How Many Tongues Can You Take?

He was drawing a kiss, and he was bored out of his skull.

That was the whole of four in the afternoon: Josh at the kitchen table with the iPad flat in front of him, one leg folded under himself on the chair, a mug of tea at his elbow that had been too hot to drink for ten minutes and would go straight from too hot to cold without ever passing through the part where you drink it. Two heads at an angle. Mouths open. He had the outside of it fine. He always had the outside of it fine.

It was the inside that killed him.

Because the inside of a mouth is the inside of a mouth. Teeth at the front, a tongue in the middle, dark at the back, and that is the entire available material. He had drawn it hundreds of times over six years and every one of them looked like every other one, and there was nothing you could do about it, and he had reached the point in the afternoon where he was saying things out loud in an empty-ish room.

"Kissing is the worst thing to draw."

Luna was on the sofa behind him, upside down, her head hanging off the seat cushion and her legs up the back of it, reading his phone. She had been up since five. She was always up since five, and she spent a lot of the day like this, doing nothing at a volume.

"Why."

"Because it's boring." He scrubbed the panel back and started the same line again. "The inside of a mouth is the same every time. It's teeth and a tongue and then it's dark. That's it. That's the whole thing. I could copy and paste it and nobody would ever notice."

The phone went face down on the cushion.

He didn't hear that. That was the problem, in hindsight. He was looking at a jawline.

"Mine isn't," Luna said.

"Mm."

"Mine's different every time."

"Sure," said Josh, to the iPad.

There is a particular quiet that happens in a flat when somebody has decided something, and Josh had lived with it for two weeks and still could not hear it coming.

She came around the table. He got as far as what before she was leaning over him, one hand on the back of his chair and one flat on the table beside the mug, folding herself down through her waist to get her face level with his face, and that was the bit that always took the room away from him.

She was six foot three. He was five foot six. Nine inches of difference meant that any time she wanted his eyes she had to bend, or crouch, or put a knee on something, or pick him up, and she did all four regularly and had never once complained about it. He had worked out a while ago that she liked it. Not tolerated it. Liked it, the whole business of having to come down and get him, the way somebody likes a heavy door.

Her face stopped about six inches from his, and then she stayed there, and she looked at his mouth for a long time before she said anything at all.

"Poor baby," she said. "Six years of drawing mouths."

"Okay, that's--"

"Sixteen hundred pages." Her voice had gone down into the register she used on the phone with people who owed her money, low and warm and unhurried, and it did that on its own, and he watched her notice it working and decide to keep it. "And not one of them was worth drawing. That's so sad. That's genuinely the saddest thing you've ever told me."

"It's a technical complaint--"

"Mm-hm."

"There's nothing in a mouth. That's all I'm saying. Structurally there is nothing in--"

She came down another inch, and her hair swung forward and closed off the kitchen on both sides of his face, so that there was nothing left in the world but her and the smell of her and the mug going cold somewhere behind her elbow.

"Open your mouth, Josh."

"No."

"Then watch mine," she said, and opened hers.

She did it slowly, and that was the first thing wrong with it, because nobody opens their mouth slowly. Her lips came apart at the middle first and the seal broke wet, and the corners went last, and the whole time her jaw was coming down at the speed of a lid.

Heat came off it before anything else did. He felt it land on his face, dry and enormous, the kind of heat that comes out of an oven when you crack it, and his eyebrows registered it a full second before his brain did.

Then the steam came out.

It rolled, rather than blew. It came up out of the dark at the back of her throat in a slow white curl, thick as the steam off a pan, and it broke over his forehead and his eyelids and the bridge of his nose and kept coming, and it kept coming, and it kept coming. It went up past his hair. It fogged the cold black surface of the iPad and blanked out the panel he'd been fighting with. It condensed on his eyelashes and on his top lip and ran, and he sat there in a chair in his own kitchen getting wet in the face while a cloud came out of a woman.

She shut her mouth. The cloud thinned out and drifted off toward the window and was gone.

Josh sat very still.

Because here was the thing about steam, and he had a horrible amount of time to think about it while a drop of her ran down the side of his nose: you got steam out of a mouth when you were so hot that your own body had stopped being polite about it. You got it after. You got it at the end of the worst hour of your life, when you were still shaking, when everything in you had gone up past what it was built for and had nowhere to put it. It happened to you.

She had done it as a sentence. She had taken the inside of her own mouth up past boiling and held it there long enough to make weather and then put it back, in the time it took to lean over a table, to win an argument about drawing.

"That's the boring one," Luna said. "That's the one I do in front of company. There are things I can do with my mouth that you couldn't draw with both hands and a week off."

