The apartment comes with a roommate, of a sort.

It’s not uncommon, these older buildings, to have someone—some thing—lurking in the basement. But the broker had assured Alix that he mostly keeps to himself, and that she’d be expected to leave out the customary offering of bread and milk in a corner of what had been converted into a shared laundry room and never make eye contact if she saw him. Pretty standard, as Creatures went.

Alix takes the place; there’s no earthly or unearthly reason not to. It’s a charming studio, with a kitchen along one wall and high ceilings and space for her drafting table and the perfect spot for her bed. Big windows, a remnant from the building’s pre-gentrification life as a warehouse of some sort, let in the north-facing light and make the perfect spot for all her plants, plus all the ones she plans on acquiring.

She wants to live surrounded by greenery, surrounded by life. So much of her life so far has been pockmarked by stops and starts; she wants to put down roots. To live, and to thrive. To grow.

And so, like so many others, she leaves out the bread, and the milk, and doesn’t think about the Creature at all.

Alix lives, and works, and sleeps, and cooks, and does everything a normal, living person does in her new place. She stays up late and watches shows, eats dairy-free ice cream out of the carton, swipes one way on boys that look like their idea of fun is explaining her job to her and swipes another on girls who look like they need therapy but want another finger. So it goes. She waits, as it feels like she’s always waited, for her life to start. For some ethereal voice to boom down from the heavens and announce NOW YOU ARE A GROWN-UP, AND THIS IS WHAT YOU’RE MEANT TO BE DOING WITH YOUR LIFE.

Instead, the voice comes not from above, but from below.

It starts, and ends, with ice cream. Coconut raspberry ripple.

Alix had worked through all her familiar period pieces (history, not uterine sloughing) and had taken a gamble on the ‘recommended for you’ tab, but the movie had been more horror and less homey. One too many jump-scares and she’d sent the half-melted pint flying, painting a stripe of pinkish slime across her favorite bedspread.

“God fucking damn it!”

Alix scrambled to pause the movie, closed her laptop screen, and wrenched the comforter off the bed to examine it. She darted to the kitchen half-heartedly, thinking I’ll just wash it in the sink, but no. Visions of a massive comforter dripping raspberry coconut mess all over the floor made her hesitate. She needed to take it down and get it into the wash.

But downstairs meant milk and bread—an offering, as was right whenever she visited the Creature’s domain. Everything beneath the earth belonged to them; that was the term of their binding, the ancient agreement between human and Other-kind. So, still cursing under her breath, she hoisted the rest of the paper carton of real milk and the two ends off of a loaf of discounted whole wheat bread up under her arm with the quilt, and headed out into the hall and down the stairs.

It was somewhere after midnight; nobody else was likely to be up, let alone using the washer, so Alix didn’t worry too much about having to fish out someone else’s forgotten delicates to get her quilt into the wash. In bare feet she went down the three flights of stairs, turning the corner and bumping the half-open door to the laundry room open.

Inside, there was a man.

Alix stilled.

No. It wasn’t a man at all.

Her brain had seen the man-shaped figure and filled in the rest, but it wasn’t… there was no way it could be human. Firstly, he—it—had to be well over seven feet tall. It had the body language of someone who’d just been caught doing something, and wasn’t particularly pleased about it. There was no rule against bothering Creatures, but they liked to be left alone.

Alix looked down at the corner, where the bread and milk had been left by the other residents.

“I’m… sorry,” she managed. “I didn’t—”

“No, wait,” the Creature replied. Its voice was more feeling than sound, or maybe it was concrete dragged across gravel, or maybe all of her memories before the age of five, or maybe it was the wisp of smoke of a blown-out candle made solid and suspended in a drop of ice. It reached towards her, almost reflexively, six-fingered hands coming to sharp, claw-like points. Not threatening.

Beseeching.

Lonely.

He was lonely.

Alix didn’t move.

Creatures weren’t known for attacking unprovoked, but it still happened, sometimes. Usually when they were provoked, unfed, disrespected. She remembered the bread and the milk she’d brought and slowly began to crouch down, not taking her eyes off of his midnight-ink form in the still-dark laundry room, to set the offerings down.

“These are for you,” she said, her voice sounding like a mouse coloratura soprano auditioning for an opera made entirely of fearful squeaks. “I didn’t—”

“What’s on your… your blanket?”

