him in a headlock.
“You are chained to the bed,” she says. “You can’t go anywhere.”
“I want to see more than just your home,” he says. “It is hard for a human to spend time in one room.”
“Being trapped in a home is the life of a submissive,” she says.
“I would like to know more about your people and your people’s culture. If I am to stay here for the rest of my life I will have to fit in.”
Jujy tightens her grip around his neck. “You do not have to fit in. You just have to stay here in my house.”
“I really want to see more of your world,” Franklin says.
“No,” Jujy says, squeezing not only his neck tighter with her arm, but squeezing her legs tightly around his torso. “I am the dominant. You have to be obedient to me and do what I say. Do not speak to me now.”
“But I just think . . .”
“Don’t speak,” she says. “Just do what I say.”
Franklin opens his mouth to speak, but decides to remain silent. If he presses the matter any further he will get on her bad side. He just lies there on the bed and listens to her breathe. After a few moments, she loosens her grip and then curls her face into the crook of his neck. Her cotton candy hair tickles his nose and lips as she falls into a deep sleep.
Franklin awakes one morning because of a tickling sensation crawling up his neck and the side of his face. He was woken up several times in his sleep because of a tickling sensation on his face, which Franklin assumed in his half-consciousness was just Jujy’s cotton candy hair brushing against him during the night. But Jujy has her back to him.
Franklin wipes his face and looks down at his fingers to find six ants curled in balls on his hand. He looks around the room and spots a thick trail of black ants that flows across the floor, up the side of the bed, and under the covers.
He pulls the blanket away to discover that his chest is swarming with ants. There are dozens of them crawling all over his torso. Many of them are dead, glued to the wet sticky parts of his candy coating. Then Franklin feels the itchiness. It is more intense and irritating than ever before. He notices the trail of ants leads into the cracked area of his candy skin. He feels them crawling underneath the shell, between the candy and his skinless muscle tissue. He can see them through the green candy like it is an ant farm behind stained glass. The ants are chewing pathways through the scabby sugar cavern as if they are trying to create a new home.
Jujy wakes to Franklin screaming and frantically wiping ants from his body. His hands hover over his candy skin urging him to rip away the candy to get to the ants, but he holds back the temptation.
“They’re inside of me!” he cries.
It takes Jujy a while to realize what is happening to Franklin.
“That’s unusual,” Jujy says. “It’s ant season already?”
“How do I get them out?” Franklin runs out of the bed and trips over his chain. When he hits the floor, the crack in his hard coating breaks open wider. It rips a gash into his flesh and a pool of blood fills the cavity beneath his candy skin and oozes out of the crack.
Jujy gets out of bed and helps Franklin to his feet.
“I’ll clean them off,” she says.
Jujy pulls a harness out from under the bed and then straps it to her waist. Then she unhooks his chain from her bed and attaches the end of it to the harness. The process takes some time and Jujy moves very slowly.
“What are you doing?” he cries, tugging on the chain and wiping the ants. “Hurry! Get them out of me!”
She pulls back on his chain. “You can’t shower unless I do this.”
“Forget about the chain!” Franklin cries.
“This is the only way I can unchain you from the bedpost and keep you as my mate,” she says.
“Just hurry!” Franklin says.
As she takes him into the kitchen, Franklin grabs the doggy dish of water from the floor and pours it over his body.
“No, don’t use water,” Jujy cries. “You’ll melt the candy.”
“But aren’t you going to shower them off anyway?”
“Not with water,” she says.
In a cabinet, Jujy pulls out a hose that ends in a head similar to that of a hand shower unit. It does not spray water, but hot air.
“This is how you bathe?” Franklin asks.
She turns it on and uses it like a hairdryer on his skin.
“We only use water if we get muddy or have dried blood on our skin,” she says, “This is much safer.”
She still needs to wipe away a lot of the ants, but most of them are blown away by the hot air. She tries to get as much hot air into the crack as possible, but it doesn’t remove any of the ants. Instead, she melts the candy inside with the hot air, smothering the ants in sugary goo. Then she melts the candy around the crack in his torso. The melted sour apple fills in the crack as well as his open wound. When she is done, his candy glistens as if brand new.
“We normally don’t have too many problems with ants,” she says. “They tend to feed on the candy vegetation and only bother you if you sleep outside. I’ve never seen them go under the skin.”
Franklin nods his head. He can still feel ants crawling inside of him, but he isn’t sure if that is because of the infection, internal bleeding, or because there are still some alive in there.
Jujy agrees to take Franklin on a walk. Since he is already chained to her waist and because he has just gone through a traumatic ordeal—although Jujy doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about—he is able to persuade her into taking him outside of the house for a while.
“We’ll go into outsider territory,” she says. “Nobody who matters will be in that area. Licorice definitely avoids it.”
“What is the outsider territory?” Franklin asks, as they step outside into Jujy’s chocolate flower garden.
“It is where the undesirables live,” she says. “The people who are too gross to mate with.”
Franklin stops her.
“My cane . . .” he says.
“What?”
“I need my cane from the house,” he says. “It will help me walk.”
Jujy gets it for him.
“I can’t balance very well without it. Especially with my new legs.”
Really, Franklin just wants to have a weapon in case he needs to defend himself against candy people.
After a few minutes of trekking through some rolling cupcake hills, Franklin’s prosthetic candy leg becomes difficult to walk on.
“Your muscles are weak,” she says
“It takes a while to get used to walking on false limbs.”
“You didn’t need to remove my leg,” he says. “You could have just coated it in candy like the rest of my body.”
“It is common for submissives to have their limbs removed during the early mating periods,” she says. “It is easier to dominate one with a false leg or two.”
“You did it so that I wouldn’t be able to get away?”
Jujy nods. “It is also common for a dominant to want to eat pieces of their mate. Dominants claim their mates because they like the way they taste, so it is natural for a dominant to want to eat some of their mate. And most submissives enjoy watching their mate eat them.”
“Enjoy it? Why?”
“It is flattering,” she says. “Wouldn’t you love to see your mate enjoying your flavor? Wouldn’t that make you feel like you taste really good?”
