The Moth's Song

PUBLIC BETA

Note: You can change font size, font face, and turn on dark mode by clicking the "A" icon tab in the Story Info Box.

You can temporarily switch back to a Classic Literotica® experience during our ongoing public Beta testing. Please consider leaving feedback on issues you experience or suggest improvements.

Click here
dr_mabeuse
dr_mabeuse
3,768 Followers

I looked at the inhuman face: the blind, faceted eyes and the twitching, sucking mouth. Two large feathery antennae twitched from the top of his head.

"The lovely thing about etops is that way they reproduce. They have what we call a very mobile genome, lots of variation, lots of mutation. They mutate so much that almost half the males are functionally sterile. Great genes, lots of variation, but they're sterile. Old etops has found a way around that though. The female has multiple partners. The males take turns with the female, and one male's sperm piggybacks on top of another's. Hitches a ride, so to speak, so the sterile male's DNA sneaks in on a fertile male's. Pretty clever, huh?"

The talk of sex made me uneasy, and I didn't like the looks of that moth, crawling around on his hand like a furry blind thing, antennae waving. I didn't like the gawky way the feet dug their tiny claws into Todd's hand

"I never really gave much thought to the sex lives of moths," I said. "I just thought the female laid eggs and the male fertilized them or something."

Todd smiled. "No. Fish work like that. Bugs have organs just like people. Well, not like people. The male has an aedaegus that deposits the semen. He also has organs down there that hold on to the female during sex, kind of like having another pair of hands or claws. Fascinating, huh?"

He must have seen the look on my face because he laughed. He was enjoying this.

"So what do you do with these things?" I asked, wanting to break the mood. "All that research and gene mapping? You trying to wipe them out, like with the cut-worms?"

He put his hand back under the cloth and shook the moth off.

"What do I do?" He gave me a knowing, satisfied smile. "Whatever I want. I can do pretty much manipulate their genes to do whatever I want to with them. Make them brown, white, black; short wings, big wings, no wings at all."

'So you can make them big or small too? Change their size?"

"No trouble at all," he said.

From the house, the kitchen light started flashing on and off like a fire alarm. Todd smiled.

"That's Faith signaling up to come in for dinner. She refuses to come outside anymore at night. She hates the bugs, especially the moths."

Todd covered the cages and walked over to the light switch. I realized that this was my last chance to say something to him alone before we went back into the house. I didn't want to talk to him in the yard with the moths fluttering against my face.

"Listen, Todd. I really appreciate the offer to put me up for the night, but I think I'd rather stay in that motel, so I think after dinner I'll just—"

"Oh come on! Faith is having a ball seeing you. I haven't seen her looking so happy in months. It'll break her heart if you don't stay. Besides, I really have to get back to the lab after dinner. She'll be all alone and, despite what she might have told you, I really hate leaving her alone."

I was embarrassed. "No. She hasn't said anything about that."

Todd smiled. "Well, whatever. I know I work terrible hours and it's hard on her. Things will change soon though, once I finish this one project."

Todd turned back to me and lowered his head conspiratorially.

"And, look: if something were to happen between you two... Well, let's just say I understand. Faith and I have a very open relationship, know what I'm saying? It's okay with me. I know how much you mean to her."

I felt the blood pound in my ears like surf on a beach, but before I could think of anything to say, Todd switched the lights off and hustled me out into the yard. I tried to wait for him as he locked up, but the moths were growing bolder and had been joined by other bugs: some delicate but maddening lace wings that seemed to aim for my nose and mouth, and huge, stumbling beetles that buzzed in flight like old war-time bombers and dragged their scratchy chitonous legs through my hair. I waited for as long as I could stand it, but then I turned and just ran to the house as fast as my dignity would allow.

~ ~ ~

I didn't know what to do, and if Faith noticed my silence during dinner, she didn't say anything. I pretended to be tired and excused myself, leaving Faith and Todd alone. Faith showed me the room and got me some towels, and showed me where there was an extra blanket if the AC got to be too much. Several times she seemed about to say something, but I didn't give her the chance. I needed to sort things out.

From the bed I could hear them talking downstairs as they straightened up, although they didn't say much, and Todd left shortly after. I heard Faith clearing away after dinner, and then I heard her come upstairs and go into her room. I lay in bed looking at the moonlight and shadows in the walls and trying to ignore the soft thump of the moths against the window screens.

