Secrets of the Velvet Trap
In 1935 Chicago, a married woman analyst and her younger lesbian patient pursue a romantic relationship. Dr. Eleanor Wentworth, a London-trained psychoanalyst who has built a “normal” life, takes on Eddie Langley, a pulp writer who spends her nights in the underground club the Velvet Trap. As their sessions ignite desire on both sides of the couch, the walls of the consulting room can no longer contain what’s happening between them. Eleanor is already suspect at the conservative Chicago Institute for her foreign training and her interest in “deviant” patients; a scandal with Eddie would destroy not only her career but the fragile queer networks that keep them both alive. Caught between professional ethics, a marriage she refuses to fully abandon, and the first love that feels like truth, Eleanor must decide what kind of analyst—and what kind of woman—she is willing to be.
Shadows of the Velvet Trap
It’s Chicago, 1942. Ration books and suspicion grease the gears of the city, and at the Velvet Trap danger is part of the show. The club is a swing palace thick with sailors and working women. The volatile Eddie Langley runs the floor with charisma and deception. Her lover, Dr. Eleanor Wentworth, balances a public marriage and private desires, while schooling the next generation at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Over them both presides Vivian Moreau, the Trap’s formidable owner, whose upstairs suites host the city’s most dangerous and desirable patrons. And Mireille, a foreigner with perfect gloves and imperfect motives, who brings the scent of blackmail and espionage. As wartime shortages tighten and watchful eyes multiply, erotic obsession ignites a slow war between secrecy and desire—and nothing will end clean.
Author's Note: Secrets of the Velvet Trap was serialized on Medium (2024–2025) but has since been withdrawn for traditional publication. Shadows of the Velvet Trap is the follow-up, set in 1942. DARKLAW SERIES - EPIC FANTASY
Ambition. Love. Apocalypse. When gods rise, nothing is forbidden. Avestine, a fallen hero turned outlaw, must face her brother’s armies and her own insatiable hunger for power. Driven by dark passions, Avestine can't relinquish possession of the woman destined to end the world, even if it unravels a thousand years of prophecy.
BLOOD DRIES (novella) Avestine fights to master her own ambition, as well as a world fraught with power struggles and dark secrets.
DARKLAW SAGA (novel) An outlaw must conquer not only her brother’s army but her own insatiable ambition. And what of her love for the woman prophesied to end the world?
SAVAGE SINRU (illustrated series) She came into the world like a storm — dark-eyed, cursed, ravenous — to challenge the powers on earth and defy the dominion of demons.
ALL WRITING
ILLUSTRATION
I paint most of the covers for my stories. I'm a digital painter using Procreate, Clip Studio Paint, and Adobe Photoshop. I use an iPad Pro for creating and a desktop computer for edits. I often write about my process on art posts.
SUBSCRIBE
If you enjoy my stories, please consider clapping, highlighting, and commenting. Interactions is how Medium determines what stories to share and how to pay authors. If you prefer to stay anonymous and just read, that's cool, but you know, we live in a processual world in which everything shares in creativity. I guarantee you didn't read the story I wrote, so I'd love to know what you did read.
Subscribe to my email so you don't miss anything.
BIO
Author, Artist, Analysand, Academic | Chasing jouissance and embracing transgression | Saketopoulou fangirl | https://linktr.ee/teresa.social
I write about lesbian women who desire and how they experience pleasure. I don't write about women who want to be desired and how they provide pleasure. Desire is power. It establishes subjectivity. It creates sovereignty. That's the niche you'll find here.
I am interested in what is felt to be transgressive because it is that experiential excess that will ultimately contribute to the subject's feeling overwhelmed enough for anything new to occur... What makes one's sexuality perverse is not the precise script enacted but the imbrication of transgression with the intensities of the body's libidinal excitability. (Sexuality Beyond Consent by Avgi Saketopoulou) I'm a voracious consumer of contemporary philosophy, history, and psychoanalysis focused on language, power, and subjectivity. My favorite thinkers are Freud, Bataille, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Nussbaum, and Saketopoulou. My favorite fiction comes from Dostoevsky, Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy, Graham Greene, Fitzgerald, Bataille, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, as well as lesbian pulp fiction, surrealist, decadent, gothic, modernist, and comic books.
----- The illustrations above were painted by the author in Procreate. The color has Vivian, Violet, Eleanor, Eddie in Secrets of the Velvet Trap (1935). The black and white has Eleanor and Eddie in Shadows of the Velvet Trap (1942). The lower painting is Avestine and Rook from Darklaw.
