Sweet Romance16 min read
My Tail Tied to a Stranger (and the Hotel That Burned)
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"I can't be real," I said out loud, though the room already smelled like smoke and lavender and the impossible.
"You're very real," the man said, and his voice made the lamp-light lean toward him like it wanted to hear better.
When I first woke I thought my stomach ached from a dream. "Is it—" I started, reaching down.
"Don't," the man said, and the word pressed against my teeth like a lid.
My hand hit cool scales. "What the—"
"Hold still and breathe," he told me. "Talk less."
I had no words that could stand up to the sight of a black, slick tail where my legs should be. The tail wrapped around the bed, then around me, then decided the mattress was inadequate and crept toward the window. I tried to scream, and only a rusty, hissing sound came out.
"You're panicking," he said. "You need to listen."
"Who are you?" I said, voice gone tiny.
He smiled like he could read me through my skin. "Jett."
"Jett who?" I asked.
"Jett Barlow." He offered me a hand and when I looked, his wrist was white as if his skin had never seen sun. "Do you trust me?"
"No," I said. "But I don't have a choice."
"You sound like a human," he said mildly. "Good. Keep that."
I let him pick me up by the waist—awkward, foreign—and the tail slid against his white leg the way a string curls against a flute. "Why are you here?" I asked when we had enough space between me and the bed for my lungs to try again.
"Because you changed tonight," he said. "And because the rest of them smell what you are now."
"Smell what I am?" I laughed, the sound small and brittle. "I'm Maki Pereira. I'm a barista. I don't—"
His eyes cut me off. "It will not help to be clever. Come."
Outside, the world sounded wrong—glass thumping, something hitting wood with the sick smack of hunger. Thousands of bodies slid like a tide against my window. They were not children of the human nights. They were scales and feathers and fur, and hundreds of them were all trying to get inside because I had an invitation they could feel in the air: a new tail.
"Those are snakes," I said. "Outside."
"Not all snakes," Jett said. "But many." He drew the curtain. In the dim gray a dozen patterns writhed at the glass. A man with half-bird, half-human shoulders sailed between branches like a shadow and cried down, "Find the one with the scent!" The whole sky felt hungry.
"Are my parents—" I began.
"Safe," he said. He sounded like a stone someone had knocked loose. "For now. We must go."
The window broke, and in the rush of air and glass he threw me in a hug that smelled like orchids and winter. "No looking," he ordered, as if the pieces could decide to knit themselves back together if I watched.
"Don't tell me to not look!" I whispered. "I need to understand."
"You'll understand later," he said. "Now hold on."
"Hold on to what?"
"To me."
He carried me down the outside like a man lowering a lamp. We hit the ground with a soft, controlled thud. He smiled, a flash that had teeth in it, and then his long white tail uncoiled and turned into two pale human legs that took him to a waiting vehicle. "This will keep us moving," he told me. "It will hold you."
"Is it normal to be turned into a—this?" I groped for the word.
He took the sugar of my panic and made it small. "No. But you are alive. Be grateful."
We drove under a sky that still hissed with bodies. He did not speak much in the car. At a red light he glanced at me and said, "You will not be the same person you were."
"Do you mean 'person' like human? Or like the one who paid rent and drank cheap coffee?"
"You will be what you are," he said. "The rest is negotiable."
"Where are you taking me?" I asked.
"Somewhere neutral," he replied. "You need shelter, and you need to learn the rules."
"Rules?"
"One: don't trust the hotel called 'No-Worry.' Two: remember that many of them are not what you think. Three: if anyone tells you they are your friend because you are new, check their teeth."
I snorted. "Charming. And if some bird-man snatches me and eats me?"
"Then you sing him a lullaby and he falls asleep," Jett said dryly. "But more likely he will sell you a drink you shouldn't have."
That night he carried me into a place that was a cave and a house both. It smelled like orchids and old pages and something iron. He set me on a bed and made tea even though my tail was still adjusting to gravity.
"Who are you?" I asked again, what else to do?
He sat across from me and watched me with the slow patience of someone who has watched storms cool. "I'm old in ways you don't understand," he said. "I was born among coils and scales; I learned human shape because it helps. I was sent because you were born tonight into a pattern that calls to others."
"Sent by who?"
"The council? The elders? Names are stories people tell themselves." He laughed, half bitter, half soft. "Call me what you will. Jett is easiest."
"So you're salvar—guardian? Or the kidnapper?"
He took a long breath. "Neither. Consider me... an acquaintance who does favors."
"Do favors?" I laughed. "You just threw me out a window."
"That was for your safety," he said, unrepentant. "And I will not take the credit for theatrics."
