So Pope comes home to you in his room, tied up, and he's horrified at first that his family would do this to you. But then he smells the perfume you still wear, the one he used to buy you when you were going out, and he feels up your soft arms, your hands, your painted fingernails. His resolve starts to fray. You flinch, breathing tensely as he touches you. Your thighs are warm and plush, stomach bunched in rolls where you're folded and hog-tied on his bed.

You're shaking, terrified, and of course Pope feels bad, he's not an animal, but... you're his first and only source of comfort right now. He thought about you in prison, hated how you two broke up. You'd yelled at him to leave you alone. Pope had every intention of doing that, but now you're here, pretty and smelling good and in his bed, and he's a weak man. Everyone's always told him so.

So he sits you up, pulls out your gag, removes the blindfold. He reties you so your wrists are connected to the bedpost instead. You glare at him but you know better than to scream. He tells you he missed you. He just wants a good night's sleep. He hasn't fully slept since before you broke up. Pope got used to sleeping in your bed, your legs around his, and now he doesn't know what to do with himself at night.

But you're here now. You'll keep him in check. He can be good for you. That's what he believes as he presses up against you, feeling your warmth bleed into him. He tucks his face into your chest, an arm and a leg around you. His cock hardens, pushing against your thigh, but he ignores it, and he hopes you will too. "Sorry," he rasps. "Can't help it. Won't fuck you."

All you do is scoff, like you don't believe him. But Pope means it. He won't fuck you if you don't want it. He really can be good. He'll prove it.

You could not sleep, not truly, not anymore.

At least it felt that way. You could not remember what it was like to have a truly restful night of sleep now that you were so swollen with child.

Curtis shifted behind you, the weight of him a presence you were still not quite acclimated to, even after all these months. His arm groped around your middle, not gentle, but not cruel either—the grasping, possessive way he always had of reminding you that your body was his, that you had been claimed and would never, ever be unclaimed.

“Settle,” he rumbled, voice thick with sleep and something else—something that tinged the word with an implication, a warning, a plea. His hand splayed over your stomach, thumb tracing the tautest curve of your belly. You could feel the talon at the tip of his thumb, filed to more bluntness now for your comfort, but never quite harmless.

“I can’t,” you hissed, heat rushing up your neck. “It’s not comfortable, Curtis. I feel the stiffness in my hips, in my spine. I feel too tight, too—”

He rolled you to your back, so you faced him and the flicker of his phosphorescent blue eyes. He looked at you with rapt attention, like he was examining a rare specimen, one whose suffering was evidence of profound, necessary transformation. You hated him for it, and wanted to weep with relief that he might touch you, change you, ease the ache.

“Your body was made for this.” His hand cupped your jaw, then trailed down your neck, the pressure just shy of discomfort. “Do you remember the first night I claimed you?”

You did.

You remembered every moment: the sting of his teeth, the shocking stretch, the coolness of his skin, the relentless, remorseless fullness of him inside you. You remembered the moment shame and terror lost its edge and pleasure consumed the rest.

His hand moved to your chest, fingers splaying over the heavy curve of your breast. The child was not the only thing that had grown inside you; the rest of you had blossomed too, flesh thick and ripe, veins congesting with new blood. Every sense was heightened; your skin felt alive, every nerve exposed and raw, hungry for relief. The ache in your hips and spine was nothing compared to the ache between your thighs.

His hand squeezed, and you couldn’t help but arch into it, greedy for the pressure.

“You ache,” he said. It was not a question. “Let me help.”

You opened your mouth to protest, but already his hand was sliding, possessive, down your torso, across the vast swell of your belly. His touch was electrifying, not because it was gentle—he was never gentle—but because it was so exact, so insistent, as if he could knead away every complaint inside you, every complaint and every protest, until there was nothing left but the wanting. It seemed your body was always already in anticipation, every cell addicted to the inevitability of what he would do next.

“Curtis,” you tried, but the word came out as a sigh, as permission.

His tail was already curling under your knee, prying your legs apart with the unhurried strength of a tree root. He lowered his face to your neck and breathed in, the exhale chilling, the inhale so deep it felt like he was drawing the breath from your lungs. His hand was at your thigh now, squeezing the flesh, kneading it as if evaluating the meat on a haunch. He’d told you, more than once, that you’d filled out beautifully, that the lake itself approved of what you’d become.

