Chapter 1: The Dream and the Hunger
Flora woke with a start, her grandmother’s voice still coiled in her ear like smoke. “The hunger is a song, child. You don’t hear it with your ears.”
She lay perfectly still in the tangled sheets, listening to the thump of her own heart. It felt too loud. The grey morning light leaked around the edges of her cheap blinds, illuminating the familiar chaos of her studio apartment. Half-empty coffee cups stood like sentinels on every surface. Crumpled pages of abandoned poetry drafts formed soft hills on the floor. The air was thick, stale with old incense and something else, something faintly metallic that she’d noticed for days now. Like rusted pennies.
She sat up, pushing her heavy hair out of her face. It was the same room. The same her. Same oversized grey sweatshirt, same soft cotton shorts. But something was different. A low, insistent ache pulsed deep in her belly. It wasn’t hunger for food. She’d tried that yesterday, eating an entire box of salted caramel cookies until she felt sick. It hadn’t touched this feeling. This was a hollow, restless yearning that made her skin feel too tight.
“Grief,” she said aloud, her voice gravelly from sleep. “It’s just grief. Weird… digestive grief.”
She swung her legs out of bed and her bare feet hit the cool laminate floor. As she stood, her hand brushed against a spill of black silk tangled in the sheets. She froze. It was a scarf, slender and cool as water. It wasn’t hers. She didn’t own anything like it. She lifted it, and the scent of orange blossoms and dry earth bloomed in the air—Grandma Moira’s perfume. Flora had buried her in that scarf two weeks ago.
A chill, sharp and clean, cut through the groggy warmth of sleep. She must have taken it from the old house during the cleanup. She didn’t remember. She let the silk slither from her fingers onto the unmade bed, a dark snake against the white cotton.
In the tiny bathroom, she avoided the mirror at first, focusing on the routine: tap on, cold water splashed on her face, toothpaste. Finally, she looked up.
Finally, she looked up. The reflection was hers, but the eyes were wrong. They were the same hazel, but the brown flecks in them seemed darker, deeper, like pits. The hollow ache in her gut twisted, a sharp pang that made her press a hand low against her abdomen. A scent cut through the penny-rust smell of the apartment—cologne, cheap and too sweet, leaking through the wall. Her neighbor. Mr. Errand.
Her mouth filled with saliva.
She knew him, of course. The small, perverted fellow she ignored in the elevators. The way his eyes would crawl over her sweatshirt-clad body, not with boldness, but with a wet, desperate hunger that made her skin prickle. She’d hear noises through the wall sometimes—plastic slaps, low groans, the whirr of some machine. Weird, kinky things. Clearly on his own. He had no visitors, no life. And now, this morning, that knowledge wasn’t just a fact. It was a trigger. The hunger yawned wider.
The hunger is a song.
Flora walked out of the bathroom, past the black scarf on her bed. She went to the kitchen, a narrow alcove separated from the living area by a peeling linoleum counter. The thought of her grandmother was a quiet hum at the base of her skull. She was so hungry. Not for eggs, not for toast.
She pulled out a pan, slammed it on the stovetop. She turned the knob for the burner, the click loud in the quiet apartment. She wasn’t making breakfast. She pulled frozen garlic bread from the freezer, began making dinner at nine in the morning, the actions deliberately loud. She fixed her hair as the oven preheated, pulling the band from her bun and letting the heavy, chestnut waves fall around her shoulders and down her back. She could feel the weight of it, a curtain.
From a bottle on the counter, she pumped a generous pool of vanilla-scented lotion into her palm. Right there in the middle of the kitchen, under the fluorescent light, she began smoothing it up her arms. The glide was slow, sensual. She turned on the small Bluetooth speaker, some pop song with a heavy, pulsing bass filling the space. Her hips began to sway, just a little. A slight, rolling shimmy as she rubbed the lotion into her skin. She closed her eyes, tilting her head back, letting the music move her. As if she knew.
