It was morning and, thus, altogether another day. A young, young one. A brighter wolf-woman could’ve wondered what she was doing up so early.

An even brighter one would’ve wondered about her circumstances instead. The where of location, the who of company. Kagerou’s were an odd set. A mermaid and a human. No favour for her nose before breakfast, these. Neither were the pinewood- and rush-scented floors of Sekibanki’s chic tea-house, smack-dab in the middle of the Human Village. Its current representative, being a male of indeterminate age yet somewhat a determined face, scrunched the latter as the mermaid, Wakasagihime – sprawled two-thirds along the bench beside him with her massive tail – dipped her fin-eared head below the table’s edge.

Moist lips smacked in the under-table gloom.

The man jolted on his seat. Opposite of him, Kagerou felt a jitter in her belly which wasn’t per se hunger when their eyes met over the tea-bearing cups. They joined in a look which, between different species, could be called “sympathetic.” Gasping, he tipped back his head, even as the rear of the mermaid’s began bouncing – slowly, sensually – in and out of view.

Kagerou swallowed. Her throat hadn’t been just parched when she’d woken up; it’d been pressed, glued and become overnight a veritable doorstopper. Now, the human’s strained expressions were making her want to wet it even more. Would she but… then, she jealously pictured, she could slurp even more obscenely than Wakasagihime was, to the man’s grunted appreciation. And, jealously still, Kagerou’s. The mermaid princess’s lips had proven themselves more wicked than hers and Sekibanki’s mashed together. They’d all measured theirs against the same tool.

Until, in fact, its owner couldn’t tell the difference anymore past his blindfold – and passed out on the hostess’s bed.

That had been a fortnight ago. This, pale morning, when the Grassroots had come to after their sotted hen night, the hairiest belly manifest had been none other than Kagerou’s. And no dangling accessories to hang a clumsy hand on, either. They’d carried themselves – some more carried than themselves – down from Sekibanki’s bedroom in the garret to the ground level, which the surreptitious rokurokubi had crafted into a semblance of an honest, human business. That of a snacking variety. Which, in turn, they hadn’t – trusting the magic of mint leaves in hot water over sugar to soften the morning dispositions. Steaming cups had punctuated the dim conversation.

And that was when the bell at the door had rung.

All at once, Sekibanki, who’d disguised together with the job-experienced Kagerou in the tea-house’s cute uniforms, must have had a think toward vacation. To the door, and she’d been presenting who’d stood on the other side a cautious handspan’s width of the notorious Seki-scowl.

“… It’s the crack of the bloody dawn!” she’d hissed via the gap cracked in the door.

There’d come a snuffled chuckle. “Spot-on when the beasties’re the feeblest, innit?”

Kagerou’s wolf-ears had steepled on her head. She’d known that chuckle, had the wolf-woman, and not from restless dreams alone. Wakasagihime, her upper body propped on a bundle of comforters, had cocked her fins as well.

“Come to help out,” the voice had continued. “You’re openin’ in about a jiffy, yeah? Off today, myself. Can ready the tables for you, sort the dishes—”

Sekibanki’s profile had become one mighty furrow by then. “No!” she’d snapped back. “We’re closed until afternoon. Geddit? The sign gone with the fairies? Can’t read or what?”

“Sign…?” A pause had prefaced a whistle of mock-revelation. “Huh! Wonder at that. So, want me to sweep the basement while at it, or…?”

“Now look, you—!”

Cued by the sparking impasse, the mermaid princess had thrown in her royal ducat. “Oh, do let him in, ‘Banki,” she’d enjoined with a toss of the curly bangs. “The Grassroots haven’t a rule about species. Neither has he grassed on us since the last time – has he? He’s good.”

Sekibanki had clicked her tongue; and, in through that chink in caution (and the inched-open door) peeked had a curious, familiar face. Cropped hair and handsome brows had been skewed the Grassroots at the table’s way.

Kagerou had sensed a blush in force mobilise somewhere down the cleavage of her waitress’s uniform and launch its implacable campaign up north. The tall human who’d two weeks before subdued her body and then settled for good inside her fantasies had been a colourful picture, one not far from a Tengu newspaper’s article on harvesting season in the Human Village. That Sun-burnt, bucolic quality of him hadn’t been what’d caused the blush, though. The raunchy stills flitting between her perked ears – had. And would’ve still, even if she hadn’t polished each of them into an eidetic masterpiece over more than one and more than three lonely evenings. With slippery, moist fingers on those even lonelier.

The threesome with Sekibanki on the bank of the Misty Lake, wonderful though it’d been, had been but one of these. The night eventually spent fooling around in her redhead friend’s bed alongside her boyfriend and the glamorous Wakasagihime had been another – and potent fuel for blushes itself. The drinks, expensively ferried to their meet at the lake, hadn’t seen clear bottoms by when the Grassroots, snuck not long earlier into their rokurokubi regular’s home in the human town, had heard the bell declare their (new) male inductee’s arrival. Sekibanki and Kagerou had ferried him in turn to the lounge upstairs, skinning his clothes on the way and smothering his mouth with alcoholic kisses.

He’d been left in but his bulging underpants by the time he’d presented before the less mobile, mermaid princess… who, herself, had already loosed her seaweed-green kimono into strategic dishabille.

Then and there more kissing had ensued: pushier, more horizontal and greedier than even the human’s wary expectation. So, as a man beleaguered by youkai might, Sekibanki’s hickey-peppered boyfriend had resorted to distract.

“Can I just—” he’d managed around the rokurokubi’s ravenous tonguing. “Oh, drat it all,” he’d choked out after she’d taken mercy. “Could I get a shot of something ahead of all, please? Any left?”

The assorted, raunchy youkai ladies had glanced at one another’s flushed, boozed faces.

“… For courage, is that it?” Wakasagihime had guessed.

The man had sniggered, jogging the Kagerou who’d been hugging his shoulders from behind and pawing his broad, sculpted chest. “Well, there is youkai about,” he’d joked. “No, but for real… Seki, miss Wolf, you taste something rotten right now. Sorry – you do. Want a sip of whatever you had to match if we’re to play fair. Or ‘fore it’s all out, really. Or I’m all out, drat.”

That’d been a wish even a fairy could grant. Marginally less easy had been to convince the junior, redhead Grassroot to lose the skirt and let her seniors to pour the leftover shōchū over her pearly thighs.

Sooner, nonetheless, than later, Sekibanki’s daring boyfriend would be lapping the drink from a warm and shapely chalice. That’d end rightly before too long – with the sexy redhead being tipped onto her back and the human stripping her of the black, now sake-soaked panties. Sekibanki’s smooth, nude legs wouldn’t dally, either; she’d no sooner gotten one free than she’d stuffed its foot up the pantleg of the man’s overstuffed drawers. There’d been an overt “This is everything you’ve deserved, fool human” hue to Sekibanki’s carmine glare while she’d rubbed him with her sole and wrapped her toes around the pole in his tent. Though, no longer than Wakasagihime’s slithering in beside them to at last break said tent down.

The pole, of course, remaining every inch a standing problem.

Thereon out, the members of the Grassroots Network would apply themselves as one to toppling it for good. Sekibanki, who’d either drunk or thrown her reservations away at the lakeside, would service the stiff cock alongside the tiddly Kagerou: their cheeks touching, lips brushing and tongues crossing paths more than the happy accidental. These sexual footsies would be expelled with the human’s first orgasm; and the wolf-woman, who’d backed away to let her crush reap the sticky yield of their oral co-venture, would out of nowhere find herself in Sekibanki’s exclusive arms and the recipient of an almost throat-deep, sperm-flavoured kiss.

Near on to a minute, they would swap her boyfriend’s seed back and forth, squirming and making out, until Sekibanki had gulped it down like a mouthful of runny pudding.

Kagerou’s ears – never mind her chest – had by then been afire and pounding; still, she’d registered the man comment something to the effect of dumb amazement. Sekibanki had smacked him, threatening “his own turn;” and yet, she’d been as soon upon and undressing the stunned Kagerou alongside a smiling Wakasagihime, the latter of whom had gladly lent her pillowy tits to the man’s comfort for the duration of the sloppy, double blowjob, but had a keen and (di)vested interest in Kagerou’s body herself.

There’d been enough unspent shame in the wolf-woman’s honest heart to cover up her hairier bits when fronted onto three drunken, ogling gazes. The small consolation of making this a second time for the least familiar of these – defensible, thus, by Kagerou’s moral nous – had been just that. Small. Quite unlike something else, which had been fast growling large again for Kagerou’s coarse charms.

“… Weirdo,” she’d said for want of anything cleverer, tail swishing between her thighs.

Sekibanki had sighed at her side. “He is that, yeah.”

“Of course he is,” Wakasagihime had concurred.

“‘Course I am,” the human had agreed. “Uh. Could this weirdo get another round of that shōchū, by chance?”

That, he’d very well gotten – straight from Wakasagihime’s generous mouth. And Kagerou, who’d found herself the meanwhile target of her redhead crush’s hungers, had been turned about, her hips wrapped in Sekibanki’s previously discarded skirt and positioned above the man’s restored, spittle- and cum-dribbling hard-on. And then, as the wolf-woman had done once to her, now would be Sekibanki who’d guide the slimy tip of her boyfriend’s manhood up between Kagerou’s dark, frilly labia.

A shove from the rokurokubi’s cheating hands, and he’d plunged to the hilt into the wolf-woman’s hot, slick vagina: his blunt cockhead easily sliding up to and flirting with her baby-room, where his previous load had still mostly clung since their afternoon’s romp. Sekibanki, it’d seemed, being after an encore.

Molested with no mercy – by her redhead crush to start, then by Wakasagihime, once the princess had done watering boozing their new clubmate – teats pinched between knowing, feminine fingers, ass and thighs pawed by rougher, male ones, and her vagina’s weak spots bullied by a hard, human cock, Kagerou’s climax had come the quickest it’d ever had. It had left her friends to shore her up while she’d squirted and whimpered and scratched their arms bloody in her fits.

And then, in return, she’d been compelled by whispering lips to requite: to sway her hips back and forth, and left and right for the human’s pleasure – right until his second, no less plentiful orgasm had been gushing in long, virile spurts into Kagerou’s messy womb.

A low, husky, waspish voice had murmured into the wolf-woman’s ear, even as she’d obediently let the human to plan every last drop of his precious seed inside her.

“… You wanted his ‘puppies,’ right?” it had reminded. “Geddem, then. Get knocked up. You damn dyke.”

To her shock, confusion and rather a pleasant flutter below, it had been Sekibanki’s.

These and other unutterable occurrences – up to licking the cream out of a mermaid cream-pie – wouldn’t at all prepare Kagerou for the strangeness of rousing at dawn up to her ears in Wakasagihime’s bust while, nearby, a human and a rokurokubi had engaged in a hush-hush, early-morning heart-to-heart. Never ahead or since had the wolf-woman heard her crush utter the words “Yeah,” “Me” and “Too” in sequence with so little guarded sarcasm affixed.

Two weeks later, she’d thought she’d scented a trace of the same, three-word sentiment when Sekibanki had caught her nosey boyfriend by the handsome chin and dragged him out the exiting door for a private word.

“—down with them awhile, all fine?” she’d been saying once they’d walked back in, and now she’d had a certain, subtle dimple in her cheek. It’d been that of a woman slaked enough to face reality – for now. “Might as good, and I’ll fix you a bite to eat. You two too, I guess? What’ll it be?”

The final pair of questions had been aimed at the senior Grassroots, who’d promptly weighed their friend’s new goodwill against their empty stomachs.

“Methinks I’ll try some of those steamed buns with jam, pretty please,” Wakasagihime had said.

Sekibanki had sketched out a nod. “Uh-huh. Kage?”

“Um. Same?”

“Cert’nly,” Sekibanki had shot back, possibly in jest and, even more so, occupational usance. “Will take a few, so buckle in for a bit. Try ‘n not eat anyone, huh, you two?”

The senior Grassroots had each given a nod back. One, of the nimbler faculties, had waved the newly deserted human to sit at her side. After, anyhow, Sekibanki had vanished in the back of the shop, and she’d knocked her pile of comforters off the bench. The human, ostensibly, meant to be their replacement. Which he had – reclaimed their place – to rather a grabby and grateful mermaid princess.

“Thaaanks,” Wakasagihime had chirped, arms winding all around the strapping man’s chest. “Always nicer with an actual shoulder to lean on. And, apologies, mister Human. This was… not prearranged, I take?”

“… What? What wasn’t?” Sekibanki’s boyfriend had asked, caught afoul of a glance Kagerou-wise at the wolf-woman and her smart uniform.

There’d been more about it than could be absorbed with a single glance, too. The tea-house’s monochrome ensemble was something like a maid could wear, if she weren’t overmuch concerned for her young lord following her up a flight of stairs. The tops were corset-tight and a prim black, except the basket of ruched, white rayon in the breasty area which, Kagerou had on coincidental experience, stretched wide out at so little as a friendly tug. Or a lean-over, if said breasts were of a heavier persuasion.

Oddest of everything, however, there had always been a set of it just in Kagerou’s three sizes. Complete with a pair of skimpy, silken, colour-coordinated panties.

Wakasagihime had smiled man’s distraction away in that innocent way she had, even while her palm had trailed down his flank to alight atop his thigh. He’d watched it range, but hadn’t bothered giving other directions.

“Us,” she’d explained. “Here. Me and Kage, pulling out that rug. Oh, please, none of that,” she’d huffed at the denial quaking his Adam’s apple. “Speak, and speak plainly with me. Were you or were you not going to?”

He’d blinked. “Going to… what?”

“Sweep her basement, was it?”

The human had gone still in the mermaid’s coquettish embrace. “… Ye—Yeah?” he’d managed. “What ‘bout it?”

“There’s no basement under this house, silly.”

There’d come a stuck pause, with the human on its end… and then a rattle of resignation chased by a complying sigh. He’d grimaced. “… Crap. Sounded swift in my head, I swear.”

Wakasagihime had absolved him of this slip, the roaming hand encroaching further and further onto his male quarters. “Could have been worse,” she’d opined. “Could have been cobwebs.”

“Er. Not suicidal, princess. I do have a care, yunno?”

