* give me your hand …

“Things are escalating,” Larissa says, as if describing a weather front rather than a noose. “I won’t debate this with you.”

You do anyway. Of course you do. You tell her you can help. That you’re not a student, not a porcelain figure to be shelved when the ground rumbles. You will not break. You will stand shoulder to shoulder with her and bear the creak of the beams. You say all of it with your mouth and none of it with your eyes, because her eyes make your arguments dissolve into steam. Those eyes are tired. Not in the way sleep cures, but in the way iron tires after it’s held a bridge for decades.

She smiles for you, not the tight show-reel curve she gives the Board, but the private little comma, lowered and genuine.

“You would be a distraction,” she says, finally. “Because I worry for you. Because I would look at you instead of the danger, and that would be… inconvenient.”

Her mouth lingers on inconvenient as if tasting another word and choosing not to say it. Ruinous. Fatal.

You tell her, then, that you’ll go. You tell her, and the telling splits something open in your ribs.

“I’ll call you every night,” you add, as if the promise has any teeth, as if a phone line can hold back the dark.

“Don’t,” she says softly. “Not until it’s settled. I don’t trust the lines. I don’t trust anything that can be listened to.”

You hate the days when she is this person—Principal Weems rather than Larissa. Armored. Gentle because she must be. She steps around the desk, and you catch a flicker of something almost broken in her posture before she straightens it away. “Let me be the one who asks this time,” she murmurs. “Please.”

You should refuse. You should plant your feet and root into the carpet and be impossible. But—and this is the shame that will later haunt you—you are susceptible to the dignities of her. You want to be the thing she can ask. You want to be good for her.

“All right,” you whisper.

“All right,” she echoes, and it isn’t triumph. It’s relief salted with something like grief. She reaches for you then—carefully, always carefully—and your heads incline toward one another like two towers acknowledging wind. Her lips don’t touch yours. You’ve both been so responsible. You ache with how responsible you have been.

Her hand finds the back of your neck and holds there, a pledge against the nape—go. You’ll come back when it’s safe. I’ll keep everything standing until then.

You leave the next morning. The train throws the landscape backward, and every track joint feels like a small verdict. You keep your face against the cold glass because the glass does not require you to be brave, and because the faint reflection there looks like a person who has chosen, rather than a person who has been asked.

The first night away, you do not sleep. You sit in the rented room with its neutral art and its obedient plants, and you write a letter you do not send.

Larissa,

I did as you asked. I hate myself for it and love you for asking. The room is beige. I think the beige is meant to be calming but it feels like a hand over my mouth. Are you safe? I would like proof of you that isn’t a voice in my head.

You fold the letter once, twice, then tear it into strips and line them in a little grave across the kitchen counter. You stand there until the sun elbows up behind the apartments across the street and paints each strip another shade of regret.

Days divide like cells. Phone silent by design. News keeps its teeth tucked in behind courtesies. Your body does its biological basics like an embarrassed animal: you eat, you shower, you move from chair to bed to window to chair again. Sometimes you imagine her in faculty meetings—chin erect, hands folded, a patient queen—but your imagination won’t force its way past a door to show you what she does when the room empties. You suspect she leans once against the desk, hand wide against the wood, eyes shut for five seconds only, the way she rationed vulnerability.

Two weeks, you tell yourself, then three. The word temporary loses meaning. It becomes the spell people use in hospitals when they say “It’s a temporary measure,” and mean “We hope. We’ll see. We don’t know.”

The letter arrives inside another envelope, like a smaller, crueler house within a house. It is all correct nouns and passive verbs. It does not use the word murder. It uses the word funeral. It thanks you for your support. It anticipates, with institutional tenderness, your grief.

You sit on the floor. The body does strange things, you notice. For example, you are cold. For example, you keep saying her name and it sounds less and less like a name, more like a noise a person makes when falling. You fold yourself into the kitchen the way people fold sheets—badly, with the corners uneven. When you stand, you do it because the other option is to remain forever in the two o’clock slot of a clock where time stopped. You book a return trip. You do not so much pack as collect, as if items might be harmed by firmness. You move through your tasks with the reverence reserved for walking past sleeping animals.

The funeral is a choreography of solemn efficiencies. Nevermore wears grief well, it has practice. Black cloth behaves itself. Chairs align. The sky notices what’s expected and obliges with iron clouds, a few tidy gusts. There are lilies, which you hate—how arrogant they are with your oxygen while smelling like hospitals. You stand where you are told. Your hands perform clasp. Your face performs listening. People you have known in passing hold your elbow as if your bones have turned to river and they are building little dams.

You do not weep during the eulogies. There is a perversity in you that refuses witnesses. It is only later, when the last careful voice has concluded and the collective throat has cleared, when someone has spoken of legacy in that tone that imagines it is kind, that the weeping comes. Not theatrical. Not even visible, really. It happens like a leak inside a wall. Everything feels damp afterward.

You go to her office. You have no right to, but this is one of those days when right bends under love. The door is heavy. The room smells the same. The ordinary betrayals are lined up politely—pens, files, a small glass paperweight with a bubble of air inside. The stained glass has clawed a little colour across the floor still, as if nothing essential has been informed. You stand at her desk and put your fingertips in the same places her fingertips lived, and the warmth of the ghost of that gesture is so convincing you feel briefly steadied. A chair. Her chair. You do not sit in it. Her chair is a reliquary and you have no relic to place in it. You leave with nothing. You leave with everything she didn’t.

The weeks after are both crowded and empty. People bring you casseroles as if sadness can be suffocated by pasta. They invite you to sit with them and smile the particular smiles of people who have rounded a bend you have not yet found. You nod so as not to grow feral in their kitchens. You hold your breath when they say her name like a fragile thing. The nights are battlegrounds. You find yourself sitting on the floor between two rooms because picking a room feels like betrayal. The kitchen implies appetite, the bedroom implies sleep—both are insults to the dead.

The first time she says your name, you’re standing at the sink, hands in the dishwater. The window shows you the black idea of trees and the geometry of neighboring windows. You think—that’s odd, because she is dead, and then: you’ll have to stop this, and then: what if you don’t.

“Don’t,” the voice says, not unkindly. “You’ve enough wars without declaring one on yourself.”

You do not turn. You dry your hands instead. You tell yourself—because your sanity is greedy, because you have seen itself clamor for precedence at the oddest moments—that you will acknowledge the voice without indulging it. You will be… what? Polite. You have always been polite with Larissa Weems.

“Hello,” you say softly to the window. “You’re late.”

“You asked me to be careful,” she answers. If a voice can open a door, this one opens all the doors in you. “I took my time.”

Turning is not a decision so much as an inevitability. She stands by the dining chair, hand resting on its back as if anchoring to furniture as she always did to avoid showing nerves. Her hair is a pale standard. Her mouth is the exact same problem as the day you left. She is dressed in one of those suits that made you feel unexpectedly safe, silly in its formality yet perfect because it armored what must be protected without crushing the delicate part of her. The suit is grey. She looks like she has walked in from a day that involved deadlines and choices and terrible tea.

“Larissa,” you breathe, and hear yourself sounding childlike.

She smiles. Not the formal one, not even the private one, but something you’ve never seen, a middle state like a window latched but uncurtained. “It’s me.”

“Don’t do that,” you say, because your body has found an anger and it needs to be used. “Don’t say it like it’s uncomplicated.”

“It isn’t,” she allows. She crosses to you. There is no sound of heels on hardwood—odd. You note the oddness and put it now where you put the lilies from the funeral. “I wasn’t given the option of uncomplicated. But I am here. That is what matters.”

You want to touch her and you are also frightened to touch her. You reach out because that is what you would do if she were alive, and because denial is a luxury you can no longer afford. Your hand meets her forearm, cool and firm, and the gasp that leaves you is animal. She is solid. She is made of the opposite of fog. You put your forehead against her shoulder like a person in a church finding the exact place on the pew worn smooth by other people’s pleading. The smell is right. How is the smell right.

“Tell me what you are,” you say into the cloth. Your voice sounds brave in the way breaking does.

She is quiet for a time.

“A guide,” she says at last, choosing the neutral word. “Call it whatever you like.”

You choose to let her into your days because it would be cruel to let your days keep out the person they were arranged for. Mornings, she stands by the kettle and makes notations on the travel section of the paper, as if any of those cities could be reached by any train you would dare to board again. She doesn’t drink tea, though. She says she doesn’t need it now, and you file that in a drawer labeled Later. She watches you toast bread as if the practice of living is a small tender animal she’s defending from hawks.

In public, she is an exercise in discretion. She angles herself behind you, so to anyone else it looks like you’re listening to a memory rather than conducting a new conversation. At the grocer’s, you hear her voice beside the lemons—not that one. You pick another. Better. The clerk gives you the look clerks give to people who have paid exact change and added a twenty for sorrow. You thank everyone too much. Larissa kisses the air near your hairline when you’ve escaped back onto the street, pleased at your continued success at being among the living.

At night, she sits in the chair by the window and reads the books you loved and never told her about, and you understand that she knew anyway. Sometimes you forget what you’re doing and slide a second pillow to the far side of the bed. It remains unindented in a way that feels like an accusation.

People begin to notice. The barista, a woman with a window-cleaning smile, asks if you’d like the “usual” one morning and then, with a soft curiosity she tries to disguise as courtesy, asks if you’d like a second for your “friend.” You should say no. You say yes. You set the second cup on the table across from you. Larissa cradles it in both hands, not drinking, and says thank you as if she is warming more than her fingers.

You talk to her without the carefulness you had when she was alive. You tell her about the nightmares where the hallways become lungs that breathe you backward. You tell her about stupid magazines using the word closure as if grief were a door you could simply shut and walk away from. She listens so well you hate her a little for it. She gives advice—nothing grand, just instructions to put your shoes on and walk to the corner and come back, to add more salt to the soup, to return the overdue library book because the idea of debt has begun to scratch at your skin. Her guidance is small, human, relentless. You accustom yourself to being cared for by someone who is not alive.

When you ask her about the days you were gone, she is vague the way fog is vague, the way kindness is. “I managed,” she says. “I made what peace I could with the inevitable.”

“You were poisoned,” you say bluntly, because tenderness feels like a cheat.

“I was,” she says with a softness that is not concession. “It was very quiet, in the end. Quieter than I deserved.”

You start to keep track of the way light moves around her. It stutters there, slightly. It behaves as if it has been asked to pretend something it knows is not true. You tell yourself that scientists do not know everything about light. You tell yourself many things.

Sometimes she disappears for hours and returns when you are on the verge of calling no one. When she reappears, she has no smell of air on her clothes, no imprint of bench on the back of her skirt. “I was with you,” she says when you ask where she was. “Just somewhere you weren’t looking.” You nod, because what else is there to do.

You bring her to the cemetery because you believe in calling a thing by its name. Larissa stands at her own grave with an expression that is neither vanity nor horror. It is administrative. “They did well,” she murmurs, looking at the stone as if marking a report. “Simple. Clean.”

“I couldn’t speak,” you say, and then, because there are no witnesses here to require your composed face, your mouth shakes. “At the funeral. I thought I would say something worthy and my mouth—” You make a small helpless motion with your hand.

“You were there,” she says, with that firm kindness you loved, the kind that could erect a building out of shame. “That was the only part that mattered.”

“Larissa,” you say, and the name is a held note. “I left you.”

“You did exactly as I asked.” She turns, not touching you, but aligning her shoulder with yours. “If you’d stayed, I would have watched you die. Do you think I would willingly do that?”

“I would have preferred it,” you say, shocked by your own cruelty to yourself.

She is silent. A bird chirps on a branch over you. The world is insultingly competent at moving on. “We do not always get to arrange our endings,” she says at last. “You know that.”

It is a long time before you admit to yourself that she never contradicts you. It is longer before you admit she never says anything you do not already know. It is much longer before you stand at the sink again, hands in dishwater again, and say out loud, “Tell me something I don’t know.”

She’s at the table, folding your utility bills into a square stack, making order because she knows what a kindness order is to you. She looks up, amused. “You are owed a refund for overpaying the water last winter.”

“I knew that,” you say, even though you didn’t, even though you could have. A person can know a thing and not know they know it. There is no victory in this.

“Try me again,” she says, indulgent as if you are a student who has decided to be difficult in a harmless way.

“Tell me who knocked on the door Tuesday night when I didn’t answer.”

“No one,” she says immediately. “You imagined it.”

She is correct. Your mouth goes dry.

You take to rehearsing questions in the shower, where your head has always been uncommonly honest. You prepare traps you feel silly for preparing. The next time, at the grocery, you stop by the flower buckets. “What is the name of this?” you ask, pointing at a spray of small starry blossoms you have never cared to learn.

She opens her mouth and closes it. She smiles, composed. “Does it matter?” she counters.

You put the flowers in the cart because admitting a test feels like betrayal and because they are very lovely and because you hate lilies and these are definitively not lilies. Later, at home, you look them up. Waxflower, the internet tells you, with the solemnity of an oracle. You sit with the word wax in your mouth, thinking of grief candles people burn until the room smells like church.

The neighbor’s kid—short, serious, wearing a blanket like a cape—catches you on the stairs one afternoon and announces, as children do without tact and blessed with accuracy, “You talk to yourself a lot. Is that how grown-ups practice?”

