The first thing I notice about this strange woman is her wasp-thin waist. My friends and I follow behind her as she, too, enters the house party, the late evening sunset behind me reflecting on her metallic green dress. Even before seeing her face, I am distracted by her subtle curves and the willowy way she walks. She is an alien-esque kind of beautiful, the kind that seems to be made of something else. Couldn’t be regular flesh and clunky, marrow-filled bones, not even when she walks across the house party and extends her hand and says, “I’m Jules. What’s your name?”
Her voice is saccharine with a subtle rise in tone that falls into a soothing murmur. This tall, elegant woman could eat me alive in any social circle. For a moment I imagine her snapping my arm off at the elbow and sucking the juices from my bones to satiate her hunger. Her sharp smile dropping open, jaw dislocating to shove the ripped end of my arm into her mouth. I can only watch the thin red liquid drip from her pointed chin as the fluids drain from my body.
I refocus on Jules, whose chin is still pointed, but clean. There’s a ringing in my ears and I desperately want to leave.
Before I can scurry away, she grabs my forearm. I freeze under her tight grasp, her fingers digging into my arm. She examines me for weakness. This unreachable beauty must see me as a creeping thing at her feet, twitchy and ready to run for a dark corner. She raises a perfect eyebrow. She’s waiting for an answer.
“Danielle LaRoche,” I say, my voice croaking out of me. My pulse is racing.
“Danielle,” she says, and I am distracted by the small, perfect shape of her lips. “I would love to pick your brain for a minute.”
I protest, motioning with a halfhearted gesture to my friends, all piled together in the corner of the room. I mumble something about being needed elsewhere, and that surely, I’m the least interesting person here.
“Come with me, just over here. I won’t keep you forever.” She buzzes with a high-pitched laugh and draws me forward even as something within me feels bloodless and cold. My dissent is halted in my throat as if my soft palate has been punctured and the words come up my esophagus just to fall out the gaping wound before they can make it to my tongue. The poor lighting gives her a greenish hue that only makes her seem more ethereal, and I am mesmerized. I’m slow and sluggish but she guides me with a needling hand, and I scuttle behind her like a dog on a leash toward the hallway flickering with a dim fluorescent light.
Halfway down the darkening hallway, she turns back to me with a smile full of teeth. “Let’s go in here. It’s cozy.” My limbs are unresponsive to my command, and so I follow her through the door and into the master bedroom with a king-sized bed.
She releases my arm, steps around me and closes the door behind us. Blood flows back to my hand, my fingers curl and straighten. The room is lit only by a dimmed lamp, and my heel is pressed against the foot of the arena-sized bed.
She turns back to me, her sharp smile already in place. Again, I try to make an excuse to leave, but again, words escape my grasp. She seems to know exactly what I mean to say.
“No one will miss you yet.” As she says this, more to herself than to me, she’s examining me again. Her long-fingered hands rub together, the whispering sound of it abnormally loud in this quiet room. This motion, reminiscent of a fly cleaning its legs, feels a little too predatory and I step backward—or try to—and bump into the bed. I cry out and I am falling, my arms flailing wide to catch myself on the bedframe, but instead I am caught by her.
She pulls me to her, startling me with her strength. Her firm abdomen is pressed against mine, her arms constricting around me. Warm, syrup-sweet breath washes over me, flooding my mouth and nose, and the house party is gone. I see only her mouth and her honeyed tongue, and I want to open my throat and swallow her essence. Let each of my cells be infiltrated by her. Drink her nectar, swallow gulps of her perfect body.
And I am on the bed, and I am bared, and I am staring at the textured ceiling as her perfect mouth laps at me, the heat of me, the wetness of me, and I cannot tell if it is pain or pleasure that I am feeling, but who can tell the difference anyway? Then I remember her beauty, even with something dark and wet dripping from her mouth, and I smile, my vision blurring, and I almost find my voice just to say, Eat me, devour me completely, because I am nothing without your attention, I am nothing but a cockroach in the rotting boxes piled behind this house without your eyes on me, and I know she will take all the goodness I have left inside me but she can have it, she can have all of it, she can take all of me and I will give it, I only want her perfect mouth on me, even if it is my internal organs she wants to devour, even if it is my blood and lymph and mucus she wants to drink, they are hers, they were always hers, and she can rip my heart out of my chest with her long fingers because I wasn’t using it anyway—
