In darkest night you found them, fledged teeth and hunter’s eyes. Everything your grandmother warned you of. Heat caught between the gums. The wet drag of tongue against your thighs. Every breath large enough to move an entire body with it, rocking you gently back and forth in the red dark like something being pulled toward its origin.

Your body had stopped asking for triumph. It wanted walls. Something safe to retreat into. Something overpowering, even fear itself. It asked to be carried when walking became unbearable and thoughts acquired the mass of collapsing stars. To stand naked before appetite and discover that being wanted does not always end in ruin.

And when they see you and shame still reaches? They do not know you climbed in here willingly. They see your knees drawn to your chest, sheltered inside horror, not knowing it was their world that tore you open long before this one ever touched you. Within these fangs, you feel unbearably safe.

Slow breath drifts across the softest parts of you. Saliva gathers beneath your body. The tongue shifts again and the entire mouth answers around you, warm and alive. You realise how easily you could disappear here. How carefully you are not.

Cradled through the dark in something more womb than bed. Something older. Mammalian. Primal hunger shared. The tongue shifting possessively, almost reverent. How honest the body becomes once it no longer has to explain.

Still, stay too long and the world outside begins losing shape. A moon less convincing than the pulse around you. Time loosening. Your own weight forgotten in the terrible seduction of never having to carry yourself again.

Oh, I understand it.

But tonight, you may become small. Tiny, even. I know you deeply crave something enormous. And I will be enormous for you.

Rest within my maw and know this: as much as I hunger for you, you will never be devoured. Let your world end at my teeth while I end the world of anything that tries to harm you. come closer.

Nothing enters this mouth without becoming mine. And nothing hidden or cruel survives long enough to touch you.

Let go. Become small for me.

I am large enough to carry you.