Chapter 23: The Library Aftermath
The smell of turpentine was stuck in her sinuses. It lingered on her skin, in her hair, a chemical ghost from the art room. She scrubbed her hands under scalding water in the third-floor bathroom, but the sensation of cold, ruined clay persisted in the grooves of her palms.
She fled to the library.
It was the only place that felt like it had a ceiling higher than her own thoughts. The oak shelves rose like ancient trees, forming narrow canyons of knowledge and dust. She walked until the muffled sounds of the hospital faded into the soft hum of the building itself—the creak of settling wood, the distant, frantic clatter of a typewriter from the administration office. She found a worn leather armchair tucked into a corner by a window that looked out onto the barred courtyard. She pulled her knees up, making herself small.
The door opened with a soft sigh. Footsteps, light and hesitant, moved between the shelves. Susanna held her breath.
Daisy’s face appeared around a stack of psychiatric journals from the 1950s. Her expression was one of gentle reconnaissance. “Hey,” she said, her voice a low whisper meant for the room. “Saw you bolt out of art. You okay?”
Susanna just shook her head. The motion felt loose, unhinged.
Daisy didn’t ask for permission. She pulled a heavy volume on differential diagnosis from a nearby shelf, sat on the floor beside the armchair, and leaned her shoulder against its worn side. The solidarity was quiet, physical. After a moment, she placed a warm, steady hand on Susanna’s ankle, just above her sock. It was a grounding point. A tether to something humane.
“Janet said your sculpture had a structural failure,” Daisy said, a faint smile in her voice. “Happens to the best of us. My last vase looked like a deflated football.”
Susanna let out a breath that was almost a laugh. It caught in her throat, watery and thin. “It wasn’t the clay,” she managed.
“I know,” Daisy said, her thumb making a small, soothing arc on Susanna’s leg. “It’s okay. You can just sit.”
They stayed like that for minutes, the silence between them comfortable, charged with a fragile trust. Susanna felt the icy knot in her stomach begin, incrementally, to soften. Daisy’s touch was clean. It asked for nothing. It simply was.
The library door swung open again, this time with force. It hit the wall with a dull thud.
Both women flinched. The footsteps that entered were not hesitant. They were a proclamation—sharp, confident heels on polished wood. Clip, clip, clip.
Lisa stopped at the end of their aisle. She was silhouetted against the window light, her wild hair a chaotic halo. She didn’t look at Daisy. Her eyes, two points of reflected grey light, were fixed on Susanna.
“There you are,” Lisa said. Her voice was sweet, singsong, and utterly cold. “We missed you at lunch.”
Daisy’s hand tightened slightly on Susanna’s ankle. “We’re having some quiet time, Lisa.”
“I can see that.” Lisa took a step forward. The air in the aisle thickened. “But I need to borrow my friend. Girl talk. You understand.”
“She doesn’t want to go,” Daisy said, her voice firmer now.
Lisa’s smile widened, showing teeth. She finally flicked her gaze to Daisy. “Mouse, you’re in my light. And you’re touching my property.” Her head tilted. “Hands off the merchandise.”
Before Daisy could respond, Lisa moved. In two swift strides she was upon them. Her hand shot out, fingers like iron talons around Susanna’s forearm. She yanked her up from the chair. Susanna stumbled, her legs numb from being curled so tight.
“Lisa, stop!” Daisy scrambled to her feet.
“Admin call, Daisy,” Lisa snapped without looking back, already pulling Susanna deeper into the labyrinth of shelves. “Don’t you have a med check?”
The world became a blur of leather spines and gold lettering. Lisa dragged her around a corner, into a dead-end stack crowded with outdated pharmaceutical manuals. She shoved Susanna hard against the shelves. A cloud of dust puffed into the air, catching the slatted light.
“I warned you,” Lisa hissed, her face inches away. The sweet veneer was gone, stripped bare to raw fury. “I spelled it out for you in fucking clay. And you let her put her hands on you?”
“She was just—” Susanna’s words died as Lisa’s hand slapped over her mouth, crushing her lips against her teeth.
“Shut up.” Lisa’s other hand went to the waistband of Susanna’s sweatpants, fingers digging into her hip. “Let’s see how comforting she was.” She shoved her hand down, a brutal, searching invasion. She found the dampness there, a wet patch of sheer autonomic fear. Lisa’s eyes glittered with vicious triumph. “You’re sick. You’re so fucking sick. You get wet for this? For me dragging you away from your little savior?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She worked her fingers with a punishing rhythm, a rough, graceless fuck meant to hurt, to imprint. Susanna’s head knocked back against a thick volume of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Second Edition. Stars burst behind her eyes. Shame and a grotesque, unwelcome sensation coiled together, a serpent eating its own tail. Her body, traitorous and conditioned, responded to the violence of the attention.
“You’re mine,” Lisa chanted, a hot, venomous whisper against her ear. “You don’t get to choose quiet. You don’t get to choose kind. You choose this.” She bit Susanna’s earlobe, sharp and mean. “You crave this.”
The orgasm was a rupture. A silent, convulsive seizure that ripped through her with the force of a detonation. Her knees buckled. Only Lisa’s body and the bookshelf held her up. A small, pathetic sound escaped from behind the hand still clamped over her mouth.
Lisa slowed, drew her fingers out. She held them up between their faces, glistening in the dim light. She maintained eye contact as she brought them to her mouth and licked them clean, slowly, with deliberate obscenity.
“Don’t forget it again.”
She released Susanna, letting her slide down the shelf to the floor in a heap. Lisa straightened her own shirt, smoothed her hair. She looked down at Susanna, a curator examining a broken exhibit. Then she turned and walked away, her heels clicking back into silence.
Susanna lay on the cold library floor, curled on her side. The smell of dust and old paper filled her nose. From the other side of the stacks, she heard a faint, questioning call. “Susanna?”
Daisy’s voice. It sounded miles away, across a wide, dark sea. The memory of her hand on an ankle was a small, faded photograph, blurred beyond recognition.
Susanna pulled her sweatpants up. She pressed her forehead against the cool leather of a book spine. She did not answer. She did not move. The only truth left in her world was the throbbing, aching proof between her legs, and the salt taste of her own tears mixing with the taste of Lisa’s skin still on her tongue.