Minerva Dashwood

You went barefoot, toes digging in the mud, and thought that the strange itch developing under your skin was maybe not so strange, not in the grand scheme of things.

Curtis said your body would change. Maybe you had outgrown your skin and your home, until the only thing left to do was to come here and wait to be collected. The urge was stronger than ever, and you could no longer resist, only yield.

The waterline was lower than you remembered, the silt and reeds exposed in the flickering starlight. You waded in ankle-deep, sinking, sensing the soft sucking of the mud as it accepted your feet. The air was loud with crickets, the occasional splash of fish, the far-off call of some night bird. The moon was gone, but the stars provided enough light to see the expanse of the lake, sprawling out imposingly.

And yet the lapping of the water around your ankles soothed in a way you hadn’t felt in weeks. You’ve felt dry in your skin, and these last days even your veins feel like hollowed-out reeds beneath the surface.

It had been eighty-three days since Curtis climbed through your window, the second night he filled you with his seed. It had been one hundred and twenty-three days since the night he claimed your body and pumped you with pleasure and with his spend all night, marked you in ways no mother’s salve could erase, left you shivering on the shore, his seed rooted in your womb.

You kept going, wading past the reeds and the brambles, the hem of your nightdress dragging through the shallows, soaking up moonless water and pond scum.

Even now, you told yourself you’re out here only to see the stars, but you knew you were lying.

The changes in your body had become more pronounced and less deniable. Soon you would no longer be able to hide the swell of your belly, blossoming with the taut dome of new life. The skin had grown soft but oddly cold, even through the high summer.

Your eyes started to reflect light in a way that makes children in the street shy away from your gaze. Your sister, ever helpful, insisted you were simply tired, that the sleepless nights were just exhaustion from your job at the bakery, the endless cycles of flour and heat, the constant lifting and kneading. Your sister believed what she said, but you sensed her growing unease—the way she looked at your belly with furtive suspicion, the way she muttered prayers when she thought you could not hear.

Curtis has not returned. The absence of him was a wound that festered.

You thought, in the aftermath, that Curtis would return often, if not every night. You thought he would haunt your window, your dreams, your shadows. But he was true to his word: he gave you space. There were nights you sat up in the window seat, knuckles white on the wood, waiting to see the gleam of blue scales or the shimmer of his eyes, and nothing appeared but the unbroken dark. Sometimes you convinced yourself this was a mercy, a kindness, and that you hadn’t wanted any of it to begin with. Other nights, you pressed your face to the glass and called his name softly into the silence the night, and the longer he hasn’t come, the more your spirit has withered.

Surely he hadn’t abandoned you.

He had seemed so insistent.

And yet… he was not here, and you were, and inside you the child of him grew steadily, unerringly, as night follows the tides. The thought left you hollow, as if your body had already begun to be carved away by the thing inside it, making you less yourself with each passing week. You felt it now, even as you shivered in the shallows; a dull, aquatic ache that stretched through your hips and lower belly, encompassing all that you were meant to be, and all that you no longer were.

There was only the wind and the water, and you, marooned between them. No answers. Only a hunger, like a current, dragging you under.

You stood, shivering in your thin shift, despite the cloak around your shoulders, and waited.

Waited for—

You didn’t know.

But after some time, you trekked back to the shore. Your body seemed to know where it wanted you to go, and you are not surprised to find yourself back near the trees where it all began, where he both ravished and worshipped your body.

You crouched into the hollow of trees and planted yourself at the base of the trunk. It was humid and close under the branches, the sweet, sharp tang of decaying leaves pressed into the earth, and beneath that, the mineral wet of the lake. You pulled your knees to your chest and listened for footsteps, for anything, but in the night the whole world was quieted to only the whisper of leaves, your own uneven breathing, and the persistent lap of water against the shore.

Though you were well-hidden, there was a break in the trees that gave you a view of the lake. You watched as the surface quivered, reflecting back the warped face of the stars, and you wondered if you were supposed to do something more. If there was a ritual to summon him, or if all of this—the ache, the hunger, the uncertainty—was part of the summoning. You dropped your face into your knees and breathed deeply, searching for any scent of him, any hint that Curtis still lingered on the edges of this world. All you tasted was old wood and lake rot and something soft and almost metallic—a scent that felt like memory.

If you closed your eyes, you could remember the weight of his hands on your skin, the dark press of his body against yours, the way his voice was both threat and comfort. You wanted to hate him for what he did, for what he made of you, but you couldn’t. Not when your own body, traitorous and tender, mourned him even as it craved his presence.

