Hottest Blood

by Jeff Gelb

  Tom pressed against the tall, husky boy and looked into his eyes. “I feel like I know you, too, Grant.”

  The music stopped.

  “Do you want to dance again?”

  An urgency surrounded them, reminding Tom that his time in female form was limited. He turned to the wall clock and cringed. It was already ten o’clock. Fighting disappointment, he squeezed Grant’s hand. “What do you want to do, Grant?”

  Grant blushed this time. He looked at the clock, too. “What time do you have to get back?”

  Tom wanted to say never. “Midnight,” he purred softly.

  “That’s awful early.”

  Tom pouted again.

  “Are you staying with your cousin?”

  Tom nodded slowly.

  “How about if we take a drive before I bring you back there, then? Get out of this noise and crowd.”

  Tom’s heart leapt. This was too good to be true! But he refused to let himself doubt that it was happening. He only prayed that nothing would mess up this golden opportunity. Happily, he saw Ginger across the floor in Ralph’s arms as the big jock’s hands kneaded her firm ass. Grant saw, too.

  “I’d love to,” Tom breathed.

  Grant was still glaring at Ginger. “Let’s go.”

  Without a word, they turned from the dance floor and started down the steps, hand in hand. Tom’s heart was beating fast as he pressed against Grant, feeling Grant’s heart pounding in rhythm, too.

  In the parking lot, Grant led Tom to the passenger side of his big blue Pontiac Grand Prix. He opened the door and helped Tom in like a gentleman. Tom fluttered his lashes once more and licked his lips when Grant squeezed into the driver’s seat.

  “Where do you want to go?” asked Grant sheepishly, starting the car.

  Tom closed his eyes and stuck a long nail in his mouth delicately. It was now or never. Tom’s wristwatch read 10:05. “How about the lake?” he asked.

  Grant laughed lightly, backing up the car. “You can even read my mind.”

  They kissed for several minutes in the front seat, then Tom winked at Grant and got out of the car, entering the backseat and lying down, the dress pulled above his beautifully formed knees. Grant blinked, hesitated, then followed.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” Grant said happily, crawling over Tom carefully. He trembled as Tom guided his hand under the long gown.

  “Me neither,” whispered Tom. “I’ve dreamed of this moment…” Tom loosened Grant’s tie as Grant straddled above him, then unbuttoned Grant’s shirt. If only time would stop.

  “It’s like we’ve been waiting for each other to meet, that we already knew each other in some kind of way,” gasped Grant as Tom licked his hairy chest.

  “We do,” Tom sighed, unbuckling Grant’s belt and then sliding the slacks down muscled thighs. “We’re meant for each other.”

  “Tommie,” Grant moaned as Tom threw the clothing to the front seat, bending over to kiss him and lick him. “Oh, God, Tommie…”

  Tom giggled, shivering as Grant’s hands reached around him to unhook his soft dress. Grant carefully lifted it up, bringing it over Tom’s head and dropping it onto the front seat with the discarded tux. Grant unhooked and removed the sexy lace coverings underneath and tossed them aside, too, until they were both naked and close. Very close. Grant was redfaced and hard. Tom was wet and ready, fighting the desire to just pull Grant down quickly and be finished with this long, long torment of waiting, to feel the length he’d desired and dreamed of for untold nights.

  Grant sucked Tom’s breasts, licked at his pubis, and touched wet lips to his. Their tongues wrestled again as their bodies moved into position, and then the object of Tom’s desire entered Tom’s new pleasure center with a stunning hugeness that made him climax immediately. And even as the vibrations of ecstasy shook him, Tom felt Grant shaking in kind, sharing in instant gratification.

  Grant lay on top of Tom, their sweat mingling, joining with the sweet scent of their love.

  “I always knew it would be like this,” Tom whispered, tears of joy flooding his eyes and cheeks. “I knew you loved me.”

  Grant looked at him curiously in the shadows but nodded in agreement. “I feel that way, too. It’s funny, isn’t it?”

  Tom saw moonlight flicker across Grant’s watch face: 11:30. His stomach trembled and he felt tears again, of sadness this time. Of futility that this once-in-a-lifetime experience was almost over.