We argued until the sun-panel lamp clicked off. He taught me to breathe without moving my hips, to imagine walking when my muscles wanted only to writhe. He touched the end of my tail and the scales shivered under his finger like pages.
"You'll have to hunt," he said. "You will probably hate me when I teach you. You'll hate yourself sometimes more."
"How can you know that?" I asked.
"Because you are human enough to recall shame," he said. "Because I remember it in myself."
"Do you regret?" I whispered.
"Sometimes," Jett said, and frowned like regret had a flavor. "Sometimes I wish I could have been a rock and not a thing that feels."
"Then why help me?"
"Because I heard you sob when you first twitched," he said. "Because your fear sounded like a song I remembered."
We lived in cycles of training. He made me kill rabbits and lambs and small things to find the hard thread in me. I refused at first.
"I won't do it," I said once, hands shaking around the handle of a dull knife.
"Then you will watch," he said. "Then you'll watch me finish what I started."
"Why do you make me watch?" I demanded.
"Because this world counts by proof," Jett said. "Here, actions weigh more than words. To be a snake is to own that which you can take."
The first time he forced me close to the rabbit the rabbit screamed and my hands trembled and I cried. He laughed bark-soft and then was brutal. "You will not spare weakness," he said, and forced me until my skin hurt. Afterward he held me like a thief hiding in daylight.
"Does it make you hard?" I asked through my tears.
"It makes me keep breathing," he answered.
A month passed in unrecognizable ways. My tail learned to hold a fork; my tail learned to pick up a cup. I found shame and hunger in places my heart had never gone. I found, too, small things that climbed into me like warm water: when he laughed and tucked a stray curl behind my ear; when his cold hand warmed when he saw me shiver; when one midnight he wrapped me in his white tail like a blanket and told me a story about a child who survived a storm.
"Do you like me?" I asked him once, in a voice that sounded like a child's.
"Yes," he said without hesitation. "In all the ways that are useful and useless."
"Useful and useless?" I echoed.
"You'll learn," he said. "And you'll teach me to be less of a stranger."
He taught me to speak the whistle that calmed the smaller serpents. He taught me to coax the venom-silk from my own mouth the way a woman sings a lullaby.
"Play it now," he often said, hovering near like a hawk testing a wind.
"Do you want me to make them sleepy?" I asked.
"Make them listen," he said.
I blew. The notes were wrong at first, and more than once I had the hollow feeling of a glass with a crack. But the snakes slowed, and their heads turned. The sound hummed through the bones in my tail and calmed the small ones. Jett's smile, when it came, was a small, honest thing.
"You used to be a child who hid in light," he murmured once. "You still are."
"Do you ever want to be a child again?" I asked.
He considered. "Only when you forget to pull your tail through a doorway. Then I laugh like a child."
We were not alone in our small truce. There was a world above—No-Worry Hotel—an ugly contradiction: bright chandeliers, velvet and cages, dinner plates with lives still in them. The hotel ran on the currency of fear and the auction of bodies. "They sell spectacle," Jett said. "They profit off of the thrill of watching."
"We should destroy it," I said once, more hope than plan.
"We will not," he answered. "Not yet. You are a new kind of trouble. We have to be careful."
I was less careful than he hoped. The hotel had eyes everywhere. By mistake I let a thought slip to a stranger and word moved faster than I did. Soon, there were men and women—beastfolk and predators—who spoke of me, of a new animal with a human mind. They made wagers on when I would break.
"You're in danger," Jett said simply one night as the lavender-scented air around his bed stiffened. "They have hired a tiger to push us out."
"Why would a tiger care about me?" I asked.
"Because he thinks he can be famous," Jett said. "Because he believes you are worth the show."
"Then we will avoid him," I said.
"We will not," he said.
A tiger named Dalton Newton—tall, broad-shouldered, and all teeth—found us at the edge of town. He came into the room like a storm in a suit, with a retinue and bad manners. "You took something of mine," he told Jett with a voice like gloves sliding across iron. "Return it."
"I don't know you," I said.
"Don't be clever," he said. "Bring the new one out."
"You're absurd," Jett replied. "She does not belong to you."
He made a show of bargaining. He made a show of menace. I learned in the way a lion learns to watch the sun—by feeling heat first. When Dalton stepped too close, Jett struck like a viper and the two tangled in a burst of claws and scale. I wanted to turn away, but something small in me leaned forward and watched two beings I had begun to love fight for me like territory.
We did not kill him. We couldn't, not then. He left bleeding and loud. But something changed in the hotel gossip; the stakes were raised.
"People like to see others punished for their cruelty," Jett said later.