The ache spiked, sharper this time, radiating from the place where your child grew. It was not pain, exactly. More an insistence, like a call you were unable to answer. You wrapped your arms tighter around yourself. But as the night wore on, your body loosened, drooped, gave into sleep—one of the things it had long been craving.

Something woke you in the deep hours, something more than cold or discomfort. You peeled yourself off the ground, stiff and numb, leaned against the tree trunk, and then instantly sensed the difference in the air. It was charged, vibrating with static, and the reeds at the water’s edge were shivering where no wind stirred them. Your heart stammered, your mouth tasted copper, and for a moment you were sure you were only dreaming.

Curtis was there, just outside the ring of trees that sheltered you. He stood perfectly motionless at the water’s edge, as if he’d been carved from the dark itself, a shadow with a suggestion of scales and the faintest luminescence tracing the lines of his body. His eyes shone out of his face, impossibly blue, fixed on you with a ferocity so wild and so focused it made you flinch. You had not heard him arrive. You wondered how long he’d been standing there, waiting for you to open your eyes.

You found that you are not afraid, not in the way you expected. It was something else, a tension like a drawn bow. His tail was flicking behind him, the tip slicing dangerous curves through the humid air.

He moved toward you in an unhurried, even elegant way, each step deliberate, his weight barely imprinting the mud despite his hulking form, so much larger than a human man’s. He didn’t speak; you realized suddenly that he never had to. He only needed to look at you, and your body would answer.

He took your face in his hands—not soft, not gentle, but not cruel either, and tilted your head so he could look into your eyes. You saw the hunger there, a desperation that matched your own, but also a grief, and something nearly like relief.

He didn’t ask permission. He didn’t even speak. His lips crashed into yours, sharp and cold and tasting of brine. It was nothing like human kisses, but you leaned in, lips parting, swallowing the taste of him, that deep, mineral tang, the way his teeth scraped across your lower lip. When he broke off, you gasped for air, surprised at how much of your hunger was for oxygen and how much for something else entirely. His tail snapped up behind you, coiling around your back and waist, pinning you to him so you could not slip away even if you wanted to.

You shivered, but it wasn’t from cold. A sound escaped you, a wet, hungry sob, and your arms went around his shoulders before you could think better of it. You expected roughness; you found yourself enveloped, cradled against a chest so wide and firm that you could hardly breathe for the way it trapped the air in your lungs. He held you like a cherished and broken thing, and you felt the hardness of his excitement against your hip, the way it pressed through both your clothes and his. The scent of him, seawater and something sweetly corrupt, filled your nose, and you worried, briefly, that you would drown on land.

His hands went to your shoulders, then your arms, then he pulled the damp cloak from your body and let it drop to the forest floor. He was more impatient with your shift, ripping the collar so the rest of the garment could fall away and pool at your feet. The shock of air on your bare skin made you gasp, but you didn’t try to cover yourself. Curtis bent down and sniffed you, pressing his face into the hollow where your neck and shoulder met.

He inhaled deeply, pulled a low, vibrating groan from somewhere in the cage of his chest, and just like that, you were entirely, murderously desperate for him, for the feeling of his mouth and the slick pressure of his tongue, for the pain of his teeth and the searing cold of his hands sliding up your thighs. His breath fogged against your skin, cool and alive, and just hearing the ragged need in it was enough to make your knees threaten mutiny.

“Curtis,” you managed, syllables fractured and spilling out before you could stop them.

He growled, the sound vibrating through your chest, resonant and urgent. His claws grazed your shoulders as he shrugged the cloak away from you, letting it slide to the ground where it slumped darkly into the leaf mold. His hands found your waist, spanning it with impossible ease, and then his palms moved, mapping the curvature of your ribs, your breasts, then down, down, his fingers raking over your belly. He lingered on your midsection, ran his knuckles with surprising care over the curve of it, fascination and triumph wrestling for dominance in his gaze.

His hands encircled your belly and held there, as though placing a spell, or as though he expected the child to respond to his pulse. Maybe it did. You thought you felt it, some answering quiver, and you tried not to flinch. You shouldn’t want this, shouldn’t want him, but when his mouth found your collarbone you choked on nothing, a breathless exhale that turned into a moan.

