the socket, glittering on the edge.

Devi notices her fixation. She plucks the center photo from the fan and tucks the rest of them away, all the eerie long shots of his sunken hips and half-hard cock sheltered in his curled thighs. 

“Good eye,” she says, flipping the photo around to get another good look at what has to be familiar enough to her now. “I like that one too. The yonic imagery of the semen dripping in and all. I really had to fold him up to get that right—you only get one shot, you know. He was shaking by the time I got it out of him.”

“He,” Tess says, “he let you?”

“Oh, sure,” Devi says. She flips through the stack and digs out another one, flashing it at Tess. “All I had to do was ask.” 

This one is different from the others, earlier—Nny looking small and sharp against the floor, arms wrapped around his chest, an almost coquettish turn of the chin, and his bent knees spread open as wide as they can go. The photograph is frozen in time, but Tess can almost feel him trembling.

“Isn’t he beautiful,” Devi remarks, low and conspiratorial and she leans in towards Tess. “The perfect model. So eager to be made into something. These were just supposed to be reference pictures, but honestly I’m thinking about leaving them as is.”

As she taps that picture back in, Tess catches a look at the top of the stack. It’s the only one that has any sign of Devi’s presence, as far as she can tell. It’s a closeup of Devi’s hand, fingers disappearing into the debauched socket, and for a visceral second Tess can imagine the slow fingerfucking, pads sliding slick over flesh that was never meant to see the light. Tender and cruel.