Don't Turn into a Snake!

Chapter Three -- Looking For Heat

He was asleep and he was having a good dream, and in the dream he couldn't move.

That was all it was at first. No fear in it. Just a heaviness laid over him and a growing sense that his arms were somewhere he hadn't put them, and the dream went on around that for a while, doing whatever it had been doing, until the not-moving got insistent enough to be a problem and the problem was large enough to wake him.

It wasn't a nightmare. That was the thing he'd want to be clear about afterward. It was the way a door closing wakes you.

The room was dark and gray. The balcony door was open, because it was always open now, because somebody had decided two weeks ago that a flat needed air in it and had never once shut it again, and the only light in the bedroom was the moon coming in across the carpet in a long pale strip.

Something was wrapped around him. He could feel it plainly, now that he was awake for it: a pressure lying over his ribs, a second one around his upper arms holding both of them against his sides, and a third somewhere down across his knees. It was warm where it touched him and cool an inch further along.

And it was moving.

He opened his eyes properly and looked down the length of himself and there was nothing to see.

The comforter was where the comforter always was, up around his chest. But it wasn't lying flat. It had been lifted, from underneath, in two places: a long low ridge running diagonally across his stomach, and a second one further down by his knees.

He went to lift the comforter.

His hands didn't come.

They were pinned under it, one either side of his body, held down at the wrist and the forearm by something heavy, and when he pulled they didn't shift a fraction. He tried the other arm. Same. He got his shoulders up off the pillow about two inches and that was as far as the whole system let him go.

Then the ridge across his stomach began to slide.

It came up his body slowly, moving over his ribs and across his chest, and it was heavy, and it was thicker through than his own thigh, and it moved the way nothing with legs moves. It went in one long continuous pull, the mass of it passing over him section by section, each new section arriving before the last one had finished leaving.

It was a snake. There was a snake in his bed and it was on top of him.

The head came out from under the comforter about eight inches from his chin.

It came out slowly and it kept coming, more of it than he'd allowed for, and it lifted until it was above him and it turned and looked at him.

It was enormous. It was not a pet. It was not a thing anybody kept in a tank. The head alone was longer than his forearm, broad at the back and tapering forward, patterned in dark and pale bands that in that light were only two grays, and it sat above him on a neck as thick as his leg and did not appear to be finished coming out of the bed.

It hissed at him.

Josh did not move. He did not move so completely that it stopped being a decision and became a condition. Every part of him had gone rigid at once and stayed there and the only thing still working properly was his heart, which had gone up into his throat and was making an unhelpful amount of noise.

This is a dream, he thought. That's what this is. This is a dream, and that's why it's a nightmare.

The tongue came out.

It came out and flicked and went back in, and came out again, black and forked and very fast, and it was doing something. He could see it was doing something. It came out at his chest, and then a little higher, and then over toward his shoulder, and then back to the center, and every time it went back in there was a small pause. It was working him out. Taking readings. Building a picture of him out of whatever it was that snakes built pictures out of.

He tried to make the dream end. He genuinely tried, lying there, to do whatever it was you did to wake up, and nothing happened at all except that the coil around his chest got a fraction tighter and stayed there.

Then the jaw started to open.

It came apart at the back rather than the front, the way a jaw does when it isn't a jaw like his, the whole rear of it unhinging and dropping and the mouth going wider than the head had been, and it kept opening past every point at which he expected it to stop. Pale inside. Wet. Ridged along the roof.

And it came closer.

He watched it come, and he did the math without wanting to, and the math said his entire head would go in there. Not squeeze in. Go in, with room. It was six inches away and then four and then it was filling everything he could see, and there was a moment when he understood, quite calmly, that he was about to find out what the inside of it looked like.

The jaw came down over his head and closed around it and stopped.

It went black and warm and completely silent.

He could feel the roof of it resting on his forehead and the lower jaw somewhere under his chin, and the whole of it was slick and hot and pressing very lightly all the way around his skull, and nothing was happening. It had stopped. It was holding him there, and outside it he could hear his own pulse and nothing else.

Then something came out of the mouth and touched the side of his face.

It was a hand.

It went past his cheek and up and took hold of the edge of the jaw from the inside, fingers curling over it, gripping. A second hand came past his other ear and did the same on the other side. Both of them braced.

And then they pulled, and a head came out of the snake's mouth.

