I still remember the night I first saw you. I wanted to hurt you. 

It was 10PM. I was in my nightgown. It was the blue one with the green ribbons—your favorite, I think. On my bed my laptop was open playing the final minutes of a Gilmore Girls episode. My hair was still wet from the shower, and I was brushing it as I went to shut off the lamp on my dresser. Before my thumb could even touch the lamp socket, I looked up and there you were. In my fright, I screamed. 

I was never fond of spiders. When I was very young I was once bitten by a brown recluse. It was a tiny bite on the skin of my inner wrist, and within an hour it had puckered up into a welt and began to itch. I scratched myself like a dog for two days before it finally calmed into a purple bruise, and I cried to my father to go hunt the recluse down and kill him so I wouldn’t be frightened anymore. 

I don’t know what spider you were. I’m sorry, I never asked you did I? You may have been venomous, you may have not. It wouldn’t have mattered during our first meeting, I was hellbent on killing you regardless. I wasn’t really concerned with your tiny world, your classifications and your rituals. I was thinking only of my world, and my very large and very silly fear. 

As if Fate were laughing at me, I grabbed the cheap romance novel I’d neglected off my bed stand and ran to spread you thin and dead against my bedroom wall. 

But you did something unexpected. You lept onto me. 

I remember the first, whisper-soft caress of your eight fingers on the back of my hand. I remember you fluttering over a blue-green vein, then tickling the hairs of my arm as you boldly climbed further. I remember how loudly my heart beat then, and I remember not being sure if I was more frightened or fascinated by your gentle grip on my forearm, playful and soft as a brush of cattail on my thigh. 

It was the most erotic touch I have ever known. Still to this day no touch has usurped it. It was a sweet, kind touch. It was flirtatious as well. It looked as if you were dancing on my skin, leaping back and forth and dragging your forelegs against me in a trembling flourish. I was certain you were trying to seduce me. As much as it flattered me, it also frightened me in a new, previously-unfelt way. No one had ever asked me to a school dance, or stuck gum in my hair or kissed me, and there you were brazenly feeling me up in my own bedroom. I couldn’t bear it. I was so embarrassed. 

I don’t know if I was as gentle with you as you were with me that night. I remember taking a page of the romance novel and desperately scooping you off of me before my skin turned to flames. I think I sat you on the floor in front of my footboard, and you darted off into the night as if you couldn’t believe what you had done either. I sat there a while on that bed, mulling over the angel’s touch you had delivered to me so casually it was almost thoughtless. When I dreamt that night, I dreamt of being caught in a spider’s web. I dreamt of you. Soon after that, I tried to get to know you.

I observed you quietly for a few days. I know you caught me looking, I was so obvious about my crush. But you pretended you didn’t see me sitting there, staring at you. You treated each day like it was perfectly normal, the gray streamers of your web growing more numerous in the corner above my dresser. You would hunt, and I would get to see the compact, curving architecture of your body tense and release as you ensnared your prey. I’ll admit, I was ensnared by you as well from our first meeting. Whatever god designed your body had an eye for understated perfection, like a simple country church. 

Once I knew you were there I avoided changing out in the open. I would dress in my bathroom instead. You probably thought I was strange for that, but I was very shy. It continued on like this for a while, our little dance. I started to learn more about you each hour I spent reclining on my bed, watching you in a stupor as you strung up a collection of gnats as if they were animal pelts. When you dozed I dozed, the sun and breeze drifting in through my window. When you danced I danced, ABBA and One Direction songs blaring loudly from my phone speaker. I fell in love with you in those slow, hazy first weeks of summer. One evening I came out of the shower in nothing but my towel. My skin was steaming from the water. You were watching me across the room, still and expectant. You probably knew what I was going to do before I even did it. I grasped the edges of my towel and dropped it to the floor. You flexed your rightmost foreleg so subtly, but I noticed it immediately. It was as if you were longing to reach out and lay your flesh on mine. You were silently begging to touch me as you had the night we first met. I felt my chest bloom open so that you could see my heart, beating and beating and beating for your caress. 

I won’t go into the sordid details of what happened that evening. I won’t go on about what occurred between us after I cupped you in the bridged palm of my two hands, and carried you to the bed we would make ours. How your silky eight fingers felt as they raced all over me near frantic, like you couldn’t cover enough ground in enough time. How that silver, full moon was eclipsed by a heavy cloud the night we made love. No, I won’t go into that. 

