Alice wasn’t ashamed. That dull, pebbly ache somewhere between her heart and her thighs wasn’t shame; she knew shame, she knew it well. This was not that.

The summer night was humid, and her thin sheets were thick with sweat. The bedroom smelled of sweat and sex, both fresh and stale, a lingering funk. Matty lay beside her. His handsome, lumbering bulk, all trim and toned and looking like a magazine cover was, tonight, an annoyance – it was her apartment, her bed, and she was practically falling off the edge of it while he lay splayed out across its middle. And he snored. Christ, how he snored.

No, it wasn’t shame she felt. It was disappointment. Resignation. It was supposed to have been fun. The sexy neighbor, drinks at the bar, a bit of naughtiness and when he’d laid her on the bed like she was something delicate, Alice had known it was going to be the same as the last week, the first week, and all the weeks between them.

Just fuck me hard, she should have said. But asking for it would ruin it.

So she had laid there, made all the appropriate noises at all the appropriate times, and when Matty’s breath grew short and his muscles began trembling and he asked her – almost afraid, like he didn’t want to fuck it up – if she was going to come too, she clenched herself around him and said oh yes, oh yes, and when he finished and finally rolled over she felt hollow, and – though he lay beside her – alone.

There was a crack in the ceiling over her bed. Alice’s eyes traced its familiar path from the corner to the doorframe, and back again. And back again. In the corner, near the closet, spots of mold seeped through the ratty old green wallpaper. She had never thought, when she had been young, that this would be her – always dully lingering on the cusp of tears, waiting for the day the dam holding them back would break – but no one, when they are young, ever does. You never know how little remains until the best parts have passed you by. Her windows were open but there was no breeze to blow through them. Every breath she took was damp. Swampy.

She breathed slowly, so as not to wake him, and waited there, for hours, until morning.

She felt like she was wearing someone else’s skin as she went through the motions of the morning. Put on the shirt. Slide the panties over sticky thighs. Make the coffee. Sit on the balcony. It was late September, and still muggy outside – it seemed the season would never turn. Light the cigarette. Listlessly wonder what it would be like to be a kept woman in 18^th century France.

Behind her, in her apartment, Matty was rummaging through the refrigerator. Alice had taken to the habit of keeping something in there for him, things he liked that she would never eat. Milk. Those little single-serving yogurts. Waiting for him to offer to pay her back until he never did. Raw carrots. The wet, chomping-smacking sound he made when he ate them was intolerable.

She finished her cigarette and headed back inside. Her apartment was small, stuffed with secondhand furniture and thrift-store appliances. In her twenties she’d thought it delightfully bohemian; in her thirties it felt desperate. Matty was still in the kitchen, watching something on his phone – one of those political guys talking about abortion rights, wage gaps, whatever it was she didn’t care, she found it all so tiresome.

He wrinkled his nose at the smell of the cigarette, made a show of it, so she could see him doing it. He hated the smell of smoke on her, and wanted her to know it, while also wanting her to know how much he respected her autonomy.

He was such a nice, performative boy.

“Hey, sexy,” Matty grinned as he put the phone down. Little flecks of the carrots she’d bought him clung to the corners of his mouth. It was a nice mouth, Alice admitted – that easy, slightly stubbled square-jawed grin looked like it belonged on a movie poster. Broad shoulders, strong forearms, chiseled abs, and his eyes were so goddamn warm and deep… it was a cruel joke that someone who looked like Matty looked would, well, fuck like Matty fucked.

“I look like shit,” Alice snorted. But she didn’t, and she knew she didn’t. Matty might have been ten years younger than her, but Alice still turned the head of every man in every room she walked into. There was a reason he couldn’t stay away from her bedroom. Even disheveled and grungy, dirty blonde hair matted with sweat and Matty’s tee-shirt hanging like a robe over her tits, when she put her elbows on the countertop and arched her back, she could almost hear his heart begin to race.