"Do you think we can punish them?" I asked.
He touched the tip of my tail as if it were an instrument. "We can," he said.
We grew bolder. I learned the taste of raw meat and the whisper of a crowd at a spectacle. I learned, darkly, how it felt to be an object of hunger and to make others understand that hunger had a face, not just a shadow.
When I stood before the No-Worry Hotel again, this time with a plan, I felt like a different person and not a person at all. We had gathered allies: Andreas Chaney, a man kept as "pet" and now free-eyed with anger; Angelina Morris, a fox-matriarch with a network of information; Marina Crane, a woman in the hotel's staff who had a ledger and a conscience she did not know how to keep.
"Tell me again the plan," I said that night, my voice sober and thin.
Angelina smiled, teeth pale and clever. "We release the cameras." She touched the wall. "We have a mirror installed behind the glass. The guests think they watch you privately. We will make them watch themselves."
"And then?" Marina asked, clutching a single ledger page she had stolen.
"And then we tell everyone who the hotel really is," Andreas said. "We bring the truth out as if it were a lamp into smoke."
"Public punishment," I said.
"Yes," Jett answered. "When the prey turns the table, it is not mercy the crowd will ask for. They will want spectacle." He turned to me, and for a breath he looked afraid. "Are you ready for blood and truth?"
"I am tired of being hunted," I said. "Do it."
We moved like thieves. On the night of the auction, I was set to be shown as the new curiosity; my human parts would be displayed, my tail coiled beneath my dress. They thought they owned the moment like a jewel. They were wrong.
The hall of the hotel sat full of patrons: tiger men with lacquered claws, eagles with their hungry eyes, a pair of crocodiles smirking over wine. The chandeliers poured their warm judgment down. I stood on the stage as the auctioneer trimmed his moustache and introduced me like a problem for their appetites.
"She is different," he crooned. "Unique. Exotic. Live entertainment."
Jett slipped into the back like a shadow. Andreas, Angelina, and Marina were where they needed to be—Angelina flitting among the VIPs with flattery and poison smiles; Marina at the desk with the ledger, thumbs ready on the proof; Andreas, who once had been caged, now free, holding one camera.
"We go on," the auctioneer said.
"Not yet," I said, lifting my chin. I had a microphone hidden in a ribbon, but I did not need it. I had done other things to the little whispers of the hotel: small bribes, a leaked key to a hidden mirror, a list of names that had sown disease. The crowd thought I was weak. The lights dimmed, then brightened. Giant screens around the hall flickered—supposedly to show the "private viewing" they paid for.
At first the screens showed what they wanted—my body, my tail—close enough for the oils to glisten. Then it did something only a liar's ledger could do: it showed the ledger itself, Marina's single page of transactions. It reflected the hotel, the staff, and the patrons—not as predators but as predators caught in the act.
The first image that filled the wall was Marina's face close to a ledger: names and amounts, nights and payments, dates when families had arrived and never left. The camera panned and showed the basement rooms where the "failures" were thrown. The footage was crude: a woman pinned, a snake convulsing, a line of torchlight.
For a moment a hush like a falling curtain seized the room. Then the lights cut to the outdoor cam: the No-Worry Hotel's owner—Marina's superior—pouring a vial over a bound woman's tail and igniting it. The crackle of fire filled the enormous hall, but the fire was on-screen; in the hall the only heat was the blood rising in the patrons' faces.
A voice rang out from the video: "Let the failures burn." It was not a dream. It was real.
A gasp.
"That's not—" the auctioneer began, flustered.
"Shut up," Angelina hissed from somewhere among the velvet seats, suddenly as cold as glass.
My own voice fluttered into the silence, amplified by a small charm. "You think you watched the suffering because you could not help it. You think yourself a judge. You are not the judge. You are the spectacle."
There was a moment when a tiger's laugh tried to start itself up again, but it choked on its own dignity. The cameras rolled footage of patrons in the act—counting money for a blood ritual, high-fiving over a new "specimen," laughing at the caged eyes of a woman who would not survive the night.
"That's slander!" some of them howled.
"Is it?" Angelina asked, elegant and terrible at the microphone she had stolen. "Do you deny that you profited off of screams? Do you deny the ledger?"
The ledger appeared on the screen, line by line. Names, dates, payments. The crowd murmured, then tittered, then it grew into a low roar. People began to shout.
"You're lying!" a crocodile hissed.
"Whose blood paid for your chandelier?" Marina asked, her face calm as a blade.
The hotel's manager, a man in too-bright jewels, stood up and roared. "You are criminals!" he cried. "We are patrons of culture! We support the rare!"
