Jacob was supposed to be at his girlfriend's all weekend. I found out otherwise four stairs from the bottom: mid-yawn, wearing just a t-shirt and last night's evidence.

Based on image 10

***

The first thing you should know about me is that I'm twenty-six years old and I have never once made a good decision before 10 a.m.

The second thing is that at 8:47 on a Sunday morning, I was standing at the top of Dez's staircase wearing one "Bloody From The Crown" tour shirt, two mismatched socks, zero underwear, and approximately half of what Dez had left inside me at 3 a.m., which was - and I need you to understand this - a lot.

The man came like he was trying to apologize for something.

I'd woken up sweaty and dying of thirst with his arm over my ribs like a seatbelt. My options were: (a) wake him up, which felt rude, (b) die of dehydration, which felt dramatic, or (c) sneak downstairs, chug water directly from the Brita like a raccoon, and sneak back up before anyone knew I existed.

"Anyone," in this scenario, being Jacob. Dez's roommate. Who I had assumed - ASSUMED, past tense, please note the tense - was still at his girlfriend's place for the weekend.

So I got up. And immediately learned that gravity exists, and that when a large man finishes inside you twice and you sleep on it for five hours, standing up is basically pulling the pin on a very slow, very warm grenade.

"Oh no," I whispered to Dez's bedroom carpet. "Oh, no no no."

I clenched. I have decent clench game. I did a weird penguin shuffle to the door, told myself it's fine, it's a fifteen-second trip, nobody's home, and started down the stairs mid-yawn, one hand up rubbing my eye, hair doing whatever hair does after you've been railed into a mattress and then slept on it wrong.

The sequence of events matters here, for my dignity, of which I have none remaining.

Step one: fine. Step two: fine. Step three: my thighs were sticking together in a way that made a sound. An audible sound. A little tck with each step, like someone slowly peeling tape. Step four: I felt it move. Step five: I felt it lose.

A warm bead slid down the inside of my left thigh, taking the scenic route, and I froze mid-staircase with my mouth still open from the yawn like some kind of horny statue. That is the exact moment Jacob walked out of the kitchen, coffee mug in hand.

We made eye contact.

Then he made eye contact with my thighs.

Then - and I watched this happen in real time, frame by frame, like a car crash - his eyes tracked the drip. Followed it down. Like a cat watching a laser pointer, all the way to where it landed on the stair with a sound so small, and yet, so loud.

Pat.

"Morning," Jacob said, into the longest silence ever recorded in a residential home.

"You're supposed to be at Kayla's," I said, which was not a defense, or an explanation, or even a sentence a normal person would say, but it was what my brain produced.

"Kayla and I broke up Thursday." He took a sip of coffee. His eyes did not move from the general region of my complete lack of pants. "Dez didn't mention I'd be home?"

"Dez didn't mention a lot of things last night. Dez was busy."

"Yeah," Jacob said. "I know. My room shares a wall with his."

Oh no.

"Oh no," I said, out loud this time, because apparently my inner monologue had resigned.

"You told him - and I'm quoting here - 'harder, you coward.'"

"That is out of context."

"What's the context?"

"He was being a coward."

Jacob laughed. Hard. A coffee-almost-out-the-nose laugh, and something in my chest unknotted about ten percent, because... okay, we were laughing, this was a funny thing that was happening, ha ha, and not the single most exposed moment of my adult life.

I was still four steps up. Still leaking. The clench game had been abandoned somewhere around eye contact, and I could feel the situation developing further, and there was nothing to do about it except stand there in a shirt for a metal band I only sort-of liked while Dez's roommate watched his best friend's handiwork run down my leg.

Here's the part I'm not proud of.

It was hot.

Not "aw, embarrassing but whatever" hot. Hot hot. Stomach-drop hot. My face was doing its best impression of a stop sign, and underneath all of that humiliation was this low, awful, wonderful pulse, because a man was looking at me dripping with evidence, and I hadn't decided to show him, and somehow that made it worse and the worse made it better and I hate that I'm wired this way, but HERE WE ARE.

And it did not help that Jacob was shirtless. He was in gray sweatpants and nothing else, all drummer forearms and broad shoulders. That build guys get from hauling their own gear for a decade; not gym-sculpted, just solid, a little soft at the middle in a way that made me want to bite it, dark happy trail disappearing into the waistband. I'd seen him in a hundred band shirts over two years and had somehow never clocked what was under them.

I was clocking now. I was clocking so hard.

"You want a towel?" he asked. "Or, like. A mop?"

"I will kill you in your sleep."

"You'd have to stop dripping first. I'd hear you coming. Pat, pat, pat."

"I came down for water," I said, with the enormous dignity of a woman holding a t-shirt hem against her crotch like it would help. "I am going to get water. And we are never going to speak of this."

"Sure," he said, and stepped aside with a little after you gesture.

That's when I had to make the walk. Four more stairs. Past him. To the kitchen. With him behind me.

I made it two steps past him before he said, softly, almost to himself:

"Jesus. He really didn't pull out even a little, huh."

I stopped. Kitchen doorway. Hand on the frame.

My mouth operates independently of my survival instincts. Always has. It's how I ended up in Dez's bed in the first place - he'd said no way you can actually play that solo and my mouth said bet, and six hours later I was face-down proving several unrelated points.

So my mouth, without consulting anyone, said: "Twice."

The silence behind me changed texture. I heard the mug get set down. Ceramic on wood.

"Twice," Jacob repeated.

"He's very committed. Follow-through. It's why the band works."

"And you just walk around like that after?"

"I was thirsty," I said, and I heard him breathe out through his nose, half a laugh, and I heard the floor creak, and I knew that he'd crossed the room.

"You could've cleaned up first," he said. He was close now. Not touching. His voice had dropped into a register I'd only ever heard through the wall, apparently going both directions all this time, which was a thought I filed away to be mortified about later.

"I was going to sneak back up."

"Leaving a trail."

"It's not a trail."

"There's a spot on the fourth stair."

"That's - okay. It's a small trail."

His hand touched my hip. Just fingertips, over the shirt: a question. And this is where I should tell you about Dez... about loyalty... about how you don't do this with the roommate - except Dez and I had known each other since college and slept together maybe five times. The standing arrangement was, in his exact words, "we're not a thing, we're a sometimes." Dez had once high-fived me for hooking up with his bassist. Dez was going to think this was the funniest thing that had ever happened in this house.

Which is not an excuse. I just want you to know the moral geometry while I was pressing back into Jacob's hand like a cat.

"He's asleep upstairs," Jacob said against my ear.

"He sleeps like the dead."

"I know. Fire alarm went off once and I had to-" His fingers found the hem of the shirt. "I'm losing the thread."

"You are."

"Can I?"

"You're asking now? You already watched me drip on the stairs."

"Watching's free," he said. "Touching, I ask."

And, fine. Fine. That got me. The absolute gall of this man to be a menace and then be polite about it. I said "yes" in a voice I didn't recognize, small and cracked in the middle, and he slid his hand between my thighs and we both made a sound at the same time.

Him: a low, stunned "oh my god."

Me: a squeak. Like a dog toy. I'll probably hear it on my deathbed.

Because it was - okay. Sloppy does not cover it. Five hours of gravity had turned everything down there into a crime scene, slick and swollen and so sensitive that his fingers just gliding through the mess made my knees do a thing knees should not do. He caught me around the waist.

"Easy," he laughed, breath hot on my neck. "Holy shit. This isn't even mostly you, is it."

"Rude to ask."

"How much is you?"

"...Some of it is becoming me," I admitted. "Rapidly."

Two fingers slid in with no resistance whatsoever - none, I was basically a water park - and I clapped my hand over my mouth because the sound I made was not a downstairs sound. It was a wake-the-dead sound.

"Shh," Jacob said, absolutely delighted, curling his fingers. "Thought you came down for water."

"I hate you."

"You're soaking my wrist."

I turned around. Partly to shut him up, partly because I needed to see his face: flushed, pupils blown, crooked grin like he couldn't believe his Sunday either. And those gray sweatpants had fully given up. There was no plausible deniability happening. There was barely fabric happening.

"Oh," I said, looking down. "Oh, you've been like that since the staircase, haven't you."

"Since the fourth stair, specifically."

I hooked my fingers in his waistband. He inhaled like I'd pulled a fire alarm. "This okay?"

"You're asking now?"

"Watching's free," I said, and dragged his sweatpants down, and - okay.

Okay.

I don't know what I was expecting from the World's Okayest Drummer, but it was not this. His cock slapped up against his stomach, thick and flushed, a vein up the side that my brain, unhelpfully, described as friendly. He was bigger than Dez. Not by a mile, but by enough that some petty broadcast booth in my head went ohh, wall guy's been holding out, and I must have made a face because Jacob said, "What," all defensive, and I said, "Nothing," and got a hand around him.

Hot. Heavy. Twitching against my palm the second I touched him. I gave him one slow stroke, root to tip, thumb sweeping through the slick at the head, and this six-foot man made a sound like a hymn dying in his throat and put a hand on the doorframe to stay upright.

"You're loud," I said, thrilled.

"Shut up."

"Dez is asleep upstairs, Jacob."

"You're evil. You know that?" Another stroke; his hips followed my hand like he couldn't stop them. "Walking down the stairs like that. Yawning. Doing a little stretch."

"I was genuinely tired-"

"Dripping."

"That part wasn't a choice-" and then I stopped talking, because I'd sunk to my knees on the kitchen tile, which was cold through my socks and worth it for his face alone. He looked down at me like I was a magic trick.

I'm competitive. It's a diagnosed condition. And Jacob had spent the last ten minutes winning - every joke landing, every touch making me squeak - and I needed points on the board. So I did the thing I do, which is eye contact plus taking him deep on the first pass: no warmup, until my nose brushed his stomach and he swore in a whisper and his knee buckled against the doorframe.

He tasted clean and salty, and maybe a bit desperate. I got sloppy about it fast, because sloppy was clearly the theme of the morning - spit and precome and my hand working what my mouth couldn't, wet sounds bouncing off the tile because of course this house had great acoustics, they were musicians, they'd chosen it for that. His hand landed in my hair, just holding on, like I was a railing on a boat.

"Okay - okay, stop, stop," he gasped after a minute, pulling me off by the hair, gently, both of us panting. "Not like this. I'm not - I've been thinking about the staircase thing for ten minutes, I have no stamina left, I'm being honest with you."

"Weak," I said, mouth wet, grinning up at him.

"Counter," he said, and picked me up - picked me up, arms like a guy who carries his own kit - and set me on the edge of the granite, cold on my bare ass, shirt rucked up around my ribs.

"This is so unsanitary."

"I'll bleach it."

"You prepare food here-"

He pushed into me and the whole world went white noise.

Being that full, that wet, that used already - there was no friction, just heat, just this deep, slick, obscene glide, and the sound. God, the sound. Every stroke was filthy, this wet slap-squelch that made us both laugh the first time and then very much stop laughing. I could feel Dez's mess getting churned up and pushed out, dripping down over Jacob and onto the counter, and neither of us said anything about it, but he looked down, watched himself moving through it, and groaned like the sight physically hurt him.

"Evil," he breathed again, like it was my name now.

He grabbed my hips and stopped being careful, and I stopped being quiet, and a mug got knocked off its hook - it didn't break; we both watched it roll, panting, and then kept going - and somewhere in the middle of it I had the distinct out-of-body realization that I was getting bounced on a kitchen counter by a man whose last name I'd known for two years and whose middle name I did not know at all, marinating in his best friend's leftovers, and my body's response to that realization was to clamp down and come so hard my heel drummed against the cabinet.

He talked me through it - nonsense, mostly, "that's it" and "god, look at you" and one baffling "good morning" that I will never let him live down - and then his rhythm went ragged and I felt him swell and my mouth, that free agent, said:

"Might as well. It's already a mess down there."