"You're a shapeshifter," Josh said.

His voice came out about right. He was proud of that later.

"That's not the flex you think it is. You're a shapeshifter. There's no floor. There's no list of things you can't do, because every time I think of one you just make the thing that does it." He wiped his face with the back of his wrist. "It's like being impressed that water's wet."

This was, in fairness, his entire life now.

He drew shapeshifter porn. That was the job, that was the income, sixteen hundred pages of it put out one page at a time over six years to about two thousand people who paid him a few dollars a month for the privilege. And two weeks ago an actual shapeshifter had knocked on his door, and moved in, and started leaving the balcony open. He had not been given a reason. He had stopped waiting for one.

"So think of something," she said. "Anything. Pick the filthiest thing in that head of yours and I'll have it built before the kettle boils."

"Absolutely not."

"You've got sixteen hundred pages of material, baby, don't tell me it's empty in there--"

"No," said Josh, with feeling.

Because he knew exactly what happened if he started. He would think of one thing, and the one thing would arrive with about nine others behind it, and he would be hard in this chair within about four seconds, and then she'd know, and then the afternoon was over and so was the panel and so was the tea. It had happened before. It had happened on Tuesday.

So he shut it down. He put his mind flat and leaned on it, and he got both hands up onto her shoulders and shoved.

It was like shoving the fridge. She moved about half an inch, because she let him have half an inch, and then she came straight back down into the space he'd made and she was closer than she'd started.

"You started this," he said.

"You did."

"I was talking about drawing--"

She licked his face.

It started at his jaw, under the ear, and it went up.

It was warm and it was flat and it was much wider than a tongue, and it pressed as it travelled, dragging his cheek up out of shape with it, and it left a stripe of wet behind it that went cold instantly in the kitchen air. That was the first inch of it.

Then it kept going and it kept coming out.

He felt it lengthen mid-lick. That was the horrible part, that it happened while it was on him: the weight of it building against his skin, more of it arriving, the thing getting longer out of her mouth in real time so that it could reach further, up past his cheekbone, up over his closed eye, up into his hairline, and it went on so long that he had time to think that this had stopped being a lick and had become a journey. The tip curled once at his temple. It was thick enough by then that he could feel the shape of it against the whole side of his head.

Then it went back.

It came down off his face and reeled in, and it did it slowly, the length of it dragging over its own wet trail, thinning as it withdrew, more and more of it disappearing between her lips than had any business being out here in the first place. The last bit went in. She closed her mouth and swallowed once and her tongue was a tongue again.

Josh's whole face was wet and cooling and his hands were still on her shoulders and had somehow stopped pushing.

"Do you want to see what a kiss looks like?" Luna said.

He swallowed.

It was a swallow that he felt he had put a lot into. It was, in his own reading of it, an obvious and complete no, a whole paragraph of no, a no with a slight tremor in it that any reasonable person would have taken as a request to go back to the sofa and read his phone.

"Great," she said.

She picked him up.

She did it one-handed and without warning, an arm under him and a heave, and his socks left the floor and the chair went back on two legs and thumped down again, and then he was up at her height with his feet dangling somewhere around her shins and her other arm coming around his back, and she took a moment to get him settled against her like somebody shifting a bag of groceries to a better grip.

"You're always bent over," he said. "Every time. You fold yourself in half just to get to my--"

"Nine inches, baby."

"You could sit down. Sitting down is free."

"And miss this?" She hitched him higher, one-handed, until his eyes were level with hers and his socks were swinging over nothing at all. "I have to come down and get you. Every time, whatever I'm doing, I have to stop and reach." Her mouth was almost on his when she said the rest of it, and she said it slowly, because she knew what it did to him. "You have no idea how much I like reaching for you."

Then she kissed him.

And it was a normal kiss.

That was the thing he was not ready for, out of everything that happened that day, and it was the first thing. Her mouth was a mouth. Her lips were warm and slightly dry at the outside and soft under that, and they came onto his and settled, and moved, and opened a little, and he felt the wet inside edge of her lower lip against his own, and that was it. That was all it was.

There was no trick in it. She kissed him with her eyes shut and her hand spread over the back of his skull, holding him at the angle she wanted, and her tongue came into his mouth and it was a tongue, the ordinary size and the ordinary temperature, and it pushed against his and went along the edge of it and slid underneath and came back, and his whole body took about four seconds to decide that this was the best thing that had happened to him in two weeks.

He kissed her back. He got his arms around her neck because that was where his arms were, and he pulled, and she came in, and the kiss went from something she was doing to him into something they were both doing, and after that it just ran.

