The Witch Who Stole Her Heart

The hunger began not with a roar, but with a whisper. A scent on the breeze as I walked to the grocery store, a rogue gust carrying the faintest trace of bergamot and woodsmoke that made my steps falter. I told myself it was a coincidence, a trick of memory. I was better. The crushing grief was a closed book, just as she’d promised.

But that night, brewing tea in my silent kitchen, the memory of her cottage didn’t feel like a memory. It felt like a phantom limb. The clean countertop where Clara’s coffee maker used to sit was just a blank space. My eyes kept drifting to the window, to the dark line of the woods. I felt a ridiculous urge to put on my coat and walk back there, just to see if the light was on. To prove it was real. I didn’t. I was sane. I went to bed, and dreamed not of Clara, but of green eyes and the feel of rough oak beneath my palms.

The next day, the whisper became a murmur. At work, drafting a report, my pen stalled. The looping ‘e’ in ‘revenue’ looked like the curl of a climbing rose. I shook my head, irritated. This was absurd. I was grafting the intensity of the experience onto mundane details. A classic transference, I diagnosed myself. The mind, relieved of one burden, latches onto the source of relief. It was psychological, not magical. It would fade.

To test this theory, I deliberately conjured Clara’s face. The specific curve of her smile when she was pretending not to be amused. The feel of her hand in mine at the movies. The pain was… absent. A clinical observation. She left. It hurt. It doesn’t hurt now. The relief was still there, profound and real. But alongside it, unfurling like a night-blooming vine, was a sharp, vivid curiosity about Elara. The way her focus had felt like a physical touch. The cool certainty in her voice. The way the air had changed around her.

By the third day, the murmur was a chant. I tried to go for my usual walk, but the old trail felt wrong. It was just trees, dirt, cold air. It didn’t lead to her. I found myself on a different, unfamiliar path, my heart beating a strange, hopeful rhythm. I stopped before the trees could swallow me, clutching my chest. This wasn’t gratitude. Gratitude didn’t coil in your gut, hot and restless. Gratitude didn’t make you ache with the need to hear a specific voice say your name.

I fought it. I called Maya, my most pragmatic friend. We met for drinks. I talked about work, the weather. She asked, gently, how I was really doing, post-Clara.

“Better,” I said, and it was true. “I saw someone. A sort of… therapist.”

Maya’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s huge! What kind?”

“An unconventional one.” I swirled the wine in my glass. “She lives in the woods. Out past the old ridge.”

“A woods therapist? Is that a thing? Did she have you hug trees?”

I forced a laugh. “Something like that. It helped.”

Maya studied me. “You seem different. Lighter, but… twitchy. Are you sleeping?”

I’m dreaming of a witch’s hands. “Fine,” I said.

Later, back in my apartment, the silence was a taunt. Clara’s absence had been a screaming void. This new emptiness was subtler, more insidious. It had a shape, a scent, a specific shade of green. I opened my laptop, my fingers hovering over the keys. A ridiculous urge: to search for ‘witch spells attachment transfer.’ I slammed it shut. This was not happening. I was a rational person. I paid taxes and had a 401(k). I took a shower, the water scalding, trying to wash the feeling away. It clung. Under the spray, my own touch felt alien. My skin was a map waiting for a different cartographer.

On the fourth day, I broke. The rationalizations were thin parchment over a bonfire. I told myself I needed closure. To thank her properly. To understand what she’d done, so I could move on from this too. I bought a bottle of red wine, something expensive and deep, a tangible offering for an intangible debt.

Twilight again. The same creeping vines, the same buttery light. My knock was a frantic heartbeat against the worn wood.

She opened the door, and the world snapped into a sharper, more vibrant focus. “You’re back,” she said, no surprise. As if she’d been counting the days, measuring the growth of the seed she’d planted.

“I… brought you wine.” I thrust the bottle forward, a pathetic peace offering against the storm in my chest.

She took it, her fingers brushing mine. A jolt went through me, so sharp and sweet I gasped. Her moss-green eyes glinted in the low light, seeing everything. “The working holds?”

