“Let the kid have her fun,” Liz replies. “I was young and preposterous once too. Besides,” she grins, “she's going to have to walk into her house and explain the Beamer, the birthday suit and the belly to her mother. It's an... experience.” She says. “Mom whupped my ass so hard...”

“You never,” you blurt.

“There was a time before you, darling,” she smiles, squeezing your hand. “Not that I'd trade you for the world, you understand.”

“We were sixteen when we met,” you reply, still slightly stunned by this revelation. “Unless you've been lying to your husband about your age this last quarter-century.”

“Well, I was a precocious tearaway,” Elizabeth replies. “Advanced for my age. I remember trying to eat you,” she looks at you under thick lashes, and you worry it might be hungrily. “You foiled me with a kiss. Most boys would've tried to run,” she scolds lovingly.

“Didn't think it would work,” you reply.

“Wouldn't have,” she agrees. “I'm glad you were a smart one.”

“Actually,” you smile at her, “I thought you just wanted to make out.”

“Anytime, lover,” she giggles. “Next left,” she directs.

Onto Bailey Street.

“Jamie's... it's not that place on the end, by the taxi rank, right?” You ask.

“Yes,” Elizabeth replies. “I did say it was quite vore.”

Quite vore is an understatement. Bailey Street's a sharp left off Load Lane - an angle of ninety minutes, as swept out by the hour hand – and there's another roundabout. Jamie's is set back twenty or so meters from that sharp meeting of the two roads, allowing a gentler curve to its frontage as it sits between them like a two-story Flatiron building.

Despite the pleasant grassy space that fills the gap mundanes, yourself included, cross the the street to avoid Jamie's. Today your wife is taking you inside.

You slow the z4 as you approach the roundabout and the Bailey Street turn. Load Lane's higher, and you're looking straight Jamie's Species second story window display.

The boy's chest is both bare and smooth. He can't be more than seventeen, dressed and styled to look younger with his blonde hair in curls and pale pink and white checked pyjama bottoms hanging off his bony hips. You can't help that the word that pops into your head is 'edible'. It's an association Jamie's has obviously gone to some lengths to create.

You