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On the evening of the day before the Fourth of July, possibly tipsy, Rose busted out a miniature alchemitizer from the corner of her closet to make some alcohol. Or rather, recreate. When she was on the asteroid, she had made some in preparation for her mother’s time-space-dislocated teenage twin and, of course, to take advantage of the lack of adult supervision to engage in a few nights of drunken debauchery. She took one sip of that awful brew, and heard the dark gods echo, “Ambrosia.” Further days of experimentation yielded motor oil, pesticide, poison gas, and—finally!—a beer so bitter that when Roxy finally joined them, she had to dilute it to a 1:2 beer:Faygo mix.
When Kanaya came home, Rose had been sober for hours and was surrounded by bottles, all of them foul.
“Welcome,” Rose said, spreading her arms. “Welcome to the most fatal microbrewery in this fine college town. Limited production, local ingredients, and definitely not FDA approved.”
Kanaya grunted, and went straight to the recupracoon. Her hair fell like limp seaweed against her forehead and face, and her cheeks and ears were a raw, pale green through her gray skin. She hit the cooling button on the side, and stripped. Rose sipped from mixture forty-three, which she had nicknamed “Vodbad;” she had felt compelled to both number and name her creations, like the German symphonies, only with more migraines and less tendinitis. It was the mad scientist genes in her.
Kanaya’s clothes were left, unfolded, on the floor. After a moment, she picked them up and tossed them onto the double bed where Rose usually slept. This wasn’t entirely unusual; Rose worked as an editor for a regional publishing house from their apartment, and Kanaya worked at the university's Alternian botany lab, where she spent most of her time battling trees of questionable sentience. During the summer, it wasn’t unusual for her to work at subduing those plants from dawn to twilight and come home well into the night, exhausted and snarky.
“Did you eat dinner?” Rose said.
“I had something before I left.”
“Do you want to try some ‘Vodbad’?”
“What?”
“Maybe I should change the name to ‘Wodka’.” No. Wodka could be the name of the next one of Roxy’s mutant kittens. Maybe soon they could move into an apartment that allowed pets. Having a collection of taxidermied cats on top of the fridge just wasn’t the same. She had to put half of them away after Kanaya complained that not all of the undead were stiff, unattractive corpses. She wasn’t even a rainbow drinker anymore, Rose pointed out, as to which Kanaya had complained, I want a dog.
“In the morning,” Kanaya said. She rested her arms against the opening of the coon, apparently willing to entertain Rose for a bit. She blinked at the bottles, as though just noticing them for the first time. “What were you doing?”
“A little experiment,” Rose said. “Do you remember that time we tried to make a martini on the asteroid?”
“Rose, I thought we’d agreed to forget that ever happened.”
“You liked it well enough before you fainted.”
“Yes, that’s the crucial qualifier,” said Kanaya, smoothing her hair back, or trying to. “The ‘before I concussed myself on the unforgiving and hard surface of the hell rock’ part.”
“Maybe this time you can concuss yourself on the incredibly soft and forgiving surface of the bed,” Rose said. She went to the coon, and bent down to kiss Kanaya. Kanaya pulled away soon and early, and sank into the cool slime. “Can I come in?”
“Maybe,” Kanaya said. She accepted Rose’s second kiss, initiated the third, the fourth, each time retreating before they could get too heated. Rose had thought Kanaya was just flushed from the cold, but now she was closer, she could smell the pheromones, a heavy, musky, sweet smell that made Rose’s mouth water. It had to be conditioning that made the scent sexy. Back when Kanaya was still a rainbow drinker, she’d be aroused by the smell of cloying, overripe fruit. Rose moved her hand to the hem of her shirt, ready to take things off, but Kanaya took her hands and held them tight by the wrist—and then she pulled back into the slime, eyes glazed and cheeks flushed.
“Should I…” Rose said, and Kanaya kissed her, over and over again, and said, “No.”
Goddamn it.
*
When Rose woke in the middle of the day, Kanaya was on her laptop in the living room. Every few seconds she’d pinch the bridge of her nose, and say something. It wasn’t until Rose settled next to Kanaya with her toast and eggs that she saw what was irritating Kanaya so much: one topless Terezi Pyrope.
“Our affair has been discovered!” Terezi said when Rose appeared on the screen. “I must flee, before Dave learns that I’ve kicked Rose out of my black quadrant so I could wiggle my chest bumps at her matesprit. He’ll probably cry.”
“Please,” Kanaya said. “There was barely any wiggling involved.”
“Are you trying to shake your ass?” Rose said around her toast. Terezi grinned. Did she wink, too? “I’ve told you this before, but the reason no one can see you doing it is because you don’t have anything back there.”
“Ah, but can you smell it?”
“I don’t think ‘smell’ and ‘ass’ are two things that should go together in the same sentence.”
“See?” said Terezi, pointedly, to Kanaya. “Finally. Someone with a sense of humor.”
“I will embed a poisoned needle in your next dragon costume,” Kanaya said. Poor Kanaya sounded more aggrieved by Terezi than usual. They had avoided each other on the asteroid, but after the game ended, they had gone globetrotting with Aradia while Rose was in college. Since then, they had settled into a bitter hatefriendship, complete with occasional murder threats. “Goodbye.”