“The grief is gone,” I confessed, the truth tumbling out in the safety of her gaze. “But I can’t stop thinking about you.”

I expected shock, concern, maybe annoyance at a clingy client. Instead, she looked… satisfied. Deeply, primally satisfied. “The heart is a curious vessel,” she said, stepping back to let me in. “Empty one attachment, and it will seek to fill itself with the nearest, brightest flame. Or the deepest, most intriguing shadow. Come in.”

The cottage was warmer, the air closer, charged with a different intention than before. She didn’t make tea. She poured two glasses of the wine I’d brought, her movements economical, sure. She sat close to me on the worn velvet sofa, her thigh a line of heat against mine.

“What are you feeling?” she asked, her voice a low hum that vibrated in the marrow of my bones.

“Restless,” I whispered, unable to look away from the bow of her upper lip. “Like there’s a string tied behind my navel, pulling me here. Like I need…” I trailed off, the rest of the sentence too raw, too shameful.

“Like you need what?” she prompted, leaning in. Her knee pressed more firmly against mine.

“I don’t know,” I lied. But my body screamed the truth. A hot, liquid ache had taken up residence, a throbbing echo to the chant in my mind. Every cell felt attuned to her proximity, a dowsing rod finding its source.

“The spell was for unraveling,” she said softly, setting her glass aside. “But magic is not a scalpel. It is a current. It can divert, seek new channels. The energy of your released sorrow… it didn’t just vanish. It lingered. And it recognized a new focus.” Her hand came up, and she traced the line of my jaw with one fingertip. It was the lightest touch, but it burned like a brand. “Do you want me to stop this?”

“No,” I breathed, the word escaping like a prisoner finally freed. “God, no.”

That was all the permission she needed.

Her kiss wasn’t gentle. It was claiming. Her mouth was hot and tasted of wine and wild, bitter herbs. A moan ripped from my throat as her tongue met mine, not asking, but taking. I clutched at her thick sweater, pulling her closer, desperate to erase any space between us. The rational part of my mind, the ghost of the woman I was four days ago, screamed that this was madness, that I’d just escaped one form of bondage only to volunteer for another, darker one. But that voice was drowned out by a roaring, singular need: More.

She broke the kiss, her breathing uneven. “Tell me what you want.” It wasn’t a question; it was a command, an incantation.

“You,” I panted. “I just… I need you to touch me.”

A slow, devastating smile spread across her face. She stood, taking my hand and pulling me to my feet. She led me not to a bedroom, but back to the solid oak table, sweeping it clear with one arm. Vials and bundles of herbs clattered to the floor, a discordant music. “Here,” she said, her voice dropping to a register that was all authority and dark promise. “Now.”

She turned me to face the table, my hands flat on the rough, scored wood. She stood behind me, her body a warm, unyielding line against my back. Her lips found the sensitive spot beneath my ear. “The magic lingers on you,” she murmured, her hands sliding around to unbutton my jeans. “I can taste it on your skin. My magic. It’s singing in your blood, calling back to its source.” She pushed my jeans and underwear down over my hips in one rough movement, the cool air a shock against my feverish skin.

I was exposed, bent over her worktable, trembling with a mix of vulnerability and sheer, unadulterated want. “Elara, please.”

“Please what?” Her hand smoothed over the curve of my ass, possessive and warm.

“I don’t know, I just… I need…”

“You need to be filled,” she stated, as if reading the desperate scripture of my thoughts. “You need the hollow ache to be answered. To be redefined. Don’t you?”

I whimpered, pushing back against her, wordless and needy, my body a confession.

I heard the slick sound of her hand, then the blunt, wet pressure of her fingers against me. Not one, but two, pushing inside with no preamble, stretching me, claiming me. I cried out, my back arching, the sensation a perfect, shocking answer to the days of restless longing. She was right. This was exactly what I needed—to be opened, rewritten by her touch.

“So eager,” she purred, curling her fingers inside me, finding a spot that made my vision whiten at the edges. “So beautifully empty for me. Did you come here tonight hoping for this? Hoping I’d take you on my table, use you for my own pleasure?”

