You owe her that.

Brain slug beauty standards are based on chemical cues rather than sight, nor are brain slug hosts primarily aroused by visual or audio media, though they understand this can excite humans. When attempting to initiate sexual relations, brain slug hosts will sometimes literally shove it into their potential partner's face just to get their attention.
—Slug Sutra, Chapter 7

Jenny stretched with Mel that morning. She was a little ways away, naked as she always was these days, hair over one shoulder and held with a blue clip Mel hadn't seen before. Mel tried to focus on his own form as she mirrored his movements. Toe touches. Sky grabbers. Shoulder circles. Sitting stretches. Her arms shook as she attempted push-ups, unable to keep up, and Mel paused and said:

"You haven't done a lot of exercise for a while. Don't try to overdo it. Go slow, do what you can do, stop before you hurt. Remember to stretch and cool down," he said, echoing the advice his own P.E. teacher, Mrs. Colum, used to tell him.

She listened. Didn't try to match his speed on the crunches or other exercises, and they finished the stretches together, Mel counting out loud, now that he had company. Jordan, hair wet, watched from the doorway, having already finished her shower.

Before they left, Mel noticed how long the budding slug on Jenny's neck had gotten. It had to be nearly six centimeters long, not quite doubling the length of her own slug, and lying still against the middle of her back. While the budding slug had the same color as Jenny's, Mel couldn't see the bone through it because the foot was still intact. A part of him wondered if a budding slug sometimes bonded with the parent's host. How would that work? Like conjoined twins? He didn't know.

Jordan didn't just want to hold hands on the way to work. Outside the apartment building, her fingers intertwined with his. Not clutching, but Mel noticed. They walked like that for about two blocks when they had to wait at a crosswalk light; two walks of Mel focusing more on his palm clasped to hers than on where he was putting his feet.

"Do you prefer holding hands like this?" he asked. Her free hand came up in a thumb's up.

"Okay," Mel said. Then, feeling this wasn't enough, he added: "I like holding hands with you."

Blair and Bobbie were behind the counter at the Cosmic Fill-Up. Ha-Yoon gave a haggard smile, which softened slightly when she saw them holding hands. They separated to go back to their individual tasks, and Ha-Yoon silently handed him the beer fridge card again. Mel took it and asked the obvious question.

"Are you okay, boss?"

She sighed.

"Sometimes we do things for love," she said, and stood up with a wince. There was an inflated pillow, like a donut, on the chair. She bared her teeth as she stretched her back. Then, she seemed to think of something. "Do you? Do things for your girlfriends? Tell them they're pretty?"

Mel blinked, thought about the shower curtain glory hole. Was that for them, or for himself? It was a group activity, certainly. So had been the oral sex video. But how much did he do for them? Was it enough?

"I don't know if I do enough," Mel admitted. "And I don't think brain slugs care about pretty. I'm not even sure what pretty is."

Ha-Yoon stared at Mel as if he were a brain slug. He ran a hand through his unruly hair.

"I mean, I know the word 'beautiful,' right? But I don't know what it means objectively. I see 'beautiful people,' and they're just—people? Like, I see them, eyes, ears, nose, cheekbones, lips, and I know the things that people say is ugly, like if they have a mole or a scar or a big nose or something, but I don't—they're all just—it's all just people?" the last word coming out with a questioning note, Mel's unsurety coming through in his tone.

She sighed.

"Look, even if two of them are brain slugs, Jordan's sister isn't, right? You need to tell her she's pretty. Both because she is pretty, and because she takes time and effort to maintain our bullshit human beauty standards. Relationships are about communication. Constant, honest communication. You cannot just take it for granted. Everybody has an ego that needs to be stroked. They need to know they're attractive to their partner," Ha-Yoon said.

Mel digested that.

"Okay," he said.

"Beauty isn't—it's not something you can quantify. Computers keep trying to make a generic, perfect template. It never works. It's always artificial. Beauty is what makes someone special to you. You need to think about how their body is attractive to you," Ha-Yoon said. "Boobs, breast, lips, hair—if they smell nice, if you like their shirt or shoes, or the sound of their laugh, the little habits that everyone has, the way they make you feel like you're home."

It was the kind of advice that a woman might give to a particularly inexperienced teenager who had no idea how to act in a relationship, Mel realized. The kind of thing that probably should have been self-evident, but he'd been too hung up in his own thoughts and feelings to think through. Yet it also sounded as if she was talking about her own life.

"You're right," he said. "I will."

"Damn right I'm right," she said. Then, as she prepared to be seated again, she looked Mel in the eye. "And remember to kiss her. Not just because she asks for it, but just because she deserves a kiss."

There were tears in her eyes now, and Ha-Yoon wiped them away with her hands.

"Boss—what happened?" Mel asked.

Ha-Yoon smiled. "Arkwright, some day somebody's going to ask you to do something. Someone you care about. And maybe you're not in the mood to be fisted up to the elbow right that second, but they're going to look at you with those big puppy-dog eyes and talk about the thing they've been dreaming of since they got their first boner, and you'll use every drop of lube in the apartment and make that dream come true. And when that happens, Mel Arkwright, and she asks you to kiss her, you'd better kiss her. You owe her that."

Mel's jaw had fallen open. He closed it and nodded as his brain tried to skirt away from the image that now impinged on it.

There were things that needed cleaning, and the tip of his prick pressed almost painfully against the back of his belt. Mel could feel the eyes of the brain slug hosts on him as he ran the device over the tiled floor beneath the coffee machines.

Some familiar faces filtered in and out over the morning. A Black woman in a cowboy hat that Mel privately thought of as "Tex," who was always humming and liked to buy bottles of sulphurated spring water. A bulky man with a military crew cut and an artificial arm, the three-fingered grip like something fit for an industrial robot, who played his scratchers with a lucky coin that hung on a chain on his neck. Amelia, with li'l Mel in tow, looked very tired and needed Mel to carry the milk out to the tiny electric car.