She wriggled her ass a bit so his shirt would ride up over it and gave him a look that was one part glare and nine parts desire. She felt just a little out of control, perhaps from the heat, but more likely from the unfulfilled ache between her legs. It was a vulgar invitation. Just grab me, she thought – just wrap your fucking hands around my waist and shove me over the counter and show me that you need me, fucking stick that cock inside-

He stared at her with nervous baby doe eyes. “So, uh….” Matty stammered, “do you want to…?”

Alice scowled.

“No. I don’t.”

Not that it would matter, she thought to herself as she turned away, brusquely brushing past him toward the bathroom. He couldn’t get her where she needed to go, anyway. He never did.

She slammed the door shut. The medicine cabinet mirror rattled on its hinges.

Night, again. The sounds of the city below drifted through Alice’s open window, laughter, jazz, a drunken argument. Every surface in her bedroom was damp to the touch, as through the walls and floors themselves were sweating with a sort of lurid, slutty abandon.

She squirmed on her bed. Sheets clung to her legs, her languidly rolling hips, as she teased herself with her vibrator. The insistent thrumming, slipping, sticking to her sex, demanded something her body frustratingly refused to surrender. Like tugging, pulling on a rope that would not release.

Her masturbation was rote, mechanical. Insert tab A into slot B. Apply gentle pressure. Trace circles. Follow the instructions, and it should work. But it wasn’t working. It never worked, anymore. Bluetooth butterfly vibrators connected to phone apps, long rubbery dildos thick as Matty’s forearm, electrodes hooked up to black boxes with blank knobs and dials, her search history was full of blogs and videos on how to get there, but none of it worked anymore.

She was just… passing time. Waiting for something her body only knew of through repressed memory. A mountaintop beyond a maze. Maybe she was trying too hard, maybe she wanted it too much, maybe she should think about something else. The crack on the ceiling - there was a brown, tarry tint to it now. Probably water stains; the building was old, after all. The moldy patch in the corner seemed a bit larger than before. She really should call the landlord and get that sorted. Someone was honking their horn outside.

Her sex was growing numb and uncomfortable. Bitter. Alice snarled, quietly, “fuck,” and threw her vibrator across the room where it clattered and jittered over the wooden floor while she pulled herself out of bed, toward the kitchen, for a glass of wine.

Fuck it; a bottle of wine.

She woke to stark sunlight and a dry mouth. Rubbed her eyes and groaned. She’d known it wasn’t the best idea to get shitfaced on a work night but had needed something to take her mind off the insistent want of her sex.

And of course, that was how it would be. Because that was who she was, and she knew that was who she was, because that’s what everyone told her she was.

Everyone had known but her.

Slut. Bitch. The shit her coworkers whispered about her in the hallways; they all hated her, hated how the interns fawned over her and the senior managers always let her shit slide. She never invited it but wasn’t above using it to her advantage. The moral high ground, Alice figured, was for people who hadn’t started at the bottom. But they’d never understand that. Rich cunts with legacy admissions to Ivy Leagues while she worked at K-Mart to keep daddy’s rent paid. They had never needed to understand that.

She fumbled for her phone, looked at the time, and winced. She was going to be late. She already was late. Again. All because she couldn’t fucking come.

Cunt. Whore. Vodka and tequila from the C-suite after landing the Perruzzi account. How Harold locked the bathroom door and shoved her against the sink. She’d been disappointed in herself, in how quickly she’d just shut down, had just let it happen. Survival instinct. The sharpness of the countertop digging into her waist; the cold press of his wedding ring against the back of her head. His tequila breath over her shoulder, his hand jammed down her skirt; “fuck – you do want this.” How aroused her body had become. The little room inside her mind she fled to. Just make it go away. His hyena cackle. How good it felt. How little she mattered; how little she had ever mattered. How utterly fucking irrelevant she was.

The nauseous knowing that they had all been right about her. Great tits and a needy hole. An object of desire, just a fucking white trash whore. Not what she’d wanted, but what she was, and never ever nothing more than that.

Alice slowly sat up and stared at nothing. Motes of dust drifted, aimlessly, in the moist air; the world had a hazy dreamlike look. Like how old pictures looked. The room smelled like sandalwood, musty, with a hint of arousal. Her arousal. She unthinkingly let her fingers drift between her instinctively spreading legs, slide through her thin, damp hair and gently, oh so gently, over her bud. She trembled.