It came out the way somebody comes up out of a pool: shoved forward through the gap between the hands, hair first and plastered flat, then a forehead, then a face, and the face was Luna's, and it stopped when it got as far as her shoulders. The jaw had closed down around her collarbones and it stayed there. From the shoulders up she was a woman leaning out of a snake. From the shoulders down she was still entirely inside it.

She was about seven inches from his nose. She stretched her neck forward and kissed him on the cheek, once, unhurried, with her lips.

"Hi," Luna said.

Josh made a sound. He wasn't proud of the sound.

The relief went through him so hard it hurt, dropping out of his chest into his stomach and leaving him shaking with his arms still pinned at his sides, and he lay there under all of it breathing like he'd run somewhere.

Two weeks ago a shapeshifter had knocked on his door. That was the whole explanation and there had never been any more of it than that. He drew shapeshifter porn for a living. Six years of it, sixteen hundred pages, sold a page at a time to about two thousand people who paid him a few dollars a month, drawn on an iPad in a flat he didn't pay rent on. Then one of them turned up on his doorstep, and now she lived here and left the balcony door open.

So it wasn't a nightmare. It was Tuesday.

He still had no idea whether he was awake. He went to pinch his own cheek, which was the only test he knew, and remembered halfway through the thought that he could not move either hand and had not been able to for several minutes.

Luna watched him try, and work out that he couldn't, and give up. Then she laughed.

She laughed properly, with her chin on his sternum and her shoulders still inside a snake, and the laugh went through the coils and he felt it at his chest and his arms and his knees, all three at once.

"Your face," she said. "You went completely still. You just lay there like a rock. What was that?"

"I thought--"

"Were you playing dead?"

"I don't know."

"You were playing dead. You did the bear thing." She was enjoying this enormously. "That's for bears, Josh. Bears leave you alone if you're a corpse, that's the whole bear arrangement. A snake doesn't care whether you're moving. A snake finds you because you're hot."

She lifted her chin and put it back down a few inches further up his chest.

"And you're very hot," she said. "You're the hottest thing in this flat by a mile. You're lit up like a bar heater in here and I could find you from the other room with my eyes shut, and I did."

Then she stretched her neck forward and licked his cheek.

It was not a human tongue. It came out further than it should have and it was cool and dry and thin, and it split at the end, and the two tips touched his skin separately, one high on his cheekbone and one down by his jaw, and then it went back in.

Josh said nothing at all.

"Well?" Luna said.

He didn't answer. He was not really in the room yet. There was a woman's head and a woman's two arms coming out of the mouth of the largest snake he had ever seen, in his bed, in the dark, and the rest of it was around his chest and his arms and his knees, and he was still working through the earlier part and had gotten about as far as the jaw coming down over his head.

"Josh."

Nothing.

"Are you going to say anything?"

He looked at her. He heard the words. He produced none of his own.

Luna sighed, and the sigh moved the coil across his knees, and then she said, "Right," in the voice she used for solving things.

"Okay," she said. "I'm going to have to break you."

She got both hands out of the snake's mouth and put them either side of his head.

They came up over his ears with the palms flat on his cheekbones, and she turned his face until it was square on to hers, and then pulled herself forward on the strength of her arms until her face was about two inches above his. Her hair fell either side of his head and shut the last of the light out. Her breath was warm on his mouth.

It looked exactly like a kiss. Everything about the setup said kiss. He got his eyes closed on reflex and got them open again when she didn't arrive.

She was smiling at him from two inches away. Then she opened her mouth.

There was no tongue in it.

There was something else in it, and it came out over her lower lip, and it was a snake. A small one, no thicker than a finger, banded dark and pale like the enormous thing around his chest, with a proper head on it and two black eyes and a jaw of its own. It came out of her mouth and kept coming, and it turned in the air and looked down at him and put its own tiny tongue out.

Then she lowered her face and put it on him.

It landed across his cheek and started to move. It was cool and completely dry and there was muscle working along the whole length of it, and it went up over his cheekbone toward his eye, and he turned his head and it followed, and it slid down to the corner of his mouth and stopped there and tasted him.

He was making a noise now. A small one, high, entirely involuntary.

It went up.

Up the side of his nose. Across the bridge of it. Then it turned its head down, put the tip of itself against his right nostril, and pushed.

Josh broke.

