her therapist, had planted a seed that Mann could not allow to grow. Cassette had come home one night silently, eyes faraway, murmuring of "space" and "patterns," words that her therapist had planted during their session about Mann's intensity being a cage. "She tries to cut your tape, Cassette, to fray us apart," he thought, tightening his fingers around the pen he had taken from the therapist's desk; it still felt warm from her notes. He would finish it, bury it deep.
He lured her to a cabin in the woods, a ruse about a client emergency delivered through a static payphone. The night was crisp, crunching with pine needles underfoot, as her therapist arrived all wrapped tight in her coat, breath billowing like a fog in the glow of a lantern. Mann waited inside, shovel in hand, smelling of sap and earth. "Where's the client?" she asked as she stepped in, and he smiled, somewhere between soft and predatory. "You are the problem, ." She tried to escape, but he struck the blow-his shovel thudded into her temple, a dull thonk as she collapsed, blood flowing from her hairline, the glasses cracking upon impact on the ground.
He did not kill her at that point. He wanted her to know she was dying and feel an increased weight from her wrongdoing. Dragging her outside, he began digging-a small pit under the pines, the soil dark and gean, shovel biting deep constituting a half-dream with her awakening from the gag. "You would pull her, unravel her from me," he hissed, throwing away dirt, his boots sinking in mud. She twitched as he rolled her inside, clutching air with her hands while he mounted lots of dirt over her-first pressing down over her legs, then completely covering her chest, the screams choking her as the surge filled her mouth. Her eyes were glued to his wide with the fearas they dulled with dirt clogging her lungs, slivers of pine needles interspersed in her strands of hair, the only graveyard umbra across her tree stood still. "She was a snag in your weave, Cassette. I buried her so we'd root deep- my love's a soil to hold you eternal."
That night, he went back to Cassette, mud still delicately splattered on his boots, the stillness of the cabin reverberating in his bones. She was in the kitchen, stirring tea counterclockwise, her hair loose, and he swept her into his arms, kissing her neck, her jaw, her lips-fierce, possessive, tasting honey and her warmth. "You're my forever, Cassette," he growled, and she laughed softly, pulling him toward the counter. He slipped her shirt up, kissing her belly, ribs, his hands slipping under the waistband as she sighed, fingers winding through his hair. "Mann," she breathed, and he peeled her down leisurely, pressing her bare skin against the wood, his mouth moving lazily from her thighs into her warmth, deep and slow, sipping in the sounds of her songs.
He stripped, her earth and its grave with which he took her grasping his perfume, crashing her into him together with the wooden floor-raw, urgent with her legs taken in by him as he slipped into her with a tenderness that quickly slipped into greater urgency. "No one cuts us, my muse," he whispered as he fouled her hands down hard, staring into her woods. The crescendo of her wails drew in her last spasm of freedom, which then triggered his. In their sweat laid a promise. He stroked her hair after, saying, "We're eternal now," her head on his chest, a head which was blind to shed arrive soil under his nails with the grave he dug for her possession.