She closed the video chat, and settled into the couch. The couch had been salvaged from a yard sale for twenty dollars, and was covered in plastic tarp. Kanaya detested it almost as much as she detested empire waists, badly tailored pants, and What Not To Wear, but even she had to admit that it had its utility. For one, neither of them ever felt guilty about eating on it. There was an empty bowl full of discarded grubparts and what looked like thawed, raw chicken liver on the coffee table, which was technically a salvaged, overturned bookshelf Rose had found on someone’s driveway in college. Minor details.
“I thought you’d be at work,” Rose said.
“I took the day off.” She hadn’t styled her hair this morning. It curled on the back of her neck, rested soft and tempting around her face. Rose, her control weak, reached for the hair behind her ear, and wound it around her fingers. “This is nice,” she said. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you with your hair down that the image was in danger of falling out of my memory altogether.”
“I look like I fell out of a one-way transportpod from the far colonies,” Kanaya said, but blushed. She removed the plate from Rose’s lap—she hadn’t even finished eating that last egg—and then scooched, so her knees were next to Rose’s thighs, head bowed so Rose could touch her horns. “Of course,” Kanaya added, “I mean the space colonies.”
The smell was back. Rose took a fuller grip on the horn, and Kanaya leaned in closer. The couch arm dug into Rose’s spine, but it was hard moving when there was a gangly alien in your lap; even harder when that alien wrapped her arms around Rose’s neck and buried her face in her chest. After a moment, she turned her head, and kissed Rose’s breast through her shirt.
“Fast,” Rose said, but not at all displeased.
“It’s not as though I want to be,” Kanaya sniffed. “I’m simply responding to you.” She pressed her teeth against Rose’s breast, hand massaging her thigh. Below, her hips rolled against the couch cushion, then jerked into stillness.
“If you’re trying to pretend you’re not the horny one right now, you’re not doing a very good job of convincing anyone,” Rose said, sliding her hand up Kanaya’s horn. She patted herself on the back for the pun. Kanaya moaned and squirmed closer, her face mottling with green. She slid her hand under Rose’s shirt and laid a few more kisses on Rose’s breast, hand and mouth working up until she was crouched in Rose’s lap, twisting Rose’s nipple with her hand and kissing her with hungry vigor. Rose undid the fastening of Kanaya’s skirt, and reached to grasp unsheathed bulge, stroking it until Kanaya’s hips jerked into her grip. Then she took Rose’s hand and guided it down to her open seedflap.
“Come a little closer,” Rose said, and she did, until she was crouching over Rose’s lap, knees bumping against the arm of the couch and bulge twitching in excitement. Her fingers were barely positioned when Kanaya sank down eagerly, sheathing Rose’s fingers in heat with such speed that all Rose could think was, “Whoa.” Kanaya ground down on her hand, throat bared and bulge a squirming pressure on the heel of Rose’s palm and wrist. Then she raised herself off of Rose’s fingers and brought herself down, shuddering with pleasure. Rose pushed up Kanaya’s shirt, kissed her chest and shoulders, the dark erogenous spots on her breasts. Reached behind to squeeze at the back of her thighs and ass, then grabbing onto her bulge and jerking on it. Her nook was incredible around Rose’s fingers, the passage slick with generous lubrication and sweat—it wasn’t long until Kanaya came with a long groan, nook clamping around her fingers in pulses. Rose braced herself for the gush of green liquid, but there was nothing but Kanaya sagging and resting her forehead against Rose’s shoulder. Rose, uncertain, slid her fingers out so just the tips remained inside.
“Should I keep going?” she said.
“Something else,” Kanaya said against Rose’s neck. Her lips dragged hot against the skin, and vibrated as she spoke. She tugged at Rose’s collar until she did away with her shirt, then the boxers she had stolen from Dave the last time they were in Texas. She sucked at the top of Rose’s breasts, then more wetly at the dip in her collar bones, and then with a determined suction on Rose’s neck. Slowly, she began to rub her bulge against Rose’s stomach. “Right now my present thoughts are of you in various states of undress,” Kanaya said into Rose’s ear.
“Well, you’ve done a good job on making that a reality,” Rose said. “Ow—why did you have to bite?”
Kanaya settled more solidly over Rose’s thigh, seedflap spreading wide and hot across her leg. “While in this state of undress, I’m sucking at your neck—”
“You already did that,” Rose said. She kissed the underside of Kanaya’s jaw, shifting the angle of her thigh with each one of Kanaya’s movements. Her legs burned, and her cunt needed something, anything. She’d settle for humping against a table at this point. “You’re going to have to think of something you haven’t done yet.”
Kanaya’s lips puckered together. She accepted Rose’s kiss without returning it, evidently in a thinking mood. Meanwhile, Rose thought about pinning Kanaya to the floor, riding her bulge, riding her face, something. “Maybe,” she said, “words are superfluous in situations like these.”
Then Kanaya was kneeling in front of the couch, and pulling Rose forward. She nipped at Rose’s thighs, drawing small pinpricks of blood with her fangs, and then ran her tongue along the flushed line of her labia, then wet swirls at Rose’s clit, then swept down and into Rose, back up—dear god. She dug her heels into Kanaya’s back, tugged at her horns, until—finally—she settled at Rose’s clit, two fingers in Rose and pressed at her g-spot until Rose came, biting into her arm to keep herself from screaming. She slumped against the couch, breathing hard—Kanaya was already climbing on top of her, bulge heavy and present between them. Her kiss was slippery, and if Rose was being honest, tasted a little like raw meat, but little of that mattered when her bulge pushed her open, running against Rose’s clit.
