Thresholds [18+]
A beast lurks within the mountains, mythos recalls. Though, for a young couple full of emotional and sexual charge, a good thrill might push them to a new peak.
A beast lurks within the mountains, mythos recalls. Though, for a young couple full of emotional and sexual charge, a good thrill might push them to a new peak.
Edited by wellifimust and Psydrosis.
Thumbnail art used under CC0 license.
Word count: 3,018
When you're trying to hide, your stifled breath blows like the winds of a tornado. Fallen twigs crack underfoot like thunder claps. You scramble desperately through the dark under the weight of something evil stalking you with omniscient eyes, waiting for its chance to strike.
Furless, yellow skin suffused with the darkness of frostbite. A giant's frame, standing three feet taller than myself. Long, gangly arms to reach me from twice that distance, yet strong enough to knock me out with one swing. A piercing, ghastly scream that could flatten quarter-century-old trees as if they were dominos: the kind of shriek I just heard behind me.
I'll admit, I hadn't seen this monster. I knew this all from my boyfriend, who dragged me out here at midnight--half-against my will--and snuck away at the rustling of some bushes, leaving me to creep around like I wasn't about to soak my pants.
My night vision is horrible. Sprinting my way through the forest, I prayed I had the adrenaline-boosted footspeed to outpace whatever could be trailing behind without crashing into a tree.
Suddenly, something caught my foot. I squealed in panic as I stumbled and crashed face first into...a pile of leaves.
Racing footsteps crunched through the leaves behind me.
Quickly--arms flailing in a sea of foliage, cursing my species for my lackluster vision, cursing my poor diet for provoking a hungry beast, cursing my boyfriend for--
Something pounced on me. In a fit of panic, I hissed, trying to squirm away. A paw landed on my head, surely preparing to tear through my scalp, before yanking aside as I swung and caught its fur.
"Ow, Riley!" a tenor voice called. "Watch the claws, hun!"
Heavy breaths caught in my throat as I smelled sugary maple over the funky scent of dirt and leaves. I half-turned under the body and felt along the hand: more fur, then a frill of fabric. A pair of glasses caught a glimmer of moonlight. I relaxed as my boyfriend, Casey, stroked along my side.
"Easy, easy...I didn't mean to spook ya!" I gawked through the dark, scrutinizing the form of his glasses to the curve of his muzzle below. "I called out a couple times, but you just kept running! You went full tunnel vision, but, like, for noise!"
I scowled, not knowing if he could properly see either. "Why the hell did you scream like that!?" I gasped, panting heavily.
"Asserting dominance. Pacifying wildlife. Didn't we watch the cryptid hunting video?" he chided.
"Yeah! It was..." I shut my eyes and exhaled. "I didn't want nightmares! I stopped paying attention!"
Casey sighed, then wrapped his paw around my shoulders and hugged me. After a tight squeeze, he loosened up and cuddled in the crook of my arm. "Fine. I think you'll be okay anyway if you sprint that fast; I could barely keep up!"
I swatted at him: this time, playfully. "Yeah, see? I'm speedy!"
"Sure proved me wrong! A bit shocking, considering you're the one with tits!" he quipped.
I figured where he would go with this. Every teasing opportunity was a chance to launch into sex puns. "Shut up."
"Aw, don't get all riled up! You know I love your rack!" he added, arousal creeping into his ironic tone as he prodded my ear with his muzzle. "I didn't know you could play that rough, though. How you would fight if I tied you to a tree, forced you to cum in me..."
"Casey!"
He persisted with that stupid sultry voice. "Gives me the hots, y'know? Out here, exposed to the elements with a squirmy possum," he uttered, snickering under his breath, "who better hope the scent of his sweaty balls doesn't attract some heinous-"
We both froze. Something dropped into the leaves a distance away.
When Casey and I met, he goaded me with the same ruthless bite.
It was sometime that April--a rainy Friday, I think. I was a couple months into my delivery job: twenty-four years old, so I could hoist packages pretty well, despite my waistline looking even worse then. Anyhow, Casey was a nursing student at the prestigious Sully University.
I was delivering supplies to the back of the Masa Ryuu Building when a tall, slim otter struck up a conversation with me in the midst of a walk. His charisma tugged me on through a discussion of my job, his next class, and the weather, when he shrewdly snuck in a proposal to meet at the local café.
Four hours later, he arrived a couple minutes late and slid into the opposite chair. Elbow down on the table. Sharp, rectangular glasses atop his muzzle, behind which a pair of piercing blue eyes seemed to challenge me.
"I know you're a bottom," he blurted.
I blinked. "Hello to you, too."
He continued, unfazed. "The question is if you wanna get fucked. I'm not gonna do that." Those eyes shined like a magician preparing to guess my card. "But you can fuck me."
He leaned forward and explained like he was hatching a plan in a spy movie. "The men's door has a lock on it. Harley keeps some condoms tucked in the third stall's toilet paper dispenser--the plastic clicks off if you grip it right. Obviously, you can clean up afterwards. If someone knocks, I can yell that the urinals are faulty. That sound good? I've got roommates. We can't do it at my place."
"I...okay."