“My blanket?” she echoed, stupidly, clinging to it a little more tightly as she looked at him. “It’s… it’s not blood.”

He huffed in what could almost be characterized as amused exasperation. “I know that. What is it?”

Slowly, Alix stood up; he did not look down at her bread (for which she honestly couldn’t blame him) or the milk carton. “It’s… I spilled ice cream on it. Raspberry. I need to wash it out.”

“Oh,” he said.

Both of them stared at each other, and Alix tried, in a respectful sort of way, to make out the details of his face without actually staring at him. In the darkness, it was difficult to see him. All she could make out for now was a pair of wide eyes, very white, sharp teeth in a too-wide mouth… broad shoulders, and the frill of spikes which fluttered and moved, like hair in the wind, or like a bat’s wing in flight… No, she couldn’t make out his features. Just the wide torso, the long, solid arms, the powerfully built legs. Only the silhouette of him, as if he were nothing more than a silhouette made of night itself.

“Can I—?”

“Oh yes, of course,” he said, stepping to the side, gesturing to the washing machine.

“Thank you.” Alix stepped carefully forward, reaching up out of instinct to turn the light on.

As soon as she did, the Creature screamed. The sound could’ve broken glass two blocks away.

“Oh god, I’m sorry!” she exclaimed, hastily turning the light back off, slapping the wall twice before she got to the switch itself. When she turned back to him, she held the blanket in her arms as if it could provide any sort of protection at all against his wrath. She imagined it, panicked and fearful, the scrape of claws rending her flesh, the bite of teeth, her last conscious thoughts of coconut raspberry ripple—

“It’s all right,” the Creature replied, panting a little.

But she could see he was covering his face, bent nearly double in pain. One hand on his… well, where a face ought to be, she supposed, and the other on his stomach, of all places.

“Did I hurt you?” Alix said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think—”

“It’s fine,” he said. “Truly. I simply didn’t—at any rate, I’ll leave you to it, your, ah, your washing.”

Alix nodded, wondering if he could see her at all. “Your eyes must be sensitive.”

“Yes,” he replied, as she lifted the lid of the washer and felt by touch for the detergent which had her name on it, stored up on the overhead rack. The flash of light had momentarily made her lose her comparatively weaker night-vision. “Eyes, ears… Among other things.”

He said the last words on what was very nearly a groan, and for the briefest moment, Alix paused, her mind racing in an entirely unexpected, horrifyingly horny direction. Did he mean—? But no, he groaned again, and it didn’t sound like the happy, eager kind of groan.

“Are you hurt?” She worried her bottom lip as she strained to look at him. “Your eyes, I’m—”

“No, it’s not the light, it’s all that damned milk!”

“What?”

He sighed. “Bread and milk. In the old days, I accepted this… payment… and fed as needed. Wild game, raw and bloodied on my tongue, iron and salt, nourishing with life. But now, my form no longer feeds well on what is offered. And I abide by the laws your people have bound me with. I no longer hunt, and I am… I am hungry.”

She ought to have been afraid. She ought to have been literally anything other than hungry at the way his velvet voice swept over her, low and rumbling through every bone and sinew of her body. But something in the softness of the blanket in her arms made her hesitate.

“The… the milk?” she ventured. “You’re lactose intolerant?”

“What?”

“You can’t digest the milk anymore,” Alix said. “It happens sometimes. People can develop it when they’re adults even if they don’t have any hint of it as a child.”

“I am well into my matured years, yes,” the Creature replied, thoughtfully, as if considering a possibility he had never before been confronted with. “Four hundred and seventeen years, to be precise.”

“Well, the light’s very low in here, but you don’t look a day over three hundred,” Alix replied, with a smile.

He huffed a laugh, and shook his big, shaggy, frilled head. “Which one of the tinctures are you searching for?”

Alix looked back up at the rack, finding the spray bottle of stain remover behind the box of detergent. “I found it. I just need to put this on and get it in the wash to keep the stain from setting… “ she sighed. “Although, it’s probably too late for that.”

She sprayed, and rubbed, and shoved it all into the washer, and started it. Once it was filling, Alix turned around, her eyes once again adjusted to the darkness.

