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10D 03H 42M 29S
Carol shoves the heavy slab in place, gritting her teeth until her jaw aches.
Thud.
The gloves keep the friction from sanding down her fingerprints, the tiny spirals that she guards like a dwindling inheritance. She drives her weight into the slab, willing those ridges to burn through the rubber, to remain here after she’s gone. A selfish insistence that this grave—and the woman inside it—belong to her alone.
Thud.
Sweat runs down her back, drips coalescing at the base, soaking through her shirt. The heat seeps behind her eyes, pine needles bleed through the smell of earth. She cranes her neck as far as it goes, peering up at the endless green. “It’s like a Cathedral,” Helen whispers, but the sound is drowned out by blood rushing to Carol’s ears.
Thud.
Pressure, breath, dirt. The repetition smooths her mind flat. The weight settles into her spine and into the soft meat of her shoulders, an ache she tries to anchor herself to, but the ground beneath her softens, warps, tilting on a wobbly little table, spilling droplets of over-roasted coffee. She shivers, staring at Helen in her kitschy, overpriced scarf she bought at a tourist trap.
Amsterdam. Carol remembers hating the cold, hating the perverts, hating the way her feet blistered from her sneakers she hadn’t quite worn in yet. She remembers it all like reading a receipt, but the feelings that rise now are warm and soft to the touch. Helen’s fingers brushing her knee under the table. The exact shade of watery sunlight on Helen’s cheekbones. “I love you,” spilling from Helen’s throat, scraped raw by laughter.
It’s so close she can taste it—almost real. She wants it to be, she wants it more than she’s ever wanted anything. But it’s too saturated to step into. The colors don’t match.
Her grip slips.
Thud.
The sun casts a long shadow over the grave. Carol looks back at the orange fading into pink, the sky bleeding into the Adriatic Sea. She turns back around and takes in Helen’s smiling face, flush with youth and full of hope. The pit in her stomach grows heavy under the gaze of everyone passing them. She unclasps their hands, her own voice echoing in her ear. “Sorry,” she whispers. “People are staring.”
The moment slips its moorings. She drifts backwards, watching her younger self on the beach flinch from the reaching hand—hopeful in its persistence, the way only Helen ever was. Carol tries to lean closer, to push herself forward, but she pulls away exactly as she did all those years ago; sealed into the choice, fossilized under glass. She watches the moment repeat, loop, calcify. She can’t unmake it. She never will.
At least it’s hers.
Thud.
___
15D 19H 34M 22S
She blows the dust off and cracks the spine. The paper is yellowing, an inevitability of using the cheapest pulp money could buy. There’s a charm to it that makes her nostalgic for times that have long passed—head down in Lauchlin’s, writing until her wrist went numb—before the Funko pops, the draining tours, the crowds she’d dumbed down one book at a time.
Flipping to a random page, she reads a passage:
The firelight danced upon the blade of Raban’s rapier, casting long, shivering shadows against the cavern wall. Stoic, he did not speak of his suffering, nor the blood that stained his tunic the color of rust. Instead, he pressed his lips to Lucasia’s ear, and whispered: “Every battle I have survived has merely been a step toward you, ma chérie.”
Carol snorts. “Jesus Christ.”
She continues, skimming, flipping through the pages until seconds turn into minutes and she only realizes she’s reading it properly after she’s drained her whiskey. The dialogue is corny; the prose bruised purple, overripe, dripping with amateurish yearning to be taken seriously. A better editor would have pruned it all with a machete. But there’s something there that never made its way to the sequels. The characters aren’t likeable yet. Raban is sullen, bordering on asshole. Lucasia is prickly, prone to making the wrong choice just to prove she has free will. The chemistry isn’t smoothed over and sterilized. There’s friction.
It feels stupid now—letting her audience capture her so entirely. She’d told herself at the time it’s not selling out if there’s nothing worth keeping. Building her commercial empire to give Helen the life she deserved seemed far more important than creative freedom of her overwrought romantasy slop.
Fear masquerading as practicality.
Coward.
It doesn’t matter now. If she could go back and change it, the world still would have ended. Bigger fish to fry than her artistic integrity. Still, she can’t scratch out the itch. Can’t shake the image of Helen finishing Stormshadow for the first time.
“It’s good, babe,” she’d said. “I really like the direction you decided to go with.”