"You can't just say-" he choked, "you can't-"

"Room for one more," I said sweetly, and that finished him.

I felt it happen in stages. First his whole body locked - hands going tight on my hips, and I remember thinking good, souvenir. Then he slammed deep, deeper than he'd been all morning, and held there, buried, and I felt him pulse.

I was already so warm and so full that I honestly couldn't have picked his heat out of a lineup. It was the throb. This deep twitch of him inside me, once, twice, again, each one a little kick I could feel against walls that were already swollen and oversensitive and stuffed past reasonable capacity. My body answered every pulse with a flutter of its own: involuntary, my muscles milking him without asking my permission, and the two rhythms synced up for a second - his throb, my squeeze, his throb, my squeeze - and I heard myself make a sound like a whimper had married a laugh.

And then physics arrived, because there was simply nowhere for any of it to go.

I was already at capacity. He was adding to a full glass. I felt it push back out around him while he was still inside me - a hot, slow overflow that spilled down between us, over him, down the crack of my ass, onto the counter, and he felt it too, because he shuddered all over and said "oh my god" directly into my neck in the voice of a man watching his own funeral.

"Told you," I whispered. "No room."

"Don't talk," he begged. "If you talk I'll never stop coming and I have things to do today."

He gave one more helpless little twitch - an addendum? a P.S. - and then went heavy against me, all that drummer weight sagging into my arms, and I held him on that unsanitary counter with my socked heels hooked behind his thighs, feeling absurdly, stupidly proud of myself. Three loads deep. Structurally, mostly other people at this point. A group project. A charcuterie board of bad decisions.

He pressed a kiss to my shoulder that felt suspiciously sincere for two people who'd been strangers with a shared wall an hour ago.

We stayed like that, breathing, the fridge humming, some bird outside having a totally normal Sunday.

"So," Jacob said eventually, into my hair.

"So."

"You never got your water."

He pulled back, and out, and we both looked down at the same time, and... The counter. The state of it. He reached over, still inside my personal space, filled a glass from the Brita, and handed it to me like a waiter at the world's worst restaurant. I drank the whole thing.

Best water of my life.

That's when the stairs creaked.

Dez appeared in the doorway in his boxers, hair like an exploded bird's nest. He looked at me on the counter. He looked at Jacob, naked from the sweatpants down, which is a phrase I never expected to need. He looked at the fourth stair, somehow, retroactively - I swear his eyes went to the staircase and narrowed.

He looked back at us.

"I have one rule in this house," Dez said.

We said nothing. I pulled the shirt down over exactly none of my dignity.

"One rule," Dez repeated, walking past us to the coffee maker, "and it's that we bleach the counter after. Kayla's story, remember? We agreed."

"I was going to bleach it," Jacob said.

"You say that." Dez started the coffee. Then he looked at me, and his whole face cracked into that stupid grin I've known for six years. He said, "Harder, you coward," in a horrible falsetto, and I threw the empty glass - underhand, gently. Don't worry, he caught it - and Jacob was laughing so hard he had to sit down on the floor with no pants on.

I sat on that unsanitary counter in one band shirt and two socks, thrice-creamed and thoroughly caught, and thought:

I have never once made a good decision before 10 a.m.

And I'm never going to start.

***

Yup, Still playing Tom's game. If you want to suffer play along:

Give it a try, set the max to 20, generate a number and write what you get. Maybe you'll get lucky, maybe you'll write something you wouldn't have. Maybe you'll try something new.

Based on image 12 thanks to Tom's tom-foolery

***

The net comes up heavy. Heavy usually means money, so I'm genuinely whooping when six and a half feet of furious merman hits my deck.

The whoop dies mid-syllable.

He's tangled from shoulder to tail-tip in my gillnet, thrashing hard enough to rock the boat, and he is - there's no other way to say this - beautiful. A tail the blue of deep water, scales throwing the sunrise back at me. Above the waist, a man built like he swims against currents for a living, which... I suppose he does. Dark hair. A scar through one eyebrow. A glare that could strip paint off a hull.

"Cut me loose," he says, in a voice roughened by salt and deep water, "or I will take your vessel apart from beneath you."

"You can talk."

"You can dawdle. Blade. Now."

I'm already on my knees with my deck knife, because whatever else I am - thirty-four, broke, sole owner and crew of the Sassy Molly, a woman whose most meaningful recent relationship is with a seagull named Kevin - I don't leave beautiful things to strangle in monofilament. He goes still while I work, which I appreciate, because his tail is thicker than my torso.

"Sorry about this," I say, sawing at the mesh over his ribs. "You were in my spot."

"This has been my hunting ground since before you were born."

"You don't look older than me."

"I'm sixty-two."

"Shut up. What's your secret? Is it kelp? Blink once for kelp."

He blinks - I choose to count it - and the last line pops free. Then, instead of hurling himself over the rail like any self-respecting cryptid, he tries to move his tail and sucks a sharp breath through his teeth. There's a tear along his fluke where the net bit deep, leaking thin ribbons of dark blue blood.

"Oh no. Can you swim on that?"

"I can swim on anything." He drags himself two feet toward the rail, jaw clenched, then stops, breathing hard. He looks at the water like it's betrayed him.

"That's a no."

"That," he grinds out, "is a complication."

***

His name is Dath. Getting even that much out of him takes work. I flood the stern well for him. It is a knee-deep basin at the back of the deck where he can lie half-submerged, and he settles into it with the sulky grace of a large cat accepting a bath it secretly wanted.

"Torn flukes knit fast," he informs me. "By the dusk tide I'll be whole. Until then -" He gestures at the ocean, at my boat, at the general indignity of existence. "- I am your problem."

"Great. Do you eat? I have coffee, questionable sandwiches, and a live tank full of rockfish."

He looks at the live tank the way I look at a bakery case. I hand him a rockfish. He eats it in two bites, whole, and I decide that was normal and fine.

"So can I ask the obvious question?" I say, perching on the rail with my coffee. "Sixty-two years dodging nets. What happened this morning?"

And this magnificent, granite-faced creature actually looks away. His gills flutter.

"I was distracted."

"By?"

"The season."

"Fishing season? Yeah, that one's on me -"

"The mating season."

I set my coffee down with great care.

"The frenzy gathers around the seamount," he says grimly, like he's reporting a red tide. "Hundreds of us. Song. Displays. Everyone flashing fins at everyone. I was swimming away from it as fast as I could manage, and I wasn't watching my path."

"Hold on. You were fleeing the merfolk orgy..?"

"It is not -" He pauses. "Yes. Functionally, yes."

"Why? Isn't that like a bee skipping the flower convention?"

His jaw works. "The frenzy is indiscriminate. You take whoever the current pushes against you. Nobody asks your name. Nobody cares to. Last season, a bull named Maruu of the Nine Currents flashed his fins at me for six days straight. Six days. His display involves juggling crabs." A shudder runs the length of his tail. "I would rather risk your nets."

"So... you're picky."

"I am selective."

"You're a selective, grumpy merman who swam away from an orgy so hard you got caught by a woman whose best friend is a seagull." I beam at him. "This is the single best morning of my career, and I once caught a halibut with a wedding ring in it."

"Was the ring returned?"

"Pawned it. Boat payment."

Dath laughs. It's short and rusty, like a hatch nobody's opened in years, and his whole face changes - the scar pulls, the pale gray eyes crease - and I feel it land somewhere behind my ribs and stay there.

Careful, Piper, I think.

I am not careful. Historically. Ask anyone.

Understand something about my romantic resume. The last man I dated was Brent, who owned a boat called Reel Big Deal and asked me - third date - if I could keep my fishing "hobby" quiet around his friends. Before Brent, Jacob, who talked over me so consistently that I once recited the shipping forecast mid-conversation and he said "totally." Before Jacob, a guy whose entire personality was that he had a podcast.

So when Dath asks me - unprompted, mid-morning - why I run the boat alone, and then listens to the answer, tracking my rambling with steady gray attention and asking follow-up questions about winch mechanics like they matter, something in me goes quiet in a way it hasn't in years.

"You handled the net-cut well," he says at one point, watching me splice a line. "Fast hands. No panic. Most of your kind scream."

"I screamed internally. I'm complicated like that."

"Your hands are clever," he says, simply, like he's noting the weather.

Then he goes back to watching them, and I splice the same line three times.

It goes like that for hours. I patch the gash on his ribs, and his skin is warm. I'd expected clammy, which feels somewhat rude somehow, and he holds still beneath my hands with his eyes on my face until I have to distract myself with my inventory box. He tries coffee, makes an expression of profound betrayal, and asks for more. He tells me about wrecks he's explored, about a lighthouse he circles some nights because he likes how it insists on being seen.

"Romantic," he says, "in a needy way."

I tell him about Kevin, and Brent, and the shipping forecast incident. He gives me the rusty laugh three more times.

At some point, while I'm pretending to inspect a perfectly healthy cleat, he asks, "Do you prefer being alone?"

"Professionally? Yes. Romantically? I don't have the best sample size."

He waits.

That's the dangerous thing about a person who listens: eventually you run out of jokes.

I stare down at the rope in my hands. "I like my own company. I like not having to explain why this boat matters to me. But sometimes I come in after three days offshore and realize nobody knows what kind of day I had. That's different from wanting somebody around all the time."

Dath considers this.

"Poor company is another kind of solitude," he says.

I look at him.

"Was that wisdom?"

"An observation."

"Disgusting. Do another."

His mouth almost smiles.

By afternoon I catch him watching me. These aren't glances. He's watching steadily. Considering?

"What?"

"Nothing." He looks back at the horizon. "I'm thinking."

"About?"

"Whether to say something I've never said."

"Well, now you have to."

He's quiet a long moment. Then: "In season, my kind court. There's a ceremony - an asking. I've swum through forty seasons and never once performed it, because I never met anyone worth the words." He turns his head and looks at me. "I've now spent one day on the deck of a boat, eating your fish and drinking your bitter mud, and I find I know the words."

The rigging creaks. I don't breathe.

"Be clear about something," he adds, and his voice hardens, precise. "This isn't the season talking. The season is why the asking exists - it's the only time we sing, the only time our bodies make the season's eggs. But the tide didn't choose you. I did. If you refuse, I'll heal, I'll thank you, and I'll go. And I'll still be the only one of my kind glad he got caught in a net."

"That," I manage, "was the weirdest, most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me, and a guy once told me I gutted mackerel 'real graceful.'"

"He saw truly. May I ask?"

"You're asking to ask?"

"The asking is a ceremony," he says, wounded. "It has parts."

I sit on the edge of the stern well, cross my legs, and say - fully aware my pulse has relocated to my ears - "Proceed."

***

So the merman courts me.

He rises in the water and flares. Fins I didn't know he had unfurl along his forearms and spine, framing the great sweep of his tail. They catch the afternoon sun and split it into deep blues and vioelts.

Then he sings.

Not a whale-moan. A low, structured thrum that bypasses my ears entirely and settles in my sternum, my back teeth, and several other locations. It holds there until my whole body is humming along without permission.

He takes my hand, turns it over, and presses something into my palm: a single scale from his own tail: deep blue, warm, edged in violet.

"Piper of the Sassy Molly," he says, formal as a tide table. "Freer of nets. Namer of seagulls. Graceful gutter of mackerel. I ask for the season's first tide with you. Refuse and lose nothing. My gratitude does not depend on your answer."

Kevin lands on the rail and screams once.

"He's a witness now," I whisper. "That's binding."

"Is that a yes?"

"Dath, I've been a yes since approximately the kelp joke. That's a yes." Then, because I'm me: "I'm keeping the scale forever, and if you tell anyone I teared up at a fish serenade, I'll deny it."

"The song doesn't lie," he says, insufferably, "and neither do your eyes."

I laugh, and he catches me around the waist and pulls me into the water.

