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Emerie rubbed her cheek in tiredness. She hadn’t slept last night, and the mental strain of everything, plus this conversation, weighed heavily on her.

“Look,” she started as her hand moved to her nape, “what came out of you means you are a boy, or urm, male, I guess?” She explained her theory, unsure if it was true or not. “Since you don’t pee but produce seed or, um, cum? I’m guessing it’s purely a pleasure and reproduction function for you.”

“This is what it means to be a male?”He lifted a hand and wrapped it around the end of his beak in what she figured was deep thought.“What does your dick or cock look like then if you are female? Is yours also purple?”

Her face paled, and her eye twitched.

I’m in over my head here.It was obvious Ingram was intelligent enough to understand certain things, but he lacked knowledge. The question was, how much?

“No. I-I don’t have a cock. I have, um, something else. Something different.”

“Like what?”He tilted his head.“How is it different?”

She opened her mouth to answer, then promptly shut it before she said something very stupid, and potentially dangerous. As much as she wanted to explain to him the female anatomy, she wasn’t going to put herself in a position where a curious and horny Duskwalker went searching for a warm and wet place to shelter himself.

It was probably better if he didn’t know there was one.

“A pussy, or cunt,” she answered with a grim smile, giving him a name in case he ever needed it. “But let’s get back to the main point. What I did, we won’t be doing again, okay?”

“Why not? I liked it, and you said I did not do anything wrong.”

“Because you should do that with someone you care very deeply about,” she answered, trying not to feel pity for him. “Youcando it with someone you just feel desire or arousal towards, but it’s nicer when it’s someone who makes you feel good in here.” Emerie pointed to her heart, hoping to convey that it should be done with someone who made him feel warm and fuzzy inside.

It only reminded Emerie that’s what she’d been hoping for with Bryce, and she couldn’t remember the last time she felt that way. As much as she had insecurities about her body, she’d been desperately seeking intimacy.

In her own way, she knew she let Bryce sexually use her so she could pretend she had that with him. Was it wrong to pretend she felt loved and adored?

Maybe that’s why Emerie had stroked Ingram... because intimacy no longer felt like anything but achore.

Ingram touched an index claw to the sternum bone protruding from his chest, twisting his head downwards as though to look there past his beak.

She observed the Duskwalker sitting before her while he was in the light of the sun, getting the chance to really take him in.

Most of his bones appeared to be sitting on the outside of his flesh. All of his ribs, his sternum, his collar bones, his hip bones, his knees and elbows, and even his legs and forearms. The white bones seemed to come from where the flesh was the thinnest on a human, including his feet, ankles, wrists, and hands.

The vertebrae of his spine were visible from the back of his skull all the way to his tail tip, although they protruded a little more than a human. They almost looked like spikes themselves. She thought that was the freakiest part of him.

Most of his body was covered in black lizard-like scales that glinted with a blue sheen in the sun. That same blue was present in the short, barely noticeable fur that covered the back of his neck and shoulders. Soft places, like his stomach, the inner crook of his elbows, and the backs of his knees, were dark-grey skin.

His feet were... odd. They were thinner than a human’s, once more following a lizard likeness, yet his hands were like hers. Just far bigger, fatter, and tipped with deadly claws.

His tail was quite long, and the tapered end of it curled where it rested against the dirt.

He was covered in spikes that ran down the backs of his arms, legs, and down the sides of his visible vertebrae.

Gosh, she’d never seen anything more otherworldly than Ingram.

Everything about him – from the tips of his short, upward-jutting goat horns on his raven skull, all the way to the long claws of his toes – was inhuman. He looked like a frightening monster standing in the sun, and yet his naivety about his own body made him come across as sweet... and kind of adorable.

Even the way he was touching at his chest was cute, obviously trying to understand what his heart was supposed to feel.

Before Ingram could jump back into his uncomfortable questioning, Emerie stepped to the side.

“We should keep moving, Ingram.” His skull darted up to her, as though she’d taken him by surprise. “We have a long journey ahead of us, and I want to put more space between us and the guild.”

He fell to the side smoothly to drop his hands to the ground and walk on all four limbs.

She was thankful he let the conversation go.