Nocticadia: A Dark Academia Gothic Romance

After two hours of gathering snippets from various articles and studies on symbiosis as an evolutionary perspective for Gilchrist’s upcoming essay exam, I was sick of it.

Freaking sick of it.

Who knew beneficial relationships between insects could be so boring?

At least Bramwell’s class offered a bit of horror and action with his mind-controlling parasites.

As I eased back in my chair, I caught sight of Mel hustling past my opened dorm room door. Strange thing, university. At home, I’d always kept my door closed, hating the lack of privacy. At Dracadia, I welcomed the occasional hello as one of my floormates breezed past. They were often respectful enough not to enter, and never came off as particularly nosey, or caring of what I kept in my room. Maybe that was why I didn’t mind.

“Mel!” I called out, knocking over the coffee cup I’d left on the floor beside my chair … so that I wouldn’t knock it off my desk. “Shit.” Nabbing some Kleenex from the box beside my laptop, I knelt down and daubed it, not immediately noticing she’d stopped at my door.

“What’s up?” she asked, leaning against the doorframe.

Abandoning the sopping tissues, I wiped my wet hands on the skirt of my dress and pushed to my feet. “Hey, can I ask you a few questions?” With a frantic wave of my hand, I corralled her inside my room and closed the door behind her.

“Sure?”

“It’s about the Crixson Project. See, I work in the library, and … well, I can’t find anything on it. The librarian I work with says there are some texts, but they’re off limits.”

“Those texts are useless and meaningless.”

Useless and meaningless. Meaning what? She had better information? “So … how …. How do you know so much?”

“Why do you want to know?”

Telling her that I had suspicions about Andrea Kepling and the nature of the experiment led by Professor Bramwell’s father would’ve been laying too many of my own cards down at once. I wanted to see what she had on it first. “I find myself questioning Professor Bramwell’s current research.” I lowered my voice. “I don’t trust him.”

“You and everyone else.”

Okay, seemed I needed a bigger bargaining chip. “I know what happened to one of the participants who escaped.”

“How?”

Instead of answering, I shook my head. Had she known it was Spencer who’d informed me, I doubted she’d have given it much merit.

She stared at me for a moment, her jaw shifting. Contemplating. “Come to my dorm tonight, and I’ll show you.”

Just like that. I thought I’d have had to do something crazy, like sacrifice a goat to get her to tell me the information, but there she was, offering it up like free booze at communion. “Okay. What time?”

“After ten.”

A knock on the door interrupted us, and frowning, I opened the door to find a strange blonde wearing fancy threads that, to my untrained eye, looked designer. The harder lines in her face put her at about forty, or so, but her hair and dress gave her a sense of youth. I caught the twitch of her lip, as she gave a quick once-over, clearly examining my less impressive outfit.

“Miss Vespertine?” she asked, like the name left a bitter taste on her tongue.

“Yes?”

“I’m Missy Finch. I own the boutique in Emberwick. Mr. Spencer Lippincott sent me to measure you for a dress.”

The air deflated out of me at the reminder that I’d committed myself to that charity event with him. “Oh, God.”

“Spencer?” The air of disgust in Mel’s voice had me flinching. Not that I cared that she had something against him, but the timing was a bit off. I didn’t need her clamming up when I was on the brink of getting somewhere in my nosey inquiries. “Are you seriously hanging out with that guy? He’s a creep!”

The blonde’s gaze snapped to Mel’s, and judging by the repulsed expression on her face, it seemed that Lippincott was more than some rando who’d sent her over to measure me. “I beg your pardon.”

“Look, it’s a misunderstanding,” I intercepted before an all-out brawl could break out in my dorm room. “Miss Finch, I appreciate you dropping by, but I don’t need you to measure me.”

Her bright blue eyes flared with indignity. “I came all the way over here, leaving my boutique unattended, battling the tyrant at the gate, and now suffering insult to a family friend.”

On a huff of irritation, Mel stormed out of my room, and I turned my attention back to the blonde.

“My apologies. Can you just give me a minute?”

She crossed her arms and gave a haughty tip of her chin. “Only a minute.”

I chased after Mel, who’d only gotten about three doors down from me. “Wait. Can you please tell me what the hell is up with Spencer that you hate him so much?”

“I get it. You don’t give a shit what the freak has to say. Go off and enjoy your little romance with the provost’s privileged son.”

