Chapter 35

After William kissed me, I invited him into my hotel room like knowingly welcoming a vampire into my house.

"Sorry, I don't have much to offer," I say. "Are you thirsty? I can get you some water."

"No," he said.

He looked at me and I lamented my disheveled appearance. It seemed possible that he already regretted asking me to marry him.

He moved toward me and I couldn't stop myself from flinching. Every move was a potential act of violence.

When he grabbed me, it wasn't to strangle me but to kiss me.

"Are you going to kill me?" I whispered between kisses.

William laughed like I was joking and pulled me closer, his hand making its way to the zipper on my dress. I shivered as he slowly pulled it down, revealing my naked back to the air. There was a pause in his urgency as William stopped kissing me to make eye contact as he slid my dress off one shoulder at a time and it fell into a puddle on the floor. He undid my bra strap single-handedly like it was a practiced, simple thing.

I was left in only my pink cotton underwear. William looked at me, his eyes moving up and down my body. I was self-conscious even as I worried that I might be about to die. The women, I knew, were all naked when they were found in the ravine. There was no sign of the clothes they had been wearing before their disappearances. Was this how it began? A slow stripping of the layers like preparing an onion to be cooked?

People always talked about the fight-or-flight response, but people rarely talked about the third thing your brain can make you do when you're afraid: freeze. "Frozen" was the perfect word to describe the stillness of my body as I stood almost naked in front of a man who'd been accused of serial murder. William approached me, grabbed my wrists, and pulled me close. My breath quickened. I closed my eyes. I waited for my death.

It was William's lips and not a rope that met my neck. They moved down my body as he pulled off my underwear so that he could slip his tongue in between my legs. I'd never orgasmed so quickly, my body alert with the fear of death.

William removed his own clothing. Though he was thin from his time in jail, he lifted me up effortlessly and placed me on the bed. I wondered if he'd repeated Jill's workouts while stuck in his jail cell the same way that I'd done them in my hotel room, both of us squatting in memory of a woman who was brutally slain.

"Would it even be possible," the defense attorneys had asked during the trial, "for a single person to move the bodies on their own?"

"Yes," said the expert who was testifying. "But he would have to be very strong."

There was no discussion of condoms or birth control or anything at all.

William climbed on top of me.

The last time I tried to have sex with Max Yulipsky, we'd gone to his favorite dive bar, a place so dark and loud that I spent the evening nodding along to moving mouths that didn't seem to notice that I couldn't hear them. It was a weekday and if I'd been with anyone else, I would've gone home hours earlier than when Max finally announced that he was tired and we trekked back to the house that he shared with his roommates.

True to his word, Max was tired and he stripped down to his boxers and climbed into bed and closed his eyes.

"Max," I whispered, and then kissed his ear in the spot where I knew he was most sensitive. I put his hand on my side to let him feel my nudity. It was important to me that my body was enough to wake him from his slumber.

"Mmm," he murmured.

Max begrudgingly woke up and made an attempt at sex. He struggled to get hard and after a few minutes he said, "I don't think it's happening tonight, Hannah," and rolled off me and immediately returned to sleep, leaving me to lie in bed pondering why I wasn't enough.

In retrospect, that occasion should've been a sign that Max was on the verge of ending things. At the time, I read it for what I wanted it to be, which was a whiskey-filled blip.

William had no problem getting hard, no problem fucking me while pinning my hands back against the bed with such force that I couldn't move. With each thrust, I waited for the turn, when he went from man to murderer.

It never came.

William orgasmed with a grunt and then collapsed on top of me. He lifted his head and kissed my cheeks, my forehead.

"That was amazing," he said.

"Uh-huh," I said in agreement.

He rolled off me and we both lay naked on top of the comforter. I remembered the shabbiness of the room, the clothes still scattered about, waiting to be packed. I was imperfect and William still wanted to make me come.

He rolled onto his side and ran his fingers along the far side of my cheek, turning my head so that I looked at him. His eyes were an icier blue than Bentley's and I chastised myself for making the comparison. I was suddenly self-conscious of my breath.

"I want to give you everything," William said, still stroking my cheek.

"You already have," I replied, though it had been more of a process of removing all the facets of my life one by one until he was all that I had left.

"I'm serious," he said.

We rotated our bodies until we were spooning. I spent five minutes thinking about how perfectly our bodies fit together until my arm started to hurt and I squirmed. I didn't want to break up the moment because I wasn't sure what lay on the other side. Finally, William announced that he was going to take a shower.

"Sorry," he apologized as he untangled his body from mine.

"It's okay, you've had a long day," I replied.

I should've taken the time while William was in the shower to text people and tell them where I was. I didn't need to make the same mistakes that Emma had made in the hours before her death. Instead, I got out my notebook.

William fucks like a man ready to kill,I wrote in the guilty column, but he hasn't killed me yet.