She’d made a regal giggle, inasmuch as one could be. “Yes. I’ll warrant you are keeping our ‘Banki’s basement cobweb-free with great dispatch. Which is why—”

The man had tensed from the jaw down, eyes bulging. “Uh, princess? Wakasagihime?”

And there it had come. The first whiff of that familiar, sultry, masculine scent. Kagerou’s nostrils had flared like they hadn’t at the tangy, herbal tea. Her tail had twitched to life.

Somewhere beneath the table’s far edge, something amazing had been sprung free. It’d been enough arresting to cause the man’s breath to catch and the mermaid to lap her tongue around her pale lips.

“Oh, my…”

The man had swallowed. “Ugh. Look, this is—”

“Oh, pish-posh,” Waka had moaned. “We are all perverts here. Shush and let it happen.”

“But Seki—”

“—you would’ve been ploughing like a field upon this very table by now if only we hadn’t turned up to spoke your wheel,” she’d filled in for him the unspoken. “Yes. Obviously. Your fishing rod grew this big merely from me pushing my breasts on you. I’ll wager you had already half a stiffy going while you two nosed and smooched outside.”

“Half,” he’d muttered. “Yeah, right.”

“And so,” Wakasagihime had delivered her ultimate argument, “since we have done you this gross disservice, O mister Human, this humble wakasagi hereby presents her warm, loving mouth in avail.”

Kagerou hadn’t ever witnessed anybody but Sekibanki sever their neck and live to review the experience, but she’d definitely heard the human near wrick his when he’d wrenched his attention from the picture of Waka’s full, pouting lips poised to dispel his dry spell. He’d pled mutely with the wolf-woman opposite for support, but it’d been angling for hope in an empty beer-keg. Her long-nailed fingers had already tucked up the uniform’s lacey skirt and been stroking the front of her panties in suspense. She’d tilted her head, daring a smile of her own.

“… Crap,” the human had wheezed, defeat and racing blood making short work of remaining propriety. “Sure, drat, fine. Be lying if I said I’d not thought about this…”

Wakasagihime’s smile had turned sharklike at the reply. The smug face of royalty triumphant, it’d seemed, could be as terrible as a rokurokubi’s on the prowl.

“Think our ‘Banki will be along soon?” she’d wondered aloud, creeping over the capitulated man’s lap.

“‘Tween us four to feed?” he’d guessed. “We’ve twenty minutes, safe. That’s if she’s the dough ready.”

“Goodness. Sit back comfortably then, if you’ll please. This’ll be a long one.”

And presently, the slack-jawed conduct of his face was telling, he mightn’t last a fanlight, let alone the whole window.

Kagerou fidgeted on her seat, craning for a fuller view. The man, going by the soundscape, was being spared no suction nor saliva in the tonsils-deep, reparatory blowjob; and, being the oral expert she was, Wakasagihime steadily varied each, stopping every odd moment to swallow the built-up excess. Kagerou poured her stare hard at him enjoying her best friend’s expert lips – one hand’s fingers tapping her happiness button through her panties, and the other’s – coiled round the scalding teacup. Sekibanki’s boyfriend must’ve seized on the latter arrangement; a clench of bravado, and he stuck a hand of his own down the slit in Wakasagihime’s kimono to grasp one of the plush, opulent breasts which’d landed him in this stiff predicament.

The naughty mermaid tittered wetly around his impeding girth. She slid her lips up to and off his tip to show off a mouthful of lewd, milky foam. This, she then spat in a trailing glob all over his lucky, human cock.

“My nipple,” she advised him in a thick voice; “play rough with it, please. Twist it, pinch it – like you mean to milk me. I like it when it hurts just a bit. Mermaids are sturdy besides, so no worries.”

“… Will drat do,” blustered the man, somehow. “A mite easier on the glans yourself, OK This’s too good to blow early. You’re a catch, princess.”

Wakasagihime had beamed her magnanimity. “Thy wish is our pleasure.”

And that it pretty well was. The mermaid’s slovenly, oral massage resumed with slow intensity, with now an added ingredient of her throaty moans peppering the action. The gurgling of said throat, which Wakasagihime had indulged earlier at volume, was wound back in deference to the human’s plea; and now, for a change, rather than simulating for him the sex he’d missed out on with her mouth, the princess merely shone and polished his fishing rod with her tongue, lips and the velvety insides of her cheeks. If blowjobs were drinks, and her previous had been a vicious shot of shōchū, then this new one was a glass of smooth, red wine. With many, many lipstick prints on the rim.

On the other side of the table, a wellspring of jealousy bubbled over. The would-be waitress named Kagerou spread wider her gartered legs, rubbing herself over her underwear to the sights and sounds of a male she desired coupling with her long-time clubmate’s mouth. And, shamefully, to this clubmate’s muffled, perverse noises. Sobriety was doing her no favours; it’d been more or less fine to pounce on their junior’s boyfriend under the cover of libation, but alongside a clear mind came a not-so-clear conscience. Kagerou’s borrowed panties being pulled aside – by herself, no less – aided the case none.

Once again, because it wasn’t whatsoever the first time, it felt like cheating. On Sekibanki, on fidelity… and on herself, by the scrumptious man and her big-titted, mermaid bestie.

On the teeter-end of guilt, the humble wolf-woman threw herself in the only selfish direction surviving… and snuck her middle and ring fingers, curled , up into her ready, eager and thirsty hole. The same one Waka had fed herself, many Moons in the past, when she’d prevailed upon Kagerou that those scary, human males she loved and dreaded weren’t the sole option for buffing the edge off of her worst mating seasons. The wolf-woman’s soft, wet labia ate up her own fingers as they’d eaten up the mermaid’s: up to their third knuckles, without so much as a pang of contrition. Of other things, though, there were oodles. The less innocuous of which was the spine-bowing pang of her fingertips bumping that secret spot a trusted male was supposed to push on and grind with his hard cock.

The spot her redhead crush’s boyfriend had already pushed on in abundance.

Itchy all over, but rubbing it out of at least one place now, Kagerou faced the man with and, effectively, to whom she was masturbating. His big, ox-shouldered frame, steadied by the bench’s backrest on one arm while groping the mermaid with the spare, stoked the fire under the wolf-woman’s bellybutton. There in his lap, half-hidden by the tabletop, her friend and fellow senior was usurping the entirety of both his manhood and attention. Kagerou inhaled the tepid air, jealousy held by the ears, determined to recover her piece. The scents of tea, maleness and her own, unwashed hair mingled and lodged behind her temples.

“… So, er, um,” she finally coughed up. “Come here often… do you?”

He did not give it very fast, but when he did, his returned look was actually rather an apologetic one. “S—Sorry, miss Wolf,” he said conversationally. “Up to here in, fuh, something amazing at the mo’. What was that?”

Kagerou wrestled back the involuntary giggle. “… Asked you,” she obliged then, “asked you iffff, asked you if you came here often.”

It was said that a wolf-woman might chip her claws on a human’s cleverness, but this one’s was being sapped away even as he mulled the question. He shook his head as if dislodging a witticism and went on.

“To Seki’s?” he figured. “Whenever the winds’re good. Which isn’t near often as I’d like. Job, time, food, welly left to give…” The list sounded encompassing of the Human Village’s fickle weather patterns. “Why, you reckon I…? No. Have you know, I’d none dimmest she had you two over today. On honour. Hng.”

Kagerou licked her fangs. “… That’s not it,” she insisted. “It’s just… yunno? Curiosity? ‘Banki, er, Seki, she only ever told us some stuff. The meat, yunno? Never the dull bits. What you, um, do with her on the regular. What kind of… arrangement you have. How you met and where and so. And, um… this is a pup’s lapse, but… what your name is?”

The human looked for a heartbeat as if slapped by a Tengu’s fan. “… Wait. Hold that thought! Holy mackerel, how haven’t we—”

Wakasagihime’s saliva-thick snigger cut him off.

“Ooh,” he remembered. “Yeah. Right. Forgot. Sorry. Holy, uh, cow it is.”

“Marry, it’s fiiine,” said the resurfaced mermaid, her tone charitable but with just a hint of a repressed desire to give him a red ear. “It was funny. A little funny. Passable.”

The man’s easy humours boiled out of him a wry smile. “Gracious noble, this princess,” was his muttered retort. “Sorry for excluding you, anywise.”

“Oh, please,” moaned Wakasagihime, sinking back down to his lap, “I’m not ‘Banki. I’ll not lose my head the moment you cease paying me attention. Chat your heart out; I shall busy my noble self here.”

And, appreciably, her noble self did. The human reeled through a range of strained expressions, some reminding Kagerou too closely of their spontaneous, previous tryst to let go amiss. Her fingers glided out of then slid back among her tender walls with ease, lustred all along by warm, glassy lubricant evolved to convey even longer, girthier things. The wolf-woman fought her breath to sit and stay, even while she teased her vagina’s sensitive areas to the human’s gritted, carnal bearing.

“So, the,” she chased the open trail, “the, hnn, the name…?”

Squiggly-browed, the man peered sidelong at the backroom’s forbidding door, meaning crinkling the edges of his eyes. “Uh. Ack—ctually…” he speculated, “could be we oughtn’t. My manageress’s something of a snoop; more ‘n the rule where her bellhops and youkai customers is concerned, too. The less there can train ‘er little nose your way, well… the better for some. Innit?”

They held the stare a moment and a half, pondering on a certain redheaded unavoidability. Then, not a little put out but not yet put off, Kagerou volunteered a nod. “… OK. Um. Makes sense.”

“More ‘n you could surmise, miss Wolf,” assured the man. “Had grief enough the one time she flew a noggin over to slip our yardman my biff chit after we’d overdone drink the night before. Haven’t heard the end of it to this day.”

“Why… Um. Why was it grief?”

“Haaah,” he sighed. There was a faint Sekibankish grind to the sigh. “She signed the thing as my bloody fiancée, that’s why. Hammered it into everyone’s skulls afterwise it’d been just a mate’s prank – which it was, yeah? – and that I’m an incorrigible bachelor, but the young lady had her hounds sniffing around about me either or. So, yeah, not the swiftest idea. Anybody asks? Just a run-of-the-mill runner for the Hieda, I am. Just so. That fine, I, hfff… I hope?”

Kagerou thought no. “… Yes,” she surrendered outwards. “No, yes, I, mmn, I understand. Just so.”

“Good girl,” quipped the man, gratefully… and then, leaning back, loosed among the rafters a deep, satisfied groan. “Oh, fuuuck meee…”

Sounds of laboured swallowing presaged the mermaid’s slimy repartee. “Laterrr,” she chided. “Have some patience, you runner.”

The human barked off a laugh – clipped, once Wakasagihime’s doting lips remarried his hard-on. “Hold you— oh, crap,” he gasped. “Hold you to that, drat. Gon’ have to bloody get the young lady some flowers for this leave, bloody me…”

The wolf-woman stared hard at her crush’s docile partner. “… Is this fine?” she was asking all of a sudden.

It’d been a simple one, but the question had contained a lot of conundrum.

For Kagerou. Sekibanki’s boyfriend ducked it like seasoned fowl. “… ‘This?’”

“Us,” she said, blushing and exasperated, “doing it. Without ‘Banki. Hnn.”

The man looked her over, her arm vanishing under the table especially. “… Think I twig,” he admitted at length. “Here’s the, hff, rub, though. After last time, Seki had a… how do you say? Inlook? A good, ol’ bit of self-discovery. Talked it up to me; we gave it a tussle; and, ends meeting, she… well. Gave me a dispensation, let’s say? Story in itself, quick how that upturned.”

“And you’re fine with this?” pursued Kagerou. “You’re fine with… what is this, sharing? With us?”

He sketched out a shrug with his broad shoulders. “Has its perks.”

For a first since falling for lusting after him who’d bedded both of her best friends, Kagerou felt a bite of disappointment for her junior’s choice partner.

He must’ve smelt her pique… or seen her speed her angry masturbation… because he patted Wakasagihime’s nuzzling head for a time-out and sought another appeal.

“… Make no mistake, miss Wolf,” he vowed, grimmer, “I adore Seki. I do. I adore ‘er good and bad. Take her to wife if I could. Thought about it a million times. But I’m a simple man, not an idiot; and Seki’s a youkai, drat easy on the eyes as she is. One day, I’ll grow old – break down, die. This’s a bio-logical inevitability. Come that day, I want Seki to care for herself without wrinkling another frown for some crochety, balding prick. Crap. Might be even ahead then she’ll grow bored of me, instead. Who can ken with youkai? Sorry, that’s your own truth. And such’s fine for my lot, too. Know well whereon I stand, here.”

Wakasagihime, who’d levered herself up on her arms as he’d confessed this, offered up a supporting smile. The mermaid’s huge, pendulous bust was out by now of her unsashed kimono: one of the plump, bluish-pink nipples conspicuously plumper and pinker than its twin. Which connoted perhaps to what she said next.

“You’ve every hallmark of a very well-preserved old man,” she consoled him. “I’d nurse you.”

And the man’s reply was one where he stooped and kissed the fish princess – notwithstanding where her lips had of late been and, Kagerou thought, somewhat like a husband kisses his airheaded wife.

“Sweetest thing a girl’s said to me sober, that,” he granted. “Know my drat place, though, still. I’ll use of life as it swings, princess – now included – but I’ll have no truck with illusions. Thanks.”

Wakasagihime’s lush brows hugged each other for a flicker. “… Stubborrrn,” she then moaned; “but, I suppose me it takes like to wiggle into our ‘Banki’s good graces. Some match you are. How-ever did you strike it off?”

The man stared: at the mermaid’s hand slinking to and buttressing his neglected manhood, but also the mermaid at her large. “… She’s, er, not told you?”

“Not everything,” complained Wakasagihime, one weather eye on the slippery happenings below. “Nothing on how you allied, really. What Kagerou here has mentioned: only the juicer bits. How you… phooey, what was it? Caught her dead to rights in indecent exposure and helped her to come clean?”

“Come, yeah. Clean? Uh. Half-right.”

“Tell, please.”

And tell, please he did. The space between Kagerou’s ears went silent thus; and, where silence reigned, you could be positive as a number that youkai were in ambuscade.

