The vast lawn at the back of the house stretches to a forest of trees. The aroma of spicy magnolias, conversations between crickets, and the crescent moon pouring into the open door.

Isabella sits, curled on a chair beside the door, the midnight air sticky sweet. She loves it. Being home. But this heaven has a price, and she wonders if all heavens do.

The cost for this place is time. Making money for a house she’s rarely in; an irony not beyond her.

Isabella stands up, hand resting in that spot where her tiny waist instantly curves into a round hip. She shuts her eyes, ignoring the prints on the table. She doesn’t need to pull out the previous file to compare. Turning in on herself, sinking into the darkness behind her lids, she searches for it, immobile so long she’s certain she can feel it. The time bomb in her brain. Her imagination paints it as a red, pulsing collection of inflamed cells, angry and narcissistic and petty, threatening to take her with it when it goes.

Spending sixteen hours a day being a resident doctor for the last three years, she knows everything about what’s going on with her. A macabre thought. Going from provider to patient.

Isabella doesn’t cry. She’s just getting tired of all the damn waiting. 

Death is a part of life. An inevitability that should have the decency to at least wait until one’s led a full life. But, of course, it doesn’t work that way. She’s accepted that. Even before her condition, she knew the hardest part of dying is when it doesn’t happen instantly. Isabella walks around in a state of being nearly no one else is experiencing.

This life is fleeting. Every moment. You feel it in the marrow of your bones when you’re on the clock. Or rather, when your clock is visible to you. Wondering what will happen when it stops ticking.

Isabella wishes she’d done more.

When she opens her eyes, she has an audience.

She doesn’t startle. Her companion so appropriate she nearly laughs. She doesn’t, as she’s much too afraid.

Across the slick moonlit grass, at the line of demarcation between forest and field, stands an eerily convincing grim reaper. Its robes flutter in a nonexistent breeze until they touch the ground where they infect the grass with a tar-like substance. The scythe in its skeleton hand twinkles at the razor point. The face within the hood unseen.

Isabella’s inhale is shaky. Her exhale smooth.

They face one another, unmoving, for a time.

The reaper stands directly across the way, assessing Isabella silently through the open door. It can taste her flurry of thoughts. Death is versed in both anger and relief, joy and fear. Does not discriminate against skin color or religion. Is the other side of the coin; yang to life’s yin.

She can feel it staring right through skin and bone to her beating heart. She sighs. She doesn’t even have a pet to say goodbye to. Her family is gone and she hasn’t had sex in almost a year. She washed her friends of responsibility. Worked her usual shift until yesterday when the hospital put her on leave after discovering her last appointment’s development. And her subterfuge that hid it.

Death’s presence amplifies her loneliness.

Isabella turns away, body first, and when she manages to tear her eyes from it, the reaper is instantly on her other side.

She jumps a mile and holds her sharp breath, Death now standing in her kitchen.

The stench of something ancient wafts toward her. The tendrils of its gauzy robes inches away, the large curve of the scythe’s blade reaching over her shoulder. More than shadow, a sentient darkness fills the hood, showing no face.

She takes a step back and swallows the lump that threatens to choke her before Death can get to it.

“So. You’re here for me?”

Death inclines its head.

“This is bullshit and you know that.”

The deep laughter that fills the kitchen is a wave of roaches scurrying on dried leaves.

“You preach of fairness?” Death’s voice reverberates in baritone layers.

“If I am?”

“Hypotheticals are for enlightenment. I, above all, am fair.”

“… Why me?” Isabella asks. “Why now?”

“Why not?”

“I’m still young.”

“One is young when latched to their mother’s breast.”

“And therefore I don’t deserve more time? Have I not been a good person? Spending my days saving other people!” Isabella’s emotions flare, voice rising.

“You do not ask the right questions.” Death waves a bone-white hand, the arm of its robe floating as if underwater, tar inking over the tile. Isabella considers this. What question does Death want her to ask? What question would it answer?

“Do you always converse with those you come for?” Isabella wonders after a silence. Somehow, she knows Death is smiling behind the cowl.

Without regard to her mortal gaze, Death sheds its cloak, the blade in its hand disappearing. An upright skeleton stands before her, a foot taller than her, the hollows of its eyes peering into her as it begins to change. The sound of ligaments being born scores the horrific vision before her, Isabella watching Death’s framework grow first muscle, then veins, then organs. A gruesome display of rapid cell development. She doesn’t blink, though she tries; Death flaying himself in reverse. She can see now that he is very male.

