Kail Rose

Soap caught him at it in the mess — Simon parked against the far wall with a coffee going cold in his fist, focused on watching you eat. Soap followed the line of his stare, found you at the end of it, and grinned like the cheshire cat. "Oh, her," he said, delighted. "Aye, she's one of the hybrids. Mantis." He said it the way you'd mention someone supported the wrong football team. Then, because Soap cannot leave fuck-all alone, he leaned in and cheerfully added, "You'll want to be careful there, big man. Mantis females, ehh— they eat the fella after. During, sometimes. Bite the head clean off and finish the job. Read it somewhere once." He clapped Simon on the shoulder. "Best of luck."

And then he left. Wandered off to find some grub, whistling.

Simon stood very still against the wall, then. Felt the information go into him like a splinter you can't find to pull.

Bite the head clean off?

He looked back at you across the room — you'd tilted your head to listen to the person beside you, smooth and too far round, big dark eyes catching the strip-lights — and the want did not go anywhere, that was the horror of it, the want stayed exactly where it was and the new knowledge simply moved in alongside it and started rearranging some things.

He wanted you.

And being Simon, he did not do the sensible thing and walk away. He did the research.

The thing about dating Simon, you would learn, is that you have never in your life been so well fed.

You understood it maybe six weeks in, when you opened his fridge expecting the usual bachelor wasteland and found it stocked like he was provisioning for a siege. Yogurt. Three kinds of cheese. A bowl of cut fruit under cling film. A tin labeled ‘FROG LEGS’.

It was risk management dressed up as romance, which in fairness is mostly what romance is… Isn’t it?

He'd taken Soap's splinter and built a guideline out of it. He knows — he has read, in studies he will deny owning — that the trouble starts when you're hungry. Or stressed. Or both, which is the cocktail that turns a nice evening into something a coroner writes up.

He has constructed an entire relationship on the single principle of never ever letting you get to that point.

You'll be reaching for him on the sofa, hand sliding up under his shirt, mouth at the hot pulse in his throat, and he'll go rigid and say, in that flat  rumble of his, "When d’you last eat?"

"Simon," you sigh,

"Tha’ s’not an answer, love."

"I'm not hungry–,"

"I saw you skipped lunch."

He watches a lot. He watches you eat with open, naked satisfaction, and the first time you caught him at it you'd put your fork down and said ‘did you want some?’ and he'd said ‘no, you have it,’ and meant it with his whole strange heart.

The man can produce a plate of food out of thin air, and there's no point arguing, because he'll simply outlast you, planted there immovable as a boulder until you've eaten enough that his shoulders come down from around his ears.

He's never once said the word out loud. Cannibalism. He skirts it like a tripwire. Early on you'd tilted your head at him a degree too sharp while he was shaving — honestly just affection — and caught his eye in the mirror, and he'd nicked his own jaw and not flinched at the blood at all, only at you. Razor frozen halfway up his neck. The muscle in his cheek jumped and his pupils shrank to pinpricks and you'd thought: Oh. He's frightened. Big, terrible Ghost, who garrotes men in their sleep, scared witless by the tilt of your head. 

You felt bad for almost a full minute.

You have, in fairness, never confirmed or denied a thing. When he goes still and careful you let him. It's the most romantic thing anyone's ever done for you, this grim devout terror, and you're not about to spoil it with reassurance.

Soap, for the record, has really no idea what he started. He'll see the two of you in the canteen, Simon angling the better-fed plate toward you and think, good lad, taking my advice.

Simon had you down — the eyes that hold on him no matter where he moves, that dark point in each one that stays, tracking, while the rest of your face goes soft and human; the too-far head-turn; the way your hands fold up against your chest when you go truly still, wrists tucked, prayer-shaped.

He did not account for the wings.

You hadn't told him because you genuinely forget they're there — folded flat along your spine, a faint seam under the skin, a sheen across your shoulder blades he'd assumed was an old scar. You can't really fly. You never thought to mention them. Plus, it seemed like he knew plenty.

But now he's got you under him with your shirt long gone and his mouth working at the junction of your neck and collar, and there's none of the careful bracing tonight — he fed you an hour ago, he made sure, he watched you finish — and now there's just his weight and his hands and the husky sounds he makes against your skin. One big palm splays flat on your stomach and slides lower, fingers finding you already slick, stroking slow over your clit until your hips chase it on their own. "So soft, love," he murmurs, like he's not shaking. He gets two fingers inside you, curls them, and your whole spine bows off the mattress.

That's when they snap open.

In the dark it's monstrous; a sudden unfolding of something unknown and far too wide for the room, fanning from your back in a wash of color he can't quite name in the half-light. A deep iridescent purple shot through with flares of red, eyespots blooming towards the tips. One instant flat girl, the next a thing twice your size.

Simon goes to stone, shuts down, every system offline. This is it, he thinks — this is the bit where she takes the head. His fingers still inside you. He holds his breath, bracing.

You make a small strangled noise and pull them back down.

They fold away almost as fast as they came, gone into brackets around your spine, and you throw an arm over your face and refuse to look at him. Your ears are hot. He can feel it where his jaw rests on your cheek.

"Sorry," you whisper. "That just— happens sometimes. It– it doesn't mean anything bad, I swear… just… you… just feels good, is all.”

The single most dangerous woman he's ever shared a bed with has flashed her startle display because he got two fingers knuckle deep inside of her, and now she's mortified, hiding her face like a kid. Four months of Soap's splinter works its way loose, pushing out of his muscle, and falls out somewhere in the dark, and Simon — who has never in his life felt safe and certainly never expected to find it here, of all the deranged places — starts to come softly apart with relief. He pulls himself back to look at you.

"Le’me see you," he says, and peels your arm off your face, and when you do his eyes are doing something you've never seen on him: wet at the edges, wide open, not afraid of you at all. 

Worse than not afraid. Pleased with himself.

He leans back down and kisses you hard, pushing his fingers deeper and says it against your mouth because he’s got nothing left to lose: "Do it again. Want to watch."

So you do. 

And Simon fucks you slow and then not slow at all, and every time he tips you over they snap wide behind you and fill the room with color, and by the third time he's stopped flinching and started hunting it, smug, learning the exact angle that does it. When he finally comes it's with his forehead pressed to yours and your wings open around the both of you like something out of a church window, and he's saying something into your jaw, rough and ruined, that takes you a second to parse as all mine, there she is, there's my good girl.

Afterward you bite him. Just a little on the shoulder, just to be a menace, licking the taste of iron from your canine. 

He doesn't even twitch. "Knew it," he says into your hair, wrecked and grinning where you can't see. "Tellin’ Soap he was right."