An Education in Malice

by S.T. Gibson

I would indulge in one of my favorite sins and acquaint myself with Saint Perpetua’s small but engrossing collection of vintage erotica.

My heart skipped a beat. I had always so loved being loomed over, especially by beautiful people. I was, at my core, a brat who adored the guidance of a firm hand.

but as she looked down at me, I couldn’t help but feel small and trapped and thrilled.

I learned how to guard my heart against the sweeping, heady sensation of a crush. I learned how to survive in the cutthroat world of girlhood, where all strangeness was unrooted as ruthlessly as weeds from a garden.

“Your mother left you because she didn’t want you, Carmilla, and you must come to terms with that. You cannot hide for ever in childhood; eventually you must face the facts of life and grow up. I fear that you’ll shrink into a sort of perpetual girlhood. I should call you Petra Pan.”

But in the end, I stayed. I had the awful, yawning feeling inside myself that for her, I would always stay. It felt like standing on the edge of an abyss, looking down at the velvety darkness below and feeling held by it.

“You’d be surprised what you can learn from reading books,” she said, and slid her knee between my legs.

I wanted her to be able to think of nothing but this kiss when she was alone in her bed at night. I wanted her to feel just how much I reviled and desired her, to what maddening brink she drove me. I wanted her to want me so badly it hurt.

Real fury passed across Laura’s face, like a parcel of clouds blocking out the sun, and for a moment she was Athena incarnate. This was the ferocious creature I had encountered in the shadows outside the party, the goddess that lived within the girl. This was the woman who would unapologetically torment a lover for the sake of her own satisfaction, who would demand nothing less than total submission.

I couldn’t stop thinking about her, about the dark and glittering world De Lafontaine had inducted her into, about how I was party to it all and yet an outsider at the same time.

“It should always be senior year,” she said with a conviction that surprised me. “I should always be twenty-one, with nothing but life ahead of me. It should always be sunrise, at the start of a new day.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted.” “I thought so too,” she muttered, glancing at me from underneath her lashes. She blinked a few times, banishing the water gathering in her tear ducts. “But then I got what I wanted, and now I don’t know what to want. I’ve always known what I wanted, Laura, I’m positively made of wanting. It’s strange, to be sure of so little.”

I was miserably vexed by her presence, but I was just plain miserable without her.

She was a woman sick with love and assailed by anxiety, and there would be no peace for any of us until something released De Lafontaine from an emotional crucible of her own making.

“I know,” she said, a strange sadness in her voice. We resumed our walk, strolling beneath the bare trees that lined the quad. “And I hope, in time, you’ll realize I want what’s best for you, too.”

Suspicious

She was in love, and that was dangerous. After all, what horror wouldn’t I tolerate, if it was meted out by the hand of my beloved?