Emo Jesus in a black dress, I didn’t have the patience for her right then. “I give everyone the benefit of doubt. Including you. Just as I wouldn’t give a shit what someone had to say about you without finding out myself, I’d like to be my own judge where he’s concerned.”

“Then, find out by yourself. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“And what about meeting up? Are we still on for that?”

A furtive glance around and she leaned closer to me. “You’re asking for sensitive information. Why the hell should I trust you when you so openly trust others?”

“Because you still want to know what I know. And I never said I fully trusted Spencer. Where I come from, spilling secrets gets you killed.”

“As is the case here.” She ran her tongue over her teeth, and arms crossed, studied me again like she needed to internally ask her other moods for permission first “I don’t know why I bother with you, Vespertine. Maybe because you’re not a pretentious little trust fund bitch. But you still annoy the shit out of me.”

“Is that a yes, then?”

She rolled her eyes and huffed. “Yeah. I guess.”

Thank goodness. Breathing a sigh of relief, I returned to my room to find Missy rummaging through the dresses hung in my closet.

“Hey!”

“It’s not that you’re entirely tasteless, mind you. It’s just, well, you have no sense of balance.”

“I have balance.”

She studied me for what felt like minutes, her eye squinting on occasion as if in disapproval of whatever thoughts ran through her head. “You remind me of someone. Are you related to the Corbins, at all?”

“No. But you’re the second person who’s asked.”

“It’s uncanny. The hair.” She motioned to her own, wearing a frown as if there was something wrong with mine. “The face. The eyes. It’s like I’m staring right at her again.”

“Who?”

“An old classmate of mine. Vanessa Corbin. She lived here on the island for a number of years.”

“But she looks like me?”

“A spitting image.” Waving her hand in dismissal, she shook her head. “Let’s get this over with, shall we? I’ll take measurements back to my shop and see what dress would best compliment your figure.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” I threw up my hands at that. “I don’t get to pick the dress?”

She glanced toward my outfit and back. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Well, I happen to be very particular about what I wear. And I’m not really in the position to spend–”

She threw up a hand, refusing to hear what I had to say. “The cost is inconsequential. As I said, the Lippincotts are friends.”

“Okay. Fine. But I’d like to try it on first before the event. I refuse to wear anything that makes me uncomfortable.”

“No can do, darling. Depending on the dress, adjustments could take me right up until the night of.”

“Fine.” If it happened that I hated the dress, I’d wear one of my own, or fake being sick. Either way, the woman was not about to dictate what I wore.

As she took hold of my shoulders and urged me upright, her gaze landed somewhere on my neck, and she frowned, lifting up the small vial of my mother’s ashes dangling from its beaded chain there. “What’s this?”

“It belonged to my mother,” I answered lamely.

“It’ll have to go, the night of the gala. It certainly won’t pair well with any dress I provide.”

I groaned and shook my head. “Okay. Can we just get to measuring?”

For the next twenty minutes, she must’ve taken about a hundred different measurements, as if she was about to clone a three-dimensional version of myself back at her shop. With impatience, I let her do her thing, mildly irritated by the slow-mo pace in which she moved.

When she finally finished and left my room, I was actually eager to jump back into the symbiosis of insects.

And I would’ve dove head-first back into those studies, if I hadn’t caught sight of Professor Bramwell reading beneath the tree in the courtyard. Unusual, seeing as he rarely spent a moment outside of his office, or lab, from what I’d observed over the last couple of weeks.

That the guy had to be utterly delectable with a book in his hands made me want to scratch my eyeballs out. I snacked on an apple as I sat on my windowsill, staring down at him, hating that my determination to focus had been completely derailed by the man again.

Yes, a man. Not a boy. Not a classmate.

My professor, whom I found myself thinking about far more than I should’ve.

What started as a curiosity over what he was reading quickly turned to thoughts of what it must’ve felt like to be the sole object of his focus, like that book. I imagined him to be intense. Passionately reading every page, desperate to soak up as many of the words as he could.

Staring intently, I ran my thumb over my bottom lip, imagining it caught between his teeth.

All at once, he lifted his gaze, eyes locked on mine.

On a squawk of humiliation, I startled and fell off the windowsill, crashing onto the floor below me. A zap of pain shot up from my ass into my spine, and I grimaced, rubbing the cheek that’d taken the brunt of the fall.

“Classy. Real classy.”