[Revelations 2023] : Dark Romance Series (Giant-Kink | Vore-Kink | Layered Narrative)
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Links below2/19/2024 I no longer post the raw, written chapter words directly. They are too large for the message board.
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Book One - Swallow Me, Like Your Little Pill
Source: https://aryion.com/g4/view/926749
What you’re getting into: Shrunken Seduction. Twisted Romance. Emotional Riot. Relentless Woman. Erotic Peril. Allegorical Horror. Brutal Sex. Paranormal Paradox.
Summary
A female pill addict tries to vainly outwit, outlast, outsex a violent demonic monster. But, bound by oral fixation, they collapse into a dark, violent “romance.” It is an unholy unfurling of physical bodies, that, in paragraphs of haunting complexity, reveal her tortured descent through a gauntlet of allegory of evils.
Bearing solemn witness to this, a group of well-meaning women, The Skeptics, try to help. But one of them is not being honest; not entirely, and it could risk pulling all of them into an unwitting bloodbath.
Because he prefers his pills lady-shaped.
Story begins, below.
Click For Chapter: Chapter 1, The Prologue
SWALLOW ME, LIKE YOUR LITTLE PILL
Book One, Revelations 2023
Synopsis: A female pill addict tries to vainly outwit, outlast, outsex a violent demonic monster. Because he prefers his pills lady-shaped.
But this is only the beginning of a dark, damning, tumultuous epic saturated with vore kink, size kink, and layered narrative.
01
Well-fed devils behave better
than famished saints – D.L. Smith
FOREWORD
Her hands moved over her body.
It felt foreign to her, somehow. But she had not the luxury to explore this peculiarity further because a sudden urgency clutched her belly. It was a tip-of-the-tongue feeling. And it prickled the back of her mind. It commanded her to remember something, and it commanded her to remember that something quickly because she knew, in the way that one just knows, that her memory lapse was a gravely dangerous thing.
And she was in grave danger.
But despite this – or because of it – she could not remember what had just happened.
First: she had been in the room adjacent.
Then: she was not; she was upended and removed as though hand-waved away.
But, how? How could she have transited from one room to the next, seemingly blotted from existence, with no clear, distinct recollection of how much time had transpired, nor the method by which she had been transported? How could the middle narrative, the transitional piece have fallen out?
Fearing that she would lose even more tactility to her senses, she sat upright, hoping that the change in stature would clear her head.
And a sudden, wild vertigo clutched her.
The environment that she knew was reported back to her in disjointed pieces: the soft silk pillows, the oak nightstand, the decadent bed, all of these fixtures, she knew them, and she knew them well. But there was something wrong. There was something alien about them.
She blinked her eyes, straining against the darkness.
A feeling of wrongness slid over her skin.
It was the room.
It was impossibly large.
I’m high and I’m on the trip of all trips. That must be it.
She touched the quilt. It felt real, painfully real. She could feel every wrinkle, every fold. Her fingertips knew it, and would continue to know it in this lifetime and the next.
And the bed, around which the quilt was wrapped: its dimensions were so distorted by lens of scale that it seemed to stretch into infinity.
How?
Movement. It pulled on her. She looked up.
There was a shadow sliding across the wall. But it undulated like water across an uneven surface.
But there was, she realized, a dimensionality to it. It was not flat. It was –
Her neck lashed in alarm.
No. How could this be ?
It was a man. Her eyes strained. No; the abstraction of a man.
Because if man he was, then it was only in title, because he was far too large.
And on his approach, the shadows melted away, creating the haunting specter of something materializing.
She looked to his countenance, hoping to re-create his face in her mind. (Because she remembered it, once). But it was a vexing task. It was not unlike standing directly before a cathedral that was haloed by an aggressive sun. She could not hope to see its windows without first looking away from its ornate doors. And to look at its doors would mean she would need first to look away from its windows. And the edifice of this man was just as majestic for he was also a collection of parts she could never hope to contain in the universe of her small, singular gaze.
She had to look at him intimate feature, by intimate feature. And she knew them intimately. But they were grossly distorted.
His eyes: they were – as always – a fractal of colors: blues, greens, and silvers bright enough that one pointed look could stop a clock. And, more than that. In them: she saw herself. She saw herself suspended on the face of his pupils. She was an inducement of color. An erotic womanly shape that was stunningly nude.
And entirely too small.
In a contraction of sound, of movement, the air parting, the air-sighing, the form of him joined her.
She felt him tangibly, as an emanation of heat. He felt like the quiver of inevitability; of something that would start panting in the dark.
And there was, she realized, something else moving.
Compelled by an instinct she did not yet understand, she looked down to see a segmentation of shapes. At first she stared at those shapes dumbly, thickly absent of understanding; but then in a spark of clairvoyance she realized these shapes, these cylindrical objects moving through the fabric, reaching for her: were his fingers.
Necessarily, they moved up silently, to fence her in. Despairingly, she looked at his hands, seeing only bands of darkness. And there was something silently joining. An intrusive shape slipped craftily through the opening of her detention; and it was visible to her in sudden, arresting clarity.
His tongue. And, she realized, straining to understand the spatial nature of it: it was the length of her.
It licked her.
It was a malleable heat, a devastating undulation of damp warmth. The unctuous sound of flesh against flesh, like sex.
Oh my God.
A scream hurled from her lips.
And the momentum of it –
HEATHER
hurled her from bed.
Heather caught the nightstand with a jerk of her arms. An optimist’s inch kept her from hurtling over the edge.
But the concussive force bounced the glass of water and it tumbled to the floor, shattering. She looked down at it, miserable. It had been a nightly fixture, standing in a place of utility at her bedside for what felt like a biblical age. Sipping from it dampened the anxiety in her throat; but it also sent her careening for the bathroom more often than she cared to admit.
She grabbed her phone. The brightness of it branded her eyes, but she persisted. I’m ok. I’m ok. I’m all right. My name is Heather. I’m alive. It’s 3:45 AM. I’m alive. It’s been –
She turned her head to look at the calendar hanging from its bare nail, on the bare wall – And it’s been three hundred and sixty-three days since I got away and I have to pee.
She slid out of bed and tip-toed weakly around the shattered glass. She felt just as broken, just as naked, gleaming in the dark in a million little pieces. For the moment she just wanted to wash her face – simple pleasures – and return to sleep.
Flipping on the light, she twisted the tap handle with a violent toss of her hand. The water gushed to life. It was as though the noise itself had the power to drive away her demons. She splashed her face, sending goosebumps down her spine. The feeling was raw, bracing.
Once.
Twice.