“I just, need—” Kanaya said, breaths heavy and erratic against Rose’s neck, “—I need, this to be…” and pushed deep into Rose, her legs trembling and bulge swelling, but still there was nothing. Kanaya, miserably, thrust in again, bulge twisting insistent and aggressive. God, fucking, hell, she was going to come again—Kanaya slammed into her with punishing force, and ow, no. No, she wouldn’t.
“Kanaya… Kanaya, this isn’t working.”
“I know,” she said, withdrawing from Rose and flopping back onto the couch.
“Is there something wrong?” Rose asked. She took a quick swipe between her legs. Nothing but the familiar, thin green liquid that normally leaked from Kanaya’s bulge, and her own clear lubricate. Definitely none of the usual thicker, green fluid that marked ejaculation.
“I,” Kanaya said, sounding dejected, “don’t know why I can’t. Your performance was as usual excellent—”
“I really didn’t have to do much work,” she said, but instead of looking down with self-satisfaction and attempted modesty, Kanaya turned her head away. “Should we…”
“I’ve already tried.”
“How many times?” Rose said. When Kanaya opted for embarrassed silence instead of answering her, she said, “Maybe you should go to the doctor.”
“Maybe I should write my name on the culling list.”
“That doesn’t even mean ‘senseless slaughtering of the government-deemed inferiors’ anymore,” Rose pointed out, but smiled slightly and took a hold of Kanaya’s bulge. “Maybe you’ll appreciate a helping hand. If you’ll pardon the pun.”
“How can I, when they are so horrible that they have burned their way into my pan, the scars permanent and disfiguring?”
“Do you want it or not?” Rose said, pumping the length of the bulge. Kanaya arched her back off of the couch. Her legs, tense and beautiful things, rested against the coffee table, and then pushed it away.
*
By sundown, Kanaya had to take a nap after miscalculating the position of the couch and pitching horn-first into the floor. This hadn’t stopped her from wanting to continue at first, but evidently even her raging appetites couldn’t survive fall-induced migraines. And so down she went. Rose, exhausted, fell asleep, too, but shot awake barely an hour later when she realized she hadn’t made her day’s quota for The Complacency of the Learned or its erotic companion novel, The Cumplacency of the Spermed. Kanaya remained asleep next to her in the bed, bulge resting against her thigh. This had to be a joke, Rose thought. Surely there was a limit to troll endurance. She certainly appreciated the sense of carnal urgency, but there were limits. Kanaya, for all her sordid reading habits, poor girl, had to be prodded into arriving at aggression in bed most of the time. Sometimes she wouldn’t want to admit wanting it to Rose out loud, and would text Rose from the next room, or she’d stare intently at Rose’s elbow until Rose guessed at her desires, or she’d be so anxious that she’d make some horrible grand gesture, like dropping coffee on the floor when Rose entered a room. It wasn’t always like this, but it happened enough that it had become a dry joke in the back of Rose’s mind, and a weapon of nuclear potency in their nastier fights. But this level of insatiability struck Rose as a little unhealthy.
She went to the living room. Terezi was online, so she went to pester her over video chat. The air conditioner must have broken in Dave’s apartment. Terezi’s hair was sweat-flattened, and she was still resolutely shirtless. Her eyes, watery and red, glinted with affectionate malice.
“Cantaloupe,” Terezi said. She sniffed the screen, and then giggled in a knowing manner.
“I’m going to ignore that,” Rose said. “And instead hope that you’re frying in the sun during the day.”
“I got a little burn,” Terezi admitted, bending over to show Rose her shoulder blades. Nearly the entirety of her back was flaking off in long geometric shapes. “Leave it to coolkid to misplace the sunblock. What do you want, Rose? We both know you’re not making a social call here.”
“It’s about sex,” Rose said.
“I’m shocked! I’m going teal with titillation. Did Kanaya swallow a bottle of troll Viagra?”
“Believe me, I wish. Troll Viagra would wear off.”
“Bleugh!”
“And,” she said, feeling the need to gloat, “I’d have a chance of walking in the morning.”
“Enough,” Terezi said. “I pardon all counts of exhibition from our time on Asteroidia against you. The prosecution has held the judicityrrant hostage by suggestions of morally indecent material. What do you want to know?”
“You and Kanaya have reached sexual maturity now, correct?” Rose said. “Have you ever reached… troll heat?”
“How—it’s not even the right time for her cycle—who told you?”
“That's an interesting choice of words. What would be the ‘right time for her cycle?’”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Terezi said stonily. “The judicityrrant has no idea what anyone’s cycle would be, and would like to mention that Kanaya Maryam finds the sight of the judicityrrant’s wicked hot leg pits to be the biggest turn off she has ever seen.”
“The prosecution wasn’t asking if the judicityrrant had any idea, but now that she is suspiciously specific, the prosecution will file away this moment for later,” Rose said. “Let me phrase it another way: is there such a thing as troll heat?”
