Page 16 of Spread Me
They look exactly the way they’re supposed to look. They look like her colleague, like the person she’s spent yearslaughing with and digging next to and falling asleep on and teasing and snapping at and showering with. Every part of them looks perfectly normal.
But the way she’sseeingthem isn’t normal. Not for her. Her eyes trail across their skin and she can feel a lift in her belly, the rise of goosebumps across her arms, the prickle of rising hairs on the back of her neck. She runs a tongue across her lower lip before she knows she’s even doing it.
Kinsey grips the needle tighter. She’s sure of it now: she wants Domino. She wants to grab them and sink her teeth into them. She wants them to pin her wrists above her head and have their way with her. She wants to know the taste of their sweat and their blood and she wants to scream their name so loud it makes coyotes twenty miles from here start to yip in response, she wants them to—
“No,” she says aloud.
“No?” Mads and Domino say, one in her ear and one in the room.
She clears her throat. “No, I don’t need to examine all of you,” she says. Against her will, her eyes drop to the tight boxer-briefs Domino wears. “Just the areas where the symptoms occurred.”
Domino winces. “I’m sorry about that,” they whisper. “Really. I’m mortified. It’s just—I’m not used to being like this yet, and it’s confusing, trying to figure out where everything belongs.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Kinsey says.
“Aphasia,” Mads says in her ear. “Could be a mini-stroke, could be some kind of brain damage from that fever. Encephalitis, maybe. Keep your mask on just in case.”
Kinsey knows what aphasia is. She still remembers when her father lost the power of coherent speech after hislast stroke. It didn’t sound anything like this. “Gotta be something like that,” she says anyway.
At Mads’s instruction, Kinsey sets the pre-wrapped, single-use syringe down on a tray alongside gauze, medical tape, a pile of pre-packed alcohol wipes. She asks Domino to lie flat on the exam table. She positions them carefully, handling their limbs as gently as she knows how, avoiding their gaze for as long as she can.
After a few minutes of Kinsey’s bustling, Domino speaks. “Hey. Can you look at me? In the eyes? They’re up here this time,” Domino says, a joke hidden somewhere in the recesses of their voice. “No? Kinsey. Come on.”
She shakes her head, picks up the syringe, drops it again when the wind makes the building shiver. “Fuck. I’m doing this all backward.” She tears open a foil packet with a large alcohol swab inside. “I need to focus, okay? You have to let me pay attention to what I’m doing, or I’ll hurt you.”
“I promise you can’t hurt me,” Domino murmurs. Kinsey flinches as they reach up to her. They press their index finger to the underside of her chin and tug gently, pulling her chin toward them until she can’t help but meet their gaze. “There,” they say. “That’s better.”
“What are you?” Kinsey whispers. Her voice doesn’t tremble, but it feels like a voice-trembling question all the same.
“I’m yours,” Domino replies.
Kinsey’s lips part. She doesn’t mean them to, but they do. She presses them back together hard, jerks her head away from Domino’s hand. “I need to take this sample,” she says stiffly.
“You don’t really want to do that,” Domino says.
“I do.”
“You don’t.” They stretch their arms up over their head,languid. “I can tell when you want something. You soak yourself with your own perfume. When you’re eager and ready and dripping—I can taste it on the air, Kinsey. Everyone can. So sweet.” They lick their lips, their eyes falling to her beltline, their voice going flat. “But I can’t taste you right now. That needle doesn’t excite you at all.”
“Don’t let them get to you,” Mads says in her ear.
“Shut up,” Kinsey snaps. Domino’s head tilts to the side—they thought that was for them—and Kinsey decides to run with it. To let them think she’s shutting them down. “Of course it excites me,” she tells them, picking up the syringe and giving Domino a dry stare. “Didn’t you know that about me? I drench my panties every time I think of performing a core needle biopsy on one of my colleagues.”
Domino doesn’t seem even a little bit chastised by this. They look her over, considering. “Really?”
Kinsey huffs out a laugh. “Oh, yeah. Nothing gets me hotter than the idea of jamming a needle into you and yanking out some of your tissue. And smearing the sample onto a slide?” She pretends to fan herself with one gloved hand. “Don’t get me started.”
Domino gives a slow nod, their mouth spreading again into that too-wide grin. Only two canines on each side this time. “Okay. Let’s do it, then. But I have a condition.”
“That much is obvious.”
“No, I mean—I have terms. You have to do something for me if I’m going to do something for you.”
Something has been picking at the edges of Kinsey’s thoughts for the past couple of hours. It’s a thought Jacques already put voice to, and now is the moment it chooses to assert itself in her mind as loud as a scream:this isn’t Domino. She could have chalked everything else up to them acting strange, feeling sick, having some kind of previouslyundiscovered illness. But there’s nothing in the world that would make the Domino she knows fail to laugh at a stupid joke like the one she just made.
Whoever—whatever—is lying in front of her, it’s deadly serious about the demand it wants to make. And it’s not her colleague.
“What are your terms?” she asks, and even she can hear the chilliness in her own voice.