Three felt like a safe number. With a snap-quick movement she tugged a hand-towel free and dried her hands in vicious, rapid circles. Skin chafed, Heather flicked the television on. Good, the volume is at five. On her return trip to the bedroom, she skipped over the crack in the molding, but not before seeing a phantom out of the corner of her eye.
Curious, she turned.
It was her reflection in the mirror. She looked.
Her large, wide eyes – heavily-lashed – were still an arresting green, but they were the green of something venomous. There was an anger there, pinched around her mouth, a look of wounding; the look of a woman made weapon, a weapon that had been hardened against a whetstone of dark trauma. And she weaponized her darkness. Her black fingernails stood out against her white face as she cupped her cheek in an expression of exhaustive scorn.
Look at you. The fuck’s wrong with you? Still jumping at shadows.
Her brazenness was as bright as the light striking off her nose-ring; the stud glimmered against a backdrop of raven-black hair.
She was striking and beautiful the way only something feral could be; she was not of the high class or high gloss of a sophisticate. Heather had the aura of a slutty woman with a clever, defensive mind. Her perfectly-arched eyebrows framed an unaffected, cool stare that broadcast she was ever the sex object but so many unworthy of her. And despite malnourishment and insomnia, she was still lean and athletic, with a shape enveloped by muscular legs, a vanishingly-small waist and oversized breasts that she projected forward with materialistic pride; they had not been cheap to acquire.
But that pride had sublimated into watchfulness.
Because, for three-hundred and sixty-three days she had dedicated the temple of her body to survival.
Heather drifted back to her bed, feeling weak, feeling small. With a world-weary sigh she slumped down onto the covers; the frame creaked under her weight.
Sightless, she stared up at the ceiling, going over the dream again. It was different in some way each time.
His mouth was diffusive and intangible in her dreams. But it was no less menacing. Had he actually put her in there? She couldn’t quite remember.
Try as she might, she couldn’t summon the memory; it was like pursuing the light of a firefly. The more she pursued it, the more it danced from her fingertips. How had she escaped? Her stomach churned in anxiety. All she remembered, all she knew, was that she had been tiny – and then, she hadn’t. And the moment she had been free, she had sprinted down the rain-soaked streets, diving into the unkind scrape of mother nature. Like a rabbit running from a wolf. How had they been reduced to something so primitive, like that?
Desperate, she tried to gather her thoughts. But like most nights – like tonight – she could never find a moment of peace. No, that luxury had been taken from her. Prized from her drug-dusted fingers by something unholy.
Heather would never forget.
And she was hoping vainly, hoping desperately, that he had forgotten about her with equal tenacity. What was she to him after all? Surely he would forget her, surely he would move on to the next stimulation. (Because he was always seeking stimulation, wasn’t he?). To think that she could put a dent in his daily, racing thoughts…
Was silly. But.
Her eyelids clicked audibly in the dark, blinking back vicious tears.
How could he? How could he possibly forget her? When –
I was the one that got away, her mind whispered.
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Click For Chapter: Convalescence
SWALLOW ME, LIKE YOUR LITTLE PILL
Book One, Revelations 2023
Synopsis: A female pill addict tries to vainly outwit, outlast, outsex a violent demonic monster. Because he prefers his pills lady-shaped.
But this is only the beginning of a dark, damning, tumultuous epic saturated with vore kink, size kink, and layered narrative.
02
Well-fed devils behave better
than famished saints – D.L. Smith
HEATHER
If pressed in the future, she would be incapable of explaining how she had done it. Even she had to admit that how she had first stumbled upon it felt peculiar; perhaps, even, fated. And all that she knew, and she knew it well, was that when she did discover it, it had happened at the back-end of a constellation of coincidences that had flowed from her fingertips in quick, determined strokes.
It had felt silly and sophomoric at the time, but with the one-year anniversary fast approaching, she had felt compelled to try.
And try she did, slapping together a phrase that she thought would serve her purpose.
Mouth Camera
Heather looked at the results. She felt snubbed. No; that wasn’t what she wanted, not exactly. She sighed as a distillation of results flashed epileptically through her search library. She saw glimpses of amateur side-reels, visual outtakes, bloopers, even a few things that she had no name for.
It was close. Frustratingly close, but not what she needed.
Off a sprig of inspiration: Inside Mouth
The cascade of images returned to her suddenly pivoted toward the medical. Heather scrolled through video thumbnails that felt clinical and outdated.
Heather tapped her chin. She was approaching what she needed. She felt it.
And with some sort of alchemy of coincidence, timing, and clever word gymnastics, through a bevy of images, snapshots, and stilted videography – typing and refining her search, typing and refining – deflecting duds and disappointments, re-shaping subsequent queries with more refinement, more instinct: a sudden sublimation happened and a terminology surfaced. It floated to the top.
Endoscopy
Heather stared at the word sitting in the text box. It waited for her. It feel alien, but resonant.
Her hand reached for the mouse; stopped. It felt like an enormity. She felt that if she nosed the cursor over the web-page button and hit submit – just one finger-flick – she felt like something more kinetic than a finger-flick would greet her; something alien and terrible would burst free.
I can’t unring this bell.
Heather felt a peculiar sobriety fill her as she examined and re-examined the word.
Because she knew, only as a mad-woman could, that the word before her would be the code to break the seal on her memories – and that if she pursued what stemmed from it, it would do something even more terrible.
Give her memories context.
And the thought of being able to anchor her bizarre, fantastical memories to something real…
Heather twisted her lip in her teeth, and feeling punitive, feeling masochistic, feeling the absurd need to punish herself - punish him - punish her brain - punish her absurd state of affairs –
clicked submit.
Oh shit. Oh fuck. What did I just do?
Heather slapped her laptop shut.
It had only been a second, but she had seen something that her subconscious had recognized.
Oh my God. You are being ridiculous. Just open the laptop, Heather. Just do it. Open the goddamn thing.
With a swipe of her hand, she threw it open.
The video sat indulgently before her in a fantastical stasis, contracted down into a single frame, paused.
Shyly, she peeked through her fingers.
And hit play.
There was no sound. But she watched as the small lens advanced beyond the lips, the teeth, down the length of tongue. And Heather gripped her face; her fingers dug into her jaw. The endoscope continued on its trajectory, and she watched, unblinkingly, as it coiled around an architectural shape beneath the curve of the tongue : a geometry of viscera half-cloaked in a vector of shadow that looked…
Heather heaved into her hands. Her head jerked away.
Familiar. It looked familiar.
She flexed her mouth, her jaw, she circled it as though she would be sick.
