Nocticadia

by Keri Lake

Heroics were boring.

“What separates monsters from good men is only a matter of perspective. In your eyes, I’m a sick fuck for what I’ve done to you. But I, on the other hand, see you as a parasite.”

But not even Doctor Death could intimidate me at that point. My curiosity had been piqued. The walls of this place held dark secrets, past skeletons, that I intended to exhume with a sledgehammer.

She was a serious problem.

“Stay out of trouble, Curious Moth,” he said, as he strode for the door. Curious Moth. A nickname. A fitting one, too, given the fact that I had no intentions of avoiding the flame.

“That is the tragedy of women, isn’t it? We deny ourselves beauty for the sake of misleading men.”

“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.

“You’re a sickness inside of me that begs never to be cured. Infecting me with this unshakable craving for things I shouldn’t want.”

“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.”

I saw a flicker of pain in his eyes. Good. I wanted to frame it, study it, just to know that I’d left something inside of him, too. That he could still feel me crawling over his skin.

She was the warmth of the sun on a cold and rotting corpse. The first breath after a lifetime of death.

He was moody, like rainy days and bitter coffee. Sensual whispers in dark corners and the slow burn of fine whiskey.