On the way back from the bar she coils around Dolfein in a tangle of limbs, flesh digging against flesh, mouths hard and clashing. Boneless with need. He gulps for air, face tight and pulsing, and she mirrors him, quivering red, lips fluttering in the wavering light. Too many mouths, too many limbs, he is the thin rubber skin of a balloon wrapped around a bubble of water.

“Tonight,” he gasps, fumbling for the door, “this once, now, please, oh, please…” She presses him down, envelops him, he is flat and flailing under a hand the size of a bed. He holds her off, but she slips his grasp, too many arms to count, around his wrists, his legs, his chest, his neck.

Squeezes.

There is a moment: the light clenches into a pinprick and he feels himself going, panic coursing through his veins like cancer, scrabbling helplessly against her arm, digging for space in the bloated meat of his throat, useless, too late, too late, not enough… Her grip relaxes and she slides off him. The world comes rushing back, he feels the color draining out of his face, his body aches, it hurts to swallow.

He cannot move, cannot do anything but drink air greedily into his lungs. Alive, somehow, still, alive, alive, o! The night is young and the weekend is long; god willing he’ll live to see Monday.