Quit Your Waning (Over the Moon #3)

JIHAE

My inner horndog did not let those taboo thoughts blow over. Instead, they blew out of proportion. Like a lot of other Renatans, I heard the eerie howls and strange hollow knocking in the jungle every night, but I knew their theories were unfounded. Tinsley wasn’t setting up speakers in the trees and making the Halloween season extra creepy. I knew it was Sizzle, and his nightly howls had slithered into my dreams like a ghost in the seams of an old house’s wallpaper. They were riddled with panting and huffing, screams that turned to moans, the feel of fur on my bare skin, and a long, dexterous tongue dragging between my—

I slapped both of my cheeks like I was applying toner, attempting to soften the bristling heat crawling up to my eyebrows.

Who was I kidding? I’d been working with Sizzle every day since decorating began, and each day, my heart skipped harder when he teased me, looked at me, even if he just breathed in my direction. He was so much more than I’d expected. Attentive, patient, helpful…

And so forward. I wasn’t used to that at all. Though times were changing, people in Korea still weren’t so open about what they wanted.

But Sizzle?

His stare dripped with interest, not to mention his very long tongue. And sure, he walked on four legs, but after the last several days working together, I’d completely forgotten.

In fact, thinking about the sashay of his muscular shoulders made me press my thighs together.

There was no denying it.

I was infatuated with my decorating partner, despite the taboo and danger. And boy, did I know how to choose them. I hadn’t had a crush on a single one of my blind dates back in Korea, and the last boyfriend I’d had was my freshman year of college. I’d had almost no experience with human men, let alone the galaxy’s most charismatic chaos machine. I was so out of my depth, I could barely walk straight.

The jungle’s chorus withered to silence, and the hair stood on the back of my neck. I smiled, not afraid but excited and trying my best to keep it together. I looked into the foggy trees, brushing sweat off my brow, and waved at the ghostly morning shadows where I thought I saw movement.

“It’s adorable how unaware you are,” Sizzle greeted, prowling out from a different direction, the fog clinging to his fur like a cape. “Brings out all of my best predatory instincts.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, pulling one of Mr Fareshi’s light orbs from the levicart. We’d peppered the graveyard with decaying hands and skulls, bricked a well with a cauldron hanging from its rope next to a toddler-sized witch’s cottage dripping with black vines, and wired together plas bones of life-sized shilpakaari skeletons that slumped against the trees, sacrificial offerings littered across their laps.

But the campsite had been the most fun.

Sizzle had thrashed his head back and forth to rip the tent to shreds. He’d pounced on it like a fox hunting minx in the snow. Both adorable and terrifying, as his weight slammed into the ground and shook the trees. We’d played tug of war with the ropes—a game he let me win—and I’d gone home flushed, needy, empty. I’d watched that French film again, strumming my fingers along my slit, working up the courage to look for toys on the holomarket…

Now it was time to hang cobwebs, reflective eyes, and orbs from the trees. I blanched at the thought of climbing a ladder on uneven ground and dropped the orb with a squeak. “Aysh…”

Sizzle and I both reached for it. He swiped it up with his graceful claws, looking at the boughs high overhead. “Ah,” he hissed languidly. “Horrors below, horrors above… I like your human holidays.”

“Thanks,” I said awkwardly, clearing my throat as I watched his rows of teeth click and realign.

How did a bilong show affection? Nuzzling? Love nips? My cheeks grew hot again, so I dragged the ladder to the side of the levicart. “I know you have to patrol too, but could you watch the ladder while I climb up?”

Sizzle set the orb back in its crate and lifted the ladder one-clawed, inspecting its height. He tossed it to the undergrowth in a shiver of bloody fern leaves, sending the fog racing from the bushes, and pinned me with his intense yellow eyes. “What if I have a more enticing proposition?”

My heart skipped. “Such as?”

“You don’t need that unreliable four-legged menace,” he quipped, nodding his muzzle at the ladder sticking up out of the ferns. “You need this one.”

He gestured to himself and leaned in, his fur teasing the collar of my light jacket. I breathed in instinctively because that bonfire scent? It was Sizzle. His fur smelled like the most decadent autumn burn pile. There was a hint of pine tree bark now too that whisked me back home every time I caught it. None the wiser, he reached one long limb behind me to the levicart’s controls. It rose several meters into the air at my back and I startled, not knowing it could do that.

“But how will I—”

Sizzle’s claw, as long as my entire hand, sank into the tree beside my shoulder and he leaned into my ear with a curious click of his teeth. I blinked back at his deep draw of breath.

