4. The First Transformation
Chapter four
The First Transformation
Lauren
I woke with my tongue glued to the roof of my mouth, eyelids gummed together, and a hard, plastic-tasting dryness suffocating every soft membrane in my head.
For a long moment, I just lay there, trying to figure out where “here” was.
The room was familiar in a way that made me queasy: the soft drone of the mini-fridge, the moody rectangles of morning light slanting through the window, the faint smell of coffee residue and lavender from the overfull laundry basket in the corner.
My head throbbed, the pain settling behind my right eye, cold and mean.
I rolled over and immediately recoiled. A thick crimson smear arced across the pillowcase, brilliant as a crime scene photo.
For a split second, I thought I’d bled out in my sleep, that my brain had finally ruptured under the pressure of too much wanting.
But the stain was too perfect, too glossy, and it radiated a cheap, synthetic sweetness I recognized even in my fugue state.
Lipstick. Bright red, clownish, and impossible to ignore.
I don’t even own lipstick, and if I did, it wouldn’t be that color.
It bled outward in a petal-shaped blotch, the rough shape of a mouth pressed into the cotton. My mouth.
A queasy vertigo twisted through me. I traced the rim of my lips with my tongue and tasted wax, bitter and foreign.
My fingers went to my face. The lipstick clung to the cuticle of my nails, stained the pads of my thumbs, and left a bloody-looking print on my chin.
I reached up and found another patch smeared across my left cheek, a bruise of pigment that ran up to my temple and into the hairline.
I sat up, fighting the urge to retch. My hair had been let down, loosened completely, and now hung in frizzy clumps around my face, matted with sweat and something sticky at the ends.
For a moment, the room slid sideways. I shut my eyes and tried to piece together the night before, but the memories ran like water through my hands: a snatch of laughter, the sting of cold air, the taste of something harsh and smoky burning down my throat.
After that, a blackout. No, not a blackout. A pause. A skipped frame.
I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and found the rest of the evidence scattered across the hardwood.
My nightclothes, pale pink pajama shorts and a button-down sleep shirt, lay crumpled in a heap near the door.
The shorts were inside out, the waistband stretched as though they’d been yanked down in a hurry.
The shirt, which I’d put on only the night before, was torn open at the placket, a line of missing buttons trailing off into the ether.
There was a glimmer of gold at the collar: my necklace, broken, the chain tangled like fishing line.
My bralette and panties had been left in a separate pile, tossed as an afterthought.
I glanced down at my own body. I was naked.
Not just naked, but freshly stripped, the way you feel after the first long swim of summer, every pore gasping for air.
The skin of my chest and thighs was flush, pocked with faint red marks that looked too deliberate to be the work of a bedsheet.
Something else… an ache, deep in the belly and between the legs.
The muscles of my inner thighs and lower back throbbed, tender and used in a way that made me want to either giggle or scream.
I shifted my hips and the soreness blossomed, not sharp but hot, so that I had to clench my teeth and breathe through it.
I managed to stand, my legs shaky and unfamiliar.
My reflection caught me in the mirror, but I couldn’t hold its gaze.
I saw enough to know I looked ruined: lipstick smeared in a clown’s grin, hair wild, breasts flushed, nipples puckered and pink as raw salmon, stomach crisscrossed with impressions from the sheets.
My thighs were sticky, marked by a faint trail of pink and something darker, something I didn’t want to name.
I wrapped myself in the discarded shirt, which hung open, useless at the bust. The cotton stuck to the sweat on my skin.
The scent of the lipstick was everywhere, as though it had been painted on in layers, a shellac.
I stumbled to the bathroom. The light was pitiless, cruel.
I expected to find myself looking deranged, but what stared back was only me.
Muddled and unmade, but undeniably myself.
A trickle of red curved down from my top lip, bisecting my chin.
My collarbone bore the outline of a perfect lipstick kiss, as if someone had stamped me with a wax seal.
I traced it with my finger, shuddered, and reached for the faucet.