  He wanted more!

  But he knew it couldn’t be. In half an hour, he would be Tom, not Tommie, and if he didn’t conceal this secret from Grant…

  Grant might be so shocked and infuriated by the trickery that Tom might never be able to even speak to Grant again.

  “I need to go home.” Tom forced himself to say the words.

  Grant groaned. The pain and desire was heavy in his eyes and leaked from every pore of his face.

  Maybe…

  Tom shivered, wanting Grant more than ever.

  Maybe…maybe Grant would understand. Maybe Grant would still want and love him despite the deception.

  They kissed. A long, deep kiss, both of them sighing as they pulled away.

  “You do want me, don’t you?” whispered Tom.

  “Yes. You know I do.”

  “I love you. It may sound funny so sudden like this, but it’s not sudden at all. Not really. I really do love you.”

  Nodding, Grant dropped his face to an erect nipple and sucked tenderly. “I love you, too.”

  “Promise me that tonight won’t be the end—that you’ll be with me again.”

  “You got that.”

  “I mean it, Grant. I love you. Promise me that even if I’m not exactly what you think I am that you’ll love me anyway.”

  Grant’s lips dropped past Tom’s sex-soaked pubic hair. Tom wriggled at the way Grant used his tongue, knowing it would feel just as luscious running up and down Tom’s usual equipment.

  If Grant weren’t lying.

  “Tell me truly. Tell me that nothing will ever make any different to our love. Tell me that you want me, no matter how much I change or how different I may become…”

  “You make it sound like you’re a werewolf,” Grant said, gurgling among Tom’s lower juices. “But everybody changes. I’ll be bald with a potbelly someday.” His tongue moved deftly between sentences.

  Grant’s voice was reassuring and smooth, but Tom knew it wasn’t a full guarantee. His eyes flipped down to the watch. It was 11:45. No time to get home before the transformation. In minutes he would know whether or not Grant truly loved him for himself, or if…

  But now that they had been a part of each other, Tom couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. And when Grant understand what had happened, that he’d given up Ginger for Tom, Tom still worried that he might lose Grant forever.

  Their lips touched. Tom tasted himself and Grant simultaneously with the greatest satisfaction he’d ever known. Contentment he had only dreamed of.

  “Please,” Grant implored, pressing his resurrected virility against Tom’s bush, trying to nudge inside. “Please. I want you, Tommie. I need you. Something about you—I need you. I need to make love to you tonight at least once more.”

  Tom didn’t move, though desire exploded inside him, too, warping his thoughts, making him want Grant more than just for tonight, for more than just the nine remaining minutes.

  “Please, I love you, Tommie! I promise—I’ll never leave you!”

  Tom began to move more slowly. “Is that what you really want? To be with me?”

  “Yes,” answered the husky tremble of Grant’s moan.

  He opened the sleek, padded thighs of his body, exhaling loudly as Grant filled him again, plunging deeper. “Oh, yes. Yes! Slow, Grant. Slow this time, okay? Make it last…”

  “Forever,” Grant mumbled as he slipped his tongue inside Tom’s mouth once more. Their bellies pressed tightly together, shimmering in ecstasy that grew stronger by the minute.
/>   “Hold on,” gasped Tom, greeting Grant’s steady pumping with a rhythm of his own and loving each movement as though he’d never known pleasure before. His eyes blurred, and the watch face blurred, too.

  Sweat glistened across their bodies and faces. They moved faster and faster. Minutes passed impossibly fast, but Tom still tried to slow the pace, to stretch the moment forever. “Not yet,” he whispered. “Not yet…”

  Grant was too excited to slow down. Tom could tell by his quickened pace, by the tight mold of Grant’s ass cheeks. And now Tom could no longer hold out, abandoning all hope of stretching out their union for the ultimate joy.

  Midnight.

  “I’m coming!” shrieked Tom as the big hand reached twelve.

  “Me too!” cried Grant.

