Ryan slammed the car door shut behind him and twirled about, humming to himself and bounding up the stairs to the apartment he shared with the love of his life.  There was no mistaking the spring in his step as he fiddled with his keys, all too eager to get home and see the woman who was going to be his wife.

He didn't get texts like that often, that was sure.  Actually, he'd pretty much never gotten a message like that from Laurel.  The two of them were plenty passionate, of course.  Maybe not as much as when they started dating a couple years ago, but with Laurel's headaches and all the stress with planning the wedding and work, work, work they'd been falling asleep on the couch or going to bed quietly more often than not in recent days.  He kicked his shoes off before the door was even shut behind him.

"Hey, I'm home, babe!" Ryan called out after his belt was undone.  He fiddled with the buttons on his shirt while shimmying his pants down over his knees and hopping out of them.  Laurel didn't call back, but his instructions had been pretty clear.  He hustled down the hallway and pushed the door to their bedroom open, and there she was.

Laurel was as seductive as she'd ever been, spread out on their bed and staring directly into Ryan's eyes as he entered the room.  Her long dark hair was spread out, radiating from her head across the pillow.  Her blouse and bra were open and laying beneath her back, exposing her small, sweet breasts that rose and fell with her slow, even breath.  Her slender bare legs were slightly spread, inviting with one bent at the knee, her foot flat on the bed while the other stretched out towards him, toes slowly flexing as if they too were inviting him in.

"Oh my God..." Ryan softly murmured as he approached, his hand reaching out and sliding over Laurel's raised knee.

"I need you so fucking bad, Ry," Laurel whispered, her voice low and throaty and soft.  His hand glided past her knee and along her thigh as he mounted the bed, moving over her and shivering faintly when she reached out and ran her hand between his his legs, encouraging his already stirring manhood to rigid firmness in her grasp.  "Come on," she demanded, pulling him towards her.

Ryan pushed his briefs over his hips and kicked them down past his ankles as he shifted and scooted forward, letting his soon-to-be wife guide him.

"We're forever, Ryan.  No matter what, right?" Laurel murmured, the first hint of her familiar timidness creeping back into her voice.

Ryan let out a low groan as he started to slide into his lover.  She was so hot, so eagerly warm and wet and ready for him, and as his eyes drifted shut and his hips pressed into hers he whispered, "Mnn, forever, Laurel.  Forever..."

"I love you," she shakily declared as they found their rhythm and he slid and pumped within her.  Laurel took his hand, guiding it along her body, running his fingers across her red-hot flesh.

"I love you, babe," he replied, his voice almost inaudably low and smooth.  They shuddered together and moaned as his fingers meandered about the curve of her breast.  

"For.. forever.." Laurel gasped.  Her other hand moved along the back of Ryan's neck, fingers sliding through his hair while her body responded to his every touch.  His hand curled around and cradled her breast, palm brushing across its firm peak and she pulled it closer, encouraging him to grasp and squeeze like she loved.

Ryan paused, the movement of his hips slowing.  There was something under there, something that shouldn’t have been there and that in and of itself wouldn’t have concerned him much, but it was moving.

“C’mon,” Laurel murmured, her body still surging against his, desperate for his attention.  “Fuck me, Ryan,” she hoarsely demanded, pulling him firmly against her.

“No, just, there’s something…” he whispered while starting to pull his hand away, but she seized it and smashed it back to her breast, curling her fingers around his hand and squeezing.

“It’s nothing,” she purred, even as he felt the thing crumple between her tender, sensitive flesh and his hand.  “She’s nothing and she doesn’t matter,” Laurel dreamily continued, trailing into a wordless, ecstatic cry and bucking against his hips, her thighs tightening around his body as she rode out the long, breathtaking waves of her culminating pleasure.

“Laurel, what the fuck was that?” Ryan quietly questioned.  He pulled his hand away from the wetness beneath it, scrutinizing the reddish spot on his palm and the matching one on the curve of his lover’s breast.  “You called it she?”