“Something like that,” you say, and your voice is cheerful in a way that will cost you later.

“We have a ghost,” the kid confides, pleased. “She stands outside the laundry room and cries because her socks are all gone.”

“It isn’t always socks,” you tell him, and he nods with the gravity of a congressman.

At night, Larissa sits in the window chair as always. “Don’t let them worry you,” she says, meaning the neighbors, meaning disapproval, meaning the grinding mill of social assumption. “There are worse things than talking to yourself.”

“What would you know about worse things,” you say, and it is ugly. You mean to apologize immediately, she does not allow it.

“Enough,” she says, and the word lands in the room with a weight that stuns you quiet. “You do not have to keep inventing punishments just because none of the ones life provided have satisfied you.”

“I left you,” you say again, like a repentance the priest refuses to accept.

“And I asked you to.” She exhales, a rehearsed breath, the kind she used in meetings when someone ignorant and powerful needed to be reframed. “I chose to be where I was. You chose to honor that choice. Do not confuse obedience with abandonment just because your body wants a villain and will accept yourself if no one else applies.”

She has never been this sharp with you. Perhaps you asked for it. Perhaps you wanted the sting to prove there was nerve. You sit in the quiet after like afterlight, like a storm has passed and left the room smelling of penny and electricity.

She is right, you think. Not angrily, like noting that the sky is there when you look up. That doesn’t change anything about the ache. It just gives it better company.

You dream of the office often. You dream of the stack of papers, obedient as pets. You dream of her hand in the doorframe. In the dream, sometimes the doorframe is the frame of your body, and she holds there to steady herself as she enters. In the dream, you never say the thing you wanted to say—stay with me, even if I make you worse. In the morning, you buy a cheap pen that looks like the ones on her desk and discover how quickly cheap blue ink runs when exposed to salt water.

Spring arrives in the way spring arrives in places that resent it—reluctantly. The pear trees wear bridal veils for a week and then spill them into the gutters. You find yourself doing practical errands with an efficiency that would have made autumn-you suspicious. You return the library book. You vacuum behind the couch. You say yes when a friend arms you with a damp rag and points to her kitchen grout. Larissa approves all of this with a tilt of her chin that means carry on. She has always loved a capable person. She especially loves when you’re doing capability on your own behalf.

You stop setting the extra pillow at night without deciding to. The cup across from yours at the café remains on the shelf. The first time you do this, you ache the way an amputated limb aches—genuine pain from a ghost cause. You do it again anyway. Visible rituals, it turns out, can be mastered.

And then, a day so ordinary you would not recognize it if it weren’t for the fact that it is the day you stop pretending.

You are sorting a drawer. The kind of drawer that becomes over time a museum of the things you did not want to decide about—rubber bands turned to shells, stamps with wrong denominations, one earring you swore you would find the other of, keys that open doors to lives you do not lead. Larissa is sitting on the floor with her knees in an unladylike angle, sorting paperclips by species. She looks, absurdly, like she belongs in this exact domestic indignity.

You say, without looking at her, “What did I wear the day I left?”

It is such a small thing—smaller than waxflower, smaller than water bills. You have not, at any point, described this detail to her. You would have, had she asked. She did not ask. The memory is yours alone. A ridiculous red scarf, the one you bought because it was on sale, corner snagged on a door handle as you went, the way you refused to think of it as an omen because you were tired of the world offering you crude metaphors.

She is silent long enough for your hands to become very still. “Your red scarf,” she says at last, and the sentence lands on the floor between you like a ring you’ve found behind a radiator: valuable, warmed by absence, wrong in its timing.

“You’re not supposed to know,” you say, barely a breath.

“You looked beautiful,” she says, stubborn with kindness, and you understand suddenly, exactly, horribly: she will never give you information that was not already in you. She will never hazard a guess that risks being incorrect. She will never surprise you. Because she is you.

The room becomes a kind of underwater. You want very much to be cruel to her, to accuse, to tear. But the knowledge doesn’t come as betrayal. It comes like a shoulder at your back. Of course, you think. Of course. You have been speaking to your own mouth in her timbre, arranging your survival in her posture, because you needed to survive and you needed to believe she would approve.

You put your hands on the edge of the drawer and breathe, slowly, evenly, because this is a thing breathing can handle if you give it the instructions. You sit back on your heels. You look at her—at the idea of her, at the architecture the mind throws up around a hole.

“I made you,” you say, as gently as you can say a sentence like that. “Didn’t I.”

She looks at you as if you have asked whether water is wet. “Of course you did,” she says, and the relief in her voice is almost funny. “You did the only thing left to do.”

Tears now—finally—because now they are not a performance for a crowd or a stubborn refusal alone in a kitchen. They are something like gratitude finding an exit wound. They are, inconveniently, loud. You press the heel of your hand to your mouth and laugh, because what else is there to do, and the laugh wedges itself into the crying and makes a small animal noise you will never reproduce on purpose.

“I don’t want you to go,” you confess, and there it is, the humiliation you’ve been preparing to endure. “I don’t want to live in a house where you are a coat I’ve hung by the door and cannot wear.”

“Then keep me,” she says, and it is so tender you look away because looking is indecent. “Keep what you need. Let go of what I don’t want you to carry anymore.”

“What do you not want me to carry,” you ask, bitter, loving, ruined.

“The part where you think you left me,” she says immediately. “The part where you rewrite the story to make yourself the engine of my ending, because at least then the hurt has a shape you can draw around yourself. I asked you to leave. You honored me. Don’t make my choice into your punishment.”

This is the speech you would have given someone else a year ago, you think. You were always better at loving outward. You crawl across the floor, inelegant, and put your head in her lap because your body remembers what comfort feels like even if your mind thinks it doesn’t deserve it. She strokes your hair. Her hand feels cool, real, impossible, yours.

“How does this work,” you ask, as practical as a committee. “If you’re me.”

She laughs—a small silver sound you invented because you needed to hear it. “We keep being honest until it’s quiet enough.”

“And then?”

“And then you’ll be able to sit in your own kitchen without constructing a witness. And I’ll be in the chair, yes, and I’ll be in the drawer you finally organize, and I’ll be in the way you insist on exact change, and I’ll be in the part of your spine that straightens when you are asked to be more than you thought you could be.” The hand in your hair pauses. “I will be a guide because I always was, not because I am a ghost.”

“People will still think I’m talking to myself,” you say, half a smile, half a wound.

“They are not wrong,” she says, pleased. “And it is not a shame.”

You cry until the crying is boring even to you. You wash your face. You make tea. You put the drawer back together with a stubborn kind of affection for every useless key. She sits in the chair and watches you move around the kitchen, which you have never loved and suddenly can—because love is permitted when you are the one doing the permitting.

That night, you do set the extra pillow, not because you need the outline, but because you like a full bed. You sleep. The dreams are unremarkable—the dreadful kindness of ordinary sleep. Morning arrives with the modesty of a clerk. You brew coffee you do not actually like but have again decided to like for its meanness and heat. You take a walk before your nerves invent reasons not to. The pear trees have become leaves. Children on scooters widen the perimeter of your patience and then close it again with a wave.

You go to Nevermore once more, not to raid the reliquaries, but to sit on a bench and do nothing in particular close to the place she kept upright by sheer force of posture. The building, being a building, does not confess. It casts its cool shadow and mind its symmetrical business. You consider how you will live now that you have stopped hiding your reliance on the living part of a dead woman.

Larissa—your Larissa, the one built of your guilt and your love and her real voice collected from every memory—sits beside you, hands folded like a prayer that has nothing to do with begging. You don’t need her to tell you to breathe. You do anyway. She doesn’t need to tell you to forgive yourself. You begin, not as a proclamation but as a daily, sloppy task—like flossing, like taking out the bins.

“You’ll stay?” you ask. It feels childish and brave at once.

“I’ll stay,” she says. “Differently. Quieter. But I’ll remain where you keep me.”

“And if I stop needing you,” you venture, and your throat remembers the feeling of falling.

She turns her head, that modest little tilt that meant I’m listening, darling, go on, and the word darling does not make you flinch. “Then you’ll have proven me right,” she says. “That I loved someone who could learn to love herself in the ways I couldn’t teach while I was busy keeping the building from collapsing.”

You sit in that. In the bench. In the air that no longer feels like punishment.

Later, you make a small list on the back of an old flier:

— return Mrs. L’s casserole dish (write thank-you card)
— call the plumber about the slow sink (you can ask for help)
— go to the grave on Sunday with flowers you like (no lilies)
— buy waxflower if they have it

You tuck the list into the drawer that once kept the keys to your old life. You do it with the solemn hilarity of a person inaugurating a new country no one else has to recognize. You pour two cups of tea and set one on the table across from you, then move it back to the counter without apology. You speak out loud when you want to hear what you think. You are quiet when quiet feels generous.

Nights are still tricky. They probably always will be. Sometimes you feel the old compulsion—the urge to perform your courage for the audience of a woman who is not here and is also the exact shape of home. On those nights, you sit in the chair by the window and let the city do the talking. Larissa sits—inside you, because that is the truest location—and says nothing you don’t already know. Which is, you realize, almost everything you need.

Weeks later, you go to the café where the barista asked about your “friend.” The bell above the door is a small, ridiculous symbol of welcome. You order one coffee. The barista, expert in grief, does not remark on the subtraction. You take your cup to a table and you do something new, you leave the second chair empty and do not feel accused by it. When the window shows you your shape, it looks neither halved nor swollen by absence. It looks like a person who made a choice because someone she loved asked her to.

A child runs past outside and catches at his mother’s sleeve. “Her,” he says, pointing without shyness. “The lady who talks to ghosts.”

You smile into your coffee. You do talk to ghosts. You talk to one ghost in particular, and now you know her other name—mercy.

On your way home, you stop by the grocer’s. There are, absurdly, lilies. You buy waxflower instead. The clerk wraps them in brown paper that whispers against your wrist. You carry them upstairs and put them in a jar on the table you used to set two cups on. They make the room smell faintly of clean, green thoughts.

Before you turn for the evening, you stand in the doorway—your doorway—and place your palm against the frame as if it were the frame of an office far more elegant, far more encumbered. “Goodnight,” you say, the way you used to when you had to be formal, and then, because you have earned the extravagance of informality, “Stay.”

She does, in the way that matters. She stays as a better posture. As a better appetite. As the private comma of a smile you now practice in the mirror without shame. As a guide whose instructions are simple and rude and holy: eat, sleep, forgive, call back, say no, say yes, put the pillow where you want it, send the letter or tear it into strips—you are the only god of this kitchen, buy the flowers you like.

When you blow out the candle, the room goes properly dark. Not cruel, not consoling. Just true. You climb into bed and feel, for the first unstartled time, the spaciousness of a life you are permitted to learn how to fill. The silence is not empty. It rustles with a clever woman’s satisfied approval.

In the morning, you will make a list again. You will fail at parts of it and forgive yourself for sport. When you forget, a voice you have chosen and earned will clear its throat softly, and you will listen—not because ghosts are real, but because love is, and because guilt, once it has been named and relieved of counterfeit authority, is only what it ever was: the shadow cast by care when the light shifts.

You sleep. Somewhere in the complicated geography of you, Larissa reaches for your hand the way a lighthouse reaches—the gesture already inside the night, already accounted for, already part of the map. And when your fingers close around nothing, you feel, instead of loss, the pure shock of recognition.

————————————————————————

Larissa’s passing was hard on you. As your coworkers and students quickly moved on with their lives after the incident last spring, you felt as though a part of your heart had shattered.

Larissa Weems had shown you kindness and respect, and behind her intimidating demeanor, you discovered a gentle, caring soul. 

She rarely let anyone close, you had been a rare exception. When she passed, there were so many words left unsaid, and your heart felt heavy at the thought that you would never get the opportunity to tell her how you felt.

Then, the new school year began, and Barry Dort walked into Nevermore and erased all traces that Larissa had even existed. She gave her life for the school, died protecting her students, and in thanks, her memory was swept under the rug.

You loathed Barry Dort. Larissa had deserved more respect. 

As Día De Los Muertos approached, you had taken great care into planning a shrine for the late headmistress. You may not have told Larissa how you felt in the world of the living, but the idea that maybe her spirit would see that how much you cared brought you a sense of comfort. 

Tucked away in the corner of the courtyard, you set out her portrait, lit a few tea candles and burned incense. You left her an offering of chocolates, water, salt, flowers, and, though it felt childish, a small plush bat. You thought she might appreciate the lightheartedness of it. 

Barry Dort saw your shrine and frowned. He began to approach you, but changed his mind after you glared at him. You would not allow him to mess this up for you. You wouldn’t let him desecrate her memory more than he already had.

“You’re the only person who remembered.” 

You were startled from your thoughts. You turned around and were met with Wednesday Addams. 

“I could never forget her.” You said, quietly. “I can’t believe that no one else seems to care.”

“She appreciates it. Just so you know. She really likes the bat.” Wednesday said. 

“Wait…what?” A chill ran down your spine. You knew Wednesday was a medium, but was she really saying she could see Larissa's ghost?

“She said she’s sorry, that you never got to talk. But that she cared, still cares, very deeply and wishes she had gotten the courage to tell you her true feelings before she died.” Wednesday continued. She then turned to look behind her and spoke. “This is disgusting, why don’t you get a Ouija board and tell her yourself?...Ugh, you’re just as insufferably sentimental as my mother.” 