I will say, it wasn’t all perfect. I never left home very much, as you likely remember. I worked a remote job as an account manager for an educational software company. All I did was paint my toenails during group calls, answer emails, and pitch marketing strategies I had once read in a college textbook long ago. It didn’t pay very well. But I managed to live comfortably with that and the inheritance money Mom and Dad left me. 

Since I never went out, I never had much privacy. It was occasionally difficult to share a home with you, you know? I guess you couldn’t help it, but your presence could be suffocating. I’d feel your impatient, octadic gaze on my back during a work call. Your selfishness with my time could be charming, but you were never very forgiving about my work. Part of me resented you for that, having to end work calls early just so I could redirect my attention to you. 

But we got on well. We made a cute couple. We’d eat breakfast every morning in my room. Me: dark roast coffee with cream, strawberries, toast with jam and butter. You: the innards of a fly, curled to look like a dark moon dangling in your webs. It was pleasant sharing those minutes with you, before I would have to plug into a call for the next eight hours.

You saved my life, you know. You see, the night I met you was also the night I was planning to kill myself. I had it all figured out. In the medicine cabinet of my parent’s master bedroom was an orange pill bottle of Xanax prescribed to my mother. Inside there were still five pills. In the basement of the house was my father’s wine cellar, with a bottle of red purchased the day I was taken home from the hospital. I had already poured a glass. I’d given myself until the end of the Gilmore Girls episode before I did it. 

But like a gallant knight you swept in and saved me. You touched the very same hand I was to take my life with, and you stroked it and kissed it and let me know I wasn’t alone. I was never alone. You had been there the whole time, in the corner perched above my dresser. A guardian angel. 

Then you had babies. It was quite a shock. I wasn’t certain if I was ready to be a mother, and I fell into a depression. You didn’t pay me much attention anymore, so focused were you on weaving those dusky gray sacs of spider’s web. I was jealous. I contemplated taking one of those sacs between my fingers while you were distracted, and pinching it until all the little baby spiders fell out and onto the floor in pieces. But I wouldn’t do that to you. I loved you too much to hurt us both like that. I left you alone to make your nest, and ordered parenting books on Amazon to be delivered the next day. 

The morning I came to find you to talk, to tell you how sorry I was and how hateful I’d been, I found you dead. I was nearly inconsolable. I carried your body to the backyard, under the hickory tree that my childhood swing was tied to. I dug my hands into the earth. I remember my tears were sludge-like on my cheeks, and dirt pushed up uncomfortably beneath my nails. I made your shallow grave with my hands, and brought you to my lips before I tucked you into the ground. It was our very first and last kiss. A whisper-soft kiss. 

I couldn’t leave my bed for days. I called into work sick. The only thing that remained of you was your cobweb in the corner, and the two storm-cloud sacs of eggs dangling within it. On the third day of my mourning the sacs hatched. A thousand little spiderlings glittered in the late morning sunlight. They looked so much like you. They spilled out like small glass beads. 

I watched them struggle to find a way out of our room. I watched them as they heard the sunlight creep along the windowsill, as they fought to orient themselves with the rushing of the wind and the shuffle of the grass. I watched until I could watch no more, and then I left my bed and lifted them into my arms. 

I carried them outside to the hickory tree. They danced up me in happy hordes. It felt like a thousand little hugs. 

I laid some in the grass. Others I blew gently off my arm, and they drifted away on strings. I knelt there by your grave until each child had gone away, and then I sat up on my swing. I rocked back and forth on it four times. I abraded my hands on the old rotten rope. I closed my eyes and realized I’d run out of tears to cry.

The pill bottle was still on my bedside table. I turned on the coffee machine to drip into my mug while I ran upstairs. Your web had tangled up into a single black filament. It bobbed back and forth between the two walls in the corner. 

When I went back downstairs I sat the bottle on the counter and took a few sips of my coffee. It was a happy, steaming shade of chestnut. The very same color you had been. It tasted like chicory and smoke. 

As I retrieved the pill bottle from the counter and headed to the couch, I paused a moment to glance out the window. That was when I saw a squirrel in the backyard, thrashing his red tail in the sun and gazing at me with alert brown eyes. He was a few feet from the hickory tree, and a twig had caught in his fur. I forgot about the pill bottle and my coffee, sat down, and watched him for a while. I was as utterly ensnared as I’d been the night I met you. 

Darling, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but oh my—was he a handsome beast!