I cried while I clicked through the porn.

Actually, it was art, not porn. At least, it was on an art site, but it was porn to me. I was too jaded to look at the real art any more, and too cowardly to buck up the thirty Q for a real porn site, and risk having to explain the charges on the credit card or the email in my inbox or the bookmarks.

The messenger window blinked, and for the third time that night I told someone that, Yes, I’m fine. No, I’m really fine – but thanks, I appreciate it. I know my status says I’m feeling blue, but it’s just a little bit of silliness – just a bit of being emo for an evening.

It really was a bit of silliness, setting my status like that. I wasn’t blue; I was cry-on-my-keyboard depressed, and I didn’t want any cheering up or people to ask me about it and give me trite advice or bombard me with funny videos. I wouldn’t resent them for it; it’s kind of a societal obligation, isn’t it? You talk the people you know back from the ledge, even if you’re out on that same ledge yourself the next day. They were just acting the part of good friends, but not the kind I needed.

I wiped away a few more self-pitying tears and clicked again on the screen. Rows and columns of thumbnails promised shots of thick thighs squeezed into tight rubber, of red-painted lips and glistening pink tongues and other glistening pink body parts, but I clicked next. They weren’t what I needed.

I needed my wife. She was at her aunt’s again. Her family needed her more and more now – it seemed like someone was always sick or in an accident or short 200 Q on their rent and just needed a floater. But these were good folks, really, not freeloaders, and I couldn’t resent them or my wife, even if I wanted to. We always got paid back, eventually. We always got remembered at Christmas, even if it was to regift that awful sweater we’d given them the year before. I couldn’t resent them any more than my online friends, even after we moved to the city to be closer to them, even after my wife had to quit her job and I had to pick up the extra hours to make our own ends meet. At least I got to work from home, and got to spend time with our daughter.

Molly was the one thing my wife and I agreed on: she was the brightest spot in our lives. She was two years of clumsy, precocious joy, and she was a lifetime of my hopes and ambitions and dreams – all of that had been moved from my emotional savings account and transferred to her. I knew that some day she could be the brooding, morose teenager even the best parents seemed to wake up to discover one day, but for now she was a love mirror.

The problem was (and I know how selfish this sounds): Molly was “The Last Time” for me. Before we married, my wife and I had been the kind of couple that went for a risky quicky in the backyard, or a long, naked afternoon and evening on the couch, or a little roleplay and dressup. (In fact, I found her vixen-ear headband just the other day, in an old box of clothes destined for charity.) After we married, our sex life became about having a litter of our own, and we tried for so long and so hard that the processes became mechanical. I know she began to resent me asking for special favors, and I began to have trouble performing to her satisfaction. That meant we missed a checkbox on her calendar, and I got a scowl and a cold shoulder. And then “missionary” became our only position, because it was the best for conception. I’d suggested after a few months we give ourselves a break to rekindle the passion – that it was passion that fueled the loins – but she insisted. Every night, tired or sick or angry, we copulated. Not fucked, not made love. Copulated. We argued, more and more. That last time we argued while we copulated, and it got so tense between us that she bit me, hard enough to break my skin where her fangs sank in. That’s when I came. That was the last time, and that was the time (we were surprised to find a month-and a-half later) that Molly was conceived.

And that was that. After that she was pregnant, then she was sore from nursing, then she was tired, then she had migraines, then her family…

I was feeling so sorry for myself that I minimized the art site and clicked that hidden bookmark, that one I’d renamed “Accounts Payable” and always made sure to clear out of my history. Flash filled the screen, and loaded the image of a verdent green island ringed by shining white-gold beaches. A red-tile roof villa sprawled across one side of the island, facing out over a wave-clipped ocean. Marandara. The title built across the screen, and then links popped up around the outside of the image and I began to click. I’d already been through the entire site a hundred times before, even scouring the site map for links I might have missed, but it was still a strange sort of craven comfort to browse through the gallery again. I knew which pictures I liked best.

The thing was, I loved my wife. On a rational level, I loved her, and there were the moments when my heart and body caught up. She was a good person, and I really couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t her fault I hadn’t made any friends in the city. It wasn’t her fault that I was such a screwed up mess of kinks that my constant little requests and favors had burnt her out on sex entirely – even if she had promised me when we first met that that could never happen. It was as much my fault as hers that we’d let the romance slip out of our marriage until we were just two people living in the same house, people who barely touched each other beyond the mandatory, emotionless goodnight kiss, people who had no common interests and nothing to talk about except their kid, or to complain about how hard their day had been. I was a prisoner of solitude, bound by my wedding ring – I’d never cheat on my wife, never divorce her, and that meant I would never have sex again. Worse – far worse – it meant I would never be touched again, never be kissed in a way that made me feel wanted, never have naughty-sexy things whispered into my ear, never have anyone who would let me – want me to – explore their body.