He came apart completely. He was shouting and thrashing, actually thrashing, every muscle in him going at once, trying to get his arms out of the coil and his head out of her hands and his whole body off the mattress, and the noise coming out of him was not a word, and none of it moved anything anywhere at all.

Luna took the small snake back into her mouth in one smooth pull and clamped her other hand down over his face.

It sealed. That was the only word for it. The palm went across his mouth and the edges of her hand went soft and spread and closed over his lips and his cheeks and up under his nose, and it went airtight in about half a second, and the shout he was in the middle of went nowhere and made no sound in the room at all. He could hear it inside his own skull. It stopped existing an inch outside his face.

She held it there while he finished.

"Shh," she said. "Shh. It's gone. Look. It's a tongue. It's just a tongue."

She put her tongue out to prove it. It was a tongue, mostly. It was still forked.

It took him about a minute to come down, with her hand still sealed over his mouth and the coils still going nowhere.

She let go when his breathing evened out. The seal came away with a small wet sound and her palm went back to being an ordinary palm on his cheek.

"Right," Luna said. "So. How was that?"

"How was--"

"Rate it. Come on. That was a good one, that took me twenty minutes to set up in the dark--"

"I hate snakes," Josh said.

She stopped.

"You what?"

"I hate them. I've always hated them. I don't like snakes at all."

"You draw--" She actually pulled her head back an inch to look at him properly. "Josh. Chapter four. The whole of chapter four."

"That's not a snake. That's a lamia."

"It's a--"

"It's completely different." And there it was: the first full sentence he'd produced since he woke up, and now that one was out the rest came with it. "You've got the whole thing wrong. You've done a snake with a woman inside it. That's not what a lamia is. A lamia is a woman first, from the hips up, all the way, and then it's tail below that and the join is smooth and you can't see where one starts. There's no snake head anywhere in the design. The snake head is the single thing you're not supposed to have."

Luna blinked at him.

"You've thought about this," she said.

"I've drawn about two hundred pages of it."

"At three in the morning you're going to give me notes."

"You asked."

"Hang on, then," she said, and started pulling herself out.

She got both hands braced on the edges of the jaw again and pushed, and this time she kept going.

It was slow and it was not clean and he watched every second of it real close. She came out of the mouth an inch at a time: shoulders first, working one free and then the other, the jaw stretching and giving around them and closing back down behind. Then her collarbones. Then her upper chest, coming out slick and dragging, and all the while the snake's head was changing shape to allow it, the jaw widening past anything a jaw does, the bone in it going soft and losing its edges.

Her tits came out. The ordinary pair, the small ones she wore around the flat, because tonight was not about them and she hadn't bothered. She didn't look down at them or mention them.

Then her ribs. Then her stomach, and by the time her navel cleared the jaw there wasn't a jaw anymore. The head had lost its shape entirely. It had gone from a skull to a collar to a smooth thick join, the two lines of it drawing up and closing around her waist and going seamless, until the place where a snake's head had been ten seconds ago was simply where her hips ended and the rest of her began.

And then she was a naga, lying up his bed in the moonlight with more tail behind her than the bed was long, all of it still wrapped around him at the chest, the arms and the knees.

"Better?" she said.

"... Yeah. Yeah, that's it. That's the thing."

Then he looked at her tits, because they were really close to his face and they had just spent a minute coming out of a snake's mouth.

"Ah," said Luna.

She put both hands back on his head.

"You were looking."

"I wasn't--"

"You were absolutely looking. I watched you do it." She brought her face down to the same two inches, hair down either side, everything shut out. "Which is fine. That's the most standard thing about you. But I'd like your attention on me tonight."

And then her head started to change.

She did it slowly and she did it from two inches away and she did not let go of his skull while it happened.

The face went first, and it went forward. The whole middle of it began to push out, the bridge of her nose lengthening and flattening as it came, the nostrils sliding up and shrinking into two slits and travelling further apart, and her mouth went with it, the corners running back past where a mouth ends. Her chin dissolved into the underside of the new shape. The bone moved visibly under the skin. He could see it moving, could see the whole shape of the skull rearranging into something with no forehead and no cheekbones and a hinge at the back that went a long way further back than it had any business going.

The skin caught up last. It came over the new shape smooth and tight and then it broke into scale, spreading from the muzzle backward in a wave, pale, faintly ridged, going gray in that light.