It hadn’t felt like this in…. a long time. She dreamily allowed herself to fall back, ever so slowly, onto her bed as she traced circles around her sex. So slick, so slippery, each daring – and oh, it felt so daring, so deliciously forbidden – touch a torpid wave of pleasure that ebbed but wouldn’t subside, just kept flowing. Honey through a straw. A whisper of ecstasy.

So what if she was late. She’d call in sick. The only people who’d even notice she was gone would be glad for it. It didn’t matter. She didn’t matter. Nothing could matter compared to the warmth, the demanding need that pooled between her legs. And she writhed like a cat in heat, soft moans slipping from parted lips, legs tangling in sweaty sheets, hips rocking into stroking fingers and a raw, wet need to experience more of that pleasure, to wallow in it, drown in it, be consumed by it.

As her labored breathing gave way to moaning, and her moans dissolved into a sort of frenzied, staccato panting, the fungus behind her walls continued spilling its spores into the air, growing, spreading.

When sleep overtook Alice, it was deep. She was wholly spent, both body and mind collapsed beneath the deliriously insistent need of her sex. Her sex was a fever, demanding everything her body had to sate it, and still somehow impossible to quell. She had come – oh God, how she had come! – so many times she’d fallen asleep before the sun had sunk beneath the skyline.

And as she slept, she dreamed. She dreamed of realms somehow distant and coexistent, coterminous. Of places overlapping places, spaces shared and joined by forces both logically incomprehensible, and scientifically obscene. Of realms that human senses were ill-equipped to perceive, and sensations the mind rebelled against conceiving. Promises of pleasures neither body nor soul could adequately experience. A place of orgiastic excess, of mindless congress and of communion, of joining, merging, being.

And as she dreamt, a squamous, fungal darkness spread behind her bedroom walls. A gateway of malt and flesh, an inchoate passage to something else, something permeable, needy, wanting. Mycelium roots unfurled like lace tapestries beneath the rotting green wallpaper. A nervous system of pin-whip threads and gloamy hyphae needily reaching, grasping, seeking purchase. Seeking passage. A door to open. Soil in which to take root.

It found sustenance in her. Her sweat, her drool, the fragrance of her spent passion clinging to the humid dark. It hungered. It drank. It grew. It crept along the baseboards and seeped into the cracks of the old, creaky floor, its enzymes slowly softening edges, its fragile mass permeating, penetrating and filling the cracks between the floorboards with its pliable ochre softness. Wispy filaments swayed in the darkness, mindlessly seeking out sustenance upon which to feed, and grow.

The scent of sandalwood and vanilla merged with those of sweat and lust as the thing’s spores filled the air. A sort of biological reciprocity between it and Alice began to occur. A joining, a union.

Alice breathed, sighed, gasped, moaned. In her sleep, she came again.

Alice woke to her phone ringing; she reached for it, but the expanse of her bed seemed too impossibly wide, the phone so terribly far away. She gave up on it. Instead, she yawned and stretched, a dreamy little smile fluttering upon her lips as she savored the warm melty afterglow of her indulgences.

And her contentment curdled into revulsion when she saw the thing that now shared her room.

A fibrous mat of tannish-blue mold clung to the walls, halfway to the ceiling, and carpeting the floor between the corner and the bed. The colors of overworked flesh. The colony had spread in a latticework that looked both chaotic and purposeful, like city streets viewed from a great height. Its hyphae rippled. Occasionally, a barely visible pulsation. Throbbing.

Like her sex was throbbing.

Nervousness coiled in Alice’s gut, and it did not quell her arousal, but rather, existed alongside it in a way that made her question the reality of her situation.

Alice took a deep, shuddering breath, drawing more of the colony’s spores into her lungs, where they took root, merging, joining, with not only the other spores she’d been breathing in for the last few days, but with her. Blooming. Blossoming.