The bugbear among them was this: that the wolf-woman really was smitten by the man now recounting the familiar tale of an inter-species tryst down one of the town’s shadowy back-alleys, a merit of Kagerou’s crush stalking about buck-naked under her cape. The picture of him in lascivious disarray, inveigled above and below by her busty, mermaid friend, was only the louder half of it; the scents of his sweat, seed and male pheromones battering her acute sense of smell were a whole different, niggling breed of trouble. His gorgeous brows and the wiry, lickable neck – merely icing on this particular beefcake. What most concerned the wolf-woman was that she seemed convinced, with the kind of deep, crystal clarity you could drink from, that theirs would make for a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed litter of children. And, that she wanted three of them at the absolute least.

Concisely, that the man had thoroughly imprinted on her mind as her mate-to-be. Kagerou needn’t consult the sorry state of her fingers to confirm what it was exactly her body wanted him to do.

The dog in the manger of her heart barked at the wolf-woman this was wrong. Wrong, wrong! That someone who’d had the words “Yeah,” “Me” and “Too” whispered at them in the morning privacy of shared bedsheets ought to be the whisperer’s food alone. That the happenstance of the whisperer pushing them on, under and over each other on the same bedsheet the very night before was parenthetical and not to be oversold. After all, she’d had sex with men at Sekibanki’s beck before; some of it, even, in this self-same tea-house. Never mind those she’d enticed and coupled with of her own wiles. Often, for no more than a promise or a bushel of fruit.

All of those, she’d returned afterwards to their mothers and spouses, seldom to lope across their pastures again. All, to the boy and man, whilom prey of a wolf-woman in a flight of heat.

… All, that is, except Sekibanki’s virile, freehearted boyfriend. He’d not satisfied with a once-per-lifetime fling; he’d come around like a bad habit to screw the giddy Kagerou again the very same day: two times, three and more, with the rokurokubi’s go-ahead and without, each seeing his seed pumped into her hopeful, desperate womb without fail. No wonder, Kagerou realised, it’d received the wrong impression. No wonder she was more jealous than a Seki-head with no cup.

Monogamy was a pretty thought, but only on its lonesome. Among competition, it tended to shake. Sekibanki’s, for instance, had shaken so fast at her boyfriend’s frolicking with her clubmates, you could hardly see it anymore. Wakasagihime’s churned the waters around itself into whirlpools; Kagerou’s, meanwhile, was a high-strung thing and, she felt, apt to start jigging if she gave up her sense of romance now. Gratefully, it wasn’t she who’d said the magic words; everything she was, was attracted to both the abutting sides of the triangle.

It did, after a fashion, put the wolf-woman on point. She wasn’t sure which, yet, but it was a point.

“—an’ I reckoned, that’s it. The fat lady’s sung. Ate her out, she waddled on home, that’s the long and the short,” the human was relaying to the mermaid propped against his shoulder with her bare breasts sandwiching his arm. “Same week, though, imagine you this, I get me a run over to this quaint, li’l tea-house with a shipment of pots, pans and other jangly such. The drat place’s shut so tight, I daren’t even knock. So, I shout up at a window who and what instead – just by way of formality, intendin’ to scarper afterwise third try – and who rushes on down to open up if not the self-same redhead from the alley? My legs drat near folded; quaking they were. Straight out from ‘neath a shower, she must’ve been: hair wet, streaming, and this fuzzy robe on her. Smelled like a Celestial maiden, glowered like an Oni. Well. Whatever else, she tells me not to stand there like a lemon and to drop the cookware in the backroom. I did. Then, I asked ‘er she settle the bill.”

“Settle!” repeated the mermaid, mock-concernedly. “Our ‘Banki is a debtor?”

“Not, fuhhh, as such,” grunted the man, not without relief. “Thing is, our clerks’re out of date on the market sometimes; we balance what the items cost us and what the client paid originally on delivery. Standard MO. Well, Seki, she really doesn’t want to climb the stairs in wet slippers to fetch her purse. I really can’t leave without the copper. Chips start flying. So, she gets this bright idea into her head. Gives me this stingy look. Undoes the bathrobe, right there… and fans it wide out. Nothing inside but her. Can still see that red bush and those nips of hers standing on ends. Sexiest drat sight I’d seen… and I knew as good she loved doin’ it, every moment. Wiggled her hips, cupped her tits, pretended to stretch – the whole show.”

“And you—” prompted Wakasagihime.

“—shoved her up a wall then and there… only not,” scoffed the man. “Stalled for time, actually. Seki had to ask twice if it ‘was enough’ for me to quit gawping. Somewise, I had the wit left over to tell her no. That I’d need at least a reimburse for the back-alley shindig if I was to cover for her cute ass. Sounded just to her, it must have, because she scowled, took me to one of the private rooms, peeled down my pants and beat me off. With her feet, what on account of having just gone to the bath and my walking in off the street. Still let me come all over her crotch and bush and rub off on her muff when I did. However that per-tained to the aforesaid. Well, I was a tramp in love by then, as you may’ve sussed, so I asked if I could maybe drop by in the evening with some smoked glass to get us closer acquainted. Then asked again – pledgin’ more glass. And again. Then bloody well begged. Suss you how, but somehow—”

“Somehow,” finished the mermaid, knowingly, “she knuckled under. That is how goes business with our ‘Banki. How long, pray, until you realised your lady was a…?”

“… Youkai?” he guessed. “Next dawning, dead-on. Turned out, we’d a heap more grievances in common than rain and taxes, so nothing overmuch sexy happened evening-wise. Conked out together, glad and boozed on her bed. Morning rolls around, though, and I stir… er, feeling damp and draughty downstairs, if you will.”

“Allow me,” proposed the fish princess. “Lacquering the morning wood, yes?”

“Hah… Yes. She drat well was. Hff.”

“What’d you do?”

There was a set now to the junior Grassroot’s partner’s shoulders. To boot, Kagerou spied the muscles rippling underneath the ashen skin of Wakasagihime’s arm. The human’s long, robust pride wasn’t being jerked, which the wolf-woman would’ve undeniably heard; nonetheless, it was having a quality time among the mermaid’s slim fingers and no mistake. The scent of oozing pre-come was so fierce, Kagerou could taste it on the back of her tongue.

The man cosied up inside Wakasagihime’s topless, matronly embrace, watching his cock dirty its masseuse’s palm. “… Stayed put, peepers-shut, and let her work me up awhile,” he answered before long. “Not every day it occurs you wake up to a blowjob what isn’t just a naughty fairy sidled in your room, princess. Haaah. Trust me on this, if nowhere else. Seki’s head-game is out of this world, anywise, so last it definitely didn’t.”

Wakasagihime smoothed over his nervous bluffing with a smile. “Then, it occurred you opened your eyes…”

“Yeah. And there it was—”

“A ‘drat’ Seki-head—”

“Yep.”

“—mounted on your rod,” she finished, more tickled by the word. “That must have rattled you right down to your libido. What-ever did you do?”

The human let go of a helpless sneer. “Came! Then and bloody there,” he confessed. “Caught such a fright it tossed me wide over the edge. Seki… well, no, Seki weren’t in bed. The Seki-head – she kept suckin’ and polishing me off, like she’d not noticed I was spewing everywhere on her face and hair. Till I was shooting blanks – and then some. Was hard all over again by the time she’d finally popped her lips off of me. She licked those, then gave me this sour look… said somethin’ was as like meant to dissuade me, and then evanesced like a midday nap’s dream. ‘Least I hadn’t to clean myself up, drat.”

“What was it she said to you?”

His cheeks quirked from a sardonic smile. “… ‘Understand?’”

“And did you understand?” pressed Wakasagihime.

The human Grassroot (official?) sighed at the re-treaded point. “Youkai is a fact of life, princess,” he acknowledged in the face (and breasts) of overwhelming evidence. “That, I understand. It don’t mean none I’m vitally obliged to scream and cower whenever I bump into one. My job’d suffer, too. I’m a simple soul, anywise. I like Seki. Whatever she does on her youkai time – is none of mine. I’ll bother her on the human, long as she lets me. She stops – so do I. No bad blood. No callin’ on the Hakurei. Nothing. Know the rules, I do. That’s my own truth. Told Seki much the same, later ‘n that morning. Think we saw eye-to-eye then, bloody human and bloody youkai.”

The mermaid’s exasperated, “… So stubborn,” was the recurring review. “Phooey, you and ‘Banki both.”

The man, intent on having at least this say, kissed her once more. “… Sorry, by the way.”

“What for on this occasion, pray?”

“Me laconicism apropos Seki and I,” he said, a shade crustily. “Sorry. Storyteller I am not.”

“Not everyone’s owed to be everything,” said Waka. “Why do you apologise?”

“Well, Seki tells you enjoy fishing for these kinds of anecdotes…”

“Oh, please,” said the mermaid, shaking her tousled curls, “stories of lascivious romance are better told by a same-sex mind anyway. These do not lie within your club responsibilities.”

“… What does?” the (yes, official) human Grassroot wanted to know.

Wakasagihime’s smile could have warmed the Misty Lake enough to brew a mild tea. “To the Grassroots Network?” she cooed. “Uphold the codex. None simpler. To me, personally…? This.” The mermaid’s arm began to pump amid the squelching of slimy lube. The human swore under his breath. “… This thick rod,” Wakasagihime was saying, her sing-song voice low and domineering, “which causes women of youkai-kind to bowl over each other to claim it. I want it as well. I want my bottom hole hooked on it, trawled ashore and filled with your baby-batter. I want this big-jawed face of yours buried in my breasts and suckling. You are a prize, mister Human; and I, for one, am overjoyed our ‘Banki has decided to go Dutch with us on you. Stubborn though you be. And, to Kagerou—”

Wide-eyed and flat-eared, the wolf-woman jolted upright on her seat.

The mermaid princess gently unhanded the cock she’d been torturing: strings of man-lube trailing after her pale digits, white and stretchy. “… Shall we query the wolf at the door?” she wondered aloud. “Kagerou. Come here and… tell us, will you please?”

Skittish in her skimpy waitress uniform, the wolf-woman eased herself into the suggestion. Then, having in turn eased her drenched fingers out of her tingly vagina, she shuffled out and off the bench.

The human-mermaid pair walked her around the table with their gazes; all the while, Kagerou imbibed the salacious view which had only been a scent-scape until now. The man’s trousers were skinned to his thighs; his long, robust cock jutted, arched, out from his shaved groin: harder than mahogany, varnished from the duly-coloured glans to the bottom of the shaft with the mermaid’s pre-come-laced saliva. The whole thing throbbed, slobbering over itself; it looked, for all intents and purposes, pulled straight out of a session of intense yet, cruelly, not quite load-blowing sex. Which, for some intents and purposes, it was – just not any kind it’d been naturally designed for.

Kagerou wedged herself between him on the bench and the edge of the table: facing the former, butt propped against the latter. Then, numbly, she lifted the uniform’s lacy skirt, catching the edge in her teeth.

The lone wolf-woman of the Grassroots Network hadn’t yet puzzled out where on the aforesaid triangle she ought to situate herself; still, for this at least, she knew what would be her favourite spot for Sekibanki’s well-endowed boyfriend.

“… He’e,” she slurred, spreading the offending here under her displaced panties. Tepid air kissed her exposed, hot inner walls – that alone enough to make them shudder with an ache for something thick and similarly warm inside. Wolf-woman juice, translucent and dribbly, pattered on the man’s bunched trousers. “Wanf your cock,” she went on, urgent, scuffing forward till their knees were touching; “wanf it in he’e. All ve way in. Wanf if meffin me up. Wanf lofts an’ lofts of your shtuff in my baby-woom. Wanf your fmell on me, in me – eff’ywhere. Um…”

Kagerou stared at the man staring at her nude, hairy crotch. Her head had become a huge, pink orb of hot fluff.

“… Uh. Wow,” he summed up, dumbstruck, prompting from the attendant fish princess a buoyant titter.

“What did I tell yooou?” she chirped, squishing her massive bust against his woefully clothed flank. “To the woman and to the bone, we Grassroots accounted for are big, open, genuine perverts.”

“… Yeah,” agreed the human. His imposing, erect manhood twitched and strained as if attempting in all inanimate guile to lure Kagerou’s womanhood onto itself. “Yeah. Can hear that, drat. Crap, but I’m lucky to’ve met you. Over, yunno… youkai what only want my meat.”

“That is one direction for life to swing, ‘innit?’” teased Wakasagihime, swimming under the jape. “Yet you used of the opportunity, you, human. Chastened our ‘Banki for us. Then us as well…”

“Yet I did,” exhaled the man. “No remorse?”

“None here,” promised the princess. “I love your meat. And mug.”

He chuckled. “Same. I love your tits. And this smutty mouth.”

They looked up as if on cue.

In front of them, crouched over the meat with one knee on the bench, red-faced, like a wolf caught sneaking into the chicken coop, was Kagerou.

“… Um?” she said, tail swishing left and right.

Sekibanki’s boyfriend offered up an extra chuckle to balance the accounts. “‘S fine,” he assured the blushing wolf-woman. “On honour. Still the sexiest brunette I’ve met.”

She tried for a Sekibankish frown. “Um,” she said, now with vengeance.

Assertive hands – one human, one mermaid – seized each of Kagerou’s hips to chaperone them down onto the man’s lap, narrowly avoiding an unceremonious insertion. The wolf-woman looked on in slight chagrin as her outspread labia smooched instead the cock’s bared glans and then rode down its prickly, sloping underbelly. Her back bowed, and her hold slipped from her crotch once her clitoris joined in on the lewd, slippery fun. Human and youkai throats voiced their mutual discontent at the unproductive turn of events. The cock, which by predatory rights should never have done so, stood erect, long and bellied, its shaven base spooned by the wolf-woman’s slick petals and tickled by her dense pubes. Its tip stuck out, red and shiny, far above the band of her shifted panties. Nearly up to her bellybutton. Kagerou felt the bit of skirt in her mouth grow soaked with saliva. Her stomach tensed taut.

Wakasagihime pushed off and away the human’s shoulder, letting her soft, oversized breasts to droop and stretch at the gleeful hands of gravity. Unconsciously, Kagerou leered down at her waterborne friend’s plump, off-colour nipples. Of which, the more swollen one was already recovering.