"Culture?" I said. "Is it culture to cage, to sell, to burn?"
A woman shrieked and pointed—her finger trembling over the image of herself on screen. She had been excused as a spectator once; now she saw the tape of herself pushing for a lighter when the staff poured accelerant. Her eyes filled with the slow clarity of a window opened.
And then the first of them looked at another, and at another, and found themselves looking like beasts in a glass menagerie.
"Denial is a kind of death," Jett said softly at my side, though everyone could feel it in their bones now.
They tried to claim the footage was edited. They called for guards. They cried about slander. The auctioneer slapped at the screen, claws scraping.
"This was arranged!" he cried. "Somebody can prove—"
Marina lifted her hand. On the screen streamed a simple thing: ledger entries, orphans' names, ticket stubs, the hotel's "special events" calendar—all exact, unblurry, untouched. Each item had ink and a signature. The signatures belonged to the patrons. Their names were on it.
All of a sudden the tone of the room shifted from bravado to panic.
"What about my name?" a lioness panted. "My donations—"
"Receipts," Angelina said. "You cannot un-sign a receipt."
People reached for their phones and, in their panic, began to record themselves as the cameras had recorded them. The crowd that once thought it safe behind velvet seats now wanted to record evidence of their innocence. But the footage on the screens had already captured their actions. The laughter that used to feed the hotel had been turned into a litany. It played and replayed—someone pushing a bound woman, a patron helping carry a caged snake. Blood-smeared smiles that used to mean victory now looked like proof.
"Stop! Stop the feed!" cried the owner, voice cracking like a twig under weight.
"It is too late," Andreas said plainly. "When the truth appears it demands a witness. Tonight, you are your own witnesses."
At that, people began to turn on each other. Friends raged at friends. Patrons pointed fingers and steamed black smoke of shame. The tiger who had once sold a woman to the hotel discovered his name in a ledger, and another who had always laughed at cruelty found his signature on a sheet that said "Night of No Mercy — Paid." Men who had come for entertainment realized they had financed murder.
Some of them tried to flee. Doors slammed. Valets blocked exits. But then the hotel's private security—men who had always protected terrible comforts—froze. They looked at their peers and wondered whether to shield them or to set the law free.
"Punish them." A voice not in the live feed but in the hall said it—soft, like a verdict.
"Punish them how?" The auctioneer sputtered.
"With the light of their own eyes," Angelina said. "With their own names on fire."
Someone had thought of the simplest, cruellest justice of all: exposure. So the crowd did what crowds do—they chose to strip them of anonymity. The patrons were made to stand; each was shown their own footage, each was forced to listen as witnesses who had been hidden told the truth. They had to stand before the people they had hurt and watch the faces of the victims, live, and unblinking on the screen. They could not deny what they saw.
The owner, face pale as milk, tried to shove his way to the stage. "You will ruin me!" he cried.
"Then you will be ruined," Jett said. He did not strike him. He didn't need to. The owner's own words were playing, a recording of him discussing terms with a man who wanted to sell a prisoner for the price of a chandelier.
The hotel's grand patrons reacted in a I-want-to-die kind of sequence—first shock, then flailing denials, then the attempt to gaslight, then the dawning sense of being trapped. Faces contorted from pride into desperate pleading; one by one they went through the stages.
"You're lying," a lioness said finally, but it sounded empty.
"I'm sorry!" the crocodile begged, voice wobbling. "I didn't know—"
"You knew," said a voice from the screen—the voice of a woman who had been caged and then sold out. "You clinked the cup and paid."
At last the room that had once applauded cruelty now watched the spectacle of humility. They pleaded for forgiveness. They demanded trials. Some called for blood. In the end, the crowd that had come for thrills wanted to be rid of their names and the shame attached to them.
They began to strip the chandeliers, to pull down velvet, to open windows to let the sun—if sun there was that night—touch the mirrors. The hotel, for the first time, did not control the show; the show controlled it. The patrons, accused and exposed, tried to bargain with money they had spent for a lifetime of comforts. But money will not buy back a ledger line.
The crooning of the cameras and the small, steady voice of Marina reading out the names and dates were louder than any roar. The hotel's leader fell to his knees, hands clasped, and for the first time he felt small. He raised his head and looked around, and in that look the world saw the end of his empire.
They tried to tear Jett and me apart. They hurled curses and threats. They begged for mercy. Jett only watched with the mild interest of someone who had set a complicated clock. "It had to be public," he said to me later, when the hotel lay open and the police (such as there were in this place) and the animals and the lesser patrons made open lists of restitution. "They needed to be shown themselves."
