Content notes: oral sex, hand sex, biting, blood, T4Cryptid sex
You go because of the rumor: There’s a monster in the woods.

As stories go, it’s little to go on, probably just another false lead. But Francine hates to leave a lead alone to languish in the general inbox, just waiting to be snapped up by 3 Spooked Girls or Buzzfeed Unsolved. Paranormal investigation media is a niche, but it’s your niche, so you pack a bag and put a ticket to Seattle on Francine’s credit card, and twenty-four hours after the email comes in, you’re in a rented Subaru driving away from Seattle’s rain and into the mist of the Washington rainforests.

The town is so small you get lost three times on back roads just trying to find it, and you take deep breaths through the familiar anxiety of being a trans girl traveling alone in the backwater bumblefuck middle-of-nowhere where your research trips always seem to take you.

Just once, you think, it would be nice to go look for cryptids in Brooklyn.

Google tells you that the closest motel is an hour and a half away, but there’s a single bed and breakfast in town. When you pull in, it turns out that it’s the town’s single cafe, too, and probably its only bar once the sun goes down, if the smooth wooden countertop and rows of gleaming bottles behind it are any indication. You think, probably, that this isn’t the kind of town where you can ask for hard liquor before five.

There’s a girl at the counter that seems to serve as a coffee bar, liquor bar and hotel front desk. She checks you in while you scroll through your phone, skimming through the emails that have come in from the rest of the research team, news clips and tweets and grainy photos of a dark shape against darker trees.

It’s not much to go on.

There are still a few hours till dusk, when you’ll take your good boots and your camera gear out into the misty forest in search of something a little more concrete than what’s looked so far like mostly hearsay and photoshop. You figure you might as well kill time, so you order a coffee and ask the girl at the bar about the rumors.

“Oh, I don’t know,” says the girl at the bar, handing you a steaming Americano in a mug that looks like it was handmade by a small child. “What is a monster, anyway?”

She’s beautiful in a way that looks out of place here in the middle of nowhere, all flawless skin and big brown eyes, thick dark lashes and a cascade of curls swept into a messy fishtail braid. Her eyebrow and lip are pierced, and she smiles at you in a way that makes you feel inside-out. She looks like someone who should be pulling in ten thousand likes a post on a cottagecore aesthetic instagram account, not serving coffee to low-budget reporters in Bumblefuck, Washington.

Her fingers brush yours as she passes you the mug. “Is that a philosophical question?”

She laughs. “It could be,” she says. She props her chin in her hands and tilts her head at you. The fabric of her sweater looks incredibly soft, oversized sleeves slipping down to expose the pale skin of her wrists. You wonder if she’s flirting, or if it’s just been so long since a girl has looked at you twice that you’ve forgotten how to tell. “Do you have a philosophical answer?”

You do have a philosophical answer. Everyone in your industry does. What is a monster but something the world deems unloveable? What is a cryptid but something you can never be quite sure is real? What is a ghost but something that haunts you, always there out of the corner of your eye?

You say, “I don’t get into philosophy until the second date.” She laughs again, and you notice that her teeth are very, very white.

The sun sets hazy and golden beneath the misty horizon, and you take your camera to the woods.

You weren’t a nature kid growing up. You did Cub Scouts and then Boy Scouts because your dad and your brothers did, and you never once let yourself look wistful and longing at your sister’s Brownie sash. While the other boys in your troop got their hands dirty and debated the best ways to build campfires, you wove bracelets out of the twine where you were meant to be practicing knots.

If you had known how much of your adult life would be spent tramping through forests, you might have paid more attention to your troop leaders lectures on reading trail maps and less attention to the pattern of freckles on Cory Diaz’s neck.

There’s a full moon tonight, and this far from the nearest city, the stars are dazzling in their beauty. You allow yourself a few moments of stillness just to look at them, ignoring the chill in the air and the way your body wants to jump at every crackle or whisper of sound around you. You catalogue the constellations you know, mapping them out by eye. In college, you’d dated a girl who loved the stars, who connected your scattering of moles with a ballpoint pen and named the constellations of your body.

Something snaps, too loud in the quiet woods. It’s only practice that keeps you from yelping as you turn toward the sound.

You don’t see anything, but then, you didn’t really expect to. Cryptids aren’t cryptids because they’re easy to spot. You take out your camera, switch it into the night vision setting and raise it in the direction of the snap. The world on the LCD display is hazy and green, but brighter than what you can see around you.

There — movement. Just a flicker, but you hold your breath all the same. Another movement. A shape, if you look closely. The motion is slow and deliberate. The hair at the back of your neck prickles.

