"So can I open my eyes now?"

Today had been your first birthday since moving to the big city, and holy shit, you never knew birthdays could be this great. Up until now the day had been a non-stop roller coaster ride of raves, alcohol and an assortment of birthday presents so vast that it made you feel just a little bit like Jesus. So far it'd been the best birthday you'd ever had, and when your girlfriend Janet whisked you away from all of the commotion and dragged you to her room for what she'd cryptically-yet-suggestively described as your 'special birthday boy present', you knew that it was gonna stay at the top spot for a long, long time.  

"Just- Nnf! Just a second! I'm almost ready. *Grrf! C'mon, fit you sunovabitch...*"

You impatiently shift your weight from foot to bare foot, trying to ignore the chill breeze rolling in from outside. Would it kill the mood to ask her to close the window? Probably. You'd do it yourself, but Janet had insisted that you keep your hands firmly clapped over your eyes, lest you ruin the surprise. God, you wish she'd let you keep your clothes on; your ballsack was starting to go into raisin-mode, and you imagine it'd be pretty hard to enjoy Janet's 'present' if your dick had shrunk down to chipilata size by the time she was ready to give it to you.
Whatever, you'd manage. Janet preferred it cold anyways.

"Need a hand?" you tease as her sounds of struggle grew evermore drastic. 
"I said gimmie a second, fuck!" she exclaims, giving a final, straining grunt followed by a sigh of satisfaction. "Finally! Fuckin' medium size my ass... Okay, take your hands away in three, two, one..."
You take your hands away from your eyes, and your dick goes from 'chipilata' to 'spear of destiny' as you take in Janet in all her striped, sharky glory. The black lengerie she'd squeezed herself into hugs her generous curves, iron-grey skin straining against the skimpy constraints of her expensive-looking underwear. Her wild auburn hair is lashed back into a frazzled ponytail, the jagged smile she wore was suggestive in all the right ways and her amber eyes were hot with an excitement you couldn't help but share. A brief, eager jig betrayed her anxiety, no doubt growing stronger by the second beneath your gaze. "Well?" she asks eagerly. "Whaddya think?"

You take a moment to collect yourself; still your racing heart, calm your twitchy fingers and stop your throbbing erection from reaching critical mass and popping like a party balloon. Janet had always been one of those endearing, devil-may-care beauties who didn't give a damn about how they looked and yet somehow always managed to come off as pretty, even when they were rocking nothing but a shitty pair of old jeans coupled with a major case of bedhead and a pop-culture refrence shirt spattered with mustard stains from the night before. It's the kind of beauty that appeals to you in the same way the greasy smell of a carnival burger van does, all warm, homely and cosy-like. You'd never thought of her as the kind of girl who could pull off the whole 'down-to-fuck' asthetic. 

And, to be fair, you were right. She looked all sorts of stupid in that getup. Very much so, considering she was hopping up and down like an exciteable child. Still, it worked in a whole different way; a kind of tryhard way which charmed itself right into both your heart and your boner. The costume looked expensive, her body looked as incredible as it always had, and she just looked so damned eager to please...
You reach out, clasp her by the shoulders and kiss her. She makes a small squeal of surprise before returning it. "Mmf-that good, huh?" she says between kisses, the gravelly lilt of her voice picking up into a girlish gasp of delight as you place a pair of kisses down the length of her neck.
"Mm-hmm." you grunt between busy lips.

The pair of you find your way to the bed and tumble down atop the sheets, hands clambouring over one another's bodies. She fights her way to the top, straddles you between her powerful thighs and slams a hand flat against your chest, panting readily and grinning a proud sort of grin, as if your passionate embrace had been a competition she'd won, and that she was now claiming you as the prize. There's a volatile kind of love smouldering in her wild eyes as she looks down on you, and you get the impression that she's peicing together a long, long list of all kinds of kinky shit to subjigate you to in that kooky-ass brain of hers. 
With her frayed hair, Hannibal Lecter eyes and unhinged smile, Janet often came off as something of a psychopath - But you were cool with that. Despite outward appearances, you knew Janet to be... Relatively sane, some childhood instances of psychosis aside -- and in your opinion that didn't really count, being so long ago and all. There was only one thing Janet was truly crazy over, and that was you. 

You squirm between her thighs, overcome with a giddiness born from both the anticipation of the planet-cracking sex and the simple, wholesome happiness that came with being in the company off someone who loved you as completely as Janet did. You reach up a hand to caress the sharp lines of her face, and she makes a light-hearted show of bearing her teeth and playfully nipping at your fingers before inviting your touch with a tender kiss upon your palm. Your hand comes to rest on her cheek, and the churning ocean of love heaving in her eyes soothes into something more akin to the calm surface of a lake, as if your touch had sobered her from her lustful stupor. 

"Hey Janet?" you ask.
"Mmm?"
"I love you."
Her toothy smile beams a little brighter, and her cheek blushes warm beneath your palm. "Keheheheh, yeah, I know. Love you too, Birthday Boy." 
Your hand moves from her cheek down past her throat and across her supple breasts, taking in the simple beauty that was Janet. "Where'd you find a getup like that anyways?" you ask as your fingers pass along the fabric of her black lengerie. It looked expensive, and janet didn't have what you'd call a generous paycheck. 
"Got it from a tailor a couple blocks down south," she explains, puffing out her chest to proudly display the bra. "Usually stuff like this would cost a fortune, but I know this girl who runs the place with her boyfriend. I explained the situation and, well, she's always been something of a romantic, so when I explained the situation..."
"Tsk, cheapskate."
"Oh, fuck off goody-two-shoes, it's not like I twisted her arm for a discount or anything. When I told her it was for your birthday she practically BEGGED me to take it off of her hands!" she poses with a smug grin, running her fingers across the cups of her bra. "Can't blame her, either. I look so killer in this thing it'd be a waste giving it to anyone else, amirite?"
"Mmhmm," you aknowledge as she lowers her panties onto your twitching, ready member. Ah, Jesus, that's soft... "What's it made from, anyhow?"
"Spider's silk. All of her products are made with spider's silk." 
"Why would all her stuff be-"
Janet's hand moves up over your mouth, stopping you mid sentence. "That would take a lot of explaining, and I've got a veeery busy night planned out for me and you, so how's about we save the chit-chat until AFTER I've fucked you senseless?"
You smile a little wider, thoroughly drunk with anticipation. "Sounds good to - mmph!" you begin, only to be cut short by another one of Janet's kisses. Her tongue dances between her razor teeth and fondles its way between your lips. You would've returned the favour, but last time you tried that you ended up with blood in your mouth.

One of the most important things to keep in mind when kissing Janet was that her mouth was essentially a wet hole filled with Nippon steel. That's not to say it was unpleasant -- in fact you'd argue that she was one of the best kissers you've ever had the pleasure of getting down and dirty with -- it simply meant that you had to temper your passion with a certain degree of caution. By now you'd become so well-accustomed to avoiding the sharp edges of her teeth that you did it without thinking. Still, you'd be lying if you said it never put any boundaries between the two of you sexually. For starters playful nibbling was out of the question, as was frenching, and biting your lip? Last time she tried that you had to get stiches. Naturally, though, the award for the biggest no-no when it comes to bedroom stuff goes to-

"Hey Birthday Boy," says Janet between kisses. "Lemmie suck you off."

-That. 

"Say again?" you ask, not that you misheard her or anything. Whenever the two of you started talking about sex, the conversation would inevitably lead to the million dollar question: 'to blow, or not to blow?' Janet was fervently for them, and you were very, very much against. Apparently Janet had had a fellatio fetish ever since she was old enough to search up naughty videos on the internet, and you were all too happy to fulfill her desires, providing it was you with your face in her crotch and not the other way around. It's not that you dislike getting blowjobs- like, what the fuck kind of guy doesn't enjoy a blowjob? It's just... Y'know... 
Teeth.

"I said lemmie suck you off." repeats Janet, unwilling to just drop the subject like you hoped she would. By now she'd been thoroughly informed on your 'no blowobs' rule a hundred times over, yet it never seemed to stop her from pushing the point. You'd hoped she'd be a little more considerate of your desires on your birthday, but then again Janet was nothing if not determined to get her way. 
Already well aware of your reservations on the matter, she cuts in just before you have a chance to reply and shoot down her offer. "I know the teeth are a problem, but check it, I've been practicing!" she exclaims, reaching into the bedside drawer and retrieving a... Is that a dildo? Holy fuck, it is. Why is it purple? Janet holds the foot-long rubber member as if it were a sword, bringing the point to your nose as if she were some kind of shark version of D'Artagnan readying herself to cut down a few of the Cardinal's men. "See? Must've deepthroated this thing, like, a hundred times by now! Not a scratch."
"Wait wait wait," you blurt, trying to process what she was saying (It took you a while. It was kind of difficult to think with Thanos' twelve inch purple boner in your face). "So... You've been sucking on that thing for HOW long?" you ask, incredulously pointing at the dildo.
Blushing like she realised only now how utterly embarrassing the situation was, Janet tosses the sex toy over her shoulder where it collides with her shelf of beloved vintage comic books and sends a dozen or so of them sprawling to the ground. Janet winces, composes herself with an awkward clearing on her throat and continues. "Th-that's beside the point. The point is that you've got nothing to worry about, right? I mean, I'm pretty much an expert at this shit by now!"
"Yeah but-"
"Pleeeeeease?" begs Janet with a charming flutter of the protective membrane over her eyes; it was the closest thing she had to eyelids. "please please please please!" she lets her chin fall to your chest and pouts up at you, going as far as to put her hands together in mock-prayer. Her tail busily sways back and forth behind her, as if she were tearing through the sea in search of plump prey. You often used her tail to gague her excitement, due to it being the most expressionate part of her body aside from her face. Right now she was somewhere between 'Just got VIP tickets to comic-con' and 'Second coming of Christ.'

Crap, this must've meant a lot to her. It'd mean a lot to you too if you'd been cramming that monstrosity of a dildo down your throat in preperation. Maybe... Maybe it was a trust thing? You hope not. Janet had a tendency to get a little bipolar with her emotions every now and then. Not often! She just, y'know, had these 'episodes' every once in a blue moon. Sometimes she'd lose a penny down a storm drain and burst into tears, and other times she'd laugh her ass off from morning to midnight over some shitty joke she'd read off the back of a candy bar. 
The severity of her emotional swings was often determined by the amount of effort she'd put in beforehand. Sure, sometimes she'd throw a hissy-fit over losing a game of blackjack or something, but she'd be back to her usual self if you gave her five minutes. If it was something she'd given her all over, though? Like, say, a romantic dinner or a particularly important assignment at work? Shit man, you'd better prepare for armageddon. She once locked herself in her bedroom and cried for an entire day because a comic strip she'd drawn for some stupid competition got third place, ranting about how her dream was dead and that there was no place for a 'worthless shitstain whore' like herself in the comic book industry. 
Yeah, Janet got pretty heavy with the self-depreciating comments when she got upset.
You're not going to argue that it was normal, and you cetainly not going to say it's easy to live with, but it was part of who she was, and you accepted that. Everybody has their ticks. Janet just happened to have a whole lot of them, was all. 

