Hidden Things

Cities are designed for isolation. That’s the beauty of them. Hidden things could stay hidden without actively moving to hide them. Cities are information overload; people filter what they experience in them to keep from feeling overwhelmed. And if something – of someone – doesn’t directly affect them, it easily passes under the radar. Unnoticed, unseen.

You can hide a lot of things that way.

Laurina stood on her apartment balcony as thought over what the city before her hid in its totality, looking out over the buildings of downtown as indexes of secrets she’d never know. Thick fingers wrapped around her wine glass, holding it as her hands were held out over the railing. A salt water breeze from the harbor played at long, wavy locks of hair and tickled the wind chime that hung from its hook on the awning above her.

She knew how to hide herself with minimal effort. Standing at the bus stop, sipping her coffee while she stood waiting with the crowd for the green line into the town center. Sitting among people, head down, eyes moving from line to line at the book on her phone’s screen. Most of the other people did the same, with the occasional muffled conversation happening between a pair in some set of seats, or a person on a headset, talking to someone further away.

A simple walk of a few blocks, and a largely quiet day behind the reference desk at the library. The occasional conversation with people looking for materials. The lovely smell of paper and ink, and the quiet rustle of people going about the work of study, introspection, examination.

Punctuated sometimes, she thought as the muscles in her back and neck twitched, with the sound of someone who chose to not follow the rules. Her rules, for her library.

She lifted the wine glass to her lips, drinking down a sip of the heady red liquid inside. Loud noises, loud conversation, all grated on her nerves – nails on a chalkboard in nature, a sharp razor blade on glass. Especially the ugliness of confrontation. The push and shove of egos that clashed together in her space, her serene space, her library – this place of solitude and dignity and above all else, quiet.

Her heart ran faster. She clenched her teeth, then realized she clenched them and compelled herself to relax her jaw. It would be fine, she assured herself. The problem from earlier was taken care of. Or would be, once she finished cleaning up her mess.

Easing her weight off of the railing, she turned and carried her glass back into the apartment. It was a small space; a couch, a table, a small television. Bookshelves; those were the most numerous. All of them packed full with a compressed lifetime’s worth of collecting books of salvage sales, used book shops, other places where discarded pieces of literature ended up. It was something she related to: collecting the unwanted.

Settling onto the couch, she put the wine glass down onto the table and considered the small, perforated tin beside the coaster it rested on. Some people turned to alcohol to stem the noise of life’s irritants. Others used a variety of other substances, legal or not. She turned up her nose at most of them; people destroying their lives, she thought, and worse still, people who were breaking the rules that governed society. They were offenders, like so many others.

She leaned forward, opening the tin. She frowned down at its contents.

Offenders, she repeated to herself, like this one.

The young man inside was not much larger than one of those gummy fish you could buy by the bag at a convenience store. But he was very much alive, shivering and shaking in his nakedness, his eyes wide as they stared up at her. He looked so pathetic, so small. It was only fitting, she thought to herself, given how pathetic a state she found him, how disgraceful a place – hiding in a corner of the library, masturbating over a book of artistic nudes.

Disgraceful, she said to herself. She reached forward, fingers pressing in on either side of her captive, lifting him out of the cloth-lined tin case.

He squirmed in her grip, twisting his toothpick-sized spine in a fruitless effort to escape. They always did, she thought, even though escape was meaningless. Where would they escape to as their size? For that matter, the fall from her hand would almost certainly kill. Or maybe not. Such things weren’t necessarily fatal to a bug, and that was all these tiny miscreants were.

She laughed at that thought. Many people ate insects. She supposed she was one of them, in a way.

Her mouth opened; she pushed the young man inside, past plush lips, his back scraping against the edges of her incisors. Her tongue grabbed hold of him, pulled him deeper, drew him completely into the dark confines of her mouth. She swirled him inside, mixing him with saliva, feeling his heat and movement against her taste buds.

Pressing him to the roof of her mouth, she swallowed; her throat wrung the sweat from his skin, pressing the juices from his body. Her voice rumbled in pleasure, deep in her throat. These victims of hers were such nasty, unpleasant things, but they tasted delicious enough to make up for the unpleasantness of their being.

Settling back into the couch, her tongue moved, folded, shifted behind her jaws. She pressed her captive forward, his back against her teeth, the tip of that blunt muscle probing at his chest, his stomach, between his legs. She pressed it tight to him, feeling the swell between his thighs. A chuckle from deep in her belly as his whimpers echoed between her ears. Even in moments of sheer terror like this, she thought, it was still so easy to make them twitch with arousal.

Her tongue massaged up and down, curling, folding around what it found. Her head pressed back into the cushions behind her, tilting to one side. Her fingers walked up the top of one thigh, bunching the hem of her skirt up towards her hips, the tips of her digits then tugging aside the front of her underwear and sinking down into already wet folds.

Feet pressed down into the carpet beneath her, her toes alternately curled and relaxed as she brushed fingertips against the head of her clit. Her tongue moved downward, pressing upward on her prisoner’s bottom, lifting him again upward against her hard palate. There, she moved him rhythmically, back and forth, against the subtle texture of her mouth’s interior. She could sense the trickling taste of his body, rising towards climax, his convulsions as he both resisted and gave into the contact between them.

Her fingers sank into her, hooking deep inside her body, finding where she was most sensitive. Teeth bit into her lower lip while her thighs crushed in one one another, trapping her hand tight against herself. A little further, she assured herself, a little further and she could…

The moment hit her with a flash. She threw her head back, tongue sweeping her victim to the back of her mouth, pulling him into her throat with one tight swallow. A gasp poured out of her as soon as her airway cleared, her rushed breath spilling out all at once. Toppling sideways, she laid against the couch cushions, slowly withdrawing her fingers from inside of herself.

She laid there, still and relaxed, barely feeling the young man sliding into her stomach. He was nothing now; not a trouble-maker, not even a person. Simply food, tucked into the depths of her body, lost to the world forever. She wiped her fingers against her thigh, spreading her fluids against her skin. They felt warm, she thought to herself. They felt disgusting, as well.

Strength crept back into her. She forced herself up, reaching out for her wine glass, taking a deep drink before placing the empty glass back down onto the table.

Small towns were quiet and stable because hidden things stayed that way, she thought to herself, looking down at the bulging swell of her stomach. Somewhere beneath the layers of fat, muscle, and flesh, she kept her own things hidden deep.

Deep they would stay, she hoped.