“Have you ever wondered what it’s like to climb a bilong?” he teased, sighing against the bare skin of my neck. “Because I will be your ladder today.”

“You say things that way to embarrass me,” I accused him, throat tight.

“Mm,” he rumbled in agreement. At the blush creeping down my neck, he pressed his tongue into one of his fangs and grinned. “Your scent ripens when your cheeks rush with blood.”

My scent…? A sudden thought hit me like a freight train.

Sizzle could smell a lot more than just my shampoo.

But rather than being embarrassed as his wolfish face loomed over mine, I wondered…

Do bilongs kiss?

I licked my lip on instinct, staying still against the tree, expecting—I don’t know what. Sizzle’s eyes slashed to my mouth and he swallowed, pushing his massive bulk away. I took a deep breath, staring at his withers as his shoulder blades pistoned with his gait.

“I’m not in the mood to patrol with my cousin and his mindless ass-whip, so I’m playing hooky today. Which means I’m all yours,” he said with weight. “Under one condition.”

I drummed my fingers against the biria’s soft, bloody bark. “What’s that?”

“I know you have eaten. I smelled the noodles from your balcony.”

“Okay…”

“And I know that you are not hungry. It hasn’t been long enough.”

“Right.”

He looked over his shoulder with a hunter’s precision, lancing me with that stare. “Tell me why you shake.” His head tilted to the side. “It is not food. I’ve stuffed you so full of breakfast and nutrient bars that it’s a wonder you aren’t hibernating. And it’s not fear, because you, morsel, you just smell like honey all the fucking time. So what is it?”

My breath stuck in my chest, then tumbled out in a raspy chuckle. I pushed my hair off my forehead and flexed my fingers.

“Oh, ah, it’s… It’s just a medical condition.” Sizzle remained still, forcing me to continue. I swallowed the lump in my throat and stretched the scar along my collarbone self-consciously, my libido taking a much-appreciated nosedive. “I had surgery right before I was abducted and it wasn’t very… wasn’t very successful.”

“Surgery,” he asked, deadpan.

I pulled down the neck of my shirt and showed him the scar above my collarbone. “I had—have—hyperthyroidism. It made my hands shake, and I felt weak all the time. There were more symptoms, so I had surgery. The thyroid is a…” I cleared my throat of the incurable hoarseness that now plagued my voice. “I don’t know the word in English. A thing in our necks that makes hormones. It was too active and made me sick. So I had half of it removed.” I let go of my shirt and sighed at the ground.

“But it wasn’t very successful.”

“No. My hands still tremble and the surgery hurt my voice. Or maybe it was because I was kidnapped right after. I’m not sure.” I breathed in and gave him the smile I gave myself in the mirror some mornings, to galvanize my spirit. “But many things are better. I have more energy, my heart is better... And I don’t have hot flashes either. Actually, I’m really lucky. If the doctor had removed my entire thyroid and I didn’t have medicine, I would have died after I was taken.”

Sizzle’s hackles rose with surprise. He opened his maw and started panting, mouth claws worrying the fur around his throat teeth. His eyes bounced from my fingers to my throat to my chest. I held up my hand level with the ground so he could see the tremble.

“Most people don’t even notice,” I said with a shrug, wiping my palm on my pants. “I drop things, and I can’t draw well anymore, but it’s not so bad.” I smiled at our haunted trail and gestured around at the trees covered in cobwebs and spiders. “Actually, this has been really meaningful to me. I was a packaging designer in Korea, but it’s hard to do that with shaking hands. Decorating the trail uses the same skills. It makes me feel more like myself.”

Sizzle squinted at my throat as I swallowed.

“I have a question that I don’t like.” His nose crinkled up and his upper lip peeled back to show his fangs. “It might upset you.”

“It’s alright. You can ask anything.”

“You won’t go to the clinic, will you?”

A shock traveled through me and my lips parted. “How did you know?”

“You came to the hangar a couple weeks ago, remember? You smelled so tangy it tickled my nose for days. And the human doctor is on leave because her belly is swollen with pups. Her coil is the only one there. The shil with teal coloring and long tendrils.”

I bit my lip, wondering how much I needed to say. How much did I want to say? A meek flare of indignation settled in my stomach like heartburn. Sizzle didn’t need to know anything at all about my history. He was being too direct and blunt asking about these very personal things, and something uncomfortable squirmed inside me. He wasn’t trying to comfort me, and surprisingly, that hurt my feelings. He was just curious, like rubberneckers at a car wreck or a house fire. It wasn’t my health he was thinking of, but the rumors of which humans were stuck in which harems and—

“Do you want me to eat him?”

