Final Girl - part 2 (Patreon)

Jean's mouth is on mine. Her left hand is on my breast, and the breast is mine in the sense that it's attached to the body I'm operating, and the body is responding to her hand in a way I can't control. The signal coming up from the nerve endings is too much.

There's a pulse low in the pelvis, a warmth, a dampness — I keep wanting to compare it to what an erection feels like because that's the only reference I have, and it isn't the same. More diffuse. The location is wrong and the intensity comes in waves instead of as a single line. I can't think about it clearly. I'm also trying to kiss her back, which is what's happening, and I've kissed women before but never from this side. The angle of the jaw is different. Her tongue is doing something I've always been on the other end of.

The killer is on the floor behind us. I can see him in my peripheral vision when Jean tilts her head — the robe, the mask, the sword we put through him buried up to the hilt where his sternum should be. Jean had taken the sword off the wall. It was Maddie's, a real one, her grandfather's. Maddie used to talk about it with embarrassment because she didn't want people to think she was the kind of person whose grandfather owned a sword. Jean thrust it the way you'd see in a movie and the blade went through coverall and through whatever was under the coverall and the masked one had folded sideways onto the tile and not moved.

We checked. I'd pressed two fingers into the side of the neck where a pulse would be and there'd been nothing under the latex, no give, no thump. Then Jean had taken her shirt off because there was blood on it and I'd taken mine off for the same reason and then she'd looked at me and I'd looked at her and we'd stopped moving for a second and then we hadn't stopped moving.

Her hand on my hip. The hip is wider than I'm used to and her hand fits the curve the way a hand is supposed to fit that curve. She's smiling into the kiss, a little. She'd been in love with Maddie for two semesters, she'd told me that the first time I met her, sitting on this same bed. She told me because she wanted me to know she wasn't a threat. I'd liked her for it. I'd liked her enough to remember it now, which is maybe why this is happening, or maybe it's just that we are two people who watched someone die forty minutes ago and the body wants what it wants.

I wouldn't have been able to do this in the old body. Not with Jean. This body isn't waiting. This body is leaning in. Whether that's the body's decision or mine I'll figure out later.

Maddie's gone. I keep almost remembering and then forgetting because there is a tongue in my mouth. Maddie, who I'd met four months ago, who'd laughed at a joke I made about Jean, who I'd been about to sleep with for the first time when the door came open. Maddie's dead and I'm wearing her and her best friend is the one currently caressing me, which Maddie would have had feelings about. I don't know if any of those feelings are mine now. I don't know what carries over and what doesn't, and I won't know for a long time.

Behind us, on the floor, the gloved hand is closing around the sword's grip. The arm is testing the weight. The shoulder is lifting off the tile.