“Fuck this,” I say. “I’m out of here.
I put my clothes back on and leave the room. Through the next door, I can hear Mick moaning with pleasure, crying out like he’s having the sexual experience of a lifetime. I don’t know if he got an actual woman or slug monster, but at least he’s enjoying himself. I want to get as far from the place as I possibly can.
Downstairs, I realize that I can’t leave. I’ve got to at least wait for Mick to finish, and that means waiting by myself with a lot of old mushroom men that don’t speak my language. I don’t have a translation device, so I can’t even order a drink. And my erection is still killing me.
I contemplate going back upstairs and hiding in the bathroom, but then I remember the woman who was peering through the window earlier. I wonder if she’s still out there. I wonder if she’s available. Surely they won’t mind if I sleep with her instead of the slug creature upstairs. Unless the slug creature is what you get when you can’t afford one of the real women.
I go outside through the back door and step out on the porch, but the women are no longer here. I check around the side of the building. There’s no sign of them and there are no other entrances. I peer in the windows, but they aren’t inside either. I walk around the outside of the bar, stepping through mushrooms and deep purple soil, but it’s like they were never here.
I’m about to give up and go back in when I hear crackling sounds in the forest behind me. I turn and see one of them. The one with the red eyes is standing right behind me, glowing in the moonlight. She had been approaching me while my back was turned. When I see her, I jump and let out a small cry. The pink woman is just as startled as I am and runs away, ducking behind a tree-sized mushroom.
I wonder why she’s so afraid. Perhaps she’s never seen a human before. Perhaps she’s lived in the backwoods her whole life and hasn’t seen a whole lot of tourists from other worlds.
“Hello?” I call out. “It’s okay. I’m just a customer.”
I know the woman can’t understand me, but I’m hoping she might at least understand the inflection of what I’m saying.
“I’m a human. From Earth.”
The woman peers out from behind the mushroom, appraising me. She doesn’t say anything, just stares fixedly with her red beady eyes.
“Do you want to come inside?” I ask.
She doesn’t move.
I sigh and look away. I guess she’s not interested in me. Perhaps I just look too weird for her.
“I understand,” I say. “It’s okay. I’ll leave you alone.”
I turn around and head back toward the entrance. Then there are crackling noises behind me. I look back over my shoulder. The woman is following me, moving slowly and carefully. When our eyes meet, she freezes. She doesn’t move. Just stares.
When I turn to face her, she hops two steps back.
Looking at her up close, she is even more beautiful than I realized. She doesn’t wear any clothing, like the Manticore woman back in the city. Her skin is brightly colored. Pink face and chest, blue limbs and hair, and her flesh is purple where the colors meet in the middle.
I take a small step forward and she hops back again. When I take a few steps back, she comes forward. It’s like we’re doing some kind of dance.
“Are you coming or staying?” I ask.
I just stand still, not sure what she wants me to do. She looks down at my erection and up at my eyes. Then slowly, carefully approaches me. As she draws near, I can smell her. She doesn’t have the same pungent odor as the city Kynarians. She smells like flowers, like sweet morning daffodils. It’s just as strong of a smell, but I like it. It’s actually pleasant. She’s over ten feet away, but her flowery aroma overwhelms my senses. It clogs my sinuses worse than the mushroom spores that rained onto the city sidewalks.
“You’re really pretty,” I say.
I don’t know why I say it. It’s a stupid thing to say, especially when she doesn’t know my language. But her fragrance is doing something to me. I’m beginning to feel drunk. Or drunker, I should say.
She comes into the light and I can get a better look at her. Upon closer examination, I don’t think she’s related to the same Kynarians I saw in the city at all. She must be a different race. Instead of being a mushroom person, she’s more of a flower person. Her hair is not made of tentacles, as I first thought, but long blue plants—or something designed to resemble plants, perhaps for camouflage from predators. She also has a long tail that points straight up into the air like that of a velociraptor.
