Atlas
Thankfully, my urge to rut all the time had subsided, but Kassie had been acting strange. I hadn’t realized how much humans liked to brush their teeth. It was far more than the standard twice a day I’d originally assumed in humans.
She’s begun to run out of her toothpaste.
We’d stayed in the cabin for three days. Even with mating four times a day, which I considered a significant decrease from a Mothman’s normal seed output… Kassie still seemed to think it was excessive.
After some research on the internet, using my phone, I found out that fully grown human males in their thirties can come then have a refractory period that can last anywhere between thirty minutes to hours. The older these males get, the longer those refractory periods can become, sometimes lasting days.
That sounded fucking awful.
Meanwhile, I was ready to go right after I released the previous load.
I guess that is why Kassie was often sitting on a bag of ice. She wasn’t used to being completely wrecked all the time.
It wasn’t just me initiating, though. There were times when she climbed me like a tree, tickling my neck with her teeth in a way that drove me wild. Sometimes, I wished she would just bite me the way I had bitten her.
On the occasions when we didn't claw at each other like feral beasts, I made her rest, and pampered her the way a good moth should—bringing her steaming mugs of my hot chocolate that made her eyes flutter in pleasure. Since I was the first Mothman to obtain a match, I felt I had to set the tone for my entire species.
I ordered plush blankets in deep, forest greens, purples and midnight blues, silky sheets with a thread count that made Kassie gasp when she ran her fingers across them and a mountain of pillows that smelled of lavender and cedar. She already had belongings from her room with Harlow. Her large collection of dog-eared paperbacks and stuffed plushy animals, some I’ve never even seen before.
What the hell is a capybara?
We were combining my things with hers and also buying new things together. It made me happy, it was so… what was the word?
Domesticated.
Things were delivered quickly because of the town app on phones specifically for monsters. It was a sleek interface with a dark green background and glowing yellow icons that resembled forest mushrooms.
The delivery service, "Falls Munchies," employed poltergeists who ventured deep into the shadowy woods, their electric bikes equipped with special headlamps that cast a non-threatening, blue glow. They'd leave packages of groceries at the designated homes of the monster who ordered them.
The service was for anyone, even the humans in town. Obviously, the delivery workers had their disguises on. I had used it often when I first came to be here, when I was less aware of my surroundings and more monstrous. It was a time when I wasn’t yet comfortable mimicking human mannerisms in the crowded aisles of stores.
Gideon and the wolf shifters helped many of us adjust to the transition, teaching us how to use phones and electronics, and how our new human forms worked during the daytime. While we were learning all of that, the delivery service was invaluable.
Then, I was using it again because I wasn’t about to have my female be seen by that fox shifter.
It all felt normal, us putting together our new home, but I knew that Kassie was feeling very trapped. There was only so much you could do: decorate our home, eat, mate, watch a movie, have dessert, or have dessertonyour female, then mate and do it all over again.
She needed “air.”
There was plenty of air in the cabin, but she needed the fresh stuff, but I wasn’t about to have the fox try to sneak in. He had been absent on his server. I made her check, and while I tried to act like everything was fine, Kassie knew that it was upsetting me.
I was not the most subtle person.
“Atlas, stop looking out the window.”
“Atlas, there is nothing up the chimney.”
“Atlas, if you keep staring at the door, he will not suddenly appear.”
I was bad at keeping secrets and the idea of danger away from her. I’d never protected anyone but me. I’d never had a female, that I knew of. None of them mattered compared to her.
Kassie was the only one who mattered. And I was her only male.
I puffed my chest up with pride at that one. I was the only male, real male appendage that is who has been inside her.
She had many toys, and she wanted to use one of those toys in the wrong hole. Correction, wrong hole onmybody. Where the body gets rid of things. Never in my cryptid life had I ever thought of such a thing.
