Boo the Monster for Hire

The tent smelled like pine oil and someone else's vanilla candle, and Delia had long since stopped noticing either. She'd been sitting on the padded floor cushions for four hours, scrolling her phone between clients, doing the math again the way she always did. Eleven hundred dollars left on the credit card. Four more festival shifts at this rate. Maybe five if she upsold the good package enough times, and maybe six if the weather held and nobody threw up on her.

It was not the career her guidance counselor had imagined for her. Then again, her guidance counselor had imagined a lot of things.

The whole gig had sounded like a joke when she'd found the listing. Professional cuddler, Moonshine & Monster Festival, must be 21 or older, must not scream. She was 23, deep in grad school debt, and had once watched a horror movie without blinking, so she'd figured she qualified on all three counts. The screaming clause turned out to be about the clients, not her, which she'd learned the hard way on the first night when a very large moth person had gotten emotional about a documentary he'd seen.

So far the weekend had been mostly humans, a few hesitant half-shifters, and one goat man who tipped in actual goat-related goods. She was halfway through a text to her roommate about the goat man when the voice came from the entrance.

"You're the cuddler?"

It was a deep, rumbling voice, the kind that seemed to come up from somewhere below the floor, and Delia looked up from her phone and then kept looking up, because the tent opening was full. Completely full. A seven-foot-tall monster stood there ducked slightly at the shoulders, covered in scales that caught the fairy lights and threw them back in slow-moving greens and blues, like oil on a puddle but prettier and less likely to give you cancer. His claws were folded in front of him with the careful politeness of a man holding his hands in church.

"I am," she said, and put the phone face down, which was her version of professionalism. "Come on in. Mind the low bit of the frame there."

He ducked further and came in, and the tent suddenly felt like a shoebox. He sat where she pointed, folding himself down onto the cushions with a surprising grace for someone built like a cathedral, and looked at her. Just looked. The focus of it was unnerving, the way a spotlight is unnerving. Most clients spent the intake phase checking their own phones or asking if the fairy lights could be dimmed. This one watched her like she was the only interesting thing at the festival, which, to be fair, she might have been, given what she charged.

"Okay, so, here's how it works." She ran through the tiers, the same speech she'd given maybe forty times that weekend, counting on her fingers. "The basic package is a hug. Fifteen minutes, standing or sitting, your choice, and I do mean a real hug, not one of those back-patting things people do at airports. Mid tier is lap-sitting. Twenty minutes, you sit, I lean on you or you lean on me, whatever's comfortable, and there's a blanket involved because the blanket is non-negotiable, it's load-bearing at this point." She was aware she was talking too fast, the way she did when she was nervous or when the client was very large, and this client was both. "And the top package is full-body nestling. Forty-five minutes, both of us down on these cushions, blanket over the top, basically the closest legal thing to being a burrito with a friend."

In her head, quieter, the other math was running. Three top packages and the card was done. Two and she could finally make a payment that was more than interest. One, if the goat man's goods could be converted to cash, and she'd been meaning to look into that.

Cade, who had introduced himself somewhere in there with a rumble and a nod, considered all of this in a silence that went on long enough that she started composing a gentle suggestion about the mid tier. Then he reached into a pouch at his hip and slid a fold of bills across the cushion, more bills than the top package cost, and said, "The last one, please. The nestling."

"That's, uh, that's too much money."

"Then you will stay longer."

Delia looked at the bills, looked at him, and decided that arguing with a seven-foot reptile about generosity was a fight she could lose with dignity. "Fine. But if you fall asleep and snore, I'm charging a snoring fee."

He laughed at that. It was a strange sound, low and clicking, like a happy engine, and it did something small and unwelcome to the part of her brain that was supposed to be keeping count of the money.

***

The session itself, she would think about later, more than she meant to.

Nestling was a procedure by then. She had it down to choreography, blanket here, cushion there, client arranged on the left because the left left her right arm free for the emergency exit she never used. She talked the whole time at the start, a steady stream of nothing to fill the silence, because silence made clients fidget and fidgeting made them forget they'd paid to be still.

Cade did not fidget. Cade lay exactly where she placed him, rigid as a highway barrier, and when she finally settled against his side and pulled the blanket up, she felt him breathing like a man being operated on without anesthetic.

"Hey," she said. "You okay under there? You're stiff enough to be furniture."

"I am fine." A pause. The scales under her cheek were warm, which she had not expected, and faintly textured like expensive tile. "I am not used to this. I have never been touched like this before. Gently, I mean. Nobody has ever."

He stopped there, and Delia, who had a professional rule about not prying and a personal habit of prying anyway, waited him out.

"Nobody has ever just... leaned on me. On purpose." He said it slowly, like he was translating from a language he hadn't spoken in years. "I am an exhibit, you understand. At the natural history museum, in the city. I have a plaque. People look at me, they take photographs, sometimes a child asks if I am real and a docent says yes and everyone is amazed for four seconds and then they go see the dinosaurs. Nobody has paid to be near me. They pay to see me. There is a difference. I did not know there was a difference until right now."

Delia had heard a lot of confessions in that tent. Drunk ones, divorcing ones, one memorable one from a man who'd cried about a horse. Something about this one landed different, and she felt a flicker of something that was not greed, which was inconvenient, because greed was the whole engine here and the engine was not supposed to sputter.

"Well," she said, and shifted her weight, settling properly against his side the way she did for the good clients, the ones who needed it. "The plaque undersells you. For what it's worth."

He was quiet a long time. Then, very carefully, so carefully she almost didn't feel it, one huge clawed hand came to rest on the blanket over her shoulder, light as a falling leaf. He held it there like he was afraid the permission might be revoked.

She billed him for forty-five minutes. She stayed for an hour and ten, and did not invoice the difference, and told herself it was a rounding error.

***

By Saturday evening she'd stopped being surprised to find him there.

Not at the tent entrance, waiting to buy something. That was the strange part. He would be standing off among the vendors, by the fry bread stand or the guy selling carved walking sticks, and when her shift ended he would drift over and ask, in that rumble, if she wanted to look at the lanterns, or if the moth person had been by again, or whether the goat man's goods had any market value, which he seemed to find genuinely funny every time she brought it up.

They talked while the festival wound down around them. She learned that he'd lived in the exhibit hall for nine years, that the museum had given him a room behind the habitat glass with a small kitchen and a window that looked at a wall, that his meals were planned by a nutritionist and his hobbies were curated the way the gift shop was curated, approved and tidy. That he had signed up for the festival because the brochure used the word "belonging" and he'd wanted to see if it was a lie.

It was, mostly. Festivals were festivals. But the lanterns were real, and he looked at them like a man seeing weather for the first time, and Delia walked beside him doing the credit card math for the last time that weekend, because somewhere in the last hour she'd realized the number had stopped being the interesting one.

The second night he brought her tea.

It was a paper cup from the vendor two rows down, the one who did spiced cider and something she'd never tried, some kind of cinnamon tea that smelled like a candle store had a baby with a bakery. He held it out with both hands, which was how he did everything, like the world was made of eggs. "You have been working since noon," he said. "I watched you take no breaks."

Delia looked at the cup, then up at him, and felt the first real crack go through the whole transactional architecture she'd built. It was a small crack. It was the kind of crack you ignore. But she'd been in enough old houses to know what cracks meant.

"You watched me work?" she said, taking the tea. "That's either sweet or deeply weird, and I genuinely can't tell which."

"Both, possibly." He shifted his weight, and the