Lethal in Velvet
Language: en
Three months into an intensely private online romance with an anonymous high-roller, he asked to meet in person for the ninth time. I sat at my cluttered dorm desk, staring into the small vanity mirror. The reflection looking back at me was covered in a dense splatter of drawn-on brown freckles, dull and deliberately unremarkable. My fingers hovered over the keyboard, typing out an excuse, deleting it, then typing another. Across hundreds of miles of fiber-optic cable, he caught the tremor in my silence. Don’t worry, baby, his message popped up, gentle and unhurried. I’m not shallow. I…