I met my wife a few years ago. At some party, we both barely remember. All I can recall is stumbling up my apartment steps with her. Looking back to see she was already pulling her heels off, I meant to mention how dirty the carpet was. However, the hot and bothered feeling in my chest made it difficult to get any coherent thoughts out that weren’t along the lines of
“God you’re so hot.” Slurred out like the frat boy that I always tried to avoid being. Her face, flushed and red, looked up at me, that part of the night I’ll never forget. With us so in the moment, we found our way to the bed, and my fingers reached for her chest when she stopped their advance with her hand. Digits hung like soldiers waiting for the gates to open.
Her voice was soft and tender, withdrawn. “I have this thing…” Her words were slurred too, but instead of sounding like an asshole, her voice was delicate and cute. She would go on to explain her condition. Pectus Excavatum. An excess of connective tissue that joins the ribs to the sternum. This meant her sternum grew inward, causing a divot on her chest. She told me her’s wasn’t severe enough to affect her organs, but it would be noticeable when I touched her.
And it was, as my fingertips haphazardly explored her body, I noticed when trailing between her breasts, my fingers would dip down. It was a strange sensation at first, but over our time together, I quickly got used to it and even grew to appreciate the quirk. So long as it didn’t negatively affect her health, of course. Our sex life was great, and we grew closer together until our eventual marriage.
The love life was good for a while after, but I could feel her desire for intimacy slowly draining, and that spark was leaving her eye. We had a few talks about it, and tried to keep open communication, but she just continued to assert that she didn’t know why. She just wasn’t feeling it. Though she offered constant reassurance and would go out of her way to try and meet my needs. But not being able to give her the same satisfaction began to weigh on me.
We tried all sorts of things. Positions, toys, and even counseling, but she just couldn’t get back to that girl she was the night we met. And I was losing it too, the steam, that hot desire you feel in your chest. It was fading. I didn’t want it to, but it was hard to look at her and want the intimacy. I still loved her, though, and we still tried. Fighting a losing battle. It was one of the nights when we were just trying to enjoy each other’s company.
It felt nice to be kissing her, and her hand on my waist did send tingles down my spine. I tried kissing her neck and moved to start kissing her lower, but I slipped, and my hand quickly moved from her breast to her sternum. I felt her soft flesh push in on the divot. I immediately apologized as it felt like I had put too much pressure. When I met her eyes, though, they had widened and were darting around. Like she was trying to comprehend something.
I started pulling my hand away, but she gripped my wrist, and suddenly, the face I saw the first night together was back. Her gaze softened, and she pulled my fingers back to the divot between her breasts. Like she was teaching me how to shoot billiards, she used her fingers laced around mine to press down on the condition. She heaved a heavy breath, and I could feel her heart thudding through the flesh.
I hadn’t seen her aroused like that in so long that, despite it being a little odd, I ran with it and used my pointer to circle the divot. She relinquished her grip on me, seeing that I was picking up what she was putting down. Hands raised above her and laid on the headrest. I would poke, tease, and prod at the cave. When I did the other things she liked, it seemed to increase the pleasure, but only when the sternum was also being stimulated. And suddenly we were back.
Making love nearly every night. It didn’t matter, I just needed to keep my hand between her breasts, or she would press it so I could explore other avenues. She was so attentive to me, making sure all my needs were met as long as I fulfilled the condition. It was like discovering a spell or password. I was so intoxicated by getting to explore her body in full again that I didn’t notice at first that she was ramping up. That what she required to get off was becoming more and more severe.
I could barely hear it with my head between her thighs, but there was a small buzz one night, and looking up, she had her vibrator pressing into her concave chest. I looked up at her, borderline fascinated with what I was looking at. I should have said something, but her face planted her clearly on cloud nine, and as long as she wasn’t hurting herself, then who was I to deny her?
Night after night, though, my confidence in the scenario started to wane. When she would press my fingers down, I could tell she was pushing hard. I could feel the bones I was pressing against, They would shift under the pressure. Sometimes, I would look at her face, and I couldn’t tell if she was in pain or ecstasy. And we would never talk about it after. Once the throes of lovemaking dissipated, we would return to normal.
