5. Ruining a Perfectly Good Outfit

Light stabbed through the curtains—needle-thin and relentless. George surfaced painfully from oblivion, feeling like a shattered vase hastily glued and missing parts. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth like a hanging corpse.

Lanie lay curled beside him in a comma of smeared mascara and cum-stiff hair. Her fist clutched the silk camisole he’d gifted her, wet with tears and torn at the neckline. In that moment, she looked oh so small, breakable, fragile.

He tried to sit up.

But now, cold steel bit at his wrists. Chains rattled, anchoring him to iron pillars on either side of the bed.

Seventeen years of ovulation charts and bourbon-stained receipts swam behind his eyelids. Her laughter—sharp as a cicada’s scream. Echoeing through the IKEA parking lot where they’d fucked drunk and raw on a discount futon.

The scar under the magnolia still bled sap where they’d buried something in a Folgers can. What did she do to him last night? His groin throbbed like she’d fed it through a combine harvester. How did her magic even work on him?

The room tilted. His pelvis ached as if someone had scooped out his organs with a melon baller. The sheets slid down, revealing smooth skin and a scar where coarse hair and his manhood should’ve been. George blinked. What the fu? He pulled against the chains—

Lanie’s hand shot out, pinning his wrist. “Don’t.” Her voice was gravel and glass. “You’ll ruin the stitches.”

Stitches? He squinted. A tattoo curled across his lower belly—DICKLESS in jaunty Comic Sans, the ‘i’ dotted with a cartoon fairy. His throat closed.

“Cute, right?” She didn’t open her eyes. “Took inspiration from your pornhub history.” Her smile didn’t reach her temples.

His throat closed, and he strained against the chains. Muscles coiled—years of splitting firewood, lifting her giggling into lake water—now buzzed like weapons. The strength from a long-forgotten past surged; the demon was starting to stir.

The pillars groaned. Plaster rained down. Lanie flinched, eyes snapping open. In them: a flicker of terror, a plea written in vanishing ink. He froze.

“Shhh.” She pressed a finger to his lips. Her nail was chipped, and stained with something dark. “Sleep. It’ll hurt less.”

He wanted to scream. To claw the ink from his skin. Instead, he was **** to inhale the stench of an anaesthetic as she placed the rag on his nostrils—and his head fell back, his last thoughts being why?

The ceiling swam. A moth circled the overhead light, wings whispering secrets that George would never hear.

Lanie’s breath hitched. A tear traced the scar on her collarbone—the one she’d gotten the night they’d drunkenly tried to summon Dionysus while rutting in an IKEA parking lot.