Are you?”

Yaya planted a kiss on Doc’s lips, the surface gentle, and yet hard muscle pounded like a heartbeat behind them. A quiver ate through every corner of Doc’s body. She drew Yaya back down and kissed between her neck and jaw.

Yes, she was sure, they were sure, and they were doing this. Last time, caution had reigned. Their fingers had crept past lines of intimacy until Yaya’s head sank between Doc’s legs, until Doc’s hand found the hair beneath Yaya’s broad waist and dipped downward. They had kept a few inches of distance between their bodies.

Now they grasped and plunged. The bedroom air sweltered with primordial heat, Yaya’s fresh changes summoning extinct summers. In some places, her skin burned at the touch.

Doc held on anyway. Her mind sank deeper, happier, at every kiss, stroke, inch of pressure. The darkness from beneath Yaya spread across Doc’s lower legs, her thighs, her hips. Not holding, only exploring. Magenta’s horns pressed at Doc between her legs, opening her to that muscled stalk. Teeth grazed the inner thigh.

A sharp pain made Doc wince. “Not so rough,” she said.

“She’s sorry,” Yaya said. “We’re sorry.”

Doc took a breath and blew into Yaya’s damp curls. Below, Magenta was moving again, her wet limbs a conduit for static electricity. Every stroke sent a tingling jolt through Doc’s blood. Where did one anatomy end and the other begin? She couldn’t think to care right now. Friday night, when fingers stroked inside Yaya, Doc remembered brushing something hard and rough, what she had mistaken for birth control. Only now did she realize those must have been Magenta’s teeth.

They had already crossed paths at an intimate moment in the past. There was precedent to cross again.

Doc let out a long, slow breath and sank into the bed again. That wet lightning flooded over her not as if surging from the foot of the bed, but as if she were hanging upside-down and Magenta’s arms pooled across her body as an

inevitable matter of gravity.

Yaya’s limbs held Doc, and Magenta’s explored. Yaya’s mouth kissed at Doc’s neck; Magenta’s mouth brimmed with thunderclouds and breathed a storm through Doc’s nerves. Their touches melted together, a systemic lightning bolt binding two bodies—no, three. No, one. Doc couldn’t tell anymore. Her heart quaked, anxious and then elated. The air itself squeezed, the room’s pressure mounting in heat. Another bout of thunder rocked her body, and she clenched her toes at the bedsheet’s corners.

If a miracle had made Magenta, then the storm she rode through Doc defied all universal law. She was never meant to feel this good. But pleasure wasn’t a crime, and if it was, it would be Doc’s favorite. The universe could bend for her, just this one night, and let time pool here in the bed’s deep waters, an eternal murky November.

Mouth, muscle, heat.

Mouth, muscle, explosion.

Moaning, sighing.

“Magenta,” Doc whispered without meaning to. One more lightning bolt rocked her into a sharp cry, and then a long, rattling sigh. She was sinking.