“Yes,” I sobbed, the truth of it shattering the last pretense. I’d been hoping for exactly this from the moment the first whisper of bergamot had caught on the wind.

She fucked me with her fingers, a steady, relentless rhythm that built a coil of unbearable tension low in my gut. Her other hand twisted in my hair, pulling my head back. “Come for me,” she commanded, her breath hot on my neck. “Let me feel my magic claim you.”

It was the combination—the rough dominance in her voice, the perfect, stretching pressure of her fingers, the utter surrender of my position—that broke me. The orgasm tore through me, violent and consuming, wracking my body with waves of pleasure so intense they bordered on pain. I screamed, my knees buckling, held up only by her grip on my hip and the table’s edge.

As the tremors subsided, she slowly withdrew her fingers. I slumped forward, boneless, panting against the wood. She turned me around, hoisted me to sit on the edge of the table, and kissed me deeply, letting me taste the salt of my own skin on her tongue.

“You’ll come back,” she said, not asking.

I could only nod, my forehead resting against hers. Of course I would. The hook was set, and I was now the one pulling on the line, desperate to be caught.

The pattern was established, a new, more addictive rhythm to replace the old, sad one. I lasted two days that time. The craving returned not as a thought, but as a physical symptom. A dryness in my mouth only her kiss could wet. A chill in my bones only her touch could warm. An emptiness that was no longer about Clara, but about the specific shape of Elara’s absence. I’d find myself at her door, sometimes in the deep silence of midnight, shivering with need.

Each visit was a lesson in my own submission, a peeling away of layers she found more fascinating than any botanical specimen. She explored my body and my will with a witch’s meticulous curiosity. She taught me that my need for her was a kind of power, and she wielded it with the precision of a master.

One night, she had me on my knees before the stone fireplace, the fire painting her skin in gold and shadow. “Open,” she’d said, and I’d obeyed without hesitation, taking her into my mouth, learning the rhythm she liked, worshipping her with my tongue until her thighs trembled and her fingers tightened in my hair in a grip that was both punishment and benediction. After she came, pulling my head back to look at her, she gazed down with dark, satiated eyes. “You learn quickly. Good.”

Another time, she blindfolded me with a strip of black silk that smelled of her. “Magic is about sensing the currents you cannot see,” she whispered, leading me through the cottage by the hand. She laid me on a deep pile of furs in a corner that smelled of cedar and damp earth, and for what felt like an age, she used only her mouth, her teeth, her nails, and a stream of whispered praise and filth in my ear, until I was begging, sobbing, coming apart again and again from sensation alone, unmoored from everything but her voice and her touch.

I was addicted. Not just to the sex, which was a language my body had only just learned to speak, but to the surrender. To the way she saw me—not the polished, functional person I showed the world, nor the shattered wreck Clara had left behind, but the desperate, hungry core that existed beneath both. She didn’t flinch from it. She cupped it in her hands and breathed on the embers until it became a conflagration.

I stopped asking if this was the spell’s doing. The question became meaningless. My world had deliciously narrowed to the anticipation of her, the memory of her, the all-consuming present of her. My apartment became a waiting room. My job, a series of tasks to be endured until I could return to the woods. I thought of Clara sometimes, but the comparison was no longer painful; it was anthropological. With Clara, I had been a satellite, orbiting her sun, defining myself by her warmth and light. With Elara, I was being consumed, metabolized. I was becoming part of her ecosystem. The dependency was total, but it felt like purpose.

One stormy night, about a month after our first time, the atmosphere in the cottage was different. A feverish energy crackled in the air, and Elara herself seemed to vibrate with it. Her eyes were wild, the green almost swallowed by black. The cottage smelled strongly of ozone, crushed juniper, and the iron-tang of approaching lightning.

“The veil is thin tonight,” she said, pacing before the fire like a caged familiar. “Power flows like a river in flood. I can feel it crackling on your skin, a static charge.” She stopped and fixed me with that piercing gaze. “Do you trust me?”

