Chapter 7: The Taste of Shame
The door clicked shut, and the thin wood became the only barrier between her and the living room, between her and him. Lily’s shoulders met the painted surface, and she slid down, her back scraping against the grain until she hit the floor. She drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them, making herself small in the dim light of her own sanctuary.
Her heart was a frantic bird in her chest. She pressed her forehead to her knees.
The taste was still there. A layered, stubborn residue on her tongue. Salt, first. That was him. Underneath it, the grim, botanical bitterness of the ash and the crushed mistletoe berries, a foulness that water couldn’t erase. She swallowed against a fresh wave of nausea, but the ghost of the flavor remained, a permanent footnote to the last twenty minutes.
She could still feel the stretch in her jaw. A dull, satisfying ache in the muscles near her temples. The memory of fullness, of straining to accommodate him, flashed in her mind—not as a thought, but as a physical echo. Her body remembered the shape, the weight, the impossible heat.
“Oh, God,” she whispered into the fabric of her leggings.
A separate, sharper heat pulsed between her own legs, a traitorous throb that ignored the screaming chorus of wrong, wrong, wrong in her head. She squeezed her thighs together, a pressure that was meant to suppress but only illuminated. The slickness there was undeniable. A physical fact. Her body had participated, enthusiastically, in the blasphemy.
She could blame the spell. The stupid, dusty ritual from his stupid, dangerous book. It had provided the framework, the excuse. A medical procedure. A metaphysical correction. That’s what she had sold herself, with clinical detachment, as she’d undone the towel.
But the spell hadn’t made her notice the way his stomach muscles tightened when she first touched him. It hadn’t forced her to look up and meet his dazed, helpless eyes as she took him deeper. It certainly hadn’t dictated the flicker of… something… when he’d gasped her name, a sound of pure, unraveling need. That had been all her and her cousin.
A shudder wracked her. Disgust, hot and acidic, rose in her throat, but it was tangled with a thick, confusing cord of arousal that refused to be dismissed. The two feelings braided together, inseparable, making her want to crawl out of her own skin.
She couldn’t sit here. The floor was too hard, the silence from the living room too loud. He was just out there, probably replaying every second. Was he horrified? Triumphant? As confused as she was?
Pushing herself up, her legs unsteady, she stumbled to her bed. The pastel comforter was rumpled from her nap earlier. She fell onto it, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck haphazardly to her ceiling from a decade ago. Their feeble light was gone, just faded stickers.
Her hand moved of its own accord, sliding down the plane of her stomach, under the waistband of her leggings and underwear. Her fingertips found the wetness, and she flinched at her own touch. This was pathetic. This was insane.
But the memory was a loop she couldn’t stop. The weight of him in her hand. The stunned look on his face. The sheer, shocking size of him, something that should have been grotesque but had instead triggered a deep, primal curiosity. How far could she take him? How much could she make him lose control?
Her fingers moved, circling, a rough, frustrated rhythm. She wasn’t seeking pleasure; she was trying to exorcise a feeling. To climax, to clear the static, to reset her nervous system. To prove to herself that it was just a biological glitch, a weird adrenaline dump. She figured this might be the magic at work, making its way out of her system.
She closed her eyes and it was worse. The darkness painted the picture in high definition. The feel of him thickening further in her mouth. The choked sound sshe’d made. The taste.
Her breath hitched. She tried to think of anyone else. A guy from her economics seminar. The barista with the nice smile. Blank faces. Their features blurred, dissolved, and reformed into Ethan’s—his messy hair, his wide, wondering eyes, the sharp line of his jaw clenched in tension.
“No,” she gasped aloud, but her hips lifted off the bed, meeting her own hand.
It wasn’t tender. It was frantic, almost angry. A punishment and a release. She focused on the physical sensation, the building tightness, using it as a battering ram against the images in her head. But the images fought back. The stretch. The gagging. The absolute power of having him so utterly vulnerable, yet feeling, in that final moment when their eyes locked, that he was the one in control. That he’d let her have that.
A sharp cry was muffled into her pillow as the orgasm ripped through her, a short, brutal wave that left her thighs trembling and her mind, for three blessed seconds, utterly blank.
Then the void filled up again, faster, heavier.
She lay there, breathing raggedly, her hand still tucked against herself. The warmth in her stomach from the ritual ingredients seemed to pulse in time with her fading heartbeat. Guilt, now cold and slick, poured into the spaces the arousal had vacated. She’d just gotten off on the memory of giving her cousin a blowjob. There was no spell for that. No dusty book to blame.
She was ruined. Or he was. Or they both were.
Rolling onto her side, she curled into a tight ball. The pragmatic part of her brain, the part that organized her class schedule and balanced her budget, finally kicked in, sounding tired and strained. Okay. You did a weird, fucked-up thing for a weird, fucked-up reason. It’s done. The sample is administered. Now you observe. You see if anything changes. You deal with the fallout like an adult.
But the other part, the part that could still feel the ache in her jaw, whispered: What if it happens again?
Down the hall, the old pipes in the bathroom groaned as the toilet flushed. Ethan. Moving around. Alive in her space. The sound was so ordinary it was terrifying.
Lily pulled the comforter over her head, blocking out the faint light, the stars, the world. The taste in her mouth was fading at last. But the warmth in her belly, that strange, non-digestive heat from the ritual, continued to spread, a subtle, internal glow she couldn’t extinguish. It felt less like a symptom now, and more like a mark.