It went on. It went on long past the point where either of them had anything to prove. She turned her head a bit and he turned his the other way and it got deeper and wetter and slower, and somewhere in it he made a noise into her mouth that he had no memory of deciding to make. Her arm tightened around his back. He felt his ribs go. He pulled harder himself and got a fistful of her hair at the back and she made a sound then too, low and short, right into him, and he felt it on his teeth.

Josh was, if he was honest, exactly where he wanted to be. This was it. This was the whole thing he was always trying to get to and always losing: her holding him up off the floor with her mouth on his and nothing else happening yet, no hurry, nothing being demonstrated, no part of her doing anything a part of a person doesn't do. He would have stayed there for an hour. He had asked for an hour of this before and been laughed at.

So he knew, distantly, the whole time, that it was going to end. He just didn't know it was going to end from the inside.

She opened her eyes.

He didn't see it. He had his own shut. But he felt her eyelashes move against his cheek, and he felt the change in the angle of her head as she pulled back the smallest amount, not enough to break the kiss, just enough to get a look at his face from about an inch away.

She wanted to watch. That was all that meant. She wanted to see it happen to him, which meant something was about to happen to him.

Her tongue was still in his mouth. It went along his and then curled around the tip of it, and that was normal, that was just kissing.

Then it didn't stop curling.

It came around his tongue in a full turn, the underside of it sliding wet against him all the way, and then it came around again, and by the second turn there was more of it in his mouth than there had been in her mouth a second ago. He felt the coil close and settle. He felt it grip, and then relax a fraction, and then take up the slack again slightly tighter, and it was patient about it, and it kept coming.

Josh opened his eyes.

She was right there. Both eyes open, six inches from his, calm as a checkout, watching him work it out. The brown was still brown. The pupils weren't round anymore: the black had pinched in at the top and split into two lobes and run down to a point, and pink was flooding up through them from the bottom, filling them in solid, two small hearts sitting in her eyes looking straight into his.

He struggled. He couldn't help it. He got a hand between them and pushed at her collarbone and kicked once, uselessly, a foot off the ground, and his tongue tried to pull back and there was nowhere to pull back to.

And she just held him, and let him do it, and kept looking at him.

That was the whole message. She was not going to stop. There was no mechanism by which she was going to stop. Whatever this was, she had decided on it while he was enjoying himself, and his opinion had been collected and filed.

So he stopped kicking. He let his hand slide off her collarbone and put it back around her neck, and shut his eyes, and signed away his fate.

He felt her smile against his mouth.

Then she took the rest of it.

The coil around his tongue tightened in one long slow pull, snug from root to tip, and he felt his own tongue get squeezed thin inside it, and the pressure went all the way to the back where his tongue stopped being something he could feel individually and became just the floor of his mouth. She thickened. That was the only word he had. The tongue wrapped around his got fatter, filling the space either side of it, pressing his tongue flat and down, and then it filled the space above too, and there was suddenly no room anywhere in his head that wasn't her.

He couldn't swallow. He tried, and the swallow got as far as the back of his mouth and found the way blocked, and everything just sat there. Spit came up. It had nowhere to go, so it went out, running out of the corner of his mouth where their lips didn't quite meet and down his chin in a warm line, and he felt it drip off and land somewhere on her.

She was breathing through her nose, slow and even, and every out-breath went warm across his cheek. She had time. She had all of it.

And she moved it. That was the part that broke his brain in half. It wasn't just in there, it was working, the coil rolling around his tongue in a slow screw, tightening on the way up, easing off on the way down, so that his own tongue was being stroked from every side at once by something that had no interest in stopping. The taste of her filled his whole head. He tried to make a sound and the sound came out through his nose.

His cock had gone hard somewhere around the second turn and there was nothing to be done about that either, because she was holding him against her with an arm across his back and there was no gap between them for it to hide in. He felt her stomach against it through his jeans. He felt her notice. She didn't do anything about it. She filed that too.

Then, slowly, she pulled her face back and broke the kiss.

Her lips came off his with a small wet sound. Her head went back an inch, then another, then a hand's width, and she looked at him.

And her tongue stayed exactly where it was.

It came out between her lips and stretched across the gap between their faces, thick as a thumb, gleaming, a wet rope going from her mouth into his mouth, and inside his mouth it was still wound around his tongue in three tidy turns with the tip tucked in somewhere underneath.

Josh made a noise. It came out as "Aaghrl."

Luna raised her eyebrows.

"Aaaargh," Josh explained.