“Miss Addams, are you…can you see her?” You asked.

Wednesday just looked at you, blankly, and shrugged.

“Find a way to continue this without me. This sweetness is making me sick to my stomach.” Wednesday said. “I plan to add her picture to my own shrine. Thanks for remembering her.”

“Miss Addam I- shit.” You watched her walk away, stunned at the revelation. Could she really see Larissa? 

As an unnaturally chilly breeze passed through you, you could swear, for a moment, you could smell the familiar floral scent of Larissa’s perfume. 

A smile prods at your lips as you turn away from the window and further into your classroom with the intention of setting up for your last class of the day. You’d originally planned to guide them through a review period for an exam next week, but with the state of the sky and the weekend finally here, you decide a film might instead be just what everyone needs; you can afford to push the exam back another day, and really, they’ll be gunning for extra time where they can get it anyway. You know your students well enough.

When the kids begin filing in, you delegate tasks without explanation, the room abuzz as you instruct one student to close the blinds and a few others to adjust the desks just so. You catch a glimpse of the world down below before the windows cover up: Steady flurries still, but nothing that worries you. The kids’ thrill at spending the period in relaxation when you reveal your plan to them is enough to distract from any further thoughts on the weather, anyhow.

The hour passes swiftly as you sit in the back grading papers, every so often glancing up to take stock of the room. Everyone files out just as fast at the sound of the bell and calls out wishes for a good weekend while you’re left to rearrange the room back into its original state. You take care of the desks first, pack your own items up, decide to leave the windows for Monday since it’s dark out by now, no longer any ribbons of light sneaking through the cracks where the blinds don’t quite meet glass. A nice bottle of wine, a fire, maybe a few candles and a good book… the night is promising, and you run through a mental checklist of how many comfort items and practices you can employ as you wander down to the front entrance, bundled up tightly in your coat to brave the cold.

But when you reach the landing of the long staircase, the sight that greets you is not promising in the slightest: the outer floodlights cast a muted glow over what had been a harmless shower of snow, now furious gusts of heavy flakes collecting faster than your brain can entertain. There has to be at least a couple inches out there already, and the realization that you’ll have to navigate through the winding, hilly roads of Vermont in the middle of this elicits a groan. The treeline is hardly visible amidst the dark and the snow, and the roads are likely no better off: the town tends to skirt right around Nevermore when salting the streets. This drive’ll be a perilous one at best.

“Absolutely not.” The sound of Larissa’s disapproval startles you into a sharp and over-dramatic gasp, every muscle of yours tensing at once when her voice comes from just behind you. 

“Jesus, you scared me! ‘Absolutely not’ what?” You turn to her with features marred by confusion - once the surprise has melted away - and tilt your head up, taking a small step back to balance yourself when you realize how close she is. She looms over you in a way only she can: regal and overwhelming–––yet cordial all the same, offset by the soft floralness of her perfume. The fact that she’d reached you there without a sound would likely be unsettling if it were anyone else. With her it’s just… attractive, the slyness of it all. The mischievous grin she bares in response to how you jump doesn’t help.

“There is absolutely no chance I’m letting you drive in that.” This elicits an incredulous scoff as you peer up at her, arms lifting at your sides like a pair of very exasperated, very amused wings.

“Letting me? What am I supposed to do? Break my back sleeping on the floor of the library? No thanks.”

“Don’t be silly,” Larissa tsks, pressing her lips together in an all too familiar demonstration of thought. She’s quick with her next words, though, and something tells you there wasn’t much thought to be given at all. “You’ll stay with me.”

The firmness with which she says this, the matter-of-fact tone that has always so easily slid off her tongue, leaves no room for discussion. You gape at her but Larissa’s already swiveling on her heel and walking in the direction of her office as though it’s been decided once and for all, no questions asked. She throws a crooked finger over her shoulder and gestures for you to follow, the sound of her heels now echoing through the mostly-empty halls.

You wonder, frivolously, how in the hell you didn’t hear her the first time around.

You rush after her with quick steps in an effort to keep up; Larissa’s long, unhesitating strides carry her farther and faster than you can move without some effort. The view of her backside, however, is not one that merits complaint. You follow the curve of it up until you come upon a landing you’re not familiar with, nearly knocking into Larissa when she halts abruptly and turns towards you for the first time since this little journey began. She looks almost unsure of herself now, eyes flitting about rather than meeting yours. It’s one thing, you know, to flirt in passing; to brush arms when you’re both chaperoning students in Jericho; to trade amused, knowing glances across faculty meetings. But it’s another to invite you into her sanctuary, a decisive and loaded crossing of one of the last lines between the two of you.

“If you’d prefer, I believe there’s an empty dorm room I can have made up for you. It’d be no problem.” She finally looks down at you long enough for you to read what’s going on behind that mask of hers, typically pristine and perhaps a touch righteous: she’s trying to give you an out, trying to relinquish control for a second before she commandeers your night, and she’s worried she’s already gone too far by bringing you up here in the first place.

But you’re not going to say no to a night at Larissa’s side, especially when the potential for a warm fire and a glass of wine or two is so high.

Especially when it’s her asking.

“No, it’s alright. Unless you’ve changed your mind?”

“Not at all,” she’s quick to blurt out, shaking her head. “I simply wanted to make sure you knew you had the option, that’s all.”

With that, Larissa turns again and begins the ascent to what you assume is her hall–––until you’ve reached another landing with only one door, and she pushes it open to reveal an entire apartment all her own. It’s very her, this place: Warm, shining, elegant. The living room is awash with low, simmering lights, furnished with a mix of dark leather and velour, a towering bookcase taking up the whole of one of the far walls with an accompanying reading nook. She walks you further into the threshold and eases the door closed behind you, hovering silently as you take the space in. There are a few framed art pieces that you promise yourself you’ll review more thoroughly later on, scattered vases of flowers and various, high-hanging mirrors.

What truly draws your attention, however, are the photos strategically lining the walls, clearly taken at various points in Larissa’s life: A small platinum-blonde girl carefully posed before a Christmas tree with two very proper looking hounds on either side of her, all very regal and staged except for the wide, nose-crinkling grin on the girl’s face; a beach trip with the same girl, slightly older now, arm thrown over her face as she squints against the sun and into the camera - and a pair of kids that look to be around her age chase each other in the background; teenage Larissa suited up and on horseback, smiling proudly as a judge strings a blue ribbon around the horse’s halter; graduation photos from Nevermore; a trip to the Scottish Highlands, it looks like, a twenty-something Larissa soaked to the bone but grinning out at the miles and miles of luscious greens like she couldn’t be bothered less by the weather. It’s the most you’ve ever seen of her.

Eventually Larissa brushes behind you, laying a hand at your waist in passing as she toes off her heels and begins the process of lighting the fireplace.

Her touch leaves an emphatic tingle in its wake.

“I didn’t think my wall was that particularly exciting,” she muses, glancing over her shoulder at you. You duck your head and turn from the wall, following her lead as you slip out of your shoes and place them next to her own.

“I always like to see what people were like before I knew them. It’s intimate.” Larissa’s gaze softens almost imperceptibly before she returns her attention to the fire, adjusting the logs one last time and replacing the latch on the brass screen.

“What do they tell you, those pictures?” She wipes her hands and comes to rest against the edge of a couch, gazing at you as you shift on your feet and consider her question. Her eyes remain soft, but there’s something else lurking there behind the blue now: Curiosity? Interest? Desire, even? You can’t read it for sure, so you clear your throat and move back to the photographs on her wall, crossing your arms over yourself.

“Well, .. this one,” you start, gesturing towards the Christmas tree, “screams rich.” Larissa snorts loudly and tilts her head in a way that says you’re not wrong. “Probably an only child - at least at the time, otherwise there’d be other kids with you.” Her smile gives nothing away this time, but you charge ahead, brushing your fingers against the frame that holds the beach between its borders.

“This isn’t an American beach, that much I know.” You choose not to elaborate, allowing your ‘Americanness’ to speak for itself. “But I can’t tell if you grew up going there or if it was a special vacation, maybe visiting family… ?” you trail off as your gaze drifts over to her questioningly. She just shrugs, and you click your teeth in mock disapproval before moving on.

“You look happy here,” you observe, allowing your hand to drift over the photo of Larissa in her English riding gear. “Unforced. You enjoyed competing, maybe preferred your horse to people.” This one might be an unfair deduction, supplemented by your understanding of how cruel kids can be–––especially to an outcast, especially to a 6’3” girl.

“The Duke,” Larissa pitches in, pushing up off the couch’s back to join just behind your shoulder, gazing over at the photo in question. “My mother hated the name, but I insisted. He was a gift for my fifteenth birthday,” she reminisces, breath coursing over the tip of your ear. You peer up at her as she smiles, something sad and regretful there before she sucks in a deep breath and points out a new photo to you, more recent by the looks of it: Larissa stands with a large group of students in their Nevermore uniforms, mid-laugh as one of the kids waves his hands wildly and another has their mouth agape in what looks to be protest. Her eyes are crinkled - genuine - and one of her hands seems to be in the process of making its way up to cover her mouth, the other mindlessly resting at her midsection. You know that laugh. It’s her most uninhibited, her most authentic, which only comes out when she’s caught completely off-guard. Your favorite, if you’re honest.

“My first class of students as principal of Nevermore,” Larissa offers, scrunching her nose happily at the memory.

“What’d he say? That student?” You’re part genuine curiosity and part selfishness: eager to know what made her laugh like that, and how you can take hold of that kid’s humor and use it for yourself, elicit a look like that, a laugh like that, which so rarely comes about during school hours.

“I wish I could remember,” she murmurs, taking one last look before clasping her hands together and shocking you out of the reverie. “But nevermind all that. Have you eaten dinner yet?”

You nod sheepishly, nearly apologetic knowing she likely hasn’t and is looking to be a good hostess. But she merely nods, looking relieved: “Oh good, I can’t be bothered to cook tonight,” Larissa admits, a teasing grin stretching from ear to ear. 

“Let me show you where everything is, then.” She guides you down the hall and nudges one of the doors open, gesturing with an open palm. “Here’s the bathroom. Extra amenities are in the second drawer there, towels in the closet.” The suite is nicer than any bathroom you’ve ever had, really the stuff of luxury hotels: white marble floors, a deep soaking tub, gold knobs and handles on almost every appliance. You’ve no choice but to forcefully shoo away the startling, indecent imaginings that break through your reserves of Larissa sinking deep into the lush bubbles of the tub, skin glistening, chest bare––––

“Heated floors, too. I never go cold in the winters.” Ever humble, Larissa pulls at your shoulder gently and switches the light off, directing you to another door just diagonal of the bathroom. When she swings the door open, you’re embarrassingly aware of the way your jaw drops.

“Bedroom’s this way,” she says, stepping into the space. It’s gorgeous, swooping drapes of dark ruby and gold, satin bedding that pools over the mattress and onto the floor, puddles of fabric against a thick persian rug. There’s another fireplace opposite the bed, an area farther off with another scaling bookcase and two large, well-worn armchairs, a small number of intricately designed table and floor lamps, a matching vanity and armoire, the former of which is careful, lived-in chaos with its scattered tubes of lipstick and skin care tinctures.

It’s Larissa.

“Wow,” you breathe, meeting her amused gaze. “You never mentioned you live like this. I would’ve taken you up on a sleepover much sooner if I’d known.” Larissa flushes and coughs out a coy laugh, smoothing a hand over her hair as she looks out across the room.

“Yes, well. You’re here now.” She reaches out and lifts your handbag from you, pulling at your coat lapel next to signal you should take it off. Once you do, Larissa hangs it along one of the walls and places your bag on her vanity. Busy work. “I have clothes you can borrow of course, though they may be a bit big. I’ll set them out, although,” she pauses, glancing at her bedside clock, “it’s early still… Up for a movie? Glass of wine?”

You’re almost - almost - embarrassed by the unrestrained nodding of your head, but hell, it’s been a long week, and relaxing with a bottle of wine sounds like the perfect reward for making it through without breaking down [in front of your students]. The fact that it’s Larissa’s personal wine, in her personal quarters, in her personal hands does nothing to lessen the appeal.

The question of where Larissa will sleep, if showing you the bedroom was her way of offering it to you, hangs in your head, but you decide the answer can wait until the time for sleep comes around. By no means are you going to allow Larissa to banish herself to the couch in her own home. You’d sooner take the floor–––even if you’d jokingly complained about that very same concept earlier in the hour.

“Do you have a preferred genre?” She asks as you both return to the living room, you perching on the sofa as she disappears into what you assume is the kitchen to fetch the wine. It’s not normally a loaded question, nor one worth considering too deeply, but you realize you have an opportunity here… and if Larissa’s occasional blushes, her soft gaze, mean what you hope they do, perhaps there’s a strategy to be employed. You shift further into the cushions, absentmindedly running a hand over your clavicle in thought.

“Don’t laugh… but I’m a sucker for romance when the weather’s like this,” you call out. Larissa peeks her head out from around the corner, brows furrowed in funny disbelief.

“Really?”

“Wha–– why is that so hard to believe?!”