As golden skin completes its burgeoning, Isabella finds herself gazing into hazel eyes. Death is tall and handsome, hair dark, dressed in jeans and a sweater.

“Hello, Bell.” Voice completely human.

“No one’s called me that since-”

“July 4th of 2012,” Death finishes. Horror washes through her as she makes a belated connection, realizing this Death is everyone’s Death, not just hers. And that he took her parents seven years ago.

Even if he were unable to divine her mind's eye, even if he hadn't been the one to personally deliver their souls, he would understand the pain in her face. His eyes are campfire-warm velvet. 

"Why can't you just leave me alone?" Isabella’s broken whisper carries all it means to be at the end of your rope.

Death doesn't change his apologetic expression, though his 'sorry' is left unsaid. "You act as if my requirements are personal."

"You require death?"

"The Universe requires balance. I am a linchpin in the fabric of reason."

"Are there things you require?" Isabella tries to understand the phenomenon happening before her. Exceedingly curious if this is a dream or she's gone mad.

His grin is warm breath on her every nerve.

"I, like many things, have evolved. I am the residue of recycled energy become sentient. The embodiment of Hades' ferry. I require nothing but my purpose. Although…  amusements are rather appealing."

Isabella's brain struggles to grasp the distortion that occurs with his words. The way they melt away the peripheral of her existence until there is nothing but everything. Featherlight memories in her atoms.

She feels a tingling within.

"I'm an amusement." Her comment is a deduction. The correct one.

Death's hazel, alien eyes devour her thick curves with intention she doesn't understand.

"You intrigue me," he confesses. 

"Why?"

"It is your… self. The Chinese would call it Qi. Aristotle would call it Soul. It is that which you are, and that which you are not. Everything you've ever been or will become. Your essence is… attractive."

Isabella stands before Death, wishing she could dissect him the way he is her. Wondering what the hell he means.

"I mean that which I speak." He answers her thoughts. Her eyes squint with suspicion.

"You're attracted to me?" 

Death smiles with a mouth male models would sell their souls for, and a metaphysical fissure splits in Isabella's heart--He's so beautiful it's painful.

"I am."

Isabella blinks away the sensation.

"Should I be flattered?" Her genuine curiosity makes Death laugh and loathe all at once. 

"I should hope so. You'll wound my ego." 

"Death has an ego?"

"Likely larger than God's."

Without conscious choice, Isabella's eyes rake in his perfection. Death takes a step toward her and her heart climbs in her throat, blocking her airway.

“Breathe,” he says gently, and on his command, air audibly returns to her lungs. He steps again.

Isabella is overwhelmed by his desire on a molecular level. He is vast and wanting, and she can feel his gravitational pull. As old as time itself. She is suspended, no longer rushing toward death for it’s at her door. In her house. Eyeing her like he wants to fuck her into the next life.

The grand mal of tremors rolls through her spine. Death stops an inch away.

“You’re thinking too much, Bell. Not something you normally do.” He notes the last part in a curious tone. 

His chest is level with her eyes. She’s afraid to look up. Wondering if she’ll simply unravel the next time he literally looks into her soul.

“I still don’t understand,” she says to distract. Both he and herself.

Is she attracted to Death…?

He slides a hand into her hair, the exquisite contact distracting her distraction.

“I am exceedingly interested, myself,” he murmurs.

“What exactly do you want with me?” she breathes. Death turns her face up, and when she reluctantly meets his gaze, the result is unthinkable.

Isabella’s pussy gushes with arousal, soaking through her tiny sleep shorts in an instant. He presses the steel in his jeans against her, and she gasps.

“I want to feel you come in eight dimensions while my cock is inside you."

She moans, a shot of Epinephrine to the heart. “Do you do this a lot?” She doesn’t need to add, fuck other women when you come for their souls, for him to understand.

“I have before. Not for many millennia.” Isabella isn’t sure she likes that answer. Death can tell. “You and I weren’t ready to meet, Bell. I have lived a long time.” One hand still in her hair, the other goes to her waist, holding her close.

Being in Death’s arms: A notion she never saw coming.

“You seduce,” she accuses.

“You still have your free will,” Death responds, resenting her implication. “I only amplify your sixth sense. Stop trying to fit my existence into a box. Feel me, Isabella.” He grabs between her legs, and the world bends so far it goes full circle before settling back into place. Death bands an arm around her when her knees buckle.

“Holy fuck,” she groans as he rubs her through the warm, wet cotton, hips gyrating for him, immediately on the verge of orgasm though already wet enough to claim she’s had one. Or several.

“Would you like me to stop?”

Isabella shakes her head, mouth-breathing.

