Chapter 2: Possession's Aftermath: The Hungry Hole
The silence in the studio was no longer empty. It was a physical presence, thick and charged with the echoes of what had just happened. It smelled of sex and linseed oil and fear.
Chris lay on his back, staring at the water stain on the ceiling he’d never noticed before. His body felt like a battleground. The scratches on his chest burned. A deeper, throbbing ache lingered between his legs, a raw testament to the violence of the act. But worse was the hollow feeling in his gut, the psychic residue of that icy, consuming hunger. It had felt like being erased.
A soft, broken sound came from the corner.
Sarah was curled against the wall, knees to her chest, her face buried. Her shoulders hitched with silent, shuddering sobs. The remains of her leggings were twisted around one ankle. She looked small. Devastated.
“Sarah,” Chris said. His voice was sandpaper. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, every muscle protesting.
She flinched at the sound of her name, curling tighter.
He couldn’t just lie there. Logic was a useless, scattered thing, but some base instinct—care, or maybe just the need to not be alone in this—made him move. He found his boxers, pulled them on with stiff movements. He found her a clean rag from her worktable, one stained with gentle ochres and umbers, not the violent crimson currently smeared on his skin.
He approached her slowly, like one would a wounded animal. He knelt, keeping distance. “Hey.”
She didn’t look up.
He placed the rag on the floor beside her leg. “You’re… you’re bleeding,” he said softly. He’d felt it. The brutal, dry friction.
A fresh sob racked her. She shook her head, a desperate, wordless denial of everything.
“It wasn’t you,” he whispered, the realization dawning fully, chilling him more than the studio’s cool air. “That last part. That wasn’t you at all.”
“It was my body,” she choked out, her voice muffled by her knees. “My hands. My… everything. I was there. I was trapped inside, watching through a fucking dirty window. I couldn’t even blink.” She finally lifted her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed, shattered. “I wanted to tear my own skin off.”
He saw it then. Not just horror, but a fundamental violation. Her sanctuary, her studio, her very physical self, had been hijacked. The dice wasn’t just borrowing a personality. It could override. It could puppet.
“We have to get rid of it,” he said, his voice gaining a hard edge. He stood, his gaze locking onto the die where it lay inert on the floorboards. It looked innocent. A child’s forgotten toy. Rage, hot and clean, washed through the hollow ache. He took a step toward it.
“Don’t touch it!” Sarah’s cry was sharp, laced with panic.
He stopped. “Why? Sarah, look what it did!”
“You don’t understand,” she said, wiping viciously at her face. She unfolded herself, wincing as she moved. “When it… when it took over… I saw something. Felt something. It’s not just a switch. It’s a channel. And breaking a channel violently… I don’t know what happens. It could backlash. It could latch onto one of us permanently.” She hugged herself. “It’s not logic, Chris. It’s magic. You can’t debug it.”
Frustration curdled in his chest. He was a problem-solver. This defied all parameters. “So what? We just leave it here? Wait for it to decide to roll again?”
“We contain it.” She stood, moving gingerly. She found her discarded panties, looked at them with disgust, and tossed them into a corner. She pulled her leggings up, her face pale but set with a new, grim determination. The shock was hardening into a brittle shell of focus. She went to a storage cabinet, rummaged, and returned with a small, heavy-gauge steel lockbox, the kind used for toxic pigments. Without ceremony, she used a rag to scoop the die off the floor and drop it inside. The clunk it made was final. She closed the lid, spun the combination lock, and set the box on the highest shelf, next to the jar of cobalt blue.
“There,” she said, brushing her hands together as if wiping off dirt. “Now we talk.”
“Talk about what? The fact that my girlfriend’s best friend just raped me with a magic artifact?” The words hung in the air, brutal and true.
She recoiled as if slapped. The brittle shell cracked. “Don’t,” she whispered.
“It’s true. And you just said it wasn’t you. So what the hell are we supposed to do with that?” He ran a hand through his hair, pulling at the roots. “Do I tell Liz? ‘Hey, your dice made Sarah assault me?’”
“You can’t.” Sarah’s voice was firm now, edged with steel. “Liz gave it to me. She knows what it can do, at least partly. She’s playing with this too, somewhere. If we tell her… it becomes real. It becomes a thing that happened between us. Outside of the magic. It becomes our fault.”
“It is our fault! We played with it!”
“And now we’re dealing with it!” she shot back, her eyes blazing. “Listen to me. That last roll… it was different. The other ones, it felt like putting on a costume. That one felt like being buried alive in my own flesh. The dice is escalating. Or we’re becoming more conductive. We need to understand it before we involve anyone else, especially Liz.”
He hated that her reasoning made a dark, twisted sense. Telling Liz would fracture everything. It would paint them as victims and perpetrators in a story that had no logical framework. How do you explain a magical violation? You sound insane.
He looked at her—really looked. The quiet artist was gone, stripped away by trauma. In her place was someone harder, sharper, vibrating with a desperate need for control. The residue.
“What do you propose?” he asked, defeated.
“We set rules. It stays in the box. We don’t touch it. We… we monitor each other. If we feel anything strange, an impulse that isn’t ours, we say something.” She wrapped her arms around herself again, a self-soothing gesture that seemed futile. “And we never, ever roll it again.”
He nodded slowly. It was a plan. A flimsy dam against a tidal wave, but it was something. The act of agreeing, of creating a protocol, made him feel slightly more anchored.