“Lactose…”

“Yeah, it’s a… I think it’s a type of sugar. If you can’t digest it, maybe that’s what’s making you uncomfortable.” He walked over to the milk and bread in the corner, her own offerings beside the ones which the other residents had left. Slowly, rather elegantly, he crouched down and picked up her carton. He opened it, still crouched on the floor, and brought it to what she suspected was his nose.

“Perhaps you are correct,” the Creature said, wonder in his voice. “But—the stain, the ice cream on your blanket, that did not smell sour.”

She laughed a little. “That was dairy-free. I can’t have milk either. Gives me the—well, let’s just call it intestinal distress. This stuff is made of coconut.”

He stood up. “And you have more of this?”

“Yeah, I have more.” As soon as she had spoken, Alix realized two very crucial things.

Firstly, that she had just told a Creature she had more of what he wanted upstairs in her place, which was probably the supernatural version of inviting someone up for coffee that definitely wasn’t coffee but also could be murder. And secondly, that he was standing much closer to her now, and she could smell him.

And he smelled fucking delicious. Like church incense, like a hot priest coming out of a confessional, like being held during a terrible storm, wild and thrilling, terrifying, burnt and sweet.

“I can go get it,” she hastily amended. “Bring some back down for you?”

He nodded. Alix made for the door.

Halfway out into the hall she wondered, would he give chase? How much did the binding on Creatures really work—did it confine him just to the places below the earth, or was it the whole building itself? The block? She didn’t know. But she sprinted up the stairs, went into her apartment and opened the freezer, choosing an unopened pint of dairy-free Caramel Cookie Fudge and sliding her feet into a pair of sandals for her trip back down. By the time she returned, the washer had finished filling, and was now agitating rhythmically, the faint scent of detergent rising in the air.

“Here,” she said, offering the ice cream to the Creature.

He sniffed the air, and reached for it. Alix shivered as she felt the faintest brush of his cool skin against hers, and then he retreated. Deftly, using his claws, he pried the top of the pint off, and dipped right into the frozen treat.

“Shit,” Alix said, making him jump a little. “A spoon; I forgot.”

“It’s no trouble,” he replied, and dipped his claw right into it, coming up with a small taste.

He brought it to his mouth. She saw a long, sinuous tongue snake out, curling around the wickedly-sharp claw, and something about that made her shiver and clench. The juxtaposition of it—the delicacy of the tongue, the sharpness of the claw. She couldn’t explain it. But what had she expected, that he’d tear into it like an animal? Despite having a back crest that appeared to be more like a porcupine or hedgehog, and despite the claws and six fingers, and despite the swish of the long tail behind him, gently rasping on the concrete floor, he ate carefully, neatly.

And finished the entire pint.

“Thank you,” he said, wiping his fingers clean once more, setting the empty pint down on top of the dryer beside him. Alix realized she’d just stood there and watched him eat, as the washing machine churned and vibrated, finally switching to the rinse cycle.

“You’re welcome,” she replied.

He moved to go, as if she’d dismissed him, and she was unusually struck by the sense of longing, of loneliness, she felt. All she did was work and sleep; she didn’t know anybody in this city, just her remote coworkers, and this was the closest thing she’d come to bonding with a neighbor. Maybe it would be good to have a… a friend.

“I can bring more,” she said, and he looked up at her from the doorway. “If you liked it. Other flavors. The one I spilled had fruit in it—do you like fruit? Or… or I could cook a steak. You said you used to be able to hunt… can you not anymore?”

He watched her, head tilting to the side as if he did not know which part of her rushed response to answer first.

“Sorry,” she muttered. “It’s fine, I didn’t—if you have to go—”

“I would like that,” the Creature said softly. “Fresh meat and… and yes, more of the ice cream. I would like that very much.”

A friend, she thought. The idea thrilled her and pleased her. Alix smiled.

“Okay. Tomorrow?”

He nodded. “Tomorrow. Good night.”

 

~*~

 

It was strange how quickly it became a regular thing for her. Taking a pint of ice cream down with her laundry basket, sitting on the floor with a Creature and listening to him debate the merits of cookie dough versus blueberry white chocolate. One time, she brought ice cream bars, which he devoured with great enthusiasm, crunching happily on the wooden stick. Another, she brought a steak she’d very lightly seared on both sides and sliced across the grain, like the cooking tutorial video had instructed, though she’d left off the chimichurri because she had no idea if he could digest all of that.

