How Many Tongues is Too Many?

Josh was hanging from his own bedroom ceiling by a pair of handcuffs, naked except for his socks, and a woman with a mouth full of brand new tongues had just licked his left nipple.

Some of that needs explaining and most of it doesn't. He draws a shapeshifter porn comic for a living, sixteen hundred pages of it over six years, and two weeks ago an actual shapeshifter knocked on his door and moved in and started leaving the balcony open. Her name is Luna. She is six foot three and he is five foot six and she has never once complained about the difference.

This afternoon he said, out loud, at the kitchen table, that the inside of a mouth is the same every time. She heard a challenge. She has been proving him wrong for about an hour now.

So: the brass hook in the corner used to have a plant on it. His t-shirt is in two pieces on the carpet, cut off him with a hand that was briefly a pair of scissors, and his jeans are folded badly on the end of the bed, because she took those off nicely after he complained. His arms are over his head. His toes are four inches off the floor. He is wet from his collarbone to his ankles, he is hard, and he has not been touched anywhere that counts.

And she has just found out about his nipples.

* * *

He shuddered, hard, the whole length of him, and the chain rattled, and she pulled back about an inch and watched it happen with an expression he had seen on her exactly once before, when she'd found out he was ticklish behind the knee.

"Oh," Luna said. "Oh, that's good."

"It's not--"

"You've been sitting on that."

"I have not been sitting on--"

She licked it again, slower, and his voice went out from under him in the middle of the word.

Because it turned out that his nipples had been quietly load-bearing his entire life and nobody had ever put anything on them that was designed for the job. Her tongue was the wrong size for a nipple. That was the fundamental problem. It came across him wide and flat and hot and it did not target anything, it just went over the whole area at once, the nipple and the areola and a good handful of the chest around it, and the sensation had no edges to it, and it kept arriving for as long as the lick lasted, and every lick lasted about two seconds longer than he could survive.

"Right," she said. "This is what you get."

"For what?"

"Two weeks." The tongue went across the other one and his hips jumped. "Two weeks of my nipple in your mouth. Every time. Every single time, whatever else is happening, whatever I'm doing, whatever I've built for you, you end up with one in your mouth and you will not let go of it. In the kitchen. On the sofa. On the floor by the balcony door. That first night you actually--"

"That's different."

"How is that different."

"Because I'm--" He was hanging four inches off his own carpet by his wrists with a woman's entire face at his chest. "Because it's nice."

"Yes," said Luna, and she said it right against his chest so that he felt it as much as he heard it. "It is. It's the best thing in the world and I've let you have it every single day, and now I'm going to hang here and find out exactly what it does to you. Don't worry, baby. I'll be thorough."

And then she got to work, and he found out what he had been doing to her.

She narrowed the tip of it. He felt it change while it was on him, the broad flat end drawing in and firming into a point about the size of a fingertip, and then that point went around the base of his nipple in a slow circle, once, at the exact line where it stopped being flat chest and started being something else. Round again. Then straight across the top of it. His stomach went in like he'd been hit.

Then she took it in her mouth.

Her lips closed around it, and it was warm in there, and she pulled, slowly, a long steady draw, and the tongue underneath moving in the same rhythm, flattening him against the roof of her mouth and letting go and flattening him again, and Josh's head went back and hit his own arm, and he stayed like that for a while with his eyes shut and his mouth open, breathing like a man carrying furniture.

"Luna. Luna, listen, you have to ease off, if you keep going at that I'm going to--"

She said something. It was muffled, because her mouth was full of his nipple, and it did not sound like a woman easing off, and she did not ease off.

She spent a long time there. Longer than he could account for. She did one and then the other and then came back to the first one, and the second time around was worse than the first because everything she had already done was still there, and she found the thing where she scraped the edge of her teeth over it and then covered the whole thing in wet heat immediately afterward, and the two together took the top of his head off. His nipples had gone hard enough to hurt on their own. She kept going anyway. She went past hard into sore and then kept going past sore, and the sensation stopped being localized at all and started firing off down his stomach in long straight lines.

His arms had gone dead somewhere in the middle of it. He noticed that in a distant, filing sort of way: his hands were up above him and he had stopped being able to feel his fingers properly, and there was a hot ring on each wrist where the steel sat, and every time his body jerked, which was constantly, his whole weight went onto those two rings and then he swung, and the swinging pulled him off her mouth, and she just came with him. She had a hand on his hip by then, steering him back in.

