Dreadful Desires
The Midnight Wind
Chapter 2: How Dark the Woods
Content warning: This story contains explicit content and monstrous sex that may offend some readers. All depicted characters are 18 years or older.
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Maria couldn’t face the couple again. She untied her apron and flung it aside, grabbed her pack of cigarettes, and stepped out the back door into the darkness and dancing snow flurries with a shout over her shoulder to Danny. “I’ll be right back!” It was a lie: she didn’t take her jacket with her only because she understood, with an inexplicable instinct of resignation, that she wouldn’t need it anymore. She stumbled past the dumpster and along the edge of the woods that stretched up the mountain slope, withdrew her lighter, and made a halfhearted, fumbling effort to hold and light a smoke. The gusting wind blew the flame out again, and then again, and then snatched the cigarette from between her fingers to send it twirling away into the autumn darkness.
A frigid breeze caught a stray lock of her hair and brushed it behind her right ear. The air whirled above her shoulder as she stood stiff and petrified, her back to the diner: it sighed into her ear and formed words, a tinkling wind-chime duet with her faint whimper.