She tried to answer. He watched her try. Her mouth moved and produced a strangled hum and nothing else, because the equipment was busy, and she stopped and frowned very slightly, the frown of somebody who has picked up a phone and found it dead.

Then a mouth opened on her cheek.

It came up out of the smooth skin over her cheekbone, and it took its time: a line appearing first, dark and shallow, running an inch and a half along her face, deepening, the two edges rolling apart and thickening into lips as they went, wet arriving in the crack between them, and then the lips parted properly and there were teeth in there, and a small pink piece of tongue behind the teeth, sitting in her face, six inches from his eyes.

"Can't hear you," it said. Her voice, exactly. It came out of the side of her head.

Then it shut. The lips pressed together and sank back into her cheek and paled out and smoothed over, and there was no line, no mark, nothing. Her cheek was her cheek.

Right, thought Josh, with the small remaining working part of him. She can do that too. Great. Cool.

He bit her.

He didn't plan it. He got tired of being a fixture, and he had exactly one moving part left, so he closed his teeth on the thickest part of her tongue where it crossed his lower lip and he bit down hard.

The effect was immediate.

She made a sound he had never gotten out of her before, a sharp one, and her whole body jolted, and then her tongue came out of his mouth in one long fast pull.

He got to watch all of it. That was the part he was going to be thinking about at three in the morning. It came unwound off his tongue in a spiral, three turns going backwards in half a second, dragging wet along his teeth, and then the length of it came out through his lips and kept coming, a foot of it, more, an absurd amount of tongue crossing the air between them and reeling back home, and as it went it got thinner and neater, tapering off, taking its own slack in, until the last hand's width of it slid over her lower lip and vanished and her mouth closed.

She worked her jaw once. She swallowed. She looked at him with a kind of interest.

"Somebody wants a bite today," she said.

"You had it in a knot. What was I supposed to do, wait for you to get bored?"

"Nobody has ever bitten it." She said it the way other people say free. "Not one, in fifty years, and I had to move in with a five-foot-six comic artist to get bitten."

"You could just say ow."

"Ow," said Luna, and licked her lip where his teeth had been, slowly, watching him do nothing about it. "That was new. I like new. Do you know how little of that I get?"

"I'd like to point out that I was drawing. I had a panel open. I was working--"

"So let's do a new one today," Luna said.

She shut her mouth.

Then something moved inside it.

Her lips stayed closed and her cheeks bulged, once on the left, then on the right, then both at the same time, and the line of her jaw shifted under the skin, and Josh watched from six inches away as a series of somethings rearranged themselves behind her face. It was not fast. It went on for a while. It looked exactly like a person moving furniture in a room you can't see into: a long push, a pause, a small adjustment, a longer push. Her throat worked twice. Something settled with a soft click that he felt in his own teeth.

Her chin dropped a little on one side. She put a thumb against it and pushed it back level, and then licked the inside of her own lips, which bulged as it went around, and Josh watched the bulge go all the way around and understood that it was not going around the inside of any mouth he'd ever drawn.

"Okay," she said, without opening it.

And then she opened it.

And it was not the same.

That was the thought he had, right at the front, absolutely clear, sitting in the middle of everything else: it's not the same. Because he'd said it wasn't and it wasn't. It was too deep. The teeth were her teeth and the tongue was down flat and dark red where it always was, but past the tongue the whole thing went back further than a head goes, and it was black in there, properly black, with no soft palate hanging down at the top and no throat closing it off at the back and nothing you could point at and call the end.

Her mouth had no end. It went in and it kept going and the light stopped about where her back teeth were and after that it was just a hole in the front of her face with warmth coming out of it.

Two tongues came out.

They came up out of that dark together, side by side, and they came slowly, rising over the shelf of her lower teeth and out between her lips, and they were both hers, both that same wet dark red, and both of them kept arriving. They came out a hand's length, and then more, and they lifted in the air in front of her face and hung there, curling slightly at the ends, and they moved independently, and the tip of one of them turned toward him.

Josh said, "Oh, come on--"

They went one to each side of his face.

Both cheeks at once, both licks starting at the jaw and going up, both wide and hot and heavy, both leaving that stripe behind, both curling in over his cheekbones at the top. He felt his face get pulled up and out of shape on both sides in perfect time. It took about three seconds and it was symmetrical and there was something profoundly wrong with the symmetry.

They came off him and lifted and hung in the air again, waiting.

"That works," said Luna, out of the mouth on her cheek, which had opened again while both of the tongues were busy on his face and which he had not seen open this time. "Right. Licking. Let's do licking."

She carried him into the bedroom under one arm.

