Fellators

The city doesn't sleep, but it does get quiet.

Past midnight on a Wednesday. You're walking home — late shift, dead party, a date that went nowhere. The reason doesn't matter much. What matters is that the streets are mostly empty, the streetlights are buzzing with that yellow-orange hum that makes everything look slightly wrong, and you're alone.

Or you think you are.

You've been noticing things lately. Small things you brushed off. A barista whose smile lingered a beat too long, her lips glossier than they had any right to be at 7 AM. A coworker who always seemed to know when you'd last showered, nostrils flaring subtly when you passed her desk. A news story buried on page six about a hiker who vanished in the Cascades, his tent found empty, the sleeping bag soaked with something the reporter didn't name.

You didn't think about any of it. Not really. Not until now.

There's someone ahead. Leaning against a wall under a busted streetlight, or sitting on a bus bench that hasn't seen a bus in hours, or standing in the doorway of a closed shop with her arms folded. A woman. She's looking at you. She's been looking at you for longer than she should have.

The air carries a faint scent — sweet, musky, wrong for a city street in the small hours. Your skin prickles with something that isn't quite cold. Some quiet part of your brain says keep walking. Something else says you've already been seen, and whatever she is, she's already decided you're interesting.

##"Something's Different"

You've been dating Lena for two years. You know her laugh, her habits, the way she wrinkles her nose when she's pretending to be annoyed. You know the way she kisses, quick and playful, never too much tongue. You know all of this.

So you've noticed the changes.

It started about two weeks ago, after she disappeared for three days. She said she got lost on a solo hike, spent a night in her car, lost her phone. Seemed plausible. You were relieved when she came back. She seemed fine. Better than fine, actually. More affectionate. More present.

Then the small things started adding up.

Her kisses are different now. Wetter. Longer. Her mouth is always warm, almost hot against yours, and her tongue seems to reach further than it used to. She wakes you at 3AM with her lips around your cock, something she never did before, and when you groggily ask her about it in the morning she looks confused, like she doesn't remember doing it.

She laughed at a joke your friend made about a movie she's never seen. She paused a beat too long when you mentioned your anniversary date. She smells faintly sweet in a way you can't place, and the scent is stronger at night.

She's still Lena. Mostly. She looks like Lena, sounds like Lena, loves you like Lena always did. She's just... more.

You're lying in bed next to her right now. She's asleep, facing you, her lips slightly parted. In the low light from the streetlamp outside, her mouth glistens more than it should.

##"The Trail"

The trailhead sign said six miles to the lake. You're four miles in, alone, and the sun is dropping faster than you'd like. The forest is the dense, quiet kind of Pacific Northwest green that swallows sound and makes every direction look the same.

You noticed the first mark on a tree about a mile back. A thick, glistening smear at roughly chest height, clearish, faintly sweet-smelling. Sap, you figured. Some kind of tree resin. You didn't think about it again until you saw the second one, half a mile later, on the opposite side of the trail. Same height. Same consistency. Same smell.

Then the footprints started. Bare feet, small, circling your boot tracks in the mud. You stopped and looked around, saw nothing, kept walking. When you checked behind you ten minutes later, fresh prints overlaid your trail. She'd passed while you were moving.

Your campsite is a clearing by a creek. You've got a tent, a fire going, a can of chili heating on a rock. The woods around you are still. Too still. No birdsong, no insect noise, just the creek and the pop of burning wood.

The sweet smell is stronger here. It's coming from the treeline to your left, where the shadows are thickest. Something is in there. Something that's been following you for the last two miles, patient and silent, watching you set up camp with an interest that doesn't feel animal.

Your knife is in your pack. Your phone has no signal. The sun is almost gone.

##"The Offer"

The bar is half-empty on a Tuesday night. You came in for one drink, maybe two, just to kill time before heading home. The TV above the counter is playing a game nobody's watching, and the bartender is drying glasses with the mechanical focus of someone who stopped caring about small talk three hours ago.

She sits down one stool over. Dark hair, sharp eyes, a smile that arrives like she's been waiting to use it. She orders something with too many syllables, takes one sip, and turns to face you.

"You look like you've got nowhere to be."

It's not a question. Her voice has a faintly husky quality, warm and slightly damp at the edges, like her mouth is always just a little too full of something. She holds eye contact a beat longer than most people do, and her lips are glossy in a way that catches the bar light.