Her skin prickled. How else could she retain the memory of something that she was unaware existed in the waking-world until this precise moment? (unless she had seen it?)
What the fuck is that? What IS that? That’s in me?
Heather watched in a sort of out-of-body stupefied disbelief as the epiglottis loomed large into view, stretching from end to end across the screen.
She felt sick.
She felt the cognitive dissonance of a person suddenly, abruptly learning what lay inside their body.
It was like looking at a parasite.
But, worse. There was something far worse happening: because as vivid and fanciful as her imagination could be, she would have never, in a million years, have dreamt up such an alien structure lived within her.
Which meant…
I experienced this…
It was awful for how simple it was. And it was simple in its horror because of how elegant it was. And it was elegant because it was, ultimately, simple.
She knew about this parasite, this bodily structure, because she had seen it before.
But how?
Although this - this thing - aligned with her memories, she knew it couldn’t possibly be the product of her most feverish fantasies because she would have never envisioned something so ugly residing within her. It revolted her. It compelled her. She felt her mental state see-saw as kinetically as the video footage on the laptop screen before her. The instability of the footage made it that much more horrific.
I’m going to be sick
She looked away.
Trembling, she reached her fingers into her desk drawer, feeling around the velvet bolster, and –
Fuck
She withdrew. She stared at her hand lamely. Disbelievingly, she stared. It felt like she stared at her finger for an eternity as she wrested the idea. Then, finally, she it into her mouth. A burble of hysteria went through her as she released it with a pop.
How the hell had she I fit inside of him?
Holy hell I was small. Her face sank into her hands. “So, not only did he eat me. But he shrank me, too.”
The hysteria re-doubled.
Shitshitshit. I need more pills. I need…
She looked up. She looked away.
“He tried to eat me.” She repeated.
Nervous, she tittered into her hands. It made an awful, chilling kind of sense. All the context clues had been pieced together and they all made sense; and sensible they were when held together. But when she said it aloud, it kind of fell apart.
“I feel ridiculous.”
She looked down at her pill stash: empty. And she felt the same.
Empty, because she sat with the enormity of this alone.
“Ok, so,” she continued. If she couldn’t believe it on its face, then at least she could labor to believe it by proxy? Pretend that its construction was an elaborate metaphor?
Except it wasn’t a metaphor, her brain interjected.
If she had slept, it was undoubtedly a broken one. Because when she woke, she felt orphaned. Orphaned by time, orphaned by reality. Alone, and shrinking. And shrinking further. Somehow, having watched the endoscopy footage in one long visual spasm had excavated something from her that she was not properly equipped to confront.
She looked at the calendar again. And a dread whisked through her.
Miserable, she rolled from bed. Miserable, she set about her room. Miserable ,she looked out the windows.
She had foregone breakfast entirely. The thought of all that ugliness in her throat, and all that movement desiccated the desire to eat. Instead, she set about applying the war-paint. Her make-up was simple: a touch of black eyeliner to feather around her demure lashes and a thicker streak slanted on the eyelid to give a more lasting, dramatic effect.
Cat eyes.
Is that why he had called her Kitten?
Stop
The nickname felt tainted now. She resolved to never use it again.
At least, she thought with a flush of pride, at least he hadn’t taken that away from her. Her sanity? Maybe, just a little bit.
But, she still had her identity.
She exited her apartment.
Carefully, she wound her way up the block; vigilant. She avoided all of the cracks.
Most days, she could make it look cat-like, fluid, as though her grace would not permit her feet to land on any imperfections in the sidewalk that cleaved through the neighborhood. But today, she felt like invisible ghosts were watching; ghosts from her past that suddenly had light and shape, because she had a genesis for her memories now, and she had seen it in the video called endoscopy.
I feel like I’m being watched
Troubled, she tried to outpace her thoughts as she moved through the city-neighborhood. The poor, dilapidated neighborhood that appeared to be in perpetual motion: crumbling.
In order to avoid her previous life, she had moved to – what her father would call – the wrong side of the train tracks. The town branching off from the industrial district mottled open like a discarded carcass; the inhabitants lingered like flies, desperate to leave but unsure of how to escape the architectural carcass. It left a lot to be desired but Heather had found its despairing charm strangely comforting.
Here, the people were unconcerned with social cues; here they survived. But despite its suffering – or, perhaps, because of it – there was a sense of community. The older folks waved and wished her a good day from their stoops, the little ones playing in the sidewalk with chalk smiled up at her with their missing front teeth, and infected by their good humor, Heather returned a smile of her own.
See? Not so ugly after all.
However, there was an ugliness creeping through the seams of the neighborhood that had no sense of community. And from it emerged a breed of vermin that put her on edge. The kind that leered at her from the warehouse, every day.
It made Heather’s face curdle in anger. But she walked by with head held high.
But if she was honest, the brazen show of lust was unsettling. Heather hadn’t been in the company of a man since… well, what had happened. She had found herself unable to accept their advances: kissing had felt too analogous to being tasted.
And the men here seemed to want themselves inside of her rather than – well, rather than the other way around – she thought with a humorless laugh. She had found some form of ironic comfort in that, no matter how small. At least they were honest with their intentions.
Heather continued.
A crack in the sidewalk loomed up at her, snagging her feet. This one - this one was different. It was not like the other ones that cut across the hard ground; this one was like –
It’s like a mouth.
It was thin on either side, and widened toward the middle. It was a yawning mouth staring up at her in that same fantastical stasis she had seen in the endoscopy video.
Fuck, fuck, fuck! Not now. No goddamn panic attacks now! Not here! Not in broad daylight!
She was right in front of that damnable warehouse and they were sure to be witness to this as she stared at the crack. I must look like a maniac! No, please God not right now! Just turn the corner Heather! The fucking drugs are right around the corner!
A pair of hands gripped her shoulders and yanked her free.
“Joseph!” Heather cried out, heart hammering. “You scared the shit out of me!”
“Sorry. You were…well you looked like you needed to be snapped out of whatever th-that was,” he remarked sheepishly.
Ever the bookworm, Heather privately regarded Joseph as her savior. Young men like him were canonized many times over in the very many novels of beauties and beasties that sat on her very many bookshelves. He was very much like his literary effigy: an anachronistic saint. Perched at the end of his nose was a set of red-rimmed glasses which did little to detract from his hazel eyes. They were too soulful.
Where’s your flock, Joey?
THE SHEPHARD
And against his better (best) judgment, he would lead Heather to her poisoned trinket. A moment in time would be a moment in divine: he would do anything for Heather. He would bend over backwards for a damaged girl like her: one he could take care of, one that would make him feel masculine and capable. A woman, whose rough coarse edges could be made smooth by his saintly aspirations.