She couldn’t see him. But he was watching.
In the adjacent apartment, Rodrick Errand was perfectly still, his eye pressed to the hairline crack in the drywall where it met the cheap baseboard in his living room. It was his cathedral window. His paradise.
Oh, fuck. Oh, Jesus. Look at that.
Flora was a vision. The sweatshirt was gone. She wore just a thin, worn tank top now, and he could see the full, heavy curve of her tits swaying with her movement as she danced. Those hips, God, those hips were like a fucking bell, ringing just for him. She was putting lotion on, her hands sliding all over her skin. He could almost smell it, that vanilla, mixing with the scent of the garlic bread warming in her oven. His mouth was dry, his breathing a ragged, open-mouthed pant that fogged a small circle on the wall.
Rodrick was a small man. A lifetime of being overlooked had condensed him into a shape that was easy to dismiss: hunched back from years at a drafting table that was too low, a soft gut that poured over his belt, legs that bowed awkwardly, one foot turning in. His glasses were thick, his scalp shone under the lonely light of his single lamp. He knew what he was. He’d made peace with it. Women didn’t look at him. They looked through him. But he had this. His beautiful neighbor, Flora. He had the crack, and he had his rituals.
His hand was already down the front of his stained sweatpants, his fist moving in a slow, tight rhythm. He watched her arch her back, running her lotioned hands down her sides, over the swell of her waist. Yeah, just like that. Touch yourself for me, you sweet bitch.
His other apartment was a monument to solitary release. In the corner, a customized sex doll was propped in a chair, one of its arms loose. Near his bed, a complex arrangement of ropes, pulleys, and silicone sleeves hung from a reinforced ceiling hook. There were pumps, tubes, lubricants, inflatable cushions—an arsenal of isolation. But they were just tools. The fantasy, the fuel, was always her. It was Flora’s imagined smile, the ghost of her perfume in the elevator, the sound of her voice through the wall.
She’s moving closer, he thought, his pulse hammering in his neck. She was dancing toward the counter, her back to him now. The thin fabric of her sleep shorts stretched taut over the glorious, round shelf of her ass. He could see the faint line of her thong underneath. Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.
He bit his lip to stop from moaning aloud. His strokes became faster, more urgent. This was better than any doll, any machine. This was real. She was right there, just inches away through the wall, moving like she wanted to be seen. The thought, insane and glorious, flickered in his mind: Does she know? Is she doing this for me?
Flora’s hands slid down over her rear, cupping herself through the shorts, a slow, grinding motion in time with the music. The hunger in her was a live wire now, sizzling through her veins. The metallic taste was back, coating her tongue. She could feel him. Not just hear him or sense him. She could feel the hot, desperate spike of his desire bleeding through the plaster. It felt like warmth on her skin. It smelled like salt and sweat and sour cologne. It made the hollow ache throb.
She turned around, facing the wall. Her eyes, those too-dark eyes, scanned the surface. She smiled, a small, private thing, and let her tank top strap slip off one shoulder.
On the other side, Rodrick gasped. “Yes,” he hissed, the word a wet puff against the wall. His fist was a blur now, a painful, frantic friction. He was close. So close. Her shoulder was bare, smooth. He imagined licking it, biting it. She leaned against her counter, directly opposite his spy hole, and slowly, so slowly, she pulled the other strap down.
The front of her tank top sagged, and he caught a shadowed glimpse of the underside of her breast, the soft, pale curve. A choked sob escaped him. His back arched, his club foot scraping against the floor.
Flora’s head dropped back. The song reached its crescendo. The hunger in her roared, a primal, undeniable command. It wasn’t about sex. It was about consumption. She could see it in her mind—not with her eyes, but with that new, ancient sense—a tangled, pulsing cord of pure, desperate want glowing like a rotten neon sign in the dark of his apartment. It was attached to him, rooted in his groin, his heart, his miserable, lonely brain. It was offered. It was freely given. All his filthy, pathetic yearning was a feast laid out just for her.
