Nocticadia

by Keri Lake

“The wealthy possess an insatiable appetite for the rare and priceless. They stare because you’re the only thing worth staring at.”

Calling her beautiful was like calling the sun lukewarm. She’d blazed like the hottest part of a flame in that dress. And fuck me, I’d felt the heat.

Some kisses were said to feel like fireworks. His felt like a slow-drip anesthetic, silently siphoning my senses, until all I could smell, taste, and feel was him.

“Memento mori,” he read aloud, running his thumb over my tattoo, his soft caress stirring an irrepressible fire beneath my skin. “Remember you must die.” “It’s just something I did after my mother passed.” “A reminder to appreciate life as a gift.” Smiling, I lowered my gaze. “Some days are easier than others.” “Having purpose helps. Keeps you from doing foolish things, like dropping out of school.”

“And because I’m a selfish prick who has to live with the fact that I cannot have you to myself, I’m going to ruin you so that any boy who comes after me will leave you deeply unsatisfied, and you’ll be left fucking your own fingers, desperate to remember the time you had your professor’s face between your legs.”

The tightness in my chest promised implacable pain, but I didn’t care. I wanted this. Needed it. Even at the risk that he’d cast me aside too. And I hated myself for that. Hated that I was so hungry for passion, starving for the need to feel so much at once, that I could even fathom letting him slice me open that way like one of his dead corpses, somehow brought back to life by his skilled hands. It was too much and not enough. The commotion of everything I felt right then sprang forth a mist of tears. What were these strange, foreign feelings taking hold of me?

“Jealousy is a callow schoolboy’s emotion that ends in hard feelings and bloody noses. What I feel for you, Miss Vespertine, would destroy lives.”