“… On a second think,” the mermaid was musing aloud, “you two really could do with a quickie.”

“… What?” said the wolf woman – right ahead the human did the same. They exchanged what could be called “a look.”

Wakasagihime muttered what was… most likely… not an ancient, Atlantean curse in reply. “Oh, let it lieee!” she moaned next, louder. On a scale from her ear-fins to those on her tail, there was a decently greenish tint of envy to her voice. “Shall we? Obviously, you two are into each other; obviously, you are positively primed to do it. Somebody would have to dispense with this nasty boner anyway, before ‘Seki’ brings out our breakfast. The natural way would be, I believe, favourite.”

“Er,” chimed in the human. “Not to cut the net, here, but… you’ve done a drat number on me already, princess. No dick’s chance out in the cold I’ll last a heartbeat inside her like this. Not that I’d loathe that… but, uh,” he added, “must’ve been a week since I last drained the reservoir, so to say, so there’s a drat fine lot stored up down there. Yunno? You do ‘no, right?”

Wakasagihime rolled her eyes. “Yes. With how you were spilling…”

“Quite,” the human admitted, “and quite fun, but beside the thrust.”

“Where, pray then, is the thrust?”

He strove to compact his worries into safely-contained words. “… That safe?”

“Oh, please. Kagerou has had sex with human males aplenty,” noted Wakasagihime, who as the Grassroots Network’s chairwoman took it as read that everyone’s affairs were also hers, “not least with you; so far, she has never once gotten a big belly from overindulgence, except of food. Why is this such a concern? Mermaids are more fertile than wolf-women and rokurokubi boiled together; yet, I do not recall this winkling your hook out of me on either occasion. Why, have you not heard say of the caesg mermaids, who—”

Kagerou quit paying attention. The caesg were Wakasagihime’s go-to anecdote for anyone doubtful of her species’ ability to lead maritime bachelors and husbands astray; and, if indeed real, then the repetition had made them a ragged school of seductresses in the more scruple-less Grassroots’ heads. More pertinent to Kagerou’s right then was the other half of the mermaid-plus-human equation.

Somewhere in the arithmetically numbed crannies of her brain, the wolf-woman realised it was happening again. Someone else was deciding when and with whom she was going to copulate. And while, where honesty was due, she’d not overly minded being paid by Sekibanki to service (and service) her card-playing, liberal-handed patrons – or being ordered not to screw her boyfriend on the lakeside a fortnight ago in spite of the three-way consent – or even being all but made to screw him atop her junior’s bed the same evening – a fourth time in succession outgrew the charm and turned something of a cocklebur in her mental tail. Kagerou relished sex; and, imprinting accidents aside, the runner man had demonstrated himself to be an amazing partner in every instance, position and respect. This wasn’t about these. It wasn’t about whether or not she wanted his long, stiff, human cock sheathed up to the jewels inside her and painting her baby-room white. The question wasn’t of “if.”

It was one of “will.” The will of “will he” versus the will of a wolf-woman contemplating rebellion against crownless royalty.

The “why”s were there, too, and good questions themselves, yet nowhere so important as the “how”s.

And of those, Kagerou had already a treacherous couple in mind. All required left was a stick to beat the princess with… which wasn’t the one snuggling the wolf-woman’s bushy groin.

… Maybe.


( ) Doth the princess refuse to finish her job?*
( ) Sekibanki’s food was for Sekibanki!**
( ) Wolves took what they liked – when they liked.***

*(May contain mermaid anatomy.)
**(Includes an item from the tea-house’s secret menu.)
***(May result in bossy clubmates.)

(X) Doth the princess refuse to finish her job?

Or maybe, Kagerou rather deduced, this was the only kind of stick able to incline a princess.

To beat her over the head with it would, of course, be too blunt. As good drop bottles of wine down the Misty Lake’s waters. The wolf-woman availed herself, thus, of her remaining foxiness. Or wolfiness, as it were.

Given half-an-ear to the mermaid’s recital of her cousins’ depravities, the human lurched to attentiveness at the stirrings of activity Kagerou-wise. He looked up whence their privates were enjoying their naked play-date… then further on up, once the wolf-woman switched the saliva-wet edge of her skirt from her teeth into her hand. This, next, she tucked higher yet: both to show him a belly which could stand to meet a razor and to facilitate what should come upon it next.

… Though, with care, not too literally.

Still, there was no end to Wakasagihime’s prattling, which was inconducive. Kagerou leaned in. And there the end was, piquant words dying on the wolf-woman’s lips as she pressed them onto her best friend’s.

At first blush, the regal mermaid blanched from so couth an interjection. A second, and she was flicking her plump tongue over Kagerou’s front teeth. The wolf-woman opened wide, joining the kiss: lips mashed almost airtight into Wakasagihime’s. They half-sandwiched the man between them, did the bussing, senior Grassroots: Kagerou’s firm, clothed tits flattened against his broad chest, even as his flank was smothered between the mermaid’s sumptuous, denuded ones. The tastes of pre-come, man and her own, intimate tang were rife on Waka’s tongue; and the wolf-woman dove in, the deepest she was bold to, to scour them all from her best friend’s greedy mouth. Spittle dribbled down their chins, thick and tea-warm, notwithstanding the mermaid’s hard, audible efforts to swallow it down. Kagerou moaned – happy as a clam to feel, more than hear, a kindred reply purr up from Wakasagihime’s pre-come-stuck throat. The mermaid’s tail-end slapped the far end of the bench in glee.

Of course, their first, this kiss pretty well wasn’t. Not even the dozenth. Wakasagihime had presided over the ‘Network for the best part of who-counted-anymore; behind every male and female Grassroot’s eyes was a graphic picture of the busty fish princess coaxing bodily tribute for her continued bullying of its members into regular attendance. Though, whereas a paltry couple did still nowadays since the spreading of the Hakurei’s Spell Card umbrella, it hadn’t kept the princess athwart of coaxing it either way. From their new, human inductee, for one. From Kagerou, for another.

And redhead speculators of wolf-women’s sexual inclinations all over Gensokyo would be agreed when the bottles were tipped that, in light of Kagerou’s unswerving turnout, the scheme had proven a howling success in at least once case.

In the finely minced vernacular of those wolf-women: yes. Kagerou and Waka had kissed. Often, often at length, as how-do-you-dos and for the fun of it. In Sekibanki’s absence and when (they trusted) her back was turned. Clothed and, on that rare, feminine occasion, in the nude. No tongue and a heaping lot of it. To use a romantic simile, if Sekibanki’s was the knee-wobbling, windfall lover, then Kagerou’s tongue and Wakasagihime’s were in a long and lax, entirely open and illegitimate marriage. Kagerou hadn’t to exert to remember how open; it’d not been minutes since the mermaid’s latest paramour had enjoyed her lips with every inch of his bare cock. The same cock whose head was now shining up the wolf-woman’s bellybutton.

Up to, anyway, when it wasn’t.

In harness of her friend’s tonguing, Kagerou’d hardly felt the shift; yet, there they were, the human’s paddle hands: gripping her ass and jostling it up over his erection. The fat, ridged glans was dragged along her mons, beneath her slit, snagging her happiness button on the way – until her flushed labia were smooching its blunt tip.

Kagerou’s hips swooned together with her head. Again. Again, the clever, human Grassroot had outfoxed the wolf-woman, aiming to claim her womanhood while her focus was on somebody else. The parallels to their very first insertion on the shore of the Misty Lake, under the intervening Sekibanki, weren’t lost – not even on her giddy, featherbrained self. As then, so too now she hadn’t the grit to resist him. A little sample of him would, Kagerou frantically rationalised, do no harm anyway.

… If, that is, he didn’t break and waste his seed on her walls before she could sample his whole length.

To stay this end and for no other, the wolf-woman relaxed the stomach muscles which had been rock-rigid since their first touch – and let his large, masculine palms to steer her hips down toward his own. To no lasting good. Quivers of meek, compliant pleasure shuddered down her belly, vising her walls around his girth, no sooner than her labia had slid around his fat glans and begun slipping down his shaft. The human’s long, curved, frighteningly thick cock stumbled all over Kagerou’s best spots without discretion or pity, squeezing from her mouth (and into Wakasagihime’s) a low, blissed-out moan. On it pushed, up and up and up toward her womb…

… Until, having left a submissive wolf-woman in its wake, it bottomed out in her trembling vagina.

If she’d nursed hunches before, now they were as mature as the mermaid princess’s bosoms. Stupid. That was how compatible they were. Sekibanki’s hard-skulled boyfriend really was her ideal mate; from the tips of her wolf-ears down to her polished toe-nails, excepting her maiden heart, Kagerou’s body was in fawning, indiscreet love. She reaffirmed that love by yielding to the big, scary human: letting him to manhandle her hips and press the exposed head of his cock to the entrance of her baby-room. Her soft, juice-slick labia coddled the fat, shaven base of his manhood: a poor substitute perhaps for the mermaid’s full, sucking lips, but one Kagerou was ecstatic to submit to him all the same. His lengthy shaft flexed and strained in her womanhood’s snug clutches; and, although these were nowise the hectic spasms of a premature, male orgasm, Kagerou fully expected that, once they parted ways, she would be dripping on his trousers more than just her own, natural lubricant.

And, now he was at last where he oughtn’t, this handsome, cheating boyfriend of her lovely junior, on he blundered to give an outlet to his subtler lusts. He groped the wolf-woman’s ass with undisguised fixation; he nosed unrestrainedly around her nape and smelt her long, uncombed hair. His cock stiffened furiously, harder still inside her belly. The lie she’d presumed in its first appearance, when they’d promised each other sex at the lakeside, turned its ugly coat. He really did arouse from her smell.

Weirdo, thought Kagerou… but inside ravished the compliment.

Sekibanki’s boyfriend vocalised brusquely into her ear; and, maybe since it was the closest, he did so to one of her ticklish, canine pair. His voice had ferocity now. It was already the voice of a fulfilled male. Kagerou’s wolf-ears flicked. The straight, forthright response to how good she was making him feel cascaded small, happy shivers all down the arch of her back. It really was insidious; everything absent were her crush’s soft, petite hands roaming and cupping her curves, and Kagerou would long have been riding the human as though in heat. Up till either of her pervy, youkai clubmates demanded to switch. And to this, funny thing, she’d then have gladly consented – if only to feel them up herself.

She didn’t now. Not gladly, anyhow; though, a switch indeed was aforethought: beginning with the wolf-woman’s tongue divorcing and leaving her mermaid friend’s mouth.

Wakasagihime fluttered, confused, yet deigned the change in approach; and, the two were soon enjoying the simpler, more wholesome, lips-on-lips kiss with which, not infrequently, they’d round off their more passionate sessions. Or begin them. Or sprinkle a few throughout the middle. This, sticky, current one, meant by Kagerou to serve for a finisher, lingered instead: hearts and breaths quickening with every lovely, dawdling moment. Kagerou believed she knew why; kissing with another female before an appreciative, male audience was a turn-on they had both explored before. Kagerou – with Sekibanki; and Wakasagihime… Well, it’d be easier listed whom she hadn’t wheedled to kiss her, whether in front of spectators or without.

In the earlier, salad days of the ‘Network, when prideful, male youkai could still be convinced to patronise its meets, there’d not be a single one where somebody wouldn’t draw the mermaid’s outrageous attentions. Worse because, in the fuzzy pockets of her memory, Kagerou had the framed picture of one such occasion when – before herself, a tsukumogami from the human town, a burly hitotsume-nyuudou and a disenfranchised Kappa boy – the princess had snatched and pulled into the water a cute, dumpy bird-youkai come by chance to pay the lease to fish on Wakasagihime’s waters. Splashing about, panicked and flailing, the minor, female youkai could never, ever have eluded the waterborne mermaid’s jaws… although, rather than a more gruesome outcome, Wakasagihime had sought instead to thoroughly taste the insides of her dark-lipped mouth.

And then, so that her subjects wouldn’t be left, as it were, high and dry, the lusty princess had peeled aside the top layer of the battering bird-youkai’s dress and dabbled the white undershirt – presenting the males (and Kagerou) with the lurid outline of an ample breast and its large, nearly brown and bashfully sunken teat.

Once at last she’d disentangled herself from the mermaid’s toils and fled, flinging abuse and the shiny chips she’d brought for rent, the bird-youkai would do so short not only of a fair bite of self-esteem, but also of her purple, side-tie panties – pinched by then in Waka’s grinning ivories while she’d waved her good-byes and come-agains under the raining wealth. The looted underwear would prompt then much tiddly debate, culminating in its confiscation at Kagerou’s hands with the prim intent to look up and restore the lewd article to its owner.

Two nights on, and she’d sniffed out the pudgy youkai – apparently an operator of a mobile food-stand – hard at work midway up the decrepit Hakurei shrine road. To the wolf-woman’s astonishment, however, rather than grilled eel, it’d be the cook’s brave, lone, human customer being sampled: plucked out of his trousers, his raw, spit-basted man-meat filling out and pleasing the soft palate of the bird-youkai’s mouth amid a gurgled, vocal browbeating. And there, tightly fastened on its base as though to stave off his coming out rare, would be a pair of purple, glossy and even scantier panties than those balled up in the peeping Kagerou’s fist.

Suffice to say, once all’d been said and done, that the bird-youkai wouldn’t want back either pair after that night.

Shaking the daydream, the wolf-woman willed gone the picture of the chubby, youkai cook leaning on the counter, sticking out her hefty derriere and inviting the human to put a bun in her oven. Then, that of the human – a lumberjack, going by the equipment and body hair – obliging the fat bird-slut several times in a row. Wakasagihime’s lips were glued to hers still: moist and warm and clingy as she’d known them – pouting their discontent the moment they were reaved of those of her wolf-woman friend’s. The amorous mermaid’s face wasn’t too far removed; one upward glower of those sky-blue eyes informed Kagerou she’d have kissed an hour yet if she’d but had her royal way.

Glistening with saliva, Waka’s lovesome lips parted now to scold. “… What? What now?” she moaned. “We had such a nice one goinnng.”