“It’s not, I just.. wasn’t expecting it, I suppose. You seem more of the action or thriller type.” She shrugs and disappears again without further explanation, leaving you to half-pout half-ponder at her words. Before you can make an argument in your defense, however, she’s returning with two full glasses, bottle tucked under her arm, and dimming the lights, a practiced look of concentration slanted across her features as she makes her way over to the couch and lowers one of the glasses into your waiting hand. The red sloshes up just near the edge when Larissa hands it off, and you half-jokingly prod at her as your brows shoot up in amusement.

“Are you trying to get me drunk, Principal Weems?” She tuts with faux indignation, but the growing flush of her cheeks betrays her.

“I wouldn’t dare.” She settles next to you - still a respectable distance for colleagues, but closer than mere acquaintances - and places the uncorked bottle on the table ahead of you, grinning.

“Romance it is, but I pick.” You ‘d be surprised by her demand if you didn’t know Larissa’s need to be in control at all times. In fact, if anything surprises you, it’s her calmness in the face of this turbulent weather–––perhaps the most uncontrollable variable there is. Even the most headstrong people can be manipulated, but not the sky.

The film she chooses isn’t one you’ve seen before, which excites you, and you both sink into the couch with a comfortable silence. You share little notes back and forth on the revolving plots and chuckle at the occasional joke, however cliché, as the movie rolls, finding an easy rhythm you’ve never before been able to appreciate amidst the chaos of classes and faculty meetings. 

It’s about an hour in, having finished your first glass and poured another for yourself and Larissa, that you make the mistake of peering over at her from the corner of your eye. A particularly sappy scene is playing out before you. The TV’s light flickers softly against her face, which is content and dare you say tender as the two protagonists share a moment together. The stumble before the fall. Her forehead creases and you have the sudden urge to kiss the lines away, warmed by the wine and her beauty.

“Stop looking at me like that,” she whispers hoarsely, though her eyes never leave the screen. 

Your heart jolts when she catches you out, running hot with guilt. Your legs shift beneath you as you move to scoot a few inches away - to give her space from your leering gaze - but you freeze when you feel her hand on your knee, holding you in place. You watch her for any sign that’ll tell you what’s going through her head but she doesn’t budge further, only loosening her hold on you a fraction when you relax against the cushions again. Your heart is beating hard at the door of your ribs as you tilt your head back towards the movie, far too distracted to actually process anything that’s happening. The air is so thick now your lungs can hardly keep up; it’s a dizzying thing, electric, and your thoughts jumble haphazardly as you wonder whether or not Larissa’s feeling it, too.

You risk a peek at her again–––but Larissa is already looking at you. 

Her chest is heaving, albeit subtly, and her eyes are dark. A steep wave of arousal pulses through you when her tongue slips out along her upper lip, her gaze flicking down to your mouth and back up again: a question. The second you nod her mouth is on yours, both of you sighing into the touch. You cup the back of her neck, pulling her closer still as your other hand fists around the fabric of her dress. An insistent tug at your waist brings one of your legs between her own, hips rolling against each other as she gropes at you mindlessly, squeezing the thigh slotted over her heat.

“Is this okay?” she asks breathlessly, dragging your bottom lip between her teeth before she pulls away to look at you. Her cheeks are flushed a heavy pink and her lipstick is smudged. You giggle at the realization that there must be bright crimson streaks along your chin and lips.

“Yes,” you assure her between steadying pants, stroking a hand from her shoulder to her wrist and entwining your fingers, giving them a gentle pinch. “You alright?”

A smile briefly turns her lips, soft and loose. “Very much so.”

The next few moments are sweeter, slower as you take your time savoring her taste, tracing the swell of her lips, the delicate scar at the top there, following the line of her jaw up into her hair with your fingertips. She presses into you as gentle as ever, drawing shivers up to the surface of your skin as her hand snakes up the length of your spine. Barely there still is the sound of the fire lingering in its box and the distinct roar of wintry gusts at the window, mere suggestions at the back of your brain. The wine’s been long forgotten on the table.

You shudder when Larissa’s fingers tease at the lower hem of your blouse and brush against a bare sliver of skin, resting there before you arch into her and take hold of her wrist, guiding her hand higher. Her lips quirk to one side at your earnestness, especially as she reaches the clasp of your bra. She hesitates again, more teasing than searching, and slides her tongue into your willing mouth, exhaling sharply when you meet her move for move. Nimble fingers unclasp the bra without issue before they drift around to your front, putting distance between your bodies as Larissa palms your breasts, takes a nipple between her fingertips and pulls and twists with wicked dexterity.

A whimper escapes you when she sinks her teeth into your lip for a second time, much harsher this go around before she suddenly parts from you and begins pressing open-mouth kisses along your jaw and down your neck, nipping and soothing in time with the hapless rocking of your hips. She adjusts to unbutton your top, never once pausing in her assault on your neck as she does so.

“Wait,” you pant out suddenly, and all at once her body leaves you, drawing back to give you space. The look on Larissa’s face is a concerned one, but gentle still, and you know she’ll follow where you need. It’s everything you can do not to keep her waiting in exchange for the chance to look at her, swollen lips and mussed hair, dress askew. 

She’s never been more beautiful to you. 

“Take me to bed.”

Her concern is washed away and replaced with relief - and then more prominent, want.

Larissa rises up from the couch and reaches a hand out to you, catching you off-guard when instead of walking you to the bedroom once you stand, she bends at the knee and scoops you up, your legs coming to wrap around her waist as you laugh in surprise.

“Who am I to say no,” she teases, placing a chaste kiss to the corner of your lips before making the careful trek over to the bedroom.

The question of where she’ll sleep is hardly that anymore. 

You’re both already naked and rocking against each other beneath her blankets when the power goes out. Neither of you truly take notice until the temperature in the room’s significantly plummeted.

“Oh–––one moment, darling.” You push yourself up on your elbows and whine as Larissa slips out of bed, hissing against the cold. Goosebumps raise along her skin, the peaks of her nipples hardening further as she rushes to kneel before the fireplace, sparking a flame in record time. Her skin nearly glows in the moonlight that trickles in from the windows, reflective amidst the snow. She looks like a ghost before you - ethereal, hauntingly so - and you tilt your head, gaze tracking from the deep slope of her calves to the fine curve of her ass, the faint divots of her spine, the wisps of hair that have come loose from their hold and fallen to her shoulders.

“You’re staring,” Larissa chides as she slides back under the covers, shivering.

“I’m admiring,” you correct lamely, a pitiful pout coming to rest upon your lips as you open your arms and draw her closer to warm her now-frigid skin. She hums as if to say ‘yeah, okay,’ burrows into you and drapes an arm across your middle as she pushes her leg between yours. Your hips instinctively buck when her thigh slides against the wetness of your cunt, and you’re both abruptly reminded of what had you so distracted in the first place.

Larissa tentatively nods towards you again and runs the tip of her tongue along your pulse point, your hips beginning to rock together once more, panting heavily and in unison while the storm surges on outside, unabated. The heat pooling in your stomach is in stark contrast to the drifting chill in the room, rearing a confused, overwhelming sensation of hot-cold along your skin. Larissa’s breath, warm on your neck, only further urges the feeling along until you feel as though you might snap if she doesn’t take you fully.

“Please,” you whimper, dragging your nails up over her back with little reserve. Larissa nips at your chin and yanks your leg further across her, taut against your clit.

“Please what?” Her voice is raked over with a carnal desire the likes of which you’ve never seen on her before, deep and airy. It only serves to pull the coil tighter. Your breath hitches as she pushes herself up on her hands and knees, hovering over you now, and she leans down, down until her face is level with yours, an intense wave of adoration flooding through you as she caresses one of your cheeks. She whispers, “I want you to beg, sweetheart,” and it’s all over, never a chance, the air all but torn from you, slick heat gone straight to your cunt.

Beg for her. Beg for Her. No matter how many times the thought bounces around within that empty little head of yours, you’re frozen in place both by lust and surprise. You’ve had your share of fun, of course, but the type that usually involves you calling the shots, taking charge. You thought you liked it that way.

You might’ve been wrong.

You’re only finally jostled from your thoughts when Larissa pulls back and draws a brow up at your silence. A shadow of concern passes over her face but you’re quick to pull her back in, nodding.

“Please fuck me,” you all but whisper, desperate to be filled, to be warmed, to be taken care of while the elements ravage the earth beyond these four walls. Larissa grins smugly at your feebleness, pressing her full weight upon you before she winds a hand down between your bodies, cupping your slickness in her palm. You’re dripping all over yourself, you know: a cool, nearly chafing wetness coating the inside of your thighs, so easily spread when Larissa dips her fingers in between your folds. She sinks a single digit into you just halfway, draws it out, sinks in again and curls it against that soft spot, yes, right there––

She easily adds another and hums at the way your body translates its own neediness, busying her mouth with the soft line of your jaw.

“You feel so good..” she murmurs as her fingers bury themselves into you knuckle-deep, so long and soft and better than you’d ever imagined (and you’d certainly spent time imagining it). Her hips press into yours from above, throwing weight behind her hand as she rolls against you, a slow and steady fucking that excites the fire already roaring within you. You gaze up at her in awe as her eyelids flutter in time with the movement of her hips, realizing she’s found just the right friction against the back of her own hand that each time she thrusts into you, a firm, rippling pressure rubs up against her own clit.

Your hands search frantically now until they’re planted at the slope of Larissa’s waist and you watch, carefully, as you pull her harder into each drive of her hips, rejoicing when she gasps and shudders into the pattern, breaking it for a fraction of a second before driving into you with a far greater desperation.

“Oohf, yes, th-that’s it, darling,” she pants out before capturing your lips in a sloppy, bruising kiss. Suddenly your own orgasm is incidental as you revel in the picture of her coming undone above you, chest flushed, cheeks pink, her hair falling further from its updo as she works her bottom lip between her teeth.

“Look at me, I want to see you,” you clamor with a novel burst of confidence, hands drifting up from her waist to cup her face in your palms. You want to look her in the eye when she cums. You want the memory of her sounds, her face, so deeply imbedded in your mind that it’ll keep you warm when you’ve returned to your own quarters. You want, you want, you want, and she whimpers - a heavenly sound - and obliges, gaze unfocused for a moment before she looks down at you, tongue darting out as she attempts to maintain some degree of focus.

“Right there, right there.. I can feel how close you are,” you huffily encourage, shifting so that both of your legs wrap tight around her and wrench her deeper, harder into you, smiling when her breath hitches at the change of pace and pressure against her sex. You watch her closely, in awe: Larissa’s brows are furrowed, her mouth fallen open and the pink of her tongue closely matched to that of her cheeks, the slight swell of her tits lurching which each thrust. The knowledge that each plunge into your cunt brings her closer is surreal––that she’s so obviously getting off on fucking you, that the frantic snap of her hips is building both of you up, simultaneously.

Her hips begin to stutter into you, airy whimpers falling from her as she teeters on the edge, fingers curling haphazardly in an attempt to continue fucking you through the oncoming rush of her orgasm. The mattress rocks and dips momentarily as Larissa gasps, sharp, and suddenly bows over you with the force of her climax, breath hot on your neck, forehead pressed into your temple, chest heaving against yours as she mindlessly ruts. Her fingers remain buried in your heat, pulsing slowly in time with her come-down. 

Larissa’s body shudders as you run your palm over her in light, gentle sweeps, one hand carefully traveling to cup the back of her neck.

“You’re alright.. I know.. ‘s good, hm?” You feel a weak nod at your side, Larissa eventually stilling atop you. The pad of her thumb draws slow, lazy circles around your clit as her breathing slows, nosing the crook between your shoulder and neck. 

“Christ,” she mumbles against your skin, and you chuckle as her lips draw a line from your ear to your chin.

“Yeah?” She hums and - slowly, determined - begins to wriggle down your body until her face is level with your cunt, glancing up at you with a blissed-out smirk before she presses an open-mouthed kiss to your slickness. The wet warmth of her tongue slides easily against you, dipping between your folds, lapping up the puddle that’s collected at your center, working in tandem with the pressure of her thumb at your clit, a feeling dumbly akin to religious devotion: a reverent prayer at your sex, holy flames licking up the walls of her bedroom, the weighted creases of her sheets stretched where she kneels before you.

A strong gust of wind wracks the shutters of her windows. They bang haphazardly against the glass, knocking in time with the surges of the storm.

Your fingers clench around the bed covers as Larissa rolls over your entrance once more, teasing, then pushing into your dripping hole with an embarrassing ease. She fucks you slow and as deep as she’s able, fingernails digging into the flesh of your hips. Not even the devil themself could stop you from rolling your pussy against her face in search of some greater friction, whining as the sounds of her tongue wading through your arousal mixes with the crackling of the fireplace, the moan of the storm outside.

“Ohfuckyes,” you pant as your legs spread further on their own accord, knees drawing up to alter the angle at which your pleasure floods through you. She moves with delicious ability, and you watch the stark blondeness of her hair bob with every fervent lap of her tongue, overwhelmed with the sudden realness of the moment: Larissa’s scent on the pillows, her lipstick smudged across your lips, her sweat on your skin. Her thumb abandons your clit, and a desperate cry waits at the threshold of your mouth until her finger is replaced with the pointed flicking of her tongue, quick and full and firm against you. The coil pulls tight within your core.

She murmurs something brusque but you’re too consumed with the sensation of her fingertips at your inner thigh to process, but she repeats herself as you release a heavy sigh, her fingers sinking deep into your cunt.