“Would you like my tongue here instead?” Just his words are enough to tear her mind in half. Abruptly, his lips are on hers, and all she can feel is him, alleviating the fraying of her frontal cortex.

“Stay with me, Bell.”

She breathes into him, trying to keep her grip on reality. Whatever that means now.

She just kissed Death on the mouth.

His presence is opening her mind’s eye in ways it’s never flexed before, something telling her if she did get lost in him, it would take a valiant, labyrinthine journey to make it back out.

“I would never let you be lost.” His lips against hers are a breeze caressing damp blades of grass. She can smell him; a million wildflowers under the stars, desert dusk after a purple rain, his cologne bottled midnight. She can feel him; smooth jasmine sandalwood between her legs, warm milk running over her nipples, through her navel. His breath spider-spun silk.

He smiles. “Much better.”

Death lays a gentle kiss on her mouth and the sensation fills her body with a wave of helium, and then, she’s floating. Being kissed and licked on every lewd inch of her body, bones soft as she writhes, her moans a high pitched singing somewhere beyond. Effervescent nectar fills her mouth, down her throat, fills her pussy, tingling in a gentle boil.

Her fingers glide through mink-soft strands, the already high nerve count in her clitoris tripling as something fantastical sucks on it. Isabella is blind with arousal, pure white irises rippling vibrant watercolors as concentrated nirvana courses through her body.

Tumbling in kaleidoscopic galaxies, swimming in a lake meant for gods.

Lashes flicker beyond the masterpiece of her vision. She breathes, lungs shivering as if the oxygen entering them was orgasmic. The blood in her veins caressing her limbs.

“Don’t get lost, little lamb.”

Death's whisper brings back some of her. Recalling she’s a person and not an exposed nerve submerged in pure eroticism. A speck floating in space.

Isabella’s hips search. She knows her knees are far open. Why wouldn’t they be? Whatever’s happening between her legs is so intense she would surely die if it stopped. She doesn’t want to live without it.

He bites her inner thigh, and the sting makes her moan. 

“Fuck, you are delicious.” His approval, his breath, humid as the Georgia air, gives her purpose.

She realizes the ultra-soft texture between her fingers is Death’s hair. Isabella holds his head against her, and next she blinks, she can see, his endless eyes on her face as he conducts the ultimate cunnilingus on her. The tile beneath her back soft as a cloud.

“Speak to me, dove,” Death instructs.

“What’s happening to me?” Isabella’s voice is new to her, two octaves higher than usual. The inflection so needy it’s arousingly pathetic. His rippling tongue glides along her puffy lips.

“Spatial distortion. You’re adjusting. Stay focused on me.”

Isabella notices she is completely naked, unaware if Death undressed her or simply willed her clothes out of existence. She begins to believe the latter upon seeing his now bare shoulders.

Isabella whimpers. “It’s too much."

"You would prefer I stop?"

"No! Please don't."

Death smiles. "Tell me what you want, little lamb." Licks her. 

"I want to ride your face,” Isabella purrs.

More instantaneous than thought, she is astride his mouth as she envisioned, the shift disorienting, yet smooth.

Whatever she wants--In the blink of an eye.

"Oh fuck, that's nice," she mewls, grinding on his tongue. Death loves the feeling of being straddled by her. Her scent is the moment of new life. The sensation of rain misting on flower petals. The stillness of winter air through calmly falling snow.

What started off as one enormous, soul-deep orgasm has broken down, and now Isabella can feel herself cycling through smaller, equally exquisite orgasms. She moans sweet iterations, teeth clenched as she humps, Death growling beneath her. Hands on the swell of her ass, her generous breasts.

Eons later, he slips out from under her, comes up behind her and pushes her head to the floor, just as she wanted him to. Ass in the air, his tongue roughly licks her, and she arches like a cat, moaning without shame. She is an animal, after all.

"Please,” Isabella coos, “I need you inside me." Death licks from her clit, into her pussy, up to her ass, and she comes again. 

"Need is a passive construct," he mumbles into her spasming cunt. “And I already am inside you.”

She smiles. He wants specifics.

"I want your cock in my pussy." She speaks like an addict as she shivers away her last orgasm. "Please, I want your cock inside me. I want to be fucked."

Isabella’s effect on him is deep. Looking down her back at the pleasure on her face as she bends over willingly. It's been too long for him. Much too long.

"Say that again," he commands. 

"I want to be fucked." The innocence in her knitted brow puts him on the verge of bursting. Death throbs, his cock hungry for her every hole. He knows her mouth and ass and pussy are desperate for the mind-bending friction only he can give. And Death is very kind. He is the Final Sleep. Brings relief to the greatest pain.

