Emilia had broken up with Leo a few times before leaving Los Angeles forever with Jack in the middle of tour. She remembered him, around the final time, being devastated by the crying mammoth effigies at the La Brea Tar Pits, how he had avoided looking at them, or at her, sworn over and over “Oh fuck, Jesus, awful,” and she’d gone from unclosed at his unexpected sensitivity to closed and irritated when he kept at it.

“It’s not like the mammoths are real,” she’d said to Leo.

Stupid disappointment crowned his face.

“No shit,” he’d said. “The sculptor made them to feel a certain way, and it worked.”

Emilia hadn’t known if he meant that the sculptor had put his own anguish into the trumpeting baby and its sinking mother, puppeting them with the grotesque shape of his humanity, or if he meant that the sculptor had wanted visitors to feel horrified by this permanent display of horror, the dad mammoth’s trunk low and unbothered, or which one she was supposed to think was worse.

The cool thing about the tar, she’d insisted to Leo, was how it not only preserved, perfectly, the remains of every living thing which got stuck to its surface—a giant ground sloth dooming itself with each tug of its massive weight, exhausted, dehydrated, but still alive when the direwolves pounce and sink deep their fangs, too frenzied by the hot blood gushing into their mouths to realize they’re stuck too, and the scavengers and insects that follow—but also it churned their parts together, with no regard for individual animals or species or eras.

The tar didn’t have intention, motive, feelings, didn’t prey.

Falling in would have been unremarkable. Just another final day.

“It still stinks,” Leo said. He looked so hot when he looked mean, and he looked so mean when he was bothered.

She’d seen Leo once, last year, for the last time. His band came through, the new one he’d started after she left their old one. Jack knew. Leo had invited them both but he declined, probably because he knew.

So Emilia went alone and went early, and got drinks with Leo because there were three hours to kill between soundcheck and doors. And even then they’d probably get more time if they wanted, he said, and when he said it one lip touched her earlobe.

She found her body next to his in the dive bar booth. Found the suction of churned millennia in her belly. Found them both in the unlocked storage room off the green room backstage.

They fell into each other like they were tar and animal bones still wrapped in flesh, still unopened, still kicking. Insistent mad heat just like when they were young and in love, or he was in love with her, anyway, which back then had been enough. She plunged her pussy up and down his cock, watched his pupils expand and dug her knees into the ground harder and felt him deeper in her than he’d ever been and definitely saw something explode in him, a gut gasp, eyelids thrown open so wide it was like someone else yanked them. And Leo’s ballooning bursting blood vessel extruded, prodigiously, the gravity tug of desire across his body, brain, veins to absolute capacity, and the coursing surge of liquid pressure did its work on him in one or two heartbeats.

One moment a bucking, thrusting body hot with momentum beneath her, the next a body slowing to the creep of black sludge, slower and slower, and she saw it happening, saw the light drain from Leo’s eyes, his face, his skin, felt him leaving her even as his lazying pumps dragged on, but she was so close, so close to the bottom of the pit, and she didn’t want to stop, not now. Not with this pull, and him still hard and curved into her deep center, the place where everything is ground down into fuel, is transubstantiated. It all went in a circle. Her body decided before she did. She moved her hips like one wheel, inevitable rotation. She was so close.