“You sure?” Carol had asked. “I’m worried the fan service in chapter five is too much. Even for my readers.”
“No, it’s just… accessible. I mean, you’re finally letting them be happy. You’re really letting the audience in.”
Carol pours another finger. “I didn’t let them in,” she whispers. “I opened the door and let them loot the place.”
But it makes sense now, she supposes. Helen never liked the books to begin with. She always knew it in her gut, but having it confirmed made her feel wrung out; no room left to delude herself. But it’s not like Carol likes the books either. So who gives a fuck, really?
___
21D 17H 21M 34S
She’s drunk again when she finally tries to make herself come.
Her stomach settles somewhere between nausea and desperation at the idea. There’s no anticipation, only a dull sense of dread and a curdle of guilt. Maybe if she goes through the motions, wills her body to pull taut and tremble, it’ll trick her mind into being happy for a moment. Rewire the synapses that keep forgetting parts of Helen, like training a muscle, until she’s sore enough that she’ll never forget any of it.
If she hadn’t scared herself shitless the last time she got high, she might’ve done it again for this.
So goddamn fuckable.
The melting had felt the same as she remembered at fifteen, though the pilfered drug from the hospital could never really hold up. She still misses the warm flood of intense apathy, like nothing in the world could hurt her. She remembers the cold was trying to. The heavy hand crawling up her thigh, the insistent press of loneliness—but she was untouchable. She could’ve died and it wouldn’t have mattered. Let them all try; Carol had reached inside herself and found just as much nothingness as there was outside. It’s intensely comforting to discover that one’s own cracked foundations have stopped aching.
A smothering blanket of acceptance. Vague, unspecified love. Something unearned.
No, she won’t get high again. Not yet, at least. Just drunk enough that the edges soften into a pleasant blur. It’s a good thing she flushed the heroin before they’d left.
Back against the couch, her hand pushes past the waistband of her sweats, brushing the crop of curls between her thighs. It feels forced. Carol tells herself she wants it. Because she does, she thinks, body hungry, hips already stuttering off the couch when she finds her clit through her underwear.
Helen had always been so careful when she’d touched her. Before her, Carol had thought she’d needed blunt force to get herself off—rough enough that the pleasure burned out the shame, wringing out an orgasm until her body tired and gave it up. But Helen had patience, and waited until it came gently.
“That’s it,” she’d said, kissing Carol’s shoulder while it welled out of her like a spring. “You’re okay.”
Carol doesn’t dare try to recreate it.
She slips her hand below her underwear, and is pleased to find she’s just barely wet. Enough, at least. Dragging her fingers in a slow, mechanical circle, Carol bites her lip at the first curl low in her belly. She remembers how much she liked watching Helen’s face pull and twist, brows knitting together and jaw slack when she pushed her fingers inside of her. Tries to remember how tightly Helen’s body had gripped her, white hot and so soft. The feel of her from the inside, how she’d tasted, the breathless laughter afterwards.
Carol’s stomach plunges, and sob rises from the back of her throat. Her hand goes limp, resting uselessly against her side. She squeezes her eyes shut, holds her breath, waits for the tidal wave to ebb.
Gritting her teeth, Carol swallows the grief and drags her mind back on course. The TV hums faintly, the only other sound aside from her labored breathing. There’s a ring of moisture that will stain the coffee table, a fine layer of dust accumulating on the unlit candle. A still life she refuses to leave. Carol hates the quiet now.
She’ll feel better when it’s over. Shakily, she jerks her hand out of her pants and lays it across her diaphragm, steeling herself. Carol starts again—not her touching Helen, this time, but hazier memories of pleasure, gauzy fantasies without teeth.
She imagines someone else’s hand running over her body, following the thread. Her nipples pebble when she thumbs over them through her shirt, breath hitching when she cups her own breast. When she closes her eyes, they become light, long fingers. Steady and warmer than her own, so much less afraid of her body. For the first time in a month, her cunt aches.
Well—not entirely true.
Zosia’s smiling face blooms, like it’s been directly under the surface this whole time. Waiting for Carol’s guilty, guilty conscience to circle back to her inevitably. And god she’s beautiful—something plucked directly out of Carol’s mind and designed to drive her insane.
