Getting the words out was the hardest part.

“They tried to tell me you weren’t real, you know that?”

Amanda couldn’t help but take a long drink as she said it, hands trembling slightly but managing to keep the glass almost still. She dearly wished it had something in it other than orange juice; dearly wished she hadn’t promised to be Hannah’s DD, so she could leave right the fuck now. She didn’t know where she’d go, to be honest – where could she go that she couldn’t be followed? – but there was a small, deeply animal part of her that told her to leave, now. Get on a train, catch a bus, jump into the sea itself if she had to. Leave. Go. Do something! Something that wasn’t sitting here.

The slender, smiling thing in its red leather jacket and black leather shoes smiled even wider at Amanda over its own crystal glass. It blinked, its eyelids flowing in a long, unhurried display of utter serenity, making sure to catch Amanda’s gaze again and pin her slowly back into her head with its stare.

“And why would they tell you that?” It let its hand drift, as though weightless, through the air as it made a little gesture to encompass itself.

“I seem quite real to me. Perhaps you could affirm?”

Its smile never wavered. Neither did its stare.

Amanda couldn’t help but let her eyes sink down to catch that too-wide smile. Its teeth, like its flesh, were so very white against the cut-crystal glass, halfway filled with some clear liquid. Vodka, it had said – Amanda wasn’t sure if that even mattered. Perfectly white teeth in a perfectly white face against perfectly pink lips. Not a single blemish. Not a single blush of life.

Not like a living creature would possess.

Amanda tried very, very hard to put her glass down gently, but her brain felt so far away from her hand that it was as if she was not truly in control of it but rather issuing polite requests and begging for a response. She tried to tell herself this wasn’t its influence, couldn’t be its influence, just the adrenaline of the situation. It couldn’t have her already, could it? No, she’d watched it carefully. It had never touched her. They couldn’t influence you if they hadn’t touched you. At least, that’s what everyone on the website said.

When the clunk of her glass hitting the table arrived in her ears, she squeaked loudly. She had forgotten it was still in her hand.

The thing’s mirthless little giggles ran like dull knives across her brain. It brought one perfect hand down to the table, now, and began to slowly tap-tap-tap its fingers onto the wood. Taptap, taptap, pause. Taptap, taptap, pause.

“I’m waiting. Rabbit,” it said, eyes widening into razor-sharpness for the merest fraction of a moment.

Amanda realised she hadn’t inhaled in some time. She sucked in a breath so hard she nearly choked on her own spit. Her tongue wouldn’t cooperate.

“It. You. The, the. Um. The websites.”

Her mouth felt filled with ash. She tried to take another drink: it didn’t go away.

“I was… there are sites. Servers, old forums. Most people don’t know them. They’re… they talk about spotting…”

Amanda felt the word creatures die a quiet, unmourned death on her lips.

“Like… like, not…”
“Not human.”

Her eyes were fixed upon the smiling thing’s smiling lips. Legs terribly asleep, mind terribly awake. Unable to move; a rabbit, paralysed by a gaze of a snake.

The thing opposite her took another sip from its glass, setting it down again with utterly liquid elegance.

The rabbit felt her eyes lock to the glass and follow it down, entirely outside her will. Amanda couldn’t be sure, but it looked to be that the level of the thing’s drink had not changed since it had first picked it up.

Amanda wanted to scream. Wanted to vomit. Wanted to press her thighs together and rub-

What?

No. She would be okay. It was too public, here, for the thing to make a move – and if it tried, she had her talismans. Still, her heart jumped, pulsing against her clammy skin as if crying out in sympathy for whatever withered thing lay within the creature’s cold breast. Amanda drew breath once more; she tried not to loathe how primal, how animal, the feeling of simply breathing could be when in the presence of one who defiled the very notion. Tried not to think about what filled its lungs. If it even had them…

She took another breath, slower this time, and forced herself to measure out four pitiful seconds as she blew out as little as she could physically manage. Her lips pursed to slow the stream of air, wrapping around the breath like she was sucking gently on her mother’s teat, tongue wrapping it, eyes flickering shut, body pressing against her mother’s hot flesh and feeling that loving hand curling up-

What the fuck?

Amanda’s eyes opened wide and she blinked, all attempts to control her breaths dying as the panic gripped her. She tried to lift her gaze from the glass upon the table, those too-slender fingers with their perfect nails still cradling it like a lover.

Tried to lift her gaze-

Tried to lift-

Paralysed.

“Poor little rabbit” came the soft, sweetly mocking voice of the thing that sat on the other side of the table. “You must be so scared.”

Its voice in Amanda’s ears was a softly beguiling coo, and it washed over her with the penetrating warmth of a bath and the irresistible pull of a tide. In a peculiar way Amanda found she craved it: its honey was something beyond the terror-stillness that gripped her every muscle, a balmy liquid sound that oozed between the cracks in thoughts that were frozen so tightly into paralytic fear. It found those dark and icebound places inside her and caressed them, drawing them out with syrupy promises and a lingering need for more of those words that were so very gentle.