Presently though, said ticks had narrowed your choices down to two options: deny her and risk having her sobbing into her pillow for the rest of the night, or accept and hope she's as good as she says she is. The first option was definitely the safest, and if she was anybody else you would've told her to stick to the dildo, but dammit...
You hated it when she cried. 

"You promise to be careful?" you ask, splitting Janet's face with the toothiest fucking grin you've ever seen her pull. It would've warmed your heart, had it not served as a reminder of what was imminently about to be wrapped around your cock. 
"Scout's honour, you won't feel a thing!" she pauses, sniggering to herself as she enthusiastically slides down your body, leaving a trail of kisses from your chest down across your belly. "Well, nothing BAD, anyways." her pointed nose nudges against your manhood, and despite your valiant attempts, a nervous whimper squeezes its way out from between your pursed lips. You didn't like this. You REALLY didn't like this. This was exactly how those freak accidents you see on those trashy freeview channel documentaries go down. You could already see yourself on Discount Jerry Springer, title-card and all: 'I tried to get a blowjob from a shark and my penis got amputated'. 
"Hey Anon, Relax." says Janet, sensing your discomfort. You don't realise you're shaking until she lays a calming hand on your thigh in an effort to stop it. "Sshh, chill out, okay? The last thing I wanna do is hurt you." she coos, a shadow of concern passing over her face. 
"I know, it's just..." you release the breath you'd been holding, and your tense body surrenders to the soft warmth of the bedsheets and the pillows. "... Just nerves."
Janet says nothing, but that shadow of concern grows a little darker. "You sure you're okay with this?" she asks, lightly gripping your dick. "I mean, I don't want you to feel like I'm forcing this on you or anything," she plants a couple of kisses along your shaft, and your nervous whimper is soon follwed by a sigh of pleasure. "I just want you to know how much I love you."  
"I know how much you love me, babe," you breathe, finally calming down. "I know you love me plenty."
"Damn straight," she sniggers, giving your length a couple of pumps. Your member responds with a hearty throb, and she teases you with a squeeze. "Now get comfy, Birthday boy, I'm about to rock your fuckin' world!" she licks her lips in preperation, slender tongue sliding out from between he parted lips and gliding across your tip, sampling your flavour. You loose another whimper, this time encouraged by anticipation rather than fear. Christ, her tongue was smooth... 
"Thaaaats right, just loosen up a little, lemmie take care of you..." Janet purrs, the hand she had around yur cock settling into a slow, stroking rhythm. "Just take a deep breath, keep your eyes on mine-" her smile takes on a mischievious air as she lines up your penis with her drooling mouth. "And scream my name when I make you cum."
"Wha-haaaaaah!" Janet plunges down, taking your entire length into her mouth in one easy motion. As she trusts her head down her tongue snakes around you with a dexterity you didn't think possible, wrangling around your member and constricting like a wet, sopping python. Your dick tries to spasm, but the hot constraints of her tongue are bound too tight. A lengthy moan pours out of your lips as she begins to suck, and you can feel Janet's mouth pulling into a proud smirk in reply. One of her hands reaches around to cup one of your buttcheeks and pinches you lightly, eliciting a sharp grunt; her little way of saying 'See? I know what I'm doing. Told you so'.

'Oh my God' you meant to say, but the words melt on your tongue like hot butter and stream from your mouth in an unintelligible burble. She hadn't been lying -- she knew what she was doing. She knew real fucking well. Her eyes remain locked with yours, even as her head bobs up and down. She moves slowly, taking her time in loving each and every inch of you, tongue flicking, lapping and grasping along your manhood like a tootsie pop she was just dying to get to the middle of. "Haah Jan, that's... Hnnf, that's fantas- hnnk!"
You can't so much as finish complementing her before she rises to your tip and dives back down with a hungry growl, sniggering through her nose as you bury your face into a pillow to muffle your mewls of ecstasy. Her hands paw their way up your body before sliding back down by their fingertips and finally finding their place around your thighs, gripping you just hard enough to let you know that she was the one in control. 
She bobs and weaves with all the elegance of dancer, her motions so smooth that you'd think she'd been doing it her whole life. You never knew putting your dick in a wet hole could feel this good. You can already feel your balls tightening, the tell-tale tingle of an encroaching orgasm prickling along your spine. Your desperate moans grow deeper as Janet picks up the pace, working you harder still. "Juh... Janet, slow down! I-I'm not gonna last." you say, that urgent feeling of release rising ever higher within you. Her eyes take on a hungry gleam, and she sends you a sultry wink in reply. 

O-oh fuck, it's coming. Already? Goddamn, it'd barely been a minute. You'd at least hoped to last for two. That rising feeling starts reaching its peak, and you shudder in giddy anticipation. "Ah! Janet..." you sigh, if only for the pleasure of feeling her name on your tongue. Oh God, here it comes...
The cool breeze sighs through the open window once more, this time carrying with it the scent of freshly cut grass, and for some reason it gives you pause on the brink of your orgasm.
Wait a minute...
Didn't Janet have hay fever?

"CHNF!" 

Janet sneezes, and something pinches in your crotch as her serrated teeth clack together. A spray of red dashes itself across her face, and she recoils with a surprised grimace, rubbing at the spatter of crimson in her eyes. Wait, what? What the hell just happened? Why all the red stuff all of a sudden? Was she hiding a can of spray paint under the bed sheets or something? You blink hard, the momentum of your imminent climax coming to an abrupt halt as it rams headfirst into a wall of confusion. Janet seems to share in your bewilderment, wiping the viscous fluid from her face with the back of her hand. "Mmfhwhat thuh fuk?" she says through a full mouth, only for another heavy jet of red to spurt up from the bed and splash across the underside of her chin. Hold on, what was that in her-
-with a hacking cough, she dislodges what had gotten stuck in her mouth, and your penis tumbles out from between her teeth and onto your stomach. 

For a second you just stare at it, trying to comprehend why it was there and not between your legs. You blink again, half-convinced that when you look again it'll be gone, but when you open your eyes it's still there. 
Again a squirt of crimson erupts from the direction of your pelvis and plays across Janet's chest, ruining the nightwear she'd been so eager to show you. She didn't seem to notice; she was too busy staring at your crotch with a shocked sort of despair, like a woman who's just been sentenced to the gallows. You follow her eyes towards your genitals just in time to see the ruined stump of your manhood twitch out another geyser of blood, this time accompanied by a sharp, thorny blade of agony which entered you from between your legs and drove all the way up through your guts. It's a pain so intense it makes your ears ring and your stomach knot and the chords in your neck pull so tight it feels as if they're gonna snap.

The realisation finally sets in, and you begin to scream. 

She bit it off. She bit it off she bit it off she bit it-
The blade of agony pulses hot, setting fire to your insides and wracking your crotch with a kind of hurt you never thought the human body would've been capable of processing. Feels like the meat's peeling off your bones. Fills you up in a way that makes you think you're going to pop. You want to scream louder. Scream it all out before it kills you. Oh Jesus Christ she bit it off. She bit it off and it hurts it hurts IT HURTS-
Your legs kick at the bed in a feeble attempt to get away -- away from all the hurt. Doesn't work. The hurt follows. For all your efforts you go tumbling off the side of the bed, slamming your shoulder hard into a cabinet. You barely feel it. Drop in the ocean. 

Janet's horrified stare follows you as you roll across the floor in your vain efforts to escape your torment. She gawps, thick rivulets of your blood still rolling from her open mouth. You reach out to her for salvation, your plea a dry ghost of a whine. Can't breathe. Chest frozen. Lungs won't fill up. You're still screaming in your head. You're screaming so hard it feels like your skull is going to split. Janet's mouth moves, and through the ringing in your ears you can barely make out the words.
"I didn't mean to."

"I didn't mean to!" she says, this time with more desperation, as if she believed everything would fix itself and be fine as long as she said it loud enough. "I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to! Oh God, Anon I'm sorry I DIDN'T MEAN TO!" she riles up out of her shocked stupor and into a frenzy of dread, flying to her feet and scrambling to your side. 
She cradles you in her arms, trembling. You bury your face into her belly, trying as best as you can to hide from the pain, but the pain was smart. It follows after you, sinks its talons deeper and does all it can to make you wish you were dead. It wraps a crackling, fiery gauntlet around your stomach, crushes it in its barbed palm and forces a stream of vomit out your mouth. Somewhere along the line, you catch another lungful of air. You use it to scream some more. 
Janet makes a miserable sound of anguish and pulls you closer, still whimpering her mantra. "I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to..." she drones, stroking at your head like a little girl coddling a doll. She pulls away, removing your head from her lap and laying it carefully on the floor like a delicate china ornament. "I-I-I'll call someone, okay? I'll call someone and they'll make it better. They'll fix it. They'll-"
She turns and runs out of the door, as if another second in the room with you would've killed her. You reach after her, wheezing for her to stop. No. Don't go. You don't want to be alone. Come back. Come back and make it stop. 

She doesn't hear you. You're alone. Alone with the pain. It hurts. It hurts so badly you'll do anything to make it stop. God? Do you hear that? You'll do anything. You'll do whatever you're asked. You promise. Just make it stop. Please.

You... You wanted your Mom. Way back when you were a kid, whenever you were hurting, she used to sweep you up in her arms and do that thing where'd she'd rock you side to side and kiss your head and make all the bad stuff go away. You wish you were a kid again, wish you were back in your mothers arms so she could make all the pain go away. 
The stump of your manhood throbs, every note of its pulse battering you with a fresh wave of torture. Hot blood squirts up onto your chest, and lacking the strength to keep screaming, you settle instead on sobbing. "Mom..." you weakly cry, tears running down your face. Mom, where were you? You needed her now, needed her to kiss you on the head and tell you everything was gonna be okay. "Moooom, make it go away..."

Janet's back. She's standing in the doorway, arms crossed, eyes squeezed shut, trying as hard as she can to block out the world. "Ambulance is coming." she says, rocking herself on her heels. "Ambulance is coming."
"Janet... Help me."
She shakes her head, eyes still clamped shut, and repeats herself. "Ambulance is coming. He'll be fine. Ambulance is coming..."

You try to crawl towards her, but your legs won't work. You look down. Blood everywhere. The bedsheets are soaked through, the carpet is moist with the stuff, it's all over Janet and your hands are red halfway up to the elbows just from trying to stem the tide. You didn't think a human being could bleed so much and live. You can feel yourself getting weaker. Insides getting cold, things going fuzzy, heart beating slower and slower...

You're dying.

You didn't want to die. You never gave it much thought before, but looking at it from the perspective of a person at death's door, there was so much more you wanted to do in life. Places you wanted to go, people you wanted to meet, children you wanted to have... You wanted to die an old man, sleeping next to an old woman whom you'd spent your life loving. Not like this. God, please, not like this. Not now.