  And on cue, the magic spell of the fairy godmother ended. Tom’s penis sprang forward without warning, replacing the vagina it had earlier become, growing around Grant’s penis like a groping umbilical cord as the throes of their orgasm exploded again and again. Their mouths parted, and Tom’s firm breasts became mere nipples beneath Grant’s fingertips.

  But as the acute pleasure ebbed, their unity stood firm. As Tom had hoped, their last moment of intercourse would continue forever. He cried with glee as his flesh mixed with Grant’s binding them together like Siamese twins, making them more truly one than any wedding vow between man and bitch.

  But in the dimness, Tom looked down Grant’s muscular chest and taut stomach to where their sexes connected—forever.

  Forever.

  Tom pulled back gently and winced at the pain. He reached down and, as though awakening from a wild dream, he suddenly understood.

  Forever. Till death do you part.

  And then Grant noticed that Tom’s body was no longer soft and supple, that the hair on his head was now short and coarse.

  Grant stared ahead blankly, making gurgling noises in the darkness. His luminous watch hands read 12:01.

  Tom was breathing hard again, but this time it wasn’t with excitement. Grant was still inside him, and he could feel Grant’s hatred.

  Inside him.

  Even that emotion of disgust was a part of him would always be a part of him now.

  Grant shook his head, choking as his hands flattened against the wiry hair scattered over Tom’s chest. His fingers stretched down to their melding and flew back warily, then back down. A low bellow of agony burst out of Grant’s lungs, becoming furious, uncomprehending wails and tears. “Oh…oh, my God! Tommie!”

  Grant’s hand squeezed their sharing, crushing Tom’s fingers. They both tried to jerk away, and now Tom’s cry was as loud as Grant’s. “No!” he whined.

  “No—NO! Tommie! What have you done to me!”

  Tom was sobbing, then laughing insanely, missing the high giggle and knowing that this wasn’t what he wanted. He had a sudden overpowering urge to urinate.

  And soon, Grant would have that need, too.

  Safe at Home

  Steve and Melanie Tem

  Mindy.

  “Touch me. Here. Like this.

  “You like to touch me, don’t you?

  “That’s a good girl. Oh, that’s right.”

  Charlie was incredulous. “You want me to take you to another horror movie? But you hate that stuff.”

  “The monster in this one has long sticky tentacles that come up out of a dark pool.” Melinda squinted at the newspaper ad and gave a short laugh.

  “Let me guess: It has a particular affinity for pretty young women.” Charlie’s laugh was easier, fuller than hers.

  “Don’t they all?” she said.

  Charlie took her to the movie because she wanted to go, and also because he knew there was a good possibility of sex afterward. She didn’t begrudge him that. Charlie was a good guy, and Melinda felt bad about using his baser instincts to get what she wanted. But it worked. It had always worked.

  She didn’t love Charlie, not yet. And he didn’t love her. She hoped he didn’t love her.

  “I love you, Mindy. You’re my favorite niece, did you know that?

  “You want to make your uncle Pat happy, don’t you? Let me show you how to make me happy.

  “Oh, you are such a good girl.”

  Charlie was a tender, considerate lover. He went slow. He’d never hurt her. She knew he thought what they did together in bed was beautiful.

  It made her want to throw up.

  Monsters made it possible for her to throw up. Monsters in horror movies especially, with sticky appendages or gaping maws or formless bodies that oozed from everywhere and never went away.

  At some point during every show she’d get up and hurry to the ladies’ room, hoping there wouldn’t be a line. She’d crouch over a toilet and vomit for a long time. If she’d been able to force herself to eat any popcorn or candy, it would come out of her in recognizable chunks, but everything else being expelled from her body was whitish and viscous, like semen. For a while then—sometimes minutes, sometimes the rest of the night—she wouldn’t be sick to her stomach.

  “Oh, no, Mindy, this isn’t wrong. We love each other, so how could anything we do together be wrong?

  “Show me that you love me, Mindy.

  “That’s right. That’s my girl.”

  She hated having to chew and swallow in front of people. Sometimes she caught herself imagining that if she opened her mouth too wide a sticky, sinewy monster would slide out and wriggle into the darkness under the house, under the streets, under the world.