Carol leaves goosebumps in her wake when she slides beneath her shirt, a low whine catching in her throat. Her arousal pulls, stretching into a deeper want, thickening into something tarry. She can feel wetness slick her inner thighs. Palm flat to her skin, her hand creeps lower, languid and torturous in its descent.
She isn’t thinking of Zosia. She’s not.
Her clit is swollen, pulsing with want when she finally reaches the hem of her underwear. Breath hitching, she carefully wets her fingertips, and presses a firm circle where she’s aching. Carol's head thunks heavily against the back of the couch, lips parting at the spark in her stomach. Her entrance clenches when she traces the rim of muscle, then her clit again. Not enough to relieve the pressure, but kindling a desperate heat from within.
But it is her. Dark, kind eyes, and her infuriating, unwavering smile. Carol’s heart skitters at the thought, and she hates herself for it. Her fingers quicken between her legs, circling a relentless rhythm over her clit until she’s dripping. Her mind’s caught in a feedback loop—the more she twists, the more she tries to struggle against the drag, the more vivid it becomes. Her abs catch when she pictures Zosia’s quivering lip, quiet tears spilling down her cheek. The long bend of her neck, the wide angle of her jaw. How eagerly she’d give Carol whatever she wants. How badly Carol wants to take it.
A weak, wet sound presses from Carol when she finally sinks a finger inside herself. She feels out of control, dizzy with how good it feels and how helpless she is to stop. It’s barely enough—she’s starving for someone else to wrest control and touch her instead. A second finger joins her first when Carol’s body starts begging unconsciously. Her thumb pets messily across her clit while she thrusts her fingers inside of herself over and over, hips bucking up from the couch and legs restless.
She’s past caring. Carol gives into the tug of war in her head and lets the rope slide from her grip, palms rubbed raw from the friction. And there it is: Zosia, Zosia, Zosia. She imagines pressing her face in her tanned shoulder, running her tongue down her chest until that grin faltered and she broke. Would she feel real with Carol’s fingers buried in her to the knuckle? Zosia would ask so nicely, she thinks. Sound so goddamn pretty when she came. Wrong as it is, Carol wants it more than anything.
Her rhythm stutters, muscles spasming around her uncoordinated fingers as she barrels towards the edge. Carol is panting, flushed red from her cheeks all the way down her chest. Her wrist aches, but she can't stop, not when she needs it this badly. She bites the meat of her palm to keep from crying out when her spine goes rigid, all the pent up pressure cresting and breaking, before flooding Carol in a tide of release. Whimpering, she cinches around her own index finger and arches into a bow, before collapsing backwards in a breathless heap.
Underwear soaked through, thighs still twitching around her hand, Carol cries. The relief lasts barely a breath before she’s sick with herself. She hadn’t meant to, and yet, at the rotten root of herself, she’d known it would happen. There’s a reason she couldn’t bring herself to try in her bed—their bed.
She’s undeserving, but she asks Helen anyways, desperate for some sort of absolution, some way to make amends.
Forgive me.
___
35D 15H 44M 12S
Loneliness is a cruel thing, desperate as it is dull.
The bitterness she used to feel toward humanity feels laughable now, a petulant child rebelling. She’d give anything to have it back. The cashier with bad breath who talked her ear off at Sprouts, Crazy Moira from Kansas City sending her endless parcels of hats she’d never wear, her in-laws asking when do we finally get to meet your side of the family every Thanksgiving.
But scraping at the walls of the hollow only grows it. She packs her golf clubs into the trunk and drives.
___
-13604D 13H 52M 41S
The Reflection Chamber is eight feet by six, painted the kind of off-white that makes it feel dirtier than it is. Carol sits cross-legged on her cot, runs her fingers over the words on the frame: Property of Freedom Falls. She counts the cinder blocks—two-hundred and forty-five of them—and traces the mortar lines with her eyes until they blur into gray smears.
They caught her behind the chapel with Jennifer’s tongue in her mouth, hand up her shirt, both of them stupid enough to think they could get away with it. Now Jennifer’s probably in her own cell, or maybe she cracked already. Crying through some performative confession in Pastor Dave’s office about how the devil works through our weaknesses.
Carol won’t crack.