He seemed beyond pleased by it, picking up the strips of near-raw, bloody meat and eating them with sounds of pleasure that made her, for the first time in her life, wish she were a steak.

Her experiments with sourdough starter yielded some… interesting results. He dutifully ate the loaves she made, but even she could tell that they weren’t very good. But they got better. She got better; she had a reason to try.

It was curious. She wasn’t afraid of him, the more she got to know him. His form no longer startled her when she came round the corner and into the laundry room. She found herself becoming eager to see him, hoping the days would go by quicker and sleeping in later and later to stay up with him and chat about every little thing.

Sometimes, he would ask her about what she did, or about the outside world, and Alix would tell him as best she could. She hardly knew what to ask him, and anything she thought of edged on personal, perhaps even offensive—what did Creatures find offensive? She didn’t know. But over time that fear subsided.

They became more honest with each other. More intimate.

Until, at last, Alix worked up the courage to ask him what had been on her mind since the first time they’d met.

“What is your name?”

He looked up at this from his spot on the concrete, his spines flattened down so he could lean back against a tumbling, rumbling dryer. Alix had been around him long enough to have a better read on his emotions, even though she still didn’t have nearly as good night vision as he did. Now, he seemed genuinely surprised.

“Why do you want to know?”

She picked a little on the edge of the fraying towel she’d been folding. “I was just curious. I keep referring to you in my head as ‘Creature’ and… it just seems rude, is all.”

He huffed a laugh at this. “There’s plenty of things humans do that are rude, but I’ve learned to adapt to them.”

Alix flushed a little in embarrassment and anger—not anger at him, but anger that her own kind had been so cruel and thoughtless.

“But you shouldn’t have to,” she countered. “Unless you don’t want to tell me—”

“Human throats cannot make the noise of our kind,” the Creature said. “If you tried, you’d probably…”

“Probably what? Accidentally insult your grandmother?”

He barked a laugh. “No. Probably get a sore throat.”

“Try me.”

He sighed. “Very well.”

And then he made a noise—half purr, half growl, low in the back of the throat, but made with some kind of vocalization that Alix couldn’t attempt even if she had all the time and bravery in the world. And yet it was not a rough noise, it wasn’t aggressive; hearing him speak his own language made her yearn to be able to understand it, and say it with the respect she felt it was due. When he had finished, Alix shifted a little uneasily where she sat.

“I—”

“I wish I could say it,” Alix said, softly. “The way you do, I mean.”

The Creature seemed not to know what to say to this.

“We… Humans, I mean—hell, I don’t know much about your kind. Hardly anything. I guess I can’t speak for anyone else, but… we just know what the stories tell us. But those can’t all be true.”

“And what do your human stories tell you about us?”

She hesitated.

“Tell me,” he urged, voice low and soft, as soft as velvet on gravel.

“That your kind were dangerous, once.” Alix’s voice was hushed, her tone apologetic. “Monsters. That you kept us… enslaved, I guess. That there was something about us, and the way your magic worked.”

He nodded; she could see it in the dark, even.

“Yes,” he said, slowly. “I suppose that’s all true.”

“But?”

He did not reply right away. Instead, he lifted his hands, spreading those twelve long, claw-tipped fingers, turning them this way and that. For a brief moment, Alix could see the faint glimmer of something, some kind of energy—like the waves of unseen heat coming off of a gas stove—encircling his wrists. He let his hands fall to his lap.

“Your kind did bind us. And the binding remains. There once was a time when we… Well, we believed we were working alongside your kind. With you, not against. Humans have vast magical potential locked within them, and our kind knew how to harness it, amplify it. Together we crafted great things. But then the Church called us demons. Their one great act was stolen from our very tomes of knowledge.”

“The binding.”

“Yes.”

The dryer behind him clicked off. That was her cue. Alix stood up, stretching her legs, and reached for her laundry basket. Her load was done, and she needed to get upstairs and pretend like she was going to fold it but really leave the basket on the floor by the door and flop into bed like a gremlin. Alone. Just like she’d done every other night they’d met, and talked like this.

