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“Ahhh,” I groaned in pleasure as her wetness engulfed me.

The sensation was overwhelming—she was tight and gripping me like a fist. The more of my length I pushed inside, the more her body began to yield and stretch to take all nine inches of my girth. I loved feeling her adjust around me with an elasticity unlike that of the women I’d been with. She was lush and warm inside as my lust burned hot. She took so good, her eyes rolling back, until she was seated fully, her full weight pressing me deeper than I'd ever been inside anyone, and she threw her head back and cried out in Ewe⁠—

"Nye dzi lɔ̃ wo! Me kpe wo!"

My heart loves you, and I love you, she said. I understood the Ewe native tongue without ever having learned it. The words were in my blood because she'd put them there.

She began to move with a rhythm that resembled the tide. I rocked into her feverishly like drums at the Praise House. Our lovemaking was turning the earth on its axis. She rode me with a conviction that was maddening—slow rolls of her hips, grinding down, taking me deeper with every stroke, letting her weight shift so that she rubbed herself against me with each descent. Her breasts swayed above me as she caught my hands and brought them there to fill my palms with their heft. I took pleasure in squeezing and kneading them with worship.

"Harder," she moaned out.

Her voice had layers—harmonics that made the bedposts hum. "Touch me like you mean it. I'm not fragile. I'm not human. I can take everything you have, and I want it. Your blood, your seed, and your soul. Give it to me."

I gripped her hips, thrusting up into her, meeting her rhythm, becoming part of her tide. She moaned in delight, and moved faster, harder. The feel of her slamming down on me made my toes curl as the bed shuddered and the mosquito netting swayed. The house itself seemed to relish in Addie’s pleasure as it breathed with us.

She leaned down until we were chest to chest and her mouth found the scar she left on my throat from last night.

"Now," she whispered with every inch of me pulsing inside her passage to pleasure. “The true feeding and binding.”

Her teeth pierced the scar, causing pain to flare bright before morphing into pleasure so total I shouted.

“Mmmm, Nye lɔlɔ̃,” I cried out, feeling my release near.

She drank, and with every pull of her mouth I poured into her—blood, memory, the accumulated grief of a boy who never fit anywhere—and she poured back.

Images of Ghana flooded me. As she weaved herself into my soul, I could see my grandma's village near Ho and the red of laterite roads. The sound of Ewe spoken in a market where every voice was a song rang in my ears. The smell of my grandmother's kitchen and groundnut soup permeated my nose as I felt her hand on my head. Addie allowed history to play for me as I was able to see the hold of a ship. I saw the Middle Passage from above, the ships like coffins on the water, and I learned what survived it: the Gullah weaving baskets, keeping the language, keeping the Gods, and keeping her, Addie. I saw myself anew—not as a lonely scholar but as a bridge, a bond to the past and a resource for the future.

She rode me harder, teeth still in my throat, her sex clenching around me in rippling waves. She was climaxing—I felt the contractions and the way her whole body shook when she screamed against my neck in Ewe:

"Mawu kafu! Nye dzi dzaa!"

Hearing her declare her desire for me pulled my orgasm from my pulsing dick as I spilled my seed into her with a force that felt like dying, like being born, like every orgasm I'd ever had compressed into a single moment that lasted forever and ended too soon. She drank and drank, and I felt myself thinning, going translucent at the edges⁠—

Until she stopped and pulled back, before licking the wound closed.

"Enough," she gasped. Her chest heaving and skin glowing bioluminescent with satisfaction. "For now. We are now one. I’ve made you mine forever."

She collapsed onto me, wrapping herself around me, and I loved it—her pressure and presence showed the undeniable reality of her. She was soft everywhere. She smelled of sex and blood; she smelled like my home.

"Day husband," she whispered, kissing my eyelids, my cheeks, and my mouth. "My beautiful angry boy. You're mine now, and I'm yours, forever. Until the marsh dries and the fireflies forget how to glow."

I was satiated, filled with everything I’d been yearning for. I finally drifted to sleep, dreaming in a language I'd never learned and now understood perfectly.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE NIGHT WIVES

He sleeps beside me, his body warm like every other human I’ve owned, but this time he is mine, and I am his. The binding has begun. I can feel him in me now—a new thread in a pattern three hundred years old. The feeling is bright and strong with a mixture of anger and kindness. He's part of my hunger and my memory. When he dreams, I dream with him, and now his dreams are the red roads of Ghana and his grandmother's hand.

I smile because he doesn't know everything yet. He thinks he's my first and only special exception. He is special, I’ll admit that. I’ve never taken a day husband. He's my bridge to the sun, the one Akosua promised me. He's the first in three centuries to look at my true shape and not flinch. I’ve taken many night husbands that much he knows, but I've also taken women too.

Night wives, I call them, though they're fewer than night husbands. Women are harder to find and more difficult to convince. Women are taught to fear their needs and wants from the time they can walk and talk. We often shrink ourselves and apologize for wanting too much. It takes a particular woman to surrender to me—to let herself be consumed and find joy in it instead of shame.

But when they do…mmm. There's something different about feeding from women. Their blood is sweeter, more layered, threaded through with the particular suffering of being a woman in a world that fears autonomous women. When I take a woman—when I'm inside her with my fingers and my tongue, when I drink from her throat while she climaxes against my mouth—I feel recognized in a way male blood never quite gives me. I’m seen by someone who knows what it is to be called a monster for daring to desire. I have three night wives now, and unlike my night husbands, I grant my wives to come and go as they please and need.

Sarah, who teaches literature at the College and comes to me when her marriage to a man who doesn't see her becomes too lonely to bear. She likes me to take her from behind, bent over my kitchen table, my teeth in her shoulder and my hand between her thighs, making her scream into her own arm so her husband won't hear it in his dreams.

Zora, the Gullah elder on Johns Island who Malik met upon his arrival. She has known me since she was eleven and I was the lady who always came at dusk. She gave me her surrender at twenty-two; she's seventy-eight now. She doesn't come for sex anymore—her body is tired—but she comes for the feeding and the closeness to me. I give her the memory of when we were young together, and I taught her what it meant to want without apology. Her blood tastes of aged molasses.