And saintly they were. He had been working at the pharmacy for the better part of a year, handing out medication to the disadvantaged. It had been established by political fiat but it still required a doctor’s note. And Heather had no note to her name.
But that is why he was here.
HEATHER
Heather had consistently, with a fearsome singularity of focus, refused to seek therapy. How could she? The words never left her lips let alone were they spoken aloud for the benefit of being repeated by another.
And she had a new one that was now starting to nest in the beehive of her brain. It had become parasitic, latching onto her. She went to bed with it. She woke with it, she –
“Endoscopy,” Heather blurted. “Joey, what do you know about that?”
Joseph looked at her, startled. “That’s random, Heather.”
Heather suddenly looked up at her companion. “It – I… I, uh, what is it exactly? I mean, I have an idea, it just,” she shrugged, and after a clever, calculated second: “YouTube Rabbit hole, you know how it is.”
“Ah, all too familiar,” Joseph responded. With a twitch of his lab-coat arm, he eased open the door to the pill dispensary.
You wouldn’t do that, Heather thought silently. You wouldn’t do that to me, Joey. You wouldn’t try to ‘endoscopy’ me.
Not Joseph. Never Joseph. He was too kind. Too saintly. Too perfect. Which is why Heather had never projected signals of interest; and he, too polite, had never even ventured to try.
No; you like them rough, don’t you? I want them to fuck me coming and going. And apparently I want them to eat me, too. Fuck.
“Well, it’s a medical procedure,” he began airily, as he took his erstwhile companion to the back room.
Heather half-listened as the pharmacy technician began an effortless, uninterrupted dissertation that at junctures where mere mortals would normally need to breathe, Joseph brightly carried on.
Off her look: "Sorry. Medical stuff gets me excited. Especially since I want to study to become a gastroenterologist. "
Heather barked a laugh. Of course he does.
In the posterior of the store there was an annexed area, one where the employees lingered between shifts. The front desk woman looked up as they transited, smiling a knowing smile. Heather resented her. She probably thinks I’m gonna suck him off for some pills. Mad world.
They left the front desk woman in their wake and advanced into the storage room proper.
Heather resigned herself to one of the stiff blue chairs by the coffee table. Anxious, she thumbed through an old magazine. A glossy magazine spread for indigestion materialized. Frustrated, she flung the magazine to the floor. What the fuck is going on? Why did it feel like the entire world had begun winking slyly at her?
Fortunately, Joseph returned, saving her from her racing thoughts.
It was a shame she couldn’t just buy a bottle from him. The regular pittance he normally offered wouldn’t last more than a week.
“…a few pinches” Joseph said in unison with Heather’s returning chorus. It was their refrain, and they had grown to enjoy it. “Like always. Since if I take anything else, it’ll be noticed.”
Joseph handed Heather the pharmacy bag. In a spasm she clutched it. “All there?”
He nodded. “One to sleep, one to calm your nerves if you have another panic attack. And one to feel like you’re floating on air.”
Heather began to rise –
“Wait, Heather. Sit.”
She did. (Surprisingly). In fact, so surprised was she by this turn of character that she was not even sure it had been a cognitive decision. She simply had.
He sat down in the chair beside her, leaning in, back hunched like a beaten cur. “You don’t talk to me anymore… Sure, we meet up once a week and do - do this - but, man, Heather, I’m risking serious jail time doing this. And I don’t even know why I’m doing it.”
Heather hardened. “No.”
Off her tone: “Heather?”
“No. I see what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to get me to open up and talk. And I told you, Joey, I told you, I’m not going to do that.”
“Something happened to you. You were free spirited and happy. The life of the party! Now you – what – hide inside like a crazy cat lady and pop pills? Come on, just-just let me in. Talk to me. Say words.”
Heather didn’t even look at him. She sat in the enormity of what had happened in that terrible bodily silence.
“D-did… did he hurt you? Your… the guy you’ve been dating. The one… he…”
Heather felt a coolness, a numbness whisk inside her.
Had he hurt her? Doubtless, they had had their squabbles; their tiffs; their outbursts. But his every argument, his every gesture had loosened Heather from her moorings. She had become unleashed, unabashed, and had met him stroke for stroke: in bed, in conversation, in ego.
In physicality.
If she was honest - perfectly honest - with herself, she would have, with all of its complications, complexities, and conflicts, dissected her relationship down along its neat seams into taxonomical slices of abuse. Heather felt lost, then. To be asked so directly had rattled free a memory as painfully as anatomical dissection.
Wrestling with the knowledge of whether he had wanted to hurt her or pleasure her had plagued her days and nights. It felt like everything - everything - he did had had the unspoken potential for becoming violent. There had been an intangible quality to him that had always felt feral. (And, once, it was an appealing trait. Now, it only vexed her). The oral sex had been emblematic of this. Heather knew that each time he had eaten her with his tongue (seeking her clemency) that whenever he brought her to flawless orgasm it had been emotional blackmail. She had resented this, relished it, hated it, loved it, because it had felt sacred, apologetic when he did it, because each tongue stroke had felt like an apology for the times he hurt her. (Or she hurt him).
And that was the seduction of it, wasn’t it? He could be cruel; but he could also be sorry. So sorry. So very, very sorry.
Lost to the memory, Heather resurfaced, and looked over at Joseph. “I… I don’t know. We were… complicated.”
“Complicated enough that you need to pop pills?! Jesus, H-town. What happened between you two?”
“Endoscopy,” she said lamely.
“What?”
In a moment of invention: "He - we - I … we argued over the term for it, and we got into this stupid fight, and - "
He tried to eat me, her brain supplied.
Heather felt brittle, like she would crack. This was the closest she had ever gotten to admitting aloud what had happened to anyone. "It got pretty bad. It got violent – "
I think he tried to swallow me
“And…” Heather’s voice evaporated. She looked at Joseph with wounded eyes. And in them: a quiet universe of pain. She urged him, telepathically, to understand, to see - to see - through the verbal sleight of hand and see the ugly truth running parallel to her fantastical metaphor.
With great intuition: “He… molested you?”
Heather could scream. She could cry. It was all so close.
She was drowning. Drowning with the need to say something, anything, to her spectacled savior. And whatever fault lines Joseph saw, he saw them in her, because he amended with a gasp: “He raped you?”
Bless him. Joseph could scarcely say the word. And Heather inured herself to this. She offered a silent, taut nod. If she couldn’t explain what had happened in the black-letter of the law, then she would - God help her - get him on the same wavelength as this elaborate metaphor, so, then, at the very least she could milk him for his sympathies, and receive her precious (precious) pills, untroubled.
