You Only Come to Girls (Patreon)

He ran through the forest with the other boys close behind him. The boughs were greening. The sun shone through them. He crashed through brakes of fiddleheads curled tight in dreams of summer. Blackberry brambles caught at his hose and the hem of his tunic and drew red lines of blood across his shins. Pheasants burst from the undergrowth in whirring coveys somewhere to his left and he nearly slammed headlong into the moss-furred trunk of an ancient pine. The shouts of his pursuers echoed through the trees.

He tried not to think of the sweat that had darkened the front of Luther’s tunic, of the graceful curve of the other boy’s neck as he’d turned to squint up at the sun over the castle wall. Goosebumps swept up his arms in waves of prickling flesh. His lungs burned with each stride. His legs felt heavy, his throat tight. 

What will happen if they catch me?

Limbs twining, hands seizing hold of calves and wrists. Fingers digging into shoulders. Teeth clenched and slick with spit. An engine of young meat in motion. He squirmed at its living heart, the weeping head of one of their sexes pressing against the taut ring of his anus, smearing it with wetness. They clutched at the soft down of his pubis, licked at his armpits, nipped at his ears and throat with hungry mouths.

A face pressed close to his. A tongue forced between his lips. Knees against his inner thighs, someone hiking his hips up off of the forest floor. Rivers warm and sticky on his back. Flowing white over his ribs. Pooling in the dirt around him.

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His bare feet struck the carpet of dead leaves. His own breaths sounded like a bellows in his ears. How far have I gone? The trees look different. This is-

The ground sagged beneath his feet. He twisted, trying to backpedal, then to claw at the crumbling lip of the ridge. Earth sloughed in dry channels. Roots tore in his hands. The stony slope rushed up at him.  

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Branches webbed the sky above like veins in a pale eye, the sun its merciless pupil. The boy blinked. He sat up. His head throbbed and his hands were sticky with blood. Beside him, a creek ran over a bed of stones across a mossy glade where ash and elm shaded the forest floor. He bent to dip his hand into the water and drank deeply as it ran from his cupped palm.

I fell, he thought as he wiped his lips on the sleeve of his tunic. The ridge he’d fallen from loomed high above, its slope steep and forbidding, gouged where his weight had collapsed part of its lip. He couldn’t hear the other boys. Maybe they’d lost him, or given up, or seen his fall and guessed him dead.

He tried to stand and a bolt of nauseating pain shot from his left thigh up through his guts. He flopped onto his side, gasping. Each blown-out breath sent little ripples through the streamlet. He steeled himself, then looked down. Near the top of his thigh a broken branch protruded through his hose, which were dark with blood around it. He closed his eyes again, waves of feverish nausea washing over him. The sun beat down on his stinging skin.

It took minutes to crawl into the shade on the clearing’s far side, each jolt to his bad leg hammering at his thoughts. He bit his lip to keep from whimpering. At last he reached a stone tangled in the roots of an old oak and heaved himself about to slump against it, sweat slicking his throat and soaking the front of his tunic. He sucked in lungfuls of clean air and watched the stream run past. It wandered in a shallow defile down a gently sloping hillside. Trees swayed over its mossy banks.

I don’t want to be alone.

His thigh throbbed. He looked at it again, and thought of Luther’s hand brushing against his hip, of the other boy’s fingers on his knee. He imagined a hundred different kisses. Rough and eager. Shy. Relentless. Tongues lashing and lips squirming and drool mingling on their chins. Straining to reach one another through the bars of a cell, cold metal against soft skin. A hand caressing his freckled cheek.

He heard a sound.

She picked her way over the stones on cloven hooves, goatlike and nimble, and her coat was not white, not really. It burned with a hot silver light as though something molten flowed beneath it. She came down the hill along the path of the stream and passed through the latticed shadows of the trees and the slanted blades of sunlight which fell through their limbs. From her head grew a spiral horn as long as a man’s forearm. 

The unicorn halted a short way off and knelt to drink. Her pale mane floated on the water, coils of hair billowing like cloud. He watched her in a daze. 

“You’re supposed to come to girls,” he said at last.

She stood, making no reply. Her eyes were pale as milk, her pupils burnished silver. Water dripped from her delicate muzzle and ran down the length of her horn. He felt a terrible need to please her, to be worthy of her. It ached like a knife in his breast, for he knew that he had nothing to give her.

“Can you help me?”

Can you feel your body dying?