Day three, her jaw aches from clenching. She does pushups until her arms tremble, recites every Patti Smith song she knows, picks at the cuticle on her thumb until it bleeds. The boredom has taken a physical form, squeezing her skull between its hands, threatening to crush her if she doesn’t give in.
Carol won’t give in.
Day five, she catches herself talking to the water stain on the ceiling. She’s given it a name: Henry. She asks it the meaning of life. It answers: atoning for your sins.
Carol stops talking to Henry.
Day seven, Pastor Dave opens the door. “Have you reflected on your choices, Carol?”
“Yes, sir.”
He smiles, pleased. Thinks he’s won.
He hasn’t. She held the line. Didn’t let them grind her down into a digestible paste. When her parents pick her up two weeks later, she’s still herself. Still knows what she wants and who she wants.
She didn’t break.
___
36D 11H 27M 12S
But didn’t she?
Carol sits on the rooftop overlooking the city when the truth sucker punches her: there was nothing to break, she’d already learned the lesson they wanted to teach her. How to partition herself, how to keep the shameful parts locked away where decent people wouldn’t have to see them. She’d left conversion camp still gay, then spent the next twenty years proving Pastor Dave right regardless.
Her family asked about her love life at every holiday, and Carol served up vague allusions to men who didn’t exist rather than risk their disappointment. Better to be a spinster than a dyke; to let them imagine her lonely than to let them know her.
Before she met Helen and cut them off like a dying limb, anyway. Not like she needed to—the life she built for them was perfectly small, contained, deniable. Separate bedrooms when her publisher visited, wardrobe consultations before tours to make sure Helen looked professional enough. They didn’t get legally married in the decade it had been legal. Carol’s choice, of course. Too risky.
“It’s fine,” Helen had said. Always. “I get it.”
But she shouldn’t have had to get it. Carol should have taken her to the courthouse and said fuck it all. Instead, she spent her life being a good little girl who knew how to keep her perversions to herself.
And now the whole world knows, and she’s alone. Completely, utterly alone. They looked inside her and found exactly what she always suspected was there—weakness so fundamental that even her art was poisoned by it. Corruption so deep that she managed to scare away every person on the planet, afflicted or not.
But Helen had loved her anyway. Had loved the drunk, the fraud, the woman too chickenshit to write a lesbian romance or hold hands in public. Despite how endlessly difficult she was, despite hating every iteration of her writing, despite knowing exactly how deep the rot went, she loved her anyway.
She knows—with absolute certainty—a love that real, that honest, that unconditional, will never exist for her again.
For anyone.
___
38D 16H 43M 41S
Carol swings. Hits her target. Facing east, there are two-hundred and sixty-eight windows, and she’s broken twenty-two of them.
___
38D 16H 45M 11S
Twenty-three.
___
42D 09H 23M 57S
Zosia misses you.
The words have been rattling around in her brain for weeks, long enough that they don’t sound like words anymore. Nonsense from the start, tumbled into something real: if Zosia is one in seven billion, and the world misses her, then she supposes it’s true, technically. Zosia misses her.
She misses Zosia, too.
____
48D 20H 42M 33S
Carol feels it before she sees it: the barrel falling, slanting toward her like a turret finding its target.
She doesn’t move.
The fuse spits, crackles. Her heart thuds once, twice, the pace steady. She expects her life to flash before her eyes—a montage of Helen laughing, the phantom taste of her mouth. A hot rush of yearning for roads not taken. Nothing comes. The hollow hums with a dull, patient stillness.
Fitting that she’ll die how she lived: too scared to jump, too weak to step back.
Eyes closed, she waits.
The rocket tears past her cheek.
____
49D 5H 53M 56S
She’s staring at the O'Keeffe when she hears the engine coming through. The flower opens like a throat, petals soft and obscene, swallowing her deeper, deeper. The engine grows louder, a mechanical heartbeat approaching through the dead city, and still she sits there, transfixed by the way the light catches the pigment.
Her body leans toward the approaching heat like a plant bending toward radiation. Someone else will smile at her with Zosia’s mouth, seven billion stolen fingers will reach for her, and Carol will let them.
The devil has you, Pastor Dave would say. Maybe he’ll stare at her through Zosia’s eyes and realize she knows it—that he’s right, always was, and she was too proud to admit it. But the devil has everyone now, and she refuses to be the only one left out in the cold. And maybe that’s where the last of her humanity lives: the hunger. The inability to go without when poison is within reach. The shameful, animal need to be held by the thing that’s hollowed out the world.