It had been hot and dry all day, and although the AC was on inside, it was still stifling and still outside. Somehow the heat communicated itself to me lying in bed with just a sheet over me and made me sweat. Occasionally I could hear Faith moving around in the house. Despite the extensive overhaul, the old floors still creaked softly and the house itself seemed to groan as it settled. The sound of those soft bodies hitting the windows was maddening.

I heard her come up the stairs and stop outside my door, and then go back down again. I heard her come up and go down the hall to her room. I heard her lie down on her bed and then get up again. I knew exactly what was going through her mind

It wasn't a happy home. There was a kind of clinical sterility about it that was so unlike Faith that it made me nervous. I tried to sleep but kept on waking up, hearing the sounds of the moths. I fancied I could hear that soft, dry, cooing sound I'd heard in the greenhouse above the soft pattering of their bodies against the screens. I finally took my tee shirt off, rolled it up and threw it on the floor to make the room feel more lived in. I dozed.

I was instantly awake when she tapped on the door and pushed it open. I'd been expecting it. I didn't say anything when she came in. Through the mottled shadows of the moths on the window screen I could see she was wearing old sweat pants and a tee shirt, what she always slept in when we were together. She closed the door behind her and walked over and sat on the side of the bed without saying a word.

I knew I shouldn't. I knew it would only lead to trouble and do neither of us any good, but I knew that she wanted it too, and I might have been able to deny myself, but I couldn't deny her. I never could.

I took her wrist in my hand and I pulled her down, and she resisted only briefly before she fell down on top of me, her hair was hanging around her face and curtaining us off from the world. Her lips were warm and so soft and yielding and the way she needed me so much, the way we fit together so perfectly, the smoothness of her skin under my fingers was all too much. Nothing had changed and everything had, and suddenly it was just the way it had been last January and yet this time the hunger was for each other, not to save ourselves, but to give ourselves away, and as she kissed me I knew that despite her engagement I wasn't the only one who had felt so lonely.

I sat up, kicking the sheets off me and Faith lifted her arms up so I could pull her tee shirt off and then leaned back on her hands, giving her tits to me, knowing how they drove me crazy. We didn't say a word. I filled my mouth with her flesh and thrust my fingers between her legs and she fell back with a groan, her hips working against me, desperate for my touch.

I'd known how much she could hurt and now I learned how much she could want too, and she pushed me over on my back and pulled my shorts down, panting with excitement. She got up on her knees and dragged her tongue over me.

"Faith... Wait!"

She opened her mouth and impaled it on my cock and sucked me with a voracity I've never felt from a woman before, her cheeks hollowed, brow furrowing as the shadows of the fluttering moths clouded her face. She went down on me, groaning, but when she dragged her lips up me all I could see was Todd, sipping his drink through his pursed lips. There was something insect-like and obscene about it, with Faith splayed over me like a female mantis with her prey, and I reached down and pulled her off. I didn't want to see her like that.

She rolled over onto her back with a gasp and lifted her hips, and I pulled her sweat pants off. She was naked beneath them and wet, and my fingers found her out as I kissed her and she sobbed into my mouth, wrapping her arms around my neck. This time I had no problem getting hard. I was erect and throbbing as soon as I kissed her. She spread her legs shamelessly and I could see her already glistening with wetness. I plunged into her softness and she sobbed with pleasure. Immediately she started to fuck me, throwing her hips up at me with a wildness that took my breath away.

I'd never dreamed she could be so passionate and so athletic in bed, but now when I held her wrists down and buried myself inside her, she met me stroke for stroke. I fucked her hard, and when I flagged she fucked me back, curling her body up to mine with a biological urgency that went beyond mere lust, as if her very survival depended on it. She squeezed me inside, drew me into her and milked me, threw her legs around my back and held me deep as she worked against me. She took what she needed from me too, holding my hair in her hands and kissing and licking my face as her hips worked whorishly beneath her.

"Come in me," she hissed. "Shoot it in me, Davey. I need to feel you come. You don't know how long I've wanted this!"