You squirmed away from his cool heat, the pressure, but he only pressed his palm up to your pussy, and you yelped, not out of fear, but at the obscene, greedy pleasure of it. He inhaled again, and you realized that he was savoring the rising, salt-sweet scent of your arousal.

“You’re restless,” he said, tongue flicking in the hollow behind your jaw. “Let’s cure it.”

You thrashed, but the movement only succeeded in pressing you against his cock, which was already hard and waiting, resting like a threat against your thigh. His thumb found your clit, pressing down until you bucked, the pulse so fierce it brought tears to your eyes. He held you there, his mouth at your throat, tongue darting out—licking, flicking, biting. You could not have moved if you’d wanted to; every part of you was locked between the hardness of his body and the suffocating need in your own.

He took his time, always. He was deliberate; he seemed to relish the slow climb, the way every touch made you shudder, made your skin pebble, made your cunt throb with a greedy, insistent rhythm. His mouth found your nipple and sucked, pulling at it until you moaned, the sensation radiating out from your chest in a dizzying spiral. He bit down, and you couldn’t help it—you reached up and tangled your fingers in his hair, yanked him closer so the pain and the pleasure crashed together at the point of his teeth. His hand scrabbled for leverage on your hip, fingers digging deep as he sucked, scraped, and finally groaned into your chest, the sound wet and low, just this side of feral.

He lifted his head, mouth shiny with spit. “You need this,” he said, his voice ruined and ragged. “You need to be fucked. You need to be relentlessly filled with my seed, flushed with it so thoroughly it stitches your bones together around the ache. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re not wrong,” you choked out, clutching at his shoulders. They were slick with the faintest sheen of lake water, always, always, as if he carried the essence of his world with him, whether he was in or out of the water. Your whole body was trembling, aching, desperate for him.

He pressed the tip of his nose into your cheek, dragging it slowly along until it slid down the side of your neck, his breathing steady, his lips curled against your racing pulse. “You’re changing,” he murmured, and his hand stilled on your belly, spreading his fingers wide as if to encompass the entirety of you. “Do you feel it, little one?”

You whimpered and nodded, because it was impossible to ignore. You felt it wakeful, and you felt it always. Your body was not just growing, it was being remade. The softness of your skin had thickened to something more water-resistant, but only just. At night, you dreamed of gills blossoming open along your ribs, of your hands webbing at the base of each finger. Your eyes now reflected the moonlight with the same shimmer as his.

His hand cradled the base of your skull, claws gentle for the moment, a cage of tenderness you did not want but could not help but need. “It isn’t just the child,” he breathed, as if reciting a benediction. “It’s what happens when one like me mates with one like you. The biology is… transformative.” There was a hint of awe in his voice. “Every time I fill you, your body takes more of me, and less of your old life remains.”

He was fascinated by the heat of you. He had told you, after finally bringing you to his curious lair, that your human body ran so warm inside, and that your cunt felt like a living furnace, a molten trap that threatened to melt and consume him every time he entered you. He said it in the same way he said everything—half-worship, half-mockery, always with the edge of a threat—but you could tell he meant it. The lake was cold and deep, and he was made to thrive in it—the fire of your body was an impossible addiction.

Curtis pressed your legs apart even wider, nestling between your thighs as though he belonged nowhere else. His skin, always cooler than yours, felt almost feverishly good when it touched you. He braced himself on either side of your hips, and then, with unhurried care, pressed the head of his cock to your entrance. He was always so eager for the first breach, he always relished the shock and resistance, that first gasp, that split-second where you didn’t know if you could take him. Now, your body admitted him gladly, almost hungrily, and you felt yourself yield to the pointed insistent pressure, stretch around his girth, suck at him once he passed the initial resistance. The catching pain blended instantly with the pleasure, as familiar now as his voice, as expected as the tides. He groaned when he breached you, grinned so wide it seemed all teeth, and set a brutal, perfect pace at once—the slow, deep strokes that made you claw at the sheets, then faster, the piston rhythm that made it impossible not to buck up and meet him.

“You were born to take this,” he crooned, as he loomed over you, cock pounding out every remnant of sleep and doubt. “To crave it. I could keep you filled for a thousand seasons and you’d still want more.”