“That’s a good girl..." Your back arches at the same time Larissa takes your clit into her mouth, sucking and slurping as if to drink from that little bundle of nerves drawn straight to your core, as if to quench an otherworldly thirst. She pulls your orgasm from you quick and unforgivingly, never stumbling in her ministrations when your thighs begin to close in around her, or when your hands wind into her hair and pull, hard. She continues to devour you as if she doesn’t notice the snapping of that coil, the sounds that melt into the satiny sheets of her bed as you cry out for her–––the curling into yourself as your clit throbs towards unbearable tenderness.

“Fff––please, please, I’m––” Sapphire eyes bore into yours as her lips stretch into a devious smile, slowly but surely unlatching. A mercy, if you’ve ever seen one. You tremble in relief.

“You can’t take it?” she coos, superficial concern floating by your quivering sex. You don’t know whether to pull her closer or push her away when Larissa glances down towards your soaking cunt again––––

but the choice is made for you when she draws herself up and grabs hold of your chin, pushing her tongue into the waiting cavern of your mouth. The sure expanse of her thigh slides between your legs as she does so, eliciting a startled twitch as she brushes against your clit. She swallows your gasp.

“So sweet.” Larissa nips at your chin, presses her thigh against you more firmly and rubs her thumb back and forth along your cheek. Your hips buck of their own volition, acting solely on the most primal of instincts despite the sensitive twinge between your legs. There’s only Larissa’s softness, her warmth, her gentle affection circling your head, coloring the air around you. The world’s ending outside and it’s just her.

“Please kiss me,” you whisper, suddenly overcome with the need to absorb her, to touch her anywhere and everywhere all at once as if you could meld together somehow amidst the tousled satin.

She stills, hovering over you with a smile so soft you’re almost certain this has all been a very long, very desperate webbing of dreams until she obliges, brushing her lips against yours with the utmost of care.

“Are you alright?” Her voice is hushed, eyes searching.

“Better than alright,” you assure her, brushing a stray hair from in front of her face. “Kind of just wanted to be close to you…” You shrug sheepishly and turn your attention to the far wall, suddenly very interested in the twisting shadows of trees cast against the space there. The abrupt rush of vulnerability reddens your cheeks, lips pursing as the regret at such an intimate admission prickles up with equal swiftness. It’s quickly brushed away, however, when Larissa clicks her tongue and tilts your face towards her with a palm against your cheek, brow arched amusedly.

Tonight you meet her at The Aviary, draped in a black satin dress with a deep slit up the leg––one of her favorites. Larissa helps you into your seat as she usually does, but before she takes her own, she places a long velvet box on your empty appetizer plate.

“Ooh, what’s this?”

“Open it and see.” A small, proud smirk turns her lips, eyes sparkling. You run your fingers over the velvet and lift at the seam, features going slack with surprise when you realize what’s hidden inside: a collar necklace, glittering diamond-cut, softening into a single falling arc of gems which ebbs, finally, into a small, shining teardrop. Light from the restaurant’s fixtures seem drawn to it, gleaming to and fro in a scattered stream of reflection. Your gaze snaps back to hers almost immediately, heart pounding.

“Larissa, I–”

“Do you like it?”

“I– Of course I do, it’s– it’s so beautiful..” Your voice softens and tapers off as you return your attention to the box before you. It’s probably the most beautiful thing anyone’s ever given to you, but you stop short of admitting this. “Help me put it on?” 

Larissa’s smile grows as she gathers the box in her hands, lifting the necklace from its cushion. She moves to stand behind you and tenderly brushes your hair aside; her hands are as soft as anything, so gentle in the way they handle you, securing the piece around your neck. Your own hand raises to rest atop the new weight at your clavicle, and when she sets her palms along your shoulders and squeezes, you shift your hand up to capture hers.

“What’s the occasion?”

“Do I need one?” Larissa presses her lips to your cheek from behind before she retakes her seat, arching a brow in challenge. The answer is no, of course; this is how you work, special occasion or not. She always manages to keep you on your toes, though, far more thoughtful and intimate than any other ‘financeur’ you’ve ever humored in the past: Tennis bracelets set with gemstones which perfectly match your eyes, a new coffee bar set-up when you mentioned off-hand that Starbucks had discontinued your favorite drink, a signed first edition copy of your favorite book she ‘just so happened to come across’ while out of state. Much more than the simple, routine bank deposits and luxury brand pieces that were never quite you which you received from others. Larissa’s gifts have always been astoundingly personal.

You’ve never told her this, but you stopped dating altogether once your little dynamic began. How could anyone else compare? She makes you feel important without ever having to work for it ––– like you’re lovable, worthy, because you exist, and nothing more. You’re breaking  your own rules, being so enamored with her, but you refuse to dwell on it.

“No, you don’t…” You trail off as your food arrives, ducking your head in thanks as the waiter sets everything out before you. Any discussion of her gift to you ends there on Larissa’s own accord, swiftly and advantageously moving on to a new topic as soon as the waiter has left you. The rest of the night is spent sipping expensive wine and musing instead on all of the high-culture goings-on you never get to discuss with anyone else: Art, ballet, classical music. Larissa’s a delicious trove of knowledge and opinions and she impresses you with each turn of a new topic. You often find yourself wondering - not just tonight, but many nights whilst basking in her presence - why she’s chosen you. You can hold good conversation, of course, and have an appreciation for the finer things in life usually reserved for those older and/or wealthier than you, but what’s always been curious, what’s always given you pause, is that she never asks for anything else in return. You have no choice but to ask yourself what it is you possibly have to offer to a woman like her––but you almost always fall short of a satisfying answer.

She’s talking you both through an analysis of the most recent play she brought you to when you take one of her hands in your own, tracing the lines of her palm as you listen. Larissa stumbles over her words at first contact, a rare occurrence for her, and blushes pink at the sensation. When you glance up at her in question she quickly averts her gaze and carries on, moving to smooth her thumb over yours as you continue. You love her fingers: they’re long, delicate, awfully reminiscent of the Greek statues she enjoys waxing poetic about. It’s an instance in which you’re reminded art, very often, echoes us in a continuous cycle of give and take.

You don’t say a word when you notice her face darken another shade as you press a kiss to the inside of her wrist before moving on to dote upon her other hand.

She’s not once explicitly told you, but Larissa’s never expected you to take a physical liking to her. She set the rules she did early on for a reason, knowing she could live with looking and not touching, taking care of you and watching your face turn alight with each gift or special night out without ever ending the evening by your side. No sex necessary, no physical affection expected. But here you are, fawning over her, and she’s never been more conflicted.

To assuage the feeling, she convinces herself it’s the wine that’s made you this way––a good bottle will go a long way, thus your touch must be the product of inebriation, not genuine affection. You’ve both long since finished off your meals when Larissa pays the bill and drives you home as she normally does, to an apartment she partly finances (not fully, at your own insistence that there are some things you should take care of yourself) and walks you to your door, stooping to kiss your cheek. Routine. 

She is right about one thing, however, and that’s the potency of the house wine tonight. Not on your reasoning, but your self-control. You spent the car ride home admiring her profile in the passing streetlamps and traffic lights, studying the way each red light cast itself across her, how the passing headlights of opposing traffic bathed her in a cinematic glow you associated only, appropriately, with Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire. Ghostlike, almost. Ethereal. And at that same wine’s behest, you lean further now into her goodnight kiss than you’d normally allow yourself.

It’s as she prepares to leave that you decide - anchored by the weight of the diamonds around your neck - that this is the night you’ll throw caution to the wind, fervently hoping it won’t backfire and end with her rejection and a ruined arrangement that you’d both worked to preserve over the past six months.

“Do you want to join me for a nightcap? I know we don’t usually, but.. I’d like you to. If you’d like to, of course. If you don’t that’s–––”

“Y/N,” she interrupts. You can hardly tell but her heart’s just about burst out of her chest. There’s an inner battle waging right on the precipice of her ribcage and your bright, hopeful eyes staring up at her aren’t making it any easier to parse out. Do you feel obligated somehow to pay her back for the necklace? She knows you know she’d never ask that of you, that your arrangement is not a traditional one, but has she unknowingly pushed the bounds all the same? Did you simply imbibe too much and don’t really have a clue what it is you’re saying?

Or, perhaps.. Most dangerously: Do you mean it?

“I don’t want you to feel as though you have to… ‘pay me back’ for tonight. That was never my intention.”

She volleys her own inner turmoil dead straight in your direction and stares down at you with what might be, if you squint hard enough, a nervous expression.

You lean sideways against the door and cross your arms over yourself, appraising her. Does she really not want you? What the hell does she get out of this if she doesn’t? You just can’t wrap your head around it, and while you insisted to yourself you’d never outwardly question the bounds of your relationship and why they’ve settled where they are, you’ve put yourself at a crossroads.

“Do you think I’m pretty?”

She balks.

“What? Of course I do. What does that have to do with anything?” Larissa’s expression is a mixture of incredulity and apprehension. You decide to bite the bullet then as she lingers uncertainly beneath the moonlight.

“I don’t understand what you get out of this. Am I not–– you think I’m pretty but you don’t want to touch me? You pay for my livelihood but you don’t want anything tangible in return?” You both purse your lips simultaneously and you’d laugh if the situation weren’t so dire all of a sudden. “You confuse me, Larissa.”

She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, a small cloud bursting forth as she sighs.

You fucked it, didn’t you? Fucked it right to hell, and now she’s never going to speak to you again.

“You’re an idiot, do you know that?” The air goes still.

…

It’s news to you. 

Larissa suddenly pushes forward and traps you against the front of your door, hands leveled at your waist. “I’ve always wanted you,” she grits out, her arms tensing at your sides. “I just didn’t want you to feel as though you had to. Return the sentiment, that is. You’re too precious for that.” Her voice is low and rough in your ear, strangled. You grab hold of her forearms to keep yourself upright when her tone shoots right through you, breathing heavily. You gradually lift your gaze, poring over every curve of hers as you do, and meet her eyes. They’ve nearly gone black with lust, and a subtle quiver in her lip tells you everything you need to know.

“Kiss me.”

Larissa groans, which is admittedly not the reaction you’d expected, and presses further into you, her nose brushing against your cheek.  You can feel the heat of her grow, ensnaring you in perfect contrast to the cool night air.

“You have to tell me you want it, darling. I need you to say it.” … Oh. A new wave of arousal surges through you as you turn your head ever so slightly, her lips hovering just out of reach. The shared breath between you has become fraught with possibility, with the overwhelming, unspent energy that’s been collecting over the last six months without either of you quite noticing. Of course this is what she needs: confirmation, not that you’re hers but that she’s yours, by choice and choice alone.

“I want you, Larissa. Please,” you whisper, squeezing her arms in an attempt to ground yourself. She says nothing in return, instead immediately closing the distance and engulfing you in a desperate, searing kiss. Your cheeks burn and it’s all you can do not to melt into her fully, sucking in a sharp breath as her tongue slides against your bottom lip. This, this, you realize, is exactly what you’d imagined: Feeling her against you, wrapped up tightly in her arms, being drawn in and freed all at once, struggling to contain the desire you feel pulsing within yourself. It’s like Larissa’s split open your mind and picked through every thought there, coming away with only the most indecent imaginings and putting them to use as her hips pitch forward and her hands grasp achingly at the roundness of your thighs.

“Open the door,” she husks, suddenly ripping herself away and turning you at the waist to face the door. You fumble for your keys as she scores your neck and shoulders with hot, open-mouth kisses, running the tip of her tongue along the muscle that pulls taut there.

“F-fuck.” The chuckle she gives in response to your whimpering, shaking when you can’t fit the key into its slot, only weakens you further. Larissa must know her effect well as she wraps an arm around you to hold you upright, the other grabbing the key from you and swiftly unlocking the door in one go.

“Trust me, I’m trying.”

Laughter follows you both as you take the stairs one at a time, pausing every few to take her tongue in your mouth and run your hands along her front. You bypass the living room once you reach the landing - a feat in itself - and lead Larissa straight to your bedroom, kicking one heel off in the hall and the other at the threshold of your room. 

She stops you just before you reach the bed and holds you steady for a moment: “Hold on, I want to look at you..” You hair is mussed, curls losing their hold in the heat of your entanglement, chest heaving and red. Larissa steps forward to brush her thumb over your lips, searching your face for any sign of hesitation or doubt.

She doesn’t find any.

“Christ, you’re a pretty thing,” she hums. The pad of her thumb pulls at your bottom lip and you acquiesce, tilting your chin up before taking her finger into your mouth, rolling your tongue against its tip, watching her with wide eyes that imply an innocence you don’t possess. A hiss escapes her when your teeth come down around her knuckle and she scowls, gripping your jaw with an intensity that rivets the surrounding atmosphere as she rips her hand away, smashing your lips together once more.

In the next second the backs of your knees are buckling against the edge of the mattress and you squeak; Larissa had slipped a hand over your sternum and shoved, launching you down hard into the bed. Wet heat urges your hips forward as she crawls over you, but her hands swiftly come down to force them back into the mattress, trapping you there.

“Patience, darling.” You scoff as she begins the journey down your body, placing lazy kisses to your lips, cheek, jaw, chest while her fingers deftly work to pull your dress from you. You lift your back so she can snake a hand around and drag the zipper down to its end at the top of your hips, wriggling free and moving to pull at her own dress–––but she grabs your wrists, pinning them above you with a devious smirk. 