But as she opened the door, a wild thought occurred to her. She slowly pulled the warm, clean laundry into the basket, and when it was full, she bumped the door shut with her hip, and stood up, holding it.

The Creature was standing, too.

“Can you leave this place?”

“The room, or the building?”

She shrugged. “Either. Both, I guess.”

Both of them seemed to understand what it was she was really saying. What it meant, for them. What she needed. What she felt he might need as well.

“Are you… inviting me upstairs, to your residence?” he asked. “Me? A… monster?”

Alix felt a frisson of wild need shudder through her skin. Softly, she answered him—declaring it to herself as much as to the Creature who stood before her.

“I don’t think you’re a monster.”

~*~

 

The Creature followed her upstairs.

She kept the lights off, and drew him into her apartment with a gentle touch and soft, encouraging words. There, with the street lights outside filtered softly through her pale yellow curtains, she let him touch her, and thrilled when he let her touch him, too.

How different they were from each other. Her skin felt so soft, so warm, he breathlessly told her—even though Alix was sure she had neither shaved nor recently moisturized. He didn’t care. If anything, the downy, fine hairs on her arms and legs made him fascinated, and when she parted for him to reveal a thatch of denser curls, he breathed in her scent and held onto her hips as if he was awestruck, as if every one of his senses was in overdrive.

Alix didn’t have much experience with good oral, but the Creature’s long, flexible tongue soon proved the utter uselessness of human men. Human women, too.

How could anyone compare, after that?

She felt devoured, utterly consumed. Satiated, beyond all comparison. She understood, at last, what it was he meant when he spoke of magic, untapped. What it meant for such magic to be unleashed and explored together.

He stayed beside her, afterwards. Even when Alix reached for him with shaking hands, eager to find a way to reciprocate… but the sun was starting to rise, and soon, her bed would be flooded with light. And he was a shadow-being, a Creature who was allotted only the darkness.

She dozed.

Content, and languid. Deeply, dreamlessly.

But he was not there when, come mid-morning, she at last awoke.

 

~*~

 

“What do you do down there?”

Alix asked him this one night, after this had become their new routine. He’d come up to her place nearly every night, made love to her with his mouth and then held her as she slept. She had questioned whether there was some latent magic that the bindings did not contain which made her feel so good in his arms, but she hadn’t questioned it that deeply. She felt good.

Now, she wanted to see the world from his eyes.

“I read,” he said.

“In the dark?”

He tilted his head at her; she could hear the smile in his reply: “My eyes are sensitive enough to read in near-total darkness.”

“I believe you,” Alix said, smiling herself, blushing to remember how he had studied her in the dark the night before. “You read… what do you read?”

“Histories, biographies. Adventure stories. Romance.”

“Romance?”

“It is not solely limited to Humans, the concept of love and desire,” the Creature replied, still amused.

“If your kind wrote romance, I’d love to read it.”

“Who’s to say they don’t?”

“But human eyes can’t read it, I bet?”

He laughed, that low, throaty purr. Alix slid off the dryer and came to sit beside him on the floor, leaning her head on his solid, scaled shoulder.

“And I paint, sometimes,” he continued, almost wistfully. “In colors that…”

“My eyes cannot see?”

“Yes.”

Alix sighed. “I wish I could, though. You’ve shown me so much already. But I wish I could be with you, in the light. Without hurting you.”

She shifted and made to kneel beside him, reaching up to feel the contours of his face. He flattened his frill of spikes under her touch, and she pet him, almost like a cat. He nuzzled into her touch.

“I wish I—”

“Would you like to see my… my home?” he asked her, all in a nervous rush. “You don’t—”

“Yes,” Alix replied. “Yes, please.”

And so the two of them descended.

 

~*~

 

The Creature’s home was accessed through a metal door marked with a sign labeled FACILITIES. It was just off of the laundry room, and it led to a metal staircase that descended down into pure darkness.

Every instinct was telling her to turn on the flashlight app on her phone, but Alix resisted. Over the last few weeks, she’d gotten better at trusting the darkness, and trusting him, but she was, after all, only human. Her eyes strained in the darkness, and she could barely see her own hands in front of her face.

When they reached solid ground, there was another doorway to pass through—this one sounded as if it was made of wood, heavy and solid, not metal—she knew right away when they had crossed into his space.

