Cthulhurotica Read Online Free PDF Page A

made her heel hit my shin, or being kept awake by her incoherent mumbling in her sleep. I didn’t want to say anything that could broach the topic of how things used to be, because that would lead to talk of how things should be, and could or could not be, despite what had happened last night. The only innocuous words I could think of were, “How about breakfast?”
    She let me fix her something simple, and we ate out on the balcony outside her bedroom. When she finally looked at me with a wide smile and told me, “I can’t believe how you could make me fuck like that at this age,” I was on top of the world. Overlooking the Harbor, eating breakfast with a woman I hadn’t expected to see again, I couldn’t just let myself sit there and grin like an idiot. I had to open my mouth.
    “You trained me well,” I said. “You turned this prince into a frog.”
    The smile disappeared from her face, and suddenly that perpetual wide-eyed stare of hers wasn’t as endearing. “What was that?” she said quietly.
    I realized what I’d said.
    “No, no – frog into a prince .” I didn’t listen when my head screamed to my mouth, Shut up! "Why, do you have something against frogs?” I joked.
    Anna let her fork drop and bounce off her plate, and then pushed away from the table, spilling both our juice glasses. She stormed up the staircase to the widow’s walk. I gave it a moment before following her up. Even at our closest, she always insisted that she wouldn’t let herself be smothered, not at her age.
    I found her looking out at the Harbor, standing just as she was the night before. My first instinct was to hold her. I crossed my arms and supported myself on the walk rail next to her instead. I should have told her she was being too dramatic for a woman her age.
    Instead I said, “I’m sorry.”
    Anna sighed. “Don’t be,” she said. “I’m just crazy these days. Now I’m wondering if this was such a good idea.”
    “Why?” I asked, fixing my eyes on that famous blackened rock jutting out of the ocean known as Devil’s Reef, praying she wasn’t about to push me away again.
    She shrugged. “Too many changes lately.”
    “Change. That’s the real c-word. Always looking to mess things up,” I said. “Change isn’t always a bad thing.” She tensed, getting ready to make some big pronouncement, and I knew it was happening all over again.
    I didn’t know what I was thinking when I got down on one knee. I didn’t even have a ring. I just knew I had one chance to keep her from sending me away.
    “Anna Waite-Saothwick…” I said.
    She put her finger on my lips. “Please, don’t.”
    “Why not?” I said. I pulled a speech out of my mind that I’d been rehearsing for the better part of a year. About how a seventeen-year age gap didn’t matter. That I wouldn’t be better off with someone my own age. That there wasn’t any way her body could change that would matter to me (though, she really scoffed at that one). “Let me prove it,” I said, squeezing her hand. “That was all I’ve ever wanted.”
    “What about the c-word?”
    “What, cougar ?”
    She slapped my shoulder.
    “Screw the c-word,” I said.
    “You’re not worried about what I might change into?”
    I smiled. “I didn’t before. And definitely not, after last night.”
    Except for any evidence of tears, Anna had that look people get when they laugh and cry at the same time. “But you don’t know–"
    “I don’t care.”
    “Really?” she asked.
    “There’s only one way you’re going to find out,” I said. “Let me stay.”
    “Actually, there’s another way.”
    Anna slipped her hand from mine and faced out toward Devil’s Reef. She cupped her hands and shouted some words I couldn’t understand, but that reminded me of her mumbling last night. And unless I was hearing things, she was answered, from the Reef, with the most bizarre and disturbing sound I had ever heard.
    As I stared at the Reef in awe, with my stomach