When she made me… dig my fingernails into the skin between her breasts, that’s when I had to tell her I was getting uncomfortable. She insisted that it was fine, that it didn’t hurt, it felt so good. But I just couldn’t participate anymore, and she refused to have sex with me if I wasn’t stimulating her there. So we stopped having sex, but she didn’t stop. Every night, whether I was in the room or not, she would take care of herself. I never saw her touch anywhere other than that divot. Sometimes, I would notice that her chest was getting red and that it had small claw marks on it.
Other nights, she would try to convince me to join her. She would touch me, but my hand would always be dragged to the same spot. She would push so hard I thought I’d crack the bones, but with her wailing, she was beside herself. I couldn’t imagine how it felt good to her. I needed to get away from it for a bit so I went to my brother’s house for the weekend. Told her I had a business trip, which wasn’t too unusual for me. Just three days, that’s all it was, and I returned home, ready to have a talk with her. Ready to suggest we explore options and get back to counseling.
Getting home, the house was quiet. It was around the time she’d go to bed, so I didn’t think anything of it. Stepping into the bathroom, though, my heart dropped something awful. The sink had been sullied with small and thin trails of red. There are little droplets here and there. I’m not sure anymore what I thought might have happened. All I knew was that my wife had been hurt and I wasn’t there. So quickly, I rushed into the bedroom
At first, I recoiled. The light was off in the room, and I hadn’t expected to see a figure standing just a foot or so from the door. It was hard to understand the shape before me, a silhouette hunched over and thin, a tangle of lines meshing with the dark room.
“Oh, you’re back.” Her voice wisped into the air as if nothing was out of sorts. The words were carried by shaky tones. Tones I first thought were those of fear. As she spoke more, though, the tone reminded me of how she would shutter out my name with her lips an inch from my ear. An ecstasy. Reaching out and pressing plastic, I brought the room to life with the flick of a switch. Cascading a horrid truth before me. My wife looked like a rabid dog. Like a person who had just discovered civilization and broke into my home.
It took too long for me to reconcile with the gruesome scene resting in the center of her chest. An old photograph slowly developed in my mind. I think I was trying to speak, but I can’t recall what I was trying to say. Maybe I was trying to ask her what she had done to herself, and the words got caught by the evidence before me. I didn’t need to ask. It was apparent, the way her satin robe, once glossy and white, had become soaked and heavy.
Her fingers curling, ashened branches bending inwards towards her chest, red sap covering the ends. My wife had become a horrible sculpture. Frozen in place, her fingers digging into the oozing wound on her chest. Glossy, fingers were so glossy like she had dipped them in hot wax. Scarlet dripped. I couldn’t see the wound, but the image of it was clear in my mind. I imagined the way she clawed through the fabric of her dress in a frenzy. Chemicals make it impossible for her to stop, stepping closer and closer to climax
“Baby, it doesn’t feel as good as when you do it.” She muttered, her voice disembodied, bouncing around the room, I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the wound. The fibers of the dress pressed in as if you laid a bowling ball onto your freshly made bed. My body, without instruction, lurched forward, gripping onto her wrist. Finally, I was moving, I ripped her hands away, holding them as far from her body as I could. Still, no words escaped my lips, but she continued to plead.
For a moment, she must have thought I was going to indulge. This desire, a rush of hormones, made her more robust than I had ever experienced. She was struggling against me, and it felt as though she was winning. Our hands got closer and closer to her chest. I knew I needed to call for an emergency service. I also knew that as soon as I let her go, she was going to get right back to it.
We fought back and forth, and her face flushed the whole time. Blood ran in thin lines down her arm, exterior veins formed until reaching her wrist. With the struggle continuing, the liquid got between our skin and made it hard to maintain a grip on her. One quick jerk backward, and she was free again. Long enough for her, in jittering motions, to slip off the robe that was sticking to her body.