It’s a prey instinct, you know; your nervous system activating in the presence of a threat. Your hands sweat around your camera. The skin between your shoulder blades tingles and tightens. You flex your fingers around your camera and look into the woods.

The woods look back through large, unblinking golden eyes, visible without the night vision filter. With it, you see more than the eyes — you see the teeth.

This time, you scream.

You don’t remember deciding to run or whether or not you had the presence of mind to turn your camera off. Your legs move without your consent — prey instinct, you think again, wild; because alone in the woods, you are prey — and you’re not aware of anything until you’re falling, your ankle wrenching with a horrible pop that makes your stomach lurch into your throat. Adrenaline outpaces pain and gets you back on your feet. You keep running, staggering, uneven steps.

Can you still hear something behind you? Is something following you in the dark?

Are you imagining the swell of hot breath on the back of your neck?

Before you can stop yourself, you turn to look over your shoulder. Your foot catches on a root.

You fall, and the last thing you see before your head hits the ground is the glow of yellow eyes.

You wake to soft blankets and throbbing pain.

“Easy now,” someone murmurs. The voice is tender. There are hands in your hair, and you turn your head into the touch. The motion makes the world dip and spin around you. “Easy.”

You open your eyes.

The room is unfamiliar. The girl stroking your hair is not. “Oh,” you say. You’re shocked that your words aren’t slurred. “I know you.”

The girl from the bar smiles at you. “A little, at least,” she says.

She helps you sit up, and hands you a glass of water. This isn’t your room at the bed and breakfast — it must be her home, her room, her bed. The sheets are soft against your bare legs, and you realize she must have undressed you. You recognize the sweater you’re wearing as the one you saw her in at the bar, and it’s as soft as it looked. You wonder if it was still warm from her skin when she gave it to you.

You remember, belatedly, that you never asked her name. “I’m Laura,” you say.

“I know,” she says. “I checked your wallet. Don’t worry, I didn’t steal any cash.” She takes the empty glass and sets it on the nightstand with a gentle click. “I’m Cam.”

Dimly, you think that you’ve never met a straight girl named Cam. “How did I get here?”

Cam tells you that she found you unconscious at the edge of the woods on her walk from the bed and breakfast to her apartment. She tells you that you woke up long enough to beg her not to take you to a hospital and that she knows a few things about avoiding doctors herself, so she brought you back here, bandaged your swollen ankle, kept an eye on the knot on your temple. That she looked in your wallet just to see if you carried any medical alert or medication information, and she promises that she didn’t take any of your cash, which is hilarious, because you’re pretty sure you only had a few crumpled dollar bills.

She tells you you’ve been out for a little over ten hours, and that’s what makes you panic. “Oh, shit,” you say. “I need to call my editor.”

Cam hands you your phone. The screen is cracked, but it’s fully charged. “I plugged it in,” she says. “We have the same model.” She gets to her feet. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

You watch her go. She’s wearing another oversized sweater, with a pair of metallic leggings and fuzzy socks with pompoms on the back. Her hair is in a pile on top of her head, a few tendrils brushing the pale column of her neck. You think, again, that she seems too pretty to be real.

There are ten texts and four missed calls from Francine. You send her an email with the bare bones: there is, in fact, something in the woods, but it’ll be a few days until you can get back to learn more. You promise to send the footage from your camera as soon as you get your hands on your backpack.

Her response comes in under a minute, crisp but not unkind: See a doctor. Keep me posted.

You write back with an easy lie about having already seen the local doctor in town, and then, unsteady on your feet, you maneuver yourself out of bed. Your jeans are folded neatly on a chair beside the dresser, clearly laundered and smelling faintly of dryer sheets and lavender. You wriggle your way into them — they’re always tighter just out of the wash — and roll up the cuffs.

Your ankle aches, but not so badly you can’t walk on it, and you follow the sounds of brewing coffee through Cam’s apartment. It’s a small, cozy, eclectic place, seemingly caught out of time, the furniture and decor a mismatch of style and decade and texture. The rooms feel at once lived-in and haunted, as if something is missing, but has left unseen pieces of itself behind. You touch your fingertips to a picture frame, a black-and-white shot of a woman who must be Cam’s grandmother.

The resemblance is uncanny. They have exactly the same eyes.

“You shouldn’t be out of bed,” Cam says from behind you, and you nearly jump out of your skin as you turn to her. She’s holding two steaming mugs in her hands, and arches one eyebrow at you.