I stood trembling on the stage while a half dozen once-proud patrons clambered to beg at our feet, waving papers and apologies. Dalton Newton was among them, head bowed, whiskers dripping with contrived remorse. He began hoarse and strong, then the change came: pride to shock, shock to denial, denial to pleading, pleading to collapse. He fought each emotion like a drowning man fighting waves. "You have to listen," he said to anyone who would—first to the ground, then to me, then to the rooms where the burned were shown on screens. He tried to blame me, to blame Jett, to blame the new cameras. When his words failed he tugged at collars and tore at the fabric of his own life.
Around him people whispered and a camera clicked. A young eagle with a video-phone recorded his falter. "He's a monster!" someone shouted, vodka breath against the chandeliers. "He helped pay for—"
"No," Jett said, and the word was not a defense. "You do not get to be a man of taste and a man of terror at once."
A woman who had helped pour fuel covered her face and begged. She learned, in the echo of the hall, that even apologies have weightless cost.
For one long hour the crowd kept them in front of the mirrors. They let those accused watch their own faces as victims stepped forward, names read from the ledger, their acts spelled out in crystalline detail. The reaction was a violent, human thing. One by one the once-powerful found themselves humiliated, laughed at, scorned. A few tried to flee and were caught; some were even stripped of their finery and left in plain, embarrassed fur.
It was not a simple, violent vengeance. It was a stripping of masks and an insistence that those who preyed must see what they had done. Some begged and were met with cold silence. Some asked to be taught to be better. A few actually began to help.
The punishment changed them in a public way. Dalton, who had once barged into rooms like a god, knelt before a woman whose sister he had once sold. He bared his claws and begged for forgiveness. He tasted shame and could not wash it off. He grew small before cameras and before the people he'd hurt. The tiger's becoming small in public was itself a kind of punishment, and the witnesses recorded it with merciless delight.
When the last ledger page had been read, when the last patron had been forced to face what the hotel had done, the audience turned their own stores into restitution. The No-Worry Hotel would not disappear the way ostriches cover their heads; the truth had been broadcast and posted. It would reopen with different hands, or burn, or become a museum. The point was the ledger was known.
"Was that cruelty?" I asked Jett later, when we stood on the hotel's threshold under a moon that was less used to such truth.
"It is correction," he said. "Sometimes people must be seen."
"Did you ever enjoy the watching?" I asked.
He paused. For a moment the orchid scent fell into his chest. "I enjoyed the light in your eyes when you stood up," he said. "I did not enjoy the laughter."
I thought of the leather chairs and the way the chandelier had looked when considered a trophy. I thought of the woman who had burned in a video and the people who had been stalled at the brink of compassion.
"Do you feel better?" I asked him.
He was sideways and honest. "I do. Bad things happen less when someone imagines being on the screen."
When the hotel quieted, Marina closed her ledger and sat with us while the dawn gathered some grey courage. "You punished them in public," she said, with a softness I had not expected.
"Yes," Jett said. "Because secrecy makes cruelty possible."
"Was it enough?" Marina asked.
"No," I said. "But it's a start."
Weeks passed. The city changed its angles. We picked up what we could and left what we could not. My tail learned to be proud rather than hide. I learned to balance desire for normal life with the neatness of my new body. Jett taught me how to wind myself into a space and be still for hours. I taught him how to hold a coffee cup, the ripple of heat on porcelain.
And at nights when the city was less frightening we would go to the top of the broken tower and watch the sky.
"Do you regret saving me?" I asked him once.
"No," he said, and very quietly, "I regret not meeting you sooner."
He kissed me then, not like wind or hunger but like someone closing a long, necessary wound. His lips smelled faintly of orchids and of iron, and in that kiss I felt the impossible fit—the human bit of me and the snake bit of me and the man who had never quite belonged to either.
When I think of it now, I think of a tail curling around a wrist, of snake-skin in a bedside drawer, of a ledger opened and then burned or maybe archived properly. I think of a hotel that had once sold bodies and the men and women who were forced, in public, to look at themselves.
"I still do not know if this is the right world for me," I said one night, watching his tail flash white moonlight.
"You make this right by being you," he told me. "And by being stubborn about small kindnesses."
"I still miss Netflix," I said.
He laughed. "There are no shows here but our own."
I pressed my head against his chest and listened to the "tick-tick" of my new heart. Outside, maybe somewhere, the snakes still hissed and the birds still cried and the city still forgot truth sometimes. But on the nights when I look at Jett, I know one thing: the tail that once tied me up now ties me to someone who will not let them burn me in the dark.
And that is a very particular kind of home.
The End
— Thank you for reading —