Carol steps outside and walks toward her. Zosia’s face glows in the sunlight, and for a moment, she could almost be real. Almost be someone beyond the shape of comfort, the promise of warmth, the bella donna opening its petals.
She knows better.
She doesn’t care.
She sobs into Zosia’s arms, clawing at her shirt until her fingerprints wear away.
____
57D 22H 34M 13S
“You are trying to distract me. Knock me off course. You rebuild my favorite diner, you jump for joy when I tell you I’m writing again, but it’s all an act. It’s manipulative bullshit because you know I haven’t given up. Admit it. Tell me you know I won’t give up.”
“We know. We wish you would,” Zosia scoffs. “But it’s also true we love Wycaro.”
“All right, honesty. Let’s go for it. Cards on the table. I like you. You people. You-You—” she gestures, “…whatever. There’s a lot of things that I like about you, but this? This is a train wreck. This is unsustainable. It’s mental illness. It’s psychosis. You are starving, and you can’t even pick a goddamn apple off a tree? I… How… Someone has to put the world right, even if it means you all leave me again.” Her voice shakes so badly she can barely breathe. “Even if it means that I’m…” She inhales deeply, fighting off tears.
Zosia stalks forward with the precision of someone defusing a bomb, the patience of a predator circling wounded prey. She leans in, the kiss barely there, just a brush of lips, but her mouth is as certain as it is soft. Carol jerks back so hard she nearly falls. She knows exactly what this is. She’s not a fucking idiot.
She kisses her back anyway.
A moan tears out of her, the kind of desperation that only comes after you’ve lost everything. She grabs Zosia’s face with shaking hands, pulls her closer, lets reason die on her lips. Zosia’s mouth yields under hers, so pliant, and whimpers when teeth catch her bottom lip and pull. The sting lances straight to her cunt, aching to be filled.
Carol’s hips roll forward, seeking contact, seeking relief. “Please,” she gasps. “Please. I need you.”
She doesn’t even know what she’s begging for. Release; oblivion. To stop burning; to burn until there’s nothing left. For Helen to come back; for Helen to stop haunting her through this stolen mouth.
Zosia pulls back just enough to meet her eyes. “Let us help you, Carol.”
Us. The word drags Carol back to the surface. “I know what you’re doing,” she manages.
Zosia’s thumb brushes her jaw. “Does it matter?”
Carol’s sick with it all, sick with herself, knowing what the answer should be and knowing what it is. She can’t bring herself to care, can’t believe for one more second that suffering this profound could be noble, that loneliness this cavernous could be just. Pitiful or not, her excuses don’t matter. There’s no argument left to win or lose. Her body has decided for her.
Zosia lets out a soft whoosh of air when her back hits the mattress, Carol’s hands pressing firmly on her bony shoulders and following her down. A real sound—tangible proof that Carol’s still here, that the world can still be affected. It’s addictive.
She crawls astride Zosia, bracketing her waist with her knees and settling her weight onto her thighs. Zosia’s straining below her, trying to catch her lips in another kiss. Carol gives in, because she can’t do anything but take what’s offered, meeting her in another desperate collision of mouths. She’s moaning again, sighing directly into Zosia’s waiting mouth like she can breathe life into her that way. She catches the start of a gasp from Zosia. A barely there sound that shimmers like a mirage across a stretch of dunes. Carol’s dying of thirst—she wants to crawl towards the noise, drown herself in it.
Zosia’s hands find the back of her neck, pulling Carol closer until their chests meet. Her breasts flatten and press against Carol’s, and suddenly there are too many layers between the two of them. She pulls away, panting, fingers fumbling blindly for the row of buttons on Zosia’s top and tugging. Far more successfully, Zosia helps, until her shirt parts to reveal the flat plane of stomach below. Carol groans, sitting back on her heels and taking her in.
Her skin is smooth, stretched taut over soft ridges of muscle. It makes Carol wonder guiltily what Zosia—real Zosia—did before all this. Whether she is watching this all unfold through her own eyes helplessly, body flush with a stranger who was too lonely to resist. Something burns up the back of her throat.
“Tell me you want this,” Carol demands.
