Welcome, dear reader! I’ve got a very special treat for you this fine day: a deleted scene from AN EDUCATION IN MALICE, my dark academia Carmilla retelling. Spoilers ahead! And if you haven’t picked up AN EDUCATION IN MALICE yet, why not take advantage of the B&N preorder sale to get 25% off your paperback?
Author’s note: this scene was supposed to happen roughly 80% of the way through the book or so. It was ultimately cut because it had little bearing on the plot, but I never stopped thinking of it fondly, so I’m pleased to share it with you now.
Disclaimer: this scene was never edited by my publication team, so forgive any small errors!
Double disclaimer: please read no further if you don’t want to have the plot of AN EDUCATION IN MALICE spoiled for you, or if you’re not in the mood for a sex scene <3
As the campus curfew grew less forgiving, Carmilla and I came up with more creative ways to see each other. This mostly entailed bending the university’s rules. The curfew only stipulated that you had to be in the dorms by 9pm, not that you had to be in your own dorm room, and the rules against having dates sleep over conveniently excluded other Saint Perpetua’s girls.
We saw less of De Lafontaine in those days, but that meant Carmilla and I had much more time to enjoy each other in private, for which I was grateful. I was a greedy lover, insatiable to the point of obsession, and I wanted as much of Carmilla as I could get. Carmilla in my arms, Carmilla on my tongue, Carmilla on her knees before me.
Though my dear monster fed from me regularly, I often felt like I was the devourer in our relationship. I drank down every drop of her with abandon; every whimper, every sigh, every crooked smile.
Carmilla was entirely nocturnal by then and I was halfway there, so we would often pass the languid night hours in her dorm room, smoking out the window or reading in contented silence. Or, more often, taking each other apart piece by delicious piece in her bed. Sometimes, I was cruel, making her beg for every kiss, other times I was generous, lavishing her with praise as I worshiped her body with my hands. I was addicted to each petulant flash of her amber eyes, and I delighted in driving her to the brink of climax over and over again before finally allowing her release.
On nights when I drifted off in the wee hours, she would sit guard at my side, chewing cinnamon gum and revising her poems. She faded like a night-blooming flower as dawn crept across the horizon. I would wake in the morning to find her slumbering beside me, her dark hair spread out on the pillow, one arm thrown over her eyes to keep out the sun. In these moments, I would be so seized with love that my chest ached. That ache often led me to quietly retrieve my notebook from my bag and pen odes to her beauty while she slept.
Once, she stirred awake and snatched the notebook away from me. She must have been lying in wait for some time, feigning sleep, because her eyes were wild with mischief. She reached across the gap from her bed to the chair where I sat with an instantaneous fluidity, as easily as a hawk snapping up a rabbit.
All the blood rushed to my face in embarrassment.
“Carmilla, don’t,” I said, but it was too late. Carmilla was already flipping through my innermost thoughts, propping the book up on one askew knee. She had fallen asleep in nothing more than an ivory slip and a delicate gold wristwatch, and it winked at me as she turned the pages.
“Let’s see what secrets Saint Perpetua's favorite ingenue has been hiding,” she teased. But then, perhaps sensing my distress, she glanced at me for my approval. “I’m not being beastly, am I? Perhaps you’re allowed your privacy. Say the word and I’ll give it back and apologize.”
“You’re…”
I grasped for the right words and failed, pressing my lips together in frustration. Carmilla waited patiently for my answer, amber eyes attentive.
“You’re not being beastly,” I finished with a sigh. “It’s alright. It’s just a poem. Not a very good one, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said, the high-and-mighty lady once again. Carmilla flipped to the page I had been scribbling on and scanned my jumbled words. It was a sonnet, mostly scratched out because I couldn’t quite capture the starling perfect latticework of the blue veins adorning her eyelids.
“This is about me?” She asked, and her expression was so soft when she glanced up at me that I could hardly stand it.
I learned forward and gently took the notebook from her hands, pressing it closed on my lap.
“It was just practice. A way to pass the time.”
She grinned at me, showing the gleaming edges of her canine teeth.
“But of course,” she said with mock seriousness. “The great poet laureate Laura Sheridan would never be reduced to penning love poems out of sheer sentiment.”
It was difficult to remain dignified under the barrage of her teasing.
“Perhaps I might show them to you of my own volition someday, if you weren’t so wicked,” I shot back, partly serious, partly in play.
“Yes, I am wicked, am I?” she said, draping herself across the bed like a cat. The sheets slipped down to her waist, exposing the peaks of her breasts silhouetted by that pearlescent ivory slip.
Hunger flared to life inside me, as unruly as a wildfire.