She was slick and tight and as sweet as the earth, as strong as the night and I couldn't have held back if I'd wanted to. I looked down into her face clouded with her rapture, and I gave her everything, pouring myself into her as she went wild beneath me, clawing my back and biting my shoulder, and when at last I fell back exhausted she peeled her body away from mine and kissed me all over, down my chest, trailing her warm lips along my belly.

I pulled her back down in bed and got up on my elbow, leaning over her. For the first time since that day last winter I got a chance to look at her body, and what I saw made me gasp in alarm. She was marked all over with those little circles like she'd shown me in the kitchen, scraped as if she'd been worked over with a metal rasp.

"My God! What happened to you?"

There were those circles all over her breasts and shoulders, going down her belly and laid along the tops of her thighs, some old and fading into bruises, some new and still red, and her body was streaked with lines a scabs and strange red scratches. There were two bruised areas on the outsides of her hips that looked as if she'd been flayed with a whip, as if she'd been held.

"Faith? What the hell's going on here?"

"I told you! I told you but I guess you didn't believe me! I don't know what it is, Davey. You tell me."

"Does he do something to you? I mean, when you make love. Is he kinky or something?"

"No. I mean, I don't really know. Half the time I can't remember. I just seem to wake up all bruised like this, with these marks all over me."

I sat up. "We've got to get you out of here, Faith. We've got to get you to a doctor or something. Maybe even the police."

"Shhh, shhh." She put her fingers over my lips. "Whatever they are, they don't bother me. I feel fine, except that they're kind of sore. These cuts on my hips are the worst. They hurt when I bend or stretch."

"Faith, Faith..." I didn't know where to begin. In the moonlight her eyes were clear and calm and I couldn't look away. "Look, We've got to talk. I love you, Faith, and I made a horrible mistake. I know that now. And you're making one too, marrying him. We belong together. We've got to get you out of here."

It all tumbled out of me then, all the feelings I had for her and the ones I didn't even know I had, all my need and loneliness of the last seven months after she'd moved away. I tried to be fair. I tried not to say bad things about Todd, but I had to tell her how I felt, and I had to tell her how wrong he was for her. Still, I didn't mention what he'd said to me as we were leaving the greenhouse. There seemed no need for that.

"I know, I know," she said at last. "Everything you say is true. I love you too, Davey. I've known it for months now. You're the one I want, but I can't just walk out on him now. I'll have to break it to him slowly, talk to him. I care for him, Davey, I really do. I just didn't know."

I burned with anguish, with fear and desire. I held her, and it was like old times, us crying together in each other's arms, but now they were a different kind of tears, and it made all the difference in the world. Just the feel of her in my arms set off my lust, and I wanted her again.

"I have to go," she said. "He'll be back soon. I have to get back to bed."

"But what's going to happen now?" I asked. "How am I going to be in the same room with him with you around?"

Faith sat up naked on the edge of the bed. In the moonlight, even with the shadows of the moths crawling over her, even with the marks and scars, she looked beautiful.

"Oh, it's not like that," she said. "You don't have to worry about that. Todd's all for this, for us being together like this. He told me."

"He told me too, Faith. He's crazy. But he can't have thought this would happen, that we'd feel this way about each other."

"No," she said. "No. He couldn't have."

She reached down and picked up her tee shirt and put it on.

"I have to go. You'll just have to let me handle this in my own way, Davey. Please. I'll tell you all about it later. For now just let me handle it. You sleep. Leave it to me."

I tried to pull her back to the bed and she leaned over and gave me just one kiss, one long hungry kiss. I wanted her to stay with me, but she pulled away. She bent and picked up her sweats and carried them out of the room, closing the door behind her with a finger to her lips, and I lay back staring at the shadows on the ceiling.

~ ~ ~

I might have heard Todd's car come back. I might have heard their voices on the stairs. Whatever it was, I awoke from a troubled dream to find absolute silence in the house and silence outside, and the room seemed unnaturally dark and enclosed. Then I saw why: all the moths outside had stopped their wild flitting against the windows and were clinging to the glass blocking out almost all the light. They were slowly moving their wings, trembling as if breathing, a slow, almost hypnotic sight.

