As I walked my way home, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and turned it on. The light illuminated my face and the time appeared on screen. The clock struck ten, and I couldn’t help but rub my eyes upon realization. I wasn’t planning on staying out so late at night, but the fire locked me in a trance that was way too hard to escape. 

I had been walking for around an hour and I finally made it to my neighborhood. I could’ve gotten there sooner, but I froze with every light breeze in the wind. Any time I so much as heard something that sounded familiar to a footstep, I would run into the nearest alley without hesitation. My nerves kicked into overdrive, and the beating of my heart echoed all the way to my head. 

Nevertheless, I managed to crawl my way back home. I could see it just up ahead, and the mental image of my bed forced my legs to shrivel and tremble. Maybe I’d get something to eat, but after that, I’d sleep like a log for two days straight. I was just exhausted from everything that happened. 

The wind picked up, and I grabbed onto my porch railing to keep myself righted. It wasn’t that grand a breeze, but my legs could barely support me without something pushing at my back. Keeping my palms on the railing, I steadily climbed my porch while searching for keys in my pocket. 

I didn’t have any expectations of what I’d find upon opening my front door. Harmony had to be home, no doubt about it, but whether she was asleep or watching TV, I couldn’t tell. I hoped that she’d be awake cause my stomach screamed for food, and I sure as hell didn’t have the energy to make it myself. My stomach was so empty that I’d probably have to enter my inner nineteen-sixties man side and tell the woman to get into the kitchen. Fuck the PC police. I want a damn sandwich.

Turning the keys into the doorknob, I opened the door, and thankfully, Harmony was indeed awake. She was watching TV, and her butt was firmly planted on the couch. What I didn’t expect was to see her sticking a carrot up her crotch while moaning echoed from the television speakers. 

We locked eyes for a brief moment. Her hand stopped moving, and she could only awkwardly look back and forth between the TV and me. I wanted to say something, but when I was tired as shit, adding onto the shock wouldn’t get my vocal cords working. 

“Uhm,” Harmony spoke first, grinning awkwardly. “What’s up doc?” 

I could only blink and that only made the situation more awkward. True, I’ve seen her naked plenty of times before, but that didn’t eliminate the embarrassment of being walked in on. It’s like how most parents know that their teenage son or daughter masturbate and saw them naked as a toddler, but they would still sputter speechlessly if they walked in on it. 

“Food. I need food.” That’s all I could say. I walked into the living room and slammed the door shut behind me. 

Harmony took the carrot out of her crotch, and it shined from the juices her pussy leaked out. I swore I could see my reflection from the doorway. I couldn’t worry about that, since I had five seconds to sit on something before I collapsed. Before the counter could touch zero, I made my way to my chair and fell down so hard that the material creaked under me. 

“You want food?” Harmony asked.

“Yes. Food. Get. Want.”

“Does it matter what?”

“Fuck. No.” 

Harmony shrugged and stood up, taking a bite out of the carrot that was just lodged in her privates. At that moment, I came to a shocking realization. Stuff portrayed as hot in fiction, and looks hot in fiction, doesn’t necessarily translate to how it’d feel in reality. I’ve seen a few moments like that in hentai and hentai visual novels, and every time I thought it looked sexy. Seeing it in real-time, however, only made me feel deeply uncomfortable knowing where that carrot just was.

“Carrot. In. Food?” I asked.

“No, I’m just going to eat it.” Harmony said. “Unless you want me to put it in there?”

“God. No.”

Harmony chuckled at my weakened self, only capable of shrinking into my chair. I looked at the TV only to see a porno playing on the screen. It was one of the many I owned, and the specific one she had going was a personal favorite of mine. It was a first-person view porno where the guy in question was getting ridiculed by an Asian tutor with mammaries the size of tumors. 

When I sat down, the porno played to the point where the tutor began riding the guy while asking him math problems. The idea behind it was that the more cum he released, the smarter he became. Apparently, the guy had such a sex drive, that he would get so backed up that he turned stupid, and that’s how the situation got to that moment.

I could appreciate the intricacies of the porn, but sadly my pecker couldn’t salute to the porn. That’s just how tired I was from running from a demon that nearly killed me. Have I mentioned how tired I was? I’ll do it again. I was goddamn fucking tired.

Have you seen any woman that looks like me? She’s a bit shorter, but we look pretty much identical.

The question the succubus asked me whirled in my head, and I looked over at Harmony, who was cutting up some garlic at the moment. Her hair bounced as she swayed side to side, and her tail remained taught in an “S” shaped position. No amount of movement forced it to sway.

“Hey, Harmony,” I called to her.

“What?” 

I gulped down the saliva that filled my mouth. “Remember back when we first met? You said you had brothers, right?”

“Yeah. What about it?”

No hesitation to answer, huh. “Did you have a sister also?”

The sound of her cutting ceased. Her tail twitched slightly, and I practically heard her breathing become non-existent. Almost instantaneously, she stopped everything she was doing, but just as quickly, she returned back to her work.

“No, I don’t have a sister.”

