by K. C. Cross
I push her knees up higher, gaining a little more access, and when I ease myself fully inside her, she gasps and goes still.
“You OK?” I want her to enjoy this. I don’t want to hurt her.
“Yeah.” Her single word is a soft moan. “Better than OK.”
We both relax and our rhythm smooths out and becomes more natural. And as this new intimacy builds, so does my desire. The slow, even pace becomes something more than sex and I realize that I’ve missed this feeling. I’ve been missing this connection for thousands of years.
I picture her with me forever. I could make it happen. It would not even be hard. She’s stuck with me. I could keep her forever.
“Pell,” she moans, her hips urging me to go faster.
But I don’t. I won’t.
I slow down, choosing to turn her on with the closeness of us. The passion in our kisses. The way I softly caress her breast and the depth of penetration.
She gets it too. Because even though I’m going slow, everything about her begins to pick up pace. Her breathing. Her heartbeat. The way she rubs her thighs up and over my hips and the pressure of her fingernails digging into the hard muscles of my shoulders.
Then she’s there.
We’re both there.
It creeps up on us. And I like that. I like the surprise when we both realize that this joining is perfection and our progression to climax was easy and natural.
Our release isn’t an explosion. There is no epiphany, no song of angels and trumpets.
But it’s better than all those things combined.
It’s like an out-of-body experience. It’s like we become one.
Two souls merged. A couple connected.
In the middle of this climax I open my eyes and find us—not in the Roman party room, but truly in that forest of trees. The woods. My woods.
Her nails dig deeper into my flesh as she squeezes her pussy around my cock. Gushing her release as I fill her up with mine.
I close my eyes to groan with pleasure, and when I open them again, we’re back. In the middle of the palace orgy, surrounded by hedonists and their extravagant sexual exploits.
And even though it was easy, I find that I am spent. So I lower myself down, then roll to the side of her, pulling her close to me the way I wanted to when I was in her bed last night, but didn’t.
Here, we can do what we want.
Here, we can be what we want.
And maybe, one day, out there we can do that too.
She’s breathing hard and when I press my chest up against her back, I can feel her heart racing. A quick, staccato, pounding beat. We lie there silent for a little bit as the party continues on without us. But eventually, we both know this is over.
“Regrets?” I ask.
She sits up a little so she can look at me. Her hair is a mess of blonde waves, some of it sweaty. Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes and mouth give off a tired, but satiated look. Then she opens her eyes wider and straightens her back. “Shit, you’re already having regrets?”
“No, not me.” So innocent. So naïve. So damn cute. “You, silly.”
She points to herself. “Me?” Her blush increases. “No. Why do you say that?”
“Just making sure.”
She sits up a little more, leaning back against the cushions, her fingers absently twining around in my hair. It’s longer here. I shave it regularly back home because it’s bothersome. But I like the way this feels and so I close my eyes and enjoy it.
“Are you ready to go back?”
“Are you?”
She thinks about this. “No. This place was OK. But the best thing about it is you.”
I smile at that. “What is it you’re looking for, Pie Vita?”
I can feel her shrug. “I dunno. Does the hallway take requests?”
I chuckle, eyes still closed, the memory of being inside her still very real. “Not really,” I finally say.
“I’m willing to take my chances.”
“If you had a request, where would you want to go?”
“Well.” She pauses. “Not here. You said you lived here—”
“I did.”
“OK. But you’re a man here.”
I open one eye. “And?”
“And there are places where you’re not a man, obviously. I want to see those places.”
“I won’t look like this in those places.”
She nods. “I know.”
Now I sit up. “You like me the way I am. When we’re not here, I mean.”
It’s not a question, it’s a statement. And it makes her smile, then laugh. “What’s not to like? I mean… horns, Pell. Horns come with hornjobs—”
“You’re just being silly now.”
“No, really. This is OK. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re a hot man. But it’s not you. Unless I’m wrong and this is you?”
“No. It’s not me.”
“You’ve never been a man, have you?”
I scoff. “I’ve always been a man, Pie. The word you’re looking for, the word everyone is always looking for when they ask this question, is human. I’ve never been a human. But I have always been a man.”
She stares into my eyes for a prolonged moment. Then she nods. “OK. I get it.”
“I doubt that.” But I drop it and move on to something else because this topic bothers me and I don’t want to get into it now. “Should we keep going then?”
She side-eyes me and shrugs with one shoulder. “Do we have a choice?”
“Not really. I mean, we can stay here or we can leave. Those are our choices.”
She looks around. The party is even wilder than it was before. Almost everyone is fucking. Dancing, singing, naked, fucking. “I’m bored with this place.”
I laugh out loud. “Bored?”
She nods. “It’s way too much.”
“Completely over the top.”
“I want something… slower. Do you think we can find somewhere slower?”
“Probably.” I reluctantly get up, wishing we were already home so I could take her into the steam cave for a dip, then take her to bed in her cottage. But who knows how long it might take us to get back to the hallway?