Through the gaps in their patterns I could see the moon high in the sky, thin clouds razoring across it. Outside the cicadas had stopped and the crickets were shrill in the dying grass and in the fields that stretched away from the house like a sea of green. Beneath the forlorn stridulations of the crickets I could hear that soft, furry sound again, loud this time, and not so much loud as present, as if the air were full of it and I could feel it as a soft pressure somewhere against my body, a small, curling thing, as if cotton balls were raining down on my skin. I heard it with a part of myself I don't usually use for hearing things, and it made me think of dark things, of life under rotting logs and in the secret spaces beneath the bark of trees, the dry coolness below the surface of the soil where the blind bugs live.

There was a creaking, a rhythmic metallic sound, and I realized with alarm that Faith and Todd were having sex. The sound and the steady tempo were unmistakable, the old rhythm of copulation. Whatever Faith's plans for handling Todd were, they involved fucking him first. My heart sank. There was no way I could go back to sleep or even try.

I should have stayed in bed. Everything told me to stay in bed, but the same time something made me get up. I swept the sheets off me and got to my feet. The shadows of the moths on the windows showed a sudden trembling agitation. I put on my pants and went to the door and opened it.

Moonlight in the empty hallway, the moving shadows of the moths made giant on the walls; the moving shadows of leaves on the trees. Now the creaking of the bed stopped, to be replaced by another sound, a kind of scrabbling sound of something hard scurrying or clawing against the polished wood floor. Then that soft, spluttering explosion of moth song again, like puffs of air against my skin, like dry bubbles somewhere in my chest.

I already knew what was happening. I don't know how I knew, but I knew without looking, yet still I had to look. I tiptoed out into the hallway, keeping near the wall so the floorboards wouldn't creak. Their bedroom was just down the way; the door stood ajar, moonlit darkness beyond it. Somehow I already knew what I'd see.

The room was filled with moving shadows and when I pushed the door open there was a violent furry as its wings began to beat. Faith was naked, on her back, and the thing was between her legs, it's furry thorax pumping at her with a slow, obscene regularity. The wings beat harder and I felt the wind on my face, smelled the odor of wet leaves on the forest floor and damp things beneath rocks, life half-formed emerging from its glistening chrysalis, the musty smell of insect pheromones coupled with the scent of human female arousal. Between the beating of its wings and the scrabbling of its horny legs I saw the organ enter between the columns of her thighs, dark and shiny. I saw the dull, moon-knowing faceted eyes, the long, sucking mouth, the feathery antennae stroking her breasts, and I watched as the clawed feet scratched at her flesh with urgent, instinctive need. Two hooked appendages emerged from its thorax and held her hips up off the bed so that her legs hung limp on either side, and her thighs flexed as she took the steady mechanical thrust of the thing's appendage.

It saw me, or it knew I was there, but that didn't stop it, and there was nothing I could do myself but stand there in horror, breathing the reek of the thing and watching that furry abdomen pumping against her again and again. Faith seemed unconscious, but her lips were slack and her eyes closed as if in beatific pleasure. The wings went still and the thorax suddenly trembled and I knew the thing was ejaculating.

I dove at it then, and my hands closed on its soft, waxy fur. The body was cool and hard and massively heavy. I pushed at it and pulled, but it was not till it was done that it climbed off her with awful twitching legs and got down from the bed and turned to face me. It stood on its hind legs like a man, the body enormous, the eyes blank and each facet reflecting the light of the moon through the window.

There was no intelligence in its face, nothing but blind instinct, but what it new it knew perfectly: the sounds of the night and what happens in the shadows where blind white root meets sucking mouth in the darkness of the soil. Where sex is a force like life and hunger and eating and being eaten. The wisdom of the insects, the knowledge of the moth.

It rushed at me then and I covered my face and fell as the wings struck me, dislodging a storm of pearly scales that filled my nose and mouth as I fought to breath. There was the sharp hook of insect legs on my flesh as it scrambled past, easily throwing me down and scrambling over me. Then the next thing I remember was fighting back my blind horror as I grabbed Faith and wrapped a sheet around her and carried and dragged her down the stairs, through the immaculate kitchen and out the back where the moths still hadn't stirred. I carried her across the lawn, my bare feet crushing the writhing furry bodies, and threw her into the car just as the moths began to stir and flutter up from the weeds around us.

dr_mabeuse
dr_mabeuse
3,768 Followers