She did not put him over a shoulder. She had him under an arm, sideways, like a rolled-up rug, with his legs out in front and his head out behind and one of her hands spread across his stomach holding him in place, and he had a really excellent view of the baseboard going past.

"My tea's still--"

"Your tea was never going to happen. Your tea died at two o'clock."

"The panel's still open, if the iPad goes to sleep it loses the--"

"Josh."

"What."

"Say the inside of a mouth is the same every time one more time for me," she said. "Go on. In that voice you do. The bored one."

"I'd rather not."

"No, I loved it. Do it again and I'll go easy on you."

"You've never gone easy on me in your--"

"No," she agreed happily, "I haven't."

She dropped him on the bed on his back and he bounced once, and while he was still bouncing she was reaching down the side of the mattress with an arm that got longer to do it, and she came back up with a pair of handcuffs.

Josh looked at them.

They were real. That was the first thing. They were not a shape she had made out of herself, they were steel, dull and scratched with a little dent in one bow, and they hung off her finger and turned and clinked, and they were about the least magical object in the flat.

"Where did you get those."

"Guess."

"You don't have pockets. You have never in your life had a pocket. Where do you keep--"

"Guess again. Lower."

"Luna."

"They were down the side of the bed," she said, and let them swing off her finger.

"They were not down the side of the bed. That's my bed. I sleep in that bed. I would have--"

"They were down the side of the bed today, baby." She closed her hand around them so they stopped clinking, and reached for his wrists with the other one. "And they're going to be down the side of the bed tomorrow. Arms up."

She did it fast, and it was the only fast thing she did all afternoon. One hand collected both of his wrists and stacked them, and the other put the cuffs on, and the ratchets went around with that noise they make, six or seven fast clicks each, and then she pushed each one two more clicks past comfortable with her thumb, and the steel closed cold on the thin part of his arm where there's nothing but bone.

He pulled. There was about an inch of chain. His hands were his hands and they were about a foot from his face and they were now, functionally, a handle.

"Right," she said, and picked him up by it.

She went for the ceiling fan first.

He watched it happen and could not do anything about it. She lifted him one-handed, straight up, until his socks were level with her hip, and reached up with him, and hooked the chain of the cuffs over the fan's downrod where it came out of the ceiling.

He hung.

The fan made a noise.

It was a small noise and it was a very bad one. It came from up inside the mounting plate, a dry crack followed by a long low creak of metal bending somewhere it hadn't planned to, and the entire fan tilted out of true and stayed tilted, and a fine snow of paint flakes and plaster dust came down off the ceiling rose onto Josh's upturned face.

"Okay," he said, "no. No. Take me off it. Take me off it right now."

"Shh. It's holding."

"It is not holding, it's bending. That's a light fitting with a hobby. There's a plastic box up there and four screws and it's rated for the fan and the fan wobbling, that's it, that is the entire--" He blew a bit of ceiling off his lip. "I don't pay rent, Luna. I don't get to pull a ceiling down. There's a hook."

"A what."

"A hook. In the corner. Someone had a plant on it."

She looked. There was, in fact, a hook: a fat brass thing screwed up into the corner of the room where whoever had lived here before had hung something green, and Josh had never once used it because he did not own a plant and had never gotten around to unscrewing it.

Luna lifted him off the fan, and the fan creaked again in relief, and carried him across the room and hung him on the hook.

That held.

So this was the situation.

Josh hung from his own ceiling in the corner of his own bedroom by a pair of handcuffs that had come from nowhere, with both arms straight up over his head and his chin more or less level with his own biceps. His shoulders had gone up around his ears. All of his weight was on the two strips of steel across the back of his wrists, which had stopped being cold about thirty seconds ago and had started, instead, to be the only thing he could think about below the neck.

His toes were about four inches off the carpet. Four inches was the whole difference. He was five foot six and the ceilings in this flat were the ceilings of a cheap flat, and if he had been any taller at all this would not have worked, and Luna had known that when she picked the hook, because she had been in the room when he told her about the hook and she had already picked him up twice that afternoon.

He turned slowly. That was the other thing nobody mentions. Hanging from a single point means you rotate: he went around about a quarter turn on his own, until he was facing the closet, and had to work with his hips to get himself back around to where she was, and the working made him swing, and the swinging made the cuffs bite, and after two goes of that he stopped and let the room come to him.

The chain ticked against the hook.

Luna stood in front of him and looked at him hanging there with her head tipped over.

"Oh, that's good," she said. "Look at you. You're the perfect size for this. I want you to know I've thought about this before."

