She looked at the framed print for two seconds. Then the window. The parking structure filled most of it, which is fine, it's a parking structure. Then the couch. Then the coaster on the coffee table, placed in my first month and never moved because it was doing its job.

She moved through the space like she already knew where everything was.

In the kitchen she stopped.

She found my coffee brand without opening any cabinets. Lifted the bag, read it, set it back down.

She held the bag up and looked at me.

"It's fine," I said. "I've been buying it since college. It was on sale once and I just kept going."

She set the bag down. Slowly.

"Since college," she said.

"It does the job."

"That's a long time to be doing the job."

"Water, orange juice, or—"

"Water."

I got it.

When I came back she was looking at the coaster.

I handed her the water. She looked at the apartment one more time — print, window, couch — checking what she'd already worked out on the way in against the reality.

The reality appeared to satisfy her.

"Sit down," she said.

---

I sat.

She sat beside me. The close kind. The ambient heat of another person, the specific awareness of exactly how much space remained between us. She held the water glass. There was some conversation about the couch, that it was comfortable, I said I'd bought it used from an ex-girlfriend of a colleague who'd moved to Denver. She absorbed this without particular interest.

Then she asked something, some ordinary question, and while I was answering it her hand moved from her own lap to my shoulder.

That was the end of the conversation.

Her hand moved to the back of my neck, fingers in my hair, and she pulled me in and kissed me. Not a first-date kiss. Her mouth opened mine before I'd decided what was happening, her tongue against mine, her other hand on my jaw angling me exactly where she wanted. Her body turning into me on the couch. Slow, deep, unhurried, like she'd already decided how this was going to go before she walked in the door. The thought I'd been forming was gone.

When she pulled back her lips were slightly parted and her blue eyes were hungry.

"Okay," I said.

She kissed me again, deeper, her hand tightening in my hair.

---

She stood up.

The worst possible interpretation: she was leaving. That would have been the single most disappointing event of my adult life. She was not leaving. She pulled the top over her head and dropped it on the floor. Then the jeans. Then she was standing in front of me in nothing.

She hadn't been wearing a bra. She'd been sitting on my couch in that dark top with nothing under it the entire time.

Tall and tanned, her body was the kind of thing that didn't happen in real life. Flat stomach, narrow waist, hips that curved into long legs, and her tits. Full and heavy and sitting high on her chest like gravity had been informed and had declined to participate. Her pussy was smooth and bare and already wet, slick shining on her inner thighs. I stared. I was not subtle about it. She watched me stare with complete stillness, like she'd expected this part and was giving me the time to get through it.

I did not get through it. I was still staring when she dropped to her knees in front of me on the couch and her hands were at my jeans and I thought: this does not happen. Not to me. Not in this apartment.

Then she had my cock out, and wrapped her lips around the head, and her tongue moved in a slow circle and the thought ended completely.

She didn't ease into it. She took me in slow and deep, her lips stretching around my cock, her tongue pressing up along the underside as she went down. All the way to the base. Her nose against my skin, my cock buried completely in her throat, and she held it there. Not struggling, not working at it. Just taking it, her throat tight and hot around me. She swallowed. Then she pulled back and went down again.

She sucked my cock like she meant it. Like she wanted it there. Her lips tight around my shaft, sliding up and down in long wet strokes, her tongue working the underside on every pass. The wet sound of her mouth on me filled the apartment. Her hands gripped my thighs, fingers digging in, pulling herself deeper onto me. Her eyes open and on me the whole time.

I came in her mouth.

She didn't pull back. She swallowed, slowly, her throat moving, her eyes still on mine. Then she wiped her lower lip with her thumb and wrapped her fist around my cock and stroked me, slow, while she licked the underside of my shaft from base to head. She took me back into her mouth. Deep again, her throat working around me, her hand cupping my balls.

I was still hard.

This does not happen. I have had a cock for twenty-three years and I know how this works. You come, you go soft, you wait. That is the sequence. That has always been the sequence. I had just come in her mouth and I was hard like nothing had happened.

She didn't seem surprised. She looked up at me with her mouth wet and her lips swollen and her eyes full of a hunger that had nothing casual in it, and she stood and took my hand and pulled me toward the bedroom.

---

She lay back on my bed and her legs opened wide. Gymnast-wide, spread so far apart I could see everything. She looked up at me. Then she reached down between her legs and spread herself open with two fingers. Pink and wet and swollen, her pussy glistening, and she held herself open like that. Showing me, letting me look.

"Fuck me," she said. Low, direct, watching my face. "Put your cock in my wet pussy and fuck me."

I was on top of her before the sentence finished.

I fucked her slow at first. Long strokes, pulling almost all the way out and pushing back in, watching my cock slide in and out of her. The slick of her coated me, shining in the light from the window. The sound of it. Wet and rhythmic and real. Her tits moved with each thrust, full and heavy, swaying with the motion.

"Harder," she said.

I gripped her hips and went harder. Her back arched and her tits bounced with each thrust and the slap of our hips filled the room. She was tight and hot around me and I could feel her pussy clenching as her sounds lost structure. High and urgent, her voice breaking apart.

"Fuck me," she said. Her voice had dropped into something that had nothing of the PT session left in it. "Don't hold back. I want all of it."

I didn't hold back. I fucked her hard and deep, her legs spread wide around me, watching my cock disappear into her and come back slick.

"Your cock feels so good," she said. "Fuck me deeper. I want to feel you in my stomach."

I went deeper. She gripped the back of my neck and pulled my face down to hers and bit my lip and said, against my mouth: "You're going to make me come on your cock."