Left to his own reverie, it would seem, Heather daintily plucked the brown pill bag from the table and made hasty exist, but not before wondering if she had broken the poor boy, because he still had not moved from his seat, even as she strode under the soft, silvery tinkle of the dispensary bell.
HEATHER
She ignored her phone for quite some time that evening.
It went off again, a minor reminder that there was a text waiting.
Wait.
She felt a prickle of curiosity. Maybe it was Joseph? Maybe she forgot something at the drug store? Was it work calling? Is it that sassy slut who thinks she runs the place? It’s a florist shop for chrissake, not a modeling agency. There is no ‘perfect bouquet.’
In a cloud of thoughts, Heather entered her apartment with a huff, slapping the brown paper bag down on the table. It toppled over gracelessly, and her precious, precious pills clattered free.
She stared down at her sordid collection. They were what her father would call ‘horse pills’. Too big and too hard to swallow.
Would I have been too hard to swallow?
Fuck! She could slap herself.
Heather pulled a face and walked resignedly into the kitchen.
She swallowed the pill and felt its every waxy inch. Was it this? Was this what it felt like to swallow a tiny human?
Fuck aren’t these pills supposed to stop the bad thoughts?
Troubled by her thoughts, and unsure how to reconcile them, she tried to hide from them: she crawled into a nest of pillows on the bed, and plucked her phone free.
She was lilting. Laying on a cloud. She scanned through her emails (doggedly ignoring the one, errant text message), and saw that her application for apprenticing had been accepted. It would appear that working at a floral shop for the better part of a year would pay sizable dividends. The hiring manager had thought she had potential: and she could see the glimmering promise of an artist in Heather’s sketch portfolio.
And, suddenly, Heather felt a sudden lift, a buoyant updraft of what could only be optimism. Perhaps, she could do this after all. Maybe – just maybe – she wouldn’t just survive, but she could thrive.
The pill was melting away her inhibitions, loosening her mind, she felt like she could stretch; forever.
The phone buzzed again. She ignored it.
Instead, she reasoned: to celebrate she would abort her current efforts and detour to more ministerial acts.
Because it had become something of a religion hadn’t it? No; a ritual. Nevertheless, it persisted.
Heather sat a little taller; a little more upright. She typed the sacrosanct word into the textbox.
And she was rewarded with her feed; her feed that, due to repeat alchemical reactions, was becoming increasingly curated – in fact, the search engine seemed to take on a nigh-sentient ability because the latest cropping of videos were exactly what she needed.
There was, she learned, a small, gifted population of people (nameless, faceless) that could ingest their own endoscopes. And unlike the unflattering, stilted video footage she had procured from medical archives, these were entirely different. Heather knew, immediately - only as a madwoman could - that these videos were voyeuristic. And the host was possessed of a talent that distilled down into what she realized was an uncanny ability to control the motility of the mouth and throat.
Unblinking, she watched. The drugs in her bloodstream conscripted in her an ability to see the images with arresting clarity.
The red of the reds. The black of the blacks. The raised texture of the tongue like very many cobblestones.
She felt safe in her nest of pillows. So, she permitted the footage to play, uninterrupted. The pill had certainly imbued a soft, relaxing aura. Normally, at this juncture, she would have paused the video in an alarmed spasm. But, tonight, as a silent reprisal against her erstwhile lover (imagining she was needling his oh-so-fabulously constructed ego) she deliberately forged ahead. She watched the precise moment the epiglottis opened and –
Christ
The esophagus, appearing as nothing more than fault lines in the throat at first, suddenly peeled open.
Trembling, Heather leaned in. But the video smashed to black.
Shaking. She was shaking. She had not even been aware of it.
All of those shapes, those lines, those contours, they were horrifically familiar. They were familiar to her in a way that permitted her to realize that it had been familiar because that had been a man’s mouth. She felt squeamish. The others, she realized suddenly, had been mouths attached to women.
So, there appeared to be a division of the sexes in this fetish. For fetish it was. Heather sensed that the intention of the filmmaker was to take their videography and charge it with erotic undercurrent. While she could appreciate the effort, it was certainly lost on her.
She was repulsed by it. Fascinated by it. Perhaps she steeped herself in it in order to armor herself against it. She had started watching the more erotic versions because the slower, more sensual presentation (unlike the medical ones) afforded her the luxury to actually see the environment and study the bodily architecture in great detail. To what end, she was unsure. But she felt it was critical that she do this, every night. It was critical she understand.
She had to understand what happened to her.
It did little to inspire though. The only thing these nightly rituals succeeded in doing was fortifying her belief - however absurd - that she had been in the very areas of her boyfriend’s mouth the endoscope had transited in the stranger’s videos.
So, he had never swallowed her. Small miracles, I guess.
But that left her raw with a new reality that was even more potent and dangerous; one now exacerbated by confusion: Why?
An entire universe lay in that single syllable. Why had he rejected her?
Similarly, she realized she was still rejecting that lone, errant text message.
It felt good. It felt good to be in control. It felt good to operate from such spite. It felt good to lie to Joseph, it felt…
Heather suddenly gasped back a panic. What was happening to her? What kind of monster was she becoming? Was she undergoing some metamorphosis after escaping her erstwhile boyfriend? Certainly, he had lied often, cajoled readily, and twisted the truth to suit his purpose. But did that mean she did, too? Did she have to?
Well, I’ve certainly learned from the best.
Feeling contrite (and a smidge guilty) she finally thumbed away the rest of her open windows, and searched out the text message that had been pitifully chirping the better part of an hour.
Sorry, Joseph. Didn’t mean to leave you on read. I just don’t want to think about you, because thinking about you means I have to think about me. And I don’t like thinking about me.
Heather clicked to retrieve the message by rote.
She shrieked.
What.
Heather caught her breath, panting. What was that? What was she looking at? Her subconscious brain had registered it long before her higher mind did. But whatever she saw, she wanted to reject it from her reality.
No.
The phone clattered from her hands. She jerked back like it was a viper. Her fingers tightened, smothering her mouth. Blood coursed through her veins so quick that she felt like she would drop down on the floor and lose that precious pill right then and there.
No, I’m seeing it wrong. I’m seeing things.
Bracing herself, she looked down at the screen again.
It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing. What she was seeing didn’t naturally register. But it did. She knew what she was looking at. She understood. Determined to confront the image, she studied it. Her chin jerked up in alarm. That’s me. Of course, she knew that. It was a photograph of herself, taken from a distance.
But.