"Right. Great. Cool."

"Every time you reach for something on the top shelf, actually."

"I hate everything about that sentence."

"You're up there now, baby." She put two fingers under his chin and tipped his head up and looked at him for a while, from an inch away, and she was not laughing anymore. "And you're going to stay up there until I'm finished."

Then she got rid of her clothes, and she did it the lazy way, which was the way he hated most, because there was nothing to watch and he watched all of it anyway.

She didn't touch them. She just stopped keeping them separate.

The gray t-shirt she had on went first, and it went from the shoulders down. The color drained out of it, gray pulling back toward the seams and thinning as it went until it was the color of her, and then the weave went: he could see the little grid of the cotton getting shallower, flattening out, the ribbing at the neck going smooth, the small ridges of the shoulder seams sinking level. It stopped being a t-shirt on her and became a t-shirt drawn on her, and then it stopped being drawn on her.

The last things to go were the hems, a line at each sleeve and a line at the waist, holding on for a second longer than the rest before they blurred and paled and were gone. Her nipples showed through it right at the end, coming up dark under the last of the gray while it was still just barely fabric, and then the gray wasn't there and they were.

Her clothes had sunk into her skin. That was the whole of it, said plainly: the t-shirt was never a t-shirt, it was her, and she had stopped holding it separate from the rest of herself and let it merge back in.

The leggings did the same thing from the ankle up, and took longer, and he watched the whole slow climb of it up her shins and her knees and her thighs, the black going pale and the surface going soft, until the waistband was a black line low across her hips with nothing above it and nothing below it, and then that thinned out too and there was just Luna, standing at the foot of his bed with no more clothes on than she had ever actually had.

"You've never worn clothes," he said. "Not one thing in two weeks."

"Why would I? I'm wearing me." She ran a hand down her own side, slow, all the way from her ribs to her hip, to show him there was nothing on it. "Everything I've got comes off in four seconds and grows back in forty. You can't compete, baby. You've got a belt."

"Do you have any idea how much a t-shirt costs?"

"No," said Luna, and came to take his off.

His hands were cuffed together over his head, and there is no way in the world to get a t-shirt off over that. She gave it a proper go anyway: hauled the hem up his ribs, gathered it, shoved it up under his armpits and got it as far as his own wrists, where it stopped dead and bunched into a thick gray ring around his forearms with his elbows trapped in the sleeves.

"See," Josh said. "Physics."

She stepped back and looked at it, and then she held up her right hand in front of his face, index and middle finger out, and opened and closed them once.

A scissor. She made a scissor with her fingers.

"Luna--"

She didn't say anything. She just let him watch.

The two fingers started to flatten. They went wide and thin from the base out, the round of them pressing into blades, the nails sinking away into the ends and gone, and the whole of both fingers went from skin color to a hard dull gray that started at the knuckle and travelled up to the tips. Then the edges came in. He watched the inside edge of each one draw down into a line, the meat of her finger narrowing to nothing along it, going pale, going sharp, and the last thing to arrive was the shine: a thin bright line of it running the length of each blade, catching the window.

She opened them and closed them again.

And this time they sounded like scissors. That dry metal scrape and the small snap at the end of the stroke, right in front of his eyes, out of a woman's hand.

Josh went absolutely berserk.

He got about four seconds of genuine fight out of himself, which was four seconds more than he'd managed all afternoon: both legs kicking, his whole body swinging on the chain, twisting away from her, shouting, and the hook creaking above him with every lurch.

"No. No no no no, not that one, not this one, Luna, I'm serious, this is my--"

She put her free hand flat on his chest and stopped all of it at once.

"Hold still," she said. "You'll get cut."

"Then don't cut it--"

"I wasn't going to cut you. I'm very good at this." Her hand stayed on his chest. She was looking at him with real confusion now, her head slightly to one side, trying to work out what part of this was the problem. "It's a shirt, Josh."

"You made your hand into a pair of scissors."

"Yes."

"You made your hand into a pair of scissors."

"That's the fast way," she said, still puzzled, and started cutting.

She started at the hem on his left side and went up. The blades went through cotton with that sound, a long crisp shearing noise, and she did it slowly, the way she did everything, one stroke and then the next, and the cut fabric fell away from the line and hung open as she went. He felt the flat of the cold blade slide against his ribs. He felt it come up over his chest, and pause, and come the rest of the way to his collarbone. She turned her hand and went out along the shoulder.

Then the other side. Then each sleeve, from the cuff at his trapped forearm all the way down to the armpit, and she took her time on the second one, and the whole ruined shirt came off him in two gray pieces and went on the carpet.