Kagerou had all but agreed they had, before her feelings veered toward the defensive. Youkai who had it on personal record they indulged in the un-youkai-like could be like that; in particular, wolf-women were instinctively anxious for others assuming they did and, owing to some quirk of the heart, enjoyed kissing mermaids on the lips, which they possibly couldn’t have, on the basis of the former being hunters, and the latter – prey, and both females to boot. Kagerou, said feelings imported, couldn’t have talked her way out of sex, let alone a sapphic accusation. Cleverly for herself, the wolf-woman, therefore, didn’t.

“Yesh—” she slurred – remembered to swallow – then tried anew. “… Yes. But.”

Temper vied with the princess’s aroused appetites: rolling her eyes and squishing her plush, naked frontage on the human’s flank. The apogee of which saw her reach an indelicate hand for the laden top of Kagerou’s waitress uniform.

A small, deft tug, and wolf-woman tits spilled free: flushed, heavy, sheened with sweat from down in the valley up to the caramel-cream peaks. Shamed tingles caused them to stand even firmer on ends under the double, mixed-sex scrutiny. And then, doubly so, the human’s. Quite forgetfully did Kagerou now recall she had never let him bury his cock in said valley, despite the idea having been whispered fervently back and forth a lot. Other nooks of her femininity had always laid hold of its promised space.

Meanwhile Waka – whose monster cleavage had once already sunk his man-o’-war – seized in a soft, pale hand one of Kagerou’s escaped, virgin mammaries. The wolf-woman bent near backwards once the mermaid’s fingers swept, not at all on accident, one by one across its erect tip.

“… But whaaat?” chided the fish princess, playing with the breast. “What is now not to your like, Kagerou? He is already inside you. Is he not? Your nips are harder than pearls, dear me. What is it? The position? Want him to take you from behind, do you? You mustn’t come, you do realise? You’ll make a mess.”

“Tha—” Kagerou stammered, “That’s hnnnot what…”

It was, though. That was the trouble spot; already, the wolf-woman could feel the human ready underneath her to hoist her up and bend her over the table as Wakasagihime had proposed. Yet, she had it wrong and right in one, did the overbearing, mermaid princess. The latter in the main. The small of Kagerou’s back bowed obediently at the prospect of him pushing and prodding and molesting her weak spots in her favourite positions. He’d shown he was capable, the strapping great villain. Him and this fantastic, burly cock of his.

Kagerou twirled her waist, grinding one of aforesaid spots on his beastly girth. There weren’t three ways to bite it; either she threw the leash now, or he’d be soon mating doggy-style with a very unhappily happy wolf-woman.

As good, then, that the casual, womb-deep flirting had also killed the motion bunching the man’s muscles besides a drove of Kagerou’s surviving scruples. A throttled gasp, a twinge of the meaty shaft stuck between her wet, tightly-clinched labia, and the would-be father of wolf-man half-breeds turned back to putty in the senior Grassroots’ topless, feminine embrace. Imagination on its own supplied what the twitching pressure under Kagerou’s bellybutton stood for. That, even in the absence of a gods-intended ending, the wolf-woman’s womb would taste at least a presage of the human’s rampant virility. A fierce, hot gush of it, pumped straight into her baby-room.

Kagerou paid it no mind. It wasn’t a mean trick to; a real one would have been to wait some five Moons first. Likewise, she snatched the mermaid’s groping hand by the wrist and urged it away from her swelled, pointy teat.

“… You do it,” said the wolf-woman, feebly. “You… do him. You get him off.”

Waka’s patience, which at any rate had the capacity of an ordinary wolf-woman’s lungs in matters of sex, ran over. The mermaid scowled as thunderously as messenger of the Dragon Palace. “What? What is it this time?” she fussed. “Have you not got him where you wanted him? I’ll note: explicitly so?”

“I—” began Kagerou.

“Shush! I’ll not stand… well, I’ll not stand at all, but especially not for this. You two want this; ‘Banki, too, has given you the go-ahead-and-mate. Am I mistaken, or what?”

Kagerou licked her teeth. “… No.”

“Then what, pray tell me already, is it?”

“You do it,” was the repeated cause. “You started it. You finish.”

Wakasagihime opened her mouth. Wakasagihime left it open, quietly outraged, as the wolf-woman braced on a knee and began lifting her hips off the human’s lap.

Inch behind inch, her labia relinquished the long, veiny, pre-come-smeared erection: its bare, brutish glans scraping and gouging every crease and fold of her vaginal walls on the way out. Two-thirds of his tremendous length weren’t dislodged from her depths when Kagerou’s thighs turned shaky from the prolonged, building pleasure. An inch yet, and the wolf-woman paused for breath – coincidentally, right then, with the human’s blunt, pulsing cockhead wedged against her G-spot. There were no excuses left to speak; Kagerou pushed out her trembling hips, so that their most vulnerable places met each other in a slippery shoving match. Wolf-woman juice trickled down the cock’s bulging, flexing shaft in the aftermath, further easing its withdrawal.

Once its head, too, had plopped free of her ruffled, trailing labia, everything else he’d poured inside her followed the grand opening. Kagerou crouched, breathing hard, over the human’s denuded lap; meanwhile, down below, her shaggy womanhood oozed the combined pre-come, girl-lube and what could’ve been the products of a ruined orgasm all over his reddish, pulsing, yet nevertheless wilfully erect penis. Scents of gratuitous, inter-species sex went from dense to unsavoury; even Waka, who’d previously spent minutes spitting on and swallowing the runner’s manhood, wrinkled her nose now and gulped in morbid relish as more and more of their liquid arousal poured forth. Of her earlier chagrin, there was not a trace frown. The mermaid princess smacked her lips close then opened them again and again, appropriately, like a landed fish.

At charged length, she wormed her wrist out of Kagerou’s grip, brushed the curls from her cheeks and conferred on them her solemn review. “… What a mess,” she opined. “Are you certain he has not already climaxed? Or you? Kagerou, Kagerou. I have given serial boob-jobs cleaner than this at the end. This is a pigsty. And that is quite the pig you have taken in.”

Kagerou hadn’t the wits left over to follow on the ribbing. “I’d’ve felt if he did,” she muttered instead. “Yunno? If he came inside me.”

“She’d drat have, fuck me,” concurred the runner man, as breathless as they came (or didn’t).

There was a consternated pause. The big-titted mermaid towed herself a bit closer by the human’s shoulder and, as she did, skimmed the liberated hand to something below her scaly waist while her eyes remained apparently occupied with the human’s filthy groin. The slimy, post-coital landscape of his manhood took the starch out of her stuffiness; Wakasagihime nipped her plump, bottom lip, fickle as the princess she alleged herself to be. Kagerou recognised that face; the Grassroots’ chairwoman had made it at altogether too many able male members who’d not gotten the hint. Those who had, in retrospect, would usually leave the ongoing meet last.

Maybe, Kagerou tardily caught on, that’d been where the princess had picked up her many bedroom knacks. It explained none whatsoever their miserable, modern turn-out, however.

“… No chance,” Wakasagihime at last judged. “Over my beached body I am sticking my nose in this. I appreciate the fair play, Kagerou; I do. Still, no. I’ll fain rethink it, mind; don’t mistake me… after you’ve gone and scrubbed his rod clean, first.”

Kneeling over said instrument, the wolf-woman, who’d not forgotten the rife taste of pre-come on her best friend’s tongue but elected not to say, growled instead. “You needn’t, yunno, fellate him,” she argued. “Could, yunno… have him mount you. Um. Screw you. He’s done it before, yes? Twice… um, no, was it thrice? He did, still. Wasn’t scared or anything, either.”

Attired in the weary expression of somebody who never “screwed” but at worst had a lot of promiscuous, extramarital sex with men in pre-existing relationships, Wakasagihime gave a shake of her finned head. “Have you felt his balls, Kagerou?” she returned, startling both her fellow debauchees with the terminology. “How heavy they are? Well about to burst, the sorry things. He’s been fasting; you heard it. Imagine: a week’s worth of this thick, potent stuff going inside that round, roomy belly of yours. Might be, he is even right. Might be, it’ll take this time. That ought to turn you on more than it does me, ‘yunno?’ Impregnation is your fetish, not mine.”

Kagerou didn’t attempt controverting the claim – firstly because controverting Waka was like handling a particularly busty eel, and secondly because the princess wasn’t far in error. A different hook had to, therefore, do. “That?” she countered, she thought, a hair bolder than she should’ve been able. “After all the crowing and cawing about mermaids bearing sailors’ children? Waka…”

“A wakasagi, not a caesg, first of everything, Kagerou. And, furthermore,” the princess went on, louder and crisper, as if defying the world to prove her wrong, “I have it on rather a present suspicion that ‘Banki’ll pretty well let the four of us fool around together afterwards, provided we respect her business’s opening hour. I’ll… screw him, gosh… later. On a bed. Where I’ll be positive he won’t roll off of me and bang this handsome dome of his on the table’s edge. I like his faculties where they are. However they are.”

“So,” Kagerou pressed on, “so, so, you’ve considered it. Screwing him here? You have. I’ll pitch in, so just do iiit.”

A pouty Wakasagihime gave back her silent retort. It’d taken the mermaid princess three encounters, two weeks and one kissable mouth to wrap Sekibanki’s boyfriend around her little finger or, more saliently, to wrap said mouth around his, and having this control wrested from her now by an implicit ally was causing her humours a visible imbalance. Another nudge, and, so the wolf-woman gambled on, the mermaid would as good tip over.

So, she nudged. Though, whom in actual she did nudge was Sekibanki’s slack-jawed and ogling boyfriend. The runner man, who’d been so far content holding the spare oar and letting the two youkai ladies to rock the boat by themselves, needed no lengthy explanation. The kiss Kagerou was proposing with her open mouth and rolled-out tongue was joined with wolflike zest; and there, right there in the middle of Sekibanki’s very own home, the wolf-woman was re-enacting the moment she’d first cheated on her crush with her audacious, scary, human partner. The saving grace, in this instance, being that he wasn’t packing a load of his seed right up against the entrance of her womb while churning their tongues. That made the friend inside Kagerou feel better… and the female inside her, worse.

Worse yet when Wakasagihime slithered up the runner’s flank to wrench him out of the kiss by the chin. Then, when she co-opted his face for herself.

The incorrigible mermaid flirt tongued Sekibanki’s boyfriend like a fairy on a sugar high: the careful tilt of her head alone giving it a semblance of forethought. Nor was Waka’s silvern voice spared any decency in egging him on, giggling and moaning down his throat; and Kagerou, whose ass was suddenly the only part of her retaining the human’s attention, reflected she was not, as a matter of fact, in a romantic triangle.

She was rather in something more approaching a rhombus. The added geometry made her simple wolf-woman’s soul growl its frustration.

The ass did rivet his attention, however; not even the princess’s sweet, thieving mouth could wholly take it away. Sekibanki’s swinging boyfriend gripped, spread and squeezed Kagerou’s buttocks relentlessly beneath her uniform’s skirt. The back of her matched, black panties had vanished, eaten up by her crack, presenting him with full, unhindered coverage of her ample hind quarters. To which, he gave in exchange palmfuls of pinching, groping caress. Kagerou presented her rear, back bowing, eager to, if not further entice his interest, then at the very least let it be clear it was an excellent spot to pet a wolf-woman.

Jealousy – jealousy over Waka, over him – was screaming at her from between her swept-back ears to use the sight of the two making out to quite selfish ends. Kagerou sent it scurrying with a frantic whip of the tail. The sight was sexy, it was; even more so were the sounds bubbling out of the mermaid and the human’s mouths as each explored just what the other could do with theirs. A rapid education was being audibly had by one, whose bulk of hitherto experience with a mermaid’s tongue belonged to a different of his body parts. That part bucked back and forth, hard, indignant, loath to share the princess’s busy oral timetable. It dribbled lube like froth.

None of which spelled the end of Kagerou’s ploy or the leave to trifle with her lady bits to her clubmates’ adult performance. In the fulness of, if it wasn’t the human’s breath, then definitely the fleeing minutes, the insatiable pair came apart at the lips, only to hastily retract the distance and indulge a final, protracted, farewell smooch ahead splitting up for good. A pronounced reluctance bogged the runner man’s recovering wits. It sounded something like this:

“… Crap. You kiss almost better than Seki.”

Wakasagihime’s replying smile was a crescent of pearly smugness. The smuggest it’d been, in reality, since being gruffly told how gentler to work the human’s sensitive cock. “… Mm. Thank yooou,” she crooned. “I have practiced. One day, on my oath, I’ll puzzle out how to trump she who can train in solitude.”

Sekibanki’s boyfriend scoffed. “Hah. Too right. Thank the gods of the Mountain I haven’t to choose, either or.”

“Ye-e-es,” drawled the mermaid. “I, too, prefer kissing your down-there, anyhow. The veeery base feels the best for both of us, I believe. No need to crowd your mug.”

This caused him to snort laughter through his nostrils. “This princess…”

“Yes, I am,” praised Wakasagihime. “A princess who loves nothing more than heaps of tongue-service. Congratulations on noticing.”

“Mean lip-service?” chanced the human.

The mermaid shaped a smile, brushing it on his lips in return for the connivance. “Meant what was said,” she assured him. “However. Kagerou has the right here; it shan’t be healthy, either, for you to stay at full mast for too long. We have got to rub it out, lest something goes awry and you outsize your trousers forever. Never mind that our breakfast’ll be done any minute. What’ll it be, then? Hmm?” she asked, prodding a finger at his broad chest. “Truth to tell, I should rather not put my nose in Kagerou’s mess if I mustn’t – and that she were the one to take responsibility, but… bother; you’re a Grassroot now, first in ages. I can be your dirty, little caesg… if such is your price.”

Goosy-faced, the man let his eyes slide under and lap the mermaid’s huge, naked bust. Then, with a creak of uncooperative vertebra, he turned to do the same to Kagerou’s little smaller one: dangled before him in its sweaty, drooping glory. Spoilt for choice like a teenage boy piled onto by naughty fairies, he kneaded and squeezed the wolf-woman’s bum all the while he made debate with his accomplice downstairs. And the consensus they forged out was one with which even Kagerou, with her idiot hope she’d be the pick after all, must grudgingly satisfy.