At this, Terezi scratched, sheepishly, at her neck. “Rose, did you ever read about troll heat in Karkat’s books?”
“No.”
“Exactly! Because only the most depraved kind of pornography would feature someone being driven into a mindless, panting animal once every three sweeps, compelled to pail things indiscriminately until someone’s blackened heart goes a little red or a little pale and …”
“Sorry? I couldn’t quite hear you.”
“Sticks their hand up their nook and fondles their shameglobes until they spurt enough genetic material to fill a pail! There, I said it. Now leave me alone. I need to bury my head in a pile until I expire.”
“Wait!” Rose said. “What is troll Viagra made—” The screen went black. Rose tapped the side of her mouth, and smiled to herself.
*
She wrote another few hundred words of The Cumplacency of the Spermed, set it aside, and went to Google for some research before returning to the bedroom. Kanaya was awake, and reading a book with a furrowed brow, bulge idly curled around her free hand. Someone in the neighborhood was setting off fireworks.
“Would it be a crime if I said you look radiant in this late hour?” Rose said.
Kanaya rolled her eyes. “I’d in fact prefer if no one were to mention my episodes of rainbow drinking luminescence again,” she said. “It was entertaining for a few hours, but then became inconvenient.”
“All right,” Rose said. “You glow like a firefly whose ass is being squeezed.”
“And you like venomous jellyfish,” Kanaya said. Rose made her way back to her spot on the bed, and kissed the back of Kanaya’s bare shoulders. After a moment, Kanaya twisted around enough so she could kiss Rose’s lips, tugging at Rose’s lower lip with her teeth. Her bulge lashed against Rose's thighs—how was this even possible? Rose tried thinking about sex, but could only think of the twinging in her jaw and UTIs.
Rose said, “Troll heat.” Kanaya froze, face blanching as though someone had just tossed her in boiling water. “Sorry,” she said. “That was indelicate of me. I meant that I was talking with Terezi and she mentioned that you might be in some kind of… troll heat.”
Kanaya for a moment remained immobile, squashed between the wall and Rose. Were circumstances different, she’d like to roll straight off a cliff, Rose was sure. Finally, she said, “I can’t deny that I hadn’t come to that conclusion myself, but the timing isn’t right. My first one was a little more than a sweep ago, and I was able to pail normally.”
… Wait a second. Two years ago Rose had still been in college; Kanaya, then, had been traveling the world with Jade, Jake, Aradia, and… “Does that mean—you and Terezi?” Kanaya grabbed a pillow, and buried her face in it. “A hate fling?” Rose guessed. “That turned into a literal pityfuck while you two were little more than mindless animals, willing to even frot against a wall if it could bring you to orgasm, even if it peeled the skin off your bulges?”
“Kill me," she moaned. "If you have any love for me at all, extinguish my life and leave my corpse to be hauled away by the barkbeasts.”
“That was a touch melodramatic.” She shook Kanaya. When that didn’t get a response, she kissed her shoulder, neck, behind the ear. She wasn’t angry, but instead perversely delighted at uncovering something Kanaya hadn’t told her, both with Terezi and the bizarre workings of troll biology. “Kanaya. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
Kanaya lifted her head, just enough for Rose to see her eyes. “About Terezi?”
“The troll heat, I mean.”
“I didn’t,” she said, green all the way to her forehead, “I didn’t want you to think that I only wanted you because my body wanted it.”
What a weird answer. They had been together since they were fifteen. There had never been—for Rose, at least—a question of wanting. All of her wanted Kanaya, and it mattered little to her which parts of her wanted what. Maybe Kanaya saw things differently. She had spent years with a separate hunger roaring in her the back of her mind. From what Rose could see, Kanaya had always wanted things with great intensity, and denied the wanting with the same force. It had always struck her as counter-productive, and a little sad. A philosophy of restraint that begot not calmness, but a nervous, shifty troll with a chainsaw and a talent for slow, explosive anger. Rose was glad that Kanaya had grown past that. She worried less when Kanaya wasn’t obsessively mulling over her own failures or revving her chainsaw in the night.
“In fact,” Kanaya said earnestly, “sometimes I don’t want you at all.”
“A terrible answer,” Rose said, and bit down on Kanaya’s neck, then lapped at the pale outline her teeth had left. “I think you should be punished for that, don’t you think? Say, by having someone reach up to your shameglobes and squeeze them until…” How did that work, biologically speaking? “… You fill a bucket.” Wow. That sounded stupid as hell. Good thing Kanaya had never been much good at reading minds. “Would you like that? Or should I punish you in some other fashion? Tie you somewhere and leave you until you go mad with wantonness, or until someone takes pity on you?”
“Rose,” Kanaya groaned, sounding nearly ready to acquiesce to being tied and possibly flogged right then. If only Rose were up to it. As it was, she was too tired to even think about it. She eased away from Kanaya, ignoring the small, hopeless whine, and shut off the lamp.
*
Never mind morning. Kanaya hit the slime and was out, all through the morning and then noon, and past even that. Rose started the day looking up “troll heat” and wound up reading Troll Star Trek fanfiction. Around four, the landlord brought a set of ribs and saltgrubs and some slices of cake from the neighborhood barbecue. Rose opened up a can of corn, put it in a blender, and spent the rest of the afternoon scrubbing the mess off the walls. Evening came. She shook Kanaya, but found her slow-breathing and unstirring. Her brow was furrowed, and didn’t relax when Rose kissed her fingers.