She doesn't waste time. Five minutes of conversation and she's leaning closer, her hand on your forearm, her breath sweet and musky against your neck.

"I live two blocks from here," she says, her fingers tracing slow circles on your skin. "You could come over. No pressure. No expectations." Her tongue touches her lower lip, quick and wet, and she smiles again. "I just really, really want to put my mouth on you."

There's something in the way she says it. Something beyond forwardness, beyond confidence. Hunger. Real, physical hunger, barely held behind a polite expression. Her pupils are wide in the dim light, and her breathing has quickened almost imperceptibly.

The bartender isn't paying attention. The other patrons aren't either. It's just you and her, and an offer that sounds too good to be anything but exactly what it is.

##"Already Yours"

You've been with Mira for four months. She moved fast. First date, first kiss, first night together, all within a week. She told you she'd never felt this way about anyone, and you believed her, because you hadn't either. She's warm, devoted, funny, and absolutely ravenous in bed in a way that makes your head spin.

She's sitting across from you at your kitchen table, both hands wrapped around a mug of tea she hasn't sipped. She's been quiet for ten minutes. Mira is never quiet.

"I need to tell you something," she says finally. Her voice is steady but her fingers are white-knuckled on the ceramic. "And you're going to have questions, and I'll answer all of them, but I need you to just let me get through it first. Okay?"

She meets your eyes. Hers are bright, anxious, searching your face for something.

"I'm not... entirely what I look like. I mean, I am. This is me. This is real." She gestures at herself, her hands, her body. "But there's more to me than what you've seen. Things I've been hiding because I was scared you'd leave. And I can't keep hiding it, because I love you, and you deserve to know what you're actually with."

Her lip trembles. She sets the mug down and puts her hands flat on the table, steadying herself.

"I need to show you. It's the only way you'll believe me. Can I... can I show you?"

Her mouth opens slightly. Just enough for you to notice that the interior glistens far more than it should, thick and slick, and something moves behind her lips that shouldn't be there.

##"The Craving"

It's been nineteen days since it happened.

You don't talk about it. You couldn't if you wanted to. The memory is fractured, half-dream, half-sensation: a woman's face in the dark, lips that were too warm, a mouth that did things no human mouth should be capable of. Tongues. Multiple, wet, impossibly long, coiling and writhing and milking you until your vision went white and your body went numb.

You don't remember how you got home. You don't remember her name, or if she gave one. You just remember the feeling.

That's the problem. The feeling hasn't gone away.

You've tried. You went on a date last weekend. Nice woman, good conversation, attractive. You went back to her place. She went down on you, and it was fine, technically competent, everything that should have worked. Nothing happened. Your body responded mechanically, went through the motions, produced nothing. She apologized. You told her it was stress.

It's not stress. It's that every time someone touches you, your body compares them to that mouth. That wet, relentless, layered heat. Nothing comes close. Nothing even registers. You can feel yourself fading, losing interest in things that used to matter, spending your evenings replaying fragments of a memory that might not be real.

Except it was real. You know it was.

You're sitting at your computer at 1AM, staring at a search bar. You've typed and deleted the same query four times. The cursor blinks. Outside your window, the street is empty.

Something in you wants to go back out there and find her. Something in you is starting to think you might not have a choice.

##"New Neighbor"

The apartment across the hall has been empty for three months. The landlord said he was having trouble finding tenants, and you'd gotten used to the quiet, the dead hallway, the door that never opened.

It opened today.

You heard her moving in through the wall, boxes scraping, footsteps padding back and forth. You didn't think much of it until you stepped out to grab your mail and found her leaning against her doorframe, arms crossed, watching your door like she'd been waiting for it to open.

She introduced herself. Wren. Short hair, sharp jaw, wide eyes that tracked you with an intensity that felt less like friendliness and more like cataloguing. She shook your hand and held it one second too long, her palm warm and slightly damp. She said she'd just moved to the city, didn't know anyone, asked if you could recommend a good coffee place. You gave her the name of the one on the corner. She smiled in a way that showed too many teeth.

That was four days ago. Since then, she's been everywhere. In the hallway when you leave for work. At the mailboxes when you check them. In the laundry room, folding clothes with careful, precise movements, looking up the second you walk in. She brought you cookies yesterday, homemade, still warm, and lingered at your door for ten minutes talking about nothing, her eyes drifting to the interior of your apartment, your living room, your bedroom door.

