Halp.

Sex is not a contest. It is communication. It is not supposed to hurt. If it hurts, you are probably doing it wrong. If it hurts badly enough to scare your brain slug lover, violence may ensue. So be gentle. Attentive. Willing to surrender control. Let them decide how much to hurt themselves on you. Let them find and test their own limits. They want you to feel good too, but the survival instincts are strong.
—Anaïs Nineveh (trans.), Your Brain Slug Lover and You

"Who all has been in your apartment recently?" MacElroy asked.

Mel paused to think. A car waited to pull into the hydrogen pump, and Mel waved, finished his task, and then moved aside.

"Myself, Jordan, Jennie, Rachel, Béibhinn, Anastasia," he said, counting on his fingers. "Um. Molly and her mother Lucie. Kayce, but she didn't come by until after I took the samples. Cara, although that was a few days ago now. You."

Mel stared at his fingers, counting them out again, wondering if he had forgotten anyone. There had been the police and social worker, but that had been weeks ago. Surely they didn't count? And Maxine had come by that one time. Shit. Amelia hadn't come by, but he had visited her.

"Who are Lucie and Kayce?" the detective asked. While Mel explained that, the brain bat casually reached over and slid a hand into his pocket. She did it as if it was the most natural and expected thing in the world, and when she withdrew her gloved hand, his hoodie pocket was heavier by about the weight of the spore-reader.

"We need more samples," MacElroy said. "Massimi's apartment seems to be the most likely place to start, but anywhere you or the others hang out. The device will register the time and place where the sample is taken. Get a few dozen samples in different places."

Mel nodded. "By the way, I have a phone now. I can put your phone number in it."

He dug the phone out of his pocket. MacElroy held out one gloved hand. "May I?"

She actually waited for him to hand it to her. Immediately, she popped the back of the case and looked at the battery. Then turned it on. Mel hadn't locked it yet. She scrolled through various screens and settings, then his contact list. The brain bat put her own number in there, then called herself. Something in her jacket buzzed.

"Good," she said. "Now we both have each other's numbers. And it doesn't look like there are any strange apps or obvious bugs in your phone."

That made Mel blink. "Was that a serious concern?"

MacElroy faced Mel. With the wrap-around shades, he couldn't read her eyes. Yet the features were almost as blank and placid as a brain slug's. He wondered if she cultivated that resting face, for whatever effect it had on other people.

"Serious enough," she said. "Béibhinn is worried you're too institutionalized. Nice ordered life in the orphanage. Like your routines. No real opportunities to safely rebel. That can be a problem, if you get too comfortable, too quickly."

"Why?" Mel asked.

"Because if it looks like you're in imminent danger," the brain bat said. "You might have to leave this little life you've built for yourself. If the changeling has ready access to your apartment, it isn't safe for you or your lovers. If your apartment isn't safe, you'll need to move somewhere else."

"But I don't have anywhere else to go," Mel said. It was automatic. He looked at Detective MacElroy, but she put her hands back into her coat pockets and turned to walk away. Leaving Mel with a task and a question that brought that knot back to his stomach.

The floor in the Cosmic Fill-Up still needed Mel to run the swifter over it. Mel emptied the waste bin in Ha-Yoon's office and was glad to see there were no beer cans or tabs. A stack of fresh copies of Slug Fucker Monthly on the stand. Minutes turned into hours. It was time to go home.

Jordan held his hand today, Jenny hovering behind them, sometimes making contact, sometimes not.

Where would we go? Mel wondered. He wanted to ask Jordan and Jenny that. Mel hadn't been saving money for a down payment on another apartment. He had no financial cushion. Hadn't thought he needed one. In hindsight, that was stupid. Mel had been focused on not spending too much money, but he hadn't had any plan for actively saving up for a rainy day. Just taking things as they came.

Stupid, he berated himself, chewing on the thought. Jordan and Jenny could, probably, stay at the apartment of other brain slug hosts in the Seacouver Hive. Mel would have to find someplace else. A street shelter or . . . maybe crash with someone else. Could he impose on Amelia? No, she had the baby, and her apartment was small.