She left a note on the fridge, went to the liquor store, and picked up some beef jerky, chips, actual vodka, and the cupcakes they had for sale. The woman at the counter was a good-looking redblood with blue streaks in her hair and a seductive offer of New Zealand wines. When she returned, Kanaya was standing in the middle of the kitchen with a salt grub in hand, and very naked. The sopor slime glinted green on her thighs and arms and stomach, still wet. They’d have to scrub the floors later—and the couch, and the bed, and the rugs. Rose felt a faint sense of dread, and then pushed it aside.
“What happened to ‘vodbad’?” Kanaya said.
“I thought maybe I’d deconstruct the actual thing first. Why don’t you sit down? You know how much I hate it when you eat standing up. My mother used to eat buffalo wings on her feet and drop the bones on the ground. When she was hungover in the morning she'd clean it and say, ‘I’m never doing that again,’ all while sipping a martini.“ Kanaya stared at her, blankly.
“Do you want me to vomit on the—”
“That’s not what I was getting at.”
“Oh.” Kanaya finished the salt grub, then took Rose’s hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. She wrapped her tongue around the wrist, tasting the salt and the night air still clinging close to her body. “I’m sorry,” she said, her teeth scraping Rose’s fingers. “But I don’t care about what you want at the moment.”
“That’s not very sexy,” Rose said, curling her fingers back into her palm. They were a little sticky, and definitely slimy.
“I thought it was okay.”
“You were never good at romance.” She set her bags down. Kanaya’s hair was sweat-damp, face flushed. She leaned in, then pushed her hand against Kanaya’s mouth. Her lips moved in either genuine outrage, or just a comical mimicry of it. Rose wasn’t sure. “Ssh,” she said. “Shall we take care of it now?”
*
She couldn’t help herself from teasing Kanaya, peeling off the drying sopor slime from her skin: starting with the slime on her hands, stripping her gray hands free, then her feet and her legs, then back up to her stomach, kissing the skin as it was revealed. By the time she released Kanaya’s hips, Kanaya’s bulge had was curling in on itself, and Kanaya nearly looked ready to grab Rose by the hair and drag her down.
“Turn over,” Rose said.
“Rose,” Kanaya said, her voice trembling with frustration.
“I find that deep penetration goes much easier when your partner’s sexually aroused,” Rose said cheerfully. “And I’m supposed to be reaching all the way up to your shameglobes this time, aren’t I?”
Kanaya stretched her legs, torso twisting up as she did so. Rose’s mouth went dry; she did her best to smile around it, to keep Kanaya from guessing. She lay her hand flat along the pinched line of her waist. It was an elegant curve, and deceptively solid. She gave it a little tap, and Kanaya rolled onto her stomach.
“It isn’t true troll heat,” Kanaya said, sounding hopeful as Rose’s hand glided over her ass on their way to the back of her knees. “It could be that my shameglobes in fact have nothing to do with this strange condition.”
“Maybe,” Rose said, kneading the back of Kanaya’s thighs with one hand as she worked her fingernail under the edge of a particularly large patch of dry slime on her calf. When Kanaya began to rut against the blanket, she slapped her ass twice, two asymmetric blows on the same cheek as the leg she was working on that made Kanaya’s back arch and the slime crack. She rubbed over the tender, darkening skin as she continued to work, striking Kanaya whenever she tried to grind against the sheets. By the time Rose finished the first leg, her seedflap was open, the entrance nearly liquid and inviting. Rose ran her palm over the second cheek, cool and unmarked, and suppressed a laugh when Kanaya raised her hips for the next blow. “I always thought rainbow drinkers were supposed to be the dominant ones,” she said, narrowing the circumference of her strokes until she settled on a single spot, massaging it gently with the tip of her fingers.
“Haven’t we moved beyond such common prejudices?” Kanaya said, voice muffled into the pillow and shaky. The muscles in her calves and ass tightened, then slackened, then tightened each time Rose lifted her fingertips and then, with gentle pressure, set them back down again. “Rose, please—”
“Please what?” Rose said, tugging at a stubborn sheet on Kanaya’s shoulder blade. “I like to think I’m a gentle soul—” Kanaya snorted at that, and Rose nearly considered swatting her for being cheeky. “—who doesn’t even think to do harm to people unless they deserve it.” Kanaya groaned and, trembling, brought her hips down onto the bed again. A fair enough effort: Rose struck hard enough for Kanaya to sob and rip the sheets with her claws. There wasn’t much slime left now, and Kanaya, maybe out of a compulsive need of symmetry, forced herself down faster and faster, until even the skin on the back of Rose’s hand was bright red. She stopped then, and turned Kanaya over. Her face was flushed, green from her ears to the top of her breasts. When Rose went to kiss them, she shoved Rose’s head away, and then down.
“If you try to prolong your vile torment any longer, I will choke you in your sleep.”