There’s color high on Zosia’s cheeks, her lips bitten and swollen, eyelids heavy. “We want whatever you want, Carol.”
“No—fuck—no,” she grits, pulling her hands from Zosia’s bare waist.
Zosia’s eyes soften. She wets her lip. “I want this. I want you, Carol.” She sits up enough to catch Carol’s wrists, tugging her hands back to her hips. “Please.”
It’s what she wants to hear, of course. They both know it. And it’s still not enough to tear Carol away.
She dips to lick the tan strip of skin below Zosia’s ear. Lets her teeth skate along her thrumming pulse point until she gasps again. Zosia’s hands are in her hair and her knee presses up between Carol’s thighs, and it’s enough to have her trembling.
Roughly, Carol pulls down the cups of Zosia’s bra, exposing her dusky nipples. She starts at her sternum, running her tongue through the valley of her breasts, before finally flicking across a pert nipple. Zosia stutters, arching into the feeling, breath deepening. She sucks the slight swell into her mouth, trying to swallow Zosia whole just because she can. Carol will do anything if it means watching her whimper and writhe below her, composure slipping through the cracks until she’s a perfect imitation of an infatuated lover. Her own desire throbs so sharply she doesn’t care if it’s all fake—to what end? Let them play pretend if it fills the gnawing emptiness.
“Oh–” Zosia whines when Carol scrapes her teeth over her sensitive bud, soothing away the hurt quickly with a lash of tongue. Her tits are left spit-slick and shiny, the cups of her bra darkened by Carol’s mouth. Carol’s own hips have started rutting against Zosia’s thigh, desperate to relieve the pressure. She aches everywhere, a hollowness that’s being filled so suddenly it hurts.
Zosia’s hands snake below her tanktop, brushing her stomach gently. She wants to tell her to stop, but the words bob out of reach, and there’s no drive left in Carol to grab for them. She redoubles her efforts, kissing lower on Zosia’s abdomen, following the trail of baby-fine hair towards her belly button while rolling her nipples between her fingers. Zosia’s chest heaves; Carol relishes in the knowledge that she’s struggling to take it all in.
At the waistband of Zosia’s pants, she pauses, panting. Months of restraint unspool around her wildy—Carol doesn’t think she could stop if she wanted to. But she doesn’t want to. She needs this. Zosia needs this.
“Please,” Carol asks again, her voice breaking. “Let me.”
Zosia sucks her bottom lip between her teeth—an unconscious response more than a choice. It goes straight to Carol’s cunt, until she can feel arousal pool in her underwear. She nods, brushing blonde hair back from her face so tenderly it makes Carol’s stomach ache, long fingers curling around her jaw.
“Yes Carol,” she hums. “Anything you want.”
It’s not quite right, but none of it is. Carol searches for some disgust, something in her that should recognize the wrongness. She comes up emptyhanded—the only thing she finds is a visceral need to press herself closer, feel the slick and teeth and heat when she cracks Zosia open. She tears at Zosia’s drawstring until she lifts her hips enough for Carol to tug her pants over her ass, panties catching low on her hips. There’s nude lace slung between her hip bones. Practical, but barely keeping her decent anymore. The dark shadow of curls revealed makes Carol’s mouth water.
She’s grinding into the mattress in earnest now, hips seeking any friction while she mouths at Zosia’s pubic bone through her panties. She can see how wet she is already—can smell it. It’s devastating, so rich it’ll make her sick. Carol realizes suddenly she’s being too loud, groaning directly into Zosia’s cunt, unable to keep it in. Zosia, in comparison, makes polite little sounds, breathy whines and inhales that catch behind her teeth before they can really spill out. Her eyes are open, but her brows are knit and lips parted, pupils eclipsing her irises.
“Please,” Carol begs, eyebrows arching. If she sounds pathetic she doesn’t care. “I need to hear you—I need it Zosia.”
Smiling gently down at her, Zosia nods. Carol swallows, pressing her thighs together to stave off the ache. Her hands shake while she eases down Zosia’s underwear, fingertips dragging over so much bared skin. She shoulders below one long thigh, then the other, until Zosia opens for her like an orchid.
Abstaining has always been futile. Denying herself every comfort, every offered hand, letting her loneliness bleed like a raw wound—what’s the point? When Zosia’s made like this.