It doesn't hurt anymore. The pain is there, still trying to get at you, but the body is too depleted to hold up its end of the bargain and supply you with the physical sensation of agony. You can feel stuff inside of you powering down, giving up the battle to keep you alive. "Janet, please," you speak in a voice barely over a whisper. It feels hard to move your jaw, and your tongue is slow in shaping the words. 
With a pitiful whimper, Janet collapses to her knees, finds a nice corner to cower in and crams her hands over her ears. "I-It's not real. It's not real. It's just a nightmare. It's a nightmare and I'm gonna wake up. I'm gonna wake up. He'll be fine. I'm gonna wake up..." she mutters. 
"Janet, hold me..."
"I'm gonna wake up. He'll be fine. Just a nightmare."
"Jan..."
She crushes her hands harder into her head, hard enough for her nails to pierce her skin and draw blood. 
"Please," you utter as the darkness begins to clot around the corners of your eyes. "Don't... I Don't... Don't let me die alone..."
  
The last thing you see before everything goes dark is Janet still huddled into her corner, repeating the same three words over and over, as if in prayer.
"Just a nightmare. Just a nightmare. Just-"

------------------------------------------------------------

A nightmare. 

You open your eyes to darkness, and for a moment you're terrified that you might still be there in Janet's bedroom, bleeding to death like a stuck pig through the ruins of your cock. You make a wretched whine of dread and scramble for the nightlight, pawing at your bedside and whimpering like a kid on the verge of wetting the bed. You find the switch and turn on the light whilst you grasp at your manhood with the other hand, praying your fingers won't close around thin air. 
Your fingers clamp around your penis and cling to it like a drowning man to a hunk of driftwood. 
Ach, FUCK! Not too tight! Don't squeeze too tight. Remember what the doctors said. You drop your cock like a hot potato and tear back the covers, wretched with the fear that you might have broken something in your panicked fervour. 
Oh Jesus, sweet relief... It's still there. Still there and in one piece. 

Falling back into the cold, wet patch of sweat on your mattress you let out a shuddering sigh, willing your heart to slow down and your legs to stop shaking -- they're going at it so bad it's like you can feel your knees rattling against the cartilage. 'Settle down guys, false alarm.' you think at them, giving them a few testing kicks, trying to shake the nerves out of them. Shifting your weight you notice another wet patch further down the bed, beneath your thighs. Your ass clenches and your back goes cold. Blood? Are you bleeding? Oh God, you're-
-No, no wait, you just pissed yourself again.   

Another relieved sigh later you're up, sorting out some fresh bedding. You'd be embarrassed, but at this point you'd wet the bed so many times that it'd stopped being an issue. Swapping out the bed covers had become second nature to you upon waking up. Shit, the first week after you came back from the hospital you couldn't even help yourself; you pissed where you stood, sat or slept on the regular. Now it was more of a 'once every three days or so' thing. You suppose that counts as progress.

Carrying out your now semi-daily routine you change the sheets, head into the bathroom, open up the cabinet behind the mirror and start popping pills. 
There were a lot of them.

you were taking something to speed up the healing process, something to dull the pain, something to suppress erections, a whole bunch of things to help the synthetic urethra and nerve implants meld with your shredded flesh-
-And fish oil. Gotta get that omega 3. 

You look down at the obliterated rod that was once your pride and joy and, once again, sigh. To describe it kindly, your junk looked like a well-used scratching post for the world's most frustrated cat. Every inch of your length, from base to tip, bore some kind of battle-scar received on one of your many, many tours of the surgeon's table. They laced up and around your member in hideous webs of disfigurement -- a jagged ring around the bottom where Janet had initially castrated you, winding dashes too numerous to count where the doctors had tried their hands at fixing an artery or un-fucking a nerve cluster, a long, thick line that travelled from the top of your penis to bottom where some world-renowned surgeon had opened up your dick like a banana split and replaced your urethra with  what could best be described as a high tech, state-of-the-art piss tube -- all it needed now was a coat of green spray-paint and hey, presto! You've got a zombie cock. 
You suppose you should be grateful; it was only thanks to a long string of miracles that you still had your package in the first place. Had you still been living in your old world they would've tossed your severed manhood into the trashcan, bored a new pee hole up through your taint and sent you on your way. So, yeah, you guess Night-of-the-Living-Dick was the better outcome.

The medical science that'd gone into saving your cock had been bordering on sci-fi stuff. Thankfully, with all the various species of anthros the hospitals had to operate on around here the medical scientists had gotten a little more innovative in their medicines. Even then, the expenses of the procedure could be placed somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, and would've ruined you financially had it not been for that online petition the guys at work had set up in your favour. Apparently the concept of getting un-manned by a shark halfway through a blowjob was enough of a novelty to gather sufficient attention -- one guy even made a meme video of King Arthur pulling the sword out of the stone, only King Arthur had a dorsal fin on his back, and the sword was a dildo. 
Funny video. A real kicker. Missed out the part where you lost three pints of blood and screamed for your Mom, though. 

Out of nowhere your breath starts to waver and things start to blur as your eyes decide that now would be a good time to start filling up with tears. A nameless, spectral kind of dread swirls down over your shoulders and combs a cold hand through your scalp. It drains the heat from your face and sets you up with that dull, throbbing pain you'd usually associate with headaches, only it didn't stop at your head. Instead the feeling works its way downwards, filling you up from top to bottom with aimless anxiety. All of a sudden being naked made you feel vulnerable. You were too exposed here, out in the open. You wanted to go back to bed. Wrap yourself up in your bedsheets. It was safer there. Safe safe safe...
You clasp the corner of the sink in a deathgrip and clench your teeth hard enough to make your gums ache. Shit, you were hoping you weren't going to have to go through this today, but all-fucking-righty, then. Fixing your eyes onto the floor you take a deep breath in, and then a deep breath out, counting ten seconds between the inhale and the exhale. "It's all in my head.  I'm being stupid. There's nothing to be afraid of." you say to yourself, breaking the little jingle up between breaths. Ease up. Look around you. Think. What's there to be afraid of? Nothing. It's just your fucked up nerves harping bullshit into your ear. 
Deep breaths, calm down, no danger. 

The tears stop stinging your eyes and the tide of gooseflesh sweeping your back mellows down to nothing as the cloud of dread ascends from your shoulders. It's not so much a surrender than it is a tactical retreat. You can still feel it in the room with you, planning its next move. Waiting. You flee back to your bedroom, and pray it won't follow. 
Ever since... Ever since Janet bit you, you'd been having these dark bouts of emotion, seemingly at random. They hit fast and they hit hard and it was the weirdest fucking thing. Like, you cried yourself to sleep last night, and you're not talking about that regular 'damp eyes and sore chest' crying yourself to sleep, either. You sobbed, you hugged your pillow, you whimpered tearful nothings to yourself and bawled so loudly that your neighbours had to take turns hammering on your door, telling you to shut the fuck up. The worst part is that you don't even know why you were crying. It was as if someone had spiked your drink with the mother of all downers. 
Truth be told, it was all pretty scary, actually. Sometimes you want to cry like a mother who lost their baby, other times you want to punch holes in the dry wall and rip the light fixtures right out of the ceiling, and on some rare occasions...
On some rare occasions it feels like it'd be so easy to take one of those kitchen knives you keep by the sink and...

Fuck it! Fuck it all, now you're making yourself sad, as if all this depression shit wasn't doing enough already. Man, you should be happy. Shit, you should be ecstatic; you're not dead AND you've still got a cock to piss out of. Lady Luck's been giving you handjobs under the table up until now, and what were you doing? You were sulking. You were stewing in your own juices like a chicken that'd been left to boil for too long and you were sulking. you should be outside right now, savouring that cool wintery air and meeting your friends and thanking God that you didn't bleed out back on Janet's bed and that you can still go to the bathroom standing up!

...

So why weren't you? The door was right there. 

You fidget with your hands, rocking yourself on your heels and staring apprehensively at the door. Maybe you could finally go outside again today. It could be nice, feeling the wind in your hair again. You'd been cooped up in here for weeks now, and you could count the people you'd spoken to on one hand. Perhaps going out and socialising could do you some good. You shuffle on over to the window, grabbing a handful of your bedsheets as you went and wrapping them around your shoulders - for some reason you felt as if you needed the protection. Reaching out with a shaking hand, you part the blinds and look outside.
From your sixth floor window, you've got a wonderful view of Christmas. You overlooked a basketball court and beyond that, the always bustling streets. There's a thick layer of snow crusting on the sidewalks and caking the rooftops, with a fine white dust sprinkling down from the heavens, and it stirs in the gust so tumultuously that you can practically feel the wind-chill through the glass. There's children playing down in the basketball court: those two rhino twins from a couple of rooms over were waging an all-out snowball offensive against the kids who lived across the street and doing a fine job of getting their asses kicked; their wide frames made for easy targets, and their bulky fingers were ill-suited for shaping the snow into something throwable. Beyond the wire fencing which set the boundaries of your apartment complex the city was winding down into that sleepy state of mind it usually settled into for the winter. The occasional car crawls across the roads, hampered to a sluggish pace by ice and snow, and the sidewalks were sparsely populated by the dozen or so people brave enough to face the snow and hoof it to work. Off in the distance, strolling past the corner store you used to frequent, there's a pair of wolves wrapped with their arms interlinked, one resting their head on the other's shoulder. 
It all looks so inviting, like the cover of a Christmas card. You'd always loved the snow. Maybe... Maybe you'd finally go outside today. Maybe you'd slip on your winter boots, take a walk down to that corner store and get yourself a box of that mint cocoa you liked -- give yourself something nice to drink in front of the TV tonight.

The two wolves begin talking to one another, and through their parted lips you can make out the whites of their teeth, glistening against the black canvas of their fur. You shut the blinds and retreat back into the solace of your bedroom as your heartrate spikes and your skin tingles, threatening to break into a cold sweat. 
Maybe tomorrow. 

You suppose it's for the best. Doctors said you still had a lot of recovering to do, anyways. You'd probably end up spending today like you did most days: watching a few movies, playing a couple of games, reading a book and waiting for night to come so you could do it all over again tomorrow. 
Look, you know spending all your time inside isn't healthy, and you're not going to pretend you're oblivious to the fact that you're slowly becoming a hermit. It's just that going outside is really hard at the moment, y'know? Being around other people, standing out in the open... It made you uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. That's not to say there hadn't been attempts, because there had been. Just last week you made it all the way to the corner store before pussying out and going back inside. You just needed time. A lot more time.

'Deep breaths, calm down, no danger.'

The mantra spun in circles around your head, repeated over and over until the act of thinking it became as natural as breathing. Subconsciously, you were always chanting it. You'd been chanting it ever since you woke up on that hospital bed with your pelvis wrapped in bandages and tubes sticking out of you. Those six simple words had become the umbrella you used to weather the constant rain of anxiety that'd followed you home from the emergency room. It was your go-to cure for all the pesky panic attacks you'd been wrangling with, and so far it'd worked pretty damn well. Knots in your stomach? Say the mantra. Hands won't stop shaking? Say the mantra. Can't stop twitching? Getting chills? Woke up to the sound of your own whimpering and have the inexplicable urge to go find someplace to hide? Say the fucking mantra. 