There was an object, two of them, blotting her back in a way that looked suspiciously like they were - Oh God, no - like they were –
Little Heather had enjoyed such optical wizardry in her youth, hadn’t she? Playing with perspectives and distance was a time-honored tradition. But this was not the innocent, fanciful play of a child.
This was –
The two objects – fingers – superimposed on her tiny body as they were, at the distance she stood, appeared to be gigantic in form, holding her upright. A god holding an ant. Having opened the text message by rote, she had overlooked the sender. It wasn’t Joseph.
And, the visual burst of a follow-up text.
No, of course not. Heather was not allowed nice things. Heather wasn’t allowed peace.
She had only this. This cancer of the silence that stretched between them. Of what he had done. And what she had survived. And that she knew. And that he knew she knew. And as was so on-brand for him, he was coming at her like a snake: sideways. Neither confessing to his sin, nor dismissing it.
And in what could only be termed a spiteful lunge of her finger, Heather retaliated by sending – with what felt like telepathic whiplash – one of the ugliest endoscopy videos she could find from her library. (And she made sure it was the ugliest).
A long second passed. And Heather had not the luxury of that second to contemplate what she had done, what she was doing, that she was engaging him and permitting him to move ever closer when she had responded with what she hoped to be equally unruffled glibness, when her cell phone chimed back an incoming text.
Heather lifted her finger to type; stopped.
Subtlety was, as always, his craft. And, suddenly, she understood.
Oh God. Oh God. He knows… he knows. Oh shit. Oh fuck. He knows. He knows where I get my pills.
And in that uncanny way of his, as though returning her telepathic whiplash, another text bloomed on screen:
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Click For Chapter: Coffee & Drugs, My First Love
SWALLOW ME, LIKE YOUR LITTLE PILLBook One, Revelations 2023
Synopsis: A female pill addict tries to vainly outwit, outlast, outsex a violent demonic monster. Because he prefers his pills lady-shaped.
But this is only the beginning of a dark, damning, tumultuous epic saturated with vore kink, size kink, and layered narrative.
03
Well-fed devils behave better
than famished saints – D.L. Smith
HEATHER
Three-hundred and sixty-three days.
Somehow, three-hundred and sixty-three days had moved forward, dream-like, in a numb narcotic-soma with Heather flowing, Heather gliding, Heather slip slip slipping away into three-hundred and sixty-four.
Then, in another ripple of time distortion she slip-streamed into three-hundred and sixty-five. Somehow, she had lost time. She had lost precious, precious time. In her stupor, she had thought – falsely – that it had only been three-hundred and sixty-three days hence that had churned by her, in her, through her when she had first read his texts – now so-famously heralding his abrupt return into her narrow, singular existence.
And at that time, it had seemed like the year mark was, as of yet, still two days away.
But, no.
A small, so very small edit would need to be made in her mind now – stamped on the pages of her mental archives – because now that she consulted the text messages on her phone she saw that two: two days had whisked through her. She looked at the calendar on her wall in a slow peaking horror because it corroborated her mental unmooring.
On it, there was a loud progression of red x markings. There had been one for each and every single daily square. They had marched forward, day by day, in a red sea of rebellion, announcing her victories, celebrating her single-minded determinedness in eluding the monster for yet another day – that is,
Until today.
She started at the empty square, biting her lip.
Because, apparently, when she had first sat on her bed – extracting the alchemy of curated endoscopic videos – she had, somehow, in the time waxing and waning, lost not one – but two – days.
And when those two days came and went: his text pushed through – a disembodied hand reaching for her – on the second of those two consecutive days.
And when she had answered, deflecting his messages with remarkable verve, it had happened – not one – but two days after she had soundlessly slipped into bed –
Dreamless, until it had become loudly, resoundingly, outrageously
Today.
Three-hundred and sixty-five.
Today, auspiciously, at the stroke of midnight the seams of her universe ruptured open, catastrophically changing everything. And spilling forth was this unbidden, darkness; his intent heard, even felt dripping in remarkable voice in his text messages after one year of absence.
One year.
It was unfathomable, and yet, somehow entirely predictable.
And she had predicted it in a way that one just knows. Her prophecy had been entirely mathematical – and yet not. It had escaped reason, and yet harmonized with it quite well. She knew, only as a madwoman could, that the madman himself would returneth on the eve of her escape because it was so absurdly in character for her dark, divided devil.
One year of survival. One year of existing. Now gone. Now done. But it certainly didn’t feel like living; not in form, not in function because she had continued forward kinetically in a hollow sense of what she had once been. And now she felt even more enervated knowing he had texted her, precisely, at the one-year mark.
Heather felt uneasy. Did this mean he had been keeping time, too? Did he have some time-piece that doggedly marched toward their reunion, seeking to enfold them in some sort of dark bookend symmetry, too? And despite it all, Heather still found it hard to believe she could put a dent in his daily, racing thoughts. And if she did? Well, that was terrifying because that implied she meant something to him.
And seeing that square on the calendar meant something to her by virtue of its emptiness. Her streak was over. There would be no red x to carve into her rebellion tonight.
Seeking a lifeline, she picked up her phone. She re-read the texts. He seemed perfectly lucid, perfectly colorful. Awash with emotion, she put it back down.
It was paralytic: having so many questions. Having so many feels.
And there was a slowly-blooming magnetism there. She could feel it. She was feeling an inexorable draw toward something. And that something had a face, a name – one which she refused to say aloud, even to herself. And she need not to, in order to summon him. She need only think of him, it felt like, and he would be there; sliding through the seams of her mind.
He had that effect didn’t he? She could feel him, almost bodily. They always seemed to share an uncanny hive-mind: feeling one another, sensing one another. Two hands on the same clock-face rotating around as they beat together - their dark hearts attuning - in a circadian rhythm just as ceaseless as time itself. But did she want to be drawn back into that world? Did she want her existence unfolded into his?
Heather wrung her hands in frustration. Because if she was honest with herself - perfectly honest –
Talking to him, even if it had been a quick transaction, had felt good. Trading the barbs, fencing the words had brought color and conviction back to her. True, she wasn’t her Catholic Best when she was around him, but she didn’t feel like a ghostly apparition when they volleyed their energy back and forth, goading one another into a game of intellectual one-upmanship. A fatalistic cat and mouse.
If not then, then most certainly now he viewed her as a small woman mousing her way through life. Back and forth she would go; in, and out; in and out; crawling back into her hole.
And which hole would that be? Her mind sneered. His?