Her eyes stayed in roughly the same place. That was the worst part. He watched the pupils go from round to two vertical slits without the eyes themselves ever moving, and for about a second and a half in the middle of it they were still her eyes and were still looking at him.

The hands on his skull didn't change at all. They stayed a woman's hands, warm, fingers spread, holding his head still on the pillow.

Then the snake's head above him opened its jaw, and it went wide, and the fangs came down out of the roof of it and locked into place, and it dropped straight for his throat.

Josh screamed.

He got a real one out this time, a proper one, and she let him have it. The jaw closed around the side of his neck and did not close on it: he felt the two lower fangs touch the skin under his jaw and the whole mouth settle around his throat with no pressure in it at all, and he lay there shouting at the ceiling with a snake's mouth resting on the side of his throat and a pair of human hands still holding his head still.

He was not looking at her chest. He had entirely forgotten that anything like that existed anywhere in the world.

She held it four seconds. Then she let go.

The head came back faster than it had gone out, which he thought about later. The jaw shrank and hinged forward, the scale drew back off the muzzle in a retreating wave and left skin behind it, the bone came up into a forehead and cheekbones and a chin, the pupils opened out of their slits and went round, and her mouth arrived last, already smiling.

"There," Luna said.

Josh lay under her with his heart going like a machine and his arms pinned and his throat wet, and it was at this point that he became aware of a problem.

She was wrapped around all of him, including the parts of him that had opinions, and there had been a length of tail lying diagonally across his hips for the last five minutes.

She looked down her own body at where the tail was. Then back up at his face.

"Josh."

"Don't."

"Your cock's gone hard."

"I'm aware."

"I did the fangs." She was delighted in a way that was going to be a problem for him for years. "I did the whole head. I went for your neck. You screamed."

"I know what I did."

"You screamed and you got hard. Both. At once. I felt it happen." She shifted the coil across his hips deliberately, once, and he made a noise. "That's not a normal thing, that. I want you to know that's not a normal thing."

Then she tightened, and it was the first thing all night with nothing playful in it.

There were four coils on him and he had them all straight by now. One across the chest. One around the upper arms, holding both elbows against his ribs. One over the knees. One at the ankles.

The chest one came in first. It didn't slide or shift, it simply reduced, the whole loop of it drawing down onto his ribs, and the air he had in him went out. It went out steadily, over about two seconds, until his chest was where she wanted it and then a little further, and then it stopped and held there.

The arm coil came in with it and locked his elbows. The knee coil took up its own slack. The ankle one moved, which was how he found out it was there.

He tried to breathe in and got about half of what he wanted.

"Don't fight it," Luna said. "You get a bit each time. Just take the bit."

He took the bit. It worked. It was not remotely enough and it worked.

"This is how I'd do it if I meant it," she said, propped on both arms over his chest with her hair hanging down onto his face. "You do it slowly. You wait. Every time they breathe out you take up the slack, and you never give it back, and you don't really have to squeeze at all. You just have to be patient about it. It's the most boring thing in the world to actually do."

"You're doing the coils wrong as well," Josh said.

She stopped.

"I'm sorry?"

"You're using them like arms. You've got one across my chest and one on my elbows and they're both just holding, they're not doing anything." He was flat on his back and could not move a single limb and was, apparently, going to do this anyway. "You're supposed to start at the feet and work up. That's how it's meant to look. You come up the body."

"Says who."

"Says everyone. Says the whole genre."

"The genre." Luna looked at him for a long moment. "The genre is four hundred men on the internet drawing a snake they've never met."

"One of whom is me."

"One of whom is you, yes, and you're currently under a real one, so." She let a coil slide a bit up his ribs, unhurried, and watched his face while it went. "Anything else, or shall I get on with it?"

"The tail tip's sensitive."

That one landed.

She went completely still above him. "What?"

"The tip. Last foot or so of it. It's supposed to be the most sensitive part of the whole--" He stopped, because her expression had changed. "You didn't know that."

"There's no reason for that to be true."

"There's no reason for any of it to be true, you're a snake woman--"

"Hang on," said Luna, and went quiet.

Somewhere down past the end of the bed, something moved.

Then her whole body jerked, all four coils at once, hard enough to lift him an inch off the mattress, and she said "oh" in a voice that came from a long way down, and dropped her forehead onto his collarbone.

"Well," Josh said.