His cock was standing straight up off his stomach and had not been touched by anything all afternoon.

He looked down at it once, in the middle of all this, past his own chest with her mouth working on it, and it was flushed dark red and shining wet at the tip and it was, quite visibly, leaking. There was a long strand of it hanging off him. He watched it stretch, and thin out, and let go.

It landed on her thigh.

She stopped.

She looked down at the little clear splash of it on her own leg, and then up at him, and she did not say anything at all, and something changed in her face that he had learned, in two weeks, to be extremely frightened of.

"You're leaking on me," she said.

"I can see that. I'm aware of it. It's been a long afternoon--"

"Josh. I have licked your feet and your ribs and your armpits and both of these," and she thumbed one of his sore nipples while she said it, lightly, and watched him jolt on the chain, "and I have not laid one single thing on your cock, not a finger, not once, and you're already dripping on my leg."

"Then maybe don't do the thing where you--"

"You're going to be so easy," said Luna, in a voice like a hand down his back, and went down on her knees and put her mouth on his cock.

* * *

It did not help. He wants that recorded. Whatever the theory was, whatever the intent was, the effect was that everything got immediately and dramatically worse.

She only used one. That was the mercy, and it was the only one available. One tongue came out of her mouth, that same dark red, and it went around the base of his cock in a single wet loop and pulled snug, and that was the point at which his knees tried to buckle and discovered there was nothing down there to buckle onto.

Then it started to climb.

It wound. It went around him in a spiral from the base upward, and every turn overlapped the last one slightly so that there was no gap anywhere, no bit of him left in the air, and as it climbed it got longer, more of it coming out of her mouth to feed the spiral, and by the time it reached the top his cock was wrapped in her from root to head in six or seven tight wet coils, with the head of it standing out red and bare above the last turn, and there was still tongue arriving.

Then it tightened.

It did not happen all at once. It went in waves from the bottom up, a squeeze travelling the whole length of him in about a second and a half, one coil after another after another, and then release, and then another wave. She could do it in the other direction too. She did it in the other direction. Every wave dragged wet over every inch of him at once and there was nothing to grab onto, no rhythm to sit inside, because the wave was the rhythm and the wave went wherever she wanted it to go.

"Okay," Josh said. "Okay okay okay okay--"

The mouth on her forehead opened.

It came up in the middle of her brow, above her eyebrows and below her hairline, and it opened slowly enough for him to watch the lips form out of smooth skin, and it was upside down from where he was hanging, and it spoke in that low warm register she had found in the kitchen and never put down, the one that got into him under the ribs.

"You're not going to last," it said.

"I'm going to--"

"You're not going to last, baby, and I haven't even had it in my mouth yet. Look at you. Look how hard you're working."

She had not, either. That was the thing. Her actual mouth was still a couple of inches off him, tongue coming out of it and going up him in a spiral, and he could see the whole arrangement clearly if he lifted his head, which he did, and which was a mistake.

Because it went from this is a lot to this is happening with no warning at all.

It gathered at the base first, that heavy pull right up behind his balls, dropping through him, and his thighs went rigid and started to shake and his socks scrabbled at nothing. He tried to say her name and got the first letter out. The coils did one more wave upward.

And then he came, hanging, with nothing holding him but two rings of steel and a brass hook.

The first pulse was the hard one. It ripped up through him and out and there was so much force behind it that it went past her entirely, over her shoulder, and landed somewhere on the comforter behind her. The second went up his own stomach and chest as far as his collarbone, hot, and started running back down him immediately. The third and the fourth came close together and mostly went over her, on her cheek and her jaw and down her throat, and the coils never once stopped moving through any of it, still squeezing him in waves, wringing each pulse out of him one at a time.

His whole body clenched and locked on the chain and he heard himself shout and the hook took all of it.

The pulses got smaller. Five, six, a seventh that was hardly anything, and his hips kept twitching forward after there was nothing left, and his heart was banging in his ears, and his hands were completely numb.

He hung there and gasped at the ceiling.

Luna knelt back on her heels with cum on her face and looked at his cock, still wrapped in her tongue, going soft in the coils.

"I didn't get it in my mouth," she said.

"I know. I'm sorry. That was--"

"I didn't get it in, Josh. That was the plan. That was the whole plan, that was the new thing, and you went off in my hand like a sneeze before I could--"

"In your tongue, technically--"

"That's rude," said Luna. "That is genuinely rude."