You've just about got your blood pressure back to a manageable level when a knock at the door sends it spiking back up again. Then you realise it's ten thirty and it's probably just Arnold coming around with your daily care-package. Just to be sure though...
"Who is it?" you ask, hovering a hand over the deadbolt but taking great care not to touch it, worried that you might slip and unlock it by accident. 

"It's Janet. Just dropped by to talk, see how things are going, maybe snip your dick off again, if I've got the time."
"... Fuck you, man." you grumble, unfastening the deadbolt and opening the door. There's a reindeer waiting on the other side, his arms crossed and his hooved foot tapping against the floor in an impatient rhythm. An old 'bag for life' hung from his fingers, packed with your groceries. He was wearing an old, moth-eaten hoodie and a pair of jeans more shredded than your wiener. Must've been Saturday; that was typical weekend wear for Arnold. 
"That's not funny." you harrumph as Arnold walks past you. One of his antlers inadvertently connects with your head as he does so, and you stagger back against the wall before he accidentally pokes your eye out with one of those things. Honestly, why he kept those things was beyond you. You'd think that after he'd taken out that light fixture at work he'd have had them taken back to stumps. 

"Lighten up Dickless, I brought snacks." he says nonchalantly, rustling the bag at you like you'd jingle a set of keys in front of a baby -- a peace offering to make up for the name-calling, not that you minded it all that much. By now you'd very much gotten used to Arnold's unique fashion of conversation via shit-talking. The two of you knew one another from work, and after two straight years of dealing with his 'particular' brand of banter, you'd come to consider him one of your closest friends. 

"What kind of snacks?"
"The rice ones. Y'know, the flat ones that kinda look like patties? Covered in paprika or some shit? Those ones." 
"... And cherry soda?"
"And cherry soda." he assures you, producing a twelve pack from the bag, yanking a can out of the plastic netting and tossing it to you with a casual underhand. You catch it with a clumsy fumble, crack the tab and take a desperate swig. Mmph, elixir of the Gods. He'd fucked up your requests a few days back and brought you lemon and lime in lieu of something actually drinkable, and you've been bursting for a soft drink you could stomach ever since. 

"So how you been holdin' up?" asks Arnold, taking one of the sodas for himself and collapsing onto your sofa, taking up the remote from the table and flicking through the channels. He punctuates himself with a hearty yawn, dropping his legs over one side of the couch and his head over the other. "Go outside recently, or are you still sticking with the ol' hermit routine?"
"I've been making progress." you bullshit, hoping you made it sound casual enough to slip under Arnold's radar. 
"And what was the progress?" 
You consider lying and telling him you've been going for strolls along the sidewalk, but after he went through all the trouble of bringing you the cherry soda you just don't have the heart. "Well, I've been planning on taking a trip around the city recently-"
"-Yuhuh," answers Arnold in his lazy, Canadian drawl, finishing off his soda and tossing the can at a nearby bin. He overshoots it by a country mile, instead dashing it against the wall and spattering your carpet with dregs of purple fluid that'll doubtlessly be an absolute bitch to get out. "You said the same thing last week, and the week before that, and that, and-"
"I get the point," you say firmly, walking over to the can, picking it up and dumping it pointedly into the trash. Arnold doesn't seem to notice; through all his channel-surfing he'd finally settled on a movie: some grindhouse exploitation trash with a budget consisting of spare change. Plenty of tits, ass, and pig guts swimming in murky red corn syrup. "And Christ, would you turn that shit off?"
"C'mon man, it's Slaughtersphere! I thought you loved Slaughtersphere?"
Maybe once upon a time, back when your manhood didn't look as if you'd tried fucking a pencil sharpener. Ever since the incident, though, you'd developed an aversion to gore. It made you nauseous, reminded you how red everything had been that night... Hot fountains of crimson jetting from the grisly faucet of your mauled manhood, bedsheets so sodden you could wring rivers out of them, Janet's bewildered face painted with the scarlet spray, her shocked mouth agape and blood streaming from between the gaps in her  deathly white teeth...
"Just turn it off." you waver, knees beginning to tremble. "Please..."
Arnold turns off the TV and twists himself around to face you, and even though you're not looking at his eyes, you can feel the incredulity they needle into you all the same. You can picture his face in your head: mouth a granite frown, chiselled by all the time he'd sunk into putting up with your shit, ears flat against his head as if weighed down by his disappointment in you, brow arched in a way that said 'Seriously? Over a fucking movie?' 
You hang your head a little lower in shame, crumpling before the spotlight of ire he shone on you. Guilt tethers itself around your throat and tightens itself to near choking-point and that horrible dropping feeling begins to tug at the pit of your stomach. Christ, why hadn't you just let him watch the film? It's a stupid B-movie, for God's sake. You feel like such a jackass it's unreal, it's-

"Anon? Hey, look at me, man." says Arnold, the mellow drawl of his voice as soft as air. 
You direct your eyes a little bit upward, focusing on his neck. 
You can practically hear his eyes rolling in their sockets. "At my FACE man, c'mon."
It's hard at first - like there's a piece of string going from your pupils down to your cheeks, and you're straining against it just to move your eyes the couple millimetres upwards it takes to settle on his features. With no small modicum of effort you force them the rest of the way to meet his.
His face is the very picture of concern, and you realise you've been bullshitting yourself; what you'd taken for ire had actually been worry. The guy had just been worried about you. Of course he had. He's fucking Arnold. The guy was so laid back he made the Dali Lama look temperamental. You seriously thought he'd be pissed over a little television?
He holds your flimsy stare, reading what might be going on behind your twitchy eyes. "You okay?"
"I'm fine," you mutter as the back of your hands begin to prickle and your toes start to get cold. "Just... Don't want the TV on, I Guess."
It's a lie, and Arnold looks as if he's about to call you out on it. Then he shrugs and lays himself back down on the sofa, perhaps deciding that leaving you to your excuses was for the best. "Whatever. Anyhow, I can't hang around for too long. The rest of the guys from work are doing this, like, fancy-dress party thing before we break up for Christmas, and I promised them I'd be there." he explains, getting up and stretching his arms as if he'd been laying there for hours. "I just came by to drop off your groceries and- oh yeah!" he crams one of his hands into the pocket of his worn hoodie and produces a crumpled piece of paper. "Janet wanted you  to have this."

Janet.

Arnold holds the piece of paper out towards you, and your legs carry you backwards all by themselves. You stop yourself before you trip up on some furniture, and place a shaky hand on a nearby wall for purchase. "W-whuh-why-"
"She came round the office the other day; said she wanted you to have this." he says, taking a step closer to deliver the letter into your hand, only for you to curdle away from it like paper under a flame. He raises his hands in what you think is supposed to be a calming gesture before setting the letter down on the coffee table next to the sofa. "Easy now, Dickless, don't be having a spaz-attack on account of a lil' scrap of paper, alright? She didn't wanna freak you out with a surprise visit, and since you changed your number and stuff, she couldn't just call you or nothin', either."
You flex your fingers uneasily, trying to shake the pins and needles out of them. Janet. "What-" you choke. Breathe Anon. Deep breaths, calm down, no danger. "What does it say?" you ask, forcing the words out of your straining throat. Arnold shrugs, apathetically making his way to the door. "Dunno, man. Didn't think I should read it, it being addressed to you and all -- look, I gotta bounce. Me and a few of the other guys are gonna be hittin' the party as Santa's reindeers, and they're gonna be short of a Dasher if I don't shift my ass." he opens the door and goes to leave, only to pause halfway out the room. "You gonna be okay?" he asks. 
Answering him takes more deliberation than it should. "Yeah. Yeah, I'll be fine. You uh, you go have fun." you answer, waving him off. Your eyes hadn't left the scrunched piece of paper on the coffee table. As stupid as it sounds, you felt as if it'd be dangerous to let it out of your sight. 
"Alright, see you  around." he says, closing the door behind him.

You approach the screwed ball of paper with all the caution of one of those goofy cartoon characters doing the whole 'tiptoe' sneaking thing. You're sure you look ridiculous, but you'd be lying through your teeth if you said that little piece of paper didn't put the fear of God into you. 
The last you'd seen of Janet had been in the recovery room. You'd been staring at the clock on the wall, lacking the energy to so much as wipe the drool away from your bubbling lips. The nurse by your bedside had been filling you in on the results of your operation when Janet had decided to make an appearance. She'd come tip-toeing through the frosted glass double-doors with a bouquet of flowers cradled in her arms, waving at you from across the room with a timid smile... And you'd just lost it. You'd screamed. You'd thrashed and struggled so hard the restraints binding you to the bed came loose. You dragged yourself across the floor, locked your hands around the nurse's leg and begged for him to make her go away. You'd wailed and you'd cried and it'd taken four orderlies to hold  you down whilst another administered the sedative. 

It'd been her teeth that set you off. Whenever Janet smiled her lips naturally parted, and that thin strip of white had been enough to push you to the very edge of your sanity. You dreaded to think about how you'd react when... If... You saw her again. A big part of you wished you never would, to be honest. A few times now you'd considered moving and setting up shop somewhere a bit less crowded than the city. Who knows? Maybe if you went somewhere far enough, the anxiety and the fear wouldn't bother following you. You certainly had enough money, and office workers like yourself could find work wherever there were desks and functioning computers. Ironically though, Janet kept you anchored to this place just as much as she repelled you. Yes the mere sight of her was enough to instigate a panic attack, and yes, you were currently trembling in  your socks because she'd sent you a piece of fucking paper, but...
But you still loved her. 
As much as your nightmares and your survival instincts tried to tell you otherwise, you know what'd happened had been nothing but a freak accident. You'd been together with Janet long enough to know that she isn't the kind of person who'd do something like that. Like, she's crazy for sure, but she's no sociopath, if that makes sense. Hurting other people just wasn't in her nature, and you believed that now just as you had before she'd gone and bit your dick off. It'd just been a horrible outcome to something she'd intended to be wonderful. 
You knew that, you accepted that, and yet picking up the piece of paper and reading it didn't get any easier. 

'Deep breaths, calm down, no danger.'

The note must've gotten trapped under Arnold's phone and gotten smushed into the bottom of his pocket -- it was scrunched into a tight ball and sprinkled with lint. Peeling it open and flattening it out against the table, you find that it's not a note at all, but a hand-drawn comic. You noticed Janet's art style the moment you set your eyes on it. The dark colour palette, the misaligned positioning of the boxes, the frames practically bursting with meticulous detail... It looked more like something you'd find in an actual comic book rather than a personal letter. The quality's so fine that for a moment you forget all about you and Janet and lament over what a shame it was that the page got so crumpled in the first place; it's no way to treat artwork as good as this. 
There on the paper, from the confines of a little square, a cartoon Janet waves to you in greetings. You don't fail to notice that she'd drawn herself with her mouth closed, despite there being a speech bubble right next to her head.
"Hi."