“Okay,” Rose said, crawling between Kanaya’s legs and kissing the inside of a thigh until she was nearly at the groin. She pinned the bulge against Kanaya’s stomach, then pushed three fingers into her nook. It was wet, and already stretched out, maybe even enough for the fourth finger—pushing further, retreating to make a beak of her hand and again reaching in, until—“Oh, fuck, Rose”—her thumb slid in, sinking further until she was wrist deep in Kanaya, both of them flushed with exertion. The heat, the pressure, the way Kanaya squeezed all around her, the way she was fighting to stay still but shook anyway, were enough to make Rose wish she weren’t holding onto Kanaya’s bulge right now so she could touch herself.
“Could you—if you—” Move, was the unspoken word.
“Gladly. But which way?” She clenched her fist, then relaxed it, and Kanaya’s legs drew up unconsciously. “How much rotation should I put in? Should I try for depth? Draw my hand in and out of you until you beg for it?” She kissed the base of Kanaya’s bulge, licking up to her own thumb, then back down.
“Rose, you’re being—unnecessarily, rake yourself into my black quadrant—” All words were soon given up when Rose pushed up, just a little, and slowly rotated her hand, then took her bulge into her mouth and slowly worked it into her throat. A steady push in until her fingers just barely brushed against the cavern leading to the shameglobes, and Kanaya let loose a full stream of babbling, bulge swelling in Rose’s mouth and nook clamping down on her hand. Rose didn’t let up: she sucked and swallowed around the bulge, expanded her fingers just a bit, forcing Kanaya to come again, just as hard, but wordlessly: oh, oh… and the noise of her panting for breath. Rose gave a last swallow around Kanaya’s bulge before taking it out of her mouth, and rubbing at her clit until she came barely a few seconds later, face buried into the soft side of Kanaya’s thigh. When she looked up, Kanaya was smiling blearily at her. Then she squeezed around Rose’s hand and grimaced. “We might as well,” she said, “now move onto work.”
“I thought you liked having me touch your shameglobes,” Rose said. She was still turned on, rather badly. Once they finished… whatever was waiting after this, she’d maybe get Kanaya to pull out a vibrator and apply it mercilessly to her clit. “You never complained about it before.”
“Only because you lured me into it,” she said, rolling down onto Rose’s hand, but the mood was simmering down. There was an element of work to it now—a hard thing to associate with your drop undead girlfriend taking your hand deep into her body, but here they were. “On Alternia, we would call it a ‘bone bulge sheather.’”
It’d really be much more snappy to call it a ‘boner sheather,’ but if there was one thing Rose had learned about trollish vernacular, it was that the uglier and more ungainly something sounded, the better.
The shameglobes were just a little while away, in a wide section made to accommodate them. Rose reached in, stretching her fingers further, and there.
She had touched Kanaya’s shameglobes before, though not very often. The early mishaps—injury (to put it crudely, dick slap), mechanical misadventures in troll anatomy (stream crossing)—had been enough to make them both wary of getting too frisky with them, and so the anatomy was only faintly familiar. Even so, she could tell one of the globes was swollen and larger than usual.
“Am I hurting you?” Rose said.
Kanaya shook her head. Her bulge was wet and wrapped Rose’s forearm, and squeezed, as though for emphasis. At length, she said, “The sensation is less intense than it should be.”
“You can’t feel it?”
“Kind of. As though your hand… through a barrier.”
“Is this normal?” she said. “It seems like it should be painful.” Her mobility was a bit limited, but at length she was able to find something of a seam, where it felt like there was something attached to one of the globes. “I’m going to rotate my arm a little,” she said. “Relax for me, won’t you?”
Her thigh pressed warm against Rose’s cheek; Rose turned her head and kissed the inside of her knee, then lower, then as far as she could reach, and went on.
The thing attached to the shameglobe, whatever it was, seemed to be embedded in and through it—that definitely had to be painful, Rose thought. She tried to get a grip on it with her fingers, but couldn’t move her fingers wide enough. She slid her fingernail under it, and there. She managed to slip the fat, slippery length around her fingers.
“All right,” she said. “I’m pulling it out.”
“Pulling—the globe?”
“No—ow!” she said, as the nook clamped hard around her hand and wrist. “No, there was something in there. Unless you’d rather ‘put yourself on the culling list,’ as you said.”
“Somehow that seems more advisable than performing at home surgery.”
“You never had much of a problem with doing it before. Maybe the distinction is ‘to other people’?”
A little pull and a yank, and part of whatever it was slipped out of the shameglobe. Rose took a firmer hold on it, and whatever it was suddenly whipped all the way out of the globe and… it bit her? The faint surprise soon gave way to genuine pain as whatever it expanded its jaw, and clamped down on her fingers.
Don’t panic, she told herself. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. She let go of the whatever it was, but it seemed determined to bite through her fingers—dear god.
“… Kanaya.”
Kanaya, dazed, stroked the pillow. Feathers spilled out and stuck to her hair. “What?”
“I think we’re going to need a doctor for this,” Rose said, strained. “And maybe stitches.”
*
They managed to get to an emergency room while fully clothed and detached from one another, but not before whatever it was attached to Kanaya’s shameglobe dug its teeth into her palm, and then escaped beyond Rose’s grasp. The tip of her finger was stitched up, the other wounds cleaned and bandaged, and after two hours of waiting, a doctor finally came to sign them off. He was old, human, had exceedingly hairy hands, and came with a small entourage of exhausted looking residents. He took them into an exam room.
