So what do you get out of this relationship?

Brain slugs understand incest in the way dog or horse breeders do: as a way to concentrate certain traits, at the danger of exacerbating certain recessive characteristics. Human taboos and kinks were alien to them. They adapt.
—Anastasia Massimi, Slugnomicon: A Guide To Brain Slug Spirituality (unpublished draft)

"Would you fap to your mother?" Ha-Yoon asked.

"My mother's dead," Mel reminded her.

The Cosmic Fill-Up was in a momentary lull of activity. Jordan was outside, servicing the hydrogen pumps; Tomie was on the register; Blair was cleaning the bathrooms. Ha-Yoon was in good spirits this morning and had nothing else to do but think terrible thoughts and ask Mel terrible questions.

She waved away his answer with a dismissive hand.

"I mean, you think about it. All the teenagers have smartphones. Most of them take a nude picture at some point, right? And that's your grandparents, your parents. Porn is so much more common now that bad video of your mom having sex is probably going to be fap material for generations. Do you think if you ran across it at random, you'd feel that pull of genetic sexual attraction and just, you know, whip it out and wank it?" Ha-Yoon said. "I mean, I've looked at some of the Asian women masturbating on cam from the last century and wondered, 'gee, she looks like grandma.' Even if it isn't, it's sometimes fun to pretend a little. Makes it feel naughty."

The cage was heavy today. Mel hadn't given any thought to the chastity cage when he'd agreed to it, but after living with it for almost two days, he was fairly sure that this was one of those things that looked great in porn videos and was fine for people who never wore them for more than an hour, but as an actual practice, living with it felt like a chore. It didn't hurt, didn't cut into his flesh—the fit wasn't that tight—but the weight of it was there constantly.

He sighed and closed his eyes.

"I have an agreement with the girlfriends," he said. "No masturbation. I only get off with their permission and cooperation."

The manager's eyes shifted towards him. The little golden stars in the sclera looked like they were surrounded by tiny red auras today. Not enough sleep, he guessed.

"Is that like a BDSM thing?" she asked.

Mel considered this carefully.

"Mostly, it's a respect thing, and a biological necessity thing. They really do seem to need my ejaculate to maintain peak health. And I want to—look, I grew up in an orphanage. I only knew my parents as names on my birth certificate. I've seen kids abandoned because the mother was raped and couldn't bear to look at them, or because the father was married or abandoned them, or a drug addict who tried to sell her kid for a hit, and—there's not really any happy story that leads to orphans, and I've heard them all. I don't want to be one of those assholes who ruin a perfectly good relationship just because he can't keep his dick in his pants. So if they ask me not to masturbate, that's fair. That's communication and boundaries and mutual respect."

There was emotion in Mel's voice as he gave his little speech. More, perhaps, than he intended; and he was glad suddenly that Jordan was outside, and hoped Tomie hadn't overhead. His cheeks felt hot, and he leaned against the wall, self-conscious of his caged heat.

"So what do you get out of this relationship?" Ha-Yoon asked. She turned toward him, full attention now, and Mel was glad she had gotten off the subject of the hypothetical sexual attractiveness of parental units. Mel's face strove for neutrality. It wasn't working. One of the reasons he lost the few games of poker he'd tried in high school.

"They asked me to use them," he said. "Whenever I want, whenever I need to. I take care of their needs, they take care of mine. That's part of what we agreed to, besides not having sex with anyone else."

"You got sucked off by the K'lur'k," Ha-Yoon pointed out. "And that feral brain slug, the Black one."

"Maxine," Mel supplied the name. "And only with permission. I wouldn't do it with random people."

"You mean if your girlfriends gave your permission, you'd fuck my face!?" Ha-Yoon said with a too-wide grin, wagging her eyebrows.

Mel felt his cheeks burn hotter.

"You're in a relationship, too," he said, accusingly.

"Ha!" Ha-Yoon leaned back in her chair, still grinning. "I know. I wouldn't ask. But hypothetically. Do you always do everything your girlfriends tell you?"

"I mean—mostly, yeah," he said. "Unless there's a good reason not to."

Ha-Yoon nodded. "And in exchange, you can do what you want to them."

"Within reason," Mel said with a wince. He thought of Antonio, how he had treated Spicy Slug. "I don't like to—you know. Just violate their space. I don't exactly get hard during morning stretches with Jenny and bend her over right then and there. I like that they're accommodating, but I don't want to abuse the privilege."

Ha-Yoon kept nodding, but her nods had slowed.

"But have you had your way with them?" She said. "Some women like that, you know. Like to be treated like an object. Not hurt, exactly, but treated like just a sex toy, a hole for men to empty their spunk into. There's a certain freedom in that, giving up the choice, going with the flow, being used. Especially when they take turns, not paying attention at all, just playing a video game while taking turns plowing your ass, dumping their jizz whenever they feel like it, then the next one puts down the controller and slides into the well-greased little hole, already full and overflowing, and the feeling is that can last all night and this is just your life now, a receptacle for their desires . . ."