His hips never stilled, and his tail snaked behind, curling serpent-like around your ankle, claiming even more of you for himself. Your fingers clawed for purchase on his back, the scales there a cool counterpoint to the fevered pulse of your own skin. You felt yourself coming undone, senses overrun, the pressure building and building, rolling, deep pressure of his cock splitting you open again and again, and, oh, how you wanted more.

You had once thought that his rutting would get less urgent, less insistent over time, but if anything, Curtis fucked you harder every month, every week. He seemed to want to breed you anew every time, as if there was always a possibility you could be more his, more changed, more claimed. He would say things in your ear—“I can feel you opening for me,” “You’re so much tighter for me,” “No one else will ever fuck you this cunt that belongs to me,” “Do you like how I fill you, little one?”—and you did, you did, and you told him so, the words turning to gasps, to high-pitched whines as the pleasure outpaced any language you could give it. The world shrank to the bed, the pounding throb of his cock, the cold pressure of his scales, the way the air itself seemed to hum with the force of his need.

Curtis’s eyes gleamed in the semidark, and he gripped your face in both hands, thumbs pressing to your jaw, holding you steady so he could watch the pleasure breaking across your face with every stroke. “I love how you look when I fuck you,” he growled, hips never slowing. “You try to be strong, but you shatter every time. No one will ever see you like this but me.”

Dawn was hours off, and you had no expectation he would unhand you before then, even if by some miracle you managed to sleep. His stamina was naturally supernatural, and his hunger only that.

You came twice before you even realized it, the first at the seizing stretch, the second at the rolling, unyielding pressure of him grinding your clit with every pass. Curtis liked to feel the way your thighs trembled, the way your cunt clamped around him, the way you lost yourself in it. And you did, again and again, until the world burned white-hot and you were nothing but need and the squelch of your bodies meeting, hypersensitive to every flicker of sensation.

You didn’t notice at first what his tail was doing, too lost in the rhythm, in the hunger, in the collision of your hips. But then the cool, slick tip pressed behind you, teasing at your other entrance, and the shock of it made you jerk and squeal. Curtis laughed, low and wicked, and didn’t pause for a moment.

“Shhh, shhh—” he crooned, voice full of wicked, hungry delight, “just let me in, let me in—” and the pressure increased, cold and smooth and unyielding. He’d done this before, once or twice, always slow, always greedy, and you’d never been able to resistthe insistent, pulsing claim of his tail. The cool pressure breached you, slow and inexorable, until you were trembling, almost sobbing, with the shock of fullness from both ends. He waited only long enough for your body to yield—never gentle, but vigilant to the ways you stiffened, the catch of breath before pain. There was satisfaction in him, an echoing hum that radiated through his hands into your skin: a predator’s pride when prey surrendered to the jaw.

And how you surrendered.

He set a rhythm, fucking you with both cock and tail, every thrust calculated to reach further, fill more, feel more. You could not move, you could only ride out the onslaught, the relentless hammer and thrum and pleasure so staggering it threatened to dissolve you. Your body sang with it, nerves scattering into the ether, your mind reduced to the tidal wave of sensation. Every time you sobbed your pleasure, Curtis redoubled his efforts, drilling into you so hard you thought you could feel your whole womb twisting up to make room for the stretch. The twin fullness overwhelmed your nerves, a bright white so severe you almost begged for mercy. He gave none.

There was a point at which you were certain you could not take more, and yet your body learned to take it, to want it, to clutch him with desperate, greedy spasms, to refuse to let him go. All your muscles burned with the effort, with the need to hold him in, to be filled so absolutely that nothing else existed. Your cunt spasmed and wept and gushed around his cock, and you hardly noticed when your own arms lost the strength to clutch at his scales and simply splayed above your head, limp and pleading.

By the time you felt the first ripples of his climax about to break, you were slick with sweat. Curtis’s whole body tensed, every scale and muscle gone rigid. The groan that erupted from him was guttural, ripped from something ancient and primal inside him. He drove himself as deep as possible, until your breath caught and your pelvis ached with how wildly, impossibly full you were, and then he came. It was an abrupt flood, a torrent, so much and so shockingly intense you could feel it overflow around him, seeping hot and icy down your thighs, leaking from every stretched, desperate inch of you. His tail, still working at your other hole, pulsed too, and you felt another rush fill you there—this flooding from his tail a first, your body trembling, boneless.