Cold water burned my hands and wrists, the sting welcome and grounding.
I scrubbed at my face, but the pigment only blurred, leaking into the sink in ribbons.
There were more marks. Tiny, oval bruises along the left side of my throat, a scratch at my shoulder, and a ring of redness at my hip that looked like it could have been made by a hand.
Panic came in slow motion. My heart raced, but my limbs moved through syrup.
I checked my phone: dead. I plugged it in, but it refused to turn on, as if it too had been drained by whatever had happened.
I staggered back to the bedroom and found my bookbag on the floor.
The contents were in disarray, as though someone had rifled through it.
A handful of receipts, an empty travel-size deodorant, and my glasses, bent at the left earpiece but otherwise intact.
Beneath it all was a heavy, foreign thing.
I reached for the unknown black rectangle, thick and glossy, and picked it up.
A matchbook. Elegant, matte, with the words “Midnight Velvet” embossed in silver across the front.
The logo was a stylized pair of lips, open in a silent moan.
I stared at it for a long time, turning it over in my hands, waiting for some memory to present itself.
None did. I flicked the matchbook open. Inside was a scribbled phone number, written in a looping, unfamiliar hand.
There was also a note: “ Scarlett - Ask for Tony. You’re on the list. XOXO.
” The matches themselves were pristine, not a single one struck.
The name “Scarlett” clawed at the back of my skull, familiar but wrong.
I repeated it out loud, my own voice foreign in the bathroom’s echo chamber.
I sounded like a girl in a movie, drunk on someone else’s life.
I pressed the matchbook to my lips, tasting the cardboard, as if it could transmit information through osmosis.
Nothing. My mind was a static field, unable to make the pieces fit.
“Midnight Velvet.” I’d never been. I didn’t even know where it was, except that the name conjured up a lurid, red-lit world.
A world I’d never been brave enough to enter.
The shame was immediate and total. I slumped to the floor, back against the tub, and tried to remember.
Tried to reconstruct the moment when Lauren Prescott became someone else.
A few fractured scenes floated to the surface: hands, rough and impatient, pulling my hips back until my spine arched like a bow; fingers digging crescents into my flesh that burned with delicious pain; the taste of whiskey burning down my throat, then the salt of skin against my tongue as I traced a path down a stranger's neck.
I heard a voice that sounded like my own, but lower, hoarser, begging for things I'd never dared ask for before.
"Harder," it gasped. "Don't stop." At one point, I remembered crawling, hands and knees, across a hard floor, the cool surface against my palms a stark contrast to the heat radiating between my thighs.
My knees ached at the memory, skin still tender from being dragged across the wooden slats.
The sensation of being watched returned.
The distant memory of eyes following the curve of my back, the sway of my breasts, the parting of my lips.
Eyes that were not malevolent but deeply interested, hungrily appreciative.
Something about that gaze made me ache all over again, a pulse of want so intense I had to press my thighs together.
I blinked, and the room shifted. Time had passed, maybe half an hour, maybe more.
The sun had moved, slicing a new angle of light across the tiles.
My phone buzzed, half-charged, and the screen lit up with a dozen missed notifications.
I ignored them. Instead, I opened my browser and typed in “Midnight Velvet.” The first hit was a club, two neighborhoods away, known for burlesque and “VIP events.” I stared at the Google reviews, all five-star, all written by avatars with names like FoxyMina and VelvetDuke.
The dread thickened. I checked my outgoing calls: nothing.
My messages: nothing new. I scrolled through my camera roll and found a single new photo, taken at 2:14 AM.
It was a selfie, but not like any I’d ever taken.
The woman in the photo stared straight into the lens, her lips painted a perfect, deadly red, her eyes outlined in black.
Her hair was wild, falling over one eye.
The smile was wide and unashamed. She wore my sleep shirt, but it was open, breasts bare, one nipple caught perfectly in the frame, puckered and stiff.
There was a hand, not mine, curled around her throat.
The caption read: “Scarlett is a very, very bad girl.”