“Hello, hello,” said the doctor, blinking at them with a nearly puzzled expression. He looked down at the charts, and then said to Kanaya, “Miss Lalonde—”
“That’s me,” Rose said.
“No, it can’t be you,” said the doctor. He blinked at them again, and then said, “My apologies, Miss Lalonde. If you two wouldn’t mind, I’d like to you to answer some questions. Very rare condition. Imperative that we collect some interviews, you understand.
“When Doctor Morgen there saw your, what’s the word. Mate-spirit’s hand, yes, the hand of your mating spirit here, she said that the marks reminded her of something she saw in her anthropology textbook, and I had a little gander around, there and about, here and there, in a troll medical journal and then in a zoology journal, and what I saw was that this is indeed very rare, yes.”
Kanaya looked a particular and queasy shade of green. The residents, in their robes, shuffled a little closer.
“Now,” said the doctor, adjusting his glasses again, “if you will all look at the Miss Lalonde’s hand, you will notice the series of bites around her finger and hand. The view is obscured, that is to say, hard to see, because of the work that has been done, but I’m sure someone has some, what do you call them now, pictures. The bite marks correspond with a rare parasitic species that attach to the trolls’ gene bladder, also known as ‘a shame globe.’ They live on the gene bladder, and occasionally even worm their way inside of it—very gruesome, you’re lucky you found it so early. Swells up the gene bladder, causes all sorts of sexual dysfunction. And when threatened, they can detach and bite, see, the invading force. Now, Miss Maryam, the question, is sensitive, but do you practice, what’s it called, concupiscent quadrant monogamy.”
There was a long, stiff moment, and then: “Redly.”
“Yes, see. Trolls are especially susceptible to diseases, diseases of a certain transmission, especially in the black quadrant, where the threat of disease is part of the, the kis-mesh-fit-ic charm. In fact all medical cases of that very parasite we have on record are from when a kismet intentionally infects their partner as a way to, ah, spice up the bedroom. In the future you may consider using a form of protection.” He reached into his pockets, and pulled out several packages, and handed them to Rose. “And you will want to head to the resident troll reproductive specialist on the third floor, to take care of the parasite currently chewing at your gene gland. Your gland bladder. And the both of you will want to submit yourselves to some testing.” The doctor nodded his head, then said, “Fascinating case, wouldn’t you say. Absolutely marvelous.”
*
It was late at night when they made it home again. The blood splatters on the floor, which had once seemed like sure proof that she’d bleed out from the fingers, seemed far smaller without the magnifying effects of panic. Miniature, in fact. Rose prodded at a dark red smear on the floor, and wrinkled her nose when it smeared.
“I’ll clean,” Kanaya said. “Your hand is all right? How much morphine did they give you?”
“It’s a bite, Kanaya, not an amputation.” Kanaya sank into silence. She took a rag, and bent down and began scrubbing. Rose found herself, for no reason she could think of, deeply annoyed by the curvature of her horns. She put a hand on Kanaya’s shoulder and said, “Why don’t we go to sleep?”
“The longer you leave it, the more it will stain in the morning.”
No amount of jibs could convince Kanaya otherwise, so Rose ran the bath, hot despite the weather. She bathed alone, careful to keep her hand from the water. She sniffed at her clothes; they smelled like Kanaya's pheromones, sex, and probably millions of other things she couldn't smell because of her tragically inferior nose. When she came out of the bath, dripping water onto the floor, Kanaya was changing the sheets and sponging the mattress down. Her recupracoon had been emptied and rinsed, slowly filling with new slime. Rose felt a frustrated pressure flowering in her sinuses as she regarded the whole scene: the noxious green color of the slime, the long muscles of Kanaya’s back flexing grey beneath the thin white shirt she wore to the ER. She pressed her knuckles against the bridge of her nose, but this did nothing, and Kanaya said nothing to her. They had to get out of the apartment, out and far from home, out and out, or they'd restart this fight two days from now with explosive force.
It was still the fourth of July. Maybe she'd bring the vodka.
*
The best spot to watch fireworks was at the top of a hill near an old belfry, pressed by trees on one side and tall grass on the other. The steps were old and stone, some cracked by the force of many winters and greedy grass. Kanaya held onto Rose’s elbow, though they had been up this way before, and she had never seemed off-balance before. She blamed night, and the steps, and the faint buzz of conversation at the top.
It was already crowded, with people clustered around the belfry in even, well-spaced rings. They found a spot against a tree, and sat in the grass. Rose checked her watch. Twenty ‘til.
“I still don’t understand the point of this holiday,” Kanaya said. After the shower she had changed into a set of plain work clothes, and had her hair clamped back. In profile, she looked severe and over serious. She wore a purple heart necklace around her neck, of trollish design and make. Rose, before, had found it gaudy and a little obnoxious. Now when Rose saw the shadows of dark, towering horns emerging from a tangle of black hair in the crowd, she felt the urge to fall into chilly resentment. She understood, or maybe had only thought she understood, the whole mess and tangle of troll romance, but finding out she was living it had come as an ugly surprise. The first years of their relationship had taken place on a barren rock, and then they had been apart while Rose was in college, and only now were they together again. Strange as it sounded, she had forgotten that this was a world with more living people than dead.