Then I pull her to her feet and we both look around for the door.
“There,” I say, pointing to a door that was not there earlier.
We walk towards it and I’m just about to tug her through when she balks and plants her feet. “Wait.”
“What?”
She looks around at the lewd and lecherous Romans, and then nods her head and sighs. “I will never think of Rome the same way again.” Then she turns to me, rises up on her tiptoes, and kisses me on the mouth.
It’s a nice, long, slow kiss too. Something to be remembered. Because when we pull out of it, I’m still thinking about the way she tastes. I’m still thinking about the pressure of her lips. I’m still thinking about where exactly her hands are. How her one knee is between my legs. How her fingertips are curled into the fabric of my clothes.
She is giggling and breathless when I pull her through the next door and we find ourselves in the woods.
I am finally myself again, all the trappings of ancient Rome gone now. But I’m still lost in the memory of the palace kiss and the way I felt inside her.
“Birds,” Pie says.
And at the same time, I say, “Nymphs.”
“What?” She’s smiling when she turns to me, not understanding the danger.
“I can smell them.” Then I turn to her and take a step back.
“What’s wrong?”
“Pie… look down.”
She does and she takes her own step back too. But it does no good. The shocking thing isn’t a bug on the ground or a snake slithering too close. It’s… her.
“What the fuck?” She takes another step back. But the legs are too long, too gangly. She’s not used to being half deer, so she tumbles backwards onto her ass. And then she is crab-walking into a mud puddle, trying to ge
t away from herself. “Holy shit! Holy shit!”
I kneel and take her hand. “Calm down. It’s fine.”
“Fine? Nothing about this is fine!”
I pull her up out of the mud and place both my hands on her shoulders so I can look her in the eye. Which is nice—being nearly eye level with her, that is. Because in normal life she is much shorter than me. “It’s no different than me having human legs in the other rooms. That’s all this is.”
She looks down at herself. “I don’t have pants on!”
There is no way to stop the laugh. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”
She’s breathless again, but for wholly other reasons than sex. Her hand is over her heart. And that’s when she realizes she has no shirt on either. “Shit! I’m totally fucking naked!”
Her blonde hair is longer here. So long that it covers her breasts entirely. A few pieces are pulled back from her face with an intricate braid with flowers woven in. And every time she moves, there comes the familiar tiny jingle of spirit bells. She’s wearing a length of them wound around each wrist, and a longer strand, the bells alternating with small pink opals, around her neck.
She is the nymph I smelled upon arrival, so I relax.
But in that same moment I become immediately excited.
Because she’s not just any nymph. She is spectacular. Like someone has been breeding wood nymph chimeras for several eternities to get this one perfect specimen.
And this realization is what renders me speechless.
Pie is so stunned, taking in her new body, she just stands there, silent. Looking down at herself.
“You’re so… pretty.” I break the stillness. “I’m not just saying that. You might be the prettiest nymph I’ve ever seen, Pie Vita.”
“Nymph!” She exclaims this as she looks up at me.
It’s only then that I notice she has the eyes of a water-god. A dreamy blue that reminds me of clouds slowly floating by on a mid-summer day.
While I’m thinking this, her fingertips have suddenly found her horns. Pie gasps as she probes the gazelle-like spikes jutting out from the top of her head. “What the fuck is this? Holy shit!”
“It’s just the rooms,” I remind her. “You didn’t freak out when you were dressed like a prostitute in ancient Rome.”
“I didn’t have horns, Pell! I was still human in ancient Rome!”
I get it. She has every right to be shocked. But this is fake. It has to be fake because if it’s not fake, then… well. I don’t know. I need it to be fake just as much as she does, so I say, “Don’t you think you’re kind of overreacting?”
And of course, this is the wrong thing to say.
Her eyebrows knit together. “Over. Reacting?” It comes out as two words, letting me know that I’m not reacting nearly enough. “I’m like…” She looks down. “I’m like a fucking pagan goddess or something!” And then she looks back up at me with super-wide eyes.
“Are you holding a grudge against the pagans?”
She breathes deeply for a few moments and when she actually considers my question, I find myself saying Cute in my head again. “I guess not,” she finally admits.
“OK. So…?”
“Sorry. It’s just shocking.” Now she’s staring at her feet. Rather, her hooves. They are a light caramel color, like the fur on her legs, which is just a shade or two darker than the fur on my legs. “I look like you!”
I keep my tone playful. “Should I assume that’s a bad thing?”
Now she’s irritated with me. But that’s better than her being outraged about her new look. “Don’t tell me that the first time you walked into a room with human legs and feet, sans horns”—she points to her own set—“that you weren’t shocked! Because you’d be a liar!”
I rub my chin, trying not to smile. “That’s probably true, but it’s been so long, I could say it never happened and have a fifty-fifty chance of telling the truth.”
“You think this is funny.”
“I think this is… fun.” I shoot her a crooked smile. “I mean come on. It’s cool, right? Try walking. It’s so different when you have hind legs and hooves.”
