Phantom Prey

opened the medicine cabinet, probed it.
    “No razor?”
    “In the basket behind the cupboard on the left.”
    He opened the cupboard under the sink counter, took out a wicker basket, rattled the contents, took out a pink-plastic throwaway razor, started to put the basket back and then said, “What’s this?”
    A straight razor. He flicked the blade open.
    “It belonged to my husband,” she said. “Put it back; you can hurt somebody with it, if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
    He grinned at her and flipped his hair in the practiced way: “Yes, you can; but I do know what I’m doing.”
    “No . . .”
    “It feels good,” he promised. He pushed her back into the stream of hot water. “I’ve done this before . . .”
    “With who?” she blurted.
    “Before,” he said. His left hand stayed with her body, trailing gently down her hip all the way to her ankle, as he knelt down.
    “I, ah, jeez,” she said shakily.
    “Shut up for a minute,” he said. Looking down, she saw him set the razor aside on the floor with his right hand, which moved to her groin. His fingertips probed lightly in her pubic hair, as though he were combing it. “Open here, just a little,” he said. “Your legs.”
    His hands were gently, but insistently, prying.
    “No, c’mon,” she said, but her legs opened, just a bit, the warm water running down between her breasts, her head thrown back. His hand moved between her legs and she felt him opening her.
    “Very warm,” he said. He leaned forward, the water from the shower splashing onto his wet dark hair, and the most exquisite, soft-sexual thrill climbed through her as he stroked her clitoris with his tongue.
    “Oh, God . . .” She put her hand in his hair, on the back of his head, and let the weight of it press his face into her.
    After a moment, he picked up the razor. She stepped back, leaned against the cool wall. The steel of the razor touched her at the point of her hip, then moved along the outside of her left thigh all the way to her ankle in a single rasping stroke.
    “Feel that?” he asked.
    “Feels . . .” she said.
    Another long stroke, and another; a dozen of them, then small, quick gestures, touching up.
    “Done here,” he said. He started on the right leg, moving quickly, adept with the edge, cutting, rinsing, patting, cutting. And then, “All done.”
    She looked down at him, and his dark eyes were on her face. “Except for this,” he said.
    He laid the tip of the razor at the top of her thigh, under his thumb, and traced a sinuous curve down her quadriceps. Her leg tingled, as though a hot nail file had been drawn down it. Loren was kneeling, expectantly, looking at her leg, and then the blood appeared, seeping out of the nearly invisible cut, a crimson curve.
    “An L,” she said.
    “For Loren,” he said, nodding. He bent to her knee and his long tongue came out, and he licked and traced the bloody curve with the tip of it. He did it once, twice, three times, and then the blood had stopped. “Barely broke the skin,” he said, grinning up at her through the spray. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of his mouth, pink in the flow of the shower.
    She started to bleed again as Loren dried her with a rough terry-cloth towel. He did her legs first, before the blood surfaced again, and she watched it bead along the line of the cut.
    “That’s so . . . I’ve never . . .” She didn’t know what to say. Loren turned her and did her back and buttocks.
    “You’re ready now.”
    “You’re right,” she said.
    Later, in the Prelude, cutting through the night. “Hunting is better than sex,” Loren said. “Don’t you think?”
    “They’re almost the same,” Fairy said. “I can’t explain it.”
    Loren reached across in the dark, stroked the side of her face. His hands had gone cold again, an hour out of the shower, a half hour out of the bed. “I know what you mean. Exactly what you mean.”
    They flashed over the LaFayette Bridge into St. Paul, the city brilliant on the bluff above the Mississippi; they took the wraparound exit onto I-94 and headed west toward Minneapolis. “You’re sure?”
    “I’m sure. She was involved.”
    The apartment was dark. They sat in the street, waiting, their breath steaming the windows. They had been here four times; and three of those times, Patricia Shockley came back early, while Price stayed out late. Price was the lover and the dancer and the socializer. Shockley was the intellectual, the