Page 48 of Lagoon

“Holy shit,” said Angela in a gravelly voice.

He had more of those in him, and he could tell, and he wanted to… shit, he wanted to put them in her. A shudder went through him. He panted, gazing up at the sky.

She wasn’t touching him anymore and the gun wasn’t on him. Instead, she’d gone down to kneel next to the egg. She poked it with her finger. It was the size of a baseball. “Huh,” she said.

He pushed his stinger down against his leg and struggled to pull up his pants and cover it up again.

“Oh, you’re putting it away,” she breathed, looking up at him.

“You sound disappointed,” he said, hoping she was.

She stood up. “I, um, I…”

“Let me,” he said.

“No, are you insane?” she said. “No, we saw what happened—”

“One is not that big,” he said. “She had, like, I don’t know, forty of those things in her, and I’ll just put one in you, and I think you want me to, and I think we both know you want me to—”

“Oh, you did not just say that,” she said, gasping at him. “That is the shittiest, rapiest thing I think I’ve ever heard anyone—”

“Please.” His voice was ragged.

“Luther…” She turned away, and she was shivering.

He sat back down on the porch and let out a long, low moan.

She rubbed her face, and then moved her hand away to look at her fingers. “Oh, oh, oh… how long have those…?” He could see the webbing there. It wasn’t like his own hands. It was more delicate and it wasn’t scaled, but it was there. “Oh.”

“You should go,” he said. “You should get away from me.”

“I shouldn’t have made you…” She looked up at him. “It’s my fault for getting you worked up.”

“Yeah,” he muttered. “For smelling like sex and femininity and being fucking hot. It’s definitely your fault.”

She went back to the porch and scooped up the gun.

He shied from her, and everything in his crotch pulsed at her closeness.

She slammed the gun into the holster. “Let’s go back to the lab. Bring everything.”

“I just said—”

“You’re in control of yourself,” she said.

“I justbeggedyou—”

“And I didn’t say yes, and you haven’t done anything, and I trust you, and let’s go.”

He took a breath to tell her that she shouldn’t trust him and that he was not in control of himself. And then he realized that if he did that, she would probably leave him alone, and the odds that he’d get to lay an egg inside her would diminish significantly.

She was definitely into the idea of it, even if she was scared. He could convince her. He could wear her down.

If he played it right, she’d let him.

He closed the laptop. “Okay. Let’s go.”

“We’ll talk to Jonathan and Riley and then we’ll decide about making outside contact,” she said.

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