The only sound that continued beyond that was the moaning from the TV and her knife thumping the cutting board. A tense atmosphere hung over the living room and kitchen, nearly crushing the both of us. I had to break the ice and fast before she got some sort of idea that may or may not have been true. 

“So, what were your brothers like?” I asked.

She turned a burner on, and I could hear her slide something into a pot of water. 

“Well, the older brother was, how should I say this right. Kind of stupid. He would constantly get on mother’s nerves, always try to hit the tutor, and would always act out. As he grew up, though, he learned his lesson and started to become much more bearable. 

“Oh, the youngest of us though? Don’t even think he became anywhere close to humble. He was born spoiled. He grew up spoiled. He will forever remain spoiled. I remember when I came home one night, and he pretended to not know who I was. Fucking classic.” 

Her tone shifted to one that sounded hostile about the whole scenario. I couldn’t understand why, honestly. It sounded like she was telling the truth, but in some part of my core, I couldn’t fully believe her. 

Whoever told you that lied to you to not frighten you.

If what Talia said then was the truth, then Harmony had lied to me once already about her life. Not to mention, I may have lived with her, but realistically, I knew so little about who she was as a person. I knew she was a succubus, and that whatever happened in her past harmed her so much that she came to hate humanity. Yet despite that hate, she still tried to become friends with the people that caused her species so much misery.

Her plan may be childish and would only work in a children’s Saturday morning cartoon, but it was a plan that attempted to grasp the meaning of peace. Befriend the little guys, then use those connections to spread her ideology and influence outward until the people at the top would have no choice but to listen. If that actually worked, which was near impossible, then would it result in the peace she wanted?

The memory of Harmony holding Tiffany’s corpse by the neck returned to my mind. If I brought up my grievances with her, would I be the next to experience the noose? As much as I would like to say otherwise, I couldn’t hide it from myself any longer. 

I was terrified of this woman. In my mind, she was no different from a demon that could keep me quiet if she wanted to. I didn’t want to feel that way, and I was disgusted at myself for it, but I couldn’t help it. What does she actually think? Who was she really? Was the person I was living with more related to a demon or a living creature with thoughts and emotions? 

Her emotionless eyes returned to my head, but so did all those moments when she looked at me with insatiable lust. The way her eyes glowed like pink diamonds when she was turned on was as much imprinted into me as that moment in the basement. 

I couldn’t decide. At least not yet. 

“Here’s food.” Harmony laid a hot bowl of spaghetti on my lap. “You must really be tired.” 

For a second, I thought she had said that because my eyes were red or whatever. However, upon looking at the television, I noticed the porno had finished some time ago and went back to the play screen. I had apparently been thinking for so long that I missed the climax of one of the greatest scenes ever implemented in porn. 

On the other hand, I had a nice warm bowl of noodles on my lap, so I could forgive myself for spacing out.

“I didn’t expect the orgy to end that soon.” Harmony said.

I picked up my fork and began eating away at the spaghetti. For someone not human, she sure knew how to cook. I knew she studied before coming, but there still had to be some hiccups in the process. 

“I couldn’t get into it,” I said, chomping down on the dish. “They wouldn’t let me in without giving them a doctor's note saying I was completely clean of any and all STDs.”

Harmony looked at me as if I said something weird, and I couldn’t help but feel put off by it. 

“What?” I asked.

“Well, how would having an STD be any problem? Just rest for a day or two. It’ll fade.”

I swallowed the food down my throat, returning the confused stare right back at her. 

“Do STDs work differently for cubbi? Most STDs here are permanent.”

“Say that I get HIV or whatever,” Harmony began explaining. “A few blisters will show up in the infected area, but as long as I rest for a day, they’ll eventually fade.”

“What about genital warts?”

“Gone in like two days, but there’s an ointment that some lenders sell that helps with irritation and can drop to only one day of rest.”

It turned out being a cubbi had some perks with it, but I don’t think I would ever want to be one in a million years. The idea of giving up my virginity forcefully before my balls even drop, and I’d have to keep that up for days at a time or else I’d go crazy just sounded like an awful life to live. I had to give Harmony and Talia massive amounts of respect for keeping on living despite that, even though their eyes terrify me sometimes. 

I pondered the idea of telling Harmony everything that I had just been through. About the cubbi I encountered, and who Talia was. I thought about it more and realized that Talia and Harmony never actually met. If the time came, I would introduce the two of them. 

Or maybe not, because I don’t want to die. I still trusted Harmony, but there were just some aspects of our relationship I couldn’t get past thanks to what I’ve learned. What’s the truth, and how can I figure it out for myself. The only idea that came to mind was going to the land of the cubbi myself, but I wasn’t that much of an idiot. From Talia’s description of the place, I wouldn’t last a day there. 

Nevertheless, I wanted to learn what the truth behind the cubbi was. But how was I going to figure that out?

As I came up with the idea, something knocked at the door. I looked at it, and my eyes widened in terror. There was an aura coming through that door, and it froze me in my chair.