***

The kiss is nothing like the man. The man is granite; the kiss is patient and pulling. He tastes clean and mineral, one hand spread against my back, and when I make a noise into his mouth he hums against my lips - that same resonant note - and I grab his shoulder to stay upright.

Clothes go over the rail. His eyes travel down me, naked in the sun-warm, knee-deep water, and darken at the edges.

"Sit on the ledge," he says, low.

"Bossy."

"Selective," he corrects.

He rests his hands on my knees. For all that certainty in his voice, he waits until I nod before easing them apart.

He's exactly what the whole day promised: attentive, patient, thorough. He learns me with the same focus he brought to everything else, and when he finds what makes my hips jump, he stays there. Then he hums the courtship note against me, and the vibration is a filthy miracle.

I look down. The smugness in his eyes is barely there, but it's there.

"Oh, you know," I gasp.

His answer is another hum.

Then he tilts me back, slides his shoulders under my thighs, and takes his head fully underwater.

He does not come up.

He does not need to come up.

His gills flare calmly against my thighs like this is a sustainable long-term arrangement while I come apart above the surface, fist in his hair, loudly briefing the seagulls. The first orgasm rolls through me long enough to steal my balance. He doesn't stop. The second one hits sharper, knocking a sound out of me that has no business being heard by wildlife.

When he finally surfaces - hair slicked, mouth wet, and enormously pleased with himself - I need thirty full seconds before words return.

"Cheating," I pant. "The no-air thing is cheating."

"Sing your complaint to the tide."

I slide off the ledge and ease him back against the sloped stern. Only then do I let myself look at what's emerged from the narrow slit low on his front.

Human-adjacent, but unmistakably not: deep blue-rose, tapered, ridged along its length, slick with a sheen that catches the light. The alienness of it should probably give me pause.

It does not.

I wrap my hand around him. He's hot beneath my palm, the ridges yielding slightly as I stroke. His breath leaves him in a controlled hiss. His head tips back, and one hand curls over the rail, but his voice stays level.

"Careful," he says. "Or the first tide will be shorter than advertised."

I keep my hand moving, slow enough to watch that famous self-control start to fray. Then curiosity gets the better of me, because it always does.

"Can I-?" I glance up at him. "Do your people do this? With mouths? Is that a thing down there, or am I about to commit some sort of faux pas?"

He looks down at me, gray eyes gone dark, and considers the question with what appears to be genuine cultural gravity.

"It's not tradition," he says. "Make it one."

I do.

He tastes faintly sweet - sea-grape and salt - and the slickness lets him move easily against my tongue. His hand settles in my hair just resting there: steady and trusting me with the pace. I hum his courtship note around him, badly covered.

The sound he makes in answer is low and dangerous.

"Enough." He draws me up by the chin and studies my face. "Not like this. I want the whole tide with you."

"Is that ceremony language, or -"

"It's a promise." His gills flutter. "And a warning. The eggs I mentioned. If we finish joined, they'll pass to you. They're harmless away from a brood reef and dissolve within the hour. But you'll feel them."

"How much?"

He hesitates, which is the first truly alarming thing he's done all day.

"The word that came back," he says carefully, "was pleasurable."

"Dath," I say, already climbing onto him, "I have never wanted a word to be accurate so badly in my life."

His hands bracket my hips, steadying me over the broad curve of his tail.

"Slowly," he murmurs. "Count the ridges."

I lower myself onto him and I do. The tapered tip makes the first part easy. Then one ridge slips past, a distinct pulse of pressure, followed by another. Then another. Every inch of him arrives as its own event, the subtle curve of him finding places that make my breath hitch.

By the time I'm fully seated, the flare at his base snug against me, I've lost count. I'm shaking, and he's watching my face with an expression of fierce, focused satisfaction.

"There," he says, low. "Now you know why we sing."

"Move," I breathe. "Or I will."

"You will," he agrees, and flexes his tail.

The water makes me nearly weightless. His tail rises beneath me, meeting each movement with a deep, rolling counterstroke, and the ridges turn every pass into a sequence I can feel coming and going. Soon I'm gripping his shoulders and forgetting every clever thing I've ever said.

He watches me the entire time. He's selective about this too, like my face is the whole point of the season. Somewhere in the rhythm he starts singing - low and broken now, the courtship note dissolving into something older - and the vibration runs through both of us at once.

"Dath-" I'm close again, impossibly. "The eggs. Give them to me."

His grip tightens on my hips. His voice is wrecked at the edges but steady at the core.

"Then hold on to me."

I do.

The rhythm deepens. Water sheets across the deck. He drives up into me three more times, and comes with a sound I feel in my molars.

Then I feel them.

The first egg moves through him as a rolling swell, ridge by ridge, before crossing into me on a pulse of heat. Smooth. Grape-small, just as he'd said. The strange, full pressure of it lands at the exact moment my climax breaks, and whatever coherent thought I had left is gone.

Then another.

Another.

Each one arrives as a fresh internal pulse, warmth spreading after it, turning one crest into the next until I stop counting altogether. I end up sobbing his name into his wet hair while he locks both arms around my back and holds me against him, murmuring something in his own language against my temple - low, continuous, almost soothing - until the last one passes and I collapse against his chest like cut rigging.

For a while there is only water, breath, and the creak of the boat.

"Pleasurable," I finally croak, "was a coward's word. I want names. That was an understatement."

"I'll carry your complaint to the seamount personally."

***

After, I'm draped over him in the cooling water. I'm boneless, the eggs are already dissolving - a fading warmth low in my belly, leaving slowly, like sun off a rock. His hand resting tenderly on my spine. Kevin lands on the rail and screams.

"Not now, Kevin," we say together.

We stare at each other.

"So." I prop my chin on Dath's sternum. "The season. How long does it run?"

"Six weeks." His eyes narrow, warming. "Why?"

"No reason. Purely academic. Is the ceremony a one-time thing, or—"

"The asking is once." He tucks a wet strand of hair off my face. "The tides are nightly."

At dusk his fluke is whole. He slides over the rail like poured water, surfaces once, and looks back at me with the sunset lighting his fins from behind.

"Same ground tomorrow," he says. "Bring the bitter drink. Leave the net open."

A girl's got a mortgage, so I set the net anyway — but I leave one side open, and every evening for six weeks, something beautiful and grumpy and selective swims into it entirely on purpose.

Maruu of the Nine Currents can keep his crabs.

***

This was not my first choice for the prompt contest, but Tom challenged us, and apparently my response to adversity is fish dicks and eggs. If you want to suffer play along:

Give it a whirl, set the max to 20, generate a number and write what you get. Maybe you'll get lucky, maybe you'll write something you wouldn't have. Maybe you'll try something new.

I tried to include all the things I know Em likes, like sweaters. But her fog abilities are beyond me. 😶‍🌫️🌫️

This theme was never my intent, but I clearly missed the themes 🥸

Tired of men scheduling her body like a calendar invite, she workshopped a strict free-use clause for her colleague: across the conference table, they are executives. In his bed, he takes. (Image 3)

***

He doesn't let me finish the sentence.

I'm halfway through "how was your-" when he's got a fist in my hair and my mouth is otherwise occupied and my keys are still hitting the floor. No preamble. No are you sure. That question got answered months ago, over wine, in writing, and neither of us has asked it since.

Now I'm cuffed to his headboard, flat on my back, and he is ruining me.

There's nothing polite about it. He fucks like he's got a grudge - deep, heavy strokes that knock the breath out of me on every landing, that shove me up the mattress until the chain jerks me short and he hauls me right back down onto him by the hips. The sound of it is disgusting. Wet, loud, rhythmic, skin on skin, the slick of me making every thrust filthier than the last. The whole room smells like sex. My thighs are soaked. His thighs are soaked. That's my doing and I'd be embarrassed if I could remember how.

"Look at you," he says, low, watching where he's splitting me open. "Absolutely dripping. You sat through a whole dinner like this?"

"Shut - ah - shut up-"

"You wore the white set." He drags a knuckle down the wrecked lace at my ribs, never breaking pace. "You knew before you left your apartment."

"That's - the deal-"

"Say it."

"You don't - nnh - you don't ask-"

"I take." He punctuates it with a thrust that rattles the headboard. "Your rule. Your wording."

It is my wording. I workshopped it. I sat across from him with a glass of cabernet and a straight face and delivered it like a contract clause, and he didn't laugh, didn't blink, just looked at me the way he's looking at me right now - like the ink was already dry.

He hooks his thumb into my mouth. I bite it. He fucks me harder for it, which we both knew he would, which is why I bit it.

The lingerie is rubble. Bra shoved up, cups useless, one breast bouncing free with every slam of his hips. Garter strap snapped an hour ago - it hit him in the chest like a rubber band and he didn't even pause. The stockings are laddered from where he dragged me down the bed by my ankles. I bought all of it Tuesday. Worth it. Worth it.

He pulls out without warning and flips me - facedown, cuffs crossing at the wrist, ass hauled up - and drives back in before I've even landed, and the new angle is criminal. Deeper. Meaner. Every stroke slams me into a spot that whites out my vision at the edges, and the noises coming out of me now are muffled by the pillow and still, somehow, too loud. He grabs a fistful of lace at my hip - what's left of it - and uses it like a handle.

"Oh f- oh my god - oh my GOD-"

"Louder."

"The neighbors-"

"Louder."

His hand cracks across my ass - bright, hot, stinging sweet - and louder happens on its own.

"That's it," he says, smug, unbearable. "And you wanted men who asked."

"I never-" slap, other cheek, and my sentence dissolves into a moan - "I never wanted men who asked, that was the problem-"

"Mm. Scheduling access." He leans down, teeth grazing my ear, hips never slowing. "Like a dentist."

"I told you that in confidence-"

"You told me that in this bed."

He'd asked me once - the only time, the wine night - why me. And I'd said: because every man before you requested my body like a calendar invite, and you looked at me across a conference table like you were already halfway through me. The yes given once. Given whole. Standing until I say otherwise. I've never said otherwise. I've never been closer to sending it in a company-wide memo.

His chest comes down slick against my spine, his teeth find my shoulder, and his hand snakes under me and lands on my clit - no buildup, no mercy, tight fast circles - and I come so hard and so fast it's insulting. It rips through me mid-moan, snaps my whole body taut, my fists white-knuckled in the cuffs, clenching around him in waves while I wail something into the pillow that used to be his name.

He doesn't stop. He doesn't even slow down.

"One more."

"I can't-"

"You say that every time."

I do say that every time. I am wrong every time. He shifts his knees wider, yanks my hips higher, and settles into a pace that is frankly disrespectful - hard, fast, sloppy-wet, the slap of it obscene and constant, his hand still working my clit while I make sounds I don't recognize. The oversensitivity burns for ten seconds, twenty, and then flips over into something enormous. It builds fast and out of order. My legs start shaking. My moans go breathless, hitching, stupid.

"That's it," he growls, feeling it. "There it is - come on-"

The second one detonates. I scream into the pillow, legs giving out entirely, and he rides me flat down onto the mattress and follows me over the edge - rhythm shattering, hips grinding, a groan punched out of him like something breaking, coming deep and hot while I'm still pulsing around him, both of us shaking, wrecked, welded together with sweat.

The room settles. Somewhere in the wreckage, my phone buzzes. Neither of us moves.

"You alive?" he says into my neck, eventually.

"Un- ah- Unconfirmed."

He unclips the cuffs and rubs feeling back into my wrists, kisses each one - gentle now, criminally gentle, like he wasn't feral thirty seconds ago - and I roll over into the ruin of the bed. Lace shrapnel everywhere. One stocking hanging off my toes like a flag of surrender.

"For the record," I say to the ceiling, "the deal has been reviewed and renewed."

"Quarterly review already?"

"Early. Performance exceeded expectations."

I let myself lie there exactly ten minutes. Then I steal his shirt, find one shoe immediately and the other through prayer, and reassemble myself into something that could pass for a person in dim lighting.