A sort of warm lethargy flooded her heart. Nervousness and arousal. Fear and longing. Two opposing forces in perfect counterbalance, and between them she found… serenity.

She gazed upward, starstruck by the wispy gossamer cilia emerging, beatifically, from the crack in the ceiling. It swayed so gently, so beautifully. Its movement reminded her of underwater anemones. And she could feel that undulating bliss within her, rising, ebbing, flowing; her heart flowed with it. She stared, enraptured and not wanting, not needing, not caring to know how long she spent there. It felt so wonderfully familiar, and appropriate.

Her phone rang again; tugging her from that grasping entrancement, and though her mind grasped onto the sharp sound like a lifeline, she felt a deeply unfathomable sadness at doing so. She lunged across the bed, grabbed the phone, and fled from her bedroom. And the tiny, soft, pin-whip threads of the colony echoed her movement.

It had been her boss on the phone. It was Wednesday morning, and she was out of sick leave. Alice tried to remember if she had even managed to let the office know she was unwell. Her memories were a puddled mess of dreamlike recollections, drifting away each time she reached for them, like optical illusions that vanished when looked at directly.

Alice showered. She put on Friday’s clothes, wrinkled and stale-smelling and left on the floor by the couch where she’d stripped for Matty after bringing him home from the bar, because the thought of returning to her bedroom for cleaner clothes was… a dangerous one.

She grabbed her purse and transit pass and headed down to the street. Creaky steps, peeling and water-stained wallpaper, plaster medallions yellowed and crumbling on the ceiling; whatever charm the old brownstone once held had long since fallen fallow. Alice’s eyes were glassy and unfocused, her movements slow and ponderous. She felt adrift as she emerged onto the humid, midmorning street. The smells of chicory, fresh-baked bread, and algae over stagnant water. An elderly couple walking their little dog. A sort of heartsick longing tugged at her.

The other passengers on the bus gave her a wide berth as she climbed aboard and took a seat. Animals instinctively shying away from a sick member of the pack. Like those dogs that can sniff out cancer. That familiar melancholy of being the only person in a crowd who wasn’t part of it. She found herself staring into her own hollow eyes, reflected on the grey haze of the window, as the world passed by beyond it.

“Young lady?”

She gently brought a finger to her lips, across her cheek, traced the edge of her ear. She felt something in her throat. Sadness, perhaps. Though her weary body had no tears to cry.

“Miss?”

The bus driver was standing in the aisle, near, but not beside her. He was unkempt and disheveled. He had a kind voice, though. Soft and concerned. “Miss, I’m sorry, but this is the end of the line.”

Alice slowly turned toward him and watched him take a nervous step away from her. “Lady, you gotta get off here.” There was a hint of nervousness in that kind voice, now. “Look, this is the end of the line.” He took another step back, and then he was walking backward toward the door at the front of the bus, but never taking his eyes from hers. His eyes were softer than his voice. Pale. Watery. And growing paler still. Then he hurriedly turned and left. Leaving her alone.

Always alone.

She slowly stood and drifted through the now-empty bus, silent save for the sound of the idling engine and her occasional muted cough. She tried to clear her throat, but that sense of thickness, of fullness, remained there.

When Alice stepped off the bus, she realized she had no idea where she was. The driver was nowhere to be found, nor anyone else for that matter. It was bright outside, cloudless and stark and sepia-toned. The streets around her were empty in all directions, nothing around but abandoned warehouses and vast, barren parking lots with weeds sprouting up between the cracks. A dog was barking from somewhere far away. She had missed her stop and couldn’t seem to put the pieces of why she had done so together in her head.

A sort of low dread began to sink into her heart. She made her way across the street, feeling like she was only just barely in control of her own leaden limbs. An unnervingly wet, clingy burbling cough percolated in her chest. She remembered learning about dinosaurs in grade school, and how their brains were so small and bodies so large that even once they decided what to do, it took some time for them to follow the command of their mind.

What the fuck was happening to her?

She fumbled through her purse for her phone. She needed to call someone. Matty. Matty would help.