I was crying again, and I couldn’t even see the monitor. I wiped the tears away as fast as they came, to keep them from leaving brown stains on my muzzle and giving me away later. That’s what I wanted to tell the people IMing me. Then I’d get what I really needed – some sympathy and commiseration, and maybe even someone to agree with what I really thought: that I was better off dead. It sounds a lot less extreme when you’re crying at your computer in the middle of the night, trust me. It was logical. If I could just die quickly, painlessly, in an accident, my wife would collect on that insurance payout and be able to provide for Molly a lot better than she could with me spending seventy-five hours a week expediting parts orders in our attic office. Sure some people might be sad for a little while, but they’d get over it and Molly and my wife could trade in on my early passing for sympathy for the rest of their live. It was so simple, so obvious. Molly would be so much better off with a Mom who doted on her than a Mom who was busy bickering with a lonely Dad.

That gave me a good solid cry, enough to finally empty me of tears and give me that hollow feeling that would eventually put me to sleep and be gone the next morning. Except this time, Marandara’s gallery pages were waiting on my monitor. The first page of thumbnails was all tourists and visitors; I’d already clicked through that. The next page was filled with what I wanted: thumbnails showing a three-story purple-gray dragon – half of her by herself, or in social functions as the island’s Maitresse D (and de facto queen), and half of her in various stages of gulping down her guests. It was that last half I clicked through, and my erection had already bulged against the inside of my shorts before the new tabs had opened. I nibbled my fingers as my eyes wandered over the first full-page shot of the scaled beauty. Her neck was thrown back and her mouth opened wide into a red-fleshy nest in which sat a pudgy pig. From his euphoric expression, there was no doubt what her tongue was doing behind the cover of her lips. Other pictures were more graphic; the dragoness liked to play with her meals, and was not at all shy about exposing either herself or them in the most compromising positions for the camera. The site said that all of her meals were volunteers, but I liked the ones best where her meals looked a little frightened; where the otherwise gentle dragoness was threatening them with her teeth or claws. I imagined myself in those pictures, clenched between her jaws while she did goodness-knows-what to my lower half, my brown eyes rolled back in fright to meet her blue. The look she gave me in my imagination let me know she’s delaying the inevitable gulp as much as possible, just to enjoy my squirming.

I’d already been clicking from picture to picture, saving my favorites for last, when I finally pushed back from the keyboard in a hurry.

I felt guilty while I cleaned up, like I always did. It was that apex predator fixation that killed my wife’s sex drive, and it had completely possessed mine. I don’t think I could even have normal sex any more, not unless I was fantasizing at the same time. I wasn’t the only creature with that kind of a fetish, or that dragoness would have starved long ago, as would have the outlaw predators you read about on the web from time to time, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you brag about with your friends. I was basically alone. Even if I had been the type to cheat on my wife, to seek some affection in an affair, I had no illusions about finding someone willing to play that game with me.

I came back from the bathroom, and the Marandara site was still up on my computer. It was a sign, I thought. Not that it was still on my computer now; that wasn’t the first time I’d been careless, but it was sort of serendipitous how the little island had come to my attention in the first place. I’d read about her on the web; even though it wasn’t every day that a new nation is granted UN status under threat of veto, or even that a country would be willing to give up the most worthless chunk of land to allow a new sovereign nation, it was page eight news, nearly buried entirely.

A couple of nights later I saw her, the dragoness, on the Tonight Show. It was one of the few nights my wife and I were both home, and she wanted to change the channel. (If Molly wakes up it will put ideas in her head, she said. Molly never wakes up after 10, I countered. I don’t like it, she said, expecting that to end the conversation. It usually would have. But I was uncharacteristically impulsive that night, and I told her that I didn’t like watching all those reality shows, but how often did I complain? Every night, she said, and left the room.) A lot of people thought the dragoness’ name was Marandara, but that was her island. She was Ariendel, and now that she had diplomatic immunity she was delighted to be able to return nature to the state it was intended. Her island had had more than 2 thousand visitors since they became their own nation, and she’d personally helped more than one hundred and thirty of her visitors fulfill what had, in most cases, been life-long fantasies. When pressed on the morality of her predilections, she brought up the fact that the meat on everyone’s table had to come from somewhere, and at least she knew where hers came from, and knew that its source was willing, and that she had made them happy. The host made jokes instead of picking a side in that unpopular political issue, and laughed off the suggestion of sending a camera crew down Ariendel’s throat, though they did segue out with her grinning red lips closing over camera 1.

The next morning there was a banner ad for the island on my favorite forum site, and I clicked through. I’ve never seen another ad for the country since.

I sat back down in front of the computer, and as I’d done dozens of times before, I went to the Contact Us page. This time, though, I actually picked up my phone.

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