Her eyebrows scrunch together, vulnerable eyes peeking into his. “I whon’ lie aga’h, Dah’dy,” she promises.

“Good.”

He returns his open hand to her and she plucks the syringe from his palm, the pads of her fingertips leaving rivers of heat where she touches. He inhales and exhales, the effects of her just setting in. He wants to grab her, rip her off the floor, curl her into his arms, but he might kill her in the process. So, instead, he watches her from this short distance and eventually asks:

“Now, why is your finger still in your mouth? Aren’t you over this childish phase by now?”

But she doesn’t hear him. Her attention is directed at something else.

She squints critically at the syringe, turning it over and over again in her free hand. But the barrel is clear. The red smudge is completely gone.

That’s because I wiped it off, she thinks to herself.

She places the syringe down on the floor and looks at her index finger, expecting to see the red smudge smeared across her skin. But it is bare. This is not the hand she used. This is not the index finger she used to curiously wipe away the smudge.

By process of elimination, the finger she used is the one that is in her mouth right now. The one that is bleeding—that she has touched with her tongue multiple times, licking away the red smudge with it. That wet, sticky, winking smudge.

A nauseating feeling lurches in her stomach.

“My sweet, are you okay?”

He presses his hand to her forehead. Her skin is drenched with sweat and he grows worried by the sudden onset. I just dosed her. He tries to pick her up to place her on his lap, but she shakes him off and averts her gaze to the floor, refusing to budge from her now statuelike position. Her finger sinks deeper into her mouth.

He recoils from her and his voice descends. “Vanilla, what is going on?”

She doesn’t respond. Her face now drips with guilt.

His eyes sharpen. He doesn’t ask again. Instead, he reaches his hand out, palm open, upright and waiting. A silent yet demanding gesture with power that breaks the air where he moves.

Reluctantly, she removes her finger from her mouth and gives it to his grip. Over and over again she thinks, Don’t tremble, don’t tremble, don’t tremble. And, amazingly enough, she doesn’t. In his large, boney hand, her baby finger is still and bloodless, barely even a dot from the puncture wound to show for the mess. She lets out a sigh of relief, her heart rate dropping. She looks at him and giggles, but his eyes are still peering down at her finger, watching and waiting.

And then his eyebrows furrow.

She shifts her gaze back just in time to see the balloon of blood that swells at her fingertip. Her heart rate spikes. He can sense it. The blood drips down the side of her finger and falls onto his hand with a quiet yet deafening plop. The contrast between her dark red blood and his pale skin is striking. She wouldn’t know it, but it reminds him of red roses caught in a fresh winter’s snow back when he hadn’t been this way. When he had been innocent like her.