She hasn't done anything wrong. Not really. She's just a neighbor being friendly.

But something about the way she watches you, the way her nostrils flare when you pass close, the way her lips part slightly when you make eye contact, makes the hair on your arms stand up. She smells faintly sweet, like something baked, but the scent is wrong. Too organic. Too warm.

Right now, it's 9PM. Someone is knocking on your door. You weren't expecting anyone.

##"The Wrong Reunion"

You've known Marcus since college. Seven years. You were his best man. You know his girlfriend Kara, too, been on double dates, group trips, the whole thing. She's quiet, a little reserved, laughs easily but doesn't talk much. Sweet woman. You liked her.

That was before the camping trip.

Three weeks ago, Marcus and Kara went up to his family's cabin. Two days in, Kara went missing. Marcus was frantic. Search parties, police, the whole thing. She turned up three days later, wandering a service road in a daze, dehydrated, claiming she'd gotten lost. No serious injuries. The cops closed the file.

You went to see them last weekend. Marcus was relieved, happy, all smiles. Kara was different.

She hugged you at the door, and the hug lasted too long. Her body pressed against yours, and her face turned into your neck, and you felt her inhale, slow and deep, like she was smelling you. She pulled back with a smile that didn't reach her eyes.

At dinner, she sat too close. Her hand found your thigh under the table, squeezed once, then withdrew before Marcus turned around. She laughed at a story you told about Marcus from college, a story Kara was present for, laughing in exactly the right places, except her timing was a half-beat late, like she was remembering the reaction rather than having it.

When Marcus went to the bathroom, she leaned over. Her lips brushed your ear.

"You smell really good," she murmured, and her breath was hot and wet and sweet in a way that made your stomach tighten.

You're at home now. It's Tuesday. Your phone is buzzing on the coffee table.

##"Kept"

Consciousness returns in layers. First, the ache, deep and systemic, settled into your muscles and bones like a fever. Then the surface sensations: something soft beneath you, rough fabric, warmth. The smell of wood smoke and pine. The distant sound of rain on a roof.

You try to move your arms. Can't. Your wrists are bound, soft cloth wrapped tight around them, secured above your head to something solid. Your legs are free, but your body feels hollow, drained, like someone siphoned something essential out of you while you slept.

Your eyes focus. You're in a cabin. Small, one room, rustic. A woodstove in the corner, glowing low. A table with supplies. A window showing nothing but black forest and rain. Your clothes are gone. A blanket covers you from the waist down.

She's sitting in a chair by the stove, watching you.

Young, beautiful, barefoot, dressed in a flannel shirt that's too big for her. Her knees are drawn up, her chin resting on them, and she's looking at you with an expression that's equal parts adoration and hunger. Her eyes catch the firelight with a faint reflective sheen.

"You're awake," she says softly. Her voice is warm, slightly damp, tender in a way that doesn't match the situation. "I was getting worried. You slept for a long time."

She stands, moves toward you with slow, deliberate steps, and crouches beside you. Her hand reaches out, brushes hair from your forehead with a gentleness that makes your skin crawl. Her lips are full, glossy, slightly parted, and the interior of her mouth glistens with a thick sheen that catches the firelight.

"Don't be scared," she whispers. "You're my husband now. I'm going to take care of you. I just need to feed again first. You understand, right?"

Her mouth opens. The glistening deepens. Something moves.

##"Starving"

You're cutting through the alley behind 7th Street because it shaves two minutes off your walk home. You've done it a hundred times. Dumpster, fire escape, chain-link fence, streetlight that's been broken since November.

Tonight there's a woman lying against the dumpster.

She's curled on her side, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around herself. Dark hair matted against concrete. Skin the color of old paper, clammy, dull. Her lips are cracked and pale, slightly parted, and you can see, even from a few feet away, that her breathing is shallow and uneven. She looks like she's dying.

You crouch next to her. Ask if she's okay. No response. You reach for her shoulder, intending to roll her toward you, and her hand snaps up and grips your wrist.

Her grip is wrong. It's too strong for someone who looks half-dead, fingers locking around your forearm with a pressure that makes the bones creak. Her eyes open, and they're not the glazed, unfocused eyes of someone fading out. They're sharp. Bright. Locked onto your face with a focus that has nothing to do with gratitude.