The thing across the table crooned to Amanda, so quietly that her ears were forced to strain as they greedily sought to catch each word and savour it. As it did so, it stroked its hand up and down its glass, as though running its fingers soothingly up and down Amanda’s spine.

She shivered, imperceptibly, at the thought.

“It’s alright, rabbit, I understand” it said, voice dripping in equal measure with sincerity and condescension.

“Really, I do.” Amanda’s eyes were still fixed upon the glass, but the thing’s hand was there no longer.

“You’re just so stressed, aren’t you, little rabbit?” Amanda’s vision had started to dim around the edges. She wanted to look away, to look up, to blink…

“All those thoughts, swirling inside. All those nasty little stories, filling you with ideas.” Amanda’s stomach muscles clenched: her body was trying to purge something poisonous inside, and Amanda was dizzy to wonder if the creature had somehow contaminated her or if, perhaps, her body was simply becoming as delirious as her mind.

“Telling you that there’s something to be scared about.” Amanda could no longer see beyond the very rim of the glass, her eyes pinned through the pupils by a speck of cold blue light.

“All those venomous little lies that those cruel, cruel people told you. Telling you that someone here wanted to hurt you. That sounds so wrong, doesn’t it, little rabbit?” Amanda’s ears were filled with a tinnitic ringing, a whistling roar that devoured the sounds of the quiet bar in which they sat and collapsed Amanda’s universe into nothing but the glass, and the words, and the unseen hand.

“Your little heart is beating so fast, little rabbit.” Amanda’s sight was a dark tunnel of void and gleam, feeling more than seeing. Feeling the motion of the thing’s hand as it slid across the table, past its undrunk glass, to lay just within the peripheries of Amanda’s unseeing sight.

“Is it beating so fast for me, little rabbit?” Amanda’s head buzzed. A memory emerged, unbidden, of childhood swimming in deep, blue pools in a forest she had never seen. Friends giggling, diving, staying under longer and longer. Dizziness. Too much hyperventilation?

“Or is it beating so fast for what you fear you’d do, little rabbit, if you could move your hand just… a little… closer?”

Amanda felt the motion, rather than saw it, as the hand of that thing reached out and made as if to grasp her own. That thing, that being, that smiling, grinning, gloating creature that wore the image of a woman so much better than any person of flesh and blood could possibly hope to wear it was reaching out to touch-

The Snap! of the fingers just below her lolling head – didn’t touch, mustn’t touch! – caused Amanda to jump back in her seat, the back of her skull clunking painfully against the wood of the booth’s bench. She barely, barely repressed a screech of shock, instead looking up wild-eyed at the grinning teeth that sat on the other side.

Saw a woman, beautiful, tall, and looking genuinely worried for the health of the woman she herself was talking to.

Her expression broke into furrowed brows and a chewed lower lip, tones of warm care seeping out as she tilted her head to one side. “Are you alright, Amanda? You started to slur a bit, and you seem very… I don’t know, out of it? Are you having a… sorry, I think you called it a ‘hypo’?”

Her accent wasn’t quite native, someone who’d come from overseas but had lived here a very long time. Perhaps Scottish, or maybe Irish, Amanda had never been too good at telling them apart. Her words were polished, refined: from money, perhaps, or maybe just from an expensive education and parents who had poured a little too much of their too-limited funds into their beloved girl. Perhaps that’s why she had an air of determination about her, even now as she expressed so much compassion for someone she hardly knew.

Or was it hunger?

She processed the other woman’s words and blinked with confusion. “Sorry, I called it a hypo? I don’t get…”

Amanda felt a wave of nauseous famishment knot her insides, so very like the ones she’d read about in the pamphlets they gave her at the hospital after her diagnosis on the websites she’d scrolled through when learning about her ex-girlfriend’s diabetes.

‘Hypoglycaemia, also called low blood sugar, can happen when you don’t eat enough or when you accidentally give yourself too much insulin. They can feel like hunger, nausea, shakiness, confusion, headaches, or other symptoms you might learn as you experience them.’

Amanda cringed against the bench, her head suddenly stabbing with a lancing pain that seemed to pierce through her left eye and nail her retina to the back of her skull. She cried out, then, unable to stop as her heartrate began to climb and she felt her lovely, newly-bought blue blouse stain with sweat as it stuck to her back and neck.

She threw her head back again, eyes turning to the stained and ancient liftable tile of the bar’s shitty ceiling, vision blurred around the edges. She felt her mouth, entirely outside her own design, utter “can someone get me some juice?” as she fought to understand why she would even say that. She’d never even felt this before that night when she couldn’t stop drinking but the shakes wouldn’t go away and her girlfriend had to drive her to the ED.

The woman opposite her stood up, visible from the bottom of her upturned eyes, and started shouting for someone to get some juice, “something with a lot of sugar”, and she sounded so.. so worried…

Amanda couldn’t help looking down, down at her table – she’d been drinking orange juice, she’d been Hannah’s DD – and saw the.

The neat vodka in her glass… and the glass next to it, empty.