“… ‘Fore everything,” was the leading disclaimer, “miss Wolf? For the record, here. Were I on top, we wouldn’t be havin’ this converse.”

“Um,” said Kagerou. “That, um, so?”

The man nodded, not to be deterred by truth, however ugly. “Yeah… Yeah,” he repeated, matter-of-factly. “You’d be bent over this here table, skirt hiked up, and I’d be using this bloody great ass of yours for handholds. Seki wasn’t fucking lying; this uniform seriously does you justice. Come eat here every day ‘f it meant watching these hips swish about the place. On honour. Never work here, miss Wolf. You’ll hear no end to catcalls.”

Sooner than foolishness might speak out and divulge how far ahead of catcalls “miss Wolf” had already come under (and on top of) Sekibanki’s clientele, Wakasagihime scuttled the conversation.

“I sense a ‘but’ in the offing…?” she put in edgeways.

Sighing, hands flaking from Kagerou’s attention-arresting behind, the human twisted about to face the pushy fish princess. And there, right there as he did, for a beat of her fool heart, the wolf-woman regretted her pride’s outburst.

“… Sure,” obliged Sekibanki’s lecherous boyfriend. “Sure, but. We’re a tittle pressed for time. So, won’t stump for that. Or a serial boob-job, sensational though that sounds.”

“Buuut…?” guessed Wakasagihime.

“Miss Wolf’s drat well got it, yunno?” he said in what belike he’d meant to be a husky voice. “We haven’t done each other enough. Nor need to wait to, neither. And, ‘f I can’t have that incredible mouth of yours on me… want tother one, instead. Tother, er, ‘mouth.’ Not that that one’s a second pick or anything. Just… Crap. Sorry. Got a lump of lead for brains right now. Want to screw you like you wouldn’t believe.”

Tickled a pale pink by his honest, outspoken lust, the mermaid nonetheless strove for a reproachful look. Until, intervening, her own emotional chemistry nipped her teeth on her moist, bottom lip. “… It shan’t be comfortable here,” she cautioned. “You do realise this?”

To which the man laughed right trenchantly. “Ma’am,” he confessed, “I know. Had more sex on these benches all in all than in Seki’s bloody bed. Girl’s got a thing for uncomfortable, tell you what. Just… Have one more question, is everything.”

“Ask it, then.”

Thus, as a man who’d made his bed must do, Sekibanki’s world-wise boyfriend went and proned out. “… You’ll,” he said hoarsely, “er, not go popping out eggs after this – will you?”

Wakasagihime’s big, exasperated eye-roll wouldn’t have been out of place on their hitotsume-nyuudou ex-clubmate. “That isn’t how it worrrks, sillyyy,” she chided. “Not at all how it works! Whatever do they teach you in the village school? Mermaids give birth; caesg, wakasagi, no different. Sirens. Sirens ‘pop out eggs;’ they are birds, after all. Nor do they mate with humans. Mermaids do. Told you no less, have I?”

“Sure,” complied the human. “Still a wee lost, though. How does it… work?”

“Simply!” said the princess, entering now what were familiar waters. “Sex occurs. The fortunate man plants his seed inside my womb. This part, I daresay you know. Thereon, now, I am presented with a choice. Should I wash my pregnant body in saltwater, then a baby mermaid or -man will be born. Should I do so in freshwater, then I’ll birth a healthy, baby human. The rest proceeds the same for either of our species; ‘Banki confirmed this for me, once. There is, however mind you, a third option. A secret of mermaids alone. Should I, for any reason and in any event, choose not to carry a child,” she confided, “then I may swim ashore and sunbathe for a couple of hours. The womb grows too warm and dry for the egg, and the seed never takes. There is a risk either way, of course… but, I am a learned mermaid.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” the human stopped her with an upraised palm. “So, all those etchings of mermaids lounging on rocks…”

“Candid portraits of ones who’ve not long before made somebody a very glad man,” guessed Wakasagihime. “The artist, I should wager. It isn’t too often we do it; drying our bodies willy-nilly, too, is anything except pleasant. The scales scuff. I’ll join my Grassroots on land anytime they ask, should they do so,” she allowed, “but not if I mustn’t otherwise. Or if there aren’t extra perks to outweigh shed scales…”

Sekibanki’s boyfriend looked briefly speculative. “That—”

“Yes!” Waka overrode him. “Congratulations! I do speak of you. You are one big, handsome perk – you stud, you. Gosh, the last man to rouse me this awfully, I gave him a baby.”

“You… did.”

“Mm. Ye-e-es,” cooed the mermaid, snuggling him tighter to her enormous bust. “Curious? A widower, he was,” she revealed. “A taken fisher, besides – boated out to the Misty Lake every odd day. To capsize and drown, methinks, much as to spin. Hardy man. Tired. Slow to trust. Took ten times meeting him, fending off a gaggle of fairies on the eleventh and then clambering aboard on my own for him to yield and let me console him. He nevertheless rather enjoyed that, the cheat. I consoled him plenty, plenty more in the months oncoming, and… come Spring, he was a father. We had a beautiful, beautiful baby daughter, we did. Human, on account of the freshwater. We… Well, no. He moved her to your town soon as she gave up the teat, as I could hardly care for a little human out here in the youkai-ridden sticks. Visiting was… difficult, but the canal was just about negotiable after a heavy rain. I went – if and when I could. Some years hence,” the princess slowly finished, “my daughter brought me the grave news. He’d passed away with a smile on his face, to hear her tell it. My name on his final breath. Very peaceful. Very touching. I loved him much.”

The table went silent. The human glanced Kagerou’s way, and knew by the flat of her ears no legs were being pulled. The wolf-woman could scent him flashing over with sweat.

“… And, er, she?” he eked out at last. “Where is… she today?”

There was the tiniest telling pause ahead an answer came forth. “… Home,” Wakasagihime said glassily, “returned to the waters whence she was begotten. As merfolk should. Childless, should you wonder,” she added alongside a downward peek, “although, I was told, happily wed to the town’s then-daimyo, the vixen. Apologies, mister Human,” she went on to add, not whatsoever sincerely. “Ought I to have annotated this was ancient history? Or were you truly concerned we were…?”

The man sucked air in with a wheeze. “Crap. No, no, that’s— My bloodline itself’s a bit muddy, see? And… Grandpa always went on this and that about youkai. And, er…”

“What afeared you was,” the fish princess filled in, “that you may have inadvertently had your own youkai grandmother give you sloppy, doting, oral sex in the home of your youkai bride-to-be. The fantasies you human males indulge…”

“Haha,” he said, wrapping up ineffable amounts of internal conflict into two handy syllables. “No, fuck me; it’s hot as all hells that you are… were… a mother. At my age, that tends to turn you on. Crap, even if you were my… mine…”

“You’d drop your trousers for me, still?”

“… Yeah,” he admitted. “Yeah, I would. Come twice faster, too, were ‘t so. That’s a fantasy, right enough. Crap, look at me,” he groaned with a toss of the shaven pate. “Here you’ve dealt a sad story, and all I’ve on my mind is getting you down on my dick. Sorry. Can’t keep the nut screwed on straight with these bloody nice tits of yours out in plain sight, fuck.”

This, for reasons most mysterious, crinkled the mermaid’s immaculate, white forehead. “‘Sad?’” she repeated. “Whichever part was?”

“Yunno. Your… er, outliving your family? Children? That’s a bit sad, innit?”

Wakasagihime’s august face mantled the expression of a woman who’d long ago realised that men didn’t think soundly precluding all available throughput of blood to their heads, but caught herself out forgetting once more. Such an expression on Sekibanki could’ve indoctrinated him into hermitage all on its own, but merely made the rokurokubi’s boyfriend laugh his helpless, boyish laugh in Wakasagihime’s instance.

“… Oh, phooey,” she muttered. “You’ll sort it out someday or -year. Never you mind my stories for now; you were to try and put a second baby in my belly, were not you? Yes, do not stare; I surrender. Kagerou, dear? Would you mind terribly if you two could swap arrangements? So that he may lie on top of me? We could kiss, too.”

Kagerou gave the wanton fish princess a blank stare, and then said, “Um. OK.”

She surged with bad grace up from the human’s lap, dropping her uniform’s skirt, and stooped to receive the transfer of mermaid from his arms. Wakasagihime moored them together, squishing their nude, slumping breasts, while a somewhat antsy human shuffled aside and off the bench to rid of his unneeded lower wear. Kagerou had featured upon a time she’d had it bad with the unavoidable mating seasons, yet she’d found human men had been through an even worse mangle with their constant, year-round rut. A more unsteady specimen than this, she hadn’t tipped her ears at since… well, since he’d told her how badly he’d wanted to fuck her back at the lakeside. He looked as though the future of his very life hung where he was hung.

And, both at once were risked as his testosterone-addled brain convinced him to push his filthy, erect manhood at the two topless, embracing youkai. Wakasagihime cottoned on first, as was her wont. A petulant, upward glance, and the mermaid leaned over to smack a big, affectionate kiss right on the slimy head of his dauntingly stiff cock. Strings of tacky, translucent pre-come clung to her lips on the hasty retreat. Only Kagerou, who’d hurried on to emulate her friend at the human’s coercive look, noted the smile quirking the princess’s shameless mouth. The blast of smells from Sekibanki’s boyfriend’s manhood anyway blew away the (im)moral implications.

The smells of him… and her own fertility, slathered all over. Kagerou’s world swam behind her eyes from how right their scents were for each other. This had its clumsy repercussions in bumping her lips on the runner man’s glans ahead she could right her back and kiss it properly, but… it’d be crying wolf to say she rued it. Warm cock-lube stained her lips just as it had the mermaid’s: the lewdest lipstick the wolf-woman had worn to date.

Wakasagihime glared down (or up) any further attempts at inflating the human’s machismo. “No more,” she warned. “Hear you? Laterrr. We’ll make you come with kisses alone if it should please this dummy rod of yours. Now. Would you focus? Kagerou? Kindly help roll me onto my back, please? And as for you, mister Human… Sit on me. Oh, please; it’s very fine. Mermaids are robust as well as bonny. Sit.”

And then, while the hale specimen of humanity which was Sekibanki’s boyfriend tentatively slung a leg over her chubby tail, Wakasagihime embarked on the inapt process of turning on her spinal axis. Not without the wolf-woman’s aid could she have accomplished even this, deceptively simple task. All too easily glossed over it was, taking due heed of her no small upper regions, how likewise big the rest of the mermaid princess was. Had she delivered on her threats and stood up to her fellow Grassroots, Wakasagihime would’ve been a head and shoulders above even their looming, human inductee. A configuration which would have placed his “mug” in, briefly told, glamorous environs.

It spoke to the mermaid’s utter trust that she’d ever relied on her clubmates, of whom most were scruple-less youkai, to move about on land. It spoke to Kagerou’s quieter shames she’d always insisted she be the one carrying around their immobile chairwoman. The perks (which was to say, the thank-you kisses) all but weren’t worth the dark stares.

Nude all down her front, from her dainty collarbones to the far-off tail-fins, Waka wiggled into a position favoured, so it might be guessed, by human-loving mermaids the world over. Half-sitting, cosying up to her wolf-woman backrest, the princess gave the human hovering diffidently astride the beginnings of her tail a look. It came with a suggestion attached. And, with a what-the-drat-kind of snicker, Sekibanki’s boyfriend obeyed the unspoken mandate and pulled his shirt up over his head.

The senior Grassroots had just the sly chance to ogle his athlete’s physique before he, in nothing now but his birthday suit, swung the expectation on them: grabbing his engorged cock and tucking the foreskin back from its head. Wakasagihime wet her lips – lips which could only have been more at home wrapped flush around his shaft – and, flirtatiously deliberate, reached down toward her waist.

And there, a little beyond where hips could otherwise have been found, where her smooth, mammallike skin transitioned gradually into the rough, piscine underbelly, an inconspicuous, vertical slit in the raspy hide, was the mermaid’s precious womanhood. With two fingertips on each side, Wakasagihime pressed down, and then slowly spread the entrance of the place where, by some miracle of life, both human and her own species’ babies could be made. The mermaid’s labia flowered out: twin, double rows of ruffled, blood-red flesh as glimmering wet as the opening they hedged and as alien as they were tempting to touch. There was no clitoris; in its absence, tiny feelers girdled Wakasagihime’s slot, ready to be snagged, bumped and rubbed upon every mating insertion. The depths of the mermaid’s vagina, Kagerou was intimately aware, contained only more of the things: a soft, wriggly lining of pygmy tentacles which coiled around and pulled after a drunk and horny wolf-woman’s fingers. There was no knowing except experience what they’d do to the vulnerable glans of a human’s penis.

One man with such experience presently chuckled his inauspicious estimate. “Still weirds me a tad out, yunno?” he said with ribbing humour. “Seems like something I’m not s’posed to go into.”

“You are,” promised the mermaid, feigning for his entertainment a bit of scholarly affront. “You have, no less. Thrice counting. Very safe occurrences all. Or have you nibble-marks somewhere on your rod?”

He laughed that up also. “Not from this mouth!”

“Oh, mercy,” Wakasagihime protested, “I did not! I am wiser than this. Than to… Kagerou. Note for posterity, please; I did not bite him.”

Caught afoul of a thought in another direction, the wolf-woman absently giggled along her assent. The wayward thought was this: that she’d never before viewed up close how Waka had sex with males. Of the lately opportunities, she had frittered away one acquainting her index and ring fingers with Sekibanki’s vaginal walls; the very next, in their rokurokubi clubmate’s bed, she’d used of the human’s preoccupation with the mermaid to teach his redhead girlfriend the basics of scissoring. The averred third time featured faintly in the wolf-woman’s besotted memory; everything picture-perfect was the fact of Waka having both of her bluish-pink teats suckled on by summoned Seki-heads. The bodied one right then being on duty licking the human’s left ear, while Kagerou had out and out cleaned out the right.

This, earmarks were then, would be an opportunity for study. The wolf-woman determined to make notes: principally, in finger-tapped Morse over her drenched panties.

