Page 19 of Space Daddy and a Boy Called Twink

Should’ve known.

When Daddy went psycho on me, I kept thinking about what Eric said when I told him we were getting together:

“There’s a lot of red flags there.”

“You should not be meeting this man anywhere.”

“He’s literally going to kill you.”

At the time, I thought him dramatic, especially considering I’d already spent a night with the guy—hell, if he’d wanted to kill me, he could have done it then.

My eyes flitted open, and I recovered from being knocked unconscious, struggling to remember what exactly had occurred. I’d been nervous about following Daddy into an alley, but it was broad daylight. Then he’d stopped and told me to get into a vent, which assured me I’d made a mistake by not listening to Eric. I pepper-sprayed the serial-killing bastard, which was as much as I could recall before becoming far more concerned with my immediate circumstances—I was restrained to a table, with bright, oval white and blue lights overhead. The blue lights faded in and out.

“Twink,” I heard Daddy say, and squinting, I turned to see him approaching.

Even knowing what he’d done to me, he was still hot as hell.

Seriously? I couldn’t even become less attracted to him when I knew he was going to kill me?

“What’s happening? What are you doing to me?” I spit out.

“I’m so sorry.” He glanced over his shoulder, and judging by the worry in his expression, I was tempted to believe him, but between what happened in the alley and me being tied to a damn table, that would have been foolish.

I could imagine, when they found my body, Eric would attend my funeral, anX-Mencomic folded under his arm. He’d stand before my headstone, shaking his head and whispering to Roger,“Told him so.”

Now, though, I had bigger concerns than stressing about my inevitable funeral because seeing Daddy brought back the rest of what happened in the alley.

But no.

What I believe had transpired after I’d sprayed him, I must’ve made up. I’d watched enough true crime TikTok vids to know the brain can do some wild things when traumatized. I thought Daddy grabbed my leg, but when I looked, it wasn’t a hand holding it. It was like a pink snake coiled around me. Only the snake was attached to Daddy, and then another snake wrapped around my waist. No…they weren’t snakes. They were…it feels so stupid to even think it…Tentacles. Like octopus, sci-fi monster tentacles.

That couldn’t be right, and I immediately scanned Daddy over, hoping to assure myself this was all some wild story my brain had concocted to make sense of the quick series of events, but there was something like a tail coming out from his back. It reached over to a nook with panels and screens, the tip tracing shapes in the air, a blue holographic light illuminating wherever it touched.

“What—what?” was all I could manage as I stared at the tail in horror.

“Huh?” Daddy seemed to catch on, and the tentacle-tail pulled close to him until I couldn’t see it anymore.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he lied, his eyes bulging.

As panicked as I was, I was more than a little offended. “Okay, I’m not an idiot. I know that wasn’tnothing.”

“Twink, I’m sorry. I had to do this for your own good.”

He said that in the alley too. It didn’t make sense then, and it didn’t make any more sense now.

“Then why do you need to tie me up?” I asked, stating the obvious.

“I don’t know how much of this is you and not her.”

“Her?”

“I’ve seen how she controls you, how the technology of your community has taken control. I brought you in here to perform a few scans to see if I could find any component in you she might be using to control your behavior. There was synthetic material in your teeth…”

Synthetic material?

“My fillings?” I inquired. “That’s because I had cavities.”