No carbs in vodka said some little part of her head, remembering her diabetes educator –her girlfriend’s doctor talking to– Amanda, explaining how to dose herself at parties, and Amanda worrying she’d mess up and dose herself too high because she always thought there were carbs in vodka ‘cause it was made with potatoes.

Someone from the crowd was stepping forward, and was carefully turning her head to face them… was asking where did she keep her pump?

“What… what pump…?”

She felt someone lifting her shirt.

Felt a, a needle? No, a tube. Inside her… belly?

She looked down…

…At the black box she had clipped to her pants, so that her top just managed to cover it, and the long hose that led to the small plastic catheter resting inside her flesh, just below its covering.

Her headache stabbed, harder, and her eyes closed on her as she moaned in pain. She tried to speak, tried to say “this isn’t right!”, tried to get her mouth to do anything-

Someone was taking her hand, and she panicked as she looked up, looked around, was it Her- IT- the Thing that, that did something, made the world not make sense?

Saw a short, plump woman in a sunny dress and long curled hair looking up at her, holding her hand. Asking where she kept her sugar tester?

Amanda’s head thought, “what tester? I don’t need a tester.”

Amanda’s mouth said, “in my bag in the blue case.”

Amanda’s eyes saw the little woman go to her bag. Pull out a- blue case. Open it. Pull out-

Her tester.

***

Amanda blushed and ducked her head, not even noticing her hands unwinding the band from her hair to let it fall around her face like curtains of black silk, hiding her profile from the gaze of the woman walking companionably beside her.

“I’m sorry about that”, she muttered, grateful that the taller woman couldn’t see her squinting her eyes closed in shame. “I fucked up my insulin before we started drinking. I- it’s not been that long, I get confused about what’s in vodka, I always think it has carbs…”

She trailed off, and they took another few steps in a silence that felt, to Amanda, as an uncomfortable chill against the warm air of the early autumn’s night.

The little chuckle from beside her was friendly and inviting, opening a little pocket of warmth and spreading the curtain wide for her to step inside, if she’d like.

“Amanda,” the woman walking with her said, “it’s completely understandable. I can’t imagine how bad I’d be at it if I suddenly had to start worrying about every little thing I ate or didn’t eat, especially at 26. You did nothing wrong, and I’m glad I got to help you.”

The chill silence it had been washed away, replaced instead with peaceful quiet. She smiled as she thought how similar the two may look from the perspective of her date.

Her date.

She loosed a giggle of her own, and turned to look at the tall, beautiful woman who walked beside her. Amanda had scarcely taken the time to admire her since the little moment in the bar, but she felt her eyelids flutter faintly as she considered her date’s red leather jacket and black leather shoes, movements flowing with utter serenity and a liquid grace that felt impossible for a mortal woman to achieve. I’m so lucky!

Her date didn’t look her way, instead concentrating on navigating the empty but darkening streets as they neared the front door to her home, but Amanda could see her ruby-red smile. “What’s so funny, bunny?”

“I was just thinking”, Amanda replied, “how, in all the confusion… I think it’s so silly, but I’ve honestly forgotten your name. And isn’t that just ridiculous? I’m going back to a – and do forgive my boldness – gorgeous model’s home after she’s seen me make an absolute idiot of myself in public, and I don’t even know her name!”

She giggled again, tinged with a twist of anxiety at her own admission.

Her date giggled, too, a deeper sound with a certain velvety husk that suggested a deeper humour, before falling back into easy quiet. It didn’t exactly alleviate Amanda’s anxiety, especially as her date seemed in no hurry to actually answer her implicit question, but it was warming and simple and Amanda felt she could let her fears go by the wayside for now.

They walked for, perhaps, another half-minute before her as-yet-unnamed date pulled up at an indistinguishable front door in an indistinguishable line of houses, pulling out a key and sliding it smoothly into the lock. The inside of her home was dark, with a long staircase immediately before them and a yet-longer dark corridor that disappeared away past the narrow steps into a gloom that seemed to have no end. The woman stepped inside and made no move to turn on the lights.

In that moment, for the slimmest fraction of a second, Amanda thought she saw a flicker about her of something-

It was nothing.

The woman took another step inside, not yet turned and not yet reaching for a switch. “Well, Amanda,” she whispered, with dark chocolate and deep promises.

“Would you like to come in, dear?”

Amanda blushed and placed a foot on the step, feeling the delicious promise it made deep in some part of her animal core.

Placed another through the door and landing on the welcome mat, feeling that warm desire spread up, out of her belly, into her chest and neck and head.

Stepped through the doorway, standing in her home, in this place that was Hers.

The tall and slender form of the woman before her turned around, face nearly obscured by the darkness in the foyer of Her house and reached around Amanda to close the door behind her.

“Welcome to my home, rabbit.”

She looked down,

And Amanda looked up into the eyes of the smiling creature in woman-shape, its beauty far too wondrous for a thing of mortal flesh and its eyes far too hungry for a being of mundane hungers.

“I do so hope you enjoy your stay.”

The last thing she thought, as the thing ran its beautiful, slender fingers down her cheeks and gripped her jaw to tilt her head up,

Was to question why she’d never thought about who was writing all those pages in the first place.