At the door I check my reflection. Hair: unsalvageable. Neck: incriminating. Walk: compromised.

"Nine o'clock standup tomorrow," I say, over my shoulder.

"Mm." He's sprawled in the wreckage, watching me with the exact expression that started all of this. "I'll bring the slides."

"I'll bring the turtleneck."

"July."

"Then I'll bring a scarf, and if anyone asks, I'm European now."

His laugh follows me into the hallway. I make it three steps before I have to stop, hand on the wall, and let my legs renegotiate their contract.

Eight thirty is going to be a problem.

Matching Em's energy on this low effort Thursday 🥱

Based on image 10

The grimoire has four and a half stars and a review that says "changed my life, also my landlord's," which I am choosing to read as a glowing endorsement. This is my first mistake. My second is the eyeliner.

The campus bookstore does not stock ritual chalk. It stocks highlighters, one anemic tube of ChapStick, and a rack of motivational bookmarks. So the pentagram on my dorm floor is drawn in a thirty-eight-dollar liquid liner I am going to mourn at a cellular level tomorrow. Candles lit. Chapter Four read aloud. "Manifesting Your Infernal Soulmate."

My order is extremely reasonable. Sharp jaw. Some kind of accent. The variety of demon who broods in a doorway and despises everyone I've ever dated. Something to justify the liner.

"Ven 'thraxus, mortu' velakai-"

The candle flames flatten sideways. The air goes heavy and strange, like the room has taken a breath and decided to keep it, and a slit of violet light tears open a foot above the rug. My heart lifts in a way I'd die to have witnessed. Here we go. Here comes six feet of eyeliner-justifying trouble.

Something with far too many arms slops out of the light and onto my floor like an overturned bucket of the ocean.

"No. Nope. Absolutely not."

I count the limbs on instinct, because that is apparently the shape my panic takes. Seven. Seven of them, iridescent and dark, unspooling across my rug. A pair of enormous eyes settles on me. They're warm. Soft. The kind of eyes that seem to think we're about to be best friends, which is somehow worse than menace.

I do the sensible thing and grab the ceremonial dagger and swing it in a wide, panicked arc at the mass of tentacles.

I do not hit the mass of tentacles. I hit something small, at knee height, that I did not know was there. The blade connects with a horrible little thunk, there's a wet squeak, and something the size of a garden gnome tips over at the edge of the pentagram.

I look down. A tiny bearded goblin lies on my rug, its expression frozen mid-greeting, its severed head rolling to a gentle stop against my knee. It's holding - I notice, with rising horror - a tiny welcome basket.

The familiar, I'm guessing. Here to make introductions. I have known this creature for nine seconds and I have opened with a beheading.

The tentacle thing looks at the goblin. Looks at me. Its huge eyes crumple like wet paper, and I feel like I've kicked something.

"Okay, that part's on me," I say, scrambling back on my hands. "But YOU are the real problem here, because you were supposed to be a GUY. You were supposed to be DEVASTATING. And instead you're a... what's the word. What's the classification."

A tentacle lifts off the floor and reaches for me.

"OFF-"

It doesn't grab. That's what shorts me out. It halts an inch from my ankle, hovers - like it's waiting - then loops around it soft as anything and peels the dagger out of my fist and sets it down on the far side of the room. Like the knife is the thing it doesn't trust. Like I'm the one who needs handling.

Another coil rises, wavers, and settles across my mouth. Not gripping. Just laid there, heavy and unnervingly velvety, warm as a held breath. It could be shutting me up. It doesn't feel like shutting me up. It feels, insanely, like it's decided I'll say something mean and regret it, and it's sparing me.

Then it leans in and goes still. The whole tremendous mass of it inclines toward me, every limb trembling, and I swear it's waiting for a yes. Like it needs one. Like it wouldn't dream of anything until I give it.

"I want a refund," I say into the tentacle, muffled, my face hot enough to relight the candles.

The coil over my mouth gives a little squeeze - happy, if a squeeze can be happy - like it caught my jaw move and took it as a green light.

Then it starts, and I lose all authority over the situation immediately.

The first thing it does is nothing much. One tentacle just skims up the inside of my thigh, and my leg jerks. Not away. The wrong direction. The direction I'd deny in court. And it stops, right there, comes back, traces the same path again, and I feel my breath catch, and it does the exact same thing a third time like it's confirming a hunch.

Oh no, I think. Oh no, it's paying attention.

Because it is. I can feel it happening. Every hitch in my breathing, it seems to catalog. Every twitch of my hips, it seems to notice and return to. A coil slides under my shirt and skims the low curve of my stomach, and another finds the crease of my hip, and I make a noise I'd perjure myself over - and this is the part that scares me - it holds dead still for half a second, like it heard it, and then chases that exact spot until it lands the pressure that turns the noise into a whimper.

"That's not... how do you even... you can't just FIND-" I get out, and the rest evacuates my body, because a slick tentacle has pressed flat and dragged up between my legs, root to top, through underwear that is frankly soaked and giving me away with every second.

I'm not lying here taking it. I have standards. I'm arguing. My hands are shoving at the nearest coil - shoving, not prying, a legal distinction my body invents without consulting me - and I'm getting out "this is CHEATING, this is... you don't even have... how are you THIS-" and I don't know what it thinks of any of it, but whatever it thinks, it adjusts. And gets better. Every complaint, it seems to take as a correction, and every correction makes it worse for me.

My underwear is just gone. I don't even feel it go. Only the cool air, and then a coil sliding warm and slippery up through the mess I've become, opening me up, and the sound I make is humiliating, high and undone, nothing like a person who was holding a knife thirty seconds ago. The tip finds my clit and settles there, a maddening light weight that doesn't move, and I could scream. Two smaller coils hook behind my knees and spread my thighs open - not yanked, just arranged, tidy - and I have never in my life felt so thoroughly set up for something.

"That's... okay, that's MINE, that's not... don't you DARE put that any- oh my god-"

It moves. And it's good. It's insultingly good. It rolls slow circles over my clit, slick with me, and every time my hips jump it shifts by a hair, closing in, until it's on the exact rhythm and pressure I've never once managed to explain to a living human. It just has it. By feel. In under a minute. Like I came with a manual and it read the whole thing.

"How. HOW did you-" and then a thicker coil noses lower, blunt and dripping against my entrance, and pauses. Presses, gently. And the pause is the worst part, because it's asking, and I hear the exact moment my "no" comes out as a wrecked little "nnh - wait, wait, how are you even-" that is so obviously a yes that we both know it.

It pushes in.

I lose the entire thread of my life.

It's thick and smooth and it fills me in one long push that shoves the air clean out of me, and then it rolls - a ripple traveling its whole length inside me, over and over, pressing everywhere at once - and it never once drops the rhythm at my clit while it does it. Two things. At the same time. Both perfect. Both getting better. My whole nervous system feels like it's being read aloud to a study group.

My back comes off the floor. My hands stop shoving and grab, fist into the same coil I was just pushing away, cling to it like it's mine now, and the creature shivers - this ripple through all seven limbs - and I don't know what it means but it feels obscenely like it's thrilled, like it can't believe its luck, and I want to die about how much that does for me.

"You're... unh... you're so pleased with yourself, I can FEEL it-"

It gives a little wiggle. Smug. I hate it. It does not let up.

I hold my convictions for exactly as long as convictions survive this, which is no time, and then the arguing just quits. My protests fall apart into vowels. Everything below my ribs goes warm and liquid and stupid. Every muscle I've been using to hold myself up and hold myself back resigns at once, and I go completely, sloppily to pieces. Flat on my own eyeliner pentagram. Thighs held wide. One coil buried deep and rolling, another circling me relentlessly, both wrists caught up somewhere above my head, everything wet, everything loud, the sounds of it obscene against the quiet of my dorm.

And it won't let me finish. It hauls me right to the edge - that tight, breathless, almost - and then backs off a fraction. And it does it again. And AGAIN. And it can only be on purpose, it can only be that it's figured out the almost is a weapon, because every time I clench and choke on a sob it goes still like it's savoring it.

By the third time it drops me back from the edge I've given up on threats and moved on to negotiation, which is worse. "Okay. Okay, I'm sorry about the goblin, genuinely, I'll... nngh... I take it back, just... you can't keep DOING that, that's not... you don't get to decide when I-" and my body hijacks the end of every sentence and files it away as a moan, because I keep trying to be stern, trying to sound like a woman in charge of her own dorm room, and what comes out instead is increasingly just a sound with a question mark bolted onto it.

When it finally lets me have it, everything lands at once - the coil deep inside me, the pressure on my clit, that stroke on my thigh it never stopped - and it hits so hard my vision whites out at the corners. "This is... this is SO... I cannot believe this is... oh. Oh, come on, that's-" and the sentence just breaks, snaps off into a strangled "hhah - oh, fuck-" as it crashes through me, and there's nothing composed left, no line to hold, only me coming apart on the rug in a long, wrecked "mmn... nnh... oh my g-" that I feel in my whole body, the last of my dignity leaving in a moan I didn't know I had in me.

It does not read this as a finish line. It reads it, if anything, as a cue.

I'm still convulsing around the first one, still shaking, when the coil inside me shifts. Instead of easing off, it pushes deeper. Further than it's been. My breath stutters.

"Wait. No, that's... that's too far, you can't fit any-"

It can. It does. It sinks in past the point where I thought I ended, thick and insistent, opening me up from the inside until I genuinely can't tell where it stops and I start, until I feel FULL in a way I did not know was on the menu - packed, stretched, every inch of me occupied - and the protest dies in my throat and comes back out as a long, disbelieving "ohhh my god" that I feel in my whole chest.

Then it starts to move. Really move. It draws almost all the way out - I can hear it, wet and filthy - and drives back in, deep, that thick length pushing all the way to where it just claimed. And again. And again. A rhythm I feel in my teeth, every stroke dragging over somewhere high and deep and previously undiscovered that turns my whole body into an alarm going off.

"Nngh... that is not... okay, that's RIDICULOUS, that's genuinely... who TAUGHT you... I didn't put that in the... oh. Oh, you have GOT to be-" and there's no finishing a single one of them, every clause running straight into a moan and not coming back up, my whole indignant speech collapsing one word at a time. It's found something with that deep, steady drive and it will not quit hitting it, in and out, and I'm cresting again already, faster and heavier than the first, still trying - right to the very end - to sound like a woman with objections.

Then it drives in to the hilt, deeper than anything has ever been, somewhere I didn't know I went, and it knocks the sentence and the breath and the outrage clean out of me all at once. "Ah - nn - oh f- it's so... it's SO d-" and I can't even land the word. Deep. It's too deep to say deep. The shock of it arches me clean off the floor as everything in me pulls tight around that thick length buried to the root, and breaks. Both wrists strain in the loops that hold them - not to get free, just to have something to hold while a creature I met eleven minutes ago fucks me stupid on my own dorm floor - and whatever's pouring out of me now isn't words at all. Just sound. High and helpless and LOUD. Nothing left of the woman who was holding a knife.

By the time it eases off and lets me pour back onto the floor, I've lost count, the plot, my dignity, and possibly a filling. I'm face-up and boneless, glasses hanging off one ear, twitching through the aftershocks with the thousand-yard stare of a woman who went somewhere and only partly came back.

The tentacle at my mouth withdraws.

"...You're not what I ordered," I tell the ceiling, from a great distance.

The creature curls in against my side, all seven limbs folding up, and gives one last small, hopeful, thoroughly-pleased-with-itself wiggle. I feel it right against my ribs.

I should get up. I should banish it, or salt it, or at minimum put my underwear back on and reassess my life from a standing position. What I actually do is lie there, wrung out and warm and stupidly, unfairly satisfied, staring at the water stain on my ceiling while my heartbeat comes back down from wherever it went.

"That was..." I start, and stop, because there is no ending to that sentence that doesn't cost me everything.