She takes a few steps, makes one of those frowny expressions one does when they have to reluctantly admit something, then lets out a long breath. “It is kinda weird.”
“A good weird,” I say, looking her up and down. Because she’s so fucking stunning. Wood nymphs are known for their beauty. The face of a wood nymph is like the song of a siren. Meant to lure men into questionable places, prod them into doing dubious things.
So they always have pretty faces. They are always sexy and alluring. But Pie is more than that. She is the pinnacle of wood nymph magnificence. Very, very beautiful. But not in a I-might-lure-you-to-hell kind of way. She also has an innocence to her and I like that a lot.
“Why are you looking at me?” She’s arranging her hair self-consciously, making sure I can’t see her nipples.
I only sigh. “I’m not looking at your tits, Pie. Come on.”
“Then why are you staring at me that way?”
“Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s pretty hard not to look at you. You’re quite… stunning.”
“Hmm.” She looks down at her legs again and runs her fingertips through the shaggy fur on her upper thigh. “I like the color.”
I nod. Because I like it too. I would like to open up her legs and press my face against the velvety hide that covers her inner thighs.
“And my hooves,” she continues, oblivious to my daydream happening between her legs. “They’re not striped, like yours.” She looks up at me with those wood-nymph blue eyes. “But they are multicolored.”
“That’s banding,” I tell her, trying to take my mind off what it would be like to take her in this body. To do everything we just did, and more, with this version of her. “It’s kind of a special thing. At least in the world of satyr chimera. But you’re not a satyr, because they’re only male.”
“Hmm. That’s interesting.”
I raise my eyebrows at her. “So… you like it?”
She takes one more look at her body while both hands go up to touch her horns in a way that reminds me of a human woman checking her hair. “I mean… I would not want to be like this forever. But when in Rome…”
I grin at her. “Do as the Romans tell you.”
“That’s not how it goes.”
“No? How does it go?”
“Do as the Romans do. Not as they tell you.”
“Funny.” I point at her. And then we stare at each other for a moment. And it’s only now, in this moment, that I realize what a gift this is. Because I have not been with a woman like this—in this form—in two thousand years. “You know what’s weird?”
“What?”
“All this time I’ve been coming up here to these rooms and never once has the hallway showed me a forest like this.”
“Like this… what do you mean?”
“A wood with a girl like you. With a nymph.”
She looks around. “You’ve never met a nymph up here?”
“Nope.”
“What about the virgins?”
“I was fucking with you.”
I earn a side-eye for that remark. Like she’s not sure if I’m for real or not. “So.” She looks confused. “Who have you been… you know.”
“Who have I been fucking?”
She blushes a little. “Yeah. You haven’t had any women?”
“Of course I have.” I think that disappoints her, but whatever. It’s the truth and I’m just not much of a liar. “In the old days, I just went out as myself with my slave caretaker. People were different back then.”
“They didn’t notice you were only half…” And she’s about to say ‘man.’ I know she is. But she stops herself and thinks. “They didn’t notice that you weren’t human?”
“They did. They didn’t care. It was kind of a big deal to fuck around with a guy like me back then.”
; She holds in a laugh. “Is that so?”
“And then, you know. People changed. We came to the New World. The natives here, let’s just say they weren’t fooled by any of my charms. They thought I was a demon. So then I had the caretakers work on spells that could glamour me.”
“So you could have sex.”
“Hey, you asked.”
“That I did.” She turns away from me and I get lost in her curves. Her tiny waist, her hips, the shape of her ass. And I have an urge to walk forward, press my chest against her back, lean in to her neck, and kiss her. It actually takes a lot of self-control to not do this. Pie turns back. “So. You have not been with a wood nymph for thousands of years?”
“That is correct.”
She turns the side and shoots me a coy look. “I would be the first.”
I say these words back in my head. Let them echo for a few moments before I allow myself to picture this. To imagine what it would be like to just… be me. And to have someone like me as a partner. Someone I was meant to be with. Someone who wasn’t thinking I was a freak in every awkward silence.
Because believe me, I have dreamed of fucking women in my natural state, but it comes with so many hesitations, it’s just not worth it.
If those women I’ve been with over the years ever knew what I was they would see me as a demon, just like the natives did. Or worse, an animal.
Pie clicks her tongue. “Holy hell. That was like… a lead-in, Pell. I was practically inviting you to ravish me. What the heck is going through your head right now?”
“Sorry. I was just… picturing it. Ya know?”
“You and me?” She wiggles a little, shaking her tits and hips.
“Yeah. I mean, no. Not you and me specifically. But me as me and you as… that.”
“Hmm.” Her eyes are dancing and her tone is still light. “Me as… what?”
“These hallways, they’re fucking with me or something.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Because, like I said, I’ve been up here so many times and they’ve never shown me someone like you. Like this.” I pan my hand down her gorgeous body. “And now, all of a sudden, everything is changing. You are the first female caretaker in two thousand years. And not only that, you’re… this.”