His mouth was cold against your skin but his tongue wet and shockingly warm, as if the heat of desire tunneled underneath his icy exterior, a core of molten need blazing inside him. Teeth pressed, not quite biting, then scraped a line along your clavicle, leaving a trail of sensation so bright it bordered on pain. Your hands went, almost stupidly, to his biceps: smooth, firm, scaled over in patches, reminding you he belonged to the lake.

Your stomach ached, low and deep, with a hunger you refused to call by name. You wanted this, you wanted him, you wanted him to take you apart, fill you until your bones dissolved, until the self you’d been before dissolved in the brine of his touch.

His lips found your throat and sucked until you thought you were being hollowed out, all feeling compressed to the bright ring where his mouth met your skin. His hands splayed at your ass, cupping and kneading, moving you against him until you both groaned in time, a shared, strangled note that seemed to ring out over the water.

He barely bothered to undress himself, simply tore away the layers of sodden cloth as if they were nothing, exposing his torso and hips until the heat of him seared into you. His cock, thick and strange and ridged with whorls of blue-black skin, already pulsed against your thigh. He backed you up against the trunk of the tree and pinned you there, one massive arm braced next to your head, and dipped his head to your chest.

His tongue rasped along the curve of your breast, a wet, hungry line, and when his teeth found your nipple, you cried out, the sound trapped between your tongue and his. He bit, just hard enough to mark, then soothed it with that impossible tongue, flicking and sucking until your head spun and a firecracking ache tethered itself from breast to cunt.

His hand was already between your legs before you could breathe out his name, and his fingers--long, ridged, preternaturally strong--slid through the wetness between your thighs. He pressed in, tasted how ready you were, and when he drew his hand away, he brought two glistening fingers to his mouth and licked them clean with a noise so greedy, so hungry, it made your core tighten almost painfully.

“The desperate smell of your want was intoxicating enough, little one,” he growled, “but your taste?”

His claws sank into the flesh of your hips and he yanked you off your feet, spinning you so fast your head swam. You landed, hands and knees in the leaf mulch, your bare ass exposed to the night and to him, your thighs smeared with your own want. His grip found your shoulder and pressed you down, arching your back, planting you so firmly into the earth you could feel the cool dampness rising through your palms and shins. You didn’t fight when he spread your legs wider. If anything, you shuddered in relief, because this, this was what you needed.

His breath was a frigid fog against your skin, and then the blunt, slick head of his cock was nudging at your entrance, so wide it seemed impossible to take him. You whimpered against the moss, torn between terror and a nearly painful anticipation. Though he had your entrance amply slick with your own arousal, the size of him was still enough to make you gasp when he breached you, slow and relentless. You felt yourself stretch, felt the ache of it, but he did not yield.

He slid in further, relentless, unyielding, and your entire body shuddered around the breach. You scrambled for purchase, fingers digging furrows in the loam, and then his hand was at the base of your spine, stroking small, slow circles in a semblance of comfort.

“Look at you,” he growled, voice low in your ear as he bottomed out with a shudder that rocked you forward. “You were made for me. You fit like a custom-forged scabbard, little one. I could breed you a thousand times and never get tired of the way you clench around me.”

His cock pulsed inside you, impossibly thick, and every subtle drag and shift of his hips sent a shiver through your entire body. He held you there, immovable, his weight pinning you to the mud and leaf litter, fucking into you with a slow, brutal rhythm that left you gasping every time he drove home. Each thrust felt like it would split you, stretch you beyond your limit, and each time you bent, pliant, desperate to be filled further, to be ruined in the same way again and again.

His tail wrapped around your left ankle, hoisting the leg upward and outward, so you were splayed wide, offered to him and the lake and the night. He leaned forward, his chest pressing between your shoulders, bent over you, mouth at your ear now, voice ragged and low. “Little one,” he growled, “I will never let you forget how you felt this night. No matter how many times I take you, I’ll always want to take you again.”

You didn’t bother to hide your noises now; any vestige of shame was gone, burned away by the friction and fullness and the way his hands gripped you with such claiming certainty. You felt yourself dripping down your thighs, making a mess of the ground beneath, and you thought it fitting, to mark the earth as you were marked, to leave nothing untouched by him.

“If the lake had not insisted on a bloodline to restore balance, I would have demanded it. You are the only thing I want in all this world, and every drop of you belongs to me.”