Her fingers thickened back into fingers while she was dropping them.

"That was six bucks," he said.

"It had a hole under the arm and it smelled like the inside of a bag."

"It was mine. I own four t-shirts. Do you know why I own four cheap t-shirts and nothing nice? Because of exactly this. Every time I see something decent in a store I think, well, no point, because at some point Luna will be standing in front of me with her hand doing an impression of an office supply, and then it's in the trash." He blew his hair out of his eyes. "I can't own nice things. I'm not being dramatic. I have stopped being able to own clothes."

Luna considered that.

"You could take them off yourself when I ask," she said.

"You don't ask."

"That's right, I don't ask," she agreed, and undid his jeans.

But she did those properly, and that was much worse, because she did them like somebody who had just been told off and had decided to take the note.

The button first, one thumb under it, a small twist. Then the zipper, which she opened one tooth at a time with her nail dragged down the tab, slowly enough that he felt every single click of it through the front of himself.

She hooked both thumbs in the waistband and worked the jeans down over his hips, not pulling, easing them, with her palms flat against him so that the whole way down his legs there were her hands and the denim moving together. She went down on one knee to do the rest. She got them past his knees and off one ankle, and then the other, and she gathered them up off the floor and folded them, badly, and put them on the end of the bed.

"There," she said, up at him. "Nicely. Happy?"

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet."

His shorts she took off the same way, rolled down with two hands, careful, and his cock came out from under the elastic and stood up and slapped back against his stomach, and he heard himself make a noise about it. She got them off over his feet one at a time and put them on the bed with the jeans.

He hung there naked in the corner of his bedroom with his arms over his head and his socks still on.

She left the socks. He noticed. He decided not to raise it.

"Right," Luna said. "New thing."

"You've made your point. Genuinely. The inside of your mouth is different every time, it's a wonder, I'll draw it, I'll draw forty pages of it, can I get down--"

"Oh, baby." She put both hands on his hips and turned him toward her on the chain, slowly, like a coat on a rail. "I haven't started the point."

She knelt down.

That was the first properly frightening bit, because he'd been braced for her face at his face, and instead she went down out of his sightline entirely, and he could not look down past his own chest without lifting his head, and lifting his head made him swing.

Something warm and wide went around his ankle.

"Wait," said Josh. "That's my foot--"

The tongue went up the sole of it, slow, flat, from the heel to the toes, pressing hard enough to bend them back, and Josh made a sound like a kettle and jerked in the cuffs and started laughing before he could stop himself, because it tickled, it wildly tickled, it was the single most ticklish thing that had ever happened to him and he had nowhere to put any of it. He kicked. His whole leg went. The kick achieved a slow half-spin of his entire body.

He'd told her once, absolutely straight, that he would not lick anybody's foot. He'd been very clear on it and he stood by it and he had made her confused for about a minute. He noticed, hanging there with his eyes watering, that he had never said one single word against having his own getting licked, and that she'd remembered that, and that he was not going to bring it up now.

She did the other one. Then the ankle, then up the shin, then the back of his knee, which folded him in half at the waist in the air.

Then she started using both.

The two tongues worked him from the feet up, and they took their time, and they did not go anywhere near his cock.

That was the arrangement, and she stated it, out loud, from somewhere down by his thigh: "That one's last. And you're going to hate how long last takes." He looked down the length of his own body and could see the top of her head and the two dark red lengths coming out of her mouth and going off in different directions, one up the inside of his left thigh and one around the back of his right, both of them stopping about a hand's width short of his balls and turning away.

They were longer than they had been in the kitchen. He was sure of it. She was kneeling further back now than she had been, sitting on her heels, easily an arm's length off him, and they were reaching him fine.

"New parts are always more sensitive," she said, and it came from somewhere else, from a mouth that had opened low on her jaw, near the ear. "Every time. You grow a thing fresh and everything in it works too well for the first few hours. Nothing's worn in yet."

"So they're--"

"They're brand new, Josh. I grew them at your kitchen table." The mouth on her jaw dropped lower, into that register again, warm and slow and pleased with itself. "So when I tell you I can feel your heartbeat through this, in your thigh, right here, I'm not being romantic. I can actually feel it. It's fast."

"It's not--"

"It's very fast, baby."

The tongues went up over his hips.

They were hot, and they were wet, and they were broad enough that each one covered half his stomach in a pass, and the pressure of them was the thing he hadn't expected, because a lick from a person is a wet little thing that skates over you and this pushed. His skin moved with them. They dragged him up and let him drop back. Where they had been, the air in the room got straight in and turned it cold, so his whole front was going hot, cold, hot, cold, in slow stripes.

