Television and film had taught the young Missus Kaylan that having too good a time as an adult was usually followed by feeling terrible the morning after.

However, besides that one time her cousin had tricked her into drinking, she’d never experienced this first hand. Margot’s adolescence had been mostly filled with a different sort of unpleasantness. The kind that was rarely accompanied by fun, and only partially self-inflicted.

It was only after the first year of her marriage that she got to experience the feeling of making an enjoyable decision the night before and regretting the overindulgence afterward.

Margot woke up feeling energized, over-energized. Her body was simultaneously flu-y and electrified in that special way that she only felt directly after an evening of intimate activities with Monty.

Her husband, on the other hand, was lying in bed unmoving, his breath shallow, looking like the dictionary definition of death warmed over. He was even starting to smell vaguely of rotting fruit.

Margot leaned in close to check that Monty was still breathing. He’d assured Margot multiple times that he couldn’t die from what he was going through and she shouldn’t worry, but he wasn’t the one who’d get turned into a widow if he was wrong.

Thus she’d keep worrying. She’d keep checking on the clearly ill man. She’d keep diligently making sure that the man’s breathing remained stable for at least an hour or two, before she felt secure enough to move on with her morning.

“*Achoo!*”

Margot sneezed as she got out of bed. This was followed by thirty seconds of violent shivering.

She could literally feel her immune system struggling to recover from its altered state. She could feel her supercharged cells responding to every alien organism and virus that attempted to assail her body’s defenses with brutality and vindictiveness. She could feel other cells going rogue grabbing the remains of those dead viruses to steal their strength, and overtake the rest of her body with a new breed of super-cells.

Margot made her way to the bathroom and swore as she felt her stomach begin to spasm and cramp. She literally vomited a rainbow, filling the toilet with a seven-colored slurry of energy, light, and bile. Then by the time she was on her feet again, it literally felt like she could take on the entire world. Her body and mind having shaken off the flu-y and muddled feeling, and now aglow with health and seemingly ending vitality.

Margot was pretty sure she’d just broken through again. Cultivating as an immortal was different so she’d have to muddle through and look closely to be sure, but she definitely felt more powerful than she’d been the night before.

She tried to leave the bathroom, her stomach lurched again and she ran back to once more prostrate before the porcelain throne.

This was the price she had to pay each time she was with her husband. This was price and prize she got from being in love with a being that literally radiated power.

And honestly, despite the fact she was now being forced to kneel before a porcelain throne and vomit out last night’s very lovely, very decadent, dinner, in her mind, it was completely worth it.

Was this what love felt like? To feel like you were dying and being freshly reborn each time you were with that person? Maybe...Maybe not...Probably not. This was probably a very unhealthy, very worrisome situation, and she probably should have been a little more concerned. Yet there was no denying that she was more or less satisfied with her actions, even if she had some problems with the current consequences.

It might just be that she was in over her head after having chosen a literal demon lord of desire for her first, and hopefully last, serious romantic partner.

This wasn’t finding oneself up against Babe Ruth during one’s first baseball game. This was finding oneself up against a thousand limbed, eldritch nightmare, formed from the platonic ideal of baseball. She was married to a creature that loved her fully, and wholly, to an extent that was both wondrous and more than a little terrifying. A creature that could set her entire nervous system on fire with a single touch.

Once she’d set herself down this road, things were a little intimidating at first. However, she’d believed, or at least hoped, she was up to the challenge. Thus far she’d been correct.

It helped that this was an actual relationship and she wasn’t just some perverted, deluded, wizard who’d been fooled into thinking their pet succubus or incubus wasn’t just treating them as a job and food source.

Monty’s current half-dead state was the result of him taking on the bulk of the backlash that she would have experienced otherwise.

Any man or woman who got involved with an infernal being of desire would initially enjoy the benefits of a portion of that being’s power. Those benefits would last until that power, and the being it belonged to, began to consume them.

The process of “consumption” wasn’t something under Monty’s control. Just like fire couldn’t choose to not burn things, he had no say in what happened as his luxuriae essence came in touch with her.

It was similar to how most people would only ever enjoy short term benefits from a crash diet. Their metabolisms behaving counter to their desires because their body was still very convinced that all this time while they were trying to get into swimsuit condition, they’d been starving to death.

Monty hadn’t “fed” in eons. Now that he was sexually active again, his body was treating Margot like a lone morsel that had managed to wander into his lair after countless millennia of fasting.

Monty’s peculiarity further exacerbated things, because the causality and probability warping energies at his core were basically working overtime to try and bring everything to its most positive outcome. No matter how improbable the outcome. Meaning she was getting run ragged because the energy was driving her every particle to what would normally be an impossibly perfect destination.

At first, they dealt with the issue with Monty restraining himself and trying to reduce the amount of content she had with his dark essence. Margot dealt with the issue with extensive buffs and treatments for her overall health, and energy purification rituals.

After months, and now years, of being together, that was no longer possible. The only way they could handle things was by spacing out their joinings so they could both recover before the next immensely enjoyable session of intimacy.

In truth, if it weren’t for the fact that Margot were an immortal, things would have already come to a head.

As things stood, Margot had no intention of dying, nor did she have any intention of going through a demonic metamorphosis and becoming Monty’s lust-thrall. This meant that sometime very soon the two of them would have to have a conversation on where they went from here.

Their relationship would survive, but it seemed that the period of blissful, mostly uncomplicated, monogamy they’d enjoyed might soon be coming to an end.

****************************************************************************************************

I woke up feeling like hell on a hot summer’s day. My body and soul had been beaten raw and tender by the demonic energy I’d spent last night trying my damndest to control. My appetites lashed out at me. Punishing for me for starving them for so long. Boiling away the blood that flowed through my veins.

It was nothing I couldn’t handle, I was on my feet again by noon. This was one of those rare mornings where Margot was up and out of the house before I was.

“The things we do for love…” I groaned after coughing up a lungful of what seemed to be blood, dead spiders, and clumps of rotten, gangrenous tissue. My regenerative powers undoing the damage done to me by the demonic portions of my being.

In both mine and Margot’s case, my peculiarity was working in overdrive. The afflictions that had started to accompany our joinings after the first few years of our being together were a form of refinement. An ultra-aggressive form of physical and metaphysical healing with symptoms reminiscent to some of the worst autoimmune disorders known to mortal and immortal alike.

I could see that my wife and I had a talk on the horizon, but I’d been eyeing that horizon for months now. Dreading it, and purposely skirting the issue, because aside from me almost dying every time we made love, our relationship was going quite well. Scarily so, going well in a way that made me afraid to look into things too closely, lest I reveal some glaring flaw that immediately turned things to the flaming, screaming, heap of fecal matter that usually served as my love life’s status quo.

After a moment of waiting for my body to finish healing, I got up, feeling better than I’d ever been. Regular feedings of blood and sex had left me stronger and more hale than I’d ever been both in my human form and my truest self.

The effects of my peculiarity and the sympathetic growth I received as a consequence of Margot’s growth exacerbated things.

Which was why I was more than a little alarmed to feel a chill as I finally got up that morning. At first, I thought it was just some lingering ill-effects of the demonic-energy backlash I experienced while trying my hardest not to eat Margot’s soul. Then I recognized what it was. It was the touch of destiny, it was fate trying to lay its hands upon my person.

I frowned. My fuzzy pink brow bunching together. Then I reached out and nipped that shit in the bud. Expending my frayed will to slap away the hands of whatever being had been trying to meddle with my destiny.