Heather knew now – and she knew it achingly – that she would have to make her usual trip to the dispensary burdened with the knowledge she would be burdened by his gaze. And what would he see? Would he see Heather? Would he see friend or foe? Would she be a lovely collection of womanly parts? Or would she be a woman in the fierce throes of personhood?
Heather wanted to berate him with questions. Worse: she wanted to berate herself. This was an alarming sensation: fretting over what his thoughts were. And worse than that: fretting over what a man thought about her. Since when did this happen?
Since he tried to fucking eat you. Her brain said in a hostile snap.
Rattled, she ran her fingernails over the colorful assortment of pills. It was a gentle tinkling of plastic against plastic. Was this her? Was she a pill for him? She picked up a capsule, studied it. At least her consumables didn’t have names, faces.
Wait. Where had these ghostly pluralizations come from? How did one name, one face – namely, hers – sprout into many?
You know why, her brain mocked. You weren’t the first.
For, if there was one intimate, gripping piece of knowledge she had retained after watching the multitude of endoscopy videos was that the talent for controlling the mouth and throat required practice. It was – she mused – no different than when she had practiced dry-swallowing her horse-pills. And it was, she realized with a burble of hysteria, exactly what he had attempted to do to her.
And if he had done it multiple times, was it a skill? One that he could perfect? How many had he done it to? And what was the purpose? Was eating her a perfunctory act? A rote contraction of movement that barely, yawningly, stretched over the seams of a lesser base instinct? (Or was it something else?)
And, more terribly, why did she care?
Because it matters. She told her brain. It mattered because she had to understand the genesis of this desire; his desire. Was it a compulsion bursting forth from his animal-brain? If so, then she was nothing more than gristle off the bone; an inducement of taste and sensation that would hold no power over him.
But, instead, if it was something more complex as she had hoped, then –
Wait.
Hoped? She felt her brain snag upon that word. Why, indeed, was she hoping for something more complex, for something more reflective? Why was she hoping for something that went beyond primitive compulsion?
Because, she knew, only as a mad woman could, that complexity made it dangerous. It made everything dangerous. And complexity could be weaponized. Could she use his own compulsion against him? Would addiction be a weapon pointed at both ends?
She stroked the purple pill in her palm. She thought it looked like a lovely little lady in a purple dress and she had a brief dissonant moment, envisioning she had been cradled in his hands just like this. She could almost, almost understand him.
But she was struck by her own strange compulsion then. It drove her to her feet. She opened her apartment door and walked out. It was scarcely a few hours past midnight, but it was the time of the night that was breathless and penetrable.
So, she penetrated it.
And as murky as her intentions were she still knew her direction. But more importantly: she knew that she refused to waste away waiting for him; she refused to be the damsel in distress to cower under his beastliness. If they were to painfully intersect, then it would happen on her terms.
Heather pulled up short. She stood, wavering, in the middle of the sidewalk.
Now, if I was a six-foot tall asshole, where would I go?
To the front of her: a bakery cracking open its sleepy-lidded eyes with an aromatic wash of fresh bread.
To the back: the warehouse.
Heather looked down at the photo in her phone; up. Almost. The optics almost lined up with the photograph.
She shouldered open the warehouse and moved inside. It was still very much an unfinished framework: hollow, wooden corridors connected and cross-connected to create hallways; a few annexed rooms convexed the corners; the rigid skeleton of rafters running lengthwise exposed themselves like a cavernous ribcage, and - as she entered the nearest space – she observed a lone work-shop table that sat spartan under a single overhead light, untouched.
Except, she realized as she moved closer, it was not.
Affixed to its surface like wax set-pieces were a coffee cup and a discarded pile of clothes.
Her scalp prickled. It felt like she was looking at the fantastical stasis of an after-moment: the shedding of a snake’s skin. She picked over the shirt, the pants, the belt. (When he loosed his humanly coils, what leapt free?)
Edging closer, she picked up the shirt. And without even realizing what she was doing, without even contemplating the wisdom of it, without even bothering to consult with her higher mind, she brought the garment to her face. It felt good. It felt soft. It felt familiar. She breathed it in.
It smelled like him. Sandalwood and cinnamon, something ripe and memorable.
A viciousness pricked her eyes (she refused to cry). And her throat ached.
It hadn’t been all bad, had it?
He had been good at first, hadn’t he? So good. He had been on his best behavior (but weren’t they all?). He had given her the oral sex, often. Said the sweet nothings, enough. Lavished on her the attention, appropriately. Had even dozed on the couch with her (his arm around her waist so she wouldn’t fall). And he had even exchanged the jokes, the memes, the promises made that started constructing the scaffolding of their relationship.
But through all of this Heather had been aware. She had been aware of the slow-drip trail of context clues he left behind that had revealed he nursed a compulsion for women that tip-toed right over the edge of polite society into oblivion. But despite this – or because of it – she had tolerated it.
Because, at the time, it had been nothing more than a metaphor. A metaphor, that in the spectacle of her head, had seemed so sexy; so hot. Which is why she had turned a blind eye to some of his more uncanny behavior. Even going to great lengths to ignore the sidelong glances he had flicked at her (to observe her reaction) whenever he needled her just a little bit by saying, in a sly fourth-wall-break of their relationship, how he’d love to eat the fuck out of her.
Admittedly, the metaphor shared between them had appealed.
Which is why (one time) when he had confided in her that it wasn’t a metaphor, (and he wasn’t just her divided devil in name) she had allowed this revelation to coexist with her dark fantasy – even – her existence, because (to her) it was perfectly acceptable. Acceptable, because she wanted to be with something special. She wanted to be special. She had wanted to be with something fantastic and other.
“This is how he gets you,” Heather began, moaning.
She held the shirt to her cheek. This is how he bursts out of the fucking ground like some kind of fucking snake, and gobbles you whole
But despite holding, touching, breathing his shirt, nothing interrupted her private interlude. Nothing, that is, except for her intrusive thoughts: the ones she kept furthest from herself, the ones she could not admit existed, not even to herself.
Because if she was honest, perfectly honest with herself:
She had ignored the evil of the metaphor – even, at times, goading him to really do it – because she had wanted to see what it would be like to be fucked by something fantastic and other, to be desired by something that had risen from the vellum of the bible. And she had wanted to see what it would be like to run her fingers around the fangs of mythical possibility; to crawl inside the jaws of hyperbole.
“But it wasn’t supposed to be real ! None of it was! It wasn’t supposed to be an actual fucking thing.”
A small tendril of steam hovered above the lip of the coffee cup. In a spasm, she grabbed it. He had been fine for her, perfect for her with all of his dark complexities, forever-teasing her with their shared metaphor until the precise moment it had ceased being a metaphor, and in violent bodily collision, her demon became something demonic. (Trying to swallow her with the patience of a saint).