“You scared the hell out of me,” you say, putting a hand to your chest. “Do you moonlight as a ninja?”

Cam wiggles her toes against the hardwood. “Socks,” she says, by way of explanation. “Though I always fantasized about being a cat burglar.”

You manage, with some effort, not to picture her in a catsuit. “You went with innkeeper instead?” you say.

“I like to meet new people,” she says, and offers you a mug.

You spend the day on Cam’s couch. If she’s meant to be at the bed and breakfast, doing whatever it is that innkeeper-barista-bartenders do in their day-to-day, she doesn’t mention it, and seems perfectly content to sit with you and drink coffee and talk. You tell her about the show and the podcast and the website, about how you turned your childhood love of fairy tales into a career. She tells you about her travels, about settling here in the middle of nowhere for a break from the overwhelming throb of cities and airports. You learn that she likes old poetry and classic rock, antique furniture and novelty socks.

When the sun shifts outside the window and paints the sky in shades of pink and gold, she opens a bottle of wine and pours for both of you. You don’t know anything about wine but it tastes expensive, full-bodied and deep, and each successive sip makes you feel warm all the way down to your toes.

By your second glass, you’ve lilted towards her on the couch, your head resting on your hand. She’s touching your hair again, twirling a few strands around her slender fingers. Her nails are manicured, neatly trimmed. You think, I want to put them in my mouth, and are proud of yourself for not saying it out loud.

Her lips are red from the wine, but there’s no flush to her cheeks. Only her eyes show any change, bright and shining, almost golden in the light of the setting sun.

You have a third glass of wine, and it makes you bold. The next time you think, I want to kiss this girl, you let yourself say it.

Cam smiles, her mouth red. She says, “Sweetheart, I thought you’d never ask.”

She tastes like the wine you’ve been drinking, sweet and rich. Her lips are soft against yours, but her hands are strong where she slips them over your shoulders, curling her fingers around your arms, holding you against her. You let her part your lips with her tongue, melting back against the couch.

Her teeth catch your lip, sharp. You gasp at the sting, and she swallows the sound. Her hands slip under your sweater — her sweater — and trace a delicate pattern against your bare skin. Her fingertips are cool, or maybe your skin is just hot. She sucks on your bottom lip, and you arch against her.

She pulls back. Her cheeks are tinted pink. Her mouth is redder than it was before, true red, not the deep purple of the wine, and you realize that her teeth must have drawn blood. As you watch, her tongue flicks out, and she licks the redness from her lips.

“Sweet thing,” she says, and touches the place on your lip where her teeth made contact. Her fingertips come away red. “Will you stay nice and still for me?”

You think, I would let her drink me dry, and shudder into obedience when she kisses you again.

You spend two days in Cam’s apartment, talking and kissing. She doesn’t take off her clothes or yours, but you feel as drunk under her hands as if she’d plied you with orgasms, as if she’s sated you with nothing but her lips on yours. The biting is new, is a bit strange, but when a girl like that kisses like this, you think a bit of sharpness is a small price to pay, and the way she smiles at you when you let her draw a drop of blood from your lips is like the coming of dawn.

When the sky turns from orange to lavender on the second night, you get up.

“I promised my editor I’d go back,” you say, when she frowns, reaching for you. You find your boots, sitting neatly by the door next to hers, and sit down to pull them on. “Just to get some better footage, if nothing else.”

Cam had brought your backpack and laptop from your room at the bed and breakfast. You’d sent Francine the footage from the first night, had gotten a laundry list of questions and requested follow-up shots in return. She’d also approved your request to move your return flight back another week, despite the change fee added to her credit card.

You’d felt only a little guilty doing it, changing your flight date with Cam’s lips trailing over your neck.

Cam gets to her feet, her movements fluid as ever. You feel graceless around her, large and clumsy against her lithe grace. “I’ll come with you,” she says.

“You shouldn’t,” you protest. “It might not be safe.”

She arches an eyebrow. “You’re going,” she says.

“Yeah,” you say, “But for work. It’s my job.”

She lets out a little hum, thoughtful, and comes to stand over you where you sit on the bench in her little entry nook. She isn’t tall, but seated, you have to look up at her. Your face is even with the soft midpoint of her belly, and you ache to lean forward, to press your mouth to the skin beneath her shirt. She cups your cheek and draws your eyes up to look into hers. “I’m not afraid of anything we might find in the dark,” she murmurs. “Are you?”

Mouth dry, you say, truthful and ashamed, “I’m terrified.”

She smiles. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll keep you safe.”