So if she’s not a normal Kynarian, what the hell is she? It’s like she’s some kind of nymph of the mushroom forest. Either way, she’s absolutely beautiful. And the more I inhale her scent, the more attracted to her I become.
When she sees me deeply inhale her scent, taking in more of her intoxicating fragrance, she becomes more relaxed and comfortable with me. She seems pleased that I enjoy her aroma. Perhaps for a flower woman, inhaling each other’s fragrance is the way you communicate your attraction to each other.
She comes closer and reaches out to me. She goes straight for my penis, rubbing the outside of my pants. Her perfume grows even stronger. I look down on her head, admiring her leaf-like strands of hair. I can see the red roots where the leaves grow into the flesh of her scalp. She slides her small blue hand down the front of my waistband and caresses my erection. Her skin isn’t the same as human skin. It feels moist and spongy. I reach out and touch her breast. It’s small and unusually firm. It feels like the skin of a dolphin or a string ray. When I rub the left nipple, it swells and leaks a few droplets of white oil, like some kind of natural lubricant.
She pulls away from me and steps back. She runs through the moonlight, disappearing into the mushroom forest.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
She peeks out at me from the shadows.
“You want me to follow you?” I ask.
She just stares at me with her red eyes, looking at me and back at the brothel. It’s almost like she’s worried somebody might see us. I wonder if she doesn’t want to have sex inside. Perhaps these flower women are more like humans and don’t like to sleep inside of pools of mud. Perhaps she prefers to have sex in nature, under the stars. It would be just like a forest nymph to desire this.
“Okay, I’ll follow,” I tell her.
Then I head into the shadows after her.
The mushroom nymph leads me deeper into the forest and I quickly lose track of her. I begin to wonder what the hell I’m doing out here. Mick said they’ve got giant people-eating spiders out here. It’s probably not the kind of place you want to wander around in after dark. But I keep going. I’m too enraptured by her, too drunk on her aroma.
I have to follow her scent in order to find her again. I track her through the mushrooms, through tall blue plants that match the hair that grows on her head. When I see her again, she’s lingering in front of a small home. Not exactly a home, more like a nest in the side of a large hollowed-out mushroom stem.
When I come near, she steps out and approaches me. She takes me gently by the hand and pulls me into the mushroom with her, laying me down in a soft bed made of some kind of cotton-like substance. Even though it smells of earthy fungus, the nest is far more comfortable than the mud bath back at the hotel. I could probably sleep here tonight if the woman would let me.
She seals up the entrance to her room by kicking soil and plants in front of it, basically burying us both alive inside her room. I don’t complain about it though. It seems like a weird thing to do, but it’s another world. They do things differently here. Perhaps it’s for safety, perhaps it’s for warmth, or perhaps it’s just the traditional way these flower people close their doors.
There’s no light inside the fungus room until the woman presses her body against me. Her skin illuminates with my touch. When I rest my hand against her chest and pull it away, a glowing blue handprint remains, as though activated by my body warmth. The light slowly fades, req
uiring me to touch her again in order to brighten the room, to see her beautiful face.
When I kiss her, she doesn’t kiss me back but she doesn’t pull away either. It’s like she doesn’t know what kissing is for, like it’s not something they do in her culture. Her breath is sharp and acidic. Her saliva burns my lips. It tastes like I’m kissing an overly ripe kiwi fruit.
The woman pushes my face away from hers so that she can climb on top of me. She claws at my pants, trying to get them off. She must never have encountered a belt or zipper before. I’m not sure if it’s because she’s not accustomed to clothing or if Kynarians don’t use anything like belts or zippers for keeping their clothes up.
I help her undo my pants and she grabs my penis before I can kick them all the way off. I pull off my shirt and pull her close to my body.
Her skin brightens against me, filling the entire mushroom hole. She tightens her legs against my thigh, rubbing her crotch against my knee. As her vagina touches me, her skin glows even brighter. It’s as if her iridescence is not caused by my touch, but by her sexual arousal.