The tension in the room shifted, thinning from panic into a heavy, exhausted awareness. They were alone. In a room that smelled of their mutual violation. The golden light had faded to deep blue twilight, painting everything in long, melancholy shadows.
His eyes traveled over her. The smudge of charcoal on her cheek. The graceful line of her neck. The way her tank top clung to her ribs as she breathed. The memory of her body, first under his, then on top of him in wild passion, then moving with that terrifying, hollow need—it all cascaded through him at once. His body, traitorously, responded. A low heat stirred in his gut, unrelated to the dice’s magic. This was all him. A confused, fucked-up swirl of adrenaline, residual sensation, and a raw, undeniable pull towards the very person he’d just shared this nightmare with.
She saw it. Her eyes dropped, then flicked back to his face. She didn’t look away. A faint, confusing blush colored her pale cheeks. The air grew thick, charged with a new current.
“Chris,” she said, his name a caution.
“I know,” he breathed. “I know it’s insane.”
But he was already crossing the space between them. This wasn’t the dice. This was the aftermath. The need to overwrite the horror with something chosen. Something human, even if it was messy and wrong.
He stopped in front of her. He didn’t touch her. “Tell me to stop.”
She stared up at him, her quiet intensity now a storm of conflict. Her tongue darted out, wetting her lower lip. She shook her head, just once. A tiny, surrender-like motion.
He kissed her.
It was nothing like before. Not Liz’s aggressive takeover, not the hollow puppet’s violence. This was slow. Tentative. A question. Her lips were soft, trembling slightly under his. She made a small, broken sound in the back of her throat and kissed him back. Her hands came up, not to claw, but to clutch at the sides of his shirt, fisting the fabric as if she were drowning.
The kiss deepened, becoming hungry, but with a human hunger. A need for connection, for proof of existence. His hands slid down her back, over the curve of her ass, and he pulled her tightly against him. He was hard, the pressure a blunt, aching reality against her stomach.
She broke the kiss, gasping. “We can’t,” she whispered, but her hips arched into his.
“We already have,” he murmured against her neck, smelling the jasmine and the sweat and the unique scent of her skin. “This is just us now. Just this.”
He walked her backwards until her hips met the solid edge of her wide drafting table. He swept his arm across it, sending pencils, brushes, and the steel lockbox clattering to the floor in a chaotic crash. The die, contained, was silent.
He lifted her, seating her on the cleared table. She wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him closer, grinding herself against the bulge in his boxers. A sharp, needy gasp escaped her.
“Fuck, Chris,” she breathed, her head falling back.
He tugged her tank top up and over her head, then her bra. Her breasts were small, perfect. He took one nipple into his mouth, sucking hard, using his tongue until she cried out. His hand slid between her legs, over her leggings, palming her. She was hot. Soaking wet. Her own want, a stark contrast to the painful dryness of before.
“Yes,” she hissed, bucking against his hand. “Please.”
He yanked her leggings and underwear down in one rough pull. He freed himself from his boxers, his cock springing out, thick and eager. He guided himself to her entrance, rubbing the head through her slick folds, coating himself in her.
“Look at me,” he said.
Her eyes, dark and wide, locked on his.
He pushed inside.
They both moaned, a synchronized sound of relief and desperation. She was tight, but welcoming, slick and hot, clenching around him instinctively. He filled her slowly, inch by inch, watching her face for any sign of the hollow stare. There was none. Only Sarah, brimming with feeling, her lips parted, her breath coming in short pants.
He began to move. A deep, rocking rhythm. Not the frantic, mindless pounding from before. This was deliberate. Intimate. Each thrust was a reclamation. Her fingernails bit into his shoulders, not drawing blood, but claiming, holding on. He bent her back over the table, changing the angle, driving deeper. The slap of their bodies was a percussive, honest sound.
“Harder,” she pleaded, her voice ragged. “I need to feel you. All of you.”
He obliged, his thrusts becoming more powerful, driving her up the table. Her cries were unfiltered, loud in the quiet studio. “Oh god, right there, don’t stop, don’t ever stop.”
He felt his climax building, a warm, coiling pressure in his balls. He was close. So was she. Her inner muscles were fluttering wildly around him, gripping him like a fist.
“Come with me,” he grunted, slamming into her.
She shattered first. A sharp, wordless cry tore from her throat as her body bowed off the table, her back arching, her cunt pulsing and milking him in rapid, intense waves. The sight of her, lost in a pure, uncomplicated pleasure they had chosen, pushed him over the edge. He buried himself to the hilt, holding her hips down as he erupted, jet after hot jet spilling into her, a primal, possessive release that seemed to go on forever.
He collapsed forward, catching himself on his arms, hovering over her. Their sweat-slicked chests barely touched. Their breaths mingled, ragged and loud.
In the fading blue light, she looked up at him. Her hand came up, trembling, and touched his cheek. It was the gentlest of gestures.
Then her eyes, hazy with pleasure, drifted past his shoulder. They focused. Widened.
Her touch turned to ice on his skin.
“Chris,” she whispered, terror bleaching her voice.
He turned his head to follow her gaze.
On the floor, amidst the scattered pencils, the steel lockbox lay open. The lid was unlatched. The combination lock hung, useless.
The die was not inside.
It sat upright on a discarded sketch, six feet away.
And it was glowing. A faint, sickly green pulse emanating from the spirals carved into its face.