But her phone was dead. Its screen was blank and black and Alice caught herself staring helplessly, once again, into her own reflected gaze as her chest grew tighter and her lungs began to seize up and something began rising in her throat-

Alice found herself standing on watery legs, before the front door to her building. It was a dark warm purple night illuminated by yellow streetlights and the too-bright beams of slowly passing cars. Crushed plastic cups on sidewalks, bass and laughter fading in and out as doors to bars opened and closed. She felt… swollen, bruised, inside. Her mouth was uncomfortably moist and drooly, and her tongue was too large yet also… pliable, comfortingly full, and spongiform.  She couldn’t remember how she had gotten here.

She still had her purse. Her clothes were all where they were supposed to be. She gingerly touched her scalp and found no sign of injury. She shuddered with an overwhelming need to cry but she just couldn’t – everything around her was simply so big and incomprehensible while she was so small, so numb. Her mind had locked her emotions inside a box and buried them. It was better not to feel, right now. It was necessary. Feeling would be bad.

Instead, just act. One step at a time. Things that make sense. Unlock the front door, climb the stairs; unlock the apartment door, step inside.

She shut the door behind her and walked slowly through the living room, not bothering to turn on the lights. She did not need them to see, to know. A thin layer of fine brown spores blanketed every surface of the apartment; the rich scents of sandalwood and vanilla hung in the air. Her movement caused the spores to stir and gently float about. Deep within Alice’s flesh a soft yearning began to stir. She sighed, a vulnerable whisper that bore the weight of an unsettling, unfulfilled, longing. Of a need for connection. To belong.

She needed to charge her phone. Then she could call Matty. Ask for a ride to the hospital. Make sure she was okay – which of course she wasn’t, but perhaps they could tell her why, give her some direction, or simply tell her what to do.

But of course, her phone charger was in the bedroom. With the… thing, the mold, the… growth. She had lost days to that room. Days, and possibly her job as well. And something else, something she could not describe, though she keenly felt its absence, the emptiness inside her.

Or perhaps she had always been empty. Perhaps she’d simply lacked the sight to truly see that before. And perhaps, in her room, she could be filled again.

Alice licked her lips; her heart began to beat faster, heavier. Of course she shouldn’t. She really shouldn’t… but how deliciously tempting the thought of opening that door again was. To indulge in the satiation of that mewling need, a craving that tugged, an invisible, gluey tether between that needy hollow space inside her heart and the memory of pleasures incomprehensible that awaited beyond her door. That familiar ache down there, between her legs. That need to belong. To be loved.

There were many ways she could be filled.

She trembled with a desire both physical and spiritual. Her heart had already made its decision and was merely waiting for her mind to accept it. She slowly disrobed, sobbing as she discarding clothing, shoes, phone. She would make herself into an offering; she longed to be accepted.

Alice took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and opened the door.

And was celebrated.

She felt as though she were being guided onto a stage, a place where the unending acts of creation’s great play were performed. It was nightmarish in its obscenity. The walls writhed and quivered, every surface, each belonging she had once owned carpeted in a softly pulsating mass of something that was not quite fungal, and not quite flesh. Soft, sinuous tendrils and glistening polyps swayed in fascinatingly hypnotic patterns. A low humming resonated through the air; the melodic shifting of its frequencies quite impossible for her mind to make sense of. The space was both larger than it had been – than it could have been, given the size of her apartment, her building… the city itself – terrifying in its vastness, and yet intimately confining. An illinear geometry where unstructured grotesqueries dwelt. Alice’s mind refused to accept it, to understand it was quite impossible; she felt only a deep dread born from prokaryotic memory, from a primordial time, a time before thought itself existed.

All she understood was that everything she’d thought she’d known about reality itself was utterly, and incomprehensibly, wrong. She felt a primal urge to flee, but her ability to even conceive of escape was being slowly subjugated by that low, sonorous humming that swept through her mind, and sent her thoughts drifting away on a tide on madness.