“Ah, ah. Let me spoil you,” she murmurs into the crook of your neck, one hand traveling to cup the dampness between your legs. Electricity cracks against your spine at her touch; you’re sweltering and freezing all at once, watching her eyes rake over you with a hunger you’ve never seen on her before. Her fingers draw idle circles around your clit as she works her way down your body, leaving a trail of wetness in her wake where tongue meets flesh, nipping at the precipice of your hip bones, glancing up at you before she licks you through your panties. There’s no helping the whine you turn free when she all but purrs at the taste she gets of you from the soaked fabric.

“Larissa, please,” you huff, lifting your hips up to meet her mouth. She takes three steps then in quick succession: chuckles into the skin of your inner thigh; pulls your panties down and off of you; and presses a series of messy, teasing kisses to your bare sex. Your fingers clutch at the top of your duvet as she finally begins to devour you, breath hitching as her tongue circles your entrance and delves into you. In a moment of white hot desperation, you hook your legs around her, calves flexing against her back as you shudder into her touch. She’s ravenous, consuming you with long, uninterrupted strokes that ride on the flat of her tongue, lapping your slickness up and winding into you all at once. The coil is tight within you already, pulsing with every movement of her mouth. You’re almost worried it’ll be over before it scarcely has had the chance to start, but a quiet, bemused voice in the back of your mind ridicules you: Larissa is nothing if not generous.

“You taste divine,” she breathes, before returning her ministrations to your clit, sucking and popping with the filthiest fucking moan you’ve ever heard. The feeling of her tongue against that tight bundle of nerves prompts your eyes to roll back, eyelids fluttering, and imbues your hands with a mind of their own, working them swiftly into her hair and pulling her as close to your cunt as you can get her, hips lurching in an unsteady rhythm. You can feel her amusement at your desperation as distinctly as you feel her mouth, but it’s quickly forgotten when she slides two fingers into you with an ease that makes you lightheaded. The sound of your wetness is sinful, and you have to admit it only spurs you on.

“Fuck me, fuck me, pleasefuckme––” Larissa’s grinning against you as she pumps her fingers, curling into you with a startling accuracy that leaves you breathless and aching. You press your cheek to your shoulder in a feeble attempt to keep yourself above the threshold dividing pleasure and bliss, useless as she slips another finger into you and flicks her tongue against you, quickening her pace as she follows the mounting tone of your pleas. Every touch spreads a warmth through you impossible to ignore, stirring a frantic need beneath the surface of your skin.

“Cum for me, darling, cum for me, that’s right.” Larissa presses the heel of her hand into the space just below the swell of your stomach and the coil snaps suddenly, sharply, sucking all of the air out of you at the same time that you yelp and tense with equal force, clamping around her face as your orgasm tears through you. She continues to lap at you even as your hands push at her, holding fast to your thighs to keep her place. Your legs shake as she builds you up in the same breath that you’re coming down, a second orgasm already rearing its head.

“I can’t,” you keen, but Larissa shakes her head and unlatches briefly to disagree.

“Yes you can, Y/N––be a good girl for me.” It washes over you when she lowers her face again and wraps her lips around your clit, sucking with an unfazed firmness that shocks you to your center. You’re tingling over every limb, pacing your breaths to ride you through this second crest. “That’s it..” Larissa coos, running her hand over your leg comfortingly. You can hardly breathe as the shockwaves roll through you one after the other, and the darkness of the ceiling above you seems to double in size as you stare in a daze.

Your muscles melt into the mattress one by one, sinking deep as Larissa finally pulls her head away and crawls forward to kiss you; you can taste your slickness on her tongue, familiar and tangy. When you part, gasping for air, you wrap a hand around the back of her neck and press your foreheads together, gazing up into her eyes with the softest look you can muster after so thoroughly falling apart in her hands.

“My turn?” She laughs loud and heartily at your doe-eyed demeanor. You’re itching to touch her, to taste her, and she knows it.

“Mmm, maybe.” Larissa shrugs and rises up from her position over you, sliding off to the side of the bed where you can’t reach her––and not for lack of trying. A whine catches in your throat when she shoots a withering look over her shoulder, patting the space beside her. “Help me with my dress, darling.”

You waste no time in flipping over onto your knees, shuffling over to her and grappling with the zipper of her dress. You flush when she laughs both at your inability to get it down in one swift motion and the frustrated little growl that bubbles up from your chest.

“Not funny,” you complain, gritting your teeth as she shifts and the zipper gives, revealing the smooth, snowy expanse of her back. Instilled with a renewed sense of hunger, you push the fabric away from both of her shoulders and continue the journey down and around to her breasts, thrilled she’s forgone a bra tonight as you palm the supple flesh there and roll her nipples between your fingers. The sigh she expels is a ragged one, her hands dwarfing yours whilst her head falls back against your shoulder. You revel in the sight of her lip caught between her teeth.

“I want to fuck you.” You just barely catch it in between her labored breaths and your own thunderous heartbeat, but you do, and you turn to glance at her curiously before her meaning hits you square in the face.

“But––”

She cuts you off. “I want to destroy you, Y/N. You can taste me later,” Larissa mutters, pivoting without another warning and capturing your lips again. You wouldn’t complain if it weren’t for the utter distress you felt to get your hands on her. She doesn’t give you a chance to rebut, however, as she slips out of her dress and climbs over you, guiding your hands to grip her ass. “Later, I promise.” She pulls back to appraise you, taking a rigorous inventory that she’ll commit to memory if it’s the last thing she does: Your flushed skin, the way you can’t keep still under her touch, the unmistakable shine of desire in your eyes.

“In th-the nightstand,” you stammer. Suddenly the realization that Larissa is here, in your bed, and you, at her mercy, is too much at once. You’re trembling with need and anticipation. She tilts her head at you, one second, two passing before she follows your guidance and pulls the drawer open, grinning wickedly at what she finds there.

“Harness?”

You nod vigorously, propping yourself up on your elbows and directing her through another drawer of your dresser. The slow, methodical way in which she fastens the leather around herself surely burns itself into your brain, and you can’t help the shameless moan that seeps out when she smooths an indulgent layer of lubricant along the silicone from base to tip, a delicious sight between her legs.

Larissa approaches with an emphasized swing to her hips, bending at the waist to press a chaste kiss to your lips before she nudges you to scoot back into the middle of the bed, positioning herself above you with a hand on either side of your head. She dips her face down into the hollow of your throat. 

Her voice vibrates against you despite her hushed tone. “Are you ready for me, darling?”

Your brain short-circuits at her words, imperfect timing. God, she’s fucking hot.

She lifts her head again to catch your gaze and smirks, nibbling on the tip of your chin. “Use your words.”

“Yes, yes, I’m ready,” you rasp, drawing your nails down the broad expanse of her back in anticipation.

The moment she slides into you is pure ecstasy: your toes curl and you haphazardly clamber for purchase upon her skin as she buries herself deep within you, stalling for a few moments to give you time to adjust. The way Larissa groans into the motion draws out an amusing - filthy - rumination about her being able to feel every stroke as with her own body, delighting in your wetness. She fills you seamlessly, snapping her hips against you before slowly drawing herself back, only to repeat the pattern and plunge into you as deeply as she’s able. It’s bruising and pleasurable all at once, how she brushes up against your walls and the ridges of the toy hit what your mind insists is every nerve-ending within you.

You rock together desperately, bodies moving as one as if you’d been doing this for centuries, mapping each other out and bringing each other to your peak. You savor the novel, tangled scent of sweat and arousal, a newly formed association with the sound of Larissa’s broken whimpers now frozen in your psyche.

A startled breath leaves you as Larissa abruptly anchors her weight to one side and pulls you on top of her, flipping your positions. Her arms wrap tight around you, looped at your back and around your shoulder as she fucks up into you at a crushing pace. You whine into the crook of her neck and realize you’re on the verge of tears, an overwhelming wave of pleasure and desperation wracking your body. Quiet grunts accompany her each thrust, slowing just so until it’s a steady pattern you can count to like clockwork, brutal and sharp at every buck of her hips. Your knees are aching, folded as they are, but the tight, coiling sensation within you overrides any and all discomfort, merely a quiet nagging in your brain; your focus is settled precisely on the angle of her cock and how her nails dig into your skin as you grind against each other. She’s close, too. You can feel it. It’s there in the shallowness of her breaths, in the urgency of her pelvis against yours, in the subtle arch of her back. You try to meet her where she’s at in your muddled state, pitching your hips backwards and down when she thrusts upwards––and you know it’s worked when she gasps and her hands scramble to lock together at the small of your back.

“Yes, that’s it darling. Just like that,” Larissa pants, using the leverage of her hold on you to help you fuck yourself. The only sounds permeating the room are that of your mingled breaths and her cock driving into you with a consistent, almost unforgiving rhythm. 

“Pleasepleaseplease, ohfuck––” 

“Y/N–––”

She tenses with you and cries out as your orgasms hit you both at once, ravaging you beyond reason. You’re hyper-aware of the way her breasts feel pressed against you, the way one of her hands flies up to bury itself in your hair as you ride her through your climax. Larissa’s hips stutter as she whines into your shoulder, sinking her teeth into you, and you marvel at the feeling of her muscles clenching around you, from the sinewy stretch of her arms to her thighs rested between your own.

Everything you’d hoped for. Fantasized about. Greedily deliberated again and again whilst watching her across the table in another fancy restaurant in another unfamiliar town.

Larissa is careful as she pulls out of you, slow and deliberate so as not to disturb the tenderness there. You remain curled on top of her but she doesn’t complain, rather rubbing your back in long, languid movements and whispering affirmations in you ear, a sweet mixture of ‘breathe darling, I’ve got you’ and more headily, ‘you did so well for me, you’re so good, you took me so well’. When you allow yourself to fall to the side of her, she shimmies out of the harness and tosses it somewhere off the edge of the bed, ignoring its clatter as she wraps you up in her arms. You burrow yourself further into her warmth and sigh at the feeling, content.

You replied to her purr with a groan, already helpless from the way she teased and nipped at your body. So quick, she was. And so nimble; fleeting with touches that had your eyes rolling back into your head because the amount of pleasure that buzzed through you was like a shock of lightning. And it simply- honestly- really never stopped. Skating soft caresses over your hips, dipping between your thighs, never touching you in the way you wanted her to. Licking at your neck, biting softly along your waist, curling her fingers into your hair… all sweet evil little tactics keeping you keening and submissive.

You felt like you were somewhere else. You felt like nothing but her mattered.

You could barely speak. You could barely breathe.

“Oh I know… I know, darling. Just so cruel, hm?”

Terribly cruel. Absolutely cruel. She knew you needed it the same way you needed air and water - but nothing so sweet came without a price. That was your price. That was your punishment. Shivering beneath her body, shaking under her touch, dripping against her soft fingertips - giving yourself up to her like a ritual for the gods. She was no god, but she was still the object of your everything. And her lipstick prints, her velvet tongue, her eyes so dark with lust they turned into midnight, all of her… it was there to drive you mad. Insane. Out of your mind. So beautiful and so wicked you could do nothing but nod your little head and allow your bottom lip to quiver. You had no other reply. She had stolen your sense.

“Poor thing,” came the sinful whisper in your ear. “Poor little thing…”

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

“Will you forgive my teasing, darling girl?”

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

“Will you be good for me?”

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

“Will you give in?”

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

“-s Larissa!”

You woke with a jolt.

Your room was dark, you noticed first. The curtains were drawn but there was no familiar glow of the bright world outside slipping through the cracks. And none of the lights were on. And you were pretty sure there was someone outside of your door.

Just what on Earth….

“I can come back later or tomorrow if you’re not feeling well, Y/n.”

…Larissa?

You frowned, sat up, and immediately let out a sharp hiss.

Your libido, awakened like a ravenous predator, constantly ready to tear and eat and bite, reared its ugly head. For a few blessed moments there you hadn’t felt a thing, but you should’ve known that such bliss never lasted long. Oh no, the confused fog of sleepiness was broken- cracked- shattered- as soon as your body stirred and your functions came back online. And once it did that, once it remembered its purpose, you were a goner. And its purpose - oh its purpose… to mate, of course. The answer was obvious in your lustful haze. You were meant to mate. And mate. And mate and mate and mate and bear children and to be bred over and over and over again until every corner of your womb was flooded with warm sticky life that came right from the tip of Larissa’s co-

“Stop,” your own voice surprised you, nearly making you jump in your spot.

Goodness you were going mad. You had to stop. You just- had- to stop.

And if it were any other day and you were actually sick, you would’ve just pushed those thoughts out of your head, pulled yourself out of bed, and gone to greet Larissa. Or perhaps even welcome her in. But it wasn’t any other day - and you weren’t sick in any way other than mentally. And the second you opened that door, she’d know. She’d know instantly. And then you’d be terribly embarrassed and you’d take the forms and slam the door in her face and never ever be able to talk to her again. And through it all, the only thing you’d want- the only thing you’d be able to think of or look at or obsess over- would be her. Just her. Just Larissa.