She took a large punitive swallow. It was impulsive and childish, but she had hoped that, somehow, she could be him at that moment. Was this what it felt like to control, to dominate, to permanently deprive with a single swallow? She could almost, almost understand him.
It felt wrong, it felt perverse, it felt strangely thrilling to ingest something that had been in his mouth – as though she could become him from this act alone. That, in this moment of infamy, she could tease him, taunt him, ascend him, and he’d feel it. He’d feel what she was doing inside their dark, teeming hivemind.
When she withdrew her lips from the cup, a bold red stain remained. It wasn’t a red x – but it would do.
LATER
On the walk home she moved fast, but no one was there to disturb her passage. No one, except the ghosts of her past.
But it was the door that Heather noticed first.
It wasn’t shut.
Feeling weak, feeling spent, she moved slowly, so slowly toward the entrance. She touched the hinges. They were ajar.
He broke in. He broke into my home. He knows where I live.
It was enough to send her to her knees. But she had to keep standing. She had to keep going. She did not know how not to. He had told her that once. (She could remember his smile when he had said it: it had hovered somewhere between amusement and resignation).
Heather pulled out her army knife and flipped open the largest blade (only the largest for you, baby). Then, with the tip of her foot, she nudged the door open. It creaked, emitting a normally familiar and safe sound. Now it was a single cry.
Heather eased in, horrified that he had come here and defiled her place. It was the one piece of the world where she had felt safe from him. Now, he took even that from her. He took her peace.
The walls felt thin, incapable of holding him back.
Her things were tossed around as if a wild animal had surged through a most auspicious camping ground, searching for food.
Food. Her brain taunted. Because I’m food.
But, no. I’m more than that. Damn you, I’m more than that. You know it. I know it. We both know it. You don’t hang back, hold back for a whole year, then resurface, tripping over your dick to get me if I’m just food.
Heather moved into her bedroom.
And it was imperceptible.
It was like a wind-shift. Something was off. Something had stirred through, something had –
– what was that?
She edged closer.
There was something on the pillowcase.
She brushed her fingers over it.
Wet.
“Cum? Did you jerk off on my pillow, you…”
No; the quality of it was such, the wetness of it was –
Oh God. Her stomach turned, knotting painfully.
He had –
he had licked her pillow.
Does… does that mean he can taste me on there?
Instead, she looked at the mise en scène: the palpable violation of the bed sheets; the wet stain on the fabric, and then, more than that: the visitation of the image of his tongue stroking the fabric where her soft cheek would rest –
It was erotic.
“Fuck. It was never a compulsion. It never was. So, why’d you flip your fucking lid?! Why’d you lose your goddamn marbles trying to eat me?”
Was it compulsion? Was it desire?
A chill entered her.
Maybe it was both.
And, in this evolutionary fall-out, did Heather find herself staring at something evil?
“…no. I don’t think so. I just think you have a very excitable prey-drive,” Heather murmured.
She felt a measure of relief, then. Because if he had attempted to eat her more like a brute, then that was a sin she could never forgive; but, if instead, he had tried to eat her (she looked at the pillow) more like a man, out of profane desire, then…
“NO.” Heather shouted. “You can never forgive him. Not fucking ever. Not after what he did. He could have fucking murdered you.”
Then why are you alive, her brain whispered.
Heather sat there, struck. Had he attempted to murder her? It was a thought that, although as logical as it had been considering the progression of events, she had never permitted herself to entertain it. How deep did this desire go? Was it so rooted in the primitive muck of his brain that he would have gone that far? Or would he have availed himself of some merciful human instinct and released her before it was too late.
She picked up her phone and mentally coached herself, reminding herself, charging herself with the task of being the ever-so-cavalier and charming Heather. It was critical, she knew, not to show fear; in fact, her existence depended on it. (lest she rattle that excitable prey-drive).
They had been two points of oral fixation coming to two separate, yet identical, ends for the evening. She: with the coffee. Him: with the pillow. They were still two arms rotating on the same clock-face but now spinning wildly, feverishly, out of control.
He answered immediately. (She hated that).
Heather strained at her phone. The fuck am I supposed to do with that?
She wanted to slap him. No. We are never, ever getting back together again. No… Jesus… just…
Heather shed her gaze on the text messages; looked at the calendar; contemplated their moments together when they had been a perfectly imbalanced couple with all of their dark but harmonized complexities, and the diffusive quality of her thoughts created a clairvoyance: she knew, suddenly, she was moving toward something that was both terribly alien but also hauntingly familiar: and she could detect the outline of it – similar to how her lower-brain had sensed something in the first endoscopy video that had imbued in her a raw, visceral understanding that what was happening was –
Shit. That was the closest he had ever come to confessing the sin, to externalizing it, to making it real.
Her: Fuck you, I’ll hit you with that triple text if I want!
Even though it was in text form, it still felt sneering.Her: Don’t call me little!
Him: Oh, you will be.Heather sprang into the bathroom. She threw water on her face. The thought of being small again… (God).
One, two, three splashes. Three felt like a safe number. Yet when she looked up from the sink something caught her eye. Through the mirror she could see the top of the toilet was lifted up.
No.
“No, no, fucking no!” Heather slapped her hand against the medicine cabinet. Threw the towels from the rack. In a high, screaming animal sound she tore the toilet mechanics apart, drove her hands in, elbow-deep, cutting her skin on the porcelain. Ribbons of venous red-purple streamed down her arm.
“Oh my God no!” Her hands flew up to her head, spraying even more red. She rushed out of the bathroom and began to pace. “NO. You fucking son of a bitch. NO.”
Fear wicked the heat from her body. Her hands turned cold. Her arms pulsed hot. Clumsily, she pulled the cell phone from her pocket. His message glowed back at her, holding new meaning.
“I hate you,” she grit between her teeth. “I hate you so fucking much.”
She drilled a text back at him, jamming her fingernails into her keypad.
She flung her phone down. Took a necessary shower. Once she was finished, she dialed Joseph. After two rings he picked up. She could weep in relief.
Saintly Joey. Good Joey. God, why are you so perfect.
“Hey? Heather? I was just getting up, everything ok?”
Up.
What time was up?
She looked at her cell phone. 5AM branded her eyes. Fuck. But she didn’t care. She needed to set things in motion. He crossed a line, taking her pills.
“Joesph?” Her tongue felt thick, swollen, but she continued. “I need you to come over. Bring your gun, okay? The little pistol you said you keep under your driver seat. Come to my place please.”