No bunched-up folds of fabric at her waist. Only skin, only Nadia. He slid his hand lower. Already, though he might have thought he'd need a week to recuperate, he was stiffening again. Helped along by her clever fingers, which kneaded him and stroked him back toward readiness.
The dress was gone. He grinned, eager to see her long, lean body in its nude splendor. Or maybe nude except for her jewelry and those stilettos ...
Her buttocks felt strange. As in, he couldn't feel her buttocks. Only her back, the smooth line of it, as far down as he could reach.
Puzzled, he frowned up at her. The quality of that beatific smile had changed to something avid and unnerving. And her eyes ... her eyes didn't look right. Still green, still large ... but the pupils ... the pupils of her eyes were long, narrow black lines.
Nadia's smile widened to show thin, pearly, inch-long fangs.
Her eyebrows were gone. Her hair was gone, leaving a bald sweep of skin lightly patterned in greenish white.
James tried to lurch away, and her grip on his erection turned into a clamp. At the same instant, something twined around his leg.
He sat up and looked the length of their bodies.
His was the same, familiar as ever, flushed and sweaty from sex.
But hers ...
Bare breasts, yes, but covered in fine scales. The nipples dark green. From the sternum down, her torso flowed not into hips and the lovely legs he had admired at the bar, but into a single muscular coil. It was shaded darker green along her back, paler on the underside. A snake's tail, fully eighteen feet long, the end of it wrapped around his leg as snugly as the embrace of any boa constrictor.
"Jamessss," she said. She flicked her tongue at him – the tongue that was now a narrow, forked strip.
She jabbed her head down. Her fangs, dripping with clear fluid, plunged into his shoulder. He felt the icy pumping flood of venom. His scream froze, unvoiced.
Numbness spread through him. He couldn't move. Couldn't feel his arms. His legs. Couldn't feel anything. But he was still breathing. His heart still beat a frantic pace in his chest.
Paralyzed. She had paralyzed him with her bite, and he was as helpless and motionless as a mannequin.
"I'm sssssorry, Jamessss," she said.
Nadia undulated, raising her torso on the powerful coil of her lower body. She swayed there above him, as if to the unheard music of some snake-charmer's pipe. His wide, staring eyes could not close or turn away.
The worst of it was that she was, in a terrifying way, still beautiful.
No ... the worst of it was that just below where her waist should have been, he could see an orifice. The scales there parted, and the flesh within was pale, glistening.
She ran her palms down over her breasts, pausing to tweak the dark green nipples, then stroked a hand along her snaky flank. Her tongue shuttled at the air as she eased her fingers into the orifice.
He knew what she wanted, what she was going to do to him. And she could, too ... the paralysis that held his arms and legs immobile also left him locked in his state of stiff arousal. He couldn't do anything about it, couldn't stop her as she slithered on top of him.
Even paralyzed, he could feel her weight pressing down on him. He hoped that it might crush his breath away, suffocate him into unconsciousness, but she braced herself on strong arms.
Unable to move his head, he had to stare up into her face where it was suspended above his. He could feel nothing, but he saw it in her expression as she lowered that clasping, glistening orifice onto his erection.
The thought of it – he was inside her, his cock buried in that snake-tail – repelled him, but there was nothing he could do. He heard the creaking, sensed the pressure of her rising and falling weight, as she fucked him. He had to watch her face as her breath came quicker and color suffused her scales. Venom dripped from her open mouth onto his cheeks, his forehead.
At the height of her passion, while he lay inert and unfeeling beneath her, the skin along the sides of her neck fanned out into a green-and-white hood like that of a cobra. Her tail cinched around his legs again, squeezing them. He only felt the dull crushing ache in his bones.
Sated, Nadia eased her weight from him. Her forked tongue shot out against his lips in a kiss he was glad he couldn't feel.
As she moved off the futon, his helpless body was jostled around until his head was bent at a painful angle. He found that he could see himself, his body that no longer belonged to him.
His cock was a soft, limp thing against his thigh, and horror shot through him as he understood what had happened. He hadn't felt a thing, but somehow, he'd had another orgasm. In Nadia.
He wanted to gag, to cry, to scream, to run. But he couldn't move.
Nadia loomed over him again, her upper body still swaying to that rhythm he couldn't hear. The folds of her hood had retreated, but the color of her scales was still bright from her pleasure.
"Ssssthank you, Jamesss," she said. "A ssshame it hass to end like thisss."
Some small, plaintive noise escaped him. Nadia ruffled his hair soothingly and shook her head. She wrapped her long body around his again, not just his legs this time.
"You wondered why I chosssse you inssstead of thossse othersss, when you were not asss big or assss ssstrong." She did the half-shrug again. "It'ssss nothing perssssonal."
He felt the constriction. Heard a splintery cracking sound that he knew was his ribcage collapsing.
"You're sssmaller, ssskinnier. Easssier to digesssst."
With that, she opened her mouth wider than any human ever could. Her jaw unhinged. He saw her glittering fangs, saw the skin at the sides of her mouth stretch, stretch.
He thought of pictures he'd seen, pictures of snakes swallowing rats whole, even swallowing rabbits. Headfirst. Their feet and tails sticking out. The snake's sides bulging horribly.
Then her gaping maw engulfed his head, and he felt her inner muscles begin to work him down her gullet in a series of slow, convulsive gulps.