It nestles closer. Patient. Damp. Waiting.

"Fine," I mutter. "That was. You know what it was. I'm not saying it."

The wiggle it does in response is so delighted, so unbearably pleased, that I have to close my eyes.

"This changes nothing. You're not my boyfriend. You're a... clerical error. With arms." I fumble around, find my glasses, and put them on so I can glare at it with proper resolution. It gazes back, warm-eyed and hopeful, a six-foot mound of iridescent limbs radiating the unmistakable energy of a thing that has decided this is its apartment now.

We'll discuss the sleeping arrangements tomorrow.

We will not be discussing the noises I made. Ever.

The story so far: For eleven years I disappeared inside this Vault. Then I breathed in something pre-War and not quite dead, and it woke a heat at the base of my spine — hands I can't see, a fullness that isn't there, a want that doesn't care that I'm on shift and supposed to be smiling. We have rules now, the spore and I. I'm losing most of them.

Cover Art by Me

---

Chapter 4: Productive and Cohesive

The alarm chirps at 0600. I am already awake.

I've been awake since 0430, lying on my cot in the dim emergency lighting, watching the ceiling and trying not to move. My nightgown is twisted around my thighs. The thin blanket is on the floor. My skin feels too tight for my body, like I've outgrown myself overnight.

The spore is awake too. I can feel it humming low at the base of my spine, the way you can feel the air recyclers running through the floor when the lights are off. Present. Patient. Good morning.

I sit up. The motion sends a slow ripple of heat through me - a pleasant clenching low in my belly that has no business being there at 0600 on a workday. I press the heel of my hand against my forehead and breathe.

The Pip-Boy on my wrist illuminates. Citizen Voss! Today's Vault-Tec Daily Affirmation: A productive thought is a happy thought! Have you smiled today?

"No," I say to the empty room.

The display pulses cheerfully. The little cartoon Vault Boy gives me a thumbs up. I lower my wrist and stare at the wall.

---

The communal bathroom is empty when I get there. Too early for most of the shift. I claim my favorite shower cubicle and strip out of the nightgown and stand under the spray. Lukewarm. Timed. The same sixty-second cycle I have known by heart since I was a girl.

I close my eyes.

My hand drifts to my collarbone without my permission. Then to the soft skin between my breasts. Then lower.

No, I think. Not here. Not now. I have to be at my station in twenty minutes.

The spore considers this. Then it shows me last night.

Not a hallucination, a replay. Every sensation from the previous evening rendered in perfect fidelity - the phantom mouth on my breast, the impossible fullness, the weight of unseen bodies pressing me down into my mattress. It comes through my nervous system like a recording playing on the inside of my eyelids. I have time to register that it's happening and then my knees buckle and I have to brace against the shower wall with both hands.

The metal is cold against my palms. The water is lukewarm against my back. My body is on fire from the inside.

I bite down on my own lower lip and ride it out. My hand stays braced. I don't touch myself. I refuse to touch myself. The replay rolls through me unwanted, building in waves, and I stand there with my forehead against the wall and my breath fogging the steel and I do not move.

The replay ends. The spore subsides, reluctantly.

"You can't have me before work," I whisper. "We have rules now."

The water cuts off. I stand in the cubicle, breathing hard. There is a pulse between my legs that I am refusing to acknowledge.

I dress with shaking hands.

---

The reflection in the chrome panel above the sink stops me.

There's something different about my eyes. I lean closer, squinting. The fluorescent light is bad in here - everything looks washed out and faintly green - but no. It's not the lighting.

There's a ring around my iris. Very faint. A thin band of violet that wasn't there yesterday, threading the boundary between the blue of my eye and the black of my pupil. Like a bruise made of light.

I lean closer. Tilt my head. The ring catches the overhead bulb and shimmers, just slightly, and then settles back into stillness.

And because I am already this close - closer to my own face than I have been in years - I keep looking.

My eyes are very blue. I had forgotten that. The violet ring makes the blue look even bluer, the way the deep purple grow-lamps in Section D make the green of the leaves underneath them go almost luminous. There's color in my cheeks. My mouth is fuller than I remember.

I look, I realize with a small startled feeling somewhere behind my sternum, like a pretty girl. The kind of girl people would notice in a corridor, if she ever bothered to look up.

I have spent eleven years not looking up.

You're growing, something says.

I don't know whose voice that is. I don't want to know.

A Mr. Handy bot whirs past the open doorway behind me. I see its reflection drift across the chrome - a metal sphere with three articulated arms, one of which is holding a feather duster. It pauses. Its central optic swivels to look at me.

"Have a productive and cohesive day, citizen."

"Thank you," I say automatically.

It whirs away. My hands come up to my hair to start the braid - eleven years of muscle memory, the same three-strand twist I have done every morning since I was a girl. My fingers lift the first section.

I pause.

I look at myself in the chrome again. At the dark wet hair falling loose around my shoulders. At the pretty girl in the mirror who is afraid of something but is also, maybe, a little bit here in a way she hasn't been before.

I drop my hands.

I gather the hair into a loose ponytail at the nape of my neck instead. A few strands escape and frame my face. I don't tuck them back.

It is a small thing. It is also the first decision I have made about my own appearance in eleven years that wasn't make myself smaller, make myself disappear.

I leave the bathroom with my heart beating slightly faster than it should be.

---

The hydroponics bay smells like wet soil and the faintly sweet rot of overripe mutfruit. It is the only place in the Vault that smells like anything. I love it the way some people love a song.

I move down the rows on autopilot. My hands know this work. My hands could do this work in their sleep, and lately they sort of have to, because my brain is elsewhere.

My brain is in last night.

I move to the carrot terraces and my brain is in last night. I check the pH on the recirculation tank and my brain is in last night. I bend to retrieve a fallen tomato from the catch tray and as I straighten back up the spore shows me a flash - just a flash - of the way it felt when the phantom presence had pushed into me and I have to grip the edge of the tank to keep my balance.

The tomato falls out of my hand and rolls under the bench.

"Lily!"

I startle so hard I knock over the diagnostic tablet. It clatters against the metal grating and bounces.

Mr. Hollings is standing at the end of the row. He is, as always, buzzing with the wholesome enthusiasm of a man who has never once questioned anything Vault-Tec has told him. His jumpsuit is impeccably pressed. His lapel is decorated with three Cohesion Achievement Pins - one for Punctuality, one for Positive Attitude, and one with a tiny enameled wheat-stalk that I think means Botany Section Excellence but I have never been brave enough to ask.

"There you are!" He beams. He has the kind of teeth that suggest his parents loved him too much. "I was hoping to catch you before the shift really got going. How are we feeling today?"

"Good," I say. "Great. Fine."

"Good and great and fine!" He laughs, apparently, at his own joke. He always laughs at his own jokes. "That's the spirit. You know, you're really glowing today, Voss. Did you sleep well?"

I think about last night. The phantom hands. The mossy bed. The way I came so hard I sobbed into my pillow.

"Very well," I say.

"Wonderful." His eyes flick - just for a second - to the loose strands of hair around my face. He doesn't say anything about it. But I see him notice. "You know, you're looking very… vital today. Very radiant." He produces a small adhesive square from a pocket and presents it to me with the ceremony of a man handing over a medal. "This is for you."

I take it. It is a Cohesion Achievement Sticker. The cartoon Vault Boy is winking and giving a thumbs up. Around him, in cheerful curling script: YOU'RE A RAY OF SUNSHINE!

"Oh," I say. "Thank you."

He pats my shoulder. His hand is warm and slightly damp. "Keep it up, Voss. We're going to make a Cohesion Ambassador out of you yet."

He walks off whistling. The melody is the Vault-Tec corporate jingle from the orientation reels. He whistles it constantly. I think he might not know he's doing it.

I look down at the sticker in my hand.

I press it onto the corner of my workstation monitor. It seems like the wrong response and also the only response. The Vault Boy winks at me from the bottom edge of the screen for the rest of the morning, and every time I notice him I feel a complicated kind of crazy.

---

It happens again at 1100.

I am elbow-deep in the recirculation tank for the carrot terraces, sleeve rolled up past my elbow, fishing out a clog of root matter that has snarled the pump intake. My ponytail keeps falling forward over my shoulder. The water is cool against my arm. I am thinking about absolutely nothing at all.

And then the spore, without warning, shows me the phantom mouth at my breast again. The way it had latched on. The teeth. The tongue.

The replay is vivid. It is so vivid that for one disorienting second I cannot tell if I am standing in the hydroponics bay or lying on the bed of moss. My hand jerks in the water. I lose my grip on the clog of roots.

I feel my nipple harden sharply beneath my jumpsuit. I feel an insistent pulse between my legs.

I make a small sound. Not a moan. Something more like a hiccup of breath that has nowhere to go.

I look around wildly. The bay is mostly empty. Tomas is at the far end with his back to me, calibrating a UV lamp. Nobody else is in this row.

I bend back over the tank, pretending to work. My hand fumbles in the water. My face is hot.

Stop, I think. Stop, stop, stop.

The spore does not stop. The replay deepens - I can feel the weight of the phantom body now, pressing me down, and the slow inexorable push of being filled, and oh god, oh god, this is not happening, this is not happening at my workstation.

It is happening at my workstation.

My thighs are clenching. I can feel myself getting wet through the jumpsuit. My free hand drifts up from the tank rim before I can stop it and presses, just presses, against my own stomach. Through the fabric. The pressure sends a shock through me that nearly buckles my knees.

I yank my hand back. Grip the tank rim. Stare down into the murky water.

Please, I think. Please not here.

The replay tapers. The phantom sensations fade. The throb between my legs remains, but it is bearable now. It is a low hum instead of a siren.

I exhale shakily.

I have a sticker on my monitor that says I am a ray of sunshine. There is a wet patch spreading on the front of my jumpsuit from the tank water that splashed when I jerked my hand. The crotch of my jumpsuit is also damp, and the two damp patches are not related, and only one of them has an alibi.

I look up at the ceiling.

"Are you serious," I whisper.

The fluorescent light hums back at me, unmoved.

I check that Tomas is still facing away. He is. I tip the rest of the tank water down the front of my jumpsuit in one fast splash. Now I am a woman who has had a clumsy plumbing accident.

I straighten up and announce, loudly, to nobody in particular: "Oh, darn it."

Tomas glances over. "You okay, Voss?"

"Tank backwash. Don't worry about it."

"You want me to call maintenance?"

"No, no. I've got it. Just going to change."

He nods and goes back to the UV lamp. I gather my things with the practiced ease of a woman who has just performed a small crime and is leaving the scene casually.

I clock out for an unscheduled cleanup break and walk back to my quarters with my arms crossed over my chest and the spore - yes, the spore is doing this now - laughing at me. It is a sensation like air bubbles trapped in an irrigation line rising up through my chest, effervescent and out of my control.

"Shut up," I mutter under my breath, passing a Mr. Handy in the corridor.

"Have a productive and cohesive day, citizen!" the Mr. Handy chirps.

The laughter rises higher.

---

My quarters are small and white and contain exactly the items Vault-Tec has determined a single adult female resident requires: one cot, one footlocker, one desk, one chair, one terminal, one closet with three jumpsuits and two pairs of regulation undergarments. There is also a small framed print of a sunset on the wall above the cot. I have lived here for eleven years and I have never seen a real sunset. The print is what Vault-Tec must think one looks like.

I peel off the wet jumpsuit. It hits the floor with a damp slap. My undershirt and bra follow. I stand half-naked in the middle of the room with the throb between my legs roaring back the second the air hits my skin.

I sit down on the edge of the cot.

My hand goes to my thigh. Just my thigh. The fabric of my underwear is damp against my fingers and I can feel the heat of myself through it and the spore is patient, the spore is waiting, the spore knows what I am about to do because the spore has been waiting for me to do it since I woke up.

