Page 5 of The Monster at the End of This Courtship

"She's …" he sighed. "Take a break for a moment, everyone."

The teacher approached me as the rest of the class shuffled out into the hallway. "You're Axel, right?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Call me Merritt." He smiled, showing most of his sharp teeth. "Axel, the child can't be yours. We can't reproduce with humans."

"What?" If he was implying what I assumed, I was about to be furious on Rosanna's behalf. Ain't no way she cheated on me.

"It's unusual for alphas to be bisexual."

Oh. He meant me, that I couldn't have gotten it up. Now I was even more enraged! "I'm straight."

"Straight." There was no heat in his words, which only made me angrier. He was treating me like an interesting science experiment. "Even more unusual. You had sex?"

"Often," I groused. I wasn't trying to brag, but this wasn't a one-off thing. "We lived together. We weren't trying to get pregnant, but we'd always planned to get married."

Well. I hadn't wanted to get married. I would have been content to live with her without all the pomp and circumstance, but then she got pregnant, and I agreed to give her and the baby my name.

"We can't," Merritt said slowly, "reproduce with humans. It's impossible. Our genes are too different from theirs."

"Life finds a way!" I quoted my favorite movie.

"I'll have our Earth team look into it," Merritt said. "In the meantime, you should spend some time with your omega and see if you change your mind about being straight."

After twenty-four years, I highly doubted it. I didn't want to spend time with that weirdo, either, though he had been friendly and cheerful.

My fiancée and I had gotten along so well because we were both miserable. She worked the early morning drive-through window at the bank where I had to pick up our cash drawers each day before we opened. We saw each other when we weren't at our best. After a particularly rude customer had set her off, I asked her on a date to cheer her up. She agreed, stating anyone who had seen her at her worst should get to know her at her best. The rest was history, as they say.

I loved her. At least, I thought I did. We hadn't been happy together for the last three months before she got pregnant, but we were going through a slump. She was unhappy with her job, same as me, and sometimes we got on each other's nerves.

I didn't take the pregnancy news well, either. We'd always used condoms. I thought neither of us wanted children, but when she found out she was pregnant, everything changed. She wanted this baby, and I was going to be a great dad.

Except now, I was a monster with pointy ears, sharp projectiles coming out of my elbows, sharp claws on my hands and feet, an elongated snout that barely looked human, and vertical slits in my eyes. I liked my bright yellow hair and stripes of yellow scales that reminded me of a tiger, but I didn't know what to think about my tail.

Even my cock was different. It was longer, thicker, and capable of knotting during sex.

I didn't want to think about sex. Everyone here kept telling me I belonged with the omega I met shortly after I arrived. I'd never been remotely attracted to men, especially not men whowore bow ties and suspenders. He looked ridiculous and gay enough to be a one-kobold pride parade. How was I supposed to want him?

Not that there was anything wrong with being gay. Just, after twenty-four years, I was pretty sure I was not gay, or bisexual, or whatever.

I had been pretty certain I was human, too. Look how that turned out.

Priestess Alma entered the classroom as some of my classmates filed back inside. Our class was comprised of the twenty-somethings who still had tails.

She surprised me when she stopped at my desk. "Please come see me after class." She dropped a bit of cloth on the desktop. It looked like a handkerchief, or a pocket square for a jacket.

"Sure." I leaned forward over the desk, the kind with a platform to rest your elbow and not much more. The cloth smelled … alluring. I leaned over it and sniffed again, filling my nose with the tantalizing scent. Wow. Whatever that was, I wanted more of it, and so did my cock.

That was weird. I'd never been aroused by a scent before. Sure, sometimes the smell of condoms and lubricant made me hard when I wasn't quite ready yet, but that was because I associated the sharp fragrance with sex.

Fuck. Was that how I'd gotten Rosanna pregnant? Maybe I had knotted her and broke the condom!

No. She would have complained about that. She already swore my cock was too big. It was even bigger now. Like my cock would be the only thing turning her off if she saw me now. I was a fucking monster!

As I sat through the rest of the afternoon class, my mind wandered. My classmates all talked about what they'd left behind on Earth, and I thought through the possibilities of what Merritt had told me.

I'd thought Rosanna was true to me. Sure, she'd fooled around before we got together, but once she moved in with me, we swore to be exclusive.

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