Just Larissa…

Just Larissa, Larissa, Larissa…

Larissa’s upper body pressed to the headboard of your bed. Larissa’s legs beneath your thighs. Larissa’s hands around your neck, Larissa’s hands digging into your waist, Larissa’s hands holding your ankles, Larissa’s hands cupping your cheeks. Larissa’s fingers dipping into your mouth. Larissa’s fingers christening your tongue. Larissa’s eyes staring down at you. Larissa’s sweet gaze making you shy. Larissa’s voice dipping into an evil purr. Larissa whispering dark sins into your ear. Larissa calling you good. Larissa calling you hers. Larissa’s lips against your neck. Larissa’s hands between your legs. Larissa pushing your thighs apart, sliding between them, smiling at your desperation. Larissa leaning down - Larissa making eye contact - Larissa pressing a slow- slow slow slow loving kiss to your cl-

“I suppose I’ll just email to reschedule, Y/n. I hope you’re alright in there,” her strong voice spoke through the door, instantly tugging you out of your daydreaming. It was faint, barely there, but there was something lacing her tone - something like worry or concern or even… disappointment…

Panic welled up inside of you. You couldn’t be a disappointment. You could never disappoint her. You could only please her. Only make her happy. Yes, only please her and make her happy. Only please her and make her happy with your mouth… and your tongue… and your fingers framing her waist and her hips on top of your head and… F-focus! God! Jesus! Get a grip!

“No!” You blurted out, scrambling and reaching toward the door with one hand, instantly cringing at the hoarseness of your voice. “N-no, stay - sorry! One sec!”

The sooner you got it over with, you figured, the quicker Larissa could leave. And then you could return to your (currently wet) bed and indulge in more pleasure and pain and try hard to wait out the struggle of the following few days.

“Oh… alright,” you heard her low murmur before the world fell silent.

Alright. Okay. Good. That was good. Time to face the music. Time to tug yourself out of bed, nearly tripping over your own feet when your legs began to wobble; time to whimper beneath your breath at the pathetic stain on your sheets; time to shuffle your way over and glance into your full-length mirror and take in the way your body responded to its helplessness.

Such terrible terrible helplessness…

With hard nipples, yearning for friction, and thighs that rubbed together, slicked with desire - almost unconscious in their need; and with hands that shook slightly at your sides and a sheen of sweat that caused the thin nightie you threw on to stick to your skin. It was the only thing within reach, being that it was thrown to the floor some days prior. Pink and pretty and rather feminine, showing off your curves on any other occasion, but honestly just seeming ‘whore-ishly’ indecent within the moment. You couldn’t possibly answer the door like that… but you had no choice. The burn from earlier, that you tried getting rid of in the shower before you fell asleep and promptly forgot about Larissa’s visit, was already swelling up again. Like a red flare. Like a warning. Telling you to be quick before the band snapped! and the clock struck midnight and the metaphorical village realized you were actually some lustful greedy succubus that yearned to fuck their wives and drink their blood and-

A tremor in your left leg had you nearly gasping for air. You shook your head. Getting carried away was bad. Leaving Larissa waiting was bad. You glanced at the door. It would be fine. It would all be fine.

You ignored the lightheaded feeling that came over you once you reached for the doorknob and took one last deep breath. It was just Larissa. It would be fine.

Gods help you.

“Hey, sorry about that!,” you smiled as soon as you saw her.

“Don’t apologize, I’m just concerned. Are you quite alright?”

Uh… Nope.

Nope, absolutely not.

Abso-fucking-lutely not.

In fact, you were the very opposite of fine. The very antithesis of fine. You were actually so un-fine that you couldn’t really think of a word to describe how un-fine you really were. Yeah. Very not alright. Very much… how could you put it to her? Very, oh you weren’t sure, very ‘Oh my god you look so fucking hot right now I need you to spit in my mouth and fuck me raw and silly before I pass out from desperation.’ And that was the truth. She looked as glorious as always.

So tall, you reminded yourself for the billionth time, and so smooth… with long arms and sculpted hands and red painted nails that would look so nice dragging along your skin… and that outfit - something different, for once… like she was trying to kill you. Purposefully accentuating her waist, keeping that white blouse tucked into the band of a light pink pencil skirt, complete with white kitten heels and a silver watch and silver earrings and oh gods you were so close to falling to your knees for her. In fact, your body was urging you - pushing you. It wanted to submit to Larissa just as much as your soul did, and it nearly vibrated with sick pleasure as your eyes followed the rounded curve of her jaw and the strong bridge of her nose and the carefully crafted curls of her white locks. Getting your fingers tangled in those would be heaven, you were sure of it. And each nasty little whisper in your ear, courtesy of the heat you were suffering though, wanted you to reach up. To run a palm gently over the smooth surface of the bobby-pinned coif… and to take the pins out and scrunch the hair up in your fist… and pull her head back and- no. No. No. You couldn’t. The sliver of common sense that lingered within the back of your fucked up little psyche was holding on by a thread, tugging on the reigns with a huge grunt, and somehow managing to pull you back to reality.

It seemed to do a damned good job because you found yourself responding as though nothing was amiss.

“Yeah yeah, just um- I dunno what it is actually. Just going through it,” you smiled sheepishly, clutching the door as hard as you could.

You probably looked mad peering out from behind the wood in the way that you were, shielding most of your bedroom from those deep penetrating blue eyes, but you didn’t care. It was simply too big of a risk. Thank goodness she didn’t really seem to notice anyway as she nodded and shot you a sympathetic smile. There was so much warmth in her gaze as she looked at you, casting a brief glance over your sweaty hairline and flushed cheeks and nervous smile, that a pang of guilt suddenly ran alongside the lust in your veins.

Larissa was there doing her job, willing to wait for you to come to the door after she stood outside like an idiot for however many minutes. Larissa was there doing her job, offering to give you the necessary paperwork because she was kind and figured you wouldn’t have the energy to get them yourself. Larissa was there doing her job, checking on her employee and making sure she was okay… And said employee was being a fool and daydreaming about licking up the column of her boss’s neck and kissing the warm skin there and whimpering into her shoulder. Lust had never been something you frowned upon, but in that moment you felt like the worst person on Earth.

‘It can’t be helped,’ your mind murmured, providing you with the truth. Of course your subconscious wasn’t wrong - it couldn’t be helped - but hopefully it could be prevented. Hell, it wasn’t even supposed to happen in the first place!

And as you looked over Larissa, watching her present the paperwork and shift through what she needed to show you, your thoughts wandered. …Would she be able to help? Not in a sexual way but in a professional way…? Would she be able to tell you what the fuck was going on? Why a human being, one born without a peculiarity, was experiencing a ‘heat’ for the first time? Perhaps she knew something you didn’t - she was always very good at research, after all. And graduated nearly top of her class, right beside Morticia Addams neé Frump. So she could know…

You blinked at the sight of a piece of paper being handed over to you.

“Do you have any idea how long you’ll be out, Y/n?” Larissa asked gently as you swallowed and slowly reached out to take the form.

Instantly, you shook your head.

The warmth was starting to spread through your legs, making them tingle and shake. You had to hurry things up.

“N-no, no I don’t think so. It’s pretty bad, I’m sorry.” And you were sorry. You felt very very sorry - but you also felt very very good.

It was like a painful, uncomfortable, lust-filled vacation. No work, just desire. An unbelievable amount of it. So much desire, in fact, that you could barely focus as Larissa responded.

“What did I say about apologizing?” she shook her head before giving you two more papers, “Don’t worry about it. All I ask is that you do me a favor and fill these out for me, please? Just so we can have your absence on record and still pay you accordingly.”

You nodded and glanced them over, only noting that the words were blurred and all ran into each other and didn’t make much sense - at least not in the moment. To be fair, you didn’t really expect them to. You figured you’d just fill them out when the burn wasn’t growing steadily, spreading along the lining of your abdomen, bursting into sudden flames within your empty womb.

“Of course, yeah I’ll just- I’ll- oh- oh gods!” You breathed, doubling over as your eyes went wide. Crazed, your hands scrambled to find purchase on your lower belly.

It was like a flip had been switched. From off to on. The burn, that damned simmering ache that heated you up from the inside out, that plagued you for days, morphed into the unfortunately familiar stabbing that you felt earlier. Warm pulses of intense heat and longing, one right after the other, filled you relentlessly. Over and over. Again and again and again - in the span of a few moments. Helpless, you watched the papers escape your shaking grasp and float to the floor. You couldn’t reach for them. You couldn’t reach for anything. It was like something in you, something innate and primal and hungry, sensed Larissa’s presence and needed more of it. Needed her closer. Needed her pressed to you, on top of you, inside of you. In and out- deeper and deeper and d-

“Agh!” You hissed, nearly crumbling once your knees began to buckle as the throbbing got worse.

The door to your room slid open when your hand banged against the knob, eager to cradle the ball of desire that formed in your abdomen, eager to release the terrible sensation of longing. If you weren’t going mad, you would’ve grasped the door and pulled it shut and kept Larissa out - but you were going mad and your mind was fuzzy and oh gods you needed her so fucking bad-!

“L- Laris-sa,” you whimpered, trying to calm the internal battle between your common-sense and your desperation.

‘Oh come on,’ your libido murmured, ‘take what you want. Just this once. She’s right there. So pretty- look at her.’

Your eyes, glazed and half-shut and welling with tears, peered up through your lashes to see Larissa’s shocked expression. Her lips were moving, but she sounded far away. Underwater. You missed the sound of her voice. Gods, was she always that beautiful?

‘Yes, look. Glorious, no? And all yours. She can be all yours. Just grasp her hand- go on- and show her what you can do. Show her what she needs.’

And your hand, pulled by a force you couldn’t control, slid away from your belly and reached out into the space between you. Your fingers were twitching, your palm was clammy, you were shuddering - but Larissa took it anyway. She put her arm out and grasped near your elbow and stepped closer, unsure of what to do.

“Do you need my assistance? Should I- do you want me to call the authorities? The nurse?” Oh she looked so nervous. She looked so scared.

‘Now is your chance. Go on. TAKE her. Now. Now now NOW NOW-’

“N-no,” you gasped.

‘NO!? WHAT DO YOU MEAN NO?!’

And of course, lit like a fuse, like a fragile exploding bomb, every cell in your body began to rebel. The ache of emptiness increased into a roaring inferno, aiming to seer the needy walls of your cunt and make them clench around nothing. The feeling was unnatural - much too strong - and forced salty tears to spill down onto your cheeks. Oh gods, gods, gods. You were vaguely aware of the fact that you were shaking your head and trying hard to detach yourself from Larissa. She couldn’t be there for that. She couldn’t witness that. You didn’t want to hurt her; so with your fingers struggling to slip from her strong hold, you whined loudly.

“Let- go!” And with a final tug- one in which you didn’t let go fast enough- the two of you went stumbling backward into your bedroom.

It was a cruel twist of fate, really. Your heels kept pressing against the floor, pinwheeling you back so far that you landed on the bed with a tiny shriek. And Larissa, who tripped over the threshold and ended up kicking the door closed with the very tip of her heel, could do nothing but close her eyes and brace for impact. It would have been heavenly - it would have been terrible - if she fell directly onto you, but she didn’t. Instead, those strong hands you loved to admire so much went sprawling out into the air… and caught the entirety of her weight upon the shuddering slopes of your knees. The pressure pushed you deeper into the mattress, sending your pathetic little mind careening over the edge of sense and into a pit of hysterics. Thoughts flooded you, nearly knocking you blind as your eyes shot down to the sculpted hands that clutched at your skin.

So warm…

So divine…

It would be a dream come true if Larissa’s hands started pushing your thighs apart… Or if Larissa’s lips were next to your ear as her fingers, tapered and thin and long went pitter-pattering along the soft flesh. Or if Larissa dipped her fingertips into the folds of your heaven and moaned softly at what she found… So much desire… So wet from the slightest touch. But that would be no surprise. You were always wet for her. Always wet and always burning. Always needing her so terribly. And she could do it too… she could just slide her thumbs a bit to the left and right respectively… put some strength behind her hold… dip down onto her knees… look up at you with those gloriously dark eyes… like she was doing then. Except… except…

You blinked.

Except she wouldn’t look so worried. She wouldn’t look so concerned. No, between your legs you hoped she’d at least be happy to be there but- ahhh. Right. Still your boss. Once your mind finally caught up to that little fact, you tensed.

“I’m sorry-”

“I apologize-”

You stared.

Larissa stared.

The heat, for some reason, seemed to calm in the face of her undivided attention. It gave you a moment of reprieve. A moment to think. And a moment to look down, still surprised that your boss hadn’t straightened up yet - which of course caused her to look down and realize that she hadn’t straightened up yet. So you watched with wide eyes as Larissa Weems pushed off of your knees like she had been burned and rose to her full height, straightening the hem of her skirt as she went. She cleared her throat. Her hands were empty. The papers were probably scattered along the hallway floor.

“I apologize for- not letting go. It seems very painful, whatever it is you’re going through. I was worried you’d- well- fall.” And the small nervous but graceful smile that fell upon those red lips made you melt.

It made you melt and it made you smile back. She wasn’t wrong. It was painful. Yeah. It was so… fucking… wonderfully… painful.

“N-no it’s um- it’s fine- fine, yeah,” you nodded, still breathless from all of the commotion.

Even though the throbbing faded, you knew it would come back - and most likely with a vengeance. The ebb and flow seemed never-ending. So in preparation, you had to kick Larissa out as quickly as possible. Though as you looked up, watching the awkwardness pass over your boss’s face, you figured that wouldn’t be too difficult. She was probably eager to leave anyway considering you were acting so bloody crazy… But nonetheless, manners were still important.

