Hunger

For a woman who turned desire into a ritual—love was not a sacrament—it was a sentence.

The Gospel of Consumption

In a fog-shrouded Northern California university town, Cotton works as a barista, but her true vocation is a far more sacred and destructive art. She is the high priestess of the temporary, a connoisseur of transient passion. For her, seduction is not an act of connection but a meticulously crafted ritual—an invocation, a communion, and a transubstantiation that reduces her lovers to closed gospels, relics to be classified and filed away. Her carefully constructed world is a fortress of silence, built to keep everyone out, and to keep the profound emptiness within from echoing too loudly.

Each conquest is a perfect, hollow performance, reinforcing her control and deepening the silence she mistakes for power. But the hunger is a relentless faith, and it always demands a new supplicant.

A Fracture in the Foundation

Then, Jasmin walks in.

She is not a supplicant. She is a still point in Cotton’s turning world, a presence that registers not as an object of desire, but as a fundamental law of physics—gravity made flesh. Her gaze does not worship; it sees. It measures, dissects, and understands. It cracks the foundation of Cotton’s curated reality and shatters the silence in her head.

This is not a seduction. It is a reckoning.

Jasmin refuses to be classified. She meets Cotton’s performance with presence, answers her liturgy with devastatingly simple questions, and offers not her body for consumption, but her perception as a mirror. The hunger Cotton feels for her is different—not a hunger to be sated, but a terrifying, magnetic pull toward the very thing she has spent her life avoiding: being truly known.

The Two Main Characters

• Cotton: A woman who has weaponized silence and turned intimacy into an academic exercise. Haunted by a past she refuses to name, she moves through the world as an untouchable priestess, classifying others to avoid being classified herself. Her journey is a painful dismantling of the armor she mistook for identity.

• Jasmin: A philosophy graduate student whose stillness is not an absence, but a potent, gathering force. Perceptive and deeply intelligent, she is the catalyst who sees the woman beneath the vestments. She doesn’t want to worship Cotton’s gospel; she wants to co-author a new one, grounded in truth, even when it’s messy.

The Setting: A Cathedral of Mist and Redwood

The story unfolds on the Northern California coast, where the landscape is a character in itself. The ever-present fog wraps the town in a shroud, blurring the lines between the real and the performed. Key locations serve as altars for Cotton’s journey:

• The Daily Grind: Cotton’s cathedral and stage, where she performs her initial rites.
• The University Library: A silent battleground of intellect and intimacy.
• The Redwood Groves: Ancient, silent witnesses to both sacred rituals and raw, human confessions.

Hunger is a dark, atmospheric exploration of desire, control, and the ethics of silence. It is a story about the terrifying, beautiful process of becoming—of what happens when the rituals fail, the silence breaks, and the only thing left to do is stay. It is a story for anyone who has ever built a wall and secretly hoped someone would be brave enough to knock.