Isabella bristles lightly from his thoughts. Death pulls her up, the skin of her back against his bare chest.

"Mmm, my sweet little dove." He buries his face in her neck, thumbing her pebble-hard nipples. Just him touching her this way brings her to another orgasm, this one soft and sweet as he kisses her ear, kneeling behind her.

"My Bell," he utters. She rolls her ass into his groin, softly moaning.

"Please, let me ride you." The urge to become his plaything seeps into her voice. Isabella would lie for days, years, centuries if Death spent every moment on her body. For all she knows, it's been that long already.

An arm around her waist, Death lifts her, lining his bulbous head with Isabella’s post-orgasmic pussy. He lowers her reverse cowgirl, his tip meeting the resistance of a wet, clenched fist.

"This is where you want to be?" 

"Yes," she insists, hips seeking.

He pushes up, the ridge of his phallus consumed by her heat.

"Oh fuck," Death groans with pleasure, and Isabella bursts into another orgasm.

She clamps around his swollen cockhead, moaning filthy words in that sweet voice. He places his forehead between her shoulder blades. 

"Fuck, Bell. When you come, you come hard." 

"Ooh, yes, oh fuck, oh fuck," Isabella repeats as she twitches madly, lowering onto him. His lips graze her spine, reaching around to rub her clit, and she blooms once more. He senses her blissfully breaking off into pieces. Inching toward insanity with every inch he gives her.

“Don’t leave me, beautiful. Stay with me,” he urges, slowly pumping into her as he rubs her intensely erect clitoris, massaging her breast. She moans--a good sign. “That’s it, little lamb. Let me guide you.”

Death absorbs the euphoria she’s emanating. Can feel her turning inside out as he moves within her. He touches her everywhere, influencing her cerebral procession of him, not wanting to lose her to insubstantial limbo. Too much empirical exposure to a minimally constructed mind has the potential for detrimental effects.

Death is highly aware of this.

The problem is her limited existential comprehension. At this very moment, she reads from the Book of Knowledge having known nothing but a single letter. Eats from the Tree of Life as she rides Death's cock.

The hand on her breast moves to her neck. 

"Let go, Bell. Forget the inaccurate preconceptions. Ride me. Feel me in you. I and you are all that matter. All that exist."

"Oh fuck, you're huge," Isabella moans with abandon, grinding mindlessly.

Doing around one hundred twenty percent of light speed, Isabella is instantaneously on her back, Death above her, so deep in her, it’s assumed he never left.

"You like this cock?" he offers with the grin of Adonis.

"Yes," Bell pants. "Please don't stop, don't leave me," she begs, pulling him deeper as she thrusts her hips up.

Death chuckles. "As if a notion existed that could compare." He pushes hard, and Isabella whimpers, nails on his back. "My desire for your pleasure is unparalleled." Death pulls her claws from his skin and stretches her beneath him. Braiding their fingers above her head as he pumps into her, kissing her.

For being the moment of finality, Death feels anything but as he moves inside Isabella. He is infinite. To stop would be unnatural.

“You’re the infinite one,” he mutters, teeth on her nipple, and she knows he would never leave her, never stop if she demanded it. Her lover hears her thoughts and suffers no conflicts. Death would raze worlds for her. 

Breathing and moaning, thrusting, they make something akin to love.

Isabella’s kitchen disappears as they roll into various positions, entwining with rhythm into whatever feels good. It is all Isabella can concentrate on. Anything beyond the man in front of her threatens to drown her. Knowing there is something vast within the man in front of her is inexplicable.

Like making love to the Universe.

He grabs her hips with both hands, pulling her hard on him, and a thunderstorm fills her. His tongue laps a faithful ocean on her mound, magnificent waves washing her bare skin. His cock is thick and hot inside her, in her pussy, in her mouth. When Death is balls deep in her ass, Isabella has an orgasm so good she almost loses her mind again, forgets everything but the dominating sensation.

Death brings her back, a fist in her hair, whispering romance tainted with wicked lechery, above her, beneath her, fucking her so deeply for a moment they aren’t two entities but one.

“Do you orgasm?” Isabella wonders breathlessly, hands on his chest as she rides him, coming down from her thousandth climax.

“If I do, this will be over,” he grunts, grasping her ass as he humps up into her.

Isabella considers this. Deducing her assumption to an uncontrollable phenomenon. If he comes, what will happen to her?

“I want you to come,” she whispers.