  She watched Charlie eat. She wanted to see what his teeth did to food, how his tongue rolled and humped to get the food down. Sometimes in the middle of a meal she’d reach over and very lightly rest her fingertips on the hinge of his jaw, where she could feel the bones and muscles, sinews and tendons, all working together in one building rhythm.

  “You’re weird,” Charlie said the first time she was brave enough to do that. Mouth full of spaghetti, he leaned across the table and kissed her.

  Melinda had thought he was going to say he loved her. He’d had that tender, passionate, self-absorbed look on his face that had nothing to do with her. Relived that he’d said something else, she didn’t pull away.

  She tried hard not to imaging the spaghetti in his mouth. For some reason it scared her.

  Then she gave up and set herself to imagining it as vividly as she could. Whitish sticky tendrils, viscous sauce. Charlie’s mouth caressing it, taking everything from it, the inside of a kiss.

  “Sweet,” Charlie said, still looking at her more intently than she liked. “And very beautiful. But definitely weird.”

  “Your mommy and daddy didn’t mean me. I’m your daddy’s brother.

  “They asked me to babysit this weekend, remember? They asked me to take care of you while they were gone. Don’t you think they must trust me a lot to let me take care of their precious little girl?

  “So you can trust me, too.

  “Come here, Mindy. Come to Uncle Pat.”

  After the movie they often rode the bus across town to Charlie’s house. When she rode the bus alone, Melinda watched all the men waiting for her, in the other seats, at stops, on street corners, on billboards, and on movie posters. During heavy rains there were so many people in doorways that she couldn’t tell which ones were waiting for just her, and in the wet shadows she usually couldn’t see their hands. There ought to be a law requiring men to keep their hands exposed at all times in the presence of females. Especially girls. Especially little girls.

  A man with a narrow face, or maybe with only a penis for a face, stared at her from a narrow passageway when the bus stopped for a light. His long pale tongue slid out of the shadows and down his coat, down one leg and across the sidewalk, leaving a slick, steaming trail. The tongue was wiggling its way toward her when the bus pulled into the intersection. Charlie hugged her and whispered a soft alien language into her ear.

  In Charlie’s bedroom she took off her clothes, forcing herself to move slowly, hold
ing her breath, hoping the bile in her stomach wouldn’t rise into her throat. Charlie watched her adoringly. “You are so beautiful,” he kept saying, and Melinda flinched that he would say such a thing out loud. “You are so beautiful.”

  Melinda could barely let herself hear such nice things about her body, but she liked hearing them, was relieved each time that he didn’t say how ugly she was, how pale, how skinny or how fat, how wormlike smooth or how hairy. If she didn’t trim her bikini line her pubic hair would just keep growing, would spill out of her crotch and rise above the waistband of her shorts, would wrap itself like monkey tails up and down her limbs.

  A woman was never safe. Like all women, Melinda had wet, hairy hole in the middle of her body. A hole in the middle of her life. Where awful things might enter.

  Charlie invited her to stay the night. Melinda said no, she wasn’t ready, and Charlie didn’t push. He insisted on accompanying her on the bus all the way home. He was so sweet. Gratefully, she kissed him goodbye at her door, although she really didn’t want to touch him anymore. She didn’t ask him in.

  Alone in her apartment, she sat naked in the dark, all the bedclothes pushed well away from her. Cloth would burn her; her bare flesh was already aching with nothing touching it at all. It hurt her to be exposed like this; it would hurt more to try to cover herself up.

  Then she waited until she was too tired to wait anymore. She waited, as she did every night, for something to break her door down or to seep in under it. For something to drag her or coax her into the sticky dark outside.

  Safe. Safe at home.

  “Mindy, Mindy, you are so beautiful.”

  * * *

  That July the annual invasion of miller moths was the worst anybody could remember. They bred somewhere in the South and would go up into the mountains to die, Melinda read, or maybe it was the other way around; when she was afraid of something she tried to find out as much about it as she could, but often she had trouble keeping her facts straight, and that just made her more afraid. It didn’t matter anyway; the truth was, they came from everywhere, bred everywhere, and they would never die.