The idea sobers me a little. I remember that this isn’t a human girl. It is some kind of being from a completely different world, some strange species that evolved in a completely different way than humans have. I wonder how close her DNA is to mine, if it is even compatible. I wonder if we could produce offspring if we decided to mate for real.
A thought flashes into my mind. I didn’t bring a condom with me. I didn’t think I would actually go through with having sex with an alien prostitute, so I wasn’t worried about it. Otherwise, I would have asked Mick for one.
The woman is ready. She doesn’t seem to even care about using protection. She straddles me, rolling her purple hips in a circle, trying to maneuver my penis inside of her.
“No…” I tell her, grabbing her by her hips and holding her back. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
Then I remember Mick saying that if I really wanted to be safe, I should stick to getting only blowjobs. So this is what I’m going to have to do. Even though this woman’s saliva is acidic and will likely burn my urethra, at least it’ll be a lot safer.
I pull myself up and try to move her head down toward my penis, but she resists.
“I can’t do that,” I say, shaking my head at her. “Only with your mouth.”
I point at my mouth.
“Just the mouth.”
But she doesn’t understand me. I push more firmly on her, but she resists harder. Since she doesn’t know anything about kissing, I wonder if she also doesn’t know anything about oral sex. I decide not to push the issue. The last thing I’d want to do would be to force her to do something she didn’t want to do.
When I release her, she forces all of her weight on me faster than I’m able to escape. I try to wriggle out from under her, but she pushes me hard against the ground. She lays her chest against mine and bites down on my collar bone. Her bite isn’t meant to be aggressive or even sexual. It’s like she’s just trying to hold me down with her teeth.
“Let me up,” I tell her, prying her teeth from my neck. “I have to go back.”
The second I get her mouth off of me, something sprays in my face. It’s the same flowery fragrance she normally emits, only now it’s in a wet, concentrated form. It squirts from her armpits, like a skunk spraying from its tail, and hits me like a grenade of tart peach.
Her scent calms me down, makes me want to stop resisting. I wonder if it’s some kind of pheromone the flower women use to attract mates, because the smell definitely makes me crave her. It makes me drugged and stupid.
Once she forces my penis inside of her, there’s no going back. It’s already done. Her insides capture me, curl around me, suck me in deeper. There’s no way I can stop this even if I tried.
She pants and moans, misting my neck with her kiwi-flavored saliva. But she doesn’t fuck me like a human girl would fuck me. She doesn’t ride on top of me or bounce up and down or bring me in and out. Instead, she clasps me in place, keeping me all the way inside and holding me there, her tail slithering against my thigh. But even without our bodies moving, there is still stimulation. It feels like her insides are filled with long gooey tendrils that tighten around my penis like a jellyfish capturing its prey. They rub against it, massaging it, coiling it up and jerking it off. It feels like I’m getting a hand job from a tiny mutant space squid that lives inside of her vagina, and it’s better than any sensation I’ve ever felt in my life. Even when the tendrils insert themselves into my urethra and slither all the way down my urinary tract, it’s still beyond heavenly.
Her body glows bright pink. If we weren’t buried inside of this mushroom, she would have illuminated the entire forest. Perhaps that’s why we had to be closed up in here, to prevent her light from drawing too much attention.
I lick her glowing skin, sucking her dusty, rubbery neck. She tastes earthy yet floral. She lays her head on me and her plant-like hair is itchy against my chest and tickles my neck and chin.
When I come, her body shivers and changes color, like she’s climaxing with me. She moans like a crying alley cat and sprays her skunk musk all over me. I wrap my arms around her and squeeze her body against me, sucking sweet moisture from her neck.
After we finish, she doesn’t release me, still holding me inside of her by sticky strings. She closes her eyes and curls her head into the crook of my neck. Our muscles relax. We hold each other, breathing against each other.