"Shut up."

"Two hundred pages."

"Shut up."

He got about four minutes of being extremely pleased with himself, and then the light changed on her.

He noticed it because of her eyes. He was looking straight up at her from a foot away and something had gone wrong with them: the brown had clouded over, both at once, going milky and pale blue and flat, like the eyes had had a film laid across the front of them.

Josh went cold.

"Luna. Your eyes."

"Mm?"

"Your eyes, something's--"

Then he got it. He got it in one piece, all at once, out of a hundred pages of reference he had drawn without ever once seeing it happen.

"You're going into a shed," he said.

"Ugh." She rubbed at one eye with the heel of her hand, which did nothing. "Yeah. It's been coming all day. It's why I came in here in the first place. You can't do it cold, it comes off in bits."

"You're going to do it now?"

"I'm going to do it now."

"Not while I'm--" He was aware, distantly, that he was reacting to this a great deal more strongly than the situation warranted. "You're not supposed to let anyone watch that."

She lifted her head off his collarbone.

"Sorry?"

"You're not supposed to let anyone see it. That's the one thing about naga. You do it on your own, in the dark, in a hole, and you don't come out until it's done." He was talking very fast. "It's more private than being naked. That's the whole point of it. There's an entire--"

"Josh, it's a skin."

"It's not just a skin--"

"It comes off, I get a new one, it takes four minutes." She was looking at him now with her flat clouded eyes and something in her face had shifted. "But you're very worked up about it, aren't you."

"No."

"You've gone red. I can see you going red, I can see the heat coming off your face."

"Luna--"

"Right," said Luna, and started.

She did it over him.

There was a dry sound first, close, coming from every coil at once: a papery crackling, and then the surface of the thing lying across his chest changed under him, going loose and separating, and a split opened along its length about a foot from his shoulder.

Then she worked out of it.

She drew her whole body backward through it a section at a time, and the old skin stayed exactly where it was: still coiled around his chest, his arms, his knees and his ankles, holding its shape, going dry and pale and empty -- while something else slid out from inside it. What came out underneath was wet and new and it was not gray anymore even in that light: there was color in it, dark and pale bands with a hard shine on them, and it was warmer than the old one by a noticeable amount.

She was not calm about it. That was the part he hadn't expected. Her breathing had gone short and she'd got both fists in the comforter either side of his head, and about halfway through she stopped being able to talk and just worked, and the sound she made when the last of it came off her tail was not a sound she made for effect.

It took four minutes. At the end of it his bed was full of a long empty tube of shed skin, thin enough to see through and dry enough to crack, still holding the shape of the coils it had come off.

And she lay on him breathing like she'd been running.

"Okay," Luna said, eventually. "Yeah. That is -- okay. That's not four minutes. That was different."

"I told you."

"Everything's up. Everything. The whole of me from the hips down is--" She shifted, once, experimentally, and had to stop and start the sentence again. "Right. Get that stuff off the bed."

"I can't move my arms."

"Oh," she said. "Yeah."

She freed one arm and he got the shed skin down onto the floor with it, and then he put his hand flat on the new surface of her, across the coil on his chest, and she made a noise like she'd been hit.

He did it again. He ran his palm down eight inches of her and watched her whole upper body go rigid over him.

"Stop it."

"You said everything was--"

"I know what I said. Stop it, or this is going to be over in about a minute and I'll be annoyed about it all week."

She took his wrist and put the arm back in the coil, and the coil closed on it, and that was that.

Then she took his boxers off with the tail.

She brought a section of herself up under the waistband on both sides, tightened, and drew them down the length of his legs and off his feet in one long movement and dropped them off the side of the bed. It took three seconds. It required no hands. It was significantly worse than if she had used hands.

Then he lay there naked and pinned in four places with a naga on top of him, and neither of them did anything for a while, and he had to ask.

"Where's the--" He stopped and started again, because she was going to make him say it anyway. "There's nothing on your tail."

"No."

"There's no pussy on it."

"There is not," said Luna. "There's no legs, so there's nothing between them, so there's nothing. It's just tail. All the way down."

"So how is this supposed to--"

"You tell me. You're the expert." She put her chin on her folded arms on his sternum and looked at him. "Go on. Two hundred pages. Where does it go."

"About a foot below the join," Josh said. "On the underside. A slit, running lengthways, in the middle of the belly scales."