It was the first time she’d asked. The answer was immediate, a truth that came from a place deeper than thought. “Yes.”

“I want to deepen the working,” she said, coming to stand before me. She took my hands in hers; they were hot. “The thread that pulls you to me… I want to weave it into a cable. A permanent bond. Not just desire, but a true confluence.”

A sliver of my old, cautious self stirred. “A bond? What does that mean? Forever?”

“Not a chain,” she said, her thumb stroking my palm in a hypnotic rhythm. “A covenant. A choice, amplified by will and magic. I want you tied to me, heart and skin and soul, as I am to you. I want your pleasure to be my spellcraft, your longing the fuel for my art.” Her voice dropped, intimate and fierce. “You would feel me. A constant, low hum of my presence in your blood. I would feel your hunger, your joy, your fear. There would be no hiding. The bond would allow you to draw on my magic, in small ways—to light a candle with a thought, to find your way through a fog, to sense the growth in a seed. But it also creates a vulnerability. My pain would be yours. My exhaustion, yours. And distance… distance would become a physical strain, a stretching ache that grows with miles.”

“What are the costs? For you?” I asked, the practical question surprising me.

A flicker of respect in her eyes. “A share of my autonomy. A permanent channel open to your emotional world. My magic would no longer be solely my own; it would answer to the bond, to us. And it requires a sacrifice. A voluntary surrender of a piece of your old life, made tangible.”

“What piece?”

“The last piece of Clara,” she said, her gaze unwavering. “Not the memory, but the artifact. The anchor. Do you still have anything of hers?”

I thought of the small cardboard box in the back of my closet. The concert tickets, a faded scarf, a single earring. And the bracelet, which she already had. “Yes. Things. Nothing important.”

“Bring me the most potent one. The one that still holds an echo of her. We will burn it in the bond-fire. Not to dishonor her, but to fully transmute that energy, to complete the unraveling and weave its thread into the new design.”

It was madness. It was everything I wanted. The reluctance was a phantom, a faint echo of a self that was already gone. It melted in the furnace of my need, which now felt less like a void and more like a destiny.

“Yes,” I whispered. “Do it.”

I returned the next evening, the storm still grumbling on the horizon. In my pocket was a small, smooth stone Clara and I had picked up on a beach in Maine, our first vacation. It was just a stone, but it held the memory of sun-warmed skin and easy laughter, a memory that now felt like it belonged to someone else.

Elara had prepared the main room. The furniture was pushed back. On the wooden floor was a large, intricate circle drawn in a mixture of salt, crushed vervain, and what looked like powdered silver. At the four cardinal points, thick black candles burned with a steady, unwavering flame. In the center was a small, hammered copper bowl.

She was wearing a simple robe of undyed linen. She gestured for me to undress. I did, shivering not from cold but from anticipation. She shed her own robe, and her nakedness in this ritual space was more powerful, more sacred, than any of our previous encounters.

“Kneel here,” she instructed, her voice taking on that resonant, otherworldly quality. She pointed to a spot just inside the circle, facing the copper bowl. I knelt, the salt and herbs gritty against my skin. She knelt opposite me, our knees almost touching. The air inside the circle was warmer, thicker, humming with potential.

“Do you offer this token of your past freely?” she asked, her eyes like dark pools.

“I do.” I placed the smooth beach stone into the copper bowl.

“Do you enter this bond of your own will, understanding its nature—the sharing of senses, the mingling of power, the vulnerability, and the sacrifice of solitary magic?”

“I do.” “Do you offer your hunger, your devotion, your very self as fuel for our shared fire?”

My throat was tight. “I do.”

She took a slender silver athame from beside the bowl. With a quick, precise motion, she pricked the pad of her thumb. A bead of dark blood welled. She did the same to my thumb. The sting was sharp, clean. She pressed our wounds together, her blood to mine.

“Blood to blood, a covenant sealed,” she intoned. “Life to life, a circuit complete.” She leaned forward, her free hand cradling my cheek, and kissed me. It was a kiss of overwhelming intimacy, deep and slow, a promise and a consummation all at once. As our mouths met, she guided my hand down between her legs, and her own hand between mine. “Desire to desire, the current flows.”

