We first made love in her blood. Drunk, with her high heels dangling from her fingertips, and a taxi pulling away from the curb behind her, she confirmed the break room gossip. Her lipstick streaked across her cheek, and her red hair wild like one of Fellini's women, I took her into the bathroom and bent her over the toilet.
Ours was, she said, a celebration of some strange freedom. Independence - but from what or whom, I could never say. She was, I felt, owned by the mere sound of her husband's name, from my lips or hers. Not that we spoke much, but sometimes, as she slid the condom over the shaft of my cock, she would tell me some little anecdote or another about her married life. His name was Jim. He worked long hours, was older, and wanted more than anything to have children. He wore suits and called her 'darling,' which she said she hated, but I don't think she minded so much, because once I saw her lips twitch upwards when he called her 'darling' from the other end of her cell phone. And she left a few minutes after hanging up.

She would leave letters in strange places for me, filled with words that romanticized our affair. My favourite was the one she left in lipstick on the mirror that simply read, "This is your illusion." A heart circled 'your'. She loved to be cryptic.

She liked me to handcuff her to the bedposts, her head turned, her mouth slightly open, and she reminded me of a postcard I saw when I was a boy in a Mexican Folk Art shop, of a woman whose entire lower body was devoured by flames as she reached up with both hands dangling chains from the wrists. Anima Sola. Lonely Soul, or Soul in Purgatory, or something like that.

We became the moderators of her monthly cycle, and I knew, that come the day, she'd show up, always drunk, always in some expensive dress her husband had bought her, always bleeding, and we would wallow in our crime, but she would never look me in the eye, and she would never stay when I offered her kindness. I was her punisher, alone.

If I couldn't be more, then, I wanted to be less, now. People recall Alexandria with romance and intrigue, but she and I were not to be remembered. Half alive, and frozen there at the place - the apex- where things either break or bend. Dwindle or burst, and we were dwindling. Even her hand in mine, began to feel as dry as parchment, and just as fragile. I recalled that she consistently misspelled the word, 'carnival', and often forget when to use 'there', 'they're', and 'their'; I found myself correcting her love letters with red pen.

She showed up late around Christmas. I thought maybe she loved me, as when we fell into the bedroom, there was none of the usual mess of her undergarments, but there was something strange about her. She wouldn't let me tie her down, and she looked at me as I fucked her. All too good to be true. Something had to be wrong.

I wiggled away from her and went to get a cup of tea. Something warm, something hotter than the false fire of her wayward gaze and the rustling of my fingers pulling apart from hers sounded like Autumn leaves, tumbling one over the other.
The last time I saw her was in a restaurant. She was wearing a white dress, stretched taut over her belly, where it was obvious something grew. Her lips twitched as I drifted past and called her 'darling.'