On the way back in, Mel saw Tomie and Maxine enter. The slim Asian brain slug host was holding hands with the taller one. Maxine, the thin Black woman with the mutant brainslug, looked a little more filled out, though she was still gaunt, and worse than that, she was shaking uncontrollably. Someone had bought them matching grey tracksuits with rainbow cuffs. Mel saw Tomie approach Jordan, who was coming out from the family bathroom; the two brain slugs touched their hands, palm to palm.

The brain slugs broke in a strange ballet. Mel watched Tomie and Maxine head for the unisex/family bathroom in that same deliberate method they had walked in, Maxine almost leaning on Tomie, unable to stop shivering, and Jordan stepped up to Mel and slid her hand into his pocket. He froze, not fighting her, as she fished out the beer fridge card and handed it to Blair behind the counter. Then she took him by the wrist and tugged, firmly, toward the family bathroom.

Mel glanced once in the direction of Ha-Yoon's office. Not sure what was going on, but reasonably able to guess that if it had to do with brain slugs, that meant—

The bathroom was crowded with all four of them in there. Maxine was seated on the toilet, flanked on either side by Jordan and Tomie, who held her hands. The pale, three-tentacled brain slug wiggled into sight around the dark brown neck, and to his surprise, Mel saw something float in the whites of Maxine's eyes. The Black woman opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue, and the tongue was stained blue, as from a slushie or breath mints. Mel glanced from Tomie to Jordan, then back at the open invitation.

"Do you want me to—um—feed her?" he asked.

Jordan held up her right hand, palm out, three fingers folded, thumb and forefinger out. That was the sign for the letter Y. Mel undid his belt and unzipped, hoping he wouldn't hear Ha-Yoon knock on the door. This would probably cost them all their jobs if she noticed. He told himself it was almost lunch time; this was their break, and besides, this looked like an emergency.

He was half-hard already. All three brain slug hosts' nostrils flared. Their eyes fixed on the rising tumescence as Mel fetched out his shaven balls, the stubble already coming in, and ran his thumb across the raised ridge of the glans. Maxine leaned forward, and for a moment it almost looked like Jordan and Tomie were holding her back, as her blue-stained tongue stretched forward and licked the tip.

Mel's thumb and forefinger circled the shaft. Maxine's eyes seemed to cross, fixated on the pink pillar pointed at her tonsils. The hot breath brushed against his swelling head as he tried to focus on the task at hand. It was harder than it looked. There was nothing arousing about seeing a woman clearly in distress huffing on his manhood. Jordan seemed to catch on to the difficulty and stepped closer, one hand down between his legs. The pads on her fingers tickled along the sensitive underside of his scrotum and then pressed.

The tip of Mel's helmet hit the roof of Maxine's mouth. Tomie got the idea, too. She stepped to Mel's side, her hand sliding down the back of his pants, her small hand crushing a buttock. Maxine began to slobber and drool down the shaft in her mouth, her tongue playing all around it as Mel did his best to stroke the now rock-hard erection. He had the idea that somehow, speed was critical, and he tried to focus on something, anything that would get him across the finish line as he rocked back and forth, hips slaying a little, encouraged by Jordan and Tomie's hands into a steady rhythm, the familiar pressure building and building inside of him, the aching familiarity like the sensationo f needing to pee but being unable to, his biology wanting to relax and tighten at the same time.

Red-faced, Mel turned to Jordan. She was bent down to tickle his balls, the taller woman's face at the level of his, and his mouth suddenly sought hers. Hungry. Without asking permission. Her hand shifted grip on his balls as his lips pressed against hers, and then they softened, opened, their tongues met, warm and accepting. A hot, wet moment of shared intimacy that left Mel moaning into her mouth as the familiar sensation of his sperm splattering against the back of Maxine's throat, Tomie squeezing and guiding the hip-thrusts, making sure neither he nor Maxine spilled a drop.

The Black woman's mouth settled on his swollen head and gave a single, long slurp, as if to get every last drop from his spent shaft. Then and only then did Jordan and Mel break this kiss, both red-faced and slightly panting. Mel looked at Maxine, hoping it worked, wondering if she needed to go again.

Yet as she sat there, mouth closed, the three-horned brain slug's pulsing seemed to become less urgent. The palsy shaking slowly began to subside. Tomie let go of Mel and gently stroked Maxine's face, her neck, gathering up sweat and licking it off of her fingertips in a way that made Mel think of nature documentaries. Some kind of grooming ritual? Reclaiming salt or pheromones? He had no way to know without asking her.

A few minutes later, Tomie and Maxine exited first. Jordan and Mel stayed behind. He wasn't sure what the plan was, exactly. Staggered exit, to allay suspicion if Ha-Yoon saw them? That seemed logical.

It wasn't until Jordan had locked the door and begun to take off her pants that he realized she had something else in mind. Mel's mouth fell open as Jordan, now bottomless, hitched herself onto the sink. Two fingers of her right hand splayed her hairless pussy, showing the wet, salmon-colored inside of her slit. For a moment, Mel thought she wanted him to eat her out.

Then her free hand came up with a condom.

Mel, trousers around his knees, shuffled forward with his pole at half-mast. He took the condom from Jordan, and her hand immediately went to her clit, rubbing it in tight, smooth circles. This was more than an invitation. It was some kind of need. Like Maxine's hunger had rubbed off on her, maybe, or had been communicated through that link brain slugs shared.

I'm about to lose my virginity in a family bathroom during work hours, Mel thought to himself, as he stared at the condom. Is that really what I want?