The bloodloss, even in dim lighting, was apparent. Her body looked like it had just been discovered, washed up on shore. The tinge of blue you see on bloated corpses. That was what she looked like. A corpse. The way she pushed me back and the shock of seeing the wound in all its glory sent me reeling to the carpet, my elbow pinging on the floor. “Take me.” She demanded.
Her weight dropped onto me before I could start getting back to my feet. In no time, I could feel her legs straddle me, and her hips begin to circle, manipulating the fabric of my pants, and twisting my zipper into a winding road. My attempt to adjust brought my hand up, and she grabbed it before I could react. She was in a power position, and it felt like she was getting stronger the minute, her adrenaline beating out mine. Our hands shuddered and moved back and forth as my fingertips got closer to her chest.
The open scar outlined in red between her breasts. The dark and open void revealed only the lightest glint of bone. It was deeply inhuman. My mind was being pulled into the cavity, and my fingers followed suit. If her heart was racing like mine was, I understood her desperation. As her hips stirred guided by instinct, her hands pulled up harder. I fought her. Oh god, how I fought her.
With each inch, I could feel the waft of her internal body heat drawing closer, like a warm breath against my neck. I could feel beads of blood drip from the wound and land on my shirt, mixing with the sweat-drenched fabric. I hardly noticed at first when my fingertips plunged into her. The whole thing was such a sensory overload. My occasional audio outburst cries for help that could have easily been mistaken for a representation of pleasure. Her noises, however, were unmistakably pleasure driven. She would cry out for god, though I wasn’t sure which god she was calling on. No sane deity would bear witness to this depravity.
The further she pushed my fingers into her, the deeper we ventured together, the more she cried out, the harder she would grind herself on me. Her other hand had long since pinned my other arm to the carpet. Just like her nightgown, the pure white fibers were stained by the red running down her arm. Like a puppet master, she orchestrated the movements of my fingers that rested in her chest cavity. Like a surgeon, we explored the internal.
All I could do was pretend to be somewhere else. I went back to the night when I first explored her body. In the brief moments, my mind was able to indulge in that memory, the soft and dewy plush of her interiors was momentarily a respite. Curling my fingers to meet with a gentle resistance wasn’t all so horrifying. The heat that raptured my digits as her slender fingers led me, teaching me how she wanted to be touched. For a moment, I was in love.
She was howling, both our bodies tied together, every fluid she had to offer me was viscous on me like I was being wrapped in a cocoon. I was almost able to drift away, almost able to ignore how hard she was twisting my fingers. Then, the resistance the surface of my fingers was feeling, became much more rigid. My eyes shot open, and I was once again reminded of my feral wife. The haggard and manic animal on top of me.
My fingers.. Were on her ribcage. I didn’t realize that we had been digging through her intervals, that I could practically feel the pressure of her heartbeats, tapping on the back of my fingers. I howled, begging her not to do it. She kept applying pressure. My cries for help became visceral and desperate until we were both animals. Predator and prey.
She kept telling me how close she was. She was almost there. “Just like that.” She cried, I had never heard her say it like that. Blood spilled like rivers, a comical sacrifice. Nothing stopped it, I never knew that the sound of bones cracking would be so loud. The splintering smooth surface pressed out further. I could see her chest bowing out and the hole my fingers were sunk into widened. Like the maw of a hungry beast, I could see the eggshell color rips poking out of her flesh, teeth ready to gnash. And there it was, our apex together. The pressure on her ribs became too much, and the bones fractured.
I heard them break, the sound of a golf being shot down range, somehow audible over the familiar cry of a climax. Her legs tightened and her hips shook, and a thick and undefined glob of her insides dripped out onto me. Cascading the pent-up madness. And within that release, just like always, her cheeks became rosey, and exhaustion took hold.
Her body dropped, the sound of a wet towel smacking against the bathroom tiles. I don’t know how long the room had been filled with the alternating of blue and red lights. That later of which almost rendered my wife invisible. I wonder which neighbor called, heeding my cries for help far too late. The knock at the door became banging. The sound of our front door being broken down sounded eerily similar to my wife and I’s final moment together.
Before the police reached us. With fading words uttered from the lips resting right next to my ear, my wife, almost mockingly asked.
“Was it good for you too?”