Chapter 18: The Night's True Claim
The words in the notebook felt like a live wire she had touched. I can make it race. All through the dreary afternoon of institutional routines—the tasteless mush at dinner, the hour of mandated television in the common room—they hummed in her skull. She watched Lisa hold court from a worn armchair, holding a cigarette like a scepter, holding the attention of two newer, younger girls with a story that was obviously, gloriously untrue. Susanna didn’t approach. She let the hum become a steady, low-frequency pulse. A plan, or the ghost of one.
The dormitory at night was a landscape of shallow breaths and rustling sheets. The ceiling, stained with ancient water marks, was her map. The half-unpacked suitcase at the foot of her bed was a cliff she hadn’t yet jumped from. She waited, feigning sleep, her body tuned to the rhythm of the night shift’s footsteps. The orderly’s pass with a flashlight was a predictable tide. After it receded, the true silence began.
The click of the door was softer than a heartbeat. A slice of light from the hallway, then darkness again. Susanna didn’t move. She listened to the whisper of bare feet on linoleum, the pause, the shift in the air as a presence loomed over her cot.
Lisa’s scent reached her first—cigarettes, institutional soap, and something wilder, feral. The thin blanket was pulled back. The cold air raised the fine hairs on Susanna’s arms before the weight settled. Lisa straddled her hips, a solid, undeniable pressure. She was naked, her skin cool from the hallway’s draft. Susanna kept her eyes closed, her breathing even.
“I know you’re awake.” Lisa’s voice was a scrape in the dark. “Your fucking eyelids are fluttering.”
Susanna opened them. Lisa was a silhouette against the faint ambient glow from the boarded window, her wild hair a messy halo. Her face was in shadow, but Susanna could feel her gaze.
“You wrote something today,” Lisa said. It wasn’t a question. Her hands came down on either side of Susanna’s head, caging her. “In your little book. After I left you dripping in the library.”
Susanna said nothing. Her heart was a frantic drum against her ribs.
“You think you’re clever.” Lisa lowered herself slowly, until her mouth was a breath from Susanna’s. “You think a few words on a page changes what you are.” She didn’t kiss her. She stayed there, a suspended threat. “What you are is a hungry, fucking empty thing. And I’m the only one who feeds you.”
Then her mouth crashed down. It was not a kiss of passion but of conquest, teeth and demand, a tasting and a claiming all at once. Susanna’s hands came up, not to push away, but to grip Lisa’s bare shoulders, the muscle taut under her palms. Lisa’s tongue forced its way in, and the taste was bitter, ancient.
Lisa’s hand slid between their bodies, her fingers pushing past the elastic of Susanna’s shorts and underwear. She was met with slick, willing heat. Lisa made a sound against her mouth, a guttural, approving noise. “Always so ready. Like a cheap slut.”
She didn’t use her fingers. Instead, she shifted her weight, yanking Susanna’s clothing down her thighs with rough impatience. Then she settled back onto her, skin on skin. She guided herself, positioning her own wet cunt directly over Susanna’s, and began to move.
It was a slow, deliberate grind at first, a maddening friction. Their clits slid together, a swollen, sensitive point of contact that made Susanna arch off the thin mattress. Lisa’s pace was a brutal, controlled rhythm. She rocked against her, using the full weight of her body, her pubic bone creating a perfect, punishing pressure.
“Look at me,” Lisa whispered, her voice ragged. “I want to see your eyes when you break.”
Susanna forced her gaze up, meeting Lisa’s in the gloom. Lisa’s expression was one of fierce, almost painful concentration, her lips parted, her breath coming in short, hot bursts. The raw intimacy of it was more terrifying than the act itself. To be seen so completely in this state of abject want.
“That’s it,” Lisa hissed, grinding down harder, faster. The slick sounds of their bodies filled the space between them, obscene and undeniable. “You’re going to come all over me. You’re going to soak my pussy with yours.”
The coil, tightened all day since the library, snapped. Susanna’s orgasm ripped through her with a force that blurred her vision. A choked, raw sound was torn from her throat, stifled against Lisa’s shoulder as she bit down on the thin fabric of her nightshirt. Her hips pistoned upward, seeking more, more, more of that exquisite friction as she convulsed.
Feeling Susanna come triggered Lisa’s own. Her rhythm shattered into frantic, uneven thrusts. She let out a low, sustained groan, her body locking rigid above Susanna as her own climax took her. Susanna felt the hot flood of her release, mingling with her own, a messy, intimate claim.
Lisa collapsed, a dead weight. She buried her face in the crook of Susanna’s neck, her breath scorching the skin. They lay like that, slick and tangled, the only sound their gradually slowing gasps. The dormitory around them remained a quiet crypt of sleep.
After a long time, Lisa shifted. She lifted her head. Her voice, when it came, was flat, devoid of its earlier venom. It sounded almost tired. “You’re mine.” She said it not as a threat, but as a simple, dreadful fact. “You can write whatever you want. It won’t change that.”
She rolled off, the cot groaning in protest. She stood, a pale ghost in the darkness, and pulled her discarded gown back on. She didn’t look back as she slipped between the rows of beds and disappeared into the hallway.
Susanna lay in the wet wreckage of the sheets. The ache between her legs was a fresh brand. She stared at the water-stain map on the ceiling, but it made no sense now. Her hand crept under the flat pillow, her fingers finding the small, hidden steno pad and a stub of pencil.
She didn’t turn on a light. In the profound dark, guided only by feel, she wrote a single line, the pencil tearing the paper in her urgency.
The feeder is starving.