Your eyes linger on her face, lapping up the details. It'd been so long since you'd seen her last that you almost forgot how beautiful she was. Alas, you doubted you'd be able to admire her this thoroughly in real life without having a minor heart attack. Still, that only seemed to make getting what you could out of the picture all the more important. You analyse the curve of her face, the sparkle of her eyes, the way her auburn hair spills over her shoulders, commit it all to memory and move onto the next box. 
Janet sits at the table of the old fifties diner a couple of blocks down from here. You and her used to eat out there on Saturdays, and Janet's rendition of it was so picture-perfect that you had no doubt in your mind over the setting. She rests her elbow on the table, props her head on her hand and stares at you longingly from the page. You hadn't thought it was possible to commit a look of such genuine sadness to paper up until now. The speech bubble coming from her mouth is small, dwarfed by the rest of the picture. Lonely. 
"I miss you."

You feel a twinge in your heart as you read those words. She misses you. After all this time hiding away from the world, you'd convinced yourself - or maybe hoped - that she'd forgotten about you and moved on to some degree. Evidently she hadn't, and to your surprise you feel more relieved than anything. You realise that didn't WANT to be forgotten. Not by her. You want her to remember you. Think about you. Reach out to you just like this so that one day you might-
Know what? You're getting ahead of yourself here. Way too far ahead. You take a deep breath, try as hard as you can to divorce yourself from the stewing emotions you had twisting around inside of you and shifted your eyes to the next panel.

Janet wipes a small, stylised tear away from her sketched face. The speech bubble in this frame has more wavering boundaries, as if it were being said in a voice rocked with gentle sobs. You spot faults in the artistry here and there where something had smudged the ink in small, sparse specks, as if it'd been left out in a light rain. 
"I know I'm probably the last person on Earth you want to see right now, and I know that you need your space, but not being around you? It's starting to hurt, Anon. I miss having you about. I miss your smile, your shitty cooking, that feeling I get when I wake up with your breath over my neck and all the other things." 
There's a break in the speech bubble, and the comic is so vivid that you can practically see her choking up as she loses herself in a moment of reflection.
"God, there's so many other things..."

Next frame the tears are gone, and  her tight-lipped smile is back. It's strained, though, and you can the ghost of her longing expression swelling up behind her porcelain mask of cheerfulness. You  swear that if you look close enough, you could almost see the cracks forming. This was so far beyond Janet's usual standards that you wonder if just gone and commissioned it from a professional, but no. There was too much heart in it, too much raw effort for it to have come from anybody's pencil but hers. 
"But I didn't draw this just so I could prattle on about all the things I miss about you. That'd take forever and a day, and nobody likes it when you try to cram paragraphs into speech bubbles. So, I'll keep this short and sweet: Come see me."

You were afraid she'd say that -- or were you secretly hoping for it? You land on the last frame, and let Janet answer that question for you.
"Know that corny diner we used to eat at on the weekends? Y'know, the one with cheeseburgers on the breakfast menu and the same four Frank Sheepatra songs playing on repeat over the radio? I'm gonna be there at three today, and I'd really like it if you could be there with me. I don't want to be that one weirdo who sits at a restaurant table all alone." 
Despite all your apprehension, Janet's crappy sense of humour still manages to elicit a hoarse cough of laughter from you.
"Seriously though, drop by, if only just for a little while." she continues in a separate speech bubble. "There's a lot of things I want to say to you, and I'd prefer to say them over something other than paper, preferably lunch. I'm buying."
The page is signed at the bottom with Janet's initials, as well as a trio of 'x's. You notice that one of the crosses has smudged beneath your thumb. She must've finished drawing it recently; the ink was still wet. You look at them for a while, those three little crosses...

...

You don't realize you're crying until the tears gather at your chin and drop onto the page with a wet *plip*. There's a thousand and one feelings playing up inside of you, broiling with all the rage of a churning volcano. Push it down. Swallow it. Pretend it isn't there. Read the comic over again and formulate a calm and calculated reaction. Deep breaths, calm down, no danger. 
Fortifying your straining heart you try reading the comic once again. You get as far as 'I miss you' before you break. The tears resume, the volcano erupts, and before you know it you're curled up on the sofa in a foetal position, clasping a pillow in a deathgrip and sobbing into its feathery bosom. 
You missed her too. You missed her blunt attitude, those chilled-out nights the two of you spent together being lazy and doing fuck-all, the way she bitched about having to get up so early on weekdays and the swathes unfinished comic pages she kept stapled to the wall, clogging up valuable poster room. On your own everything felt empty and cold and when you woke up screaming in the middle of the night there was nobody to hug you better and tell you everything was okay. You've experienced life without her, and it's been fucking miserable. 
You decide then and there to take Janet up on her deal. The prospect of seeing her still scares the shit out of you, but being without her seems worse somehow. Maybe you're tired of staring at the TV all day and want to ditch the hermit lifestyle, maybe Janet's beautifully drawn comic -- one of the few signs of affection you'd received outside of Arnold's visits in God knows how long -- had clued you in to just how lonely you really were, or maybe you felt partly to blame for all the emotional turmoil and social exorcism Janet must've endured. Christ, you hope she's had someone looking out for her like Arnold's been looking out for you. You remember the day she lost that comic-art competition, how she locked herself in her room and heaped hatred upon herself, and your mind goes to grim places you  don't want it to go. As self-depreciating as Janet could be at times, you'd never imagined her going as far as to harm herself. At the same time you knew how completely she loved you, and you dreaded to think what kind of punishment she might concoct for herself to make amends for hurting you the way she did. 

Before you know it you've got your boots on and are tugging your winter coat over your shoulders. You glance at the clock. One-thirty. Janet told you to meet her at three, and the diner was about half an hours walk away, further than you'd been from your home in over a month. Well, Arnold HAD wanted you to get out more. You pull a warm hat over your head and plough your way through your apartment's front door and rush down the stairwell before your brain's got a chance to catch up with you. You're riding on momentum here, and you're afraid that if you stop and think about it, you'll lock up and scurry back inside with your tail between your legs, just like all the other times. You can't give yourself the chance to get scared. You'd push yourself onwards and ride the coattails of your spontaneous confidence for as long as it lasted. 
You stop for a second at the big, glass double doors which led outside. You feel as if you could either rip them off of their hinges or run away from them with all the speed of a twitchy, clinically depressed roadrunner. You settle a hand around the cold metal of the door's handle, swallow back the taste of bile and copper forming on your tongue, and pull it open, stepping out into the snow and feeling it crumple underfoot. 

Deep breaths, calm down, no danger. 
-----------------------------

Deep breaths, calm down, no danger.
Deep breaths, calm down, no danger.
Deep breaths, calm down, no danger.

You shrink a little further into the sidewalk as a car trawls across the icy road, affixing your eyes to the ground and concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. Wind sweeps your face, cold and dry and bitter, and it forces you to a stop. You sway on dizzily on your feet and prop yourself on the wall of a nearby convenience store to stop yourself from falling face-first into the snow. Dear God, was it really too late to turn back now?
Forcing your eyes away from your feet you take in your surroundings and try not to panic. Okay, where the fuck were you? Lets see... There was Groundhog's Used Car Dealership, there was the local Pred-Paradise fast food restaurant, right over there was where you lost your wallet down a storm drain that one time... Alright, you got this. The diner was right around this here corner. Not far to go now. C'mon, man up. You got this. 
Pushing yourself off of the wall you bump shoulders with a passer-by, your hand brushing against something soft. On inspection you realise the passer-by was a bat, and that 'something soft' had been the membrane of their wing. She shunts you away with a vicious shove of her elbow, swearing at you  in a voice as coarse and as rough as sandpaper. "Hey, watch where you going, dickcheese! You fuckin' blind or something?" 

"Sorry!" you yelp like a kicked dog, holding your hands up in apology. You look up to meet her eyes, but on the way there you accidentally focus on her bared teeth, brandishing a pair of silvery-white fangs. Something knots up inside of you, your legs go numb and the world begins to swim. Oh shit, why'd you do that? Why'd you have to look at the mouth? Stupid bastard. Stupid, stupid bastard. You stumble back, trip, and barely manage to catch yourself on the railing which separated the sidewalk from the traffic. A truck trundles across the road, its engine roaring into your ear and its imposing presence squashing you into submission. You retreat into yourself, making yourself small and shielding your head with your arms. Your heart races, your chest strains and your lungs refuse to take in air. "Suh-sorry, I'm- I'm sorry..." you gasp, voice akin to someone who'd just received a particularly punishing punch to the gut. Oh no. No, no, no, you KNEW this was a bad idea! It was asking too much, trying to come all this way on your own. It was too much, too soon. You... You wanted to go home. You wanted to go back to your room where things were small and quiet and nothing could hurt you. 

You can just make out the bat's feet out of the corner of your eye, adorned in chunky black winter boots lined with roguish, gothic studs. Shit, why couldn't she just go away? Wasn't 'sorry' enough? Just leave you alone. Please, leave you alone. 
"Yeah, well, I mean, it's not a big deal or anything..." she murmurs. Her feet shuffle uncomfortably in the snow before turning around and making to walk away from you. They halt after three strides, anxiously shift their weight from boot to boot as their owner makes a contemplative sort of sigh, barely audible over the bustling din of the city, and turn back in your direction. "Hey, you okay, man? You look sort of..." she grinds one of her toecaps into the snow as she ponders an adequate definition. "... Fucked up. You uh, you need a hand or something?"

You raise your head just far enough from the makeshift panic room of your arms to nod. 

"Alright," she says, rocking back and forth from toes to heels as both she and you pondered what 'helping' entailed. "Do you, like, need me to call someone or-"
"I need to get to the diner. T-thuh-the past the corner there." you blurt, pointing a shaky finger South. 
"The one past- ? You mean that fifties-lookin' place with the all the red neon?"
You nod again. 
The bat's silent for a while, and although you couldn't see her, you could feel her air of confusion all the same. You couldn't blame her; if some twitchy looking freak bumped into you on the street and then cowered in the corner, asking you to take them to some old-timey burger joint, you'd be a pretty dumbfounded yourself. Suddenly she takes four quick steps towards you, and you hear the fabric of her clothes rustle as she shrugs. "Fuck it, okay. I'm game. Do you want me to... Pssh, shit, I dunno, lead you there or something?"
You take the shaky hand you'd been pointing in the direction of the diner and offer it to her.
"Okay, cool. Uh, you're not gonna freak out again if I touch you, right?"

You shake your head, and she gingerly grasps your palm with her elongated digits. Her skinny fingers and the membrane surrounding them make for an odd sensation, like holding a bony hand draped in a sheet of velvet. With a surprising strength she pulls you back to your feet and shepherds you down the sidewalk. 
"Th-thanks. And sorry. I-I don't mean to be a pain in the ass or anything. It's just, uh, I've got a lot of problems." you vaguely explain, returning your eyes to the floor and concentrating on matching your pace with hers. 
"Yeah, no shit..." she scoffs. "So what's up with you, anyways? You got brain damage or something or are you just plain crazy?" 
 You'd peg her as being insensitive on purpose if she didn't sound so oblivious. "I, ah, I was in an accident." you say, not willing to give her any more than that. As maladjusted as you currently were, you still had enough sense to know that castration-by-blowjob wasn't a good subject for casual conversation. 
"Oh yeah, what kind of accident?" she asks, looking back at you over her shoulder. "Actually, don't you live round these parts? You look sorta familiar." 
"No, I live in that apartment building down near the public school. And it's personal -- the accident, I mean." 
She doesn't make any indication of hearing you as you both stop at a traffic light, waiting for the green man to start flashing. She's a little too busy scrutinising your face to pay attention to what you were saying. "You sure you're not from around here? I swear to God I've seen your face before."
"Uh, n-no, I don't-"
"Like, seriously. I'm getting Deja Vu outta the ass right now," she mutters, leaning in closer to better scrutinise your features. You shy away from her, and she chuffs in mild amusement. "Heh, know it's weird. from this angle you almost look like my husba-" she cuts herself short with a gasp. "Mother fucker, now I remember! YOU'RE THE DICK GUY!" she exclaims, loudly. 