She let out a soft sigh, not of pleasure, but of acknowledgment.
That was the moment Rodrick Errand came, a silent, convulsive eruption into his own hand, his body jerking against the wall as his eyes rolled back in his head. The pleasure was sharp, shattering, and then instantly empty.
Flora straightened up, pulling her straps back into place. The hunger, for the first time since she woke, was quiet. Sated. Not completely, but the gnawing edge was gone. A profound, deep warmth spread through her chest. She felt… strong. Clear-headed.
She picked up the black silk scarf from her bed and walked back to the kitchen. She tied it loosely around her neck, the ends trailing down between her breasts. She took the garlic bread from the oven, the smell now rich and savory. She ate a piece, standing at the counter. It tasted like nothing.
Through the wall, she could hear the slow, ragged sounds of his breathing. The faint, sticky sounds of him cleaning up. The glow of his desire was gone, extinguished, leaving only a cold, damp husk of feeling.
Flora finished the bread, wiped her hands on a towel. The song in her grandmother’s voice was now a melody she could hum. She looked at the crack in her own wall, a mirror to his. She smiled again, this time with her teeth.
It wasn’t pity she felt. It was appetite. And she had just discovered how easy it was to feed.
The warmth in her chest was a banked coal, simmering. She could still taste him, that metallic tang of spent desire, at the back of her throat. It was better than the garlic bread. She untied the scarf from her neck, letting the silk whisper through her fingers before draping it over the back of a chair. A trophy.
A thick, congested silence pressed through the wall from Rodrick’s apartment. The humming neon sign of his want had gone dark. She imagined him there, in the gloom, sticky and empty. The thought should have made her feel disgust. Or pity. Instead, it made the coal in her chest glow a little brighter.
She was about to run water for a shower, to wash the vanilla and the scent of him away, when a sound broke the quiet.
A knock. Soft. Tentative. On her door.
Flora went still. No one visited her. The delivery guys left packages in the lobby. She hadn’t given her new address to anyone from her old life. The knocking came again, a little louder this time, a ragged triplet of taps.
She knew who it was. The knowledge landed in her gut, cold and certain.
She walked to the door, her bare feet silent on the floor. She didn’t look through the peephole. She simply turned the deadbolt, its click echoing in the small space, and pulled the door open.
Rodrick Errand stood in the dim hallway, swaying slightly. He looked like he’d been hit by a truck. His glasses were crooked. His sweatpants were fresh, but a damp spot stained the front. His face was pale, sweat beading on his upper lip. He smelled of panic, cheap soap, and underneath it all, that sour cologne.
“Flora.” His voice was a wreck, scraped raw.
She didn’t smile. She didn’t step back. She just held the door open, one eyebrow slightly raised, saying nothing. Her silence was a wall. He flinched against it.
“I… I heard music.” He stammered, his eyes darting past her into the apartment, greedily taking in the messy bed, the discarded scarf. “I… I think something’s wrong with me.”
“Oh?” Her own voice sounded different to her. Lower. Smoother. Like the silk of the scarf.
“Yeah. I felt… I saw…” He was trembling. His bowed legs seemed unable to hold him. “It was like you were right there. In my head. And then… after…” He trailed off, his face flushing a deep, mortified red. He couldn’t say it. The humiliation was a physical vapor coming off him. It was delicious.
Flora leaned one shoulder against the doorframe, blocking most of the view. She let him look at her, at the loose tank top, the sleep shorts. Let him drown. “After what, Rodrick?”
He moaned, a low, pathetic sound. “Please. You have to know. You were… dancing.” His eyes locked on hers, wide with a terrible, dawning hope. “You knew I was watching. You wanted me to watch. Didn’t you?”
The hunger stirred, not the ravenous ache from before, but a curious, probing tendril. She could feel his confusion, his shame, his desperate need for this to be a transaction, for his pathetic voyeurism to have been an invitation. He needed it to have been her fault. It gave him a storyline, a role. The seduced. The lucky pervert.