I inhale her fragrance and feel my mind drifting. Her smell is even more intoxicating after sex. It feels like I’m full of powerful painkillers, like I’ve just gone through surgery. My body doesn’t feel capable of going anywhere. I just want to stay in this bed, wrapped around this weird alien woman for the rest of my life.
My penis is flaccid, but it’s still inside of her, glued to her vaginal wall. I still feel movement curling around my shaft. It’s not necessarily stimulating it, just moving around it gently. As my eyes drift shut and I begin to lose consciousness, I imagine my penis has been inserted into a pool of wiggling, squirming maggots. And for some reason I find that idea peaceful and comforting.
Chapter Four
I wake up in a pool of warm mud, buried up to my neck. It takes me a few minutes before I realize I’m back in the hotel room. Mick’s ass wiggles at me from the bathroom as he washes black muck from his body within the toilet waterfall.
I close my eyes and open them again, wondering how the hell I got here. The mud is actually a lot more soothing than I thought it would be. I feel weightless yet supported, wrapped up safely in a blanket of warm bubbling sludge. I don’t want to get out. I just want to lie here all day.
When Mick sees that I’m awake, he says, “Time to get up. We’ve got work to do.”
He enters the room, drying off with a towel he brought from home, not bothering to hide his junk as he talks to me.
“How’d I get here?” I ask, my voice feels weird and echoed.
He chuckles. “You don’t remember?”
I shake my head.
“You were like a zombie,” he says. “I found you wandering around naked in the parking lot. You were completely trashed.”
“I remember having sex with this beautiful woman and then passing out.”
“Beautiful woman?” He roars with laughter. “That wasn’t a woman you were sleeping with. You definitely must have been trashed.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were with a sex-slug,” he says.
I shake my head. “No, not the slug. I didn’t go near that slug. I left the room and found a different woman. She was hanging out on the back porch.”
“There weren’t any women there,” he says. “They only had sex-slugs.”
“No, there was this super hot nymph girl. She was amazing.”
He shakes his head. “Nah, you must have imagined that. Sex-slugs are telepathic. They do whatever you want them to do, just by thinking about it. I bet it projected someth
ing into your mind so that you believed you were having sex with a woman, but were really just fucking a big sexy worm.”
He licks his lips after he says the word worm.
I look down into the mud, wondering if it all could have been just a hallucination. But no, it’s impossible. I clearly remember seeing the woman before I even encountered the slug. I clearly remember going outside and interacting with that woman.
“Man, was that an experience…” Mick says. “I never thought I’d fuck anything like that…” He drops the towel and goes for his clothes. “I kind of wish I had a sex-slug of my very own.”
After a shower and a weird fuzzy oatmeal-like breakfast, we take a slug-bus a couple hours out of town to meet with a tour guide who will be one of the guests on Bizarre Foods. His name is Bolgot and he’s one of the only Kynarians Mick could find who’s fluent in English.
“Bolgot, my man,” Mick says, calling to a big yellow blob-like Kynarian the second we step off the slug-bus. “How’s it going, bro?”
The creature turns around with a big round-toothed smile and oozes toward us, clomping on two stubby tree-trunk legs.
“Mr. Meyers,” Bolgot says. His English pronunciation is perfect, but the strange gurgled tone of his Kynarian accent comes through. “Very nice to meet you again.”
They tap heads when they meet, the traditional Kynarian greeting. Bolgot’s large mushroom cap bounces off Mick’s greasy skull. Then they shake hands.
Mick introduces me. “This is Rice. He’ll be shooting for us this week.”
Bolgot doesn’t bounce his head against mine and opts to just shake my hand. “Very nice to meet you, Mr. Rice.”
His pudgy marshmallow hand is too fat for me to wrap my fingers around and his fingers too stubby to wrap around mine, but I’m able to shake two of his digits well enough to call it a greeting.
All I say to him is “Hi.” Then he turns back to Mick.
“Elder How is waiting for us on his property,” Bolgot says. “We should go there as soon as we can.”
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