* * *

She fixed it, obviously. She fixes everything.

A second tongue grew out of her mouth alongside the first one, and it did it slowly, and he watched it come: a swelling under the first one at the back of her mouth, rising, separating, a groove running up the middle of the mass and deepening until the two of them were two, and then the new one lifted clear and came out over her lower lip and lengthened in the air. It was paler than the other one for a second, a fresh wet pink, and then it went the same dark red.

Then the pair of them cleaned him up.

They went over every inch of his cock together, one on each side, taking their time about it, gathering up everything that was on him and everything that was still coming out of him. They did his stomach next, one long sweep from his hip up to his collarbone, chasing the runs of it. They got the insides of his thighs. One of them went out and did a slow circle around her own face, up her cheek and along her jaw and down her throat, collecting what he'd put there, and it was strange to watch a person tidy their own face with a tongue that was doing something else at the same time.

Then both of them went back in and she swallowed and shut her eyes for a second.

"That is really good," Luna said. "That's the annoying part. You're rude and you finish early and your cum tastes like--"

"Please don't."

"No, it's like--"

"Please don't finish that sentence."

She opened her mouth again and both tongues came out and went straight back to work, and this time they had different jobs.

The first one wrapped him again, base to tip, the same tight spiral, and started working him back up. That was bad enough on a cock that had come about ninety seconds ago, and he said so, at length, in language he did not usually use in front of people.

The second one went underneath and took his balls.

It came up between his legs and looped once around the top of them and then settled, and it did not squeeze. It moved. The tip of it went in slow circles over the loose skin, light, barely there at all, and then a wider loop of it cradled the whole weight of them and rocked slightly, and every so often the tip flicked and his whole body tried to fold at once. He could not get away from it. He could not close his legs, because closing his legs just trapped it in there with him.

And then a third tongue came out of her mouth and went under him and around behind.

Josh's eyes opened extremely wide.

"No," he said. "No. Not the anal. Not the anal, Luna, anything but that, anything else, I mean it, I'm not being funny--"

The tongue did not go in.

It arrived in the crease behind his balls, warm and wet and unhurried, and it travelled back along it, and then it started to explore. It went around in a slow circle. It went out to one side and came back. It pressed flat over everything at once and held for a second and let off. Then the tip of it, which had gone narrow, found his asshole and touched it, once, a light little tap, and Josh's entire body slammed shut like a trap, and the tongue withdrew half an inch and waited.

Then it did it again. Right on it. One tap, and off.

"Luna. Luna, look at me. That's a no. That's an actual no, that's not a--"

The mouth on her forehead opened.

"Oh, I'm doing it," it said.

"What?"

"I'm going to put it in your ass, baby." Warm. Patient. Absolutely certain. "Later, though. I'm going to do all this first, and then, when you've stopped being able to talk, it's going in, and it's going to go in a long way, and you're going to be very surprised about how far a tongue can go."

"No, no, no, we agreed, we had a whole conversation about the--"

"We did. I remember all of it." The tip tapped his asshole again and drew off again. "Do you want to know the best part? You can't tell when. You can't see me, you can't get down, and you can't keep your ass clenched for an hour."

"I absolutely can--"

"Nobody can, Josh."

And she didn't. That was the whole rest of it. The tongue behind him never once went in and never once went away, and it kept up that slow patient roaming, circling, pressing, tapping, drawing off, coming back from a different angle, and Josh discovered a thing about his own body that he wished he had not: he could not relax, not for a second, not anywhere.

Every time he let go of anything, anywhere, the tip of it came back and touched him and he clenched again, and the clenching went all the way up through him into his stomach and his cock and made everything the other two were doing about four times louder. He was holding himself rigid, on a chain, with dead arms, sweating, and the effort of holding himself rigid was doing more damage than anything else in the room.

She knew that. Obviously she knew that. She had the readout right there in front of her face.

His cock had come all the way back up in about a minute and a half.

* * *

"Right," said the mouth on her jaw. "Now."

And she took him into her mouth.

His whole cock, in one movement, all the way down to the root, and there was nothing at the back of her mouth to stop it, because there was nothing at the back of her mouth. His cock went in past where a throat is supposed to be and kept going. It was hot in there, and wet, and there was no air, and the inside of her closed around every inch of his cock at once, and the coil of the first tongue was still wound around his shaft in there, still squeezing in slow waves while the rest of her mouth sucked. Her lips sealed shut around the base of his cock. Her nose was against his stomach.

