Velvet Hunger: A Sapphic Halloween Novella

by Lily S. Flowers

Because underneath the jokes and drafts and late-night messages was a story about grief and belonging and about how hunger can be both ache and altar. The kind of story that starts as a whisper and ends up as a spell.

If you’ve ever longed to be held exactly as you are, trembling, brave, and undone, this story is for you.

And to every Black woman who has ever been told her love was too much, her desire too heavy, her imagination too strange, this is proof that what we create in the dark can still shine.

They’re certain it’s not Death, but something older. They call her the Ember that Awaits Her Flame. But the truest believers say her name softly, almost tenderly: Nyssa.

A love reborn in fragments and forgetting, a promise that crosses centuries to find its match again.

To Nadine, books were spells, and to keep them alive was to keep the people inside them conjured.

“If you mend the pages,” her aunt would say, “you mend the lives folded there too.”

The sting of abandonment had dulled over the years, but never disappeared entirely. It lingered, shaping her solitude, teaching her not to expect too much from anyone who promised to stay but left anyway.

The woman turned with deliberate grace, lips curving into a grin that revealed nothing and promised everything.

“But tell me, what moves you?” The woman’s smile deepened. A glint of a red gemstone-adorned tooth flashed between lips the color of sin. Simone’s breath faltered, fascination tangling with adrenaline low in her belly. “Emotion,” she said, stepping closer, gaze unwavering. “Intensity, something that thrills as much as it unsettles.”

When the door closed behind her, Simone stood rooted, tingling from head to toe. Breathless, shaken, alive. She didn’t know it yet, but she had just turned the first page of a story older and far more consuming than she had ever dared imagine.

“One thing you should know about me, Simone, is that I devour what pleases me.”

mmm.

“Sad in ways you don’t expect. The kind of stories that bruise, but I love it. They make me feel seen. Flawed, soft, scared and still reaching. The stories linger for years and surface when you least expect, catching you off guard like a remembered ache.”

whew.

“That ache between your thighs…that flutter in your chest…that is your fear and your desire dancing.”

Now burn for me, my chosen.

“Yourself,” she said. “The way I see you, and the way I’ve seen you in every lifetime.”

“Kneel” Nyssa murmured, her voice dark with tenderness.

🧎‍♀️

“Even when the world ends and begins again, I will find you. I always do. Lifetime after lifetime, I have crossed flame and bone and breath to reach this moment. To touch you, to keep you, to remind you that you were never lost, only waiting for me.”

“Let me hear you. Let the world remember what devotion sounds like from your lips.”

Every wound, every ache, every lonely night pressed into this single act of recognition—of being seen, kept, and anointed all at once.

“You are worthy of my worship,” she whispered, “in every lifetime.”

“Now every breath you take belongs to me,” she said softly.

oh my god

“Don’t close your eyes,” Nyssa murmured, voice dark as incense smoke. “I want you awake for this.”

“I told you,” she said softly. “I’ll always stay, as long as you want me. Through every dawn and every death. Through every lifetime you forget me.”