Nocticadia

by Keri Lake

Running had always been a source of stress relief for me,

Girl what? Since when?

Maybe I should apologize to the board this afternoon for a half-assed report, because my student’s pussy was all I could think about when I was writing it.”

“You don’t want to know what you do to me, Little Moth.”

Although the door was locked, I fantasized someone walking in and seeing us, me spread before him like a sacrifice.

I’m a man who fucks hard and thoroughly enjoys the torment of delayed gratification.

“I don’t share. If anyone else so much as looks at this pussy, I’ll take pleasure in dissecting him, starting with his eyeballs.”

“Goddamn it, Lilia. Goddamn you.”

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.

with the two of us wound so tightly together? Entombed by rapture and the shame of knowing we’d breached the forbidden boundary and there was no going back.

“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.”

I knew that what I felt for him had evolved into something completely foreign. A beautiful complexity that was as pure and thrilling as it was forbidden.

If Heaven existed, I'd found it in those ancient, dark hallways, under cold misty skies with autumn's wet leaves sticking to the soles of my boots, in the scent of coffee and old books. And him. My moody and devilishly handsome professor.

she shot me a smile–one so fucking beautiful, I wanted to frame it. Capture it. Study the alchemy of it.

Fucking figured that just as I’d begin to feel something through this numb existence, fate would tear it away from me like a jealous lover.

My hands longed to destroy, the way he destroyed me from the inside, turning me ravenous and greedy for him.

“You are a merciless vision of perfection.”

“Do you need a proper fucking, Miss Vespertine?” “Yes, Professor,”