He fucked you harder, faster, driving you into the ground with abandon. Each thrust made you whine, made your elbows buckle and your head drop forward, hair stuck to your face with sweat and dew. He reached around and slid two fingers to your clit, rubbing in tight, ruthless circles that sent the world spinning white-hot.

You came so hard your vision narrowed to a single bright point. Your limbs splayed and trembled, nails sinking into the dirt and your ass bucking up to meet every brutal blow, savoring the way it forced you open, greedily cradling his cock to the hilt with every cycle. Curtis growled so low and animal it vibrated the whole length of you, and his hands tightened on your hips, guiding you, fucking you back onto him, making sure you took every last centimeter his body offered.

You wanted to scream with it. You wanted to howl his name so loud they’d hear it in every village around the lake. But you couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything but let him use you, let the rhythm of his rutting into you become the only pulse that mattered. All sense of the world dropped away, and there was only the slap of skin, the wet, hungry noises of your cunt taking his cock, the raw, animal sound of your own voice every time the head of him pressed so deep it made your belly ache.

Curtis—no longer the stranger, never just the creature—was everything: the air, the ache, the axis about which you spun. Every time he slurred your name into your ear, mangling the syllables with his animal tongue, a fresh ripple shuddered through you. He rutted you in the dirt, rutting away the remnants of your old life, seeding you so deeply you could feel it pooling hot inside where the child already grew.

He never relented. Even as your body tried to collapse, he pinned you, forced you to take more, forced you beyond your own edge, made it impossible to know where you ended and he began. He held you through it, every time you tried to shudder or twitch away, his hands locked your hips exactly where he needed them, pulling on the strings of want and need until you unspooled every last thread, the tip of his tail tormenting your throbbing clit.

If you had thought yourself hollowed by his absence, you were now made whole by his invasion, every place inside you mapped and remade by him, by this act of mating, of possession. He bit the back of your neck, just at the nape, so hard you cried out and the sound split the night open, echoing off the trees and out to the water, where every living thing had to know what he was doing to you. The air rang with your sounds, and the taste of copper and earth and salt was on your tongue, and you felt the sharp crackle of him biting through the flesh just enough to breach the skin, a mark so carnal it would never fade. You wanted to be marked. You wanted to be his—no, you were his, and always would be, because some part of you had never belonged to anything else, and he simply reminded your body whose it was.

And then he came. You felt it, the flood of cold and the clutching, almost electrical pulse. His cock throbbed inside you, filling you even as you clenched and spasmed around him, milked every last drop of his seed so there could be no doubt, none, what your purpose was. He stayed like that, locked to you, fused to your body as if he could keep you in place for the rest of eternity by the sheer force of want. All up your spine, his scales left the faintest scratch, the imprint of his cooler body temperature, a memory of friction that anointed you as singularly his. Curtis kept you there, cock still embedded in you, his weight almost comforting, the way he spread over you like a shield against the cold and the dark and anything else that could try to threaten you.

Eventually, he shifted, rolling you gently onto your back as though conscious of your fragility. His cock slid from your body with a raw, slippery sound, and you felt some of his spend leak from your fluttering cunt, soaking the ground beneath you.

He hovered over you, gaze unblinking, so close you could see the reflection of your own trembling, ruined face in his eyes. The hard line of his body pressed you flat to the earth, and you felt every inch of him, every scale and muscle, the brutal weight of his presence. He let his hands roam your stomach and your hips, drawing slow, reverent circles, memorizing the curves of your form that he already knew too intimately. For a moment, you thought he was going to say something soft, something almost human. Instead, his mouth settled by your ear and he said, voice stripped to its essential hunger, “You come with me now.”

His tail curled around your thigh, not as a threat but as a matter-of-fact assertion of what would happen next. You were dizzy from the way he’d taken you, your cunt still raw and throbbing.

He lifted you, all at once, as if you weighed nothing. You were limp in his arms, boneless from the waves of pleasure, trailing wetness and ruin as he carried you back to the water. It should have been cold, but when the lake closed around your body it was only a relief, a soft, enveloping embrace that soothed the raw places. He held you afloat, one powerful arm under your knees, the other bracing your back, until your eyes unblurred and you could see his face above you, illuminated by the briefest shimmer of phosphorescence off the water. His eyes were luminous, impossible in the dark.

He kissed you again, more gently this time, and you let your head fall against his chest. He began to swim, slow and tireless, propelling you through the black, star-pocked surface and into the heart of the lake.

Hope you enjoyed a bit of monster-fucking Monday.

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