“It’s a wonder I don’t punish you more often,” I said, my heartbeat kicking up. I was slowly learning the steps of our dance, the smooth overtures that created an arc of enticement, seduction, and satisfaction. But I was no less terrified of fumbling my part of the dance than I had been the day I met Carmilla, no matter how many times she gave herself over to me, and no matter how much my confidence in myself grew.
I had taken to sex with an amateur's enthusiasm and, I liked to think, a certain panache that would develop with time into skill. But eroticism was like a second skin to Carmilla, a mink-trimmed velvet coat she slipped in and out of with ease.
To my great delight, she caught my innuendo in the air with her own double entendre, lobbying it back to me with the grace of a tennis player.
“And what punishment would you devise?” she asked, letting the sheets slip further past her knees and calves until the fabric was barely covering her delicately sculpted feet. I wanted so badly to thread my fingers through her hair and pull her in for a kiss, but I forced myself to be patient. It was always better if we waited. If we played tug of war with each other’s hearts first. “Something out of one of your books, I suppose?”
She liked to tease me about my relative lack of sexual experience, which would have been unkind coming from anyone else. But I knew very well that she loved all the sweet little cruelties I had picked up from studying Desclos and Sacher-Masoch, just as she knew I adored her penchant for brattyness.
I retrieved the slim volume that she kept on her bedside table, next to a water glass filled with dried flowers. It was the same book of poetry I had slipped to her in the library, and it was undoubtedly now months overdue.
“Did you steal this?” I asked. She had dog-eared many of the pages, a habit that would have appalled me if I didn’t find it inexplicably charming.
“Well I certainly didn’t give it back.”
“Wicked indeed,” I murmured, leafing through the pages to one of my favorite poems. It was the most unabashedly florid description of cunningluis I had ever read, which was saying something. A notion began to swirl together in the back of my mind, coalescing into something scintillating and clear. “Do you want to play a game?”
“Please,” she whined. We hadn’t had sex or even necked in close to 48 hours, as distracted as we had been trying to keep up with De LaFontaine’s only increasingly demanding reading list. She had taken to quizzing girls without warning, making them stand by their seats and answer her, and she wouldn’t go easy on us just because we were her favorites. If anything, that would only make her more exacting.
Apparently, Carmilla was beginning to wilt in the atmosphere of abstinence.
I leaned back in my chair, flipping through the book of poems until I came across one she had not only dog-eared, but underlined throughout in tidy, thin pencil. I believed defacing library books was an offense that should have been punishable by law, but since it seemed Carmilla had no intention of giving this one back, I was willing to overlook it.
“Show me, then,” I said. In my head, my voice came out commanding and clear. In practice, I spoke too quickly, nearly stumbling over the words.
“Show you what?” Carmilla asked, arching an eyebrow.
I took a breath and forced myself to look her in the eye. Their amber liquidity warmed something within my chest, emboldening me.
“How you touch yourself when you’re alone.”
“Laura!” She exclaimed. A blush crept into her cheeks.
“Carmilla Karnstein, scandalized?”
“A little bit,” she admitted, and a thrill shot through me. While we were undoubtedly equals in intellect and age, I sometimes felt as though I lagged behind her in daring and boldness. She had lived so much life already, experimented with so many sensations and experiences. To be able to surprise her at all was a delight. “That’s, well…private.”
“And yet you were so willing to drop your dress for a pretty pair of eyes at Magdalena’s party,” I said matter-of-factly.
“That was different,” she huffed.
“I don’t see how,” I said. This, too, was part of our game. My put-upon meanness, her faux reticence so like a flower wilting under the batterment of rain. Carmilla liked to be coaxed out of her shell, provoked into depravity like a storybook princess succumbing to the seduction of a beast. And I very much liked being her beast. “But if you don’t want to play, that’s fine, I’ll just read to myself.”
“You know very well I want to play,” Carmilla said, biting her lip. “It’s just that I’ve never done that before. With anyone.”
“Would you like to do it with me now?” I asked, softening my voice slightly. This was the tipping point, the moment where I made sure the boundaries I was pressing up against were ones she actually wanted pushed. This, at least, I understood. This part, this second glance, this double check, was natural to me.
“I might,” she said, a smile creeping in. “But I must ask something of you in return.”
“Anything,” I said, without even having to think about it.
Carmilla kicked the sheets off her feet and stretched out on the bed. My breath caught at the sight of her, resplendent, unbound. Her slip barely touched her knees.
“Will you read for me?” She asked.
“Always,” I said, and smoothed the book open on my lap.
I started my reading, my mouth going dry as she reached underneath her slip and unceremoniously removed her flimsy cotton underwear. Carmilla tossed them on the ground, and then knelt on the bed before me and tipped her chin up.
“Can I have a kiss to get me started?”
This, though outside the boundaries of my hastily defined game, seemed fair. So I leaned forward and kissed her deeply. She hummed against my lips, then plucked up one of her pillows and slid it between her thighs.
Something in my brain fizzled out like a defective spark plug.
“Oh,” I said softly, suddenly awash in newfound understanding of the inner world of Carmilla’s sexual life. In all my blushing imaginings of the way she might pleasure herself when we were apart, this had somehow never crossed my mind.
“Now who’s getting bashful?” She teased.
“That’s how you do it?” Was all I managed.
“Not always. Fingers work just as well. But when I have the time and get a certain inkling…Will you read?”
Dutifully, I began to recite.
My mouth shaped of the words mechanically, and for the first few moments, I couldn’t take my eyes off the page. Even though it had been my idea, watching Carmilla seek her own pleasure suddenly seemed unspeakably indecent. Like peeling petals off a wedding bouquet, or playing sultry jazz music in an ancient church. For a long while, I saw nothing but the printed ink on the creamy pages, heard nothing but the drone of my own voice and the soft rustle of bedsheets.
Then, so quiertly I might have missed it if I wasn’t sitting in perfect silence, Carmilla let out a little sigh.
My eyes cut up to hers, and her lips quirked into a smile as she dropped her eyes bashfully. Still, her hips moved under her slip, rocking against the pillow.
We carried on like this for some time, me reading aloud and stealing little glances at her when I dared, Carmilla lightly flushed and studiously attending to her own rhythmic work. She braced herself with her hands, either on the bed or on top of her thighs as she bobbed up and down, back and forth, as surely as the pull of the tides.
The poem ended. I flipped to the next one, breathless in my pursuit of constant recitation. I could not stop for an instant. I could not let this perfect moment slip through my fingers and shatter on the floorboards.
As the minutes passed, Carmilla grew bolder. Her breathing deepened, and her sounds grew from intermittent, girlish sighs to needy hums low in her throat. When she finally whimpered aloud, her open mouth still stained with the ghost of yesterday’s lipstick, heat kicked between my legs.
I pressed my thighs tighter together and kept reading, ignoring the hot flush creeping across my chest.
Carmilla lifted the hem of her slip a few inches, either to give herself better purchase or to give me a better show, and my throat went dry at the cradle of dark curls between her thighs, the taut curve of her bottom.
Carmilla picked up her pace, seeking pressure and friction.
The watery musk of sex wafted towards me in the air, mingling with the ever-present scent of cloves, the rosewater Carmilla doused herself in after she showered, and the scent of pencil shavings and vanilla that perpetually clung to my skin. As she moved, I glimpsed the wetness spreading across the pillowcase beneath her.
No wonder her linens were always freshly laundered when I visited.
It should have been an unappetizing detail, but something about that dark dampness between her legs made me ache with need. It was exquisite just sitting here, watching. Not just in the power of being able to usher her towards climax with words alone, but also in the helplessness of not being able to touch her.
“Oh please,” Carmilla keened, either to me or to herself or to some indistinct omnipotent power. “Yes, please.”
I knew her well enough to know she was close. I challenged myself to look at her, really look, without shying away or succumbing to shame. I took in every inch of her, as though I were detailing it in a poem. The sweat-damp curls around her ears, the high pink color in her cheeks, the perfect O of her mouth, the flexed tendons in her hands, the press of her nipples against the flimsy fabric of her slip.
“You’re doing very well, darling,” I said, because it was the only thing to say. How could anyone witness Carmilla in all this glory and not be moved to praise?
Something about those few words tipped her over the edge, and she sucked in a breath, her knees squeezing the pillow tight as she ground down as hard as she could. Carmilla writhed and rocked, eyes squeezed shut, as her climax took her. She let out a cry so sharp and so clearly carnal that I thought for sure someone was going to call the RA.
Her shoulders slumped, and her chin tilted towards her chest as she heaved in a few steadying breaths. Then she looked up at me and smiled, eyes glittering with all the ferocity of girlhood and all the hunger of a fledgling vampire.
She was most beautiful like this, bed-rumpled and wild, feckless and free.
“I’ve done as you asked, madam,” she said. “Might I have a taste of you for my trouble?”
I grinned at her, a relieved sigh leaving my chest in a rush. I had been holding my breath, I realized. Not wanting to disturb the moment with so much as a misplaced sigh.
“Yes, you may,” I said, already tying up my hair and moving to the bed. My blood was pounding in my veins, hot and ready for her. “Tonight, and tomorrow, and forever, anytime you want.”
That’s all for this time, folks! Just don’t forget that my US Northeastern tour kicks off soon, and there’s still some tickets left! Check the schedule and contact the bookstore of your choice to grab your tickets before they’re gone. Be so well until we two meet again!