I press the heel of my hand against myself through the fabric. A bolt of pleasure goes through me so sharp I almost laugh out loud.

I almost. I almost.

And then I stop.

I take my hand back. I put both hands flat on the cot, on either side of my hips. I stare at the framed sunset on the wall.

"No," I say. Out loud. To the empty room. To the spore. To the throb in my body that wants what it wants and does not care that I am supposed to be back at work in eight minutes.

The spore considers this. It does not push. It does not whine. It just sits there in my chest. Quiet. Warm. The way a houseplant sits there after you forget to water it. I think it’s disappointed?

"You don't get to have me in the middle of a shift," I tell it. "You don't get to win the morning."

It hums. It is, I think, mildly amused that I am bargaining with it. I am, I think, mildly amused that I am bargaining with it. We are both - for a moment - sitting in my quarters at 1118 hours, equally invested in the question of whether I am going to be a person who comes during her lunch break because a glowing mushroom told her to.

I get up. My legs are unsteady. I open the closet, take out a fresh jumpsuit and clean underwear, and put them as if getting dressed is its own small private act of defiance.

The fresh fabric drags against my skin and every drag is its own small torture. My nipples are hard inside the bra. I can feel the wetness already starting to soak through the fresh underwear.

"This is your fault," I tell the spore.

Yours too, it says. Quietly. Almost shyly.

I cannot disagree.

I leave.

---

I make it back to the bay at 1124, only nine minutes late. Nobody notices. I sit down at my workstation and try to do my job.

I do not do my job well.

The throb does not subside. It sits in my body for the entire afternoon like a guest who has been told they can stay but not speak, and every time I shift in my chair, every time I cross or uncross my legs, every time my underwear rubs against me, the spore makes a small interested sound in my chest like oh, are we doing this now? and I have to grip the edge of my workstation and breathe.

At 1430 I excuse myself to the bathroom not because I need to relieve myself in any way but because I just need to stand in a stall for ninety seconds with my forehead against the cool metal and not think about anything.

I do not touch myself. I have made a decision. I am holding to the decision.

The spore is finding the decision very interesting. It has been quietly testing it all afternoon - small flickers of sensation, an unprompted memory of the phantom mouth, the suggestion of a hand at the small of my back. Just enough to keep me aware that the spore is also here, and the spore is also curious about how long I can hold out.

The Quarantine Terrarium pulses in its corner. I do not let myself look directly at it.

I am keeping it. I am keeping it. I am keeping it.

---

At 1700 my Pip-Boy chimes.

I glance at the wrist display. A notification has appeared in cheerful yellow text.

Citizen Voss! Your biometric readings today indicate elevated heart rate, elevated cortisol, and one (1) brief but significant spike in arousal-pattern neurological activity at 1112 hours. Vault-Tec is pleased to offer you a complimentary Wellness Consultation to ensure your continued vitality and cohesion! A Cohesion Ambassador will be in touch to schedule.

I stop walking.

I stand in the middle of the corridor outside the hydroponics bay and stare at my wrist.

I read the notification again.

One (1) brief but significant spike in arousal-pattern neurological activity at 1112 hours.

I look up. The corridor stretches in both directions, fluorescent and empty. A Mr. Handy bot rolls past me toward the cafeteria. It does not acknowledge me. Above me, the PA system clicks on and a cheerful pre-recorded voice announces that the dinner menu tonight features Salisbury Steak and a vegetable medley.

I look back down at my wrist.

Arousal-pattern neurological activity.

It has been measuring this. The Pip-Boy has, presumably, always been measuring this - every spike of arousal-pattern neurological activity I have ever experienced, in every shower, every dream, every quiet evening alone in my quarters, for eleven years. And it has never, until today, pinged me about a single one of them. Eleven years. Hundreds of small, ordinary, private moments - the fumbling in the dark under my blanket, the shower this morning, the replay the spore had pushed through me before I had refused to touch myself. None of it flagged. None of it. The system has been building a picture of me - the shape of how my body behaves when I am quietly, ordinarily, by-myself aroused - and it has never once needed to alert anyone, because that picture has always been boring.

Yesterday at 1112 hours, something on me stopped being boring.

The spike was not bigger. I don't think it was bigger. I think it was different. Whatever the spore is doing to my chemistry, whatever new signature it has been weaving into me since the night I opened the terrarium, the Pip-Boy noticed because it had never seen anything like it before. The system did not flag arousal. The system flagged me. The new me. The version of me that, somewhere in the last week, stopped registering as the same person.

And presumably this data has been going somewhere.

I am not breathing.

I make myself breathe. I tap Acknowledged on the notification. The cheerful yellow text vanishes. The Vault Boy on the display gives me a thumbs up.

The thumbs up looks different now.

I lower my wrist slowly. I look up at the ceiling, where a small black optic sensor is set into the corner of the corridor near the hydroponics bay door. I have walked past it thousands of times. I have never really looked at it. It looks back at me now and I cannot tell if I am imagining the way it has angled itself, just slightly, in my direction.

I walk to my quarters in a daze. I do not pass anyone in the corridors. The Vault hums around me - the air recyclers, the water pumps, the dim distant clatter of the kitchen prepping dinner. The same sounds I have been hearing for eleven years.

I have never, before this moment, considered that the Vault might be listening back.

---

In my quarters I sit on the edge of my cot and look at my Pip-Boy for a long time.

I think about Mr. Hollings and his Cohesion Achievement Stickers. I think about Sunny Greer, the Cohesion Ambassador, who I have only ever seen in passing - a bright young woman with too-white teeth who always seems to be holding a tablet. I think about the framed sunset on my wall. The one made by people who decided, on my behalf, what a sunset should look like.

And then a colder thought arrives. My cycle. The Pip-Boy has been tracking my cycle since I was twelve. The little pink calendar entries. The mild reminder pings before each period. Citizen Voss, your hygiene supplies are restocked in your quarters! I had always thought of it as helpful. As Vault-Tec being thoughtful. Now I think about the fact that someone, somewhere, has known exactly when I have been ovulating, exactly when I have been bleeding, and exactly - for ten years - when I have been quietly aroused in the dark with my hand between my legs and the lights off and the door locked.

They know.

They have always known.

The spore is very still inside me. The kind of stillness an animal goes into when it hears something approaching.

I take the Pip-Boy off.

I have never taken the Pip-Boy off. Vault residents do not take their Pip-Boys off. There is a Vault-Tec PSA about it. Your Pip-Boy is your friend! Your friend should be with you always!

I set it on the desk. It glows faintly green in the dim room.

I lie back on the cot in my undershirt. I stare up at the ceiling. The throb between my legs is still there. It has not left me all day. It is, if anything, worse now, because the spore is being very good and giving me space and the absence of its pushing is leaving me alone with the simple unbroken fact of my own body's want.

For the first time since the night I opened the terrarium, I am afraid of something that isn't the spore.

The thought arrives almost funny in its tidiness: Great. Now I have something else to be afraid of. I had spent the last week building a careful relationship with one impossible thing growing inside my body, and I had - somehow, in some small way - started to feel like I might be getting the hang of it. We had rules. We were having conversations. We were, in our strange way, learning each other.

And while we were doing that, the Vault was learning me too.

The spore curls warm at the base of my spine. It has not said anything in a long time. I get the feeling - I cannot prove this, I have no way to prove this - that it is sitting with me. The way someone sits with you in the dark when you cannot sleep. Not fixing anything. Not pushing. Just present.

"You knew," I whisper. To the ceiling. To the spore. To the empty room.

It does not answer. But I feel something shift in my chest - a soft pulse, almost an acknowledgment.

It knew. Whatever the spore is, wherever it came from, it has been quietly aware of the Vault's attention for longer than I have. Today I caught up.

---

The Pip-Boy chimes from the desk.

Citizen Voss, please rejoin your Pip-Boy. A productive citizen is a connected citizen!

I do not move.

It chimes again, thirty seconds later. Slightly more insistent.

Citizen Voss, your continued separation from your Pip-Boy is being logged. Please rejoin your Pip-Boy at your earliest convenience.

I close my eyes.

The Pip-Boy chimes a third time. I get up. I cross the room. I put it back on. The Vault Boy gives me a thumbs up.

I do not smile back.

I lie down on the cot in my fresh jumpsuit, fully clothed, with my hands folded on my stomach and my eyes on the framed sunset on the wall. The throb in my body has gone nowhere. The fear has nowhere to go either.

Somewhere down on Sublevel 2, a Cohesion Ambassador is reviewing my file. Somewhere in some server room I will never see, a green spike on a chart is being annotated. Somewhere down a corridor, a Mr. Handy is cheerfully reminding someone else to smile.

I lie very still and listen to the Vault hum around me.

It has never sounded louder.

Twenty new images are going up this morning, and at least three of them made me put my coffee down. The contest's open. Somewhere in that album is the one that's going to wreck your weekend in the best possible way, so let's find it.

Newcomers, read the whole thing. Everyone else, skim for what's new and meet me down at the part where I get bossy.

Getting in:

Pick your image, write a short piece of original erotic fiction off the back of it, and post it with the July 2026 Contest flair. Lead your title with the image number - [Contest Image 4] right up front - so readers can find their way to it. A bot will also drop the link in your comments, since it can be trusted with exactly one job and I, allegedly, cannot.

The strongest pieces of the month earn a notch on the Top Author tag, our closest thing to a leaderboard and a real way to build a following here. Voting closes July 30 so we can tally for the July 31 newsletter, and August's round opens the next morning. Post later than that and you're still welcome as always, just outside this month's running.

What actually moves the needle:

More than anything, it's your title and your first three lines. Nobody clicks for image #11, they click because the opening made a promise. So chase the image that hands you an idea you genuinely want to write, never the one you've calculated into a winner - readers can smell the difference.

The other half is refusing the obvious. Every picture waves an easy story at you, and most of the inbox takes it. The pieces that stay with people swerve instead: a sideways POV, a colder timeline, some feeling the image never advertised. It's a door, not a blueprint.

Two smaller levers, both real: post Sunday through Tuesday when the sub's busiest, and actually live in your comments once you do. Reply, stay warm, don't ghost your own thread. Comment counts pull lurkers in, and "she always replies" is a quietly excellent reputation to have. And enter as many times as you like - no cap, no shame, go feral as is now tradition.

The hard no's, no exceptions:

Standing rules hold: no gore, incest, non-con, celebs, race-play, bigotry, futa, or bestiality. An image might lean toward one of those lines, and untangling that is your job as the writer. If it reads as voyeurism, the story has to make plain that everyone's a knowing, willing participant. If it reads as punishment, the character signed up with enthusiasm. You know the drill, and if you don't, welcome, now you do.

The one I'll repeat until I'm hoarse: consent is the entire game, no matter who or what is in the room. Build the fantasy as unhinged as you please. The yes still has to be real. And everyone's an adult unless the evidence is overwhelming - there should be no such evidence.

The one I actually want you to read:

This came up enough that it gets its own spotlight, and this month it gets the plain version: do not enter a chapter of a story you're already writing. The contest only flows one way - an image sparks a story. It does not run in reverse. You can't take a serial you're already deep into, comb the album for whatever picture sits nearest your premise, and file the next chapter as your entry. That's not a prompt response, it's a chapter wearing a costume, and it'll be disqualified. I'll clock it, and so will your readers.

Going the right direction, though, the door's wide open. If a prompt kicks off something with real momentum, please grow it into a full series later - that's one of my favorite things that happens around here. Just make sure the entry itself was born from the image and stands fully on its own, because someone's reading it cold and deserves a real beginning, not chapter 14 of a story they've never met.

And a small freedom to end on:

Bend genders however the story needs - the album rarely hands us a clean spread, so adjust to fit what you're actually trying to tell. Beyond that, the only real instruction is to make something that catches us off guard. Be good to each other in the comments, and above all, enjoy it.

