They’re quiet. They share nothing, lock their doors, and pray each night for the sort of forgiveness you only find when you die. Leila and Maria pray together, knuckles white over crumpled sheets and bruised lips that have always silenced what is right but never the rasp of desire. Maria will wake to an empty bed and believe, fingers tracing lines of sin and skin on sheets stained with blood while Leila watches from across the room, a Renaissance beauty with dark eyes and even darker circles spaced perfectly against the pale of her throat. They pray in starbursts of pain, in sonnets of revenge, and Maria swallows Leila’s gasps like a starving ghoul screaming for absolution even though she knows they’re both beyond the touch of God.