“Didn’t you have parades celebrating Alternian pride?” Rose said.
“Every day is Offer Your Profuse Thanks To The Condesce Day. But I do recall an annual televising of the slaughter of underperforming colonies.”
“Really?”
“I think so. My lusus wouldn’t let me watch it.”
Rose covered her mouth with her hand, and laughed. Kanaya smiled, and buried her face into the crook of Rose’s neck. She tried to press a kiss. Rose pushed her away, and the next attempt, too. She pulled away, ears swiveled down and eyes averted; Rose moved closer, sinking a little so she could fit into the long line of Kanaya’s torso. But she found it unyielding, and nervous.
“Are you mad at me?” Kanaya said, looking out to the belfry.
“I’m upset with you. Those are two different things.”
“Not from where I’m presently seated,” Kanaya said, in full blown sulk mode.
Rose pushed herself away. “I’m sorry, but who was the one who nearly had her fingers cut off because of her girlfriend’s reckless sexual habits?”
“You’re over-exaggerating the matter. Your finger is nowhere near severed.”
“So you don’t deny the part where you apparently joined a speed hate fucking club, replete with all kinds of exotic sexually transmitted parasites? Should I expect your bulge to spring up and begin talking to me the next time you go into troll—”
“No one talks about troll heat in public,” Kanaya hissed. “And this is a very stupid argument, when we both know that you are my fated flushed partner—”
“’Fated’? You watch Troll Friends repeats, and apparently never learned how to operate a condom. I’m so glad that after going through the trouble of creating a universe, the gods apparently decided that my ‘fated partner’ would be dead fifty years from now from syphilis.”
“I’m sorry. Does that satisfy your vast pools of gloomdrunk, or do you also require me to promise that I will not only wrap my bulge and my partner’s bulge in latex balloons, but throw away the pail?”
“If it keeps you from another infestation, then yes,” Rose said, her hand reaching up and around to grab a horn. “And I’d rethink your position of antagonistic defensiveness when the fault for this is unquestionably yours.”
Kanaya let out a long groan. Someone cleared their throat. Rose looked up and around, and realized that she had a leg slung over Kanaya’s hips and a hand on each horn. Kanaya stank of pheromones and had one hand spread out on Rose’s stomach.
“Let’s take this to the car,” Rose said, yanking on a horn. Kanaya moaned, knees bucking before she could even make it to her feet. They headed back down the hill. Someone muttered, “Teenagers” at their backs.
It was hard to imagine sex as a possibility after the last few days or even hours, but then they were in the parking lot, Kanaya on the ground as Rose rode her face, Kanaya’s hands on the back of her thighs, her ass, a finger rubbing against her asshole as her tongue flicked back and forth from her clit to her entrance. She was angry, so angry: at Kanaya, for being reckless, for forgetting that she had another partner, that she had Rose—not angry for a raging urge to keep Kanaya for herself, but angry because Kanaya hadn’t thought to protect herself, or Rose. Angry, in a guilty way, at herself, too, for flirting with people with Kanaya nearly at her arm, citing cultural polyamory, and forgetting what it meant. She came with a pleasant, violent spasm, slit grinding against Kanaya’s chin and mouth. When she came back to herself, knees scraped raw from the asphalt and sweating in the heat, she reached behind her, and let the bulge wrap around her wrist. She got a few strokes in before Kanaya winced, and shook her head. Rose made sure her palm dragged, hot, along the length of the bulge before releasing it. She looked down at the woman beneath her, and was amazed by how quick the steady tide of forgiveness had come over her. Inertia, or some other, better explanation? They’d be all right either way.
She maneuvered off of Kanaya, and helped her to her feet, both of them calmer and no longer angry. Against the waning moon, Kanaya had a halo of white around her neck. Rose pushed up onto her toes, and Kanaya bent down to meet her for a kiss—the first of the fireworks went off over the trees then, coloring the top of the trees with red and blue light.
“Oh, for god’s sake,” Rose said. Kanaya gave her a puzzled look, but said nothing. She reached over and adjusted the part in Rose’s hair three or four times before giving up and sliding the headband back on. They straightened out their clothes and settled onto the hood of the car. Rose stroked Kanaya’s shoulder and arm, played with her long fingers and traced the green veins on the pale underside of her wrists. Finally, Kanaya took Rose’s bandaged hand and examined it carefully. Then she let them go, her hands falling away as though she had been startled.
“I,” Kanaya said haltingly, “I wish I had thought to be more careful. You know I’m loath to hurt you.”
“I know,” Rose said. “I’m dedicating my next book to you. Especially the vagina dentata scenes.”
Kanaya rolled her eyes. “And I appreciate your glibness,” she said. “It does not at all make me feel embarrassed or as though I should have kept my mouth shut.”
“Well, we both know how we deal with sincerity.”
“I think I’m all right at it.”
“You are,” Rose said. Kanaya smiled, shy and secretive. The night softened the cut of her fangs and the edges of her cheekbones glowed with foreign, strange colors as the fireworks released themselves into the air; Rose couldn’t remember if she had meant her words in jest or not. The cool metal of the car, the distant boom from afar, the trees changing colors, Kanaya quiet beside her, steady and warm--in the darkness, it was easy to believe that there was nothing else but this, and never had been.