She decided to give him the story.
Her posture shifted, softened. The coldness in her eyes melted into something like shared complicity. A slow smile touched her lips. “The walls are very thin,” she said, her voice a conspiratorial whisper.
He gasped as if she’d plunged a hand into his chest. “So you did…”
“I wondered if you’d ever have the courage to come over.” She took a single step back, an implicit invitation. “Since you were being so… attentive.”
He stumbled across the threshold, drawn in by the gravity of her lie. She closed the door behind him. The click of the lock seemed to finalize something. He stood in the middle of her studio, shaking, his head swiveling, consuming the intimate chaos of her life. His gaze stuck on the black scarf on the chair.
“Sit down, Rodrick.” She gestured to the edge of her unmade bed.
He obeyed like a dog, perching on the very corner, his hands clenched between his knees. She didn’t sit. She paced slowly in front of him, a predator circling. The power was intoxicating. It wasn’t just physical. It was his entire psyche, laid bare and bending to her slightest implication.
“You’ve been watching for a long time,” she stated, not asking.
“Yes.” The word was a prayer of confession.
“You have… devices. In your apartment. To touch yourself while you think of me.” She let disgust color her tone, just a little. Just enough to make him squirm.
He nodded, miserably, ardently. “Yes. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You’re just so fucking beautiful. You don’t even know. The way you walk. The way your hair looks in a bun. I think about it all day.” The words were pouring out now, a toxic flood. “I have a doll. I pretend it’s you. I have a machine that… that can fuck me while I look at the crack in the wall. I dream about your ass. About your tits. I want to smell your skin. I want to taste your cunt. I’m a sick fucking bastard.”
Flora stopped pacing. She stood before him. The raw, filthy hunger in his confession was a banquet. It fed the new thing inside her, made it stretch and purr. She could see the cord again, not the bright neon of before, but a guttering, muddy rope, tethering his frantic heart to her.
“You are sick,” she agreed softly. “You’re a pathetic, little man.”
He cried then, fat, grateful tears rolling down his cheeks. “I know. Thank you. Thank you for saying it.”
“But,” she said, and he froze, his wet eyes huge behind his smudged glasses. “This morning was different, wasn’t it?”
“It was real,” he sobbed. “It was you. You made me come harder than any machine. Just by dancing. I felt you inside my head.”
She reached out. He flinched. She didn’t touch his face. She took his glasses off, folded them, and set them on the bedside table. He was blind now, vulnerable. She placed her hands on his shoulders. They were bony, tense. She could feel the rapid thrum of his pulse through her palms.
“You’re right,” she breathed, leaning close. Her lips were near his ear. “I was in your head. And I know what you want. You don’t just want to watch. You want to be used. You want to be nothing.”
“Yes,” he whimpered, his head falling forward. “God, yes. Please. Use me. I’m nothing. I’m your nothing.”
The coil in Flora’s belly pulled taut. This was the offering. Not just his desire, but his utter surrender. His will, handed to her on a plate of self-loathing.
“Stand up,” she commanded.
He stood, wobbling. She pushed him back a step until his legs hit the bed and he sat down hard. She looked down at him, her expression remote, clinical. “Take off your sweatpants. And your underwear. I want to see the little thing you use while you think of me.”
His hands shook so badly he could barely manage the knot. He shoved the sweatpants and briefs down past his knees. He was half-hard, already leaking, his cock small and curving meekly against his pale thigh. He was exposed, utterly. He tried to cover himself with his hands.
“Don’t,” she snapped. “Hands on the bed. Look at me.”
He obeyed, placing his palms flat on her rumpled sheets, his knuckles white. He looked up at her, his face a mask of terror and worship.
Flora hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her sleep shorts and peeled them down, along with the thin lace thong beneath. She let them fall to her ankles and stepped out of them. She wasn’t wet. This wasn’t about that. This was about consumption.
