Page 62 of Lagoon

LUTHER SHOULD HAVEprobably woken up with her.

Everything was weird in a way he didn’t know how to parse. He was pretty sure he’d, you know, takenadvantageof her. He couldn’t deny that sex was that on some level. There was a desire, somewhere in him, to do that.

There was a reason it was a backseat-of-the-car-teenage cliche, after all, the guy pushing the girl for more and more while she tried to halt the entire thing.

It was always like this in some way. Sex for men had less stakes than it did for women, but this was blatant. He’d talked her into the eggs, and they both knew about Nancy. They’d seen that body. What the fuck?

So, on the first level, it was disturbing, because he’d never been that kind of guy, anyway. He was not the kind of guy who tried to talk girls into things. He wasn’t a scam artist. He didn’t practice negging. That was not him atall.

Things had changed within him besides his appearance, clearly.

Except, not exactly, either.

Because it had made him… well, this was fucked up, but this was how it felt… It had made him fall in love with her.

He’d urged her to take more and more of him, and that had been irresponsible of him. He’d put his pleasure above her safety. Except now, here she was in his arms, still asleep, and her belly was all full of his eggs and he felt this deep tug of responsibility towards her, and it wasn’t bad at all. It was nice, a kind of crimson-edged sense of destiny and ancient duty.

That thing that certain men were always decrying that feminism had taken from them, maybe? The provider/protector thing? It felt like that. And he liked it alot.

So, he did what men did in that situation and left.

She was still asleep in the bed in her cabin, and he got up, carefully and quietly, and edged his way out of the room and out of the cabin and outside, where it was growing dark, and the air was warm and muggy and the trees dangled dark foliage against the lines of angry color in the sky as the sun was setting.

That was when he knew he couldn’t leave her. Such a thing was unthinkable and ultimately painful. The draw, the tug, the connection between them, it was forged and set. It was done now.

So, he decided to go to the mess and get them some food. It had been a while since they’d eaten, he realized, but he hadn’t been hungry.

What if they didn’t eat human food anymore?

One way to find out, he guessed.

He brought back frozen things and let himself back into Angela’s cabin, which was when he realized that he hadn’t locked the door.You left her here, asleep, unprotected, and there are crazed guards running around, you fuckwad.

He rushed back to her bedroom.

She was fine.

Still asleep.

No one was in here.

Shit. He would not leave her again. Why had he left before?

It was the injustice of it, really. The lack of choice. He was Black and he knew all about being pigeonholed. He knew all about repressing his learned social behavior to pretend to fit into a white narrative.Behave how they want you to behave; pretend they’re the default.His whole fucking life had been running into brick walls, choices lost, narrow paths…

This—being changed, turned into a creature, having his sexual drive coerced, and then finally falling in love with a woman seemingly against his fucking will—it was too much. He needed control over his life.Somekind of control. It seemed like all his control had been taken away.

He started heating up food.

Angela smelled it and appeared in the doorway, wrapped in a sheet from the bed.

He guessed he didn’t wear clothes anymore. What was the point, really? His new skin was different, tougher.

“You got us breakfast, huh?” she said with a little smile.

His gaze went to the swell in her belly. “Thought you might be hungry.”

“Feeding your spawn?”

---