"That's disgusting."

"That's how it works. That's how it works on actual snakes, it's called a--"

"I know what it's called."

"Then make one," he said.

She made one.

She rolled a section of herself over, brought the pale underside of it up into the moonlight about a foot below where her hips ended, and opened it.

It started as a change in tension. The broad belly scales in one band went slack, and then the whole thing parted along a line about ten inches long, opening from the middle outward in both directions at once. The edges thickened as they drew apart, coming up soft and heavy and rolling outward, and the scale on them stopped being scale about halfway through the movement and went to skin. And inside that, in the dark, she built a pussy: the deep part first, then the inside of it, then the surface last of all.

The heat came last, out of her all at once.

"Right," she said. Her voice had gone. "Put your hand in it."

"How much--"

"All of it," said Luna. "As much as you can. That's the point. Go on."

He got two fingers into her, and then four, and then his whole hand up to the wrist, and it kept taking him.

That was the thing. It did not resist and it did not run out. Every time he thought he'd found the end of it there was more of it, opening ahead of his fingers and closing warm and tight behind his knuckles, and she was not stretching to take him. She was building it, out in front of his hand, as fast as he could go.

He stopped at his wrist. Then he went past his wrist.

"Keep going."

"How far does this--"

"That's the question, isn't it," she said, and he could hear her grinning through the dark, and he could also hear that she was not entirely in control of her own voice while she did it. "Go on. Find the end."

He got his forearm in nearly to the elbow before he lost his nerve, and there was still no end, and when he finally pulled his arm back out of her it came out slick to the shoulder and she had both fists in the comforter again.

"There's no end," he said.

"There's no end," Luna agreed.

Josh lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and thought about that for a while.

How to actually do it was the next problem and it took them a minute to solve.

She had no legs. That was the whole difficulty. There was nothing to part and nothing to straddle with, and every arrangement either of them had ever used depended on her having a knee to put somewhere, and she did not have one and was not going to grow one because that would have been cheating.

So he parted his.

She let the knee coil go and the ankle coil go, and he got his legs open, and she brought the whole thickness of her body up between them until the underside of her was flush against him from his tailbone to his navel, and then he was the one on top of her, more or less, lying along the length of her, and she got both arms around his back and held him there.

It was not a position with a top and a bottom in it. That was the thing he could never afterwards explain. They were both on the bed, level, and every time either of them moved the whole arrangement turned a few degrees, so that over the next half hour they went slowly all the way around: down the bed, across it, back up it the other way, the sheet dragging under them and going with them, her tail moving them both as one object.

She reached down between them and took his cock in her hand and put it against the slit she'd opened.

"Ready?"

"Yeah."

"Good," said Luna, and pushed the whole of herself up onto him.

It closed around his cock from the base up, and it was so hot around his cock that he said something into her shoulder that wasn't a word.

Her pussy was tight around his cock. That was the first thing and it made no sense at all, and he was too far gone to hold onto the question and held onto it anyway, because a minute ago he'd had most of his arm up inside her without touching the sides.

"Hang on," he said. "How is it--"

"Mm."

"My whole arm was in there."

"Yeah."

"So how is it--" And then he got it, in one piece, and it was the same answer as it had been in the kitchen two weeks ago and every single time since. "You changed the inside of your pussy."

"I changed the inside of it," Luna said. "Around you. About four seconds ago. Do try to keep up."

And then she stopped talking.

She fucked him with the whole length of her body, and there was no rhythm in it that anything with hips could have produced. His cock never came out of her once the entire time.

Her upper half hardly moved. She stayed pressed along his front with her arms around his back and her face in the side of his neck, and everything happened below the join: the entire mass of her drawing back and driving forward in one long wave that started a long way down the bed and arrived at him last.

And every time it arrived, the coil across his chest tightened.

She wasn't doing that on purpose. He worked that out about a minute in, when it started coming in harder and less evenly than she was moving. The muscle that was fucking him was the same muscle that was wrapped around his ribs, so she squeezed on every stroke and let go between them, and neither of them had any say in it.

Which meant he got air between the strokes and not during them. He stopped trying to have an opinion about when. It was not frightening, and he noticed that it was not frightening, and filed that with everything else he was going to have to think about.

"Still there?" she said, into his neck.

"Mm."

"Say a word."

"Fine."

"Good," said Luna, and did not slow down.