He hung and took it. The cuffs had gone from cold steel to hot steel to something he had stopped being able to describe, and his fingers had that thick sausagey feeling you get from having your hands over your head, and his shoulders were burning in the joint, and none of it was what he was thinking about.

Then there was a third one.

He caught it on his back. One went up his stomach and one went around his ribs and something else, entirely separate, laid itself flat between his shoulder blades and went up his spine, and Josh, hanging there, did the arithmetic and got three.

"There's three."

"Mm-hm."

"There's three, that's not-- you can't just add one, that's not a thing you get to--"

The fourth one got the back of his neck.

"Okay," he said, "okay, no, hang on--"

He tried to count and couldn't hold it. There was one on his stomach and one on his ribs and one going up his spine and one on his neck, and then something was doing the inside of his elbow, high up above his head, which meant one of them had gone the whole way up his arm, and he could not tell whether that was a fifth or whether the neck one had left.

They moved between his sides. They handed him off to each other. Every time he pinned one down another one arrived somewhere that hadn't been touched in a while and the count fell apart in his hands, and he stopped being able to say how many were on him, and that was somehow the worst part of the entire afternoon so far.

He had not been touched anywhere that counted, not once, not by accident. His cock was hard and had been hard since the kitchen and was standing up untouched in the middle of all this, and there was already too much happening. His legs had started to shake. He could hear himself breathing.

"Luna. Luna, how many is that."

The mouth on her jaw took its time answering, and when it did it was almost kind about it.

"Does it matter, baby?"

"Yes! It matters to me, it matters a--"

"You can't move, you can't see me, and you've got no idea where the next one's going to land." A long slow one went up the back of his thigh while she said it, unhurried, and finished with the tip curled behind his knee. "Why would I tell you the number?"

Then she stood up and came around in front of him, and he saw her face, and he stopped talking for a while.

Her jaw was open past the hinge.

It had come down and back, so that her chin was low on her own throat and the corners of her mouth had split wide toward her ears, and the whole lower half of her head was a hole. Her eyes were exactly where they always were, brown with two pink hearts in them, looking at him over the top of it, calm, interested, hers. Her cheekbones were her cheekbones. Everything above the nose was the woman who'd been reading his phone upside down on the sofa an hour ago.

And out of the hole came the tongues.

There were too many to count from the front, too many. They came up out of that black in a bundle, thick as a wrist where they all crowded over her bottom teeth, and split apart in the air in front of her and went off in every direction, and four or five of them were still on him, and he could follow each one with his eyes from her mouth all the way across the room to the place on his body where it was working. One went past his cheek and behind him. One was moving in a slow line down his stomach. They were wet, and the wet was catching the window light, and every single one of them was moving on its own.

He looked down at himself.

He was soaked. His whole body, from the socks to the collarbone, gleamed. It was running off him, down his legs, off his heels, and there was a dark patch on the carpet underneath him the size of a dinner plate, and it was cold everywhere the air got at it, and he was shivering hard and could not tell anymore which of the shakes were cold and which of them weren't.

She came closer.

The bundle of tongues gathered as she came, several of them drawing in toward his stomach at once, and one of them went low and around and under, and he felt where it was going and got about half a second of pure clean terror.

And then one of the others, on its way up, brushed his nipple.

It wasn't a lick. It was the edge of one going past on the way to somewhere else, the wet side of it grazing across him for less than an inch, and Josh's entire body convulsed on the chain.

His shoulders locked. His back arched. Both legs came up. He made a noise that he heard from outside himself and did not recognize, and he swung on the hook, and the chain jumped and rattled and the cuffs bit hard into both wrists, and every tongue that was on him stopped at once.

Silence, except the chain, ticking.

Luna looked at him.

Then she reached up and put her hands on her own jaw, one either side, and pushed it slowly back into place.

It took a few seconds and he watched every one of them. The corners of her mouth drew in from her ears, the split closing and sealing and the lips reforming along it, and the hinge came up and back with a low grinding sound like a knuckle, and while that happened the tongues came home. All of them. They pulled in off his body one at a time, the wet lengths sliding back across the room and over her lower lip and down into the dark, and each one thinned and shortened as it went, and the crowded bundle at her teeth got smaller as it emptied, and then there was one left.

One tongue, ordinary length, sitting in an ordinary mouth in the middle of an ordinary face.

She worked her jaw once, side to side.

"Say that again," she said.

"What?"

"About your nipples."

"I didn't say anything about my--"

She leaned in and licked one.