I blinked, then burst into laughter, barking into the canopy. Just like that, my spiral of worry dissipated. Sizzle licked his muzzle, trying to temper his obvious snarl.

“You can’t just eat people,” I laughed hopelessly.

“Yes I can,” Sizzle assured me. “I’ve eaten plenty of people. They taste disgusting, but sometimes it’s necessary.”

My face fractured into a brilliant smile full of happiness and confusion, and I felt light. He wasn’t pushing for details. He was just looking for solutions, and by the way he thwacked the jack-o-lanterns with his tail, he was feeling impatient for a way to make me feel better.

“No, I don’t want you to eat Dr Zarabi.”

“But you know that I will if I need to, yes?”

I held up both of my hands in surrender. “Yes.”

“So you feel safe with me.”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Safe enough to go to the clinic together?”

We caught each other’s eye, both frozen between the question and the answer. Sizzle sat on his haunches, stock still, his ears swiveled in my direction. And I realized he’d made me feel better after all. It wasn’t that he was bad at comforting me, but that he did it in the only way he knew how. With his mouth and claws and stomach and the promise of violence. He was a guard dog, not a lap dog, for lack of a better description. The thought made my spine soften and the color return to my cheeks. I felt like he’d wrapped a heavy, tight blanket around me like well-made kimbap, keeping all my insides in the right places.

“I can try,” I told him with an uncertain smile. “If you go with me.”

“Deal.” Sizzle snapped his teeth and pranced over, tail sashaying behind him with his usual brand of mischievous glee. Then his y-shaped grin curled and the words he spoke took on a serpentine hiss. “Now turn around and spread your legs, morsel.”

“Morago?” I yelped defiantly.

Sizzle snickered, steam jetting from his nostrils. “If you trust me, you’ll turn around and spread your legs for me.”

There he went, asking me to trust him again. I was growing suspicious, squinting at his sly expression. He was no better than the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, but I did trust him, so I turned around and stood with my feet apart.

Like a superhero, not a vixen.

It was a matter of principle.

As if he had his own gravitational pull, I felt Sizzle come up behind me and my feet swayed with anticipation. When his coarse red and black fur brushed between my thighs, I startled, looking down. His head appeared between my legs, ears popping out after passing my knees. He took a careful step forward until his withers were pressed against the backs of my thighs, then held me steady with one front claw.

“Grip behind my ears,” he instructed.

I bent forward, feeling silly, and did as he asked with my chronically trembling fingers. Then he shifted his weight, putting his back legs beneath him, and suddenly I was in the air five, ten, twelve feet, gasping as the fog swallowed the trail like the River Styx below.

“Oh my god!” I gasped, clutching his fur like a life ring. Sizzle cracked his neck and then his shoulders did the same right beneath my seat bones. The orientation of his scapulas shifted so that instead of sitting on withers, I was sitting on shoulders. As in humanoid shoulders.

“What shall we hang first?” he asked, rummaging through the options with his front claws like they… like they were hands. I brushed my sticky hair away from my forehead and blinked down at the hammer he held up. I took it and clutched it to my chest, wobbling this way and that as he sifted through the levicart’s supplies, looking for a cup of nails.

Sizzle was acting like this was any normal Tuesday, so I did my best to hide my flabbergasted shock and rasped out, “The, uh, the lights?”

“Mmm, good choice, morsel.”

I dropped more nails in the first ten minutes than I think I ever had in my life, but Sizzle never complained. He brushed his claw against my calf in time with his deep, slow breathing, and eventually my tremors lost the edge of anxiety. It was like anything else Sizzle did—unexpected but laced with that chaotic sense of normalcy. Even when his mouth claws brushed against my ankles with curiosity.

We set a rhythm and listened to horror pop on my holotab, hanging ghosts and cobwebs and will-o-wisp charging docks. I expected Sizzle to set me down after a few minutes, but he never did, only crouching now and then to pick up my detritus or listen to the trail. He claimed he never saw anything dangerous during patrols, but the habit died hard. His teeth would itch and clamp shut if he went too long without checking our surroundings.

When my playlist ended two hours later but my hands were still occupied, I turned to small talk to fill the silence. A genuine compliment was always a safe conversation filler, so I said what was on my mind. “You must have amazing core strength to hold me up on two legs like this all morning. Thank you.”