I was twenty-four. Gosh, what was I supposed to say to a proposal like that?
"Good. One more thing." His eyes slid away as he whispered, "you okay with fucking a boy's muff?"
The Givry Horror--the beast we were searching for during the night in the woods--was first spotted by late-nineteenth century researchers in a valley between the dueling peaks of the Tehlben Mountains. A quarter after midnight, deep into the winter months, a series of pained, rumbling moans awoke the small team of arctic foxes. Once the five crept outside, they discovered a large fellow of indeterminate species, crouched by a nearby tree, quivering in the cold. The expedition leader trode forward to investigate.
According to team member, Denis Barbarov, the beast bent its crooked, grisly face towards their chief. In an instant, it dove towards him and tore through his body before he could even make a sound.
Barbarov sprinted as fast as he could, away from the wretched screams of his abandoned friends. Completely off trail and in the dark, Denis lost his footing and plunged twenty feet into hard snow. He awoke in a nearby hospital the evening after a search party found him...and no one else.
Barbarov is either thought to have been a liar--pathologically or honestly--or a victim of suggestion. Potentially, those who interviewed a confused, bedridden fox wanted to believe that a supernatural presence possessed the mountains around that small town.
Nevertheless, Barbarov's testimony remained consistent throughout his life. Other expeditioners reported similar, yet far less bombastic, stories of a giant, yellow-skinned beast lurking even in the woodland below.
That image of a yellow-skinned, sharp-clawed murderer, is what led hobbyist cryptid hunter Casey Woodrow to the scene. He was gonna be a nurse, and he had to know what was possible in terms of biology--even life on the very cusp of realism. He believed in the Givry Horror, much like he believed in the possibility of lake monsters and bug people hiding in unexplored, uninhabited regions of the world.
He also believed in scaring me with this stuff.
I got used to it. We'd curl up on the bed of his apartment, laptop across his thighs, when he'd ask me if I wanted to "visit some lore". I usually agreed just to please him.
It was simple; we'd order a pizza, view another video in his repertoire, then cuddle quietly. Minutes to hours later, we'd be watching some silly sitcom when he'd try to get frisky: either sliding his arms around my sides, tickling me until I was squirming away, or simply reaching in the nightstand, quietly, and pulling out a condom.
This was an odd dynamic, three months in. We fucked after most dates, but I never managed to finish in him.
I was fine with it. He was so cute, stretched out over me, glasses askew, mouth ajar, working himself over me until he climaxed. When he got tired, he'd slide off my dick and jerk me off into the rubber, rubbing my belly with his other paw and encouraging me like I was some kind of pet.
I offered to change positions, every time, but he always declined. We always had to watch his videos, and I always had to lie flat on my back during sex; this pushiness was one of the reasons we eventually broke this relationship off. But, he challenged me in ways no one else did.
My gay friends wouldn't shut up about how gross they thought vaginas were. We were all still young, I guess: still looking for an outlet for this identity that our parents couldn't understand. My straight friends, on the other hand, seemed to go on for hours about their deepest fantasies, coveting the vulva like a sacred relic. Casey didn't say a word about his parts, so neither did I. My friends knew my boyfriend from what he presented to them: a quiet, witty otter who might've been a little out of my league.
But, anyway: after a few months, Casey went back to school in the fall, and we only saw each other through pictures and the occasional weekend off.
A couple weeks into October, he sent me a proposal: over the upcoming break, we could head to his hometown of Givry and meet his parents. He also wanted me, his boyfriend and "partner-in-crime", to hike out into the woods and settle a bet with one of his friends about a certain monster.
Casey was my first boyfriend, so I felt like I had to legitimize something in our relationship. It seemed like another challenge: like he was daring me to surrender and reveal myself as anyone who wasn't the possum he wanted. I was persistent by this point.
When his break hit, I took a few days off to travel. We flew a couple hours down to the chilly city on a commercial plane, staring out at the dark pine trees on a white canvas of snow leading down the mountain range, to a sea of golden leaves beneath their skeletal branches.
His parents were remarkable, if slightly less mysterious people: just an aging couple of otters housed in a hard maple cabin, supportive of their son's identity and sexuality in spite of the crosses on their necklaces. They let us lodge in Casey's old bedroom, and told us we could get up to anything as long as we didn't make any noise or break anything.
The next night, Casey stocked up his backpack with a night vision camcorder, flashlights, water bottles, jackets, makeshift first aid equipment, a bag of chips, and any other arbitrary item. At eleven-thirty, we threw on our dark hoodies and crept out the front door of a sleeping house before hopping in his dad's truck.
We stared towards the rustling noise. His warm breath blew steadily against my whiskers. "Riley," he whispered, "did you hear that?"
I didn't know if he could actually see me. As quietly as I could muster, I spat, "Yes!"
A couple seconds passed. My mind began to sprint ahead. Was this the beast? Was it something else? Should we run away? Play dead in the leaves?
He slid off me. Then I heard a package tearing open. In a swift movement, his cold paw pads were squeezing under the waist of my pants.
"What are you doing!?" I hissed.
"Shh!" His finger was against my muzzle. "Just get me off!"
"What!?"
