Brittany “Brit” Holloway followed her husband’s affair to a doorway on Halloween night, then followed a stranger’s flyer up a hill to a house she’d never once noticed, despite knowing every historic property on that street. The man who calls himself Mayank — the moon of unfulfilled dreams — has shown her a crystal ball, and a version of her own marriage she doesn’t want to believe.

He also has the one thing two years of trying never gave her. He has just finished telling her exactly what it will cost.

“The future,” I said.

“Yes.”

“A child,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You can give me that.”

“I can.”

“In exchange for what.”

He said it plainly, no theater in it at all. His seed. My body. Tonight, and as many nights as it took. He would keep me until I was pregnant, and then I would go home the morning after Halloween, my own time, no days lost from the life I’d left. Nine months before the following Halloween, I would make my husband finish inside me. The child would come the next Halloween.

The door was behind me. I was free to leave. If I left, I left with nothing.

I looked at the door. I looked at my bangles.

I didn’t get up.

He crossed the room to where I sat. He stood close enough that I felt the warmth coming off him, not quite an ordinary body’s warmth, something more than that, and raised one hand to push my wet hair back from my face, his palm against my cheek, his dark self-lit eyes holding mine.

“Say no and walk out,” he said.

I did neither.

He bent his head and closed his mouth over my breast through the wet silk of my blouse.

Not tentative. Not building toward anything. He clamped onto me the way something hungry closes on what it’s finally been given, his lips hard around my nipple through the soaked cloth, his tongue pressing the fabric flat against the stiff peak, and the heat of it went straight from my nipple to my pussy without asking my mind’s permission. Between my legs I felt myself flood in immediate answer, a rush of wet that had nothing to do with thought and everything to do with the sheer fact of being wanted like this.

I put my hand on the back of his head.

He pulled back only long enough to strip the wet clothes from me, efficient, not reverent, an obstacle being cleared rather than a ritual being observed, and stopped being efficient the moment my breasts came free.

He took my right breast in both hands and put his mouth on it and sucked like something starving, pulling hard on the nipple, his tongue working the stiffened tip while his other hand found my left breast and squeezed, thumb circling the peak. He went from one to the other and back, relentless, no pattern I could predict, no gentleness in any of it, not worship, just appetite, taking because he wanted and because nothing was stopping him. I’d never felt my own breasts respond like this, every pull of his mouth landing somewhere between my legs like a wire ran direct from one to the other.

He untied my lehenga and it pooled by my feet. My panties followed. My pussy was already soaked, slick running down the inside of both thighs, and I was grinding against nothing, against air, just to give the feeling somewhere to go.

“Please,” I heard myself say, not sure yet what I was asking for.

He stepped back and shrugged the robe off his shoulders in one motion, unhurried about it in a way that was somehow more unsettling than urgency would have been, and let it drop where it fell. I understood, looking at him for the first time without anything between us, exactly what I’d agreed to. He was longer and thicker than any man I’d been with before, not performed, not displayed, just present and significant enough that seeing him produced want and genuine physical apprehension in the same instant, neither one changing my mind.

Continue the story in Trick and Treat.

All images are AI generated and do not depict any real person.