They’re in the cemetery — an odd-shaped medieval lacuna of moss and morbidity, bending the side streets apart around it to create a pocket of dark and quiet. Midway on the walk between the ugly wasteland of the city center and the spot on the grimy urban fringe where the cheapest, cringest, student-friendliest nightclub lurks.
It rained a little, in the afternoon; here in a corner, amid the eroded headstones, the soil smells damp and green. The faint, obnoxious pulse of the club’s bass in just audible, even from here.
Lucy’s boxed up against a crumbling Victorian mausoleum, vodka-dizzy and slightly breathless. Maddy’s all sharp-edged and pretty and it does things to Lucy, inside Lucy, makes her hot and flustered and hungry and shaky. And Maddy has her boxed up against cold and algae-greened stone in the damp night air, the bottle — between them, emptied — now perched atop the monument, behind and above Lucy’s shoulder. Maddy’s eyes are bright and her mouth looks damp and soft and kind of cruel.
“I want to treat you like a princess,” Maddy says. The words fall like pennies from a skyscraper, punching through Lucy like gravity, like bullets. She makes a noise, high and needy, and Maddy’s cruel mouth turns mockingly smug. Lucy’s riveted to the dart of Maddy’s tongue, wetting her lip.
Lucy starts to whimper something like uh-huh, nodding along.
“Thrown you in a dungeon until you think you might never get out,” Maddie says, eyes alight. Her teeth glint in her smile. “Drag you out for a humiliating show trial before a revolutionary tribunal, then parade you in front of a jeering audience to take your terrible punishment at the people’s hands.”
Lucy’s nodding freezes. Her whimpering doesn’t; Maddy takes hold of her face, fingers gripping her cheeks. Maddy’s eyes are huge and gleaming and all-encompassing in the dark, flecked with the glossy highlights of the closest streetlamp, over the churchyard wall and along the street beyond.
Lucy shivers, all through herself; a cartoonishly abrupt, full-body shake. Overfilled with hotly thrilling dread, she feels herself slickly leak between her thighs.
“Call my face The Chair, the way you’re gonna meet god when I make you sit on it,” Maddy says with menacing relish.
