Her tolerance is building faster than I expected, faster than she expected too, though she won’t say it. I know by the way she adjusts the schedule each evening, crossing out numbers and writing new ones, moving the timeline up by increments she thinks are conservative but aren’t.
She’s settled into the cave the way a professional settles into a workspace. Vials behind the lip, not organized in any system I can identify but apparently functional. Notebook open, always open.
The shelf is full. I dragged a flat stone in from the ledge and set it at the right height for the workbench and didn’t say anything; she sat on it the next morning without comment.
The space doesn’t look like mine anymore, and it looks better for it. My cave has a workbench now, and a seat, and a glow-stone, and a woman.
My cave has a purpose beyond being a place to die.
She takes the bite every morning, same time. She moved the delivery site from her forearm to her neck on the second day, better absorption, she said.
She didn’t mention the other reasons, and I didn’t ask. I was too happy to oblige. The scent of her, the tease of her skin in my mouth, was exhilarating.
She tilts her head before I reach for her, baring her neck, and I bite, and she breathes out, a sound she doesn’t try to catch. My venom surges after it, all of it, the full flood that would bind her to me in a single morning. I give her the dose I measured instead. Two seconds. Then I take the rest back behind my teeth, and it costs me more than it did the day before.
This morning, after the bite, she sets the pen down. She doesn’t write. She just sits on the stone ledge and looks at me.
“I’m attracted to you.”
She says it flat, no preamble, and the professional voice arrives about a half-second behind, catching up. “That wasn’t how I meant to open. I was going to lead with the protocol frame and work up to the content. Apparently, my mouth got there first. The physical orientation response has a non-clinical component. It’s affecting my baseline readings, which means it’s relevant to the titration design, which means I’m obligated to report it as a variable.”
She says it the way she’d report a contaminated sample.
I don’t move.
“I’m not telling you this because I expect you to do anything about it,” she continues. “I’m telling you because honest data requires honest baselines. If I’m pretending the orientation response is purely venom-mediated when it’s partly sexual attraction, then the titration schedule is built on false inputs. And I don’t build protocols on false inputs.”
As if she just told me the water source needs filtering and not that she wants me.
Nobody has ever said that to me. Nobody has looked at this body and said those words in any language. She said it in thelanguage of data, and it doesn’t matter that she framed it as a disclosure.
I’ve known since the first bite. My species reads biochemistry through heat pits and chemical receptors, and her arousal has been arriving in my senses every day, building. I’ve been holding it behind my teeth because she had the right to her own body’s privacy.
My glands are full. They have been full since she bared her throat this morning, and they push harder now, the venom climbing to the front of my jaw, toward her, and I hold it where I hold everything. Behind the teeth. She thinks she is reporting a variable. She does not feel what it costs me to sit still while she does.
Now she’s named it herself, and I can’t match her honesty, because matching it means examining why I’ve been holding back. The reason is older than this cave. Older than the sickness. Planted in me when I was eleven.
Thassren.
The memory surfaces hard. The male was old, bonded, dying, and he let me stay a night in his cave. Before I left, he told me what bonding really was.
“I am rewriting her, a little more every day,” he said. “Every bite takes a piece of what she was and replaces it with what I need her to be.”
My venom surges when she’s near, and every Ophidian knows what that is. The bonding response.
“What?” she says.
I realize I’ve been staring, and not at the notebook. At her neck, the pulse running under her jaw, the venom in my glands responding to the sight of it.
“Nothing.”
My hand moves toward the space between us, and I stop it before it arrives anywhere and set it back on my thigh. She’s already seen it when I look up.
“You’re a terrible liar for a creature with a face that doesn’t move.” She sets the pen down again. “You look like you’ve been arguing with yourself for the last five minutes. Who’s winning?”
“Nobody.”
“That tracks. You don’t seem like someone who wins arguments with himself.” She turns back to the workbench, picks up a vial, holds it to the light. “Your dried meat, by the way. Is it supposed to taste like that?”
