Slithering Into His Bed

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The pet snake I dropped off at an exotic pet store this morning climbed thirty-two floors of a Manhattan high-rise tonight to stop me from sleeping with another man.

I'm aware of how that sentence lands. Stay with me.

Bang. Bang.

Something was hitting the glass.

The guy I'd brought home shoved off me, annoyed, and yanked the curtain back.

A black kingsnake was flattened against the window. Thirty-two floors up. Beating its head against the glass like it had an appointment.

"Snake!"

He didn't grab his clothes. He didn't grab his shoes. He was a naked blur, and then he was gone.

I stayed exactly where I was. The cold started under my ribs and spread out from there.

Because I knew that snake.

This morning I'd handed it to a pet store and paid them to make it their problem. Hours before that, it had cornered me in my own shower, made a move for somewhere no animal has any business being, and I'd hauled it off me and run. New hotel. Middle of the night. Clear across the city.

And here it was.

Nose to the glass. Thirty-two floors up. Staring at me like I was the one who owed it an explanation.

Chapter 1

The snake was watching me again.

I came out of the kitchen with a glass of water, and there it was, threaded through the branches of my potted ficus, that small flat head pushing out between the leaves. Tongue going. Eyes on me.

I stepped left. The head tracked left.

I stepped right. The head tracked right.

I went into the office. It poured itself down off the tree and followed me in without a sound.

For the record, I have no particular feelings about snakes. I don't find them scary. I don't find them beautiful. I'd agreed to take this one because my oldest friend swore it was the lowest-maintenance animal on earth. No company. No walks. One meal every couple of weeks.

"It won't bite me?" I'd asked.

"It lives in a tank. How's it going to bite you?" He'd waved me off. "Black kingsnakes are sweethearts. And even if it did bite you, it'd hurt less than a mosquito."

Twenty years of friendship. I believed him.

I bought the tank. The food. The heat lamp. Set it all up exactly the way I was told.

My snake spent one day in that tank.

After that it broke out nightly. Didn't matter how I latched it, weighted it, sealed it. Every morning it was loose, and it had made its rounds like a landlord running inspections: my desk, my closet, the arm of the couch.

One evening I came home to a gift.

There was a shed skin laid out on my bed. The snake was coiled on my pillow, and when I walked in it flicked its tongue, pleased with itself.

Hello, human. For you.

I dropped the skin in a box and didn't think about it.

That night I rolled over in my sleep and something under me was wrong. I dragged the blanket back. The snake was wound around my thigh, its head resting on the jut of my hip. The second I stirred it flowed up my body, looped my shoulder, and tucked its head into the hollow of my throat. Wagged the very tip of its tail. Satisfied.

Here is the problem.

A human body runs at ninety-eight point six. A snake wants to be somewhere around ninety. Which means, to a snake, a human is a bad place to live. Too hot. Wrong.

So there was no reason for it to keep climbing onto me.

I put it back in the tank and closed the lid. Then, because I didn't trust the lid, I set a weight on top.

"This is your home," I told it, and I meant it. "You don't get to treat me like a mattress. Understand?"

It circled the tank, hunting for the exit. It butted its head against the lid. Got dizzy. Rested. Tried again.

I started to wonder if the tank itself was the problem, so I checked. I checked the whole thing twice, and then I reached in to feel the temperature myself, and the snake took the opening and wrapped my wrist on the spot.

I ignored it and kept inspecting. Thermostat, fine. Cool side, warm side, both correct. Fresh water. Clean hide. Room to spare. There was nothing wrong with the tank. I called my oldest friend to be sure.

I came to the only conclusion the evidence allowed.

The snake was not all there.

Chapter 2

Or, less generously: an idiot.

I let it stay wound around my hand and gave the situation some serious thought.

Snakes are not smart. That's not an insult, it's a fact. They don't have feelings and they don't recognize their owners. Spend every day of your life with one and, best case, it files you under harmless furniture.