“Um you should- prob-probably go,” your voice was shaky as you moved to stand up, not even bothering to pay any attention to the buzzing between your legs. You only hoped and prayed to every god listening that Larissa hadn’t noticed you weren’t wearing anything beneath the nightgown; you were in a hurry - and if anything was covering your desire, you probably would have burst into a huge ball of horny flames by the door.

Honestly, it didn’t really matter though. Your room gave you away. The wet sheets in the unmade bed behind you, blatant and on display due to your carelessness; the three sets of panties discarded on the floor, all of them sporting a since-dried damp spot from the days in which you tried to ignore your situation; Hell, the fucking smell of the room. Musty and damp and just - very very strange. Like you lived in some sort of sex jungle. The bin beside your bed was also overflowing with tissues, all from the late night sessions you frequented when trying to see if your hand could get rid of the persistent ache once and for all (it couldn’t). And the bathroom door was left open, exposing the glass shower which was still waiting to dry. Your only saving grace was that no sex toys were left out… probably because they were nonexistent. Really, a huge fucking oversight on your part. When you needed them most, you didn’t have them. And you hadn’t experienced true desperation until you felt your body- your womb- start to cry out for something long and thick and hard and honestly just big enough to nearly break you and of course, that just steered your mind on a rampage. For days, before locking yourself in your bedroom, you considered going up to a fellow teacher and asking them to borrow anything they may have. It would have been the most embarrassing conversation of your life, but it would have helped. Unfortunately, you ended up talking yourself out of it when you imagined the kind soul asking you if you were alright. You’d have to explain the sudden biologically impossible ‘heat’ moment and then you were almost certain word would spread, and if word spread, that meant Larissa would hear it. And if Larissa heard it? You were fucked. And not in the good way.

“Yes. But…,” speak of the sweet Devil. Her voice was hesitant, shaking with questions and concern. It made you tense.

Oh no…

“…what, if I may ask-,”

Oh no no no…

“-what is wrong?”

No Larissa no-

“Your reaction was so…”

You watched in concealed horror as her eyes observed every little detail of your room. Her gaze was slow; her eyebrows furrowed.

“…abrupt.”

You knew she had only chosen that word out of kindness. Just like you also knew she was highly perturbed and most definitely confused. And because your soul was absolutely hopeless for her, you realized then that you couldn’t just leave her like that. Worrying about her colleague… talking about it with others to try and get other opinions… Larissa was no gossiper (unless it was in private you figured), but that didn’t matter. If she wanted to know something, she’d find a way of knowing.

So, with that in mind, and because she was your boss, well… how could you withhold it? How could you look at her, see her mild distress, and just stay quiet? How could you keep the- honestly the importance of this ‘heat’ from her? How could you keep it a secret? It was, technically, a biological breakthrough. You knew your family tree; no part of you was intertwined with werewolf blood. And you’d never been bitten. And you were certainly not one of those shapeshifters that could shift into animals. So really, really, there was a chance Larissa may be able to help. You’d thought of it earlier. She could help. She could. And was it even really that big of a deal? You were both adults - you were both sane (well, sort of) - and you weren’t the types to spread rumors or share secrets with those who weren’t trusted. Larissa was very smart. Larissa knew so much. Larissa loved science! You could tell her.

‘You should tell her.’

You gulped, finally making eye contact with your boss as her blue pools moved to look down at you. They were swirling with questions; swirling with knowledge. You could tell her. You should tell her.

“I’m in heat.”

You told her.

…Just very very softly.

It was actually barely audible; so soft that even you had trouble making it out. And all it did was make Larissa respond with a hasty “Pardon?” and a strange look.

You sighed.

The heat began nipping at you. You felt your legs tremble.

If you waited any longer, an episode like the one some minutes earlier would repeat - and then you’d be absolutely screwed. And then you’d have no choice but to fall to your knees or collapse onto the bed or push yourself up against the wall and fuck yourself silly while gesturing with your eyes for Larissa to go; because surely, you wouldn’t have the sense to beg her to leave with your lips alone. In fact, you probably wouldn’t have enough sense to beg her to leave at all. Your libido, if its desperate angry little voice said anything, would most likely want her to stay. Would want her to watch.

A twinge in your abdomen made you clear your throat.

Now or never. Now or never. Before she called the ambulance or something. Before she thought you were crazy. You weren’t crazy. You were just in-

“Heat.”

You repeated yourself, louder, unable to look at her as you quickly skirted around the bed and toward the windows.

“I’m in heat.”

Once the worst of the worst came back, you weren’t sure what you’d do after standing so close to Larissa. Probably cry, most likely. And if not that, then probably turn to grasp her shoulders, bring her close, and kiss her until she pushed you away. Lust was a powerful motivator after all; it drove people into ways of existing that they never thought they’d experience before. The most innocent person could become the most brutal lover. And those in higher positions, with lots of work on their plate and a respectful amount of authority to their name, were more likely to obey their master behind closed doors. You knew that. You were familiar with that. And as Larissa stayed silent, no doubt processing your words and waiting for an explanation, you wondered about her preference. Your fantasies begged for dominance, but reality… well it could tell a different story.

‘Doesn’t matter. She can help us either way.’

You shook your head. Absolutely not. Larissa could not help. Larissa could not help because she didn’t want you like that - and you weren’t going to put her in a compromising position. And she also had no fucking clue what was going on. So before she asked any questions, you needed to explain. Quickly.

“I don’t know why I’m in heat, Larissa. Why or how,” you sighed while parting the curtains and taking a look at the rainy world outside. “But all I know is that I am. And I will be for the next oh I dunno- 3 to 4 days?” With a roll of your eyes, sparked by irritation and exasperation and exhaustion, you turned to face your boss.

Your boss… who was staring into space, into your eyes, with a blank expression. The sight of no physical response had you cringing. Dear lord, what was she thinking? That you were crazy? Making it up? You frowned and pressed yourself back against the window, delighting momentarily in the cool glass against your overheated skin. Well. At least that was one thing, you noticed. The throbbing had subsided quite substantially. It was nearly lost, really. Lost to- well to your anxiety. To your fear.

Larissa was still staring. Her lips were unmoving. Her body didn’t even twitch. It was uneasy not to see anything hiding behind her eyes, but as soon as you crossed your arms out of a random surge of insecurity and nearly opened your mouth to tell her to go, she was speaking.

“I don’t… understand.” And her eyebrows furrowed - the first sign of recognition. You nodded, sighing again.

“I know. Me either. But it’s- um- happening. And I… I don’t know what to do.”

“…It’s happening right now?” There was a redness to her complexion that wasn’t there before. Was she… oh goodness, was she blushing? Hell, how embarrassing! Yes the topic was taboo for normal conversation but this was your boss. The sight of the pinkness on her cheeks had you quickly clearing your throat and pushing yourself off of the wall.

You spoke as you walked, nearly running up to her and gently grabbing her wrist, steering her back toward the door, thinking she was uncomfortable.

“Yes- yes it’s happening right now. And I need you to leave before I go crazy. I’m really sorry about that- this- all of it!” Your words came out so quickly they all ran into each other. Your skin felt hot with shame.

It wasn’t something you could control. It wasn’t something you could even handle! It was a mystery if Larissa knew that or not, but as you took her to the door, you found it didn’t matter. If she wasn’t around, it would be fine. If she wasn’t around, you could suffer in solitude.

“Wait.”

Nevermind.

As if commanded by her stern tone alone, you paused in the doorway and stood as still as stone. The doorknob was held in your left hand and your right was hovering above the small of Larissa’s back, careful not to touch her for fear of sparking another wave of mind-dizzying desire. You felt yourself begin to sweat as you stood behind her, trying not to breathe too heavily. She was so close… standing so tall… back straight and strong… hands fidgeting at her waist. You took a step back, feeling as though she were a monument and you were a tourist hungry for the best picture you could manage; looking with shining eyes and a sense of utter tiny-ness. Small within her broad shadow. Her lovely broad shadow. God you wanted to climb her like a tree.

“Are you sure it’s a heat?” Her tone was low but strong.

It led you to frown and nod, even though she couldn’t see you.

“Of- of course it is. I mean I- well-”

“Could you describe the symptoms to me?”

Oh. No. No, you couldn’t do that actually. In fact, you couldn’t share any of it with her. It would probably send your body into a spiral if you said- well- anything. ‘Oh yes Larissa, sure, I’d be happy to tell you about how often I think about you in compromising positions. The desire that fuels me in those moments sometimes becomes so overwhelming that I have to press my face into my pillow to muffle my moans as I ride my own fucking fingers! And seeing you at my door, with those strong hands of yours and those legs, which I know are oh so capable, nearly had me fainting! I’m sweating like mad, eager to be fucked, nearly crying with the need to orgasm over and over and over again and there is no one here to help and it’s really making me angry.’ Thank goodness Larissa suddenly realized the implication behind her words as she balled her hands up into fists, inhaled sharply, and shook her head.

“I apologize. Of course you don’t have to share, you’re my colleague. It was silly of me to ask, I just wanted to help-”

But before her hurried words, tinged with nervous embarrassment, could continue into a tirade, you reached up and placed a hand on her shoulder. It was meant to be comforting - and you sincerely hoped it was as you swallowed down the strong urge to pull her around into a kiss.

“I know. It’s okay.” And it really was. You knew Larissa only wanted to be of whatever assistance she could be. That was just her personality. She wanted to help. But perhaps going about it in that way was- well- you weren’t sure. You didn’t know; neither of you did.

Though if there were anyone you trusted with something like that… it was Larissa. She was the first person that came to mind. And usually, when you were in a predicament, you dealt with it yourself. There was no family, no close friends, no acquaintances around that could possibly help you with personal things… but there was Larissa. The guardian of everyone. The light within your dreams. You could never stand being less than congenial and perfect for her - that’s why the situation was so stressful. It drowned out your heat for just a short time, leaving you with enough sense to worry. Had you ruined the possibility of getting closer with her? Had you acted too rude? You weren’t in your right mind… and she knew that. She understood that. But even so, not hearing it from her meant you were assuming. Perhaps it made her uncomfortable.

Perhaps it made her nervous for you. Worried for you. Concerned. Terrified?

No no, that was silly. She knew you were a strong young woman, capable of many things and definitely strong enough to handle yourself. And you were. Most of the time. But a heat? For a normie? You let out a groan as you stepped back toward the bed and threw your shaking hands over your face. They trembled with the need to touch. To touch touch touch. Touch anything. Touch heated skin and soft hands and long legs and anything- everything- they tingled with need like they had minds of their own. It was irritating.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Larissa,” your words were muffled from behind your palms.

There was silence before a bit of shuffling came from behind you - and then the door was closed. And locked. The clicking sound rang out for a suspended moment as you scrubbed at your face with anger. That seemed to be another side effect of the heat; aside from a pathetic amount of lust so strong you could barely form sentences, the body also seemed to take its slipping control into account and get mad about it. The mental image of that was a little amusing, but the real deal was bloody horrid. You got flashes of anger sometimes when the throbbing became painful or the warmth became suffocating. It went away after a few moments, but for the time it stayed, it was vicious. Angry horniness was not something you were too interested in indulging in - mainly because you didn’t have a partner. Could one even angrily fuck themselves? That thought took root in your head as you cleared the haze from your eyes and tried returning to your senses.

“Perhaps if you explain, I may be able to help.”

The sound of Larissa’s smooth voice from behind you immediately cleared your head. You turned to her, momentarily surprised at the lack of shoes. Her heels were no longer adorned and were instead placed neatly beside the door, right next to your own. You rather liked the look of them there, blending in with your various choices of footwear. From sneakers to flip-flops to flats to the white kitten heels that sat beside it all. It looked sort of… perfect. But that was unimportant. And definitely not the thing to focus on. You gave Larissa a nervous look, speaking warnings through your eyes.

Her own reflected nothing but compassion and friendly concern. The blush on her cheeks was still there, but you ignored it and considered it a result of the conversation topic. You were probably blushing as well, though you weren’t really certain - every inch of your body was hot anyway. That was probably a good start actually, you realized. If Larissa could help and she was offering, consenting, then you were allowed to share. If Larissa had information, well then even better. There was a chance she could make it go away completely - and maybe help you know if it would happen again in however many moons.

So with that in mind, you nodded and held up a hand to say ‘one minute’. Then you set about quickly making the bed - which meant throwing the duvet back into place and straightening the pillows. Once that was done, you took a seat on the edge and let out a gentle breath. The warmth was starting to nip again, inciting the tiniest tugging sensation in your abdomen. You swallowed and looked up at Larissa - who was still standing in her place from before, except with her hands clasped politely in front of her and her eyes openly welcoming.

“You don’t have to, Y/n… I’m just- telling you. There’s a chance I can help.” Larissa said slowly, backing up her words with a helpful smile.

Right. Okay.

She could help. She was offering to help.

Okay… okay. Okay. You nodded.

“Well…”

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Well... This is the most supported 'fic' I've ever had EVER. Thank you for the love - I was nervous to post this second part because I wanted it to be just as good as the first, but even if it isn't, that's okay. I hope you enjoyed anyway. Part 3 will come out... sometime. LOL. - Ripley x

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