You go back to the woods together. It’s cloudy tonight, constellations lost to the vastness of the sky. The light of the waxing moon breaks through in places, lengthening the shadows of the trees.

Cam walks ahead of you, her steps sure and steady. She seems to have none of your hesitation, none of the uncertainty that makes you test each step before you take it, cautious of the roots that had tripped you the last time you were here.

“Remind me,” she says, the sudden words startling in the quiet night despite the softness of her voice, “what we’re looking for?”

You don’t quite know how to tell her what you saw, or how to explain that you don’t look for the monsters in the woods— you simply place yourself in reach of it, and sometimes, the monsters come to you. In the end, you say, “Something that doesn’t belong,” and she laughs.

“Yes,” she says. “The monsters never do.”

A memory:

The English lit grad student you’re in love with lets you stay in her room after the sweat has cooled and your heart rates have returned to steadiness. She’s reading a translation of The Aeneid and clicking her tongue at the footnotes.

“The translator’s take on the Minotaur is derivative,” she tells you when you ask.

You peer over her shoulder. There’s an illustration. You wrinkle your nose. “I thought he was the monster in the labyrinth.”

She tells you the story: a queen and a god, a king and a sacrifice, a child who asked for none of it. A cage that wasn’t a cage, but a prison all the same.

You touch your fingertips to the picture, tracing the lines of a snarling face. “So there’s no monster in the story?”

She lays her hand over yours and draws your finger to the side until it rests against the edge of the illustration, where the walls of the labyrinth stand out in thick lines of black ink. “I never said,” she murmurs, “That there wasn’t a monster at all.”

Art by Laura Lee Benjamin

You don’t know precisely when you lose her. Only that you look down to check your camera, and when you look up again, you’re alone in the woods.

The forest around you is at once quiet and full of sounds, the ambient noise of a living, breathing natural world: rustling leaves and buzzing insects and the echoing, eerie calls of nocturnal hunters. You want to call her name, but your voice catches in your throat. The prey-sweat comes over you again, cold and breathless.

Somewhere in the darkness, a wolf howls, long and lonely and mournful.

You think, I’m going to get eaten by a werewolf in the back-ass woods of Washington like some kind of Twilight cliche, and the laugh that bubbles out of you is high and shrill.

Out of the corner of your eye, you catch a flash of gold.

Even before you turn, you know what you’ll see.

The yellow eyes gleam at you through the trees, shining and huge. The pupils are slitted like a cat’s, and as the eyes move closer, you see the body around them take shape: smooth and feline, shadow-dark and fluid as water. It’s silent as it moves, the leaves that brush it seeming to fall through it, as if it’s something unsubstantial, not really there. The mouth parts, and in the dim glow of the moonlight, you see the flash of sharp teeth.

It reaches the edge of the trees. If you stretched out your hand, it might be close enough to touch. Your hand trembles on your camera. You could bring it up and look through the viewfinder, see this creature in night vision reality. The things you can’t see, you know, are always scarier than the things that you can.

You close your eyes. You don’t run.

With a huff of hot breath that ripples your skin into goosebumps, the presence in the dark moves closer. You hold yourself still, prey in the night.

The next breath is close enough that you feel it against your face, warm and deep and heady with the iron tang of blood. Your knees, trembling, refuse to hold you any longer, but you barely register the pang as they hit the forest floor.

You wait for the rush of pain. For the teeth or the claws. For the sound of a predator announcing its presence, the last thing you’ll hear before you die.

Instead:

The touch against your face is cool and familiar and human, manicured fingertips brushing your cheek and tilting your chin up. “Sweet girl,” says the monster in the woods. “Open your eyes.”

You do.

In the blue-grey moonlight, Cam’s pale skin seems nearly to glow. Her eyes, with their thick, dark lashes, shine gold. There’s a break in the clouds above you, and as you look up at her from your knees, the moonlight catches on the too-sharp edges of her teeth.

Her lips are red and wet, and you want them, terribly, on yours.

“You told me,” she says, a purr and a threat, “that you had a philosophy about monsters.”

What is a monster but something the world can’t love?

You look up at her. Silently, willingly, you bare your throat.

She is tender as she draws you to the ground, tender as she strips your sweater and jeans away and bares you to the cloudy sky, tender as she draws your arms above your head and holds your wrist with one slim hand, deceptively strong. Her teeth are so sharp you don’t feel the pain right away when they sink into your neck — there’s only a rush of heat, a sense of something being pulled from you. Her thumb traces the line of your collarbone, a counterpoint to the throb at your pulse, and when she licks at the bite you hear yourself whine, faint and high in your throat.