Mel's ears burned. Jordan came in from outside and walked over to the water fountain. Within ear reach.

"I . . . haven't done anything like that, no," he said, and the cage shifted slightly as Mel's meat strove against the bars of its cage. "Everything alright at home?"

Ha-Yoon sighed and closed her eyes. She was still smiling, but it was a different, more self-satisfied smile.

"Things at home are great," she declared. Her eyes popped open as Jordan came up next to Mel. The brain slug host's nostrils flared, probably smelling the stirring in Mel's pants. "Hey, Jordan. Do you want Mel to, like, take advantage of you sexually? Like, you're lying in bed, and he just buries his face in your ass, or you're in the kitchen, and he just comes up behind you and fondles your breasts and grinds up against your butt or something?"

Jordan appeared to consider this question. Her face remained placid, a mask of emotional indifference, a better poker face than Mel could ever manage. She had no context for this question, no idea what Mel and Ha-Yoon had been talking about, and Mel bit his lip, the pain distracting him from the urgent need building inside of him.

His roommate's hand came up in a familiar thumb's up.

"See!?" Ha-Yoon gestured. "Get you some! But not now. I need you two to go clean out the grease trap."

Mel took the relative privacy of the assignment as an opportunity to explain to Jordan the discussion he'd had with Ha-Yoon. They carried that discussion with them as they held hands all the way home. To Mel, it seemed like Ha-Yoon put great stress in a relationship on physical displays of affection. But then she'd also told him to tell Jordan and Rachel they were pretty. To be vocal in how he liked them. Mel wasn't sure he had done that enough.

At the doorstep to their apartment building, Mel paused and looked at Jordan. She stared into his eyes. Deep blue eyes today, the irises wide and black so he could see himself reflected in them like tiny obsidian mirrors.

"I know I don't say it often enough," he said. "But I really do like being with you. Not just sex, but . . . thank you for being my girlfriend."

He leaned in, thinking of a kiss on the cheek, but she moved her head. His lips found her chin. Then their mouths met. Jordan's hands slid down the back of his pants to the crack of his ass. Mel's back hit the door, forced back by a sudden, intense passion.

Jenny, naked as she so often was, opened the door, and they stumbled through it.

She was bleeding.

Mel started, staring at the line of red that ran from a poorly-applied band aid in the hollow of Jenny's elbow, down the pale inside of her arm. Jenny looked down at the line of blood and carefully pressed the band-aid back into place. Jordan grabbed Jenny's forearm and bent down to lick at the blood. Mel frowned, closed the door, and asked:

"What happened?"

With her free hand, Jenny pointed toward the terrarium. Mel walked over and saw a small, shallow cup full of blood, though no more than a couple of ketchup packets' worth. The brain slug had its head hovering over the surface, to let the mouth-parts sip from the crimson feast.

Mel's frown deepened. It made sense, in a way. Brain slugs that are attached to a host connected to the circulatory system. Maybe it was easier for them to digest blood? But then Jenny had also fed it baby food, and he'd seen it slurp sperm off of her back. He chewed the inside of his lip, the dietary requirements of brain slugs separate from hosts an unexpected mystery. There was still a lot he didn't know about brain slugs.

Dinner was quiet. A documentary on desert spiders. There was something soothing about watching close-ups of small black bodies among sand grains. Tiny dramas of hunt and kill, occurring at a scale too small to notice. Yet he found his gaze drawn to the brain slug in its terrarium. Its head was dipped down into the bowl, the small mouth parts at the surface of the blood, sucking it up. Mel could actually see the dark flow beneath the transparent back.

Mel wondered if he would even see that brain slug if it crept along the ceiling and dropped on him at night. Thought about Maxine, comatose in her bed, as the albino slug inched forward to find the right spot to attach itself. He wondered how aware she had been. Unable to move. Unable to call for help as it slid upwards, slowly.

The arrival of Rachel helped break him out of those thoughts.

"Hey, can't stay long and no sexytimes, I've got homework, but I wanted to say hi to you all—tell me about your day," Rache said.

This was mostly directed at Mel, who told her everything, including the conversation with Ha-Yoon in the morning.

"Okay, but seriously," Rache said. "I mean, your mother is dead, but if you had a female cousin or something, and we asked you to have sex with her—would you?"

Mel frowned. With Ha-Yoon, he could dissemble, dodge the question. But Rachel was his girlfriend. He owed her the truth.

"Probably. I mean, yeah, biologically we're related, but if I had any cousins, I never grew up with them, they're strangers to me. Like, if your dad was a sperm donor and you had some half-siblings out there, you wouldn't know it, would you? Would that change how you felt about them?" he asked.

Rachel opened her mouth. Closed it. She looked at Jordan, who looked back.

"A couple of weeks ago, I would have said yes," she said, finally. "Now—"

She bit her lip.

"I'm beginning to think," she said carefully. "That there are experiences I might be open to. At some point."

With that, she kissed everyone and left.

Mel stood there for a while, feeling the heaviness of the cage, until Jordan took his hand and guided him to bed.