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i.
“You are the most sublime creature to ever walk the unhallowed ground of this impermanent sphere,” he says, “and I wish to be buried with a hole carved in the wall of my casket, that I may hold your hand until there is nothing left of my bones. Please say you’ll make me the unhappiest man on earth and marry me.”
“Oh,” she says, “alright.”
A letter arrives at her parents’ house that evening, Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty” in flowing cursive on the back of a typewritten list of evidence with the Department of Justice’s letterhead. She reads every word hungrily and concludes it is with good reason that he has not yet been dismissed as a suspect.
An insubstantial alibi. She likes that in a man.
ii.
He fastens the clasp behind her neck mid-dirge, and she looks down at the charm, a corpse flower intricately carved in obsidian.
“I’ve always wished to experience one’s scent during their brief window of pollination,” she muses years later, and he swears on the dark sky and the moon and every organ he’s ever buried in their backyard that he will bring her to one and then have its fragrance bottled as a perfume for her pleasure.
“That sounds absolutely horrible, mon cher ,” she breathes, and then, “Until then, do you know what else you may do for my pleasure?”
“Do tell me,” he says, grinning, frantically mouthing along her shoulder and jaw and neck.
Already, she knows he is a bleeding heart, which even without the gift should not surprise her. Isoquinoline has always been her favorite convulsant. She thrills to think of all the ways he will make her muscles contract.
iii.
“Do you want children?” he asks some minutes before the service starts, index finger skimming over the list of those the corpse is survived by, and she nods.
“Dearly.”
He smiles broadly, and she loves the flash of his teeth more than that of any she has ever unearthed. “I want to be a father more than anything.”
iv.
It may be gauche to host the wake of one’s own victim, but that has never stopped her. He catches her hand as the attendees file out amid breathless laughter and says, “I had wondered if you could be persuaded to do me the honor of showing me the gardens.”
“Perhaps I could,” she says, tilting her head, letting the slightest curve shape her lips, “Let’s find out.”
His kiss, when she gives her permission for it, is more heady than chloroform, and she rests her palm on his shoulder and only keeps from guiding him against the wall with an inhuman amount of self-control.
“Alright,” she breathes, and he beams, brighter than the most awe-striking bolt of lightning she’s ever chased with an iron key.
One statue in particular stops him short. “Adam and Eve,” she explains, “The original sin,” and she plucks a fruit from the nearby apple tree and holds it to him, one of their hands on each side, a mirror of the marble figures. A pair, a timeless unit, a whole more awful and devastating than the sum of their parts.
“He looks like me,” he says some minutes later, sinking his teeth into the fruit and gesturing to the statue’s smooth mons pubis, his elegantly scarred chest.
She takes a bite. “And she, me,” she says, and he looks at the rendition she has chosen of the world’s first woman, her soft penis and her uneven breasts, and his kiss tastes of recognition, of relief, and of apple.
v.
Her lips are painted the same bright red as the loops of Jequirity seeds strung around her neck. Her bouquet is a carefully balanced combination of bat orchids—the devil flower—and mourning widow geraniums. She might’ve preferred castor blossoms, but the necessary gloves would’ve complicated the ring exchanges.
His wedding band is solid lead, heavy between her fingers as she slides it onto his. “I much prefer it to gold,” he’d told her weeks ago, between eulogies, “I have the world’s largest collection of books on reverse alchemy.” Hers is a silver memento mori ring, the skull almost looking like it’s fighting back a blush.
The cake is glazed with mountain laurel honey, and when he watches her lips close around the fork he holds to them, then chases the taste with his kiss, she thinks she may indeed let her mind be set adrift like an oarless rowboat unto the rapids.
They waltz, graceful and sure, and she is full to bursting with unhappiness, chest tight like she could choke. He is hers, for worse and in sickness, hers to be adored by and to adore, to have and to hold and to kill for. She dares even death, her intimate friend, their darling matchmaker, to ever do them part.