Page 69 of A Very Monstrous Desire

They were making a difference here.

Him and the monster.

They were saving lives.

Theo was thinking about that as they readied themselves to slip through the freshly created rip into the army base. Of the improbability of it all. Of him, Theo Anderson, data scientist, running club champion, sometimes board game champion too, being a bit of a hero. It made him smile. It made him laugh. The fact that he also had a monstrous lover as well was just the icing on the impossible cake.

The rip led them into the bathroom of one of the female barracks, Julia and Gill’s in fact. They came out of it straight into a toilet cubicle. It was almost poetic. After all, Theo had ended up in the other universe the same way!

“Carefully,” the monster said as they stepped out.

He was a little concerned, he had said earlier, that the walls between the dimensions here were weak from how many times he had ripped and ripped but he’d closed every rip after himself, so Theo was choosing to believe the army base was fine.

They opened the door of the bathroom slowly and looked out into the room proper. It was quiet at this time of morning and not least Theo knew because there would be a massive clean up operation on the beach. There were thousands and thousands of munching monster bodies to remove, not to mention all of the egg sacs.

Julia was not on deployment though. She was on a six-hour break before being shipped off to her next posting. They had peeked through into her barracks just an hour ago to discover that. She had been sat on her bed, frowning at her tablet and whoever she was talking to on it. She was sat there now, flicking through a book, and Theo took a very deep breath before he pushed the door open and stepped into the room. The monster stayed behind, as they had agreed, waiting in the bathroom.

Julia jumped up the moment she saw him and grabbed her gun.

“Julia, no!” Theo shouted.

She pointed the gun at him. Baku growled. Theo gestured for him to stay where he was.

“Julia, no,” Theo said again. “It’s me. It’s Theo.”

She gasped and took a tiny step forward. “What…”

“Look at me,” Theo added. “Not the purple. I know the purple is weird. But at me, at my features, you recognise them, right?”

Julia did look at him. Eyes roving over his face, but she did not lower her gun.

“What are you?” she eventually demanded.

“I’m Theo,” he said. “Just Theo. The man who saved your ass in the village shop.”

“Theo…” she breathed. “Is that actually you?”

He nodded. “Hi, Julia.”

She lowered her gun slightly. “You’re purple.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Why are you purple?” she demanded.

“It’s complicated.”

“Is it something to do with your capture by the munching monsters?”

Theo started. “Why would you think that?”

She did lower her gun then and took a few steps towards him. “Gill and Dimitri saw you being pulled into the other dimension. Gill had gone to find another of those watermelon-flavoured isotonics. She saw you in the forest only you were in the toilet?”

“Yes, I was taken there, but not by a munching monster,” Theo said, and then quickly, he told Julia everything that had happened, from the very beginning to the very end, though he left out the sex, as she didn’t need to know all of that.

“So you stopped the infestation?” she asked when he was done and her gun was back on the bed now and quickly she went and locked the door to the barracks.

“Yes.”

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