Very loudly. 

Like, you're pretty sure everybody on the other side of the street heard that. We're they looking? You raise your head for a second to check if- yep, they were looking. Fuck. 
Meanwhile the bat had bubbled up with newfound excitement, either unaware of all the attention she was attracting or simply unbothered by it. "Holy shit dude, I saw you! I saw you all over the fuckin' internet!" 
Son of a bitch, out of all the things you could be famous for, why'd it have to be this?
"Yuh-yeah, that was me," you stutter, pulling your hat further down your head in a vain attempt to shroud your blushing cheeks. "Could- could you lower your voice a little? It's, ah, something of an embarrassing subject." You add in a feeble tone: "I, uh, don't deal well with all the attention, either."
"Wha-?" she starts. Then the penny drops and her mouth forms into a fanged 'o' as she realises there were, in fact, other people on the street, and that now, thanks to her, most of them were looking at you. "Oh. Aheh, shit. My bad." she admits with an apologetic smile. She doesn't talk again until you're a ways down the street and the bystanders who'd overheard her had all melted into the background. "Sorry about that; My husband's always telling me I'm too loud. Guess he has a point, y'know?" she jokes conversationally. 
You guess he does. 
There's a brief silence between the two of you, one that you were hoping would last the rest of the trip. Then the bat leans in and asks you in hushed, secretive tone. "So..." she  what's it like?" 
"What's what like?"
"Y'know, your D. You rockin' some chrome-looking Terminator dick, or are you like a Ken doll or something?"
You've got half a mind to tell her to mind her own fucking business, but there's a genuine, almost child-like curiosity to her voice that you can't help but smirk at. "Think more Frankenstein." you hear yourself say, Arnold's teasing little nickname floating to the top of your head. "T-there's a whole lot of scarring. Looks kind of like someone took it apart and put it back together again." 
"Hmm, grizzled, scarred-up Frankenstein dick..." she muses to herself with a thoughtful hum. "Sounds kinda hot." 
She cracks a toothy grin and cackles raspy laughter, and for a moment you forget all about how scary her teeth were and chuckle along with her. The constant weight on your shoulders relieves itself by a fraction, and breathing steadily becomes that little bit easier. It'd been a long time since you laughed with someone, so long you almost forgot how good it felt. You're so caught up in the feeling you don't even realise that you're at the diner until the bat lets go of your hand. 

"Well, here we are. You gonna be alright from here on out?" she asks.
"I'll be fine, thanks. And thank you. it's... It's nice to know there are people like you around." you answer, hoping that didn't sound as weird out loud as it did in your head. The funny smile she gives you tells you that it probably did, but she accepts the compliment regardless. "Thanks. Good luck with... Whatever you're doing here. Knock 'em dead, Dick Guy." she says with a cheeky wink before walking away into the twisting snow. For a minute you just stand there at the foot of the diner, draped in the red neon glow of its sign, watching your winged knight in shining armour slip away into the bustle of the city. Then, stepping out of the cold and into the restaurant, you look to the table Janet had illustrated picture-perfectly in her comic. 

Your heart stops.
Your hair stands on edge.
You feel cold in a way you never have before, as if the snowy weather you'd fought through to get here had frosted itself into your very bones. 

She's there.

All of your night terrors, all of your panic attacks and fits of hysteria and mental gridlocks of anxiety all summed up to jack shit in comparison to what you felt here and now in this cheap little diner with swing music playing over the jukebox and old football headlines pinned up on the walls. It's a primal fear; something driven purely by instinct. You imagine it's similar to how you'd feel in the midst of an encroaching tiger: terrified yet animated. There was a voice in your head stringing out options for escape, where to run, how best to avoid detection and all the other things the doe thought when it caught the scent of prowling wolves on the wind. Out of all the terrors you'd felt before, none were quite as base, quite as fundamental, as this. This was terror born from that tiny, animalistic part of your brain which focused on survival, and currently it begged you to turn on your heels and run for the hills while you still had the chance.

Janet's sat slumping forwards, elbows resting on the table by the window the two of you used to frequent on Saturday afternoons. Her chin sits in her cupped hands and her head is pivoted towards the window, watching. Her tail curls out from behind her seat and coils around her feet, caudal fin swaying in rhythm with her tapping feet. Her wild auburn hair had been tamed into a far more conservative haircut, ending just before the bottom of her neck. Clothes were different, too. The Janet you remember wore colours so bright they were capable of blinding, and yet here she was in casual black pants, a bland, grey shirt and an olive green parka that looked as if it'd seen better days. 
You notice she hasn't seen you yet, and before you know what's happening your survival instincts have taken you several creeping steps closer to the exist. You hadn't realised it up until now, but whoever that bat was had taken the scenic route babysitting you to the diner, and Janet's watch encompassed only the main road. Sweet relief, you had a chance. If you were quiet enough you could still get away. Slip back out through the way you came, disappear back down the sidewalk and you'd be in the clear. She'd never be any wiser. You had to do it now, though, and you had to be quick.

Only... 

No. no, that wasn't what you were here for. 

'deep breaths, calm down, no danger'.

You go to call her name, but it turns into a silent wheeze on your tongue. You clear your throat and try again, this time managing to croak a single, wavering syllable.
"Jan."
Her feet and tail freeze in the middle of their trance-like tempo, and the attentive tilt of her head, as if listening for a whisper, told you she'd barely heard your meagre call over the constant, low babble of people and music. You go to try again, but this time your mouth refuses to so much as shape the words. Your fear had swelled into a feeling impending doom so complete that it took a momentous effort not to bolt for the door. 

Janet turns slowly in her chair and with great effort, like a rusted cog or a stiff lever; she must've been holding that pose for a while now, waiting diligently for you to stroll into view so she could wave at you through the window and beckon you inside. She turns her head towards you, and your eyes are force themselves shut, as if squinting to the sudden blaze of a torch. Teeth. You forgot about her teeth. If you were to glimpse the ivory razor wire of her smile the flimsy confidence that'd carried you from home to here would shatter like glass under a hammer. 

"Anon?" calls a voice you realise you'd been waiting to hear for going on three months now. Something inside of you clicks, and the terror pulls its claws from your back. Despite all that'd happened between the two of you, it's still Janet, and her gravelly voice still charmed you like no other's. Approaching the table and pulling up a chair, you take the plunge, looking up into her face for the first time in ages.
"Hi Jan-" 

You cut yourself short as your eyes freeze on her mouth and your brain slams its fist down hard on the pause button. 
She's wearing a mask. 

"Anon," she sighs, rolling your name around in her mouth as if savouring the taste of it. What little you can see of her face sparkles with joy like snow under a dawning sun, the amber hearths of her eyes kindling with the simple warmth that came with being in the presence of a loved one. "It's... It's good to see you again."
You don't react -- you're too busy staring at where you'd expected to see her teeth. A mask. It's one of those cheap disposable masks you'd wear around in public if you were particularly anal about avoiding a cold, like something a doctor would wear. She wore it so that it covered the majority of her lower face, from neck to nose, leaving only her eyes and the very corners of her cheeks bare. Reading your expression, Janet jumps on the question before you've got a chance to ask it. "Arnold told me about your, uh, 'phobia'." she says, sliding a hand across the table and letting it rest next to yours. "I figured that if you didn't wanna look at my mouth, I'd just cover it up."
She explains the mask with an air of light-heartedness which you can tell she wants to carry through the whole conversation, but it falls flat before she finishes her sentence, and the two of you are left dawdling in the awkward silence which followed. You clear your throat, and force yourself to speak.
"You look nice." you say, darting a look up from the table. In truth, she did. Despite how much she scared you, there was a familiarity to her presence. One you'd been missing for a long, long time. You look at the hand she'd left on the table, so close to yours, but not touching. You edge your fingers a little closer, close enough to brush your fingertips across her palm. It's cold, but not so cold as to be unpleasant. Moving slowly, as if afraid she might startle you, she folds her hand around yours and holds it with a tenderness you remember only seldom seeing in her.
"Thanks. You're not looking too bad yourself." she lies. You might be fucked in the head, but you still have enough sense in you to know you look like shit. Your long weeks spent burrowed away in your apartment had left you looking pale, malnourished and in desperate need of a haircut. Arnold had compared you to Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol, claiming you had that 'sick Victorian kid' image down to a tee. It was a pretty accurate comparison, all things considered. 
Unable to think of anything worthwhile to say, and too nervous to say it even if you could, you smile, take your hand from hers and use it to beckon the waitress. 

"Hey, could we get a couple menus please?" you ask, and you don't realise how easily you'd done so until you already had the menus in front of you. A few days ago- shit, this MORNING you never would have had the courage to talk to a stranger like that. Maybe getting out and about had given you a confidence booster? More likely your five minute friendship with that bat had encouraged you not to be such a nervous spaz around people you didn't know. You mentally thank her once again before picking an order. "I think I'll have the cheeseburger and fries, thanks." 
Burgers were pretty much all the two of you had here, seeing as they were the only thing on the menu with a discernible degree of quality. As much as this place sold itself as an old-timey restaurant, it was truly nothing more than a burger joint with some 50's flair smeared across its face. Rumour had it that all the chefs they hired were in fact out-of-work patty-flippers who'd gotten the can when that one chain restaurant went bust a few years ago, hence why anything more complex than a slab of beef and two buns made their brains fry. You didn't know about that, but you'd sampled their breakfast options once before and it hadn't been pretty. How someone manages to fuck up scrambled eggs you'll never know. 
Janet pores over her menu, searching. For what, you have no idea. For as long as you can remember all she'd ever ordered here was the double-decker hamburger with extra-
"Ah, what's the soup of the day?" she asks.
-... Pickles. 