She moved towards him, placing one knee on the bed beside his hip, then the other, straddling his lap. He gasped, his whole body seizing up. She didn’t lower herself onto him. She hovered there, the heat of her body an inch from his.
“This is what you dream about,” she said, her voice empty of passion, full of purpose. “This is the only time it will ever happen. You will remember this until the day you die. You will never, ever forget that Flora Smith let you inside her. And you will know it was because I chose to take something from you. Do you understand?”
“I understand. I understand.” His words were a choked mantra.
She reached down between their bodies. Her fingers were dry. She took his cock, which was now fully, painfully hard, and guided it to her entrance. She notched the head against her, feeling the frantic throb of him in her hand. She looked into his blurred, desperate eyes.
Then she sank down onto him in one slow, inexorable slide.
He cried out, a sharp, broken sound. He was inside her. It was tight, uncomfortably so. He felt small, insignificant. She began to move, a slow, grinding rise and fall, controlling the rhythm completely. Her hips rolled, taking him in shallow, then slightly deeper. There was no pleasure in it for her, not the physical kind. But there was power. A profound, staggering power. With every motion, she could feel it—the muddy cord of his being, his soul, his essence, unraveling. It seeped out of him, through the point where their bodies joined, and into her. It was warm and dark, tasting of loneliness and pornographic fantasy and abject worship. It filled the hollow places inside her. It made her strong.
“You’re nothing,” she whispered, her breath against his face as she moved. “You’re a pump. A tool. A used-up little toy.”
“I’m your toy,” he gurgled, his eyes rolling back. His hands twitched on the bed, wanting to grab her hips but afraid to move without permission. “Fuck, your cunt is so tight. It’s so hot. You’re stealing my fucking mind.”
“Yes,” she said. “I am.”
She rode him harder, faster. The bedsprings creaked a monotonous rhythm. His mouth hung open, drool slicking his chin. He was babbling, a stream of filth and devotion. “Take it, take all of it, you fucking goddess, ruin me, use me up, I’m gonna come, I’m gonna come inside you, please let me come inside you…”
Flora felt it then, the buildup in him, a seismic pressure. She felt the cord, thick and pulsing, ready to detonate. She slammed down onto him one final time, sheathing him to the hilt, and clenched every muscle inside her.
That was all it took.
Rodrick Errand came with a silent, shuddering scream. His body arched off the bed, then collapsed like a sack of bones. It wasn’t just an orgasm. It was an evacuation. She felt the last of it, the core of whatever made him him, leave his body in a rushing wave. It flooded into her, rich and complete. The muddy cord went dark. Snapped.
She held still for a moment, feeling the strange, satiated fullness. Then she lifted herself off him. He was limp, his soft cock slipping out of her. He lay on her bed, eyes open and unblinking, staring at the ceiling. A slow line of spit ran from the corner of his mouth into her pillow.
Flora got off the bed. She picked up her shorts and thong, pulling them on. She walked to the bathroom, wiped herself clean with a cold cloth. In the mirror, her eyes were no longer just dark. They were bottomless. A predator’s eyes. The coal in her chest was a steady sun.
When she came back out, he was still there, motionless. Breathing, but just barely. Empty.
“Get up,” she said.
It took him a full minute to process the command. He moved like a man underwater, slowly pulling up his sweatpants, fumbling for his glasses. He couldn’t look at her. He was a shell.
“Go home, Rodrick,” she said, opening the door to the hallway. “Don’t come back unless I call for you.”
He shuffled out without a word. He didn’t look back. She closed the door, locking it. The silence in her apartment was different now. It wasn’t empty. It was charged. It was hers.
She picked up the black silk scarf from the chair and brought it to her face, inhaling the scent of orange blossoms and dry earth. Grandma Moira’s voice was clear now, no longer an echo, but a guiding hum in her blood.
The hunger is a song. And you, my child, have just learned the first note.
Flora smiled. It was a sharp, hungry thing. She wondered who would teach her the second.