Peace out. ❤️

Small print: the contest's optional. If nothing in the album grabs you, or you've got your own thing cooking, post it like any other month. Nobody's being held hostage here.

Based on Image 7

The path was overgrown. I had let it become so. Three months past I had stopped sending the gardener, and the wisteria had begun its slow strangulation of the iron gate; the convolvulus had thrown its pale trumpets across the lichened angels; the seraph at the eastern path had lost another finger to the rain.

I knew the way in the dark. I could have walked it blind - and had, on more than one night, in something near to a fever, eyes shut against the moon, mouth dry, the shameful slickness already gathered between my thighs before I had so much as reached the door.

For I came always now in the same state. Without my underthings. Without my chemise. Only the white linen dress that my husband had loved - the white linen I had washed and laid out and worn for him on the first night of our marriage, and that I wore now for the thing that lived beneath his family's crypt.

The linen so thin in places that one could see, in good light, the rose of a nipple beneath it; so thin that the wind, climbing the hill from the river, set the cold air against my bare belly through the cloth, and I shuddered, and the shudder was not all of cold.

I had become a woman who wore her wedding dress to be ruined on her husband's grave.

I knew it. I knew it as I walked. I said the word to myself, soft as a prayer, with every step. Putain. Putain. Putain. Whore. Whore. Whore. And still I climbed the hill; still I ducked beneath the flowering plum-branch grown across the lintel of the crypt; still my hand, of its own accord, gathered the long white skirt up as I climbed the marble step, baring my own calf to the moon, to the dead, to whatever angel's blind eye yet watched.

The door stood ajar. It always did, now.

The voice came from inside. Low as the deepest note of an organ, soft as ash, with the small lazy patience of something that knew - knew - I would always come.

"Est-ce que tu me cherches à nouveau, ma princesse?"

Art thou seeking me again. My princess.

I laid my forehead a moment against the cold marble of the doorway. Breathed. The shameful heat had risen already to my throat; I could feel the pulse of it under my jaw, in my wrists, in the soft place behind my knees. It was not fair. It had never been fair. He undid me before he so much as touched me.

"Always," I whispered.

His hand, when it found mine in the dimness, was cold as a chisel. The long slate-grey fingers, the leathered palm, the small ridge of claw where the nail should be. He drew me in. I went.

---

Inside, in the chamber where he had lit the candles for me, the air smelled of beeswax and tomb-dust and the faint green damp of moss in old stone. Hundreds of candles. They ran in long pale tears down the marble platforms where the Vicomte and the Vicomtesse slept their stone sleep beside one another, six centuries patient.

The wax pooled at their carved feet. I had begun, on these nights, to think of the wax as an offering - as the slow white blood of some gentler sacrifice, given on my behalf, so that I might be permitted to give what I had come to give.

He led me past them. Past my own family's name carved in the wall - the family of de B-, our beloved dead - and beneath, the new bronze plaque with my husband's name still bright. I did not look. I had stopped looking weeks ago. He pulled me on, into the deeper dark.

In the inner chamber he turned me by the shoulders, and seated me upon the low pallet of furs and old velvets he had long since drawn into that place for me, and stood above me a long moment in silence - the great cold ruined cathedral of him filling the candle-light to its furthest stone - and looked down at me as a thing both treasured and indicted.

"You wore it."

"You asked me to."

"And beneath it?"

I lowered my eyes. The blush rose; I could feel it crawl across my collarbones like the prick of nettles, like the small hot stinging of confession when the priest had been a stern man and the sin a sweet one. "Nothing."

He made a sound, low in his throat. Not a word. Older than words. The sound a great patient animal makes when it has been waiting in the dark for a thing long-anticipated and at last delivered into its keeping.

"Montre-moi," he said.

Show me.

I knew what he asked. He had asked it of me before, on other nights, and on each of those other nights I had wept a little before I could obey him - for the asking was always the same asking, and the obedience was always the same obedience, and the shame was always the same shame, fresh as if it had never yet been spent.

To be made to give the thing was so much worse, and so much sweeter, than to have the thing taken; and he knew it, and I knew that he knew it, and the small pact of our knowing was itself a part of what bound me to him.

I lifted my hands to the hem of the white linen. I gathered the cloth slowly in my fingers - the long fine pleats of it, the cold cloth that had been my husband's first sight of me on the first night of our marriage - and I drew the skirt up, and up, and up, baring first the long pale lengths of my calves above the high white boots he had asked for, and then the still paler skin of my knees, and then - slower yet, with the small last courage of a penitent at the rail - the soft inside slope of my thighs, where the candle-light went silvering up from the floor and showed him what he had asked to be shown.

There was no concealment left to me. I had worn nothing beneath; I had walked the hill so. The cloth bunched at my hips in two soft fists, and the candle-light gilded the small light fleece between my thighs - that hidden gold I had been taught from girlhood to keep hidden - and showed him also, I do not doubt, the wet of me that had gathered there in the long climb and that the cold air of the crypt could not yet abate.

He looked. He looked a long while. I could not lift my eyes to look back at him; the blush had gone down past my collarbones now, down to the small high curves of my breasts beneath the gathered linen, and I felt myself burning with it from throat to belly as one of his own white candles burns from wick to base.

"Comme tu m'obéis bien," he said softly. How well thou obeyest me. "Comme tu es belle de m'obéir si bien."

How beautiful thou art in obeying me so well.

He went down then, slowly, to his knees before me on the cold flagstones - that great horned creature, on his knees, before a widow in a ruined wedding dress, in a crypt full of her husband's people - and the candle-light pooled in the curve of his lowered horns and made of him a kind of dark altar, set against the dark wall, before which I had been seated as the offering and the offerer both.

His hands came up to my thighs.

The cold leathered palms; the long slate-grey fingers; the small curved obsidian of his claws at the tips, that he was forever careful to turn aside from my skin. He laid those hands upon the outsides of my thighs, just above the knees, and slid them up - slow, slow, ceremonious - to the soft inner slope where his own gaze had already gone before.

He parted me with his thumbs. Only a little. Only as much as a sexton parts the curtain of the rood-screen before the office.

I made a sound. I could not help it. The sound a small animal makes when it has been caught in a snare it has walked into of its own free will.

"Chut," he murmured. "Chut, ma princesse. Tiens-toi pour moi."

Hush. Hush, my princess. Hold thyself for me.

I held myself for him. I held the gathered linen at my hips in both my fists - knuckles white, the cloth crushed past saving - and I watched my own hands holding it as though they were a stranger's hands, the hands of some other woman, some shameless woman who lifted her dress in graveyards for what was not her husband and was not a man at all.

The strangeness of seeing my own hands so was itself a kind of small further ruin, a smaller shame folded inside the larger one.

He bent his great horned head between my thighs.

The first touch of his mouth on me was an unmaking.

I cried out - I could not have stopped the cry - and his hand came up at once and laid two long cold fingers gently across my lips, not to silence me, only to remind me, the small reminder that he had given me on so many other nights: the dead, my princess. Mind the dead. And I bit down upon the cold leather of his fingers, because I could not bite down upon nothing, and the cold cathedral of his shoulders moved between my parted thighs as he set himself to the slow patient labour of undoing me.

It was always so, with his mouth. The mouth of him was a different country - a country I had only ever been to with him, a country I had not known existed in this world before he had brought me to it. The roughness of the strange dark stars of his teeth, never biting, never quite biting; the cool slow patient tongue, that was not a man's tongue and was not a beast's; the breath of him cold against the wet of me; the great horned head moving between my pale thighs in the candle-light like some dark slow communicant at the cup.

I bit harder upon his fingers. The hot tears slid sideways from the corners of my eyes into my hair.

He was patient. He was always patient, here. He undid me by slow degrees, as a confessor undoes a long sin: a question, a silence, another question, the silence again. He did not hurry me toward my finish. He lingered at the brink of me until I was sobbing without sound around the cold leather of his fingers in my mouth; he drew back; he began again; he drew back; he began again; and at last, when I had no further strength to be patient with him, when my whole body had risen up toward him from the pallet in the wordless wretched petition of a woman with no words left, he had mercy upon me.

I came against his mouth with my own fists still in the ruined linen at my hips and his cold fingers still between my lips and the small high cry of my finishing muffled wholly into the leather of his hand. The candles guttered in the small wind of it. The Vicomte and the Vicomtesse, six chambers above, slept on undisturbed.

When he lifted his head at last, the candlelight caught the wet of me upon his mouth, and he did not wipe it away - would not, ever, wipe it away, until he had let me see it - and the small dark smile he gave me from between my own trembling thighs was the smile of a creature that had taken what it had been freely offered and meant now to take a great deal more.

"Mine," he said.

"Yours," I sobbed back. "Yours, yours, I am yours -"

"All of thee."

"All of me - God forgive me - all of me, please -"

He rose then. He lifted me with him as if I weighed nothing - as if my whole soaked, shuddering, shameful body were no heavier than the white linen falling around us. He sank back upon the cold flagstones and brought me down astride his lap, the way a queen might be set upon her throne; only it was not a throne.

It was him. It was the hard slate length of him, and he set me upon it slowly, slowly. I was so wet, and so open, and so wholly undone by the long patient labour of his mouth, that I took him whole in one long impossible slide; and the cry I made - into the salt-and-stone of his shoulder - I could not have stopped, would not have stopped, did not think to stop.

"Mine," he said again into my hair. "Ma princesse. Mine."

I rode him with my forehead pressed to his shoulder and my fingers locked behind his neck and my white skirts pooled between us like a fallen cloud brought indoors and ruined. He let me set the pace. He always did, the first time. He let me ride him as slow or as desperate as I needed; and tonight I needed it slow, slow, for if I went faster I would come at once and shame myself further.

He knew this. He held my hips loosely in his great cold hands and let me grind down on him in the small helpless circles of a woman who has been brought to the edge too many times for one night, and cannot help going over.

I came once like that. Almost silent. Forehead to his shoulder. Mouth open against his throat. The candles burned on. The Vicomte and the Vicomtesse slept through it, undisturbed.

When I had stopped shaking, he turned my face up to his and kissed me - the dark stars of his teeth catching gently on my lower lip, the taste of him moss and smoke and something like iron - and I kissed him back as a drowning woman kisses the wave.

"Now," he murmured against my mouth. "Now we go outside."

---

I do not know what possessed me to follow him. I do not know what possessed me, ever, to follow him.

I only know that when he stood - lifting me with him, setting me on my unsteady feet, gathering the white skirts up over my hips and tucking the bunched cloth at my waist so that I stood there bare beneath in the candlelight - I went where he led.

Out through the heavy door. The flowering plum let its petals down on me; a few caught in my hair. The graveyard lay silver-blue under the moon. The seraph with the broken finger. The obelisk for the drowned daughters. The Celtic cross of the forgotten priest, lichened and tall, its arms throwing a wide black shadow across the dewy grass.

He brought me to the cross.

He set my hands against the rough granite plinth - palms flat, fingers spread - and pressed gently between my shoulder-blades until I bent for him. The white skirt fell back a little; he hitched it up over my hips again, baring me wholly to the cool night air.

My hair - somewhere between his hand and his mouth I had lost what was left of the pins - fell forward in a long red curtain across the stone, across the carved In Memoriam, across the name and the date of a man dead two hundred years.

I made a sound. Nhhh. A sound without a word. A sound the priest beneath the stone might have called shame, and would not have been wrong.

He laid his cold leathered palm flat between my shoulder-blades and held me there.

"Quietly now, ma princesse."

His other hand smoothed up the back of my bare thigh. Slow. So slow it was almost cruel. He cupped me - both hands now, the cold thumbs parting me a little - and bent close behind me, and I felt the breath of him cold against my nape, and the long slate length of him notching itself against the wet ruined place I had only just finished offering him in the crypt.

"Silence, my princess," he said, very soft, very close to my ear, "or you'll wake the dead."

He drove into me.

