Content Warnings:
this is an erotic short story, including mentions of monstrous features, abilities, and appendages. All characters involved are enthusiastically consenting. This particular story includes what I can only describe as "erotic brain eating", which is exactly what it sounds like: the zombie graphically and violently eats her brains out of her head, and she gets off from it. I suppose that is technically vore? This story also includes asexual representation, which I may have done incorrectly as I am not asexual. If you feel like I really fucked that up or failed to include something important in this content warning, I have a form on my website you can fill out!
I tripped over the corpse of my boyfriend in the dark.
"Oops sorry about that," he said, continuing to press his cold, dead hands over my eyes as he attempted to shuffle us both between parked cars.
"Where are we going?" I giggled.
"You'll see in just a minute."
I obeyed his giddy instructions and stumbled what felt like halfway down the block from our car before he brought us to a standstill. I could hear people passing by us on the sidewalk and squirmed in embarrassment. I tugged on the hem of my pink miniskirt just in case it had ridden up during my blindfolded shuffle here. I wasn't wearing cute underwear today.
"Ok..." the spongey palms covering my eyes lifted. "We're here!"
I squinted in the sunlight and had to pull my sunglasses over my eyes before I could see where we were. It looked like a closed storefront at first, with peeling red paint on the door and a collage of newspapers covering the windows. It was only on closer inspection that I could see the little "open" sign on the door and that the newspapers in the windows all said the same thing in various fonts, like a ransom note:
Romero's Books - The Museum of Fond Memories.
"What is this?"
"Our date," my boyfriend said, jumping ahead of me to open the door.
He was strangely beautiful despite being so dead. Most of the year, he had to wear a slightly creepy human-looking mask when we went out, but during October or when comic book conventions were in town, we could pretend he was just wearing an elaborate costume. Through some magical or chemical process he couldn't explain, his skin had turned these really pretty shades of pink, purple, and bluish-greenish-grayish after he died. The skin and muscle had peeled in layers that thankfully hid the underlying bones and other gooey things. The blonde hair he'd had in life was mostly gone, but a few long strands remained that had turned the most vibrant yellow I'd ever seen. All his colors and textures combined into something arresting and undeniably horrifying, until you looked in his eyes. Kind, happy,
human
eyes that made all the difference always pulled attention away from the grotesqueness of his face. Even when he went out like this in all his macabre glory, little kids would run up to inspect his "costume". I'd even had to fend off a few girls flirting with him, which mostly just made me feel better that I wasn't absolutely sick for dating a zombie.
"Come on!" he said excitedly, motioning through the door.
I walked into... a hoarder's house? Shelves listing to one side or the other were filled to the absolute brim with books and magazines, more books stacked on the floors and in old milk crates. Strange antique figurines and toys were scattered everywhere. Right beside the door was an absolutely horrifying giant easter bunny with fur worn off in all the wrong places to expose the discolored plastic beneath. The whole store smelled old and musty and I loved it.
"
What is this place?
" I whispered.
"A bookstore-slash-thrift-store-slash-fire-hazard," my amazing boyfriend said, as if he'd plucked the fantasy right out of my head. "It's also BYOT."
He waved the two teabags he'd brought from our stash at home and then pointed off to the side where a small electric kettle waited next to a sink and shelves of the strangest collection of mugs I'd ever seen. I stumbled once again, over my own feet this time, as he urged me over to the tea stand and set about filling and turning on the kettle.
"I'll pick your mug if you'll pick mine," he murmured into my ear.
I shivered at the raspy low note no living human throat could make and surveyed the three shelves of mugs. Next to a mug stamped all over with Weird Al's face was what looked like a piggy bank with a handle, which was under a plain white mug etched with the official seal of Omaha, Nebraska. There were mugs shaped like animals and strange objects, mugs with old froot loops glued to them like a child's arts project, and even a mug that appeared almost radioactive, its glow-in-the-dark paint was so strong. After a careful examination of my options, I picked one that looked like a fish with its giant mouth open wide for my boyfriend. There was a little infuser attached to it by a fishhook that looked like those red bobbing ball things on fishing lines. He laughed and gave me one shaped like those little King's Cake plastic babies, with a detachable skull for sipping. He knew me so well.
"We have all day," he promised once our teas were ready and I was taking in the cluttered, crowded bookstore. "Just make sure you don't take too long in this front room."
"Why? What's in the back?"
He grinned, showing off his blackened, sharp teeth, and said, "The largest cassette collection I've ever seen."
My mouth popped open. Tea, books, thrifting,
and
cassettes?!
"You are
so
getting laid tonight," I told him seriously.