Her pussy was clenching around me, her hips lifting to meet every thrust, and then she said it flat, direct, like the next item on a list: "Put it in my ass."

"I want you to fuck my ass," she said. "Do it."

I pulled out of her pussy. She reached down between her legs and guided the head of my cock to her ass. The tight resistance, then past the ring, slow, the first inch pushing through. She was tight around me in a way that was nothing like before, hotter somehow, and she pushed her hips back to take more.

"All the way," she said. Her voice had dropped. "Give me all of it."

I pushed in deeper. Watched my cock slide into her ass inch by inch until my hips were flush against her. She gripped the headboard and her whole body arched and she made a sound that had nothing measured in it. I pulled back and pushed in again, slow, and the sound from her was different now. Raw, her voice losing whatever structure it had left. I fucked her ass with long strokes, watching myself go in and out of her, the tight grip of it, her body taking me completely each time.

Then she did something I was not prepared for.

She brought her legs back toward her head. Effortless. Gymnast-flexible, a movement that didn't think about itself. Her feet were near her face and she turned her head and licked the sole of her own foot. A slow deliberate stroke from heel to toe. Then she looked at me.

Eye contact. She held it.

"Don't stop," she said.

I didn't stop. She alternated. Her tongue dragging slowly up the arch of her foot, then looking at me: "Harder. Fuck my ass harder." Then licking again, a long wet stroke across her sole, then: "I want you to come in my ass. I want to feel it." Her tongue on her own foot and her blue eyes locked on mine and my cock buried in her ass and her voice telling me exactly what to give her. She never broke the look.

She came hard. Her whole body tightened, her back lifting off the bed, and she made a sound in a language I didn't know. Raw and long and coming apart. I could feel her clenching around me.

I came in her ass.

Second time tonight. I waited for the softening. The thing that always happens. The body's honest announcement that the event is over.

It didn't come. I was still hard. Still inside her. Two orgasms and nothing had changed. This was not how any of this worked. I knew it wasn't possible in the same way I knew that the woman underneath me was something I didn't have a name for yet.

I didn't have an explanation. I wasn't going to get one tonight.

---

She moved.

Not the slow rearrangement of after. A decision. She pushed me back and rolled on top in one motion, still connected, still in her ass, and she was on top of me now, her hands flat on my chest, and she started riding me.

Her tits were right above me, full and heavy, swaying as her hips moved. My cock in her ass and her riding me with intent, taking what she wanted, her wet pussy pressed against my skin where our bodies met. I could see everything from this angle. Her stomach flexing, her thighs gripping me, the point where my cock disappeared into her each time she dropped her hips. She was using me.

She rode me harder. Her hands braced on my chest, her hips rolling and dropping, the tight grip of her ass around my cock each time she pushed down. The sound of our bodies meeting. Her tits bouncing above me and her mouth open and her breath coming in short sharp bursts. She reached back and gripped my thigh for leverage and the angle changed and she made a sound that was not a word in any language.

Something moved in the wrong direction. Instead of anything going away from me, something was arriving. A fullness, not a draining. Heat moving toward me instead of away, as if something that should have gone outward was rerouting. I didn't understand it. I understood it was specific. I didn't have a lot of attention to spare. She was riding me harder, her pussy grinding wet against me, her whole body working.

Her voice, which had been smooth and controlled, lost the smoothness. By degrees. Her hands on my chest pressed harder. Her hips lost their rhythm. Not slowing, speeding up, but ragged now, urgent, her body chasing something. Something had gotten ahead of her. She was not the kind of person who let things get ahead of her. I had understood that about her from the first forty-five minutes. So I noticed when something did.

She came. And in the instant of it, one moment completely contiguous with the one before it, she was not Amber.

No transition. No shimmer, no gradual shift, no sequence of stages. One moment the woman from the gym, on top of me, my cock still in her ass. The next: not.

Her skin was deep red. Not pink, not reddish, not a warm tone. Red. Saturated, completely, the color of something that had always been this color. Her hair was white. Not the near-silver she'd worn all evening but the white of very old paper, straight, past her shoulders. Her ears came to a point, angled slightly back. Two horns swept back from her temples, large and curved, crimson at the base and darkening to near-black at the tips. Wings extended from her back: bone-white frame, deep red membrane, open as if she'd started to open them and forgotten to finish. Her eyes were amber-gold throughout: warm gold filling the entire eye, catching the apartment light. On her lower abdomen: a heart-shaped mark, bioluminescent red, producing its own light. Sigils ran along her outer thighs and upper arms: deeper crimson-black, part of the same system, not glowing, just present.

She had silver rings through her nipples.

Tattoos in dark crimson-black across her skin, curving under her tits, following the lines of her hips, trailing down toward her pussy.

A tail was doing something in my peripheral vision. I was not looking at the tail.

Her body had changed. Not a different shape. More of the same shape, taken further. Amber had been at the far end of what human proportions produce. This was past that end. The waist narrower, the hips wider, the chest fuller. Everything Amber had been, turned up past what should have been possible.

She was still on top of me. She was still coming.

I looked at the ceiling.

There is a crack in the upper right corner by the window. I had been meaning to mention it to the building manager.

I looked back at her.

She had not moved. She was watching me. The amber-gold eyes had no whites and they were not looking away and the expression on her face was one I hadn't seen before: she did not know what was going to happen next.

I took a breath.

"Okay," I said.

A moment passed. An actual moment. I needed the moment.

"I have questions. I'm going to start with the ones about my immediate safety."