She came the first time about two minutes in, and he got all of it, because he was lying on it.

It didn't happen in one place. It started a long way down the tail and travelled up her, a hard contraction moving section by section along the whole length of her body, and it went through every part of her that was touching him in sequence: up the length he was lying on, then the chest coil, then the arm coil, each one clamping and releasing as the wave passed through, and the last of it arrived at her pussy, where his cock was, and gripped him there and held.

She did it again ninety seconds later. And a third time before he'd gotten his breath back from the second, and that one she was noisy for.

"I can do this all night," she said, somewhere near his ear. "You can't. So."

"So what?"

"So hurry up."

"You've got me tied to your own body at four separate points--"

"Three. You've got your legs."

"--and you're asking me to hurry up."

"Yes," said Luna.

What finished him was that he couldn't find the bottom of it.

He got his knees under himself, as much as the position allowed, and pushed properly for the first time all night, all the way in. There was nothing there. He didn't reach anything. He went in as far as he had and there was still more of her ahead of him, exactly the way there had been when it was his forearm, and the understanding arrived somewhere in the base of his spine that there was no depth at which he would ever be stopped.

He tried again, harder, to check.

Same. Nothing. Just heat, and more of it, opening ahead of him.

"Oh, you've found it," Luna said.

He said something.

"Yeah. There's no bottom. There's never going to be a bottom." She got a hand up into his hair and pulled his head back and put her mouth against his ear. "You can go as deep as you like, for as long as you like, and you will never once get to the end of me. That's not a thing that's going to happen to you tonight or ever."

He drove his cock in as far as it would go and she took all of it and asked for more.

That was the end of him.

It came up out of his thighs and went off while he was still pushing forward, and he stayed pushing forward the whole way through it, all the way in, with nothing to brace against and nothing anywhere to stop his cock going deeper, and he came in long shoves that had nowhere to end, still driving forward into her on every one of them. Four of them. Then a fifth. He had his face in her shoulder and his hands clenched in the coil across his arms and he was making a noise that went on for a stupid length of time.

She kept moving through all of it. Then, at the fourth, the whole length of her locked and came again with him inside it, and it travelled up her from somewhere past the end of the bed and hit him last, and she said his name in the middle of it and got it wrong twice.

Then everything let go at once, and both of them stopped, in the middle of a mattress they had turned about a hundred and eighty degrees between them.

He got maybe a minute of lying there with his chest working properly again before he tried his arms.

Still pinned.

"Luna."

"Mm."

"Arms."

"Mm."

"Luna, the coil--"

"In a bit."

She hadn't moved. She was lying face down along his front with her arms folded under her own chin, and the tail was where it had been all night: across his ribs, around his upper arms, still snug, not doing anything but not going anywhere either. There was a great deal of it and all of it was on him.

He tried a leg out of habit and got about an inch.

"You're not letting go," he said.

"No."

"At all."

"You're warm," said Luna, into his chest.

And that was the entire explanation, delivered in exactly the tone she used for explaining why she was eating.

"That door's been open since Thursday," she said. "It's freezing in here. I went cold about two hours ago and I couldn't be bothered fixing it from the inside, so I came and got the hot thing. That's all this was. That's the whole plan."

"You put a snake on me because you were cold."

"I put a snake on you because it was funny," she said. "I stayed because you're warm."

"Then shut the door--"

"No. I like the air."

He lay there and worked that through, with a great deal of shapeshifter settled over him and no prospect of moving before morning, and found that it came out somewhere he had not expected.

He was going to be here all night. He was not going to be able to move all night. She was not going to let go all night.

It was, he thought, the closest thing to a cuddle he had gotten out of her in two weeks, and he had needed to be nearly eaten to get it.

"Go to sleep," Luna said.

"My arms--"

"Go to sleep, Josh."

He did, eventually, with the moonlight coming in across the carpet and the balcony door still open and the shed skin in a heap on the floor where he'd dropped it.

And every so often, somewhere in the night, the forked tongue came out and touched his cheek, and went back in again, checking he was still warm.

First time I've written anything like this, so I honestly can't tell if it works.

Someone said the last one had too many numbers in it. Fair, noted.

So, straight question: did you jerk off? And if you didn't, where did it stop working?

If it did work, a vote takes two seconds and it genuinely decides whether anyone

else ever sees this.

-- Lebu