He groped about until he found my dick, then clutched it tight under my knit pants, finding my foreskin and sliding it down. "C'mon!" Casey urged. "I brought condoms! I'm right in the middle of my cycle--it can probably smell my heat--I just..."
My heart was still pounding. His weird, misplaced pleading had me hard in an instant. He hastily snagged my underwear down, leaving nothing between my fur and the leaves below, before sliding the rim of a condom around my growing erection.
He shuffled around quickly in the leaves, and I felt his densely-furred thighs drop into my fingers. A barely perceptible shadow of his arm slid up and down as he played with himself, culminating in the faintest sounds of splashing: a hallmark of each thrilling session where he got off, and I got so, so close. He climbed over my thighs and huffed before slowly sliding onto me.
I gasped. Quickly, the sound was cut short by his paw landing on my neck, pressing my muzzle up, forcing me to channel it into a quiet whimper. The other hand clamped onto one of my pecs, kneading it like dough, coaxing me into letting him take control as I always did.
"There ya go, big guy," he cooed, working his hips in slight, teasing movements.
A gust of wind brushed leaves across my headfur, eliciting a shiver. I reflexively shut my eyes as his walls clenched down on my length, producing a deep, involuntary moan from me followed by a quick, breathless shudder and a tighter grip into his thighs. I was nothing more than an instrument beneath him. This didn't stop my nose's attempts to probe for threats, but that made its job more difficult.
His paw moved from my neck to join the other on my chest, finally travelling together down the hill of my torso. He massaged my body with every slight push up my length, before each faster, cathartic thrust down met his palms at the base of my fur. I tried to focus on his face, but saw hardly more than an obscured, fuzzy outline, so I closed my eyes. There, I started to really relax.
His sharp scent was maple syrup over the earthy mass of fallen leaves. I imagined his concentrated face in the warm glow of his apartment's lamp, working to get me off. The fixation he had--so fascinated by my body, with the control to get me close, yet never over the edge.
"Almost there?" he asked softly, glasses awry, under the backdrop of the white roof of his room.
I opened my eyes to glimpse more of his brown silhouette revealed under the stars. He smirked a little. "Riley?"
I looked past him to the night sky. Innumerable stars glimmered at the brink of my poor vision: a dull sensation next to the warmth of his walls drawing me onwards, like it was sneaking me through a barrier that I never managed to cross before.
"Uh huh," I murmured, so quietly that I was surprised he nodded.
Another wave of luxury spread through my groin. I shut my eyes and leaned back into the leaves, groaning louder, trying to buck further into him, before he pushed roughly on my pelvis.
"Someone's coming!" he whispered, frantically.
I cracked an eye open. "Are you? I-"
A wave of leaves clustered over my face. I sputtered and attempted to claw them away, until a weight landed on my arms. It was Casey fighting my thrashing: quieting me from the ambling footsteps of the beast.
My heart raced again. I was so deep in him, throbbing, straining through the beginnings of my orgasm.
"Mrrrf!" I squeaked, before a blinding light shone through the leaves above me.
My boyfriend's paw snapped closed on my startled muzzle as he jerked his hips and rode me through my volcanic, blissful climax.
After minutes of holding my breath, it seemed, desperately suppressing noise over the span of my orgasm, the bright light left, and the footsteps slowly continued down the trail. Several seconds elapsed while the sound receded and Casey brushed the foliage off of my gasping face.
Through my confusion, Casey resumed bouncing up and down on my cock, panting softly, before he moaned, deep and savory, and pulsated against my length. He sighed in contentment, and mellowed his thrusts like a receding tide. In the resulting silence, he dropped onto me.
"That feel good?" he murmured, tracing lines through my arm fur.
I was half-flaccid inside of him, but it felt nice just to have that warmth around me. I laced a paw around his back. "Yeah...that ruled."
Abruptly, he lifted himself away.
"Gotcha," he taunted.
I squinted at him. "Huh?"
"Okay, well...first off, that was the park ranger. He's an old bear; hardly even sees anymore." He peeled the condom off my dick quickly enough that I flinched. "Second: I don't know what you thought, but the Horror isn't real. Really? A lanky yellow boogeyman? This thing lives in the mountains. It's been around for a century."
"Ah-"
"And another thing: I don't even have an estrous cycle!" He stepped off of me, brushing down his pants with a swishing of his paws. "Gosh, Riley, you're so gullible. You seriously thought you, as my boyfriend, just...didn't know about that?"
I propped myself up on my elbows, finally fading out of the afterglow. "I don't know! Why would you lie about that?" I gazed around in the pitch black, aimlessly. "Why are we out here?"
Casey didn't answer, I thought, until I realized the shadow of a paw he held out for me. I grasped it and stumbled up through the undergrowth, shaking leaves out of my sweater. Suddenly, his elbows draped across my shoulders, wrapped around my neck, and pulled me into a firm hug. His muzzle poked softly at mine before tempting it into a sweet, sappy kiss. I sighed through it and cuddled him back.
When our tongues separated, we stayed close in our embrace--so close that his hot breath tickled the fur on my snout.
"I had to push you over the edge," he answered, clearly self-satisfied. "Let's head on home."