You lay pinned beneath him, shuddering and shocked, and when he finally stilled, there was nothing else in the night but breathless, trembling aftermath. For a long time, neither of you moved; the weight of him, the chill and the heat, the press of his tail still inside you, the throbbing ache that was already shifting into a deep, heavy peace.

Then, gradually, you noticed something else—the strange, spreading numbness that radiated from the place where his tail breached you. It wasn’t unpleasant. In fact, it felt like a balm poured over the burning aftermath of climax, a slow, dreamy unraveling of every tension in your body. Your limbs went slack. The ache in your hips dissolved, your spine melted back into the mattress, and every muscle, every fraught, knotted nerve, at last let go. Your body, which had been a battleground of need and pain and pleasure, suddenly belonged to no one and nothing, and you drifted in a haze of perfect, suspended contentment.

“Curtis,” you managed, voice slurred and slow, “what are you—”

He stroked your hair, smoothed your brow, and quietly uttered a, “Shhh,” against your temple.

You didn’t have the strength to reply. The world glowed dimly at the edges but was mostly darkness, punctuated only by the chorus of your own heavy breaths and the lazy, overlapping whisper of the lake at the edge of the cool, cavernous lair of your new home. You lay there, half-buried under his body, feeling as if you might melt into the bed and the earth beneath it.

“I never told you about the venom of my tail. It’s not the kind you think—nothing lethal. But it is… potent.” His tail flexed, and you felt the last dregs of will drain from your limbs, leaving you hollowed out and weightless.

“It’s a sedative,” he explained, rolling you to your side and curling around you, spooning you with the possessive certainty of an apex predator. “It relaxes the bones and nerves, renders any prey motionless.”

He curled himself tighter around you, chest at your back, tail draped over your thigh, anchoring you in the nest of bedding and moss. In your boneless state, you could not escape the possessive drag of his palm over your skin—first up to the arch of your ribcage, then slowly, almost reverently, to the globe of your belly. He pressed his hand there as if you were both a relic and a promise, a rare treasure he’d stolen from another world, and you suppose you were.

In your mind, you felt the distant panic of a body that knew it should not be so helpless, that this creature had seized your survival reflex by the throat and throttled it—but after a few heartbeats, you realized you didn’t care. Curtis was pressed up behind you, his arms a wall of certainty wrapped all the way around your womb, your ribs, your shoulders. The ache was gone. The tightness was gone. You had been wrung out, emptied, and now you were nothing but full of him, inside and out.

He rumbled a sound from deep in his chest, almost a purr. The vibration traveled through your spine and straight to the place where pleasure had left you rawest. He nuzzled your hairline, then traced the shell of your ear with the tip of his rough tongue.

“Sleep,” he murmured, and you did. Or at least, you drifted on the edge of it, not quite inside sleep, not quite awake, suspended in the place where dreams bled into touch. Curtis’s hand moved over your skin the entire time, massaging the rounded slope of your belly, stroking your thigh, sometimes cupping your breast or tracing the curve of your jaw. The cocoon of his arms made you smaller, softer, less yourself and more a thing to be adored and kept.

You vaguely registered the way his cock, not even fully soft, pressed against the seam of your thighs, rutting at the seam like a persistent dream. You couldn’t have moved if you tried, but the feeling of him pushing between your thighs—wanting back in—was, impossibly, not unwelcome.

You wondered, or perhaps only imagined, if he could sense your dream-thoughts; the question seemed to amuse him. He gave you a moment of what passed for tenderness, nuzzling your hairline, rocking you back and forth in his arms, his tail stroking the flesh behind your knee. The sedative in your bloodstream left you blissed and limp, a ragdoll for his pleasure.

He was hard again, or nearly so, and the friction of his cock caught between your thighs was both a comfort and a question, as if your body had become the only vessel for his hunger.