I studied the little head. Small skull. Not much room in there to start with. And now, on top of everything, the confirmed village idiot of its entire species.

How had it even gotten this big?

My oldest friend had told me this snake was unusually docile. Never roamed. Sat quietly in its tank. A dream to keep. That was the whole reason he'd handed it off to me.

I was starting to think someone had swapped it out on the way over.

The snake lay in my palm, and because my face was close, it flicked its tongue and happened to touch my lip. Barely anything.

Then its pupils went to slits.

It came off my hand like it had been fired from a gun. Around my throat in a blink. Body sliding, tongue tapping my mouth. Again. Again. Curious about the texture of me, working back and forth over my lips like it was taking notes.

I didn't move. I'd just learned, in real terms, how fast this animal was.

It played until it wore itself out. Then it didn't leave. It stayed knotted around my neck, made itself comfortable on my shoulder, and went to sleep.

The next morning, brushing my teeth, I found a split in my lower lip. Two tiny punctures, crusted brown.

I didn't need the brains God gave a snake to name the culprit.

Speaking of which, it was already back, nudging the half-open bathroom door with its head, winding up my calf coil over coil until it could knot itself across my shoulders and go still.

It had decided my neck was its den.

I sighed.

Fine. A negative-five-threat-level idiot. I'd keep it.

After that we were inseparable.

I worked in the office. It came. I left for work. It tried to come.

Most of the time it played the idiot convincingly. The only flashes of intelligence it ever showed were in service of not being left behind. However I refused it, it overrode me and stayed welded to my body.

And there was no explaining to it why it couldn't come to work. It was a painless, brainless noodle of an animal, but most people don't know that, and most people, it turns out, would rather not share an elevator with a snake. It was thrilled. Everyone else suffered.

After they found it in my coat pocket, then my bag, then the hood of my jacket, I gave up and filed for remote work.

The snake was satisfied.

That night it left me another skin. I put it in the box with the first one, took my pajamas, and got in the shower.

I stood under the water with a hand on the tile and my eyes half shut, and I took my time. I don't cut corners on myself. I've been single since a breakup two years back, and the shower is my favorite place to handle that. Efficient. Easy cleanup.

A light, prickling drag against my calf.

I opened my eyes.

The snake had gotten in.

Which it never did. Not once, not ever, during a shower. The water ran too hot for it, and even an idiot knows to leave when it hurts.

Chapter 3

"Out. Before you cook yourself."

I still had suds in my hair. I reached down to grab it and haul it out of the water.

It wouldn't go.

It was like the snake had just figured out my body was built different than it expected. It cinched tight around my thigh, reared its head, and locked onto me with a focus no pet has any business having. Then it pressed in close and ran its tongue over my skin, again and again, like it was mapping me. There was something under that fixation I couldn't name. Something that wanted. My scalp drew tight.

"Absolutely not. I'm not that adventurous, and I do not do human-snake romance."

I got both hands on it. It clung harder, dead set, like it had already made a decision about me. I peeled it off coil by coil, using everything I had, and shut it in the tank.

The tank couldn't hold it. Obviously.

But I could at least not be there.

I got dressed, booked a hotel, and left the apartment without stopping.

That night I had a dream I couldn't have said out loud.

A black coil around me. Cold and heat wound together, tightening.

I woke up with both hands over my face.

Two years single. Maybe I'd finally cracked. Maybe I was the pervert now.

No. I was a normal person. The snake was the pervert.

I picked up my phone to pull the security cam and see whether it had behaved after I left.

The building group chat had gone nuclear.

Nine out of ten people on my floor said they'd found a snake in their unit last night.

I opened the photo someone had posted and came off the mattress like it was wired.

That was my idiot snake. Whose apartment had it gotten into?

The thread was still going, everyone demanding management explain itself and somebody call animal control to come catch the thing.

I couldn't lie there another second. I threw the blanket back to get up and go home.

The snake was curled in a neat little pile at my feet, fast asleep, scales throwing color under the lamp, the tip of its tail twitching now and then. Fed and smug.