Moist, glistening. The air was thick, a warmly cloying fog that slickened Alice’s body, further addling her thoughts as it caressed her senses. She breathed deeply of it, delighting in the ephemeral, teasing way it hinted at greater pleasures to come. The floor was spongy and malleable, a rich carpet of quivering cilia that fondled her soft, naked feet with a sensation like hundreds of worshipful kisses. Its soothing warmth radiated into her calves, reaching toward her knees, which buckled slightly at the tender onslaught of sensation.

Tongues on thighs and gentle kisses at her waist, a sensation of being cradled, nurtured, cared for, loved. The sense of forces mysterious and inevitable working upon her; she did not need to look behind her to know the door through which she had entered the space was no longer there, that space itself was collapsing in upon her, that there was no escape.

No reason to escape, Alice now realized, as the ever-present, ethereal humming unraveled her fears and rewove them into a soothing lullaby perceived through senses she hadn’t known existed. There was a gentleness to it, a sense of welcoming, of homecoming. The shapes and forms flickering at the edges of her perception no longer terrified her. They were her audience, watching from the edge of space and time. Not the leering gazes of frustrated men, or the sneering glares of jealous women. No; in this place she was known, respected, admired. Accepted. Seen for who she was, and not what the world insisted she be.

Tentacle-like appendages, squamous and ropy, their pink flesh glistening with viscous fluid, emerged from strangely folded pockets of space above Alice’s body. She gazed upward with something not unlike reverence as they approached, their movements graceful, softly rippling and undulating through the gelatinous-seeming space above her. As they slid over her shoulders, sliding between breast and arm, crossing over her torso, between her legs and then around her hips, she felt at peace, and loved. Their grip, soft yet firmly insistent, began binding her into a position more accommodating to their desire. Shoulders gently back. Wrists secured at the hollow just above her buttocks. A tender, protective embrace.

Alice’s heart soared with joy as they continued their dance across her body. Each additional restriction imposed upon her was a whispered reassurance that she would soon be safe. The appendages allowed her just enough give to test them, and in doing so reassure herself she could not escape. A promise that she would soon receive what her flesh so desperately, wantonly craved, no matter what lies her traitorous mind might tell her about fleeing, about freedom. This was freedom, and her eyes grew wet with tears at how perfect it all was.

They wrapped around her, encircled her, turned her into a gift. Slick, warm pressure, deeply subtle vibrations from the whole of her flushed flesh to the depths of her moist core, and she was shuddering, gasping, moaning now; the whole of her trembling body was her clit, and her mind was her cunt, opening wide. Alice smiled, her lips parting ever so slightly, allowing a thread of drool to pass through them. She permitted it. She would permit everything.

A thick, viscous sort of pleasure began building between her legs, slow and warmly rising, as she was drawn toward the place that, in another version of reality, had been her bed. Now a cradle of flesh, an altar, a place of offering. The distinction was irrelevant. All that mattered now was the joining, the union.

She was gently laid upon it, that place of comfort, of loving confinement. A pulsating platform of spongy, roiling softness and moist, grasping things that kissed at her impossibly sensitive flesh. Her body reduced to a vessel for riotous, impossible sensations. There was only warmth now. Only pressure, and pleasure, a sensation of every want sated, of every desire fulfilled, a wave of ecstasy that only crested, and never crashed. Her body went limp, slack and relaxed, as that pleasurable swell continued to grow. She moaned in harmony with the unearthly humming that filled the air. What would happen now was inevitable, she understood, and that understanding was its own delicious sort of bliss, something to be savored, to wallow in and sink beneath.

And deep within Alice, in that secret place where body met mind, something began to open. A door to a place beyond places. A gateway beyond which lay infinities of fulfillment, pleasures so elemental only the soul could perceive them. A realm of malt and flesh and sensations so deliriously maddening, so all-consuming, that to experience then was to become one with them. Forever.

A sensation so dense, so impossibly immense, profoundly pressing powerfully upon her from all sides, deeper, firmer, more and more until she could take no more. A fundamental force of pleasure bearing down upon her. Her bondage platonic in its perfection, her helplessness an inhuman ecstasy all its own.

She could only think one word. There was nothing more than yes. She was yes.

She screamed without sound and collapsed upon herself.

