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Would him eating it and then spitting it out kill her?

I don’t want to hurt her.

Now that he was growing attached to her, the fear of doing so had his hungry gut gurgling with a familiar nausea.

With water trickling over her head, Linh covered her tear-swollen face with both hands. She put one foot on top of the other and squeezed her knees to her chest in an attempt to make herself smaller.

To hide – from Nathair, and how she felt. The shame of how quickly she’d broken under the weight of her fear. The way guilt twisted in her chest at knowing he did nothing wrong.

I said I trusted him and then immediately broke into tears when I felt his dick.

And she felt so awful that the only reason she was even bathing was because something slimy had rubbed off it onto her thigh and hip. Even when it’d dried, it itched, irritating her skin and making her cry harder.

She wanted to remove it, and the subtle warmth that it’d left behind. She’d needed to douse and shock herself back to normality, and yet she hadn’t stopped crying since.

I just locked up.They’d been having such a good morning.I went from trying to keep him cuddling with me to screaming. He must be so confused.

Why did I do that?She knew why, and the horrible memories only made her overwrought.

She hadn’t been scared until she felt his dick. She’d known he must have had one hidden away, but she hadn’t been anxious about it before. The moment it touched her, she remembered being pinned down, choked to quieten her screams and cries, and she’d been terrified of it happening again.

No. It was worse.

Although Bragg had been undoubtfully cruel to her as her ‘husband,’ she’d never trusted him. She’d never cared for him. The moment he’d beaten her father, she’d hated him.

If Nathair had continued, Linh knew she would have felt unequivocally... betrayed.

I care about him. He makes me feel safe.She’d even felt desire towards him, and all his inhuman qualities.Oh gods. Do I like him because he’s a Duskwalker?Nothing about him felt human.

Not the softness of his large hands, his scaly skin, the coolness of his body temperature.Even his dick felt weird.Like a gigantic, spirally flower bud she knew would tear her in half.

The size hadn’t frightened her, justit– what it was, what it could do. How it could make her feel, not physically, but mentally and emotionally. What it could take away.

I didn’t want to be broken,she mentally lamented as she cried.I didn’t want my first time to be filled with tears.

She’d always thought she’d fall in love first.

“No,” she whispered, pushing her hands up to fist her hair. “Don’t think about it. It didn’t happen,” she insisted to the air around her. She covered her mouth when her trembling lips irritated her, yet her shaking hands only seemed to make it worse.

She didn’t mind that Nathair desired her. She was actually a little giddy about it, despite her current panicked state. Linh was a woman, and he was a man of sorts – she wasn’toverly surprised he’d developed those kinds of feelings. He was probably lonely, and they did seem to get along well.

She knew her trust in him was utterly warped by her trauma. She didn’twanthim to be human. She would have been constantly watching her back had he been one, worried he was only being kind to her so she’d let her guard down.

I was never that way before.She was once carefree andhappy.A silly girl who thought the world was filled with butterflies, rainbows, and fairies. Who, while knowing Demons existed, had loved her life.

In her village, she’d been quiet because shehadto be. She’d wanted people to respect her, and her father, but simmering beneath the surface had been an immature brat grinning ear-to-ear with mischief. Behind closed doors, she’d pranked her mother, her father, and even her grandmother before she passed away.

Now all she knew was that pain had nestled into her heart, and she was so scared of being touched intimately that it physically made her want to hurl.

The fact that she’d felt desire towards Nathair, only to lock up when receiving it back, hurt so deeply. She probably looked so pitiful curled up into a ball on her side.

Would the old Linh have teased him and tried to rile him up in hopes she could make him crazed? She wanted that to be the old her, and she wanted to take back the possibility of that side of herself. To be the kind of woman who was confident enough to open her thighs and crook her finger while coyly singing, ‘Come here, big boy.’

Linh palmed her nose as she tried to settle her tears. She sniffled, but her nostrils were so blocked she couldn’t take a breath through them.

She wanted to calm down and apologise. Her bottom lip trembled when she felt so bad for thinking:At least he can’t ask me about it.

Honestly, Linh just hoped he pretended nothing had happened. It’d make her feel better; a lie surrounding the resolution of how she’d acted.