Within the easing of tension accorded by the gibe, on one arm and his knees, the runner man crawled over the reclining mermaid to aim his dangling, curved erection at her proffered opening. The senior Grassroots looked on in equal suspense as their junior’s boyfriend wedged the tip of his cockhead into the inhuman hole and then lowered his hips, until the feelers at Waka’s entrance slipped past then wrapped behind the ridge of his glans. They’d no sooner begun their trip up his bumpy, vein-streaked shaft than the princess writhed, hissing from a pleasure she’d not envisaged enjoying so early in the day. Her pale hands jittered even as she held her womanhood spread wide for the human’s convenience.

“Sss… lowlyyy,” she managed to appeal. “Slowly, pleeease. Give me your whole rod, but slowlyyy. Yes, like that, like that; let me feel all of it. Give me, give me, give meee…”

Kagerou’s wolf-ears shot bolt upright. Her one untenanted arm snaked around and beneath Wakasagihime’s heaving bust to secure in place the raunchy fish princess who, from out of nowhere, seemed as like to twist and flop away from the cock steadily dominating her womanhood. Sekibanki’s boyfriend fared no better, awkward on all-fours atop the narrow bench, unknowable of expression save for the peaks of his brows, on account of watching the inguinal progress himself. Vein behind vein, his long, impressive cock was crammed inside Wakasagihime’s surrendered vagina, every inch of it made past her feeler-ringed entrance an additional reason for the princess to moan and pant like a well-paid courtesan.

There was a squirm, a yelp and rather an obscene slap of skin on scales when the human cleared the final stretch all at once and hilted his cock up to the jewels inside the mermaid’s tried and tested baby-maker. The results came in forthwith, no less prurient themselves; the human tipped back his head, harshly groaning his satisfaction, whereas the mermaid’s palms slapped across her mouth to, verifiably, hamper an even louder, female accompaniment. Her enormous, coruscating fish-tail bent nearly double behind him and overhead, all but cuffing Sekibanki’s boyfriend between the bare shoulder-blades. The clenched smile on his soon downturned face foretold more sailing the lewd mermaid’s way; and, none too soon, there it came: with a tightening of his glutes and undocking of his hips from Wakasagihime’s scaly, should-be-waist. Underneath him, Kagerou saw two whole inches of his luscious, rigid manhood leave the mermaid’s otherworldly vagina, dragging along and pulling clumps of teeny, cherry-red feelers out into the sex-scented air of Sekibanki’s tearoom.

Then, causing the princess and himself both to gasp from the suddenness of it, he slammed himself back to the hilt inside her squishy, fertile, alien depths.

The wolf-woman bridled tighter the floundering fish princess; and, spurred on by the muffled cries of quite un-bridled pleasure coming out of her, as a rule, composed friend, Kagerou slipped two of her longest, long-nailed fingers up into her own, rather less intriguing vagina. Though, the pre-come still gluing her walls averred, not a completely meritless one. These, nonetheless, were petty, jealous thoughts; Kagerou thus shouldered them aside in favour of watching her lovely, mermaid bestie get right and proper fucked by her junior clubmate. With a precarious, happy end to boot, if egos held.

Wakasagihime strained for breath through her quivering fingers. “Tuh—Tease…!” she complained in between the jolts. “Ssslowly, I, I said! Youhnnn… brute! Bar-barian! Quit grinding, hear you?!”

The runner man’s replying grin smouldered with ill-earned pride. But, he did still when told. “Weren’t lyin’, were you, huh?” he wondered around. “This’s really this intense for you when sober?”

“Um,” Kagerou butted in over her friend’s bristling ear-fins. “… What’s this about?”

Sekibanki’s boyfriend blinked. He’d run among enough youkai not to baulk at tormenting one (or three) sexually, but a trivial, human error flushed him a boyish red still. “Ah. Er. Ri—Right,” he stumbled, “you weren’t… or more like were all over Seki at the while. Uh. So’s, in short—”

Wakasagihime smacked him on the back with her eel-nimble tail. “Gosh, you,” she chided. “Tattletale! Sell out a mermaid’s trade secret for a kiss, will you? Very fine! I shall explain; do a better job of it, too. Kagerou? This, right here—” the princess jerked her waist as through to indicate what and where exactly, “—hnnm, this is why, you see now, I’d made it a point to have gotten some drink in me before I laid with him previously. Humans’ rods can grow so thick, they wind up crowding and scraping every good spot all at once. His, notoriously, likes to pick out mine. It is as he has said: intense. Scary, even, should the mermaid, gods forbid, do this too young or without foreknowledge. Me, I used to fret I was oversensitive prior to finding out sex with humans just was like this. A drink, however, numbs the edge – lets me appreciate more the act over bottling up the climax. More fun for both the parties, too, if I haven’t to pause every minute lest I come like a virgin fairy and must rest up…”

“Wouldn’t overmuch mind waitin’ it out,” said the human, wobbly on his hands and knees, but steady as besought. “Yunno? I’m no tyke fresh out of the history school. Got a drat firm rein on my dick.”

An utterance from Waka’s matronly chest gently put the veracity of that claim to a world of doubt. “However that may be,” she insisted, “I would. I’d wind up even toucher afterwards as well; it should be altogether better that I come with the man than thrice ahead of him. The pervert I remain, I do yet have limits. I am not inexhaustible. ‘Yunno?’”

Kagerou’s selfishness spoke before the lucky human could. “… Want to switch? If it’s, um, bad after all?”

“Goodness, no,” implored the mermaid, stroking the arm belted round beneath her bust. “I am, as has been shown, a pervert. I love this; I love doing it with humans. I very much plan to have this one out of his trousers sooner or later whenever we meet… provided his reciprocated interest. Simply need the aforesaid pause, should we go so far as to… ‘screw.’ So that I do not dock him of his fun prematurely, see? Albeit, he’ll not, I feel, be overlong in this instance… Will he?”

A thoroughly impenitent-looking human chuckled his assent up at the bare-breasted, youkai ladies. “No drat first how I survived miss Wolf,” he admitted, “let alone this. I’ll not be long, no-ho.”

“Then dare I hope,” Waka returned in expectant tones, “you’ll know to be at least this deep when you come if you should truly mean to keep me out of water for the rest of the day? Spent as you were the other three times, I’d omitted to tell; but, pardon me, mister Human, you are not quite reaching where you… where we want you to. Not to downsize you, mind,” she consoled him. “Mermaids are… oh, more elongated, compared, ‘is everything.’ Kagerou here is closer your scale and said you were knocking right on her baby-room.”

Sekibanki’s boyfriend(‘s handsome brows) mulled that over. Then, something fairly opposite. “And, er,” he chanced, “have you… ‘n to say, are mermen…?”

“Mermen’s,” taught the princess, stressing the possessive s, “are longer, bulbous at the base, but tapering toward the top. The bulb’s very nice to rub up to, actually; still, theirs are tools built to inseminate above all else. Humans’, on the reverse, have always impressed on me they were made for fun-times first. So-o, mister Human,” she resumed, switching around to her giggly, flirty voice, “what you shall need to do is, even before you come, push this glorious fishing pole of yours all the way inside me. Then – and only then – let loose. How pent-up you are, you just miiight have enough spunk in you for some to enter my womb. A drop or two ought to suffice, in any case. As I said: mermaids – very fertile.”

The human Grassroot synopsised it in the best way he had. “Yunno,” he said, amused. “Girl will normally tell you not to knock her up in these occurrences.”

“It is a turn-on,” Waka said blandly. “And… I am aware what it is you desire. You, male. ‘Banki has not given you the purchase,” she explained, “and so, your compulsions, your potence, lead you to impregnate the next available female. Kagerou. Myself… and, I’ll wager, you’ll be trying ‘Banki again at the nearest convenience. Whether she condones the idea of children or not at all, I suspect.”

“… Er. Yes,” was the runner’s guilty response. “Had a hope like that, yeah.”

“We-ell,” cheered the audacious fish princess, “if not a headstrong rokurokubi or a shy wolf-woman, then at a minimum you may tell your friends you once put a child in a rebellious mermaid.”

“For an afternoon,” he dutifully attached.

At which, Wakasagihime smiled her naughtiest yet. “Oh, definitely. Unless, of course, somebody dunks me in ‘Banki’s tub…”

He’d not needed a thinner red line to cross. With a steadying of hands and knees, Sekibanki’s well-equipped boyfriend began heartily to breed his girlfriend’s peremptory senior.

All but, and Kagerou would’ve chipped in this was nonsense and giddiness talking. That child-making which never took was not, in practice, child-making. That there was no feat of pregnancy to speak of. Only, she’d heard her own middle-of-sex thoughts, had the “shy wolf-woman,” and those hadn’t been very far removed. The princess had told a white lie in claiming impregnation to be Kagerou’s fetish; for it was a shared one among the elder, senior Grassroots. It merely wasn’t Wakasagihime’s first.

Which spoke, maybe, to how readily she’d voiced those fancies now. Unlike Kagerou’s, they weren’t secrets.

Jealousy curled the wolf-woman’s fingers inside her hot, wet and lonely womanhood. Jealousy of the ease with which the two flirted with each other, jealousy of her friend indulging their common fetishes by herself, and jealousy of him – for experiencing her sexy, mermaid bestie in a manner only a male could. None were grudges she might hold against them more than she might now quit holding the quivery princess against her padded front. But, under Kagerou’s coarse, hairy mons, she gave her G-spot a series of punishing strokes.

For the human’s own weak spot, “punishing” was no exaggeration. His flat, athletic butt pumped up and down in starts: tremorous from the pleasure Wakasagihime’s feelers were inflicting on his defenceless glans. And, for her half, the princess was no slouch herself: the gruelling sensations of mating with something she wasn’t physiologically designed0 to (but did all the same) degrading her to the baser of her constituents. A mermaid’s song may have been the stuff of legends, but only since no legend, Kagerou felt, would tolerate the phrase, “gasping like a fairy doing sit-ups on a strange mushroom.”

Woven with words, it went something like this:

“Oh mmhmy, oooh dearrr, nfffyes, yesss! Gosh, I’ve fffforgotte-eee-en… Sssay, how lllong… You, with ‘Banki, hnnnow long have you been fffuuu… been meeting?”

The human’s response was little above a grunt of exertion. That is, until he’d moored his waist atop hers and berthed his cock to the jewels inside her exotic vagina. “What,” he wheezed, “running on, like, fuck, two years, I ken?”

Wakasagihime attempted vainly not to laugh. “Oh, I’ll kill nnhyou, you redhead sot!”

Further words were not had. Thrust after thrust, the human plunged on toward his release and the one-day insemination with which the mermaid had goaded his male urges. In sync with those, the fish-tailed princess bent and fumbled from the stimulation of her sweet spots being brutally ground by the human’s incompatibly thick glans. Juices tainted with pre-come pooled in the dimple which housed Wakasagihime’s upturned womanhood – reamed on the upstroke then sucked back inside after the wide cockhead whenever it dove back among the mermaid’s palpitating, alien goodness.

To all of this, Kagerou, who’d somehow found her eyes stuck to the bundles of muscle quivering in the man’s arms, ostensibly on the verge of collapsing, masturbated harder and harder under her uniform’s immodest skirt. What feminine accents Sekibanki’s absence had denied her, was provided by the mermaid’s warm, damp-smelling hair.

It was with a clap of hips on fish-tail that the human Grassroot came, sinking his long, overstrained cock to the base in Wakasagihime’s baby-maker as advised. The first, groaned throe of his orgasm took his strength as well as emptying his full, swelled testicles into the mermaid’s fertile womb; and, ascertaining only his entire load would go where it was meant to by vising her with his knees, Sekibanki’s coming boyfriend crumpled atop Wakasagihime’s plush, naked body. His wiry, gropable buttocks clenched with every spurt of thick, built-up seed condemned to the mermaid’s otherworldly, feeler-lined vagina. Kagerou hadn’t seen a man climax this intensely since… well, since he’d come inside her after half an hour of on-and-off screwing a sexy, bound rokurokubi.

Whose merit it had been then… was nowhere as clear as it was now.

A scratch at her occupied arm plucked her attention from filling her womanhood with her fingers. Wakasagihime’s face was half-turned, a wonderful blush on it, pleading something in a needy, winded voice.

“Kagerou. Kagerrrhooou…”

The wolf-woman thrilled all over from the slurred, familiar rendition of her name. “Um. What?”

“Cooome,” urged the horny, peaking mermaid, “flick my nips, flick my nipsss.”

And, selfless as she’d have avowed herself to be (then regretted it later), Kagerou pulled her hand out of her soaked panties. The princess’s massive mammaries slumped against her palms, of which one smeared the mermaid’s flesh in very fresh and even slipperier girl-lube. The wolf-woman herself repositioned her hands, tracing out the breasts’ bovine outline, so that their stiff, prominent peaks were in her fingers’ thrumming range. A squeal, loud and unrestrained, fled Wakasagihime’s chest once Kagerou leaned down to close her teeth on the ashen skin of her neck.

And then, with vicious speed, the wolf-woman started flicking.

Ahead even the human may grow limp from inseminating her, with a throaty whine, the noble mermaid chairwoman of the Grassroots Network creamed herself like a clueless, virgin fairy having her first sex.

Sekibanki scuttled out of the tea-room’s facilities minutes afterwards to her fellow Grassroots, old and new, seated clothed and prim on opposite sides of their table. Two plates of fresh, nattily arrayed, steamed buns rode along on the hostess’s hands. The smells of dough and hot jam washed over those of rushes and unsubtly exerted bodies.

What Sekibanki couldn’t know about or, optimistically, sniff out was the bundle of underwear and handtowels hastily jammed among the table’s supports after her indiscreet clubmates had wiped themselves – and each other – down. On account of Kagerou’s done having done the majority of his clean-up – until, in fact, his cock had stood once again spotless and helplessly erect – the human watched his cute, dutiful girlfriend attain their table unworried for his crime being nosed out. Unless, that is, Kagerou breathed too hard.