Such were Mel's thoughts when he got home. With Rachel at her night class, the evening was quiet. Jordan and Jenny shed their clothes. Béibhinn was out. They made dinner, and for a little while it was as though they were back to how things had been in the comparatively uncomplicated time before Jenny's brain slug had budded. They sat on the couch and watched a documentary on slime molds.

It is not difficult, Mel thought, to make a slime mold beautiful. Light and shadow could play across the glistening surface as soft electronic music played in the background. Time-lapse photography added a sense of motion while the music conveyed action. They watched in comfortable silence until the ramen and tofu were gone and it was time to clean up.

"Can we practice?" Mel asked and signed. Jordan and Jenny nodded.

They sat facing each other, the two brain slug hosts knee to knee. They sat up straight, but their eyes seemed to show more expression than normal—or maybe it was just that Mel was more aware of the little cues they shared in their otherwise placid faces.

"Did you like touching my asshole?" Jordan signed.

Mel gave a nervous grin. He hadn't expected that conversation.

"It was my first time," he signed back. "It was nice."

Nice wasn't the word he wanted. Mel remembered the squishy little bit at the end of his finger. Soft, yet with the hard muscle underneath. His hand between her quivering buttocks had been nervous, unsure if he we going to hurt her. Later, when he had been washing his hands, he had found the enema kit she had used under the sink. Jordan had planned for that moment.

"I will keep it clean for you," Jordan signed, and though she did not smirk, he noticed that Jordan and Jenny's brain slugs were both shifting on their necks. Not exactly laughter, but maybe trying to catch the smell if he got an erection. "For next time."

Mel coughed nervously.

"How was your day?" Jenny signed.

Mel thought about how to respond. There were so many things it would have been easy to say out loud, but his vocabulary in ASL was so limited. Still . . . maybe this was an opportunity to talk about some stuff.

"I met the brain bat," he signed back. "She thinks the C has been here."

Their attitude changed. A stiffness to their posture, tension in their necks. All playfulness over.

"Do not talk of it here," Jenny signed. "Later."

Mel nodded.

The rest of the practice was more basic. They asked him questions that could be answered in numbers, letters, short phrases. Sometimes, Mel came up short, had to word things around gaps in his vocabulary. It was getting late, and Mel felt the mental fog that preceded bedtime settle in when Rache burst in the door with puffy eyes.

Immediately, the three of them were on their feet. The tall blonde fell into a group hug and sniffled, hugging them back tightly, her eyes buried in the shoulder of Mel's hoodie.

"What happened!?" he asked.

Rache sniffed again. "Mom called."

Jordan immediately began to pat her sister's hair. Mel wasn't sure he understood, though he knew that they didn't get along with their mother. The two brain slug hosts gently tugged Rache over by the couch. They had her pants around her ankles and seated before Rache could say anything else. Jordan signed "Eat her out," and Mel assumed the position, on his knees, untying her shoes and pulling them off so he could slide her pants over her heels. Jordan and Jenny flanked her on the couch as the tears came, obviously not for the first time.

"She's just so ugly to me," Rache sniffed. "Mom's gotten so much worse since you—I haven't told her anything! Not even about you or Mel or—"

She stared at Mel, who was gently pushing her pale thighs apart to get at her slit.

"Promise me," Rache said, suddenly dead serious. "That you will never fuck our mother."

Mel's eyes went wide. He knew now why deer stared into the oncoming headlights. There was something fascinating about approaching doom. Magnetic. Unable to look away.

"I promise," he assured her. Then, because the silence was awkward and it felt like he needed to fill it: "Not even if she asks nicely."

Rache parked out a laugh. Then started crying again. Jordan and Jenny reached out to grab Mel's head and guide it toward Rache's crotch. With the familiarity of practice, he nuzzled her clitoral hood and offered a small, soft kiss that became a sloppy lick. The tall, blubbering blonde wasn't very wet, probably wasn't in the mood. Yet she didn't try to move his face away, and as his tongue slowly traced her labia, in and out, around the entrance to her channel, up under her clit to coax it out.