You try not to act too surprised as she places an order for a bowl of soup (vegetable, no less) and a glass of water on the side. You'd never known Janet to have water when there was soda on offer, and you'd certainly never known her to pick a vegetarian option when she could've settled for meat instead. She was a carnivore by nature, after all. 
"So," she starts as the waitress walks away, folding her menu and laying her hand back on the table, offering it to you as an olive branch. Reaching down to take it again, anxiety yanks the puppet wire around your wrist and jerks your hand away at the last moment, placing it safely by your side instead. Thinking about what she was eating had got you thinking about her teeth, and thinking about her teeth had got you thinking about how maybe you weren't quite comfortable holding hands just yet. 
Janet catches the movement, wilts, and swallows back the heartbreak before continuing. "You got my 'invitation', huh?"
"Yeah. It was, uh, really well drawn and... Emotional."
"Aheh, thanks." she huffs with an embarrassed lilt, combing fingers through her hair and blushing beneath her mask. "I wanted to do something special, but the only thing I can do well is draw, so I was like 'just draw him a comic, shithead!' and so, ah, I did." she ducks her head a little, as if taking cover from judgmental eyes. "Pretty corny, right?"
"Wha-? No! Uh, no. It was nice. Fantastic, even. I loved it." 
"Oh? Well, thanks. I mean, I don't know if it's my best work, but-"
"It is." you reply automatically. "It's gorgeous, seriously. Better than professional work."   
Janet stares at you over the rim of her mask in wide-eyed surprise, thunderstruck by your sincerity. You were too, to be honest. But dammit, her corny little comic had struck all your chords and made you cry like a bitch and letting Janet talk it down as if it were some throwaway side-project just wasn't right. Janet shuffles uncomfortably in he chair, blush creeping past the confines of her mask. "Thank you. I-I put a lot of feeling into it, I guess." She drums her fingers against the edge of the table, shoulders tensing in preparation. The mask around her face moulds around the shape of her mouth as she takes a couple of deep, steadying breaths. "Anon, I'm sorry for-"

"Order up!"
The waitress slides a pair of plates onto the table, one loaded with a greasy slab of sizzling burger meat next to a small mountain of crisp fries and the other balancing a bowl of vegetable soup which looked as if it'd come straight from a can. The disparity between the two is so great that before you know it you're moving to swap your plate with Janet's out of sympathy. Then she pulls the bowl firmly over to her side of the table in a way that let you know that she had no intention of swapping.
Strange. 

She stares into the contents of her bowl for a while, brow furrowed with hard lines of contemplation. The bridge of her nose crumples as she grits her teeth and takes in a sharp, hissing breath in preparation for some unknown, impending pain. "I'm sorry!" she yelps, nails digging into the woodwork of the table. "I'm sorry for what I did and for everything that's happened and I am SO sorry for not doing anything sooner I was just sca-" she chokes mid-ramble, giving you just enough time to get over your surprise and tame her frenzy. "Hey, hey," You say soothingly, reaching out and taking her hand back into yours. "Easy." 
"*Snrrf* sorry," she whimpers, snorting back tears. "I don't- I mean I-" after a few false starts her wavering voice finds steady footing, and she anchors herself to your hand with a half-sigh, half-sobbing sort of sound which threatened to tear your heart asunder. "Dammit, this went so much smoother in my head." she admits. "I-I wanted to apologize for so much for so long and... *Snrrf!* I'm sorry, okay? If you, like, wanna get up and leave and never see me again then that's fine, but I want you to know that I'm sorry." 
"I know, I know." you coo in an attempt to talk her down from her emotional high. Looking at her now you wonder how you were ever afraid of her. She looked so... Broken. You knew she'd be messed up over what'd happened but man, it hurt seeing her like this. For a moment you want nothing more than to see her smile, razor teeth and all, only for your perpetual terror to smite the thought from your mind a moment later. 
Well, maybe if she just smiled with the mask on...

"Come on, I don't wanna leave," you assure her, finding it in yourself to smile. "I haven't even touched my burger yet."
Janet chokes out a wet bark of laughter through the tears. "You're a shitty comedian," she says, squeezing your hand the same way she used to back in happier times. "And I've missed you."
"I've missed you too, Sushi."
Another laugh, this one clearer than the last. It rings with fond remembrance and sheens her expression with that same goofy expression of joy you'd known and loved and you feel as if you could reach over, tear that mask off of her face and kiss her deeper than you ever had before. You had missed her. You really, really had. "Breaking out the pet names already? And Sushi? C'mon, you know I hate that one."
"Yeah, I know." You reply, looking down towards the table, at your linked hands. To think you'd forgotten how nice it felt to have her fingers between yours. 
She empties herself of the last of her sobs with a heavy, long winded sigh. Her rigid form relaxes, her hunched shoulders sloping downwards and easing into the contours of her chair. Everything about her seems to brighten as the haunting spectre of bereavement dissipates from around her. "I was so scared that you'd- I mean," another sigh, laden with relief. "I thought you'd hate me. I thought I'd say my sorries and you'd walk away and that'd be the last I'd ever see of you. Like, I had nightmares about this day. Fuckin' nasty nightmares where you'd-" she pauses again, but this time on purpose, as whatever had happened in her nightmares was better left unsaid. "I mean this is all just... Shit, Anon, you don't know how good it feels to have you back."
You reach across the table with your free hand towards her face and rest your palm on her cheek, its surface still damp with her tears. You feel the sharp lines of her face, the shape of her smile and the tingling sensation in your stomach as she cups her free hand over yours and nuzzles into you. Your heart drinks it all  up greedily, slaking its dire thirst on her love for you. For the first time in ages, you feel warm inside. "Trust me," you say. "I've got a pretty good idea."


The longer you talk, the easier the words come, and before you know it you can't shut up. Soon you're both jabbering on like an old married couple over dinner. She bombards you with questions, and listens attentively when you give her your answers. She begins to tear up all over again when you own up to your shut-in lifestyle and manic depression, but brightens up a little when you mention Arnold and how diligently he'd helped you. All the while she snuck spoonfuls of soup under the canvas of her mask, taking great care in keeping the contents of her mouth hidden. 
It's funny, but you can't help but think that the sound she makes slurping back the broth sounds off somehow. You can't quite put your finger on it, but...
Whatever. You were having way too much fun to be fussing over something as trivial as eating noises - and holy shit, were you having fun. Genuine, actual fun for the first time in what felt like forever. You cracked jokes, ate your burger and regaled Janet with the details of your recuperation. She was overjoyed to hear you'd made a near-full recovery, and chuckled heartily when you mentioned your encounter with the kindly bat on your way here. 
Then you asked her about herself, and all of a sudden she got a whole less talkative.

"So how've you been, anyways? Arnold told me you stopped coming into work." you ask through a mouthful of succulent burgermeat. 
"I've been... Getting by." she replies, looking into her bowl of soup and stirring its contents broodingly. "I, uh, had an 'episode' at work. Since then I've kinda been on a leave of absence."
"An Episode?" 
"Yeah, you know. An episode." She pushes the spoon into the side of the bowl, resonating a sharp *klak* as metal met china. "I, uh, saw stuff. Stuff that wasn't there."

Ah. 

"A schizophrenic episode?" you exclaim with a start. Shit, when was the last time she had one of those? When she was like, eight? 
"Pssh, if you wanna get all technical and shit... Look, I saw something that wasn't real, I freaked out and now my boss is afraid I'm gonna go postal and shoot up the workplace." she explains heatedly. "Now can we talk about something else? Please?"
"Alright, alright." you capitulate, showing the palms of your hands and leaning back into your chair. "If you don't wanna talk about it-"
"I don't."
"-Then we won't talk about it."
She crosses her arms and her brow forms a hard, angry line across the length of her forehead. Her tail stiffens in its swaying and her dorsal fin seems to straighten out of her back like a protruding slab of concrete. She tenses, loosens, and then sighs. "Sorry. I don't mean to be rude or anything, but it's kind of a touchy subject at the moment." she combs a hand through her hair, sheepishly twining a lock of it around her finger. "That must sound pretty hypocritical coming from me, right? After I asked you out here and picked your brain..."
"I don't mind, really." you say in an effort to placate her before she mires herself in guilt. She's having none of it.
"Know what? Ask me anything. Anything at all, and I'll give you an honest answer." she offers in ways of apology. Knowing Janet, it's as much an appeasement to her own conscience as it is to you. Deciding to play along you think up a question on the spot, if only to keep her happy.
"How's your art coming along?" 
"Mmph, terribly. That, ah, 'love letter' I drew you? That was the first thing I've drawn in months." she winds the lock of hair around her finger a little tighter. "You, uh, you really think it's good?"
"It's fantastic. I mean, it's better drawn than anything in that comic book collection of yours, and you've got a LOT of comics."
"Now you're just saying shit for flattery's sake." she accuses you with a flustered giddiness and a rosy smile whose warmth you can feel even from underneath her mask. 
"Seriously, I'm not joshing you. You should send it off to a publisher, show 'em you've got talent."
"What? Pfft, I can't do that!"
"Why not?"
"Because, y'know, I drew it for you." she says bashfully, her face reddening and her tail curling into her lap. She untangles her fingers from her hair and occupies them instead with her caudal fin, kneading it through her hands with all the apprehension of a school girl who'd just spilled the beans on their first crush.  
Butterflies pour up through your chest and out your mouth in a flattered giggle, and suddenly that hand-drawn love letter of hers' seems all the more grand a gesture. You feel the blush creeping into your cheeks, and remember why you loved her. Only she could make you feel special like this. For the second time today you think about how easy it'd be to reach over, yank off that mask and kiss her. Janet addresses your dopey expression with an arched eyebrow and flustered confusion, holding her fin a little closer to her chest. "What?"
"Nothing," you relent with the most genuine smile you've cracked in ages, the kind of smile only she could make you pull. You'd almost forgotten the way she made you feel sometimes: like someone special. You decided then and there that after this day was through, you'd make every effort to get her back into your life. You'd set up a second date, a third, a fourth - shit, you'd book a fucking holiday and take her along for the ride, if that's what it took. You'd find a place for her in your tangled mess of an existence, and she'd find a place for you in hers. 
She chuckles nervously, kneading her fin through her fingers. "It's not 'nothing', you're looking at me all dopey-like. What, have I got soup on my mask or something?"
"It's nothing, seriously, but..." you pause for a moment, looking over the small blanket of cloth and trying to convince yourself that what was on the other side wasn't all that bad. You'd always loved her smile..."But whilst we're on the subject, you think you could take that thing off?" 

Janet reaches up and touches the mask, eyes widening in surprise. "Wha- You mean the mask? Oh, I ah- I don't think that'd be a good idea." 
"Come on, I'll be fine. Seriously, it makes me feel like I'm talking to my doctor or something." 
"Really, no." she says with a heavy finality which left no more room for argument. Then, in a softer tone: "Sorry. It's just that... Well, you're finally here. With me. I've waited a REALLY long time for this, and I don't wanna fuck it up by freaking you out or anything."
"I won't get freaked out."
"You THINK you won't get freaked out. Look, I know you came all this way to see me and you're probably feeling a lot better, but I don't want to force it, okay? Let's just take things slow for now."
You relent, and signal at the waitress for the bill. "Alright, alright. I guess you're right. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. It's just..." you study her predatory features, from the sharp angles of her face to the hot, amber smoulder of her eyes. What was there felt so welcoming, but without the sleek curve of her smile the picture simply felt incomplete. "... I guess I just miss you're smile, is all."
Janet pulls a smile behind her mask, but its joy struggles to reach the rest of her face. "I'll ditch the mask on the second date, shark's honour. But for now, let's just ease ourselves back into things, okay?"
You nod in silent agreement, suddenly and inexplicably exhausted. You'd been moving forwards on momentum alone ever since you'd left your apartment, and Janet's denial was like bolting into a brick wall. You suppose she was right; a couple of hours ago you were shitting your pants because a stranger talked to you, and now you reckoned you were willing to look into the same mouth that'd chomped off your dick. To say you were getting ahead of yourself would be a drastic understatement. This was more like trying to take on the final boss after killing a couple of sewer rats. Janet was right, you just needed to give it more time. 