Kagerou did her damnedest not to, even while she helped right her mermaid friend into a more meal-conducive position. The plates of buns slid in front of the senior Grassroots: more mouth-watering following the workout than even the sexy, redhead waitress who’d served them. The wolf-woman swatted warily at one of the steaming treats and, having found it about safe to pick up, did so – for Wakasagihime to sample from her fingers. Hot, liquid jam had stalled the mermaid only a trice ahead out came her squealed, delighted approval. Sekibanki smiled – pretended she hadn’t – and moved on, now empty-handed, to whence the runner man had eyed her for tells of his share.

Seeing none, he skewed a brow. “… Where’re mine?” he ventured.

Sekibanki gave a shrug of the slim, uniform-wrapped shoulders. “Coming along,” she said, not without an undergrowth of nettles. “These bloody things, they must be made fresh.”

“Er,” said the human. “Right.”

“What? Want an aperitif?”

“Wouldn’t go a mi—”

And then, ahead the man might complete an answer to either effect, Sekibanki pinched and lifted up her uniform’s skirt.

Kagerou went very still. The rokurokubi’s face proclaimed she had been seen and remained uncowed by more eyes than the six now savouring her nude hips and the heart-shaped patch of red pubes. And, she had been masturbating. Unmistakeably had been masturbating. There was no way the wet streaks running down her inner thighs had anything to do with eating, less Kagerou had been very bold and Sekibanki – very drunk.

Arousal punched into the wolf-woman’s gut. The sorry state of affairs was, she’d been the only passenger on the train of events who’d never gotten off; it’d been difficult enough to keep her cleaning job on the human’s tool from turning, so to say, full-blown. The picture of Sekibanki’s trimmed bush and lube-stained thighs all but had her tongue lolling out of her mouth. The pervy, redhead waitress shuffled her feet wider apart to give them all a better view of her messy womanhood. Which, for some inscrutable, scary, human reason, threw her boyfriend down a laughing fit.

Teacups (barely touched ones) rattled their warning once he cracked his palm on the tabletop. “So!” he exclaimed, “bloody where, this time?”

Sekibanki rolled her eyes unseriously. A Seki-head whizzed out from under the table to hover by its owner’s shoulder. Kagerou dropped the bun.

The runner man smacked his lips in defeat. “Crap,” he said. “Had a wager on you’d be up in the rafters.”

Sekibanki tilted her head(s). “… With whom?”

“Just me. No one else stupid enough to bet me.”

Terrified, Kagerou glanced at Wakasagihime, who appeared outwards unperturbed by the news, though rather so by the trickle of sticky jam on her chin. Knowledge was writ large on it, and not in jam only. The conniving princess must’ve spied the Seki-head while going down on her newest toy and hadn’t thought it meet to inform either of the potentially concerned parties. Kagerou simmered. All she’d let loose in the flurry of excitement seemed in retrospect a thousandfold more incriminating.

Sekibanki dumped her skirt and, easy as a cat, insinuated herself onto the runner man’s lap. There was something that could’ve been a fond smooch, if the junior Grassroot hadn’t right then parted with her head to send it along its twin back toward the kitchens. Squelched from disappointment, the human’s eminent brows just about blocked him from spotting yet another Seki-head descend from the rafters above to resettle his girlfriend’s petite shoulders. He snorted with gusto.

“Should’ve sussed. So, miss,” he pursued, arms winding around the wily, rokurokubi waitress, “want me to towel those legs down, or were you going to rub off on my trousers?”

“And get this damn prick even harder ‘n it already is?” guessed Sekibanki. “No dice. I came, like, a couple of minutes ago; give me a break. ‘Sides, we’ll all be after washing our clothes before long, so quit grousing.”

“That decision’s foregone, huh?”

“Was when you walked through that door,” she corrected him. “I’ll remind you I hadn’t even the stove fully going when your prick was out, either.”

The man poked his chin at the crown of her head. “Hardly my doin’, was it,” he argued, looking pointedly to the mermaid busy at her buns. She winked back. “… Right. Good show, at least? Nice view?”

“I did say I’d come, didn’t I?”

“That’s a load off my conscience.”

“Conscience,” sneered Sekibanki. “Uh-huh.”

Kagerou’s barrel-worth of patience ran over. It seemed to have a coyly smiling Seki-head floating in it. The wolf-woman’s truest truth was, she knew she had no grounds for outrage. Moreover, if she averaged out the moral difficulty of everything she’d indulged, in particular a night of drunken sex with the card-playing rogues, a mere few rooms over, two of whom had professed themselves to be husbands, then the runner man’s cheating on Kagerou’s friend with Kagerou, with Kagerou’s and the friend’s tacit consent, was nothing to pen in a diary about. In fact, net Wakasagihime into it, and it fit quite neatly inside their romantic rhombus.

That didn’t stop none her wolf’s heart from fretting.

“Um—” she said eloquently.

The human and the rokurokubi opposite of her ceased flirting politely. They trailed the question with their eyes from the wolf-woman’s chest to her throat.

“Um,” she went again. “Is this really… us, sharing… yunno, fine?”

A pair of Sekibankish sighs were her rebuke. “… Kage,” said the original inventor. “He wasn’t bullshitting you; I did give him a… what, ‘dispensation?’ Secondly, you liked it as much as I did, you damn dyke. It’s bloody fine. Geddit? It will be bloody fine after you’ve eaten and we’ve all four of us gone back upstairs, too. I’m into this.”

“Just a smidge jealous myself,” chipped in the human.

Sekibanki shot him a look that could’ve been screwed onto the tip of a spear. “This, from a guy propositioned by strangers?”

The runner prfffed his dismissal, but Wakasagihime had seized on the glint of a hook. “‘Strangers!’” she said, mock-aghast. “We’ve gone halfsies on sake! We aren’t, are we?”

Sekibanki’s eyes rolled so hard, it was a wonder her head hadn’t spun along. “Not you, grandmother,” she said crookedly. “There’s this… ugh, this tsukumogami what hangs around here like a bad smell. Told her I’d sooner appreciate if she sodded off, but the bloody thing wouldn’t take a hint if it slapped her tits. It’s bad vibes for me, what with how everybody and their son knows she’s a youkai.”

“Have you asked her to join the Network?” asked Wakasagihime.

“Yes, yes, did the first bloody thing,” grumbled Sekibanki. “Told her there’s tea on the house if she takes the vow, but no dice. Insisted she ‘belonged to everyone,’ figure that out. Anyhow, couple of days ago, this lout’s in—” she indicated her ill-pleased boyfriend, “—doing the dishes and whatnot, and this tsukumogami slips in yet again. So, I says to him, get out there and make the bloody thing leave. Cause a scene, pick her up, molest her would be favourite. Make her not want to come back, in a word. So, he ties on the cravat, saunters out there and starts chatting her up while I go about the other customers’ business.”

The human harrumphed. “On honour,” he maintained, “none my idea.”

“Horseshit,” Sekibanki swore. “You had a hand up her skirt barely off the preamble. Then down her panties not minutes afterwards. Good job you were at the corner table. You’d’ve been long busted otherwise.”

“Well, I’d not told her to reciprocate,” the man declared hotly.

“No,” agreed his redhead girlfriend. “No. You only helped her take your prick out of your trousers. All fine. I’m not bloody complaining, remember? I had a front-row seat. So, if you can give the faith,” she continued, now once more at the enthralled mermaid, “not only does she not scram, she pulls out his prick, the skank, pulls her panties down and mounts him then and there. Takes him whole in one go, like she’s bloody made for it. To the balls. Then starts to fuck him. Imagine me, manoeuvring through the lunch rush all the while watching him go in and out of that blue-haired hussy. Had to change my underwear behind the counter halfway. Shouldn’t have let him at her, had I heard she was such a slut. Ptui.”

“Er. You wrote ‘enjoy fuck!’ on her omelette,” contended her man. “With an exclamation mark. That not your seal?”

“That was for you, dumbass,” groaned Sekibanki. “Whatever. Water under the bridge. ‘Least I’ll know how to deal with her next time she comes around while you’re in. ‘Cause you are fucking her again then,” she promised. “I want to see you haul her off to one of the private rooms and prone-bone her. Or doggystyle, if you can get her top off too. Gods bloody grant, there’ll be fewer bored old folks around. I don’t want my ass slapped by some geezer when I’m that turned on again.”

There was a rather viscous patch of pause. Then, the human said, “… Seki?”

“Yeah? What?”

“… Happy you aren’t,” he said, stern of voice, “but I am, as mentioned, a smidge jealous of you.”

“So what?”

“So that,” he told her, “means I’m going to need descriptions.”

Sekibanki volunteered a shrug instead. “It was just an old man.”

“And I just need his description.”

Sekibanki’s face, which under most conditions had the emotional range of a disgruntled puppy, contrived for a moment not to suggest this had been a very correct reply. Then, all grouchy rokurokubi once more, she offered, “Full disclosure, I’d flashed him my ass, so the fault’s not all his. What? I was going wild from watching you fuck that tsukumogami; I needed the edge off. So, I dropped my pen while getting his order and bent down to pick it up. Wager he got a nice, clear look at everything.”

“… You were,” her boyfriend asked leerily, “wearing which panties by then?”

“I was between pairs.”

“… Come again?”

“Couldn’t get on new ones ahead someone was calling me over again,” explained Sekibanki. “Went commando for a round about the room. Coincidence. Anyhow, I’d got the geezer his coffee,” she went on once he didn’t, “he clapped my butt, and I said to him I’d grind his own beans down for his next cupper iffen this reoccurred. Gave me his solemn oath it’d never after I’d flashed him my nips as incentive. Harmless man, all in all. Hardly even blinked when I knocked down my notepad.”

Something about the story tipped the runner man out of balance. Half of him was taking off to beat up on the elderly. The other rubbernecked, searching for the leg being pulled. Kagerou thought she had a decent guess at which leg that was.

Succour came from the sea, carried on Wakasagihime’s voice. “What was that about propositioning, again?”

Sekibanki sketched a disgusted face. “Uh-huh. Well, after getting him off twice in a row,” she fairly threw up the words, “she bumped her tits into him at the market while he was ferryin’ stock for me the other day. And, what was it she then said…?”

The man at her back issued a surrendered sigh. “Asked me,” he gave up, “whether I needed any ‘work’ or ‘favours’ done. ‘That kind,’ was the small print. Whispered, as in.”

Wakasagihime crooned. “Mm! A lady of my own school, that one. You regaled her, of course?”

“Seki weren’t nearby—” he said with a shake of his cropped head, “—so, nuh-uh, princess. Was still on the clock, also. Only gallivant on the out-of-town gigs; lesser like our young Hieda lady hears of it.”

“And had ‘Seki’ been nearby?” pressed the raunchy mermaid. “What might you have gone with?”

Another, slightly less clammy pause was ushered on, within which Kagerou caught the runner man sneak a look Sekibanki-wise. To no proscriptive return.

“… Crap,” he wheezed finally, “I’ve no first. Take her down an alley, unlace that classy vest of hers and fuck her tits?”

Now came on Sekibanki’s turn to make a dreamy sound. “Mhm. That,” she decided, “let’s do that. Never mind doggystyle; I want to see her on her knees and her shirt soaked in your come.”

The man pulled a face. “Many more youkai you’d like to sic on my dick, Seki?”

At which the redhead waitress smiled in a disarming – and likely rehearsed – way. “All of them,” she declared. “You’re a lucky mutt I don’t speak to many. Tell the occasional tsukumogami to sod off. About two others besides. Met ‘em?”

He gave a sigh. “Grandpa would’ve popped a vein.”

“Or a boner,” Sekibanki added helpfully.

“How I’d love to have popped him,” put in Wakasagihime.

“Um,” said Kagerou, a paragon of timing. “O—Other employees. Won’t they catch us if we stay too long?”

The human and the rokurokubi wordlessly consulted with each other.

“Er,” he went first. “Never came up? I’m the only ‘other employee.’”

“Never been relevant,” confirmed Sekibanki. “He is, on and off.”

“Mostly do the dishes and carryin’, anywise.”

“I don’t pay him in poon, by the by,” she disclaimed.

“Man here,” he attested. “Sex wouldn’t fill my belly.”

“Jolly.”

Kagerou felt her tail swish. “Then, um,” she began. “Could we… stay maybe longer, today?”

Sekibanki peered meaningfully at her man, who meaningfully looked away. “… Come help me set up at dawn tomorrow? I could go a day with no one slapping my ass.”

The man, like those who rose at sunrise did when questioned on the number of leisure hours in their day by people apt to commandeer them, made a noise like deflating bagpipes. “… Crap,” he capitulated, “all right, fine. Got me by the jowls. Hop out after breakfast to grab us something light to drink, how ‘bout it?”

Sekibanki smiled, in a rare variation, for a brilliant real. “Great. I…” she trailed off, glancing aside at her staring clubmates. “… Tell you after breakfast. Geddit? We’ve, uh…”

“Stuff left over, no doubt don’t want repeats,” the human provided smoothly. “I geddit, Seki.”

“Thanks.”

He smiled back. “‘S all in the pay check.”

“… Bastard.”

And no secret hoard of envy could’ve stayed Kagerou from smiling along. The two were faster friends in (sober) person than Sekibanki had ever averred them to be, which was right up one of the junior Grassroot’s lonely alleys. The man was staid in spite of his keeping pace with the youkai ladies’ excesses and, the wolf-woman tentatively acknowledged, not as scary as his kin were painted. He seemed even, in that belligerent, mannish way, caring of her redhead crush.

This put Kagerou in the awkward corner of their rhombus because, for all intents (and, perhaps eventually, purposes), Sekibanki and her runner made for a cute and sexy couple. One the “shy wolf-woman” was at once afraid and keen as her namesake to crash. The added pep being, now she realised, that Sekibanki would’ve had nothing against it. That, whatever whispered sentiment she did nurse for the human, it was wholesomely disconnected from her or his nether bits. Something in Kagerou’s moral nous told her she knew, just a bit, how he felt about the ordeal.

Of nothing else except this, the wolf-woman was positive: that today, not any other, would see these feelings tested on their tensile strength. And, to ensure no less, no sooner than Sekibanki had slid off of his lap and rushed to the kitchens, Kagerou knocked off her shoes and extended her long, gartered legs under the table.

Conceit was speaking, maybe, but… if Sekibanki had been able to snare a man with her feet, then so should the leggier of seniors.