As he licked, Rache talked. It had been, he gathered, a long and fraught conversation with her mother. The old woman was unhappy with Rachel's life choices, and her last boyfriend had turned out to be an ungodly man who had given her genital warts, which the old woman had tried to remove using some folk remedy involving a potato and the full moon before finally going to the doctor, and now she was going through a treatment of vaginal rejuvenation, and was pushing Rache to get her hymen restored.

" —so I could put myself out there to land some rich doctor or lawyer. I swear, there are times she'd gladly have whored us out if she thought we'd be in the upper middle-class income bracket. They actually have an implant for that now! You break your cherry, and it grows back in three weeks. But who the fuck wants that? I was so tempted to tell her what we were actually doing but—"

Mel's tongue was pushing a little deeper now, her channel slick and flowing, but he continued to concentrate on her clit. That was what she liked best, and as her leg cradled protectively around his neck, her hand played with his hair. The conversation had, it turned out, turned sad and nostalgic at the last as the mother had gotten back on the topic of Jordan.

"She said you'd died unshriven and were burning in hell," Rache said, her voice cried out. "Then she started crying again, and that made me cry and—fuck, why do I even pick up the phone when she calls—"

Mel didn't try to answer that. Even if his mouth weren't gainfully occupied, it sounded like the sort of question that someone asks when they want sympathy, not an attempt to answer their question. Having gotten that off her chest, she now shifted her hips to better angle her pussy against Mel's mouth. Jordan and Jenny's hands had worked their way up under Rache's shirt and the emotional conversation had given way to soft pants and hot kisses. Rache's heels drummed against Mel's back as he sped up his licking, the slightly fishy flavor tangy on his tongue as he polished her stiff little clit.

"Oh," Rache said in a tone that was completely different. Mel raised his eyes and saw, to his surprise, that the whites of Rachel's eyes were glowing. Beside her, Jordan and Jenny was frozen in place, their eyes wide and glowing too.

"Oh," Rache said, and as she said it, Jordan and Jenny's mouths moved, though no sound came out. Mel never stopped, licking fast, and as Rache's hips jerked, as if out of her control, Mel could see that the three of them were moving as one unit, in that odd synchronization he had only seen when two brain slug hosts were touching one another, one organism in three bodies.

"Oh!" Rache bucked, her legs cinched tight, forcing Mel's tongue in deep, his teeth almost shaving her mons as she forced her clit into his open mouth. Both Jordan and Jenny were taut, shaking, eyes burning so bright he could almost see the round shape of their eyes through their skin. Mel's tongue still rubbed against her clit as best as he could as he struggled to breathe.

Then something pink emerged from Jordan and Jenny's mouths. Rache gave a little high-pitched squeal, somewhere between pain and pleasure, her legs so tight Mel's neck ached. Yet out of the corner of his eyes, he could see the blood running down Jordan and Jenny's chins as their tongues slid out of their mouths.

The small pink muscles had split down the middle and were wiggling independently in the air.

Mel's heart hammered in his chest as Rachel shook and gushed, a wet flood that filled Mel's mouth as her body spasmed hard, but not hard enough to break the link or bridge between the three of them. They were locked together, and Mel was trapped by Jordan's legs, unable to move his lower jaw without biting her pussy.

For several minutes, Mel tried to use his hands to pull Rache's legs away from his neck, but the muscles were corded tight, locked in place. Even if he had the leverage to use his full strength to get free, he wasn't sure he could do it. At least not without hurting her.

That was when Béibhinn chose to open the door. She was dressed in her long jacket, pants tucked into her boots, EVERY GOLE'S A HOAL emblazoned on her chest, her laptop bag under her good right arm, and she screwed up her face into a grimace of sheer confusion and consternation at the little tableau on the couch.

"Halp?" Mel said, his voice muffled by Rache's cunny.