He leaned in closer, but Laurel was still wrapped up in the fruition of her long-lasting lusts, stroking Ryan’s hair and murmuring in his ear.  “We can do anything now, Ry.  We can do anything we want to anyone at all.  Nothing’s going to stop us…”

Her eyes slowly opened and when she looked up at her love, she saw his eyes impossibly wide, head slowly shaking back and forth in evidence of his sudden terror.  He stammered as he tried to speak.  “Th-that… Jesus Christ, that’s your mom!”

Laurel reached out for him as he pulled back, leaping from the bed and backing up against the wall.  She started to rise up and a bit of that suddenly familiar reddish shade drew Ryan’s eyes to where her foot lifted from the sheets, and there were three more stains, three more tiny people she must have smothered and crushed while the two of them made love.

Ryan shrieked, frozen to the spot as he watched Laurel move towards him.  “Ryan, it’s okay,” she assured him.  Her nude form glistened in the twilight, but all he could see were those tiny splotches of red, and now that he was looking for them, Ryan could see more and more.  Two on her shirt.  One on the mattress.  Little smears on her fingertips.

“You’re a murderer,” he managed to choke out.  His fingers were grasping for something behind him, maybe something to defend himself or a doorknob to give him a way out, he wasn’t quite sure yet, but there had to be something.  “You made me kill your own mother!”

“Ryan,” she whispered, her voice still low and sultry as she slipped up against him, her fingertips gliding across his heaving chest and her warm, bare body sliding up against his own.  “They don’t matter at all.  They were little useless people that failed me.  They don’t understand what it is to have power, Ryan, but I do.  We do, don’t we?”

It was more of a declaration than a question.  Laurel was still hungry for more, more of everything, but right now she wanted more of her man.  She pressed against him, her bare thigh grinding between his legs and her eager mouth dancing along his neck, teeth grazing his skin as she panted in his ear.  Now that he knew, now that he understood what she’d done, she wanted him that much more.

The panic gradually left Ryan.  He was still horrified, still frightened, but he wasn’t paralyzed and helpless.  A fierce growl rose in his throat and he shoved Laurel away with all of his strength.  Her little frame went tumbling back from him, leaving her laying in a heap at the foot of the bed.  She looked up at the man she loved, the only person that still meant something in her life, and absolute devastation overtook her.

“This is fucked,” Ryan hastily declared, still wide-eyed and shaking his head.  “You, this, everything… just… fucking… fucked!”

“No,” Laurel whispered, her mouth parted and her lower lip trembling with terrible distress, with the fear that she was losing the last thing in her life that mattered.  “Ry, no, it’s okay, we’re okay, we can fix this!”  Hot tears gathered in her eyes as she watched him set his jaw and shake his head one more time, and they rushed down her cheeks as he resolutely turned and marched through the door.

It took a moment, but Laurel managed to push herself up and chase after him.  “Ryan, please,” she called out, but he was already fishing his phone out of the pants laying by the door.

“Ryan, don’t do this,” she wailed, grabbing at his arm and trying to pull it away from dialing the numbers.  “You said you loved me!  You said forever, no matter what.  You promised!”

He was almost twice her size, and it wasn’t hard to push her away.  The operator picked up, and though tears of his own blurred his vision when he looked Laurel in the eye, his voice didn’t break when he spoke.  “There’s a killer in my apartment.  Please send someone right away.”

Every twist and turn this day had taken had left Laurel freshly shattered; broken her time and again to the point where there was nothing left.  She had been reaching out to Ryan, pleading with him, professing her desperate love, but when he said those words everything in her simply stopped.  For a moment she even froze, arm stretched out towards him, lips still forming the shape that her next sound was going to take, but then it all just stopped.  She stared at him, really looked him over, and as frightened and horrified as Ryan was, seeing her so hollow and destroyed still tore at his heart.

“Laurel, I had to,” he whispered, but she was already turning away, already turning her back on him.  “This isn’t you, I don’t know what happened, but…”

She was already at the table, turning the knobs and flicking the switches on some strange device he’d never seen before.  It hummed to life before he could even piece together that it might have something to do with the inexplicably tiny people he’d seen.  Laurel looked up at the last moment as the gathering brilliant light started to build around her shimmering feminine form, meeting his pained stare for just a moment but not saying a word.

Then, everything exploded.