I bit my lip. I tasted blood at once - my own small bright blood - and bit harder, because if I made a sound I would make many sounds, and I could not make sounds, not here, not now, not with the priest beneath the cross and the unbaptised child in the unkind grave just beyond my shoulder and the broken seraph turning her blind face toward us as if she could not look away.

He took me hard against the cross. Harder than he had ever taken me. His hands at my hips - the long cold fingers pressing in, leaving, I knew, pale half-moon marks I would find in the morning and press with my own fingers in the bath and ache with shame at the pressing - and the great cold body of him driving and driving, and the granite biting cold lines into the soft of my palms, and the moon on my back, and the cold air at my breasts where the bunched linen had fallen open, and the long red curtain of my hair swinging against the lichen with every thrust.

I did not wake the dead. I do not know how I did not wake the dead.

I came against the priest's grave with my forehead pressed to the granite and my mouth open against the stone, breathing the smell of cold rain and old moss and lichen, biting down on a sound that wanted out of me with the desperation of a soul trying to leave a body. The small broken sound that did escape was caught and swallowed by the lichen and the stone and the centuries.

He came with me, or just after - the great cold shudder of him, the small wordless growl into the back of my neck. He held me to the cross a long moment after, his forehead against my shoulder-blade, both of us breathing.

"Bonne fille," he murmured at last. Good girl. "Ma bonne, douce fille."

I would have wept, perhaps, if I had had anything left to weep with.

---

He laid me down in the grass afterward.

He had brought candles out - I do not know how, I never know how - and he set them around us in a wide slow ring, on the graves, on the plinths, in the cracks of the older stones. They burned upright in the windless night. They made small wet witnesses of themselves in the dewy grass.

I lay on my back in the centre of the ring. My white dress was ruined now - grass-stained at the hem, lichen-streaked at the bodice where he had pressed me to the cross, the linen rucked up around my ribs so that I lay almost wholly bare to the moon. I made no move to cover myself. I was past covering myself.

He knelt above me. He drew the linen higher still - up over my breasts - and I lifted my arms above my head and let him take it off me altogether, and lay then beneath the moon and the candles and the long dark gaze of him in nothing but the high white boots he had asked for and the gold ring I had not yet found the courage to take from my finger.

He looked at me a long moment.

"Comme tu es belle," he said softly. How beautiful you are. And then, lower, with the small dark smile that was not a man's smile and was tender all the same: "Comme tu es à moi."

How you are mine.

He took my wrists in one of his great cold hands and pinned them above my head in the grass. He set his other hand - the long stone fingers, the cold leathered palm - across my mouth. Not hard. Not unkind. Only resting there. A reminder. A warning. Silence, my princess, or you'll wake the dead.

And he settled himself between my open thighs, and entered me again, and this time he did not let me come quickly.

This time he made me beg.

He took me slow, slow, slow, with his hand across my mouth and his yellow eyes burning down into mine, and every time I came near to my finish he slowed - or stopped altogether - and held himself still inside me until I had come back from the edge, and then began again.

The second time he brought me near he stopped again. And the third. And the fourth. Until I was weeping against the cold of his palm, turning my face into it, biting the leather of it, trying with my eyes alone - because I could not speak, his hand was over my mouth - to beg him: please. please. please.

When at last he let me, I came so hard the candles guttered in the small wind of it. I came with his hand still over my mouth, and the cry went into him and stayed there, and my whole body arched up off the grass and into him, and I was - for one long impossible second - nothing at all.

No widow. No woman. No name. Only the white shape of a body in a ring of candles, in a graveyard, beneath the moon, taken open and emptied out by something that should not have existed and that I would, God help me, never, never give up.

---

He carried me back inside afterward.

I knew nothing of the passage - no marble, no wisteria, no slow descent of the steps into the deeper dark; only the cold cradle of his chest beneath my cheek, the silent fall of his footsteps as if it were the night itself that bore me, and the small ruined heartbeat of my own breath against the slate of his throat. When my eyes opened again the world had become a pallet of old furs and faded velvets in the deepest chamber of the crypt, and the candles in this room - his candles, the tall white smokeless candles he had never explained to me and that I had long ago ceased to ask after - burned upright in their iron sconces and threw long trembling devotions of light across the vaulted stone.

He had laid me down upon my side. He had laid himself behind me, fitting the great cold length of his body about the small warm curve of mine, and was already drawing the ruined linen back across my hip with the slow ceremonious gentleness of a sexton drawing a winding-sheet over the dead.

A small absurd modesty, after everything. A small late piety, when the linen was already grass-stained at the hem and lichen-streaked at the bodice and rucked into ruin at my waist, and the body it pretended to clothe was bruised at the hips with the half-moon marks of his hands and slicked still with what he had left in me beneath the cross.

I thought, at first, that he meant only to hold me. That the long black office of the night had been said. That I might, at last, be permitted the small mercy of sleep.

Then the cold leathered palm slid once more beneath the linen, and I knew that no mercy had yet been granted, and that I had not yet been dismissed.

"Mon Dieu," I breathed - and could say no more, for the long stone fingers had found the wet of me at once, and parted me at once, and stroked once, and twice, with the unhurried sacerdotal patience of a confessor laying his hand upon a penitent's bowed head; and I shuddered against him, helpless and swollen and sore, and ready, God forgive me, ready again - and he lifted my upper thigh across his own and entered me from behind in one long slow merciless inch, the way the tide enters a sea-cave at the turning of the night: without question, without hurry, by ancient right.

The cry I made was a small cry. There was nothing left in me to make a larger one.

"Ma princesse," he said, low against the nape of my neck. "Ma douce. Ma sale. Ma toute petite princesse à moi."

My princess. My sweet. My foul. My littlest princess, who art mine.

He took me so - on our sides, in the deepest dark of the deepest chamber, his front laid the whole long cold length of him against the small warm curve of my back, his great horned head upon the pillow above my own. There was no urgency in him now.

He had done his claiming; he had had me upon the flagstones, and against the cross, and in the candle-ring upon the grass, and there remained no further province of me to be conquered. What remained, in this last hour, was a slower thing - older, perhaps, than conquest - the slow tidal sacrament of a creature that has all the night, and all the nights to follow, and all the nights after those, and that means to use them.

I clutched the pillow above my head in both my fists. I turned my face into the linen of it and made small bitten sounds I no longer had the strength to silence; and he did not silence them, for there was no longer any need, the dead being six chambers above us and we long past the place in the crypt to which any earthly sound could yet ascend.

His hand smoothed up beneath the gathered linen - up the long bare slope of my belly, up the curve of my ribs, up to the small high weight of my breast - and he cupped me there, gentle as a thurifer cupping the smoking censer at the elevation, his cold thumb passing across the peak of me in slow patient circles set in time to the slow patient circles of his hips.

His mouth lay against the nape of my neck. The small dark stars of his teeth grazed the skin there, settled themselves against the cord of vein that ran beneath, and did not bite. A promise. A threat. A tenderness. The three indistinguishable, with him, as they had ever been, as they would ever be.

"What am I becoming?" I whispered into the linen.

I had carried the question through the whole long office of the night, and could carry it no further. Perhaps it was this position that drew it from me at last: that I was held so close, that his breath moved the small hairs at my nape, that his body was buried in mine and his cold hand laid in benediction upon my breast, that I had no posture left from which to hide and no veil left behind which to dissemble.

Perhaps it was only that the hour was late, and I was tired, and tired women tell at last the truths they have spent their strength concealing.

He went still inside me.

For a long moment there was only the slow whisper of his breath at my ear, the patient cold pulse of him buried in the wet of me, the small attentive guttering of the candles in their sconces, the far slow tideless sleep of the dead in the chambers above.

"What you have always been, ma princesse. Only now without the lying."

I closed my eyes. The tears came unbidden, as they had come twice before this night, and slid sideways across the bridge of my nose to vanish into the linen of the pillow. He felt them. He always did; what part of me he had not yet learned to read by touch alone, I could no longer name.

He drew his great cold hand up from my breast and laid the long palm of it against my cheek. I turned my face into the cold leather of it as a communicant turns her face into the offered host - and he held me so a long while. Holding me. Held in me.

The patient pulse of him become a second heartbeat that my own body had taken up and could not, would not, must not put down.

"Chut," he murmured. Hush. "Chut, ma princesse. Je te tiens. Je te tiens."

I hold thee. I hold thee.

He began to move again. Slower yet, if such a slowness were possible - the slow tidal rocking of a sea that had forgotten the moon. His cold hand at my cheek. His cold mouth at my nape. The white linen bunched at my waist, and falling in long pale folds across the velvets beneath us.

I came once more like that - almost without sound, only a long slow shudder that began at the soles of my naked feet and ascended by slow degrees to the crown of my unpinned head, the way grace, I had been taught as a child, was said to ascend from the body of the kneeling penitent to the high indifferent vault of God.

He made the low warm sound in his chest that I had come to know meant here, here, here. And he spilled himself in me at last, deep and quiet and unhurried - the small cold communion of him filling me as the last candle in the far sconce surrendered its small flame to the dark.

He did not withdraw.

He drew me closer instead - gathered the whole cold length of him the more wholly against the whole warm length of me, settled his great horned head against the pillow above mine, folded one heavy slate-grey arm across my belly beneath the linen - and remained within me, soft now and yet still there, still in me, the slow ache of him become a mooring to which my whole strange anchorless soul had been quietly and irretrievably tied.

Somewhere very far above us - beyond the marble and the wisteria, beyond the long sleeping ranks of my husband's people and my own, beyond the broken seraph and the unbaptised child and the priest of the lichened cross - the bell of the village chapel began to toll for midnight.

He counted the strokes with me, his cold breath stirring the small loose hairs at my nape. Un. Deux. Trois. Quatre.

By the seventh I was weeping again. I could not have said for what; for the night ending, perhaps, or for its not ending; for what I had been, or for what I should be in the morning; for the long emptied chambers of the great empty house, or for the warm filled chamber of myself in which he yet lay.

He made the low warm sound once more and tightened the cold arm across my belly, and I felt him shift - minutely - still inside me, and the shifting was tenderness, and the tenderness undid in me the last hard small kernel of resistance that had survived the whole long night.

By the twelfth I was laughing instead, soft and helpless and small, into the pillow, into the dark; and behind me the great cold cage of his chest was shaking too with that strange silent laughter of his, and the candles were guttering one by one in their sconces, and the dead slept on above us in their long marble sleep, and the last thing I knew, as my eyes closed against the warm wet of the linen, was the slow steady patient cold of him still buried in me, still holding me, still here.

I slept so. Held. Filled. Absolved, perhaps, by no god I had ever been taught the name of, and damned, perhaps, by the only one I had.

I had never in all my life been so far from heaven, nor so close to a thing older than heaven, gentler than heaven, and more patient by far than any heaven I had been promised, than this.

---

In the morning I will go back to the great empty house. I will wash the grass-stains from the white linen - I will wash it carefully, the way I once washed it for my husband - and I will hang it on the line in the south garden where the wisteria is dying back at last.

I will wear the black silk again. I will pour the tea. I will let the women in the village pity me. Such a tragedy. So young.

I will press the bath-water with my fingertips against the pale half-moon marks of his hands at my hips. I will wince. I will smile.

And tomorrow night, when the moon is up, I will come again to the crypt - in the white linen, with nothing beneath - and the door will be ajar, and the petals will fall, and the voice from inside will say:

Est-ce que tu me cherches à nouveau, ma princesse?

And I will say, Always.

I will say it until the wisteria has rotted from the gate and the seraph's last finger has fallen and there is no one left in any village anywhere to pity me.

I have no confessor now but him. The only screen I kneel behind is the dark of his crypt; the only absolution, his mouth; the only penance, to climb the hill again, and again, and never once to stop.

Could have made my title slightly more unhinged, but I'll spare you all my depravities 🤪