Page 17 of Let Me Win You

His shape shrank slowly. The horns wavered and disappeared. The tail seemed to melt, like a bright green snowbank in the summer heat, eventually splitting into two legs.

A lime-colored woman exited the house with a tea tray.

“Invi? Back already?” she asked casually. “Do you need more scones?” She blinked, spotting me. “Oh…I don’t believe we’ve met.” She put the tray on the table, adjusted the glasses perched on her nose, then offered me her hand. “I’m Kindness. Welcome to Purgatory.”

“To…Where?” I mumbled.

My mind gave up trying to make sense of any of this. My body seems to barely hold it together. My legs shook, and I gripped the table in a desperate attempt to stay upright.

“You don’t look so good, honey.” Kindness lifted my chair then shoved it behind me. “Here. You better sit down. I’ll make you some tea.”

“She doesn’t need your tea,” said the snake-man, who now looked like a bizarre, naked, glowing version of the man I’d gone to bed with last night, which felt like in another lifetime. “I have our breakfast ready, Nicole. Please come back with me. We need to talk.”

He gathered his long, green hair and twisted it into a bun on the back of his neck. If he tried to look even more like the man I had met in the club last night, he only marginally succeeded. No matter how hard he might try, regular people didn’t glow. And they weren’t green.

“Who really are you?” I whimpered, plopping down on the chair that Kindness had so helpfully placed behind me.

“Nicole, please…” the glowing man exhaled, his chest deflating as he took a step toward me.

I jerked, ready to run again, and Kindness thrust her arm at him, as if to hold him back.

“What’s going on here?” she asked, moving her gaze from him to me. “You have a body, sweetie. You aren’t dead yet, are you? Invi? What have you done?”

“He stole her.” Charity leaned back in her chair, folding her arms across her chest. “He saw Avar getting away with stealing a living mortal and thought he could do the same. That’s what happens when no one holds them accountable. The sins do whatever the fuck they want.”

“Language, my child,” Pandora chided the old woman.

“I didn’t steal her!” the green man whom everyone called Invi bristled.

“Oh, I believe you very much did,” I argued, struggling to breathe through the tightness in my chest.

That explained it. I wasn’t going insane. He stole me and brought me here, in…whatever this crazy place was.

“Nic, no… I…” Invi ran a hand through his forest-green tresses. “We had a connection, didn’t we? You felt it too. It wasn’t just me. You said you wanted more, and I… I thought my home would be the best place to get to know each other. It’s peaceful and quiet, away from all the noise and crowds?—”

“Are you talking about your swamp?” Charity cringed.

Kindness laced her fingers in front of the ruffled apron she wore over a long dress with a lace collar. “Well, his place isn't so bad. It’s a bit wet but…”

Pandora pinched the bridge of her nose that had turned deep purple now, just like the rest of her.

“You boys really should stop doing this,” she groaned.

“Living bodies don’t belong in Purgatory,” Charity asserted sternly. “You’re risking plunging the current world order back into chaos.”

Tilting her head, Pandora twirled a strand of her hair around her finger, turning to white and then to pale yellow. “That said, chaos has its fun side?—”

“Mother.” Charity tossed her a glare, cutting her off. “You’re not helping.”

“The world needs an order.” Kindness nodded in agreement with her sister. “There are so many chaotic, unpredictable things out there already.”

“Nic,” Invi implored through the chatter of his family. “Please come with me. We started something wonderful?—”

“We didn’t start anything.” I shook my head vehemently. “You’re not the same man. You just can’t be. You… I don’t even know who you are.”

“I know I look a little different. But do looks really matter that much to you? I can take the exact shape of the body I had last night, and I’ll stay in it indefinitely if that’s what you want.”He ran a hand over his chest, and I followed it down his glowing shape, over the well-defined grid of his abs, and…down to a perfectly smooth area of his crotch. “Oh, sorry,” he muttered. “I forgot one last detail.”

With those words, the area between his legs bulged out, then formed two perfectly shaped testicles and a club-sized, emerald-green, glowing dick. It bobbed at half-mast as I stared at it in shock.

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