He came instantly.

There was no build. There was no gather. There was about half a second of the heat of it and then his whole abdomen locked and it just went, straight out of him, with no ramp at all, and it hurt the entire way because there had been nothing in between. Four hard ones and then a fifth, all of them straight down into her, and he heard himself make a horrible sound and felt his own legs kicking uselessly in the air.

The tongue behind him tapped him once, right in the middle of it, and made the last pulse about twice as long as it wanted to be.

Then he sagged on the chain and hung there with his chin on his chest, wrecked, dripping sweat off the end of his nose onto her hair.

Luna took her mouth off him slowly and looked up.

"You," she said, "are a problem."

"That's not fair."

"I got it in. I had your whole cock in my mouth and I got two seconds of it, two, and then you did that down my throat."

"You can't put a thing like that on a man with no warning and then complain about the--"

"I was going to suck it, Josh. I've been doing licking all afternoon. I hadn't started the sucking. That was the new part." She wiped her chin with the back of her wrist, which did nothing, because the mess was mostly internal. "You always do this. It's always the worst possible moment. It's a talent."

"I would like to point out," said Josh, from somewhere near the ceiling, in a voice with no strength in it at all, "that this is not a fair test."

She considered that.

"No," she agreed. "It isn't."

And then she went straight back down and started sucking.

* * *

He was hard again inside two minutes, and he cried about it a bit, and nothing was made of that by either of them.

Because there was no getting out of it. His arms were finished. They had been finished for a while; they were two dead weights over his head and his hands had gone a color he did not want to look at, and the cuffs had stopped being painful in a sharp way and started being painful in a deep dull way that he could feel in his elbows. He couldn't push her off. He couldn't get his legs together. He couldn't turn away, because turning away just spun him on the hook and put his back to her, and having his back to her turned out to be considerably worse.

All he could do was hang and watch and take it, and he watched all of it, because he could not make himself stop looking.

And the setup was not even complicated. He kept expecting it to become complicated. It never did. It was one tongue wrapped around his cock in a tight spiral, squeezing in slow waves; it was a second tongue under him with his balls cradled in a loop of it, rocking them, flicking; it was a third one behind him going in patient circles and waiting for him to relax so it could remind him not to. And around all three of them, her actual mouth, working, with proper suction on it now, taking him in and drawing off him and coming back down, and every time she came down the coil inside her mouth turned the other way.

That was it. Three tongues and a mouth. She had unhinged her whole head in front of him an hour ago and this was somehow much worse, and he understood why: he could see all of it, all at once, and every single part of it was aimed at him.

"Luna--"

She hummed around his cock. He felt the hum go all the way up him.

"I can't do another one. I can't. There's nothing left, I'm not being--"

"You've got one more in you."

"I don't--"

"Baby." The forehead mouth, warm, and about an inch from his sternum. "You said that in the shower on Sunday and then you said it twice more."

He tried to explain, in whatever words were left, that this was different, and it came out as mostly vowels, and she did not stop for any of it. He got about a minute of trying to hold it back, in which he really fought her, tensing everything he had, and the tongue behind him found him clenching and tapped him for it and that broke his concentration completely, and after that he stopped fighting and just made noise.

The third one built slow and low and it hurt the whole time it was building. There was nothing good in it. His cock had gone past sensitive into something else entirely and every stroke of the coil registered as a bright white line straight up his spine, and his stomach cramped, and his thighs cramped, and he was shaking so hard that the chain kept up a continuous rattle against the hook.

"Say when," said her forehead.

"I don't--"

"Say when, Josh."

He couldn't. He never could. It arrived while he was trying to find the word and it took everything he had left with it: a long, thin, painful one, two pulses and then almost nothing, most of it dry, and his whole body went through the full performance anyway, the arch, the lock, the shout, both fists closed on the chain hard enough that the links printed on his palms. He sobbed once at the end of it and his head dropped and he stopped being able to hold it up.

She kept her mouth on him until the last twitch, and then took it off, and then sat back on her heels.

The tongue behind him withdrew.

It went slowly and it did not go in, not at any point, not even as a joke on the way out, and Josh, hanging there half-conscious with his chin on his own chest, noticed it leave and understood he was being told something.

"Not today," said Luna.

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. I said I'd do it and I meant it." She was cleaning herself up while she said it, both tongues out, running over her own chin and her throat, gathering everything and taking it back in. "I just didn't say today. You had three in you today and you've got nothing left for a fourth, and I'm not putting anything in your ass while you're hanging there half asleep. That's a waste of a good ass."

