Page 36 of Lagoon

She felt invaded.

She felt assaulted.

But there was no one to blame for any of these things. They were just happening.

And then, maybe because she was drunk, she lay awake thinking of that strange, long stinger that had appeared, growing like an arrow behind Jonathan’s penis.

And she thought about Jonathan’s penis, and she thought it was a nice penis. It had been a while since she’d seen a man’s penis, truthfully, but from what she remembered, his seemed good in the girth and length department, and—for whatever reason—even though she’d been out of her mind with fear about her body changing and totally embarrassed to be half-naked in front of him, the sight of it had sort of turned her on.

Maybe, if she was honest with herself, the strange stinger-ovipositor had turned her on too.

But she didn’t want to be honest with herself about that.

She didn’t want to, because that was awful.

She didn’t want to remember the sensation of Jonathan’s finger sliding into her, which shouldn’t have felt good, becauseshe knew that women didn’t have a lot of nerve endings in their vaginal canal, but this had felt…fuck. And then her cervix was somehow crazy sensitive.

She had felt it ripple. She had felt it move. She had felt it suck in his finger, and it been good,verygood,sogood.

Now, in bed, she rolled over and curled up, hugging her knees to her chest and tried to summon tears that wouldn’t come.

She was terrified and she wanted to cry, but she felt as if everything that was happening was too intense to properly even understand or think about. Her emotions were reeling from the hits that had been coming one after another. If she fell to pieces now, she’d never be able to put herself back together.

Or…

Were her emotions altered too?

Did amphibians feel in the same way that humans did?

Had she been changed in that way too, now more resilient but colder, more animal?

She shuddered, not wanting to eventhinkthat.

Inside her, her body rippled, her cervix twitching, and the pleasure rocked through her.

She had a sudden urge to find Jonathan right now, to get him to attempt to put that stinger inside her, all the way inside her, and to fill her up.

“No,” she said aloud, rolling onto her back.

CHAPTER TWELVE

NANCY MANES CURSEDthe day she’d ever met Anderson Scott.

He was so superior, but there was something wrong with him, too. That was obviously the reason they’d been attracted to each other. Like calls to like. There was a flattened aspect to Anderson’s empathy, just as there was one for her.

She was better at hiding it now. She’d been to therapy for her antisocial tendencies, and all therapy had done was teach her what people didn’t want to hear. She pretended to be prosocial, then, and she pretended to care.

But with Anderson, it had been a bit too seductive.

He’d been so honest with her, it had made her wonder. Could she be honest with him, too? Could she show him every single awful aspect of herself?

She didn’t think anything about herself was particularly that awful, to be honest. She knew that if she didn’t hide certain things, however, there would be consequences. And while she didn’t think that other people had any real capacity to weigh in on her own worth—because she knew she was different than them, superior, really—they treated her in ways that made her life difficult.

So, she pretended to care about what people thought of her.

In some ways, she even did. But not because itmattered, you understand, simply because it was better to follow the rules. Playing the game was the only way to win the game.

And she’d been playing so well until Anderson Scott had crashed into her life and they’d started a love affair that had made her question everything. Here he was, and he wasn’t playing by the rules. He was breaking them and getting rewarded for it.

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