Every alarm I owned went off at once.

I'd booked the closest hotel for convenience. It was still a twenty-minute drive from my apartment.

How does a snake pinpoint which hotel, which room, and arrive at my feet without a sound?

I checked the thread again.

Okay. Not without a sound. The whole building had a sound.

But by any measure, this was not a thing that fit inside the laws of nature.

My face must have been doing something, because the snake woke up. It yawned, wide enough that I could see the pink working inside its mouth.

It was not a charming sight. Snakes don't yawn to be social. They yawn to feed, to get ready to shed, to work a scent.

Or to mate.

I had, I think, officially lost it.

Because the first thought through my head was this.

Human and snake. There'd be reproductive isolation. Wouldn't there?

Chapter 4

So I gave the snake back.

I told my oldest friend, with feeling, that I was never keeping a snake again as long as I lived.

He took one look at it and lost his mind. Called me a natural. Said he'd never seen one put on size like that in so short a time.

I hadn't noticed it growing. We were together every hour of the day, so maybe that was on me. In the tank now, it lay unusually still, tongue flicking, eyes on me.

"How many reptiles you holding these days? You got the room? Want me to help you find a bigger place?"

I talked myself into it, quietly. Twenty years of friendship. When a friend's in a bind, you help.

It absolutely was not because I was worried the snake didn't have enough room to stretch out.

"Nah. Came into some money at work." He waved a hand. "I'm already looking at a storefront. Getting back in the game."

I'll give him this. The man loves his exotic pets down to the bone.

The snake would live better with him than with me. I'd been overthinking all of it.

On my way out, I looked back at it. Once.

It had risen up inside the tank, following the shape of the glass, and it was staring at me. It didn't blink.

You can't run from me.

I pulled my eyes away like I'd been caught at something and tightened my grip on my bag. My friend lived ten miles across town. There was no way it was finding its way back.

Snakes don't have feelings, I told myself. Every piece of evidence that it liked me, needed me, wanted me close, that was just me flattering myself.

I was a normal person. I was going back to my normal life.

That night, I went to a bar.

Stay pent up too long and you turn into a pervert. I did not want to be a pervert.

I needed a person. Someone alive, warm, breathing, with hands and a pulse.

The men at this place were a good crop. I caught the eye of one of them, we had a couple of drinks, we looked at each other with the exact same idea, and we stood up at the same time.

The nearest hotel was two hundred yards away.

We had about four seconds before this got serious.

Then the window started up. A tapping, like someone flicking pebbles at the glass.

We were on the thirty-second floor. Not possible.

I shoved at him and told him to go look.

He got up, annoyed, crossed the room barefoot, and yanked the curtain back.

A black kingsnake, nearly a yard of it, was plastered to the window, writhing, ramming its head against the glass to get in.

"SNAKE!"

He didn't grab his clothes. He went off the bed and out the door like a man shot from a cannon, and the room was empty before I could tell him he was naked.

I sighed. If his hips had had that kind of speed, it might have been a nice night.

The man was gone. The tapping stopped.

I walked to the window and looked at the snake through the glass.

I was done asking myself how it had tracked me. How it had climbed thirty-two floors of sheer wall.

I opened the window and let it in.

It was filthy. The scales that usually threw color had gone dull, and a half-rotted leaf clung to the top of its head. It didn't come at me. It just poured onto the sill and lay there, wrung out.

"Why do you keep coming back? I'm not even good to you."

Flat. Even.

It couldn't answer.

I reached out anyway, and it wound onto my hand, boneless and slow. I washed it clean. I gave it my neck to wrap.

It was genuinely spent. It lay on my shoulder, dead weight, and slept.

I did up the top button of my shirt, adjusted it until no one could tell it was there, and went down to check out.

A snake had crossed the city in the dark and dragged itself up thirty-two floors of concrete to end up asleep against my collarbone.

Standing in that elevator, I finally understood something.

I was never getting free of it.

And I still had no idea what it wanted from me.

I took it home