This was not the end. Nor was it the beginning. The door understood that such concepts were only constructs, containers conceived by minds too frail to grasp the enormity of what was true. Neither beginning nor end, but a knowing of what was.

The door swung wide. It was a wonderfully thrilling comfort to be open and, knowing it could not be closed again, the door pushed back through itself, bending space and time, returning to the place of its ouroboroitic birth.

There was, after all, still so much more to know.

Matty stood, hesitant, before the door to Alice’s apartment. He had raised his hand once, twice already, to knock, and stopped himself each time, nervous she’d think he was a creeper, a stalker if he told her he knew she hadn’t left her apartment in days, that he’d called her office and discovered she’d been fired, that he was worried about her.

He knew her, after all. He knew how she sought attention with her body, flaunting her beauty and sensuality, and knew how her body betrayed her when she received it – the brief tension, the nervous tremble before she angrily stamped that part of herself back down and slammed the door shut on it. He had heard, so many times, something she didn’t want to say die in her throat in the moment before letting something casually cruel come out instead. He knew Alice well enough to know he barely her at all… and knew he wanted to be there if she ever chose to let him know more.

He went to knock on her door a third time, and it swung upon, ever so slightly in the instant before he could. The scent of sandalwood and vanilla wafted into the hall.

And now the door was opening wider, a portal into warm, gentle darkness and Matty realized he was walking inside before he had decided to do so. The scent was thicker, now, tickling his nose and throat in a way that was oddly comforting. Oddly… right. Like he was meant to be there, in that place and in that time; he took a deep breath, savoring the warm lightheadedness he felt as the spores settled in his lungs. Taking root. Blooming.

Matty stepped in something soft and pliable, sticky, that clung to his sneaker. Silently cursed himself for it; it wasn’t like Alice to leave takeout lying on the floor, but he should have turned on the lights. He supposed he shouldn’t have walked into her apartment without knocking, either, but it didn’t feel wrong to have done so. It didn’t matter. He needed to find her, needed to go to her. To be with her.

To be inside her – an intrusive thought that wasn’t at all like him to think, but one he found himself realizing wasn’t wrong to think at all. It felt… inevitable. His cock was deliciously full, and he enjoyed the feeling. Hot, flushed, grasping, driven. He strode through the dark apartment with purpose, now, and entered her bedroom before knowing he had done so.

It both was, and was not, Alice’s room, and he was drawn into that fleshy, glossy, sweet pinkish-red space. A cocoon, warmly moist and yielding. It was somehow both too large and too small; he felt lost within the space even as it stretched to accommodate him, thinning in places, and beyond he saw countless Mattys, countless Alices, a choir of lustful moans and halting gasps and spasms and expulsions. Grasping, suckling tendrils latched onto his skin as fleshy cilia smeared their viscous fluids all over him, their movements somehow emotive, writhing, a ballet of need and sadness.

Matty was afraid, but only in the most logical, detached sense – his mind refused to interact any further with the unnatural obscenity around him. His mind rejected what his body knew was oh so very real, and firmly encased within that soft, amorphous flesh, he began to moan. The meat quivered with a deeply physical sound, an unearthly vibration that shifted in pitch and tone with his every movement, the pleasures it inflicted upon his form birthing a harmony most delicious and profane.

The room drew tighter around him. He began to ejaculate, a softly unending flow of bliss as his meat sloughed free from its frame, melding, joining with the surrounding flesh. And he felt loved.

Alice?

The flesh smiled like her lips had once smiled, not when she was expected to, now when she would force it, but when it was oh so rarely real, tentative and nervous, like she wasn’t sure she was allowed to be happy but dared, nonetheless.

Be with me, Matty.

In the space that once had been Alice’s room, the border between spaces, between what Matty was and what Alice was becoming, melted into one. A joining, a communion that surged beyond the walls, into the building, through the city and into all that was beyond.

I am a door.

Her words spanned epochs. And he was groped and pinched and shoved and grasped and a ring in the back of his head and he was bitten and spread wide and everyone knew he had wanted it and he was helpless and it hurt and it was thick and it did not care.