Aric watched his lover smile at Trent as their fingertips brushed; a moist, lipless kiss of longing flesh. Their fingertips were fucking, goddamn it, and doing so in plain view. Did Marco think he wouldn’t notice? That both Marco and Trent had chosen that precise moment to reach for the last beer on the table seemed less than accidental, so Aric waited for the sleep of thirteen hours on the road to seclusion to take hold of Marco before he cut Trent’s throat. He did it with the paring knife they’d used earlier to carve liquor wells into blood oranges.

*****

The aged boathouse that shared the vacation property embodied death in a way that made it seem an attractive place to kill a man and dump his body afterward. White paint flakes like eczema peeled away from the bleached timber. Even in daylight, it looked like the rotting corpse of a larger, grander structure dead from neglect. Perched on stilts amidst the idyllic lake and verdant shore, it was an aesthetic affront; a cum stain upon green silk.Aric went there whenever he could to smoke weed and scrawl lyrics to songs he’d never sing along its inner walls. He never wrote songs on paper, and never composed music anymore. The idea of strangers happening upon the lyrics, not knowing by whose hand they’d been rendered, or to what melody they might be sung was too entertaining for him to take the guesswork out of things. Aric thought it lent the shack kind of a Charles Manson vibe.Trent had leaped at his invitation to view its interior…