There’s a heat to her when she kisses you now, and you taste your blood in her mouth when she slips her tongue past your lips.

“Stay,” she says against your lips, flexing her hand around your wrists, and you say, in a voice so breathless you barely recognize it as your own, “yes.”

She traces her way down your body, her mouth against all the places where your skin has dimpled in the cold. Her teeth graze your nipple, the barest tease of a threat, but before you can protest she’s moving again, lower lower lower, to where you’re wet and half-hard and aching, every inch of you alive under her touch. She wraps her lips around you and you arch against her, intimately aware of where her teeth are, and her laughter is honey-sweet and sets your nerves alight.

Her lips find your inner thigh and she sucks a mark there, then another, another, an Orion’s Belt of bruises, and when you beg her for it she maps them out again with her teeth. She opens your veins and you flower under her, everything you are unfolding under her hands, her tongue, her teeth.

“Please,” you say, and you don’t know what you’re asking for. She lifts her head and her face is red to the chin, her eyes luminous gold. “Please.”

“Sweet girl,” she says again, and your eyes go stinging and hot. She leans down and licks at a bite on your thigh, the closest one to the place between your legs where everything is tight and wet and wanting, and when you say her name, the breath of her laughter ghosts over your skin.

“Please,” you say again.

She smiles. Her teeth gleam, sharp.

When her thighs close around your head you feel like you could drown in her. You tilt your chin up and open your mouth and the first taste of her cunt on your tongue hits you like a blessing, salt and iron and honey-musk. Her hands are cold but inside she’s blood-hot, and as you lick into her, you see starbursts of red against your eyelids.

Around you the forest is alive with sound, the night-noise of the hunters and the wind and the trees and the deeper, desperate noises that you make as you eat her out, shaking and starving. The forest floor is uneven and rocky and damp beneath your bare skin. Your head spins and you wonder how much blood she’s taken from you. You think it can’t be too much because you can still feel the throb of your pulse at your throat and your wrists and your cock, and when her clit twitches against your tongue, you lose the sound of your cry in the cacophony of sound around you.

She takes one of your hands as she rides your mouth, brings the heel of your palm to her lips. She kisses you there, feather light, a contrast to the way she rocks down against your tongue. Her teeth graze your skin, and you roll your hips into nothingness. Your skin is cold in the chilly air, colder where you’ve leaked slick and needy all over your belly. She’s barely touched you, and you think you could spiral apart.

Her thumbnail traces a line over the vein at your wrist. She pulses around you like your own heartbeat. You slide two fingers of your other hand against her, and then inside her; when she sighs your name, you add one more. She takes you in, all the way to the base of your knuckles, so hot you think she could break you down and forge you anew, reshape you until you’re exactly what she wants.

You would let her remake you. You would let her eat you alive.

“Darling,” she says, breathy. She trembles around your fingers, against your tongue. She licks at the pulse in your wrist, kisses it. She says, sweet as a sigh, “Tell me.”

You say her name. It’s the only word you can remember.

She sinks her teeth into your wrist, and you come like a shooting star.

—conclusion, I think I got a little taken in by the local ambiance. That Washington fog is no joke! There are some cute local legends around, but nothing worth an episode, unfortunately.

Let me know if you saw my vacation request — I’ve got a few more days before my return flight, and I’d rather enjoy the area instead of changing the ticket again. If you can approve, that would be great!

You hit send. The email to Francine disappears from your drafts with a tinny whoosh.

There’s no monster here, you’ve told her, typing the message out with fingers that still tingle at the tips, the bandages on your wrists grazing the edge of your laptop. The bite marks beneath the gauze are already mostly healed. Cam had licked them clean in your shared shower last night, before she brought you back to her bed and kissed you til the pain was less than an afterthought.

In the darkness of her room, the two of you naked and damp and warm beneath her sheets, she tells you of the other girls: the girls she used to be, the girls she’s lost, the girls who wanted to stay, the girls who couldn’t.

She doesn’t ask which type of girl you are. You don’t know how you’d answer.

You close your laptop. Outside, the sun is fading. It’ll be twilight soon.

The bed dips beside you. Smooth, pale arms wrap around your shoulders, and warm lips brush the side of your throat.

Her lips are always warm now.

“Come out with me tonight,” she says. Her lips are feather-soft against your neck. You feel the gentlest possible pressure of her teeth. A tease. A promise. “I want to show you the woods.”

You take her hand, and you go.

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