Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories by Susie Bright

night-blooming jasmine, rank weeds, and lake water.
    Aunt Helen didn’t want Mariah in her study. Aunt Helen was the perfect hostess. Mariah shouldn’t do anything to upset Aunt Helen.
    And yet—what was in that study? Was Aunt Helen truly crazy? Or was she just practicing to be a cartoon voice actress? Maybe the house wasn’t as safe as Mariah thought it was. Maybe she should just check.
    She swathed her hand in her skirt before reaching for the study doorknob. What if Aunt Helen somehow knew she had entered the study? Maybe not touching anything would disguise her trespass.
    The study was dark, the windows blanketed in thick curtains. The only light in the room came from something round and glowing dimly blue on a high shelf. Still with her hand swathed in skirt, Mariah reached for the light switch beside the door and flipped it on.
    After all, the study didn’t look much different from other offices she had seen. A big desk—well, okay, she’d never seen a desk with a piece of tanned leather stretched across its top before—and lots of bookshelves, with battered, fat books stacked haphazardly across them. No book looked new or even as though it had been published in the last twenty years. On the high shelf with the thing that glowed in the dark, there were all kinds of small lumpy objects. Mariah took a step into the room. On the high shelf: statues and jars of things; the glowing thing turned out to be a crystal ball, which still emitted a faint blue light.
    A counter beyond the desk, below the double, curtained windows, held open-ended jars full of sprays of dried plants. Some sticks, maybe. A couple held other things, some that looked like dried lizards.
    A box on the leather-topped desk held a collection of colored chalks. Faint tracings on the leather showed that Aunt Helen had drawn on it in chalk before and maybe rubbed out the drawings afterward.
    A fat calfskin-bound book tied with a leather thong sat on the edge of the desk.
    Okay, you’ve looked, Mariah told herself. There was no phone on the desk. So obviously Aunt Helen had been talking to herself all those times Mariah couldn’t quite make out her voice through the door. You’ve looked. You know she doesn’t want you in here. You want to stay here the rest of the summer, rent free, before you have to figure out how to get a real job. Let’s get out of here.
    She walked across to the desk and, with her skirt-swathed hand, untied the thong binding the big stained brown book on the desk.
    She let the book fall open, found herself unsurprised when the page it opened to turned out to be written in spiky, old-fashioned handwriting and purple ink.
    TO CALL FORTH THE ONE WHO WILL SATISFY YOU, said the heading at the top of the page. Then a bunch of nonsense words.
    The one who would satisfy her. Hah. As if.
    As if Jason hadn’t always promised he’d stick with her the rest of her life, when he couldn’t even stick with her past his own orgasm. Spurt and snore! She always had to take care of herself after he fell asleep. But she had liked being able to sleep next to him afterward, liked waking up to find he had slipped out of the apartment to go to the Danish bakery to get pastries and coffee for them both. She had liked sharing the paper with him over their impromptu breakfast, and she had loved standing on the corner after her last class of the day, secure in the knowledge that he would swing by and pick her up every time, that they would plan their evening and night together.
    All those things she loved doing, and he had said she was smothering him.
    Whose ideas had all those things been? She thought they had negotiated. But maybe she had been shoving all her ideas onto Jason, making him feel trapped.
    Or maybe he wasn’t the person she had thought he was. Maybe he was just a prick.
    She let her skirt fall around her thighs and pressed her bare hands down on the outer edges of the book to hold it open. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if you could say a