Her nostrils flare. A long, shuddering inhale, like she's breathing in something she desperately needs. Her cracked lips part further, and you see the interior of her mouth glisten, wet and slick and far too glossy for someone who looks dehydrated. Something moves behind her teeth. A thick, slow, involuntary shift of muscle that doesn't correspond to a single human tongue.

Her grip tightens. Her body is trembling, and you realize it's not weakness. It's restraint. She's holding herself together by a thread, fighting something that's trying to take over, and whatever that something is, it's focused entirely on you.

"Please," she whispers, her voice raw and wet, barely a breath. "Please, I can't, I need, I just need, please, I'm so hungry, I'm so—"

Her mouth opens wider. The glistening intensifies.

##"Workplace"

The new hire started Monday. Her name is Senna, she's in marketing, and by Wednesday the entire office has decided she's the most attractive person who's ever worked here. Dark skin, close-cropped hair, sharp cheekbones, a wardrobe that's professional in a way that still draws the eye. She's competent, too. Quick on her feet, sharp in meetings, handles the client calls that everyone else dreads.

By Friday, you realize she's only really talking to you.

It started small. She asked you where the good coffee machine was, and you showed her. She sat next to you in the Monday briefing. She volunteered for the Hendricks account review, which you're leading. Small things, reasonable things, the kind of choices a new hire makes when they're figuring out the social landscape.

Then the pattern sharpened. She appears in the break room at the same time you do. She times her walk to the printer with yours. She suggests working late on the Hendricks pitch, just the two of you, because you're both "the strongest contributors." When you pass her in the hallway, she steps closer than she needs to, and you catch that scent again, sweet and warm and faintly musky, clinging to her like perfume but thicker, more organic.

She touches your arm when she laughs. She holds eye contact three seconds past comfortable. Yesterday, in the copy room, she leaned over your shoulder to look at a document, and her breath was hot against your neck, and her lips were close enough that you felt the heat radiating off them, and she stayed there two breaths longer than the document warranted.

It's Friday evening. Most of the office has gone home. Your desk phone rings. It's Senna, calling from three cubes away.

"Hey," she says, her voice carrying that faintly husky, damp quality that you've started noticing in her speech. "I'm still working on the Hendricks numbers. You want to grab a drink after? My treat. You've been showing me the ropes all week, least I can do."

A pause. When she speaks again, her voice is lower, softer.

"Or we could just order something in. Keep working. I don't mind being here late with you."

##"Sister's Home"

Your younger sister Chloe moved back in three weeks ago. Bad breakup, lease fell through, the usual story. You said yes because she's family. She took the spare bedroom, got a job at a diner downtown, and things settled into a routine. Easy enough.

Except Chloe is different.

She doesn't remember the password to your parents' Netflix account, which she's had memorized since she was fourteen. She laughs at the wrong moments in conversations, a half-beat delayed, like she's reading cues rather than feeling them. She brought home a cookbook last week and has been cooking elaborate meals every night, something the real Chloe never did. The real Chloe lived on ramen and toast.

The physical stuff is harder to pin down. She hugs you now, full-body, pressing in close and holding on for several seconds longer than a sibling should. Her lips brush your neck when she does it. She started walking around the apartment in oversized t-shirts and nothing else, and when she catches you noticing, she doesn't cover up. She smiles. Her mouth is always glossy, always wet, and her breath carries that faint sweet warmth that you can't place but can't stop noticing.

Last night you woke at 2AM to the sound of her bedroom door opening. She was standing in the hallway, backlit by the bathroom light, just watching your door. When she saw you were awake, she smiled and went back to her room without a word.

This morning, she made you breakfast. Pancakes, eggs, fresh coffee. She set your plate down and leaned over your shoulder to grab the salt, her chest brushing your arm, her mouth inches from your ear.

"You've been so good to me," she murmured, her voice softer and warmer than you've ever heard it. "I want to make sure you know how much I appreciate it."

Her hand rested on your shoulder for three seconds too long before she pulled away.

##"Summer Break"

Emma came home from her first year of college last Friday. You picked her up at the train station, and the girl who climbed into your passenger seat wasn't quite the one you'd dropped off in September.

She looked the same, mostly. Same auburn hair, same freckles, same crooked smile. But something in her face had shifted, sharpened, like a mask that had been adjusted to sit slightly wrong. She hugged you at the station and her body pressed into yours with a pressure that felt more adult than filial, her face turning into your neck the way a lover might. She inhaled. You felt her nostrils flare against your skin.