Sizzle turned his head sideways to stare at me with one golden eye in calculative silence. I blinked at him, hanging the charging dock from two nails, pretending like I didn’t notice the way his claw tightened on my knee.

Then he said, “I can walk on two legs. Some of my kind prefer it. Do you prefer it?”

I faltered with the hammer and dropped my nail, eyes cutting to his in the cool red glow of the mid-morning canopy, absolutely appalled.

He could walk on two legs?!

Was this common knowledge? Did the other humans know, just not me? How should I answer? What did he want to hear? Confusion and surprise addled my social graces. I swallowed hard, not knowing what to do, what to say. I felt like an idiot.

Sizzle crouched, saving me from myself, and leaned forward with his head bowed so I could stand. I caught the faint glint of the nail I’d just dropped at the base of the tree and picked it up with a grimace.

“Uh… Found it!” I said, trying to change the subject. I could save face for us both if I pretended like my faux pas never happened. I turned towards him with the nail held high and a bright smile, but my jaw went slack.

Sizzle crouched on the balls of his back feet, elbows resting loosely on his knees. His head dipped between his shoulders, poised and awaiting my reaction.

There was no mistaking his body in this pose as being humanoid but not. His hips weren’t situated in the same way they had been before, where he could sit like a canid and have his front claws planted on the ground. They’d rotated just like his shoulders. His underside was covered in a short sleek coat of black that rippled over muscular thighs and abdominal muscles like a god of death. He was as dark and deep as a shadow, full of the passive violence of a dragon, and his proportions, previously hidden in the length of his bristly coat, incited visceral human fears of things that go bump in the night. He was terrifying, regal, otherworldly…

Breathtaking.

“Is this better, morsel?” he asked, cocking his head to the side. His throat teeth clicked down the length of his esophagus and into the divot of his sternum where a human heart would be as he awaited my answer, staring me straight in the eye.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” I breathed, voice thin and uncertain. “I… I like you either way.”

Sizzle’s pupils dilated so wide only a thin ring of highlighter yellow pierced his stare. He crawled forward, resuming his four-legged gait as his hip and shoulder joints popped fluidly into their quadrupedal positions. Goosebumps rose all over my arms and neck. Like prey, I was rooted to the spot.

Sizzle huffed against the scar on my collarbone and I shivered.

“Glad we’re on the same page.” He dragged in a deep breath and hummed with appreciation. “Tomorrow, clinic. Then we work more on the horrors above.”

He winked at me, glancing up at the ghosts and cobwebs… and our levicart, still humming high above. Sizzle rose to his hind legs, stretching up into the misty boughs of the trees. An eight-pack stretched long as he reached his overly long arms into the branches, carefully collecting our equipment. He flexed his hip muscles and they rotated his pelvis into a bipedal position on demand. The ‘v’ was more prominent than a human’s, and the protruding bones were pommeled almost like a Western riding saddle. The muscles flexed as he shifted weight, and I found myself face-to-face with a prepuce of silky black fur that hid his—

Oh my god, he’s naked.

I’d never even thought about it. I clapped my hands over my mouth, my face as bright as a cherry. Sweat misted the back of my neck as my breath thinned in a mild, infatuated panic.

How had I never noticed he was no different than a man?

A naked man?!

“Michigetta,” I whimpered to myself, flexing my toes in my boots to keep from running away.

Sizzle lowered, flexing his shoulders and hips back into their usual rotation. He looked me right in the eye as I had my silent, internal freak-out.

“Still like me just the same?” he asked in a more serious tone.

I opened my mouth, unable to breathe enough to answer, so I–I nodded. The smallest, most timid of nods. My blood felt like lava in my cheeks and my clit tingled as if I was about to pee. I squeezed my knees together and swallowed hard.

Sizzle grinned and huffed the hair off my neck as he leaned into my space. “What a sweet pet.”

I tilted my face into his by the tiniest fraction, hoping he didn’t notice as I breathed in his bonfire scent. His mouth claws brushed my chin and throat with delicate pinpricks, searching for my scar. When they found it, something wet and firm pressed against my collarbone. His tongue, I realized. Goosebumps erupted across my neck and arms, and he hummed.

“See you in the morning, morsel,” he steamed with that volcanic voice. He backed away from me, running his tongue through his throat teeth, looking at my throat with a glassy, hungry gaze.

Then the fog swallowed him up as if he’d never been there.

And the jungle started singing once again.