Page 274 of Craving Venom
It’s needed.
I fall back onto the blanket, wiping my face. “God, I hate you.”
“You love me,” she says, stretching for the tiny fridge tucked beside my desk.
She opens it and grabs a bottle of wine. It’s not chilled, not classy, and probably expired. But we don’t care. She yanks the cork out with a pen and a key, muttering curses the whole time until it finally pops.
We pass the bottle back and forth.
The wine tastes like fruit and regret, but it warms my stomach anyway.
We drink, we lean into each other, and we settle into the kind of quiet that feels earned until a sudden bang shatters it.
I pull myself up and walk over. I peek through the peephole, nothing. But when I open the door, there’s a box sitting on the hallway floor. It has no label, no return address, just a single ribbon tied around it.
“What the hell.” Tria steps beside me. I crouch. My fingers hesitate at the edge.
“It’s not ticking,” I whisper.
“Helpful.”
I lift the lid slowly. Inside the box, folded like it was made for a promise I haven’t said yes to yet, is a white dress. It’s a silk dress, backless, with barely-there straps that hold together with tiny gold clasps shaped like crescents. The hem fluttersfrom fingertip to mid-thigh. It gleams as if it was stolen from a moonlit altar.
“Holy shit,” Tria gasps.
I reach in, fingers trembling as I lift it. The fabric pools like water between my hands.
Tria takes it from me before I can ruin it with wine-stained fingers.
She holds it up to the light. “This is what you wear when you’re about to be worshipped or sacrificed.”
“Or both.”
She presses it to my body, measuring the fit. “He knows your size.”
I swallow.
Tria doesn’t stop. “Your tits will look insane in this.”
“I don’t think that’s the point.”
“Oh, it’s exactly the point.” She spins the dress toward the light, her voice pitched somewhere between awe and full-body panic. “If you die in it, I’m stealing it off your corpse.”
I take another drink. “Comforting.”
We look at it for another minute in silence.
Then Tria leans over and whispers, “You know he’s going to rip it off with his teeth, right?”
I don’t answer because she’s not wrong. That dress isn’t made to last, it’s made to tempt, to surrender in, to bleed in if it comes to that. That is, if he survives the night.
I take a deep breath, stretch my neck, and try to focus. The conclusion. Just the conclusion. That’s all I need to finish, and then this project is done.
And then what?my mind whispers.What are you going to do with it?
I shouldn’t be able to focus. Shouldn’t be able to breathe, much less analyze case studies or synthesize data. But I do.
Maybe it’s the silence.