Death’s hazel eyes send goosebumps across her skin, clenching around him as she shudders. So many ways to convince her body.

“Do you, now?” His voice taps into her, so unmistakable she feels she’s heard it all her life. 

“Would you like to?” Her question is assisted by a roll of her hips. Death sits up, nose to nose with her, their pace slowing but not stopping.

“You’re ready?”

“Yes,” she answers instantly, though the impact of his question was not ignored.

Isabella doesn’t think she’s dead. Not yet. But she knows now not to fear it. In fact, she’s growing restless for it. For him.

“Will you come in me? Make me yours?” Isabella whispers against his lips, arms around his neck. Death kisses her, the raw, sudden carnality of his mouth causing her nerves to bristle with excitement.

“Remember this,” he says into her.

“I doubt I would ever forget.”

Death smiles. A subatomic second later he’s on top of her, and she moans. He moves powerfully, every thrust neverending, and the rhythm is hypnotic. Isabella’s high is intense, anticipating his release.

Harder, deeper, Death fucks Isabella until time and space are compacted to a pin-drop. They wade together in nothingness for a moment, the two of them, their perception on pause, until the spec explodes with the force of a Big Bang.

Isabella is gone.

And then, she is everywhere.

And then her essence is quickly yanked back together, rushing, compressing. She sees worlds along the way. Hears conversations in a trillion and two different languages. Tastes a quadrillion sunrises and touches infinite matter.

She feels everything, every vibration of every atom that ever did or would exist.

And then, it is quiet.

She tries to relax, knowing she’ll be able to see once she does.

She focuses on becoming something tangible. Feels the way every individual grain of her being floats. Encourages a result.

She opens her eyes. Then, she gasps.

Floating in the black silk of space, billions of diamond planets surround her; paintings of metallic galaxies; nebulas of rainbow-hued haze expanding as far as the form she’s taken can see. She looks down; at her hands. It makes sense that the last form she lived would be the most familiar.

Left to her own devices for the first time, she does nothing. Nothing but see.

After a while, she senses him there. Absorbing the beauty around her as he absorbs her. After all, this is the first time he has met her this way.

“You’ve waited a long time,” she finally says. Her voice clear and beautiful in the vacuum of space.

“Nine hundred twenty-two million, eight hundred thousand, thirty-four years since the moment I first sensed you.” His response is distracted. She looks over. Death; as handsome as he’s always been. Staring at her. She remembers him now. Has encountered him many times.

Her shell-pink lips pull into a smile.

“Sorry I’m late.”

Death grins, not just with his face, but with his being--something that threatened to rip her frail human mind apart. Now, she can differentiate every nuance of his psyche, is delighted by his effect on her.

“No need to be sorry, love.”

“… Am I what I think I am?”

He nods to affirm. His intense hazel eyes have yet to unanchor from her. “What do you remember?”

“… Everything,” she breathes.

Death is behind her, breath on her neck, though neither of them want for air. His fingers curl around her shoulders. Feather-light memories in her atoms recalling the many times he has touched her this way. Her sentience didn’t always surface when Death came for her, but each time it did, she spent it with him.

“Just as I became over time, you, my lovely lamb, have become a lion.”

“Why now?”

“Why not?” She smiles at their innocuously repeated exchange. Spoken every time Death took as many lives as she's lived. Which is all of them. Her eyes are the gaze of every creature reincarnated, though now, she has a vessel to claim as her own.

Isabella is Life. She has, like many things, evolved. Is the residue of recycled energy become sentient. The embodiment of light and laughter.

Yin to Death’s Yang.

She turns to face him. As she does, Death shifts them seamlessly to a world of lush vegetation.

Green and vibrant, chirping with life, a waterfall rushes in the distance, a turquoise beach in the break of the trees. It smells of honey, sunlight, and blue-burning driftwood. Isabella shudders with pleasure.

“Show off,” she mocks, and her clothes disappear.

“You'll get the hang of it,” he promises, padding toward her like a lion himself. She bats her lashes, making him as nude as he made her. Her first try executed flawlessly. Death picks her up, grinning as her legs wrap his waist.

“My Bell,” he utters.

“I’ve had a lot of names, you know.”

“You have lived a lot of lives. You needn’t run any longer, my lion. Also, I enjoy the way it rings.” Death smiles when she laughs.

“So. What happens now?” Bell asks, falling into the hypnotic shifting of his galaxy eyes.

“The rest of forever," Death replies, watching every particle she absorbs, and how they're brighter when expelled from her luminescent skin.

Reveling at the end of his loneliness.