For one, it had the same crackle of faint magical energy she’d come to associate with him. And it also smelled more strongly of him, which was lovely and rich and heady. Intoxicating, though she did not feel like she was less herself. Less in control.

She had come to him, freely and honestly. Because there was nowhere else she wanted to be.

Because they both knew where this was going, at last.

Alix shivered, just a little.

The room around her was utterly, utterly dark.

“Describe it to me,” she whispered.

The Creature stood beside her. He took her hand in his, and began to speak.

“The room is approximately ten meters square. Subdivided into a living area on the right and a…” his voice trailed off, a little uncomfortably, at the faintest suggestion of where he might sleep. Even though both of them knew that was where this was heading. He cleared his throat. “I have… bookshelves, quite tall ones, forming a small alcove office. And my painting things are just beyond that.”

Alix sighed. It was a picture, half-formed, in her mind, paired with the touch of his cool, scaled skin. But it wasn’t enough.

“I wish I could see the way you see,” she said. “I wish I could see you.”

She could feel the air move as he adjusted his position to be nearer to her. Alix wanted nothing more than to be over on the left, to be on his bed, with him atop her, beneath her, inside her. Any way he wanted. He seemed to be humming, rough and soft, as he looked at her. She wished she could do the same, and see him, and know him. She wanted it more than anything.

Almost anything. 

 Will you let me see you?”

“There… is a way,” he murmured, clawed hands soft on her face, gently combing her hair back affectionately. “But… I would not ask it of you.”

“How?”

He shifted, ducking away from her almost shyly. For a Creature like him—so tall, so broad, so powerfully built, so feared—it seemed almost laughable. But Alix did not laugh. At length, he spoke.

“To… consume some of… I mean to say, to…” he swallowed, and then sighed, seemingly at a loss for words, unable to elaborate. “You don’t want that.”

“I do!” she insisted, stepping closer to him. “You can’t tell me what I want, or don’t want.”

“But if you saw me, truly saw me… I would frighten you,” the Creature responded. “Please, let me pleasure you again. Let me give you that, and feel that pleasure, and know that it is sufficient for you.”

She pressed her hands on his cool, smooth chest, so unlike her own skin and yet so marvelous to touch. Underneath, she could feel no heartbeat, only the hum of energy beneath the delicate pattern of scales. It was tempting, so tempting, to allow him to do what he wished; Alix could not deny that she wanted him that way—but she wanted him every way, too. More than just having him be beneath her. She wanted to lay beside him, and awaken with him in her arms.

She wanted to show him not to fear her, and not to hide anymore.

With her hands she told him the truth. Pressing along the lines of his collarbones, down the width of his shoulders, feeling his spines fan and shudder for her. He was sensitive, just as he’d said when they first met; he shied away from her at first, but came back. Dance and retreat, dip and circle around, until she learned what he liked. Alix had mapped the contours of him with her night vision and with her imagination, but each time she felt something new in him, something new to add to the incomplete picture.

He gave up on his stoicism and held her close at last, letting out a deep sigh of contentment. It was like a lizard, sunning on a rock, except she was the sun, and the stone, and he was more than just a creature. Her hands wrapped around his body, barely meeting in the back; she could feel down his spine to where it extended into the long, sinuous tail, which flicked back and forth, his emotions made visible.

Kissing him was like nothing she had experienced before.

Alix was used to wet and messy and forceful, tongues battling for dominance or whatever it was people said in books. Instead, he was gentle, restrained and slow. Maddeningly slow, at first, because the contact was so electric, because she needed him so badly—all of him. Then, she felt the pull from him, the give and take;

Before long, she was panting, feeling herself warm to his touch, needy and eager. He inhaled, and she knew he could scent her arousal.

“Ah, let me please you, Alix…” he groaned, scratching gently at her thighs through her jeans with his long talons. “Please, let me pleasure you.”

“I want that,” she whimpered. “But I want to… to please you, first. Will you let me?”

“Yes,” her Creature groaned. “Yes, damn me. I want—you cannot know how much I want—”

“I feel it as well, trust me,” Alix said, feeling like every cell in her body was singing for him. “Let me, please.”