"So when--"

"Some day when you're not expecting it," said Luna, "and when you've got the energy to scream properly."

"You could have just let me think you'd changed your mind."

"I could have," she agreed, "but then you'd relax."

* * *

She got him down.

He expected a key, which was stupid of him. Wherever she had gotten the cuffs from, and she was never going to say, she had clearly not bothered to collect the key along with them. There was no key. She reached up and put the tip of her index finger into the keyhole of the left cuff, and then he felt the finger change, inside the lock, against his wrist bone: it went thin and it went flat and it found the shape of the inside of the mechanism and filled it, and there was a small dry sound of metal being pushed by something that had made itself exactly correct, and she turned her whole hand, once, and the cuff sprang open.

Then the other one.

His arms came down and it was the worst pain of the entire afternoon by a long distance. The blood went back into his hands in a hot rush and he swore continuously for about fifteen seconds while she held him up, because his legs had gone completely, and she took his whole weight against her without any apparent effort and walked him backwards and sat him on the edge of the bed.

There were two thick red rings on his wrists. There was a wet patch on the carpet in the corner under the hook. His t-shirt was in three pieces by the closet with his jeans on top of them, and he was still, he noticed, wearing his socks.

In the kitchen, his tea had gone cold, and the iPad had gone to sleep on a panel of two people kissing with their mouths open and nothing drawn in the middle of it.

Luna came and stood in front of him where he sat, which put her chest at his face without her having to arrange anything at all, and she took his jaw in her hand and tipped his head up and leaned down to kiss him.

Josh turned his face away.

"No."

Her eyebrows went up. "No?"

"That mouth was on my cock. That mouth was on my cock about ninety seconds ago. You had the whole thing in there." He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand that still wasn't working properly. "If I kiss you now, I'm kissing my own dick. That's what that is. That's just kissing my own dick with extra steps."

There was a pause.

"That," said Luna, "is a really rude thing to say."

"It's a fact."

"What's wrong with sucking your own dick?"

"Luna."

"No, genuinely. What is wrong with it. If you could do it you'd never leave this flat again. You'd cancel the comic. You'd starve." She let go of his jaw. "Men are so strange about their own dicks. You'll draw it sixteen hundred times and you won't kiss it once."

"I'm not kissing that mouth."

"Fine," said Luna.

And she held up her left hand, palm toward him, and grew a mouth in it.

That was all it was meant to be. He could see that much: she wanted to kiss him and he had ruled out the mouth on her face, so she built a second one on her hand and it was a clean, reasonable, completely insane solution to the problem.

The lines of her palm went dark and deep, all of them at once, and then the long one across the middle began to split. It came apart slowly, the two edges rolling back off each other and thickening as they went and turning into lips, wet arriving between them halfway through the movement, and behind the lips there were teeth, small and white and perfectly ordinary. The whole hand shaped itself around it as it grew, the fingers curving in to make a rim, the heel of the palm dropping into a jaw.

Then she looked at it.

She turned her own hand toward herself and looked into her own palm, and Josh watched her face while she did it, and he watched the idea arrive. It came in slowly. Her eyebrows went up a fraction. The corner of her mouth, her real mouth, pulled sideways.

"Oh," Luna said.

"Whatever you just thought of--"

The tongues started coming out of her hand.

They came up out of the black behind those little white teeth in a bundle and split apart in the air between them, four of them, five, more, unfolding and reaching and dripping on his knee, and there was no bottom to her palm either, and the last of them was still arriving when she leaned in.

"You asked for it," she said.

She put her hand over his face.

It sealed. The palm came down over his mouth and the heel of it settled under his chin and the fingers laid themselves along his cheeks and welded shut against his skin, and the room went black, and the mouth in the middle of it opened onto his mouth and kissed him.

It kissed him properly. Lips, first, warm and soft and moving against his, exactly the way she had in the kitchen an hour ago, and he was so tired and it was so good that his own mouth opened before he had voted on it.

Then the tongues went in.

They came all at once, filling him, one going straight down over his tongue and two more curling around it from either side, and another going along the roof of his mouth, and another one just holding his lower lip out of the way, and there was no air and no light and no possible way to say anything about any of it. His hands came up and got her forearm and didn't pull.

Somewhere off to his right, out in the room, in her own actual voice, out of her own actual mouth, Luna said: "Same every time. Sure."