Curtis’s hands never tired. You tried to imagine the monotony of your body, the sameness of your skin beneath his touch, but it seemed he could never get enough. He massaged your belly in long, slow arcs, sometimes lifting the weight of it as if to relieve you, sometimes holding so gentle and so firm that it seemed your flesh was his most prized, fragile artifact. His palm spanned the roundness, mapping every centimeter, sometimes dipping to the underside where your skin felt stretched to near-breaking, sometimes trailing up to the space above your navel. The gentle repetition of it—his touch, the rise and fall of his chest at your back—lulled you deeper into the velvet black of near-sleep. Even your mind became lazy, thoughts smudging at the edges until only sensation remained.

When he was satisfied that you’d gone slack, that your muscles had relinquished every old human defense, he shifted behind you. The cool press of his cock found the seam between your thighs—he never seemed to lose his interest for long, even in the slow moments. He nestled himself between your legs and, with a single, unhesitating thrust, pressed his half-hard length into your cunt. It was not rough, not this time; he moved with the patience of someone tending a sacred fire, easing in until your bodies were flush, and the faint ache became a deep, saturating fullness. Your mind drifted, but your body, trained and conditioned by months of relentless attention, responded in kind: you flexed around him, and a lazy, involuntary moan struggled up your throat. Curtis groaned, his chest pressed flat to your back, and rutted once, twice, before stilling, letting you sheath him while you both floated on the edge of sleep.

He didn’t use his hands now, not for pleasure, not directly. Instead, he gripped your hip for leverage, holding you open and tilted just so, and pulled your ass flush to his pelvis, driving his cock in to the hilt and then simply… staying there. You felt every twitch and pulse of his cock, every shift in the slow, animal rhythm of his breathing. He stayed hard inside you, using your body as a sheath, as a warm, wet cradle; you were perfectly pinned, utterly possessed, and you could do nothing but receive him.

Curtis exhaled into your hair, his voice a thick, slurred mumble. “You’ll keep me, won’t you? Keep me in you all night. That’s what I want, little one. I want to rut in you while you sleep. I want to use your heat, let my cock twitch and throb all night in that perfect cunt.” He rutted once, again, and you felt the faint flutter of his cum oozing out from the last round, slicking your insides. He seemed to relish the sensation, the lazy, languid pleasure of being buried and unmoving, until another aftershock rolled through him and made you gasp.

“I can feel your body holding me,” he said, the words warm and thick as sap with sincerity. “It’s all I want now. Just to be in you. You don’t even need to be awake for it, little one. Let me have you while you sleep. I’ll fuck you in your dreams if I have to, and you’ll wake up full of me.”

You tried to protest, but the sedative still dulled your tongue and every nerve, made your body heavy and dumb with pleasure. He rocked his hips, once, and the sensation rolled through you like a wave, sticky and slow and so deep it made your eyes water. The pressure of him inside you was a kind of lullaby, a constant, anchoring weight, and you found yourself drifting, drifting, until your thoughts were only the animal, helpless response of your body clutching around his cock, milking it with every slow, involuntary contraction.

“I’ll take care of you,” Curtis promised. “You’ll always feel good. I’ll see to every want you have, and every want you can’t even name.” The words were a net, a binding, and you believed him, not for comfort, but because he had never lied to you, he had no reason to.

The night drifted on. Curtis’s hand never left your belly; his cock never left your cunt. There were times, across the long hours, where you felt his fingers knead at your clit with lazy affection, almost absent-minded, and sometimes you came, even in this fugue—little contractions that made you clamp down and wring more pleasure from the fullness. He’d sigh when you did, and sometimes you came, even in this fugue—little contractions that made you clamp down and wring more pleasure from the fullness. He’d sigh when you did, the sound vibrating through your back, and sometimes he’d soothe you with a stroke of his hand, as if petting a restive animal. Occasionally, a tiny aftershock in him would pulse more of his seed into you, and it seemed like he was intent on keeping you topped up, leaking around his cock, overflowing with the certainty of his claim.

Sometimes he’d lick the sweat from the back of your neck, or whisper obscenities in your ear about how perfect you were, how he would keep you filled until it took, until you were more lake than girl, reminding you that you were changing, that every time you let him breed you, you became more his, less the fragile thing you had been. You believed it, because it was true: your body grew more resilient, your hunger more intense, your mind more focused on the simple, ceaseless need to be joined, to be filled.

This is what your life was now, and Curtis kept you like a pearl.

I make no apologies. I need to go shower.

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