He groaned again, and pressed his face against her sweaty neck. His tongue darted out, tasting her sweat. She could feel him nod against her skin. Alix took the initiative, and  heard him groan as she reached between his legs, and felt the growing hardness there, which had begun to fill and press out from the normally-contained, smooth bulge where a human man’s genitals would be.

He was not a human man. That much had been abundantly clear from the start, but Alix did not shy away from him, especially when the low, rumbling purring sound grew more audible, vibrating through her body as she stroked his hardness.

She could barely get her hand around it, at the base. It felt as long as her forearm, and she worked two hands around it, feeling how it flared down from the tip, feeling the… it would’ve been precum, she supposed, he was leaking. It felt slick and cool and slippery under her hands, and it felt powerful to know that she was the reason why this ancient being was shaking and twitching beneath her.

He had rolled to his back, on the pile of pillows atop his bed. His quills flattened down, but his tail was writhing around her, curling around her ankle, caressing her calf, her leg, as if to express all the emotion he could not say.

To consume… Alix thought, with a wicked grin that surely he could see in the dark.

She lowered her mouth to the tip of his hardness, and licked him there.

His groan was subterranean. All at once, he bucked and writhed beneath her, nearly displacing her from where she was perched on his strong thighs, and immediately after she felt his belly tense as he half sat up, words of breathless apology and gratitude falling from his lips.

She silenced him once more with the press of her tongue to his member.

He did not taste like a human man, nor feel like one on her tongue. There was no foreskin to slide back, no bulbous head, but he was still so sensitive. The tip was thinner, but Alix suspected that it also could move, similar to the way his tail now curled tightly around her ankle. What it would feel to have this inside of her—but she was getting ahead of herself.

It was time for him to get ahead, first.

She had to adjust her technique, but he was so responsive, so vocal, it was quick and pleasurable to make him come undone. Her hands wrapped around his shaft and she stroked him, squeezed him, sucked the tip of him and drew him as far into her mouth as she could take. It was much easier to take him deeper, and the howl of pleasure he let loose when she let him touch the back of her throat made her core clench down on nothing.

He was close.

Alix could hear him panting, begging. A warning—and she did not pull away, she was not afraid of what might happen, but welcomed it, when he shuddered and tensed and spilled down her throat with a high, sharp cry of pure bliss.

She swallowed.

His seed tasted as cold and strange as the rest of him, but it was not unpleasant. There was a lot of it, as well, but when it spilled out of her mouth as he pulled her off, shaking and oversensitive, Alix felt his thumb swipe at the mess there, and she looked up at him, expecting, as ever, to see shadow.

Instead, she saw… she saw him.

“Oh,” she exhaled in wonder, trying to process what she was now able to perceive for the first time. “You’re… you’re beautiful!”

He was no longer a shadow, a shape. He was glowing—perhaps he had always been glowing, but now she could see him. Blue-green dots of light traced the contours of his face, down the sides of his neck, down his torso. They matched the patterns she had always felt under her touch, but now she could see them. He smiled at her, a brilliant, sharp-toothed smile, and Alix smiled back.

She sat up, and took him all in.

The way his quills looked so elegant and majestic with their white and pale blue glowing markings; she could see each twitch of them, moving like the aurora borealis.

The stripes down his arms, the backs of his strong hands… she took one hand in her own two smaller ones and turned it over, stroking the pale, glowing palm. Watching as the light pulsed under her touch, then settled.

Sensitive, he had said. And he was. Now she could see just how sensitive he truly was.

“Do I… please you?” he asked.

Alix felt like laughing. She smiled widely, and nodded. “Yes, of course you do.”

His strange, handsome face lit up—literally—and then faded a little, along with his smile. “And… the taste was not… You did not have to—I did not expect you—”

“You’re delicious,” Alix said, leaning down to crawl up his body, welcomed into his embrace. His hardness had flagged a little from his climax, but it had by no means gone down. Right now, it seemed as if he wanted to be held, but soon… she shivered.

“I love you,” he said, so softly into her skin that she felt it more than heard it.

“If I could purr like you, that’s what I would be doing,” Alix replied, kissing him on the cheek gently. “I love you, too.”

They lay there for a while, and slowly, the effects of his essence began to wear off. But Alix learned that there were more ways to take him inside of her, more ways for her eyes to be opened. So many more ways to love, and be loved than she had ever thought possible.

And she, and her monster, lived very happily ever after.