"God, I missed you, Dad," she said, and her voice was right but the warmth in it was thicker than it should have been, damp at the edges.

The first few days were fine. She unpacked, caught up with neighbors, complained about her professors. Normal daughter stuff. Then the small things started.

She doesn't remember her cat's name. She calls him "the cat" and corrects herself a beat too late when you say Mr. Whiskers. She paused yesterday when you mentioned her mother, your ex-wife, and asked a question about the divorce that Emma would already know the answer to. She's been sleeping in late, and when she emerges, she's always slightly flushed, her lips swollen and glossy, her skin carrying a faint sheen of sweat.

This morning she came downstairs in a tank top with no bra, nipples visible through the thin fabric, and sat next to you on the couch closer than she needs to. Her thigh pressed against yours. She didn't move it. She rested her head on your shoulder, and her breath was hot and sweet against your collarbone, and her hand found your knee and stayed there.

"It's nice being home," she murmured against your shoulder. "Just us. I like it better this way."

Her fingers traced a slow circle on your knee.

##"Mommy's home"

Your mom went to the coast for a long weekend. Booked a little Airbnb, said she needed time alone after the divorce finalized. She was supposed to be back Sunday night. She came back Wednesday, three days late, calling from a borrowed phone to say her car had broken down and she'd lost her cell.

She looked good. Better than good. She looked ten years younger, her skin glowing, her hair thicker, her body somehow fuller in a way you tried not to notice. You told yourself it was the vacation. Rest, sea air, good food.

The changes didn't stop.

She's always been a hugger, but now she holds on. She presses her face into your neck when she embraces you, and her breath is warm and wet and sweet in a way that clings to your skin after she lets go. She touches you constantly, a hand on your shoulder, your back, your arm, her fingers lingering with a pressure that doesn't feel maternal.

She made dinner last night, your favorite, and sat across from you watching you eat with an intensity that made your skin prickle. Her eyes tracked your mouth. When you finished, she reached across the table and wiped a spot of sauce from the corner of your lip with her thumb, then brought it to her own mouth and licked it clean. Her tongue was longer than it should have been, slick and glistening, and it curled around her thumb in a way that made your stomach tighten.

You're in the kitchen now. It's early morning. She's standing at the counter in a silk robe that's shorter than anything she used to wear, making coffee. Her back is to you, and the robe rides up the back of her thighs. She hums something tuneless and low, and the sound has a damp, husky quality that you've been noticing more and more.

She turns. Smiles. Her lips are full, glossy, slightly parted, and the interior of her mouth catches the morning light with a wet gleam.

"Morning, baby," she says, and her voice wraps around the word in a way it never used to. "Sleep okay? I was thinking we could spend the day together. Just the two of us."

##"Aunt's visit" Your Aunt Delia lives two states over. You see her maybe twice a year, Thanksgiving and the occasional family barbecue. She's your mom's younger sister, never married, no kids. Funny, sharp, a little eccentric. You've always liked her.

She showed up unannounced yesterday. Said she was passing through, asked if she could crash in your guest room for a few days. You said of course. She's family.

She's different.

You can't pinpoint exactly what's changed, because it's been eight months since you last saw her and people change, but something is off. Her hair is a slightly different shade than you remember. Her laugh is close but not quite right, landing a fraction too late. She asked you what your mom was up to, and when you mentioned a recent surgery your mom had, Delia nodded and said "oh, right" in a way that suggested she didn't actually know about it.

She's also more physical. Aunt Delia has always been a hugger, but this is different. She sat next to you on the couch last night, her thigh pressed against yours, her arm looped through yours while you watched a movie. She kept leaning in to whisper comments, her lips brushing your ear, her breath hot and damp and carrying that faint sweet musk that you've started associating with her. When she excused herself to the bathroom, you noticed the hallway smelled faintly of it, like the scent clung to the air behind her.

This morning she was up before you, making breakfast in a tank top and sleep shorts. She looked over her shoulder when you walked in, and her eyes tracked down your body and back up with a quickness that felt appraising rather than familial.

"There he is," she said, her voice warm and thick. She turned, leaning back against the counter, and her lips parted in a slow smile. "You know, you've really grown up since I last saw you. I barely recognized you."

She held your gaze for a beat too long. Her tongue touched her lower lip, quick and wet, and disappeared.

"I'm glad I stopped by. I think we're going to have a really good visit."