He laughed as he took my free hand with his and led me down the first of many aisles. 'Getting laid' and other hetero couple phrases like that were our own little inside joke that none of our friends understood. I was asexual, and while I'd had sex before and every once in a while the mood to get off by myself struck, I wasn't all that interested in a sexual relationship. Which was good because apparently sex drives didn't survive the undeath process. He'd once told me that eating brains-even the refrigerated, donated-to-science ones he ate-felt better than any orgasm he'd had while he was alive. I might not be sick for finding him attractive, but I was definitely sick for how his descriptions of it had once turned me on enough to want some
me time.
It was one of the best dates I'd ever been on. By the time we were back in the car, I had a big canvas bag of goodies in my lap and the same giant smile I'd been wearing for hours. There were some really
really
good tapes in the back. And I'd found a vintage hifi deck I'd been scouring ebay for that was in pristine condition. After a thorough shower at home to get the thrift-store cooties off me, the deal was sealed by a cozy cuddle sesh in bed with my favorite book and my favorite guy reading over my shoulder.
He was the most thoughtful person I'd ever been with. I'd always been the insecure type, randomly wondering if my friends were mad at me or if my partners really loved me. I used to have to ask constantly for validation that I was wanted. Which was especially hard for my partners to give me when I couldn't even define what "wanted" meant if sex wasn't involved. There wasn't a playbook out there for being in a nonsexual romantic relationship, which made it hard to know if I was doing it "right". It was so easy to tell myself that a better girlfriend would have sex anyway, would
want
sex. For the longest time, I hadn't been able to tell if I was really wanted or just tolerated, or even how to ask for someone to show me that I mattered to them.
Then he showed up. Death might've stopped a lot of things in their tracks, but not his capacity for love. He was thoughtful and expressive and observant. He was constantly finding new ways to show me how much he loved me. And even better, he wasn't afraid to show me how much
my
love mattered to
him.
It wasn't until I met him that I realized what I'd really needed wasn't some excessive display of my partners' love for me, but proof that the love I had for them was enough. He basked in my affection like a cat in the sunny spot, and that made it so much easier to do the same with his affection for me.
In a lot of ways, he was like having a cat. There were some gross parts—the brains in the freezer, the occasional weird stain on the carpet—and some annoying ones like his constant humming of this unearthly song only he could hear and his inability to put his dirty clothes in the hamper. But there was no substitute for that kind of love and companionship. Plus, he could do this really soothing purr thing, like he was doing now while we snuggled. It was every girl's dream to have a devoted cat for a boyfriend and I'd won the lottery because he was really great at planning dates too.
So there wasn't a doubt in my body when I closed my book, rolled over to look him in his kind, still-human eyes, and said, "You know that question you asked me?"
A sharp-toothed smile spread too-wide over his face. "Yeah?"
"I'm ready."
[outfit]
"You sure about this?" he whispered as he slid in close beside me on the bed until our faces were almost touching on the pillow we shared.
I looked at his strange, gorgeous face. The way his skin was as poreless and smooth now as a movie star's, but strangely textured from the way it sat in visible, shedding layers. It wasn't ugly like a snake's skin halfway sloughed off or a butterfly struggling out of its chrysalis. Each layer in dazzling shades of purple, pink, and teal was vibrant and, well... alive was the wrong word, but
animated
. I would be just as jarringly beautiful, when this was done. I asked him, when he proposed, and he said all zombies looked like him. With his polished obsidian teeth and his poison frog skin and his lovely still-human eyes. All the inconveniences of human life—bathrooms, periods, plucking stray chin hairs—would be gone, all the risks of mortality too. I would be sustained by human brains, consumed only a few times a year in great ecstasy. I would be beautiful and terrifying and loved for eternity. Immortal with the man I loved more than I'd thought I was capable of loving someone else.
"I'm sure," I whispered back. It had been months of questions and research and carefully obfuscated conversations with my friends and family. I'd wanted to say yes the moment he got on one knee and asked me, but he'd made me wait to be sure. And I was so,
so
sure.
Gentle, spongy-soft hands cupped my cheeks as he shuffled even closer. We touched from feet to chest to nose now, and I concentrated on the feeling of his sleeve scratching against my bare forearm and his socked toes rubbing against mine. These were my final living moments. What would this feel like after I died?
I listened to my breaths move my lungs, noticed how wide my ribs expanded with each inhale. I felt my pulse fluttering in my throat and, oddly, one of the muscles in my right leg. There was a little blip in my stomach where the beginnings of hunger for dinner in an hour or two stirred. And of course the moment I directed my attention southward, my nervous little bladder made itself known.
What if I peed myself when I died?!
"Wait!" I hissed. He froze. "I, um, need to pee."
He laughed and let me scurry out of bed to the bathroom. Looking at the towels hanging on the rack reminded me that this probably did need a bit of preparation before I died all over my favorite blanket. A fluttery queasiness filled me the longer I thought about how