Still, it would've been nice to see her smile. 

You insist on paying the bill, because you'll be damned if losing your penis a dick made you any less of a gentleman. The two of you talk for a while longer, grabbing a couple of drinks at the bar and shooting shit just like you used to do. It's a comfortable experience, but one you do more out of obligation than desire. You were tired, so tired you'd probably fall asleep where you were if it weren't for the fact that you'd drop your whiskey and coke and look like a jackass. As happy as you were with today, you didn't really feel like drawing it out any longer. Janet stifles a yawn on the back of her hand whilst exhibiting the concept images she'd drawn up through the long, laborious task of drawing your love letter, having saved most of them on her phone. You make a mental note to buy a picture frame for her comic when you get back to the apartment; something with that much effort put into it deserves to be hung on a wall. 
Pushing yourself away from the bar you stumble over your own feet, barely managing to catch yourself on the back of a nearby chair, much to Janet's relief and amusement. 

"Pfft, nice dance moves." she chuckles, moving to offer you a steadying hand, only to start swaying herself as soon as she un-anchors herself from the counter, legs criss-crossing as she waddles to the side in an attempt to regain her balance.
"Likewise," you say, sharing in her laughter. "I, uh, think maybe we should give the drinks a rest for now." 
"What? C'mon, we've only had like..." Janet scrunches her brow in thought, muttering to herself as she counts off her fingers. "... Four rounds? No wait, five? Fuck it, you're right. Ooooh man, I'm gonna have a headache in the morning."
"Nyuhuh, same here. Doctors said I wasn't s'posed to drink nothing alcoholic for two months after the surgery. That means this is the first time I've drank in, uh... in two months." you wince; that didn't sound half as stupid in your head as it did out loud. Shit, you were drunk. "Hey, uh, you mind if we get out of here?" 
"Already? I mean, sure, if you want." she says with poorly feigned disinterest. You know what she's feeling. Like you, she wishes tonight could've been longer, and that the two of you could've sat there and talked until the sun came up. But Alas, you were dead on your feet and you the comfort of your bed seemed oh so appealing. Janet follows you out of the restaurant and onto the street, trying not to look too downtrodden that the night was finally coming to an end. Snow pelts your face as you walk out the door, and the warm, fuzzy feeling of fulfilment you'd been enjoying a minute ago sours into dread when you realise you're going to have to walk all the way home in this, sans a bloodsucking guardian angel, this time.  
Janet realises your plight and jumps on it. "You want me to walk you back to your apartment?" she asks in more of a plea than a question. It was obvious that she was just as eager to spend more time with you as she was concerned about you getting home safely, but you decided to take that as a compliment more than anything. 
"Could you? That'd- *hic* -uh, that'd be great..." 
Wasting no time in getting deep up in your personal space, she hooks an arm around yours and reels herself in as close as she can get without tangling her legs with yours. It comes as a surprise, but not an unwelcome one. Ever since she held your hand you'd been desperate to touch her a little more. It wasn't a sexual desire, or anything like that. It was just that after so long away from one another, you'd all but forgotten how it felt to be held by someone who cared for you like she did. You could do with a reminder. 

As she guides you down the snow-blanketed sidewalk you feel more than hear the tremendous sigh of satisfaction which escapes her. You get the impression that she'd been waiting for this; an excuse to hold you the way she used to. You could relate. Adjusting your arm you wrap it around her waist, but pause as your fingers brush against the bumps of her ribs. She'd gotten skinnier, a lot skinnier. Curiously you explore a bit further, down to her hips. Was that her pelvis? The fuck had she been living off of for the last three months, celery and watercress?
She grabs your roaming hand and re-plants it firmly on her waist, cheeks creasing in a sad smile. Oh man, her cheeks. Had they always been that thin? You realise she's wearing makeup -- practically a first for her. It was expertly done, brightening the dark bags beneath her eyes and the clammy pallor of her skin, but at this distance the guise fell apart. She was worse than she looked, and she looked pretty bad. 
The unspoken question hangs in the air for a while as Janet anchors an arm around you and lets her head come to rest against your shoulder, appreciatively sinking into the warmth of your presence. "I've had... Trouble eating for a while." 
'Yeah, no shit.' you think, loosening your embrace in fear that you might break something if you squeezed too hard. "I can tell; you're practically a skelly." you say in a tone you'd intended to be jovial. Try as you might though, you just can't get the humour to reach your voice. Jesus, what's she done to herself? "You, uh, wanna talk about it?"  
She shakes her head gently. "Not tonight. We'll get together someday soon and I'll tell you all about it, but not tonight."
There's a large part of you that wants to turn around, drag her ass back to that restaurant, order her the whole damned menu and then grab her by the shoulders and shake her until answers came out. Where she'd been borderline pudgy before she was now as lean as a whippet, and not in a good way, either. Dropping that much weight so fast can't be healthy. You feel around a little more, this time with a clinical, analysing hand more befitting a doctor rather than a boyfriend. The more you probe, the deeper your concern gets, and the fact that you can feel how withered her frame was through the thick layers of her coat gets you worried in all sorts of ways. 
Once again Janet returns your hand to its starting position, this time clapping it there with a strong-headed finality. She gives you a look which straddles the line between demand and plea, and her eyes gloss themselves with a wet film, threatening tears. "Just let me have tonight, Anon. Please?" 
It's the tears that get you to concede in the end. Dammit, you hated it when she cried. "Okay, not tonight. But soon. Really soon."
"We'll talk about it tomorrow, I promise." she says, snuggling into the crevice between your shoulder and your neck. She relaxes into you, and you into her, and the two of you walk home as one. The questions that'd been burning in your mind put themselves away for another day, and you finally let yourself enjoy the simple pleasure of holding the woman you loved.

The trip home passes in silence, and despite the brewing snow and the buffeting wind, it'd passed far too quick for your liking. Janet does you the kindness of walking you up the stairs and to your apartment, if only so that you might have a couple more minutes together like this. Good things always come to an end, however, and soon you're both standing in front of your door, each waiting for the other to say goodnight but neither of you really wanting to. 
It's Janet who makes the first move. "So, you ah, you had a good time, right?" 
You smile and tell her the truth. "Best time I've had in ages."
"Heh! Yeah, same here..." she kneads her hands together fumblingly, slightly rocking on her toes. "You, uh, wanna do it again tomorrow?" 
You nod. "Sure. Same time?"
"Same time, same place. Unless, y'know, you wanna do something else?"
"No, no. Eating out's fine."
"Great." Janet pauses, waiting for you to pick up your end of the conversation. you can't think of anything else to say, so you just smile at her like an ass. It seems to make her happy enough. "Soooo I'll see you then?" 
"Yeah."
"Alright, cool."
...
You shuffle your weight from foot to foot expectantly, only what exactly it is you expect, you have no idea. The logical half of your brain knows that the smart thing to do would be to hug her goodnight, set something up for tomorrow and pick up where you left off from there, but your inner romantic is too impatient for that. It pushes you a step closer towards Janet and pulls your hands over her bony hips and before you can stop it from going any further you're rubbing noses, mouths separated by only by a few meagre centimetres and the thin layer of her mask. 
"W-what are you-"
"Lemmie kiss you?" you blurt, inner romantic spurring you on like a lovesick jockey. It drives it's heels into your sides, snaps the reins and rouses your heart into full gallop and you don't want it to stop even though you know damned well you should. You know you're getting ahead of yourself -- jumping right back into the deep end before remembering how to swim -- but you didn't give a fuck. Being around her, spending time with her, listening to her, it reminded you of all the things she'd brought into your life and how desperately you missed them. You want to feel that special way she used to make you feel again, if only for a moment. 
Janet takes a cautionary step back and flusters with a volatile jump, looking you up and down as if it were the first time she really saw you. "Uhh, I don't think that's a very good idea."
You take another step closer, closing the gap she'd formed between you. "Just once, before you leave?" you ask, practically begging. It feels like your heart is swollen with love, and the only way you can stop it from bursting is to pour some onto her. Janet paws a hand through her hair and hisses air through clenched teeth, puzzling over your request as if it were some kind of riddle. Then her eyes meet yours and all at once her reservations crumble. Stepping forwards into you, she moulds her body into yours. Her breasts settle against your chest, her thigh comes to rest against yours and her arms interlock around your neck to pull you in those last few centimetres. Your nose brushes hers, and resin-gold of her eyes monopolise your vision. 
"You promise you won't freak out?"
"I promise."
Her fingers pinch the edges of her mask, and you swallow hard in anticipation. "Alright. Close your eyes..." 
You close your eyes and the heat of her breath plays sensually across your senses as she pulls her mask down to her neck. The point of her nose brushes your cheek, and she closes what little distance remained between your lips. Wet. Cool. passionate. It's a taste of everything you remembered and loved. Sparks flitter up your back and rise as heat into your face and you blush like it's your first kiss all over again. You fall deeper into the kiss, and Janet welcomes it with a lustful moan. Your tongue moves to push its way into the wet cavern of her mouth, but she bars its entry with a rough shove of her own. She pins your explorative tongue to the bottom of your mouth and keeps it there pointedly, addressing it with a warning grunt. You get the message: 'remember I've got teeth, so hold off on the tongue." But dammit, you can't help yourself. Lust's microwaved all the sense from your brain, and all you think about was how you wanted more. You slip your tongue around hers, through her lips and-

-Teeth. 

Suddenly everything's cold. Passion freezes over, lust ices up and your body stiffens as if gripped by a hard frost. Your tongue is paused with its tip just prodding the surface of Janet's front teeth. Oh god, it's them. It's the same teeth that took your dick. It's the same-
- Wait. 
Something... Something wasn't right. You'd learnt the shape of Janet's mouth over a thousand kisses just like these, and you don't remember her teeth being anywhere near as straight as this. In fact, there's abnormalities all over the place. Their alignment, their shape, the stiffness of the gums around them. Curiosity overrides terror, and you inspect your way further into Janet's maw. 
Oh no...
She makes an ardent sound of protest, and with the wet smack of a broken kiss Janet dislodges her mouth from yours and claps a hand over her lips, pupils shrunken in horror. She backs away from you into a wall, whimpering through clenched fingers. "You weren't supposed to feel that. You weren't..."
You go to approach her, but as you take a step forwards the ground wobbles and the earth spins and you have to catch hold of your door handle to stop yourself from falling over. She didn't. She COULDN'T have. Oh Christ, you didn't want it to be true but when you ran your tongue along the roof of her gums there could be no mistaking it. You look at her in a new, depressing light, huddled into a corner like the sad and broken thing she was. You didn't want to ask because honestly you were dreading the answer, but it's a question you just can't leave. 

"Janet, Why are you wearing dentures?"