The words, her voice, cut through him like a bitter wind. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He thought for a moment how terribly human the unicorn looked, how her eyes were too close together, her mouth too gentle, her nostrils too fine and too high. She frightened him, and his sex was stiff as iron for her even as hot blood ran down his thigh.

“My...my leg. I’m bleeding.”

She came closer, placing her hooves carefully, her legs so slender that he felt certain a stiff kick would snap them, and knelt again, the warmth of her breath washing over his groin and thighs. She bent and thrust her horn into his belly. There was no pain. Gooseflesh pricked at him. The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood like serried ranks of spearmen. He clutched at her mane. Around her horn his skin ebbed like the tide over streaks of fat and muscle. Tendons stretched, slick with clear fluid. Purplish worms of meat crawled through him. Organs pulsed between the slats of his ribs. Around his nipples flesh squirmed through the strands of his red tissue, forming little breasts like the buds of meadow flowers.

The unicorn pulled her horn out from his flesh, blood and mucous trailing from its tip, her mane sweeping over his bare thighs, for his clothes had melted away. At once new skin unfurled from the wound to wrap his body, drawing tight over the reshaped lines of him, knitting itself together at his spine.  

He put a hand on his thigh beside the broken stub of branch. The skin was hot and tight around it. The pain pulsed through the root of his sex. He 

“Can’t you change it? Can’t you take it away?”

No, child. I’m sorry. 

She rose, the curtain of her mane falling aside, and he saw that she was changed as well. She offered him her hand. 

He took it.

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She held his trembling length against her body on the carpet of the moss. Sun and shade played over them. He tensed at the touch of her stiff sex against his buttock, at the brush of her hand over his tender breast and the new curve of his hip. When she took his nipple into her mouth he gasped aloud, arching his back, tangling his fingers in the silver fall of her hair and feeling for a moment the crystalline length of her horn. 

Is this what mothers feel? he wondered, breathing hard. When they hold their babes against their breast, is this what it feels like?

She thrust inside him and he screamed through gritted teeth. Her hand slid from his hip to cup the heat between his legs, the pressure on his trembling sex unbearable. Her other pulled his nipple with insistent cruelty. Her arm shifted beneath him. He was filled to overflowing, his body bent against the arc of her cock, his new skin flushed and sensitive to every touch and thrust. He clutched at her muscular forearm, trying desperately to anchor himself as a storm blew through him in wild gales and shrieking gusts.

Can you feel your body dying?

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“Who’s he with?” asked Marius, peering through the ferns and underbrush at the edge of the strange glade. “Someone’s down between his legs.”

Tristan smirked. “Sure it’s not your mother, Mari?”

Luther put a hand on Marius’s shoulder as the older boy, red-faced, turned toward Tristan. “Quiet,” he said. “It’s nothing. Light reflecting off the water. He’s alone, the filth.”

The other boys said nothing.

Luther stared at the hunched figure in the clearing, at Simon’s limp red hair and trembling back. He watched the frantic motion of the other boy’s slender wrist with curiosity and contempt. He had seen something, he thought. Some silver shadow twined about Simon’s slim form. It was gone now, if it had been at all. 

This is the only thing that will make them believe me.

“Go and get him, unless you’re afraid.”

Marius lurched from the undergrowth without another word, Tristan hurrying after him. Luther followed at a distance. Simon didn’t seem to hear them. He was crying, Luther saw as they drew closer. Crying and tugging at his cock like some mewling boy whose first curls hadn’t sprouted. He was never going to last anyway, Luther told himself. He’s too weak.

The other two took Simon by the shoulders just as, shuddering, he spilled his seed. Tristan made a disgusted sound. Marius locked an arm around Simon’s throat and pulled him bodily back toward the woods. A last proud spurt of semen arced through a beam of fading daylight. Simon caught Luther’s eye in passing, but no recognition lay in the freckled boy’s gaze. Instead he looked confused, as though he’d just been rudely woken from a dream. He made no sound as they hauled him away, his heels dragging furrows in the moss. The left leg of his hose was soaked in blood.

Luther waited for a moment as the sound of their crashing progress faded, then crossed to where Simon had knelt and squatted to inspect the ground. Near a rock at the clearing’s edge he saw the dark stain of the other boy’s blood. More than a little of it. There was a trail of ruts where Simon had dragged himself over the moss, baring soil in little canyons. No footprints, no marks where another body might have knelt or lain. 

It must have been a trick of the light, thought Luther, Simon’s screams and the meaty thump of boots striking defenseless flesh ringing in his ears. He straightened up, looked one last time around the glade, and went after the others.

Nothing remained but a streak of wetted moss.