The connection was instantaneous and staggering. It wasn’t just the physical pleasure, though that was immense—her fingers knowing me, my fingers finding her slick and hot and ready. It was a psychic floodgate opening. I felt a rush of sensations that weren’t mine: the cool, textured weave of the air on her skin, the taste of my own fear and wonder on her tongue, the dizzying, labyrinthine depth of her magical energy—a vast, ancient forest I was now walking within. And flowing back to her in a reciprocal tide was my own essence: my all-consuming focus on her, my desperate, worshipful love, my raw, unshielded need, a brilliant and focused beam of human longing.

She took my hand from her, guiding it with hers to the copper bowl. We held the small stone together. She whispered a word that sounded like the end of a story. A blue flame, cold and silent, erupted from the bowl, consuming the stone without heat. In that moment, I felt a final, tiny snip, a last thread dissolving. Not a loss, but a release.

We began to move together in the center of the circle, a slow, rocking rhythm of mutual touch, our foreheads pressed together, our breaths and whispered moans mingling. The magical feedback loop intensified every physical sensation, each touch echoing in both bodies, each pulse of pleasure magnified and reflected. I was crying, she was chanting in that ancient, granular tongue, and the pleasure built not in waves but in a single, soaring plane of existence.

“Now,” she gasped against my lips, her eyes open, locked on mine, black and blazing with shared power. “With me. Let the bond be forged in our confluence.”

We shattered together. My orgasm was a supernova, blinding and absolute, but it was inextricably woven through with the silver threads of her magic and the golden, pulsing river of her own climax. For a timeless moment, we were not two, but one complex being—one heart beating in two chests, one mind blazing in two skulls, a perfect, resonant circuit.

As we collapsed together onto the furs she had placed within the circle, spent and trembling, the new reality settled into my bones. A constant, quiet hum in my veins, a steady, low-level awareness of her, like a second heartbeat. A knowing of where she was in space, a faint impression of her emotional state—a satisfied, profound calm. And on the inside of my left wrist, where the ghost of Clara’s bracelet had lingered, a mark had appeared: delicate, interlocking spirals, like twin vines or the double helix of a new DNA, the color of a twilight bruise. It glowed faintly for a few seconds, then settled into my skin as if it had always been there.

Elara traced it with a reverent, trembling finger. “It is done,” she whispered, her voice raw with an emotion I now felt as a warmth in my own chest—a fierce, protective joy. “The cord is woven. The roots are set.”

I caught her hand, brought it to my lips, kissing the still-tender prick on her thumb. “What happens now?”

“Now,” she said, pulling me close so my head rested on her shoulder, “the cottage is your home. My bed is your bed. My power is a well you may drink from, though you must learn to dip the cup lightly at first. And your beautiful, endless hunger,” she kissed the mark on my wrist, her lips sending a fresh, sweet shock through the bond, “is my eternal sustenance, and I, its devoted keeper.”

I didn’t go back to my apartment that night. I sent a resigned email, quit my job, and let the lease expire. The pull was gone because I was finally home. Sometimes, in the quiet moments—when we were pruning the night-blooming jasmine, or reading grimoires by the fire, or lying tangled in the deep watches of the night, my wrist resting over her heart so the bond-mark pulsed in time with its beat—I’d think of Clara. The memory was like a footnote in a text now written in a different language: recognizable, but no longer holding meaning.

The ache that remained, the beautiful, desperate hunger, had a new name and a shared address. It wasn’t a void to be filled. It was a living cord, thick as a root and humming with magic, connecting my heart to the witch who had carefully, deliberately, stolen it. And every time she looked at me with those moss-green eyes that now held a fleck of my own gold, every time her touch reignited the circuit between us, I knew I’d gotten exactly what I’d asked for that first night.

I was over my ex. I was spellbound, body and soul and magic, to the woman who set me free by binding me to her forever. And I’d kneel at her altar, night after night, offering my devotion, my hunger, my very self, for the privilege of that binding touch. Forever.