The Quiet House: Hunger Behind Drawn Curtains - by Diana Piner

The last human voice left with the delivery driver. After that, the house closed around Mara like a held breath—curtains half-drawn, the same soft clothes worn day after day, silence pressing against her skin until it stopped feeling like rest and started feeling like hunger. Argos is the only living thing that still looks at her. Massive, slate-dark, patient. He occupies the rug at her feet with the unhurried certainty of weather. At first she calls it company. Then her hands begin to linger in his fur longer than they should. Then her mouth finds the heat of his neck. Then the restless ache behind her sternum drops lower and refuses every thinner story she tries to tell herself. What begins as isolation becomes something far more intimate and irreversible. The quiet rooms witness every slow crossing: the first forbidden taste, the heavy lock that seats deep and pulses without mercy, the nights spent joined while the house holds its breath around them.