She’s already drenched—that’s real. Flushed a deep pink, glistening when Carol opens her pretty pussy to the cool air. Whether Zosia can really want anything for herself, she’s not sure. But the way her entrance spasms, the way she’s soaked down her thighs; those things are certain. Carol gorges herself on the evidence, even if it means staunching her thirst with salt water.
“Fuck,” Carol curses, parting Zosia further with her thumbs, watching wetness string onto the bedspread. Her own center throbs painfully, grinding harder against the mattress. It’s divine torture. All Carol wants to do is repent between Zosia’s thighs, write her atonement into the soft flesh of her cunt.
It’s Zosia who asks this time, like she knows she needs to hear it. “Please Carol?”
When Carol finally puts her mouth on her, Zosia keens. She doesn’t wait. No time spent drawing it out, no teasing; her patience is threadbare already. Instead, Carol is certain. Thorough. Burying her face until her nose is pressed against Zosia’s clit. Carol moans at the taste, warm and sweet and alive. Her tongue drags through her folds, spreading saliva and arousal until Zosia’s a slippery mess, fingers winding knots into her hair and thighs quivering against her ears.
She presses Zosia’s legs open wider, keeping her knees bent and pinned. Her tongue is relentless, tracing circles around her fluttering entrance before pulling her clit into her mouth and sucking. Zosia’s body jerks wildly, hands fisted so tightly into Carol’s hair it stings. She moans at the punishing rhythm Carol sets, narrow spirals directly over her pulsing clit.
“Oh–” Zosia murmurs. It's all breath, pitchy and wild. Her loss of control is heady. “O-oh, Carol–”
Carol’s pulse pounds, blood flooding between her legs. Hips moving of their own accord, she ruts into the bed, grinding her clit against the tangle of blankets. She’s burning, trembling on the precipice just from feeling Zosia unravel underneath her. The rest of them might know—but it’s only Zosia who can feel this.
Lifting her chin from between Zosia’s legs, Carol replaces her tongue with her middle finger, reveling in the way her body opens up to take her. A wet string of saliva connects them when she pulls back, until it breaks over her lip.
“Do you like that Zosia?” Carol pants. She doesn’t know where it comes from. Some place deep and open where she wants more than anything to be needed. “Does it feel good?”
Zosia’s head lolls back. “Yes, God—yes.”
Carol grins against her pussy, pressing a kiss to her clit.
“More,” she pleads. “I want m-more Carol.”
She nearly comes from that. Zosia begs so sweetly and grips her finger all the way around and it’s everything she’s wanted. Carol slips her finger from Zosia, and she cries out at the loss. She quiets her with that same hand, pushing between her plush lips, smearing Zosia’s own mess across her tongue until she’s moaning. Thrusting her fingers lazily into her mouth, Carol drops back to Zosia’s clit and sucks hard.
Her cunt makes wet, messy sounds while Carol fucks her with her tongue. Dipping inside of her, circling her clit, devouring her like she’s starving. Her lean body spasms around Carol’s head, everything drawing tight while she forces her closer and closer. She can feel the sharp edge of her molars against her fingers, the velvet crush of heat around her tongue, murmured nonsense lost in a garble—everything in Zosia yielding to Carol. Letting her in, wrapping her in soft acceptance. It’s suffocating, but safe. Like being buried inch by inch in warm sand, bundled tight by the earth. It feels so good to be held.
Carol’s orgasm takes her by surprise. A stuttering, desperate thing that makes her clench her eyes shut, tipped over the edge by a frantic rock of hips against Zosia’s skin. Zosia is coming not long after, surging forward from the bed and swallowing Carol’s fingers so deep she nearly gags. Her breath catches, choking on sob while Carol continues to lap at her, unwillingly to give up before she’s wrung out completely. When Zosia finally goes limp, Carol slows, kissing her sticky inner thighs while they both catch their breath. Lifting her head from between her thighs, Carol crawls up just enough to rest her cheek on Zosia’s lower belly. They’re quiet, both their hearts hammering. Zosia strokes her hair in gentle, soothing passes, letting the air settle around them like this isn’t the worst thing Carol’s ever done.
“Do you feel better, Carol?”
There’s no use in lying anymore. At least she’s not so cold.
Carol swallows, closing her eyes and biting her lip to keep it from wobbling.
“Yes.”