He wasn't just troubled. He was engineering his own poison. And he’d been slipping micro-doses into my coffee for weeks.
I felt my chest crack open. I wanted to crawl inside his wounds and live there. I told him about my mother’s illness, the slow erasure of her mind, how I studied neurotoxins because watching her forget me felt like being poisoned drop by drop. darling venom pdf
After three weeks of hell, the numbness began to fade. After two months, I could breathe without tasting ash. After a year, I finished my thesis on—ironically—synthetic neurotoxins and their antidotes. He wasn't just troubled
Dose two came a week later. He showed up at my apartment with a storm outside and whiskey on his breath. He didn’t try to sleep with me. He just sat on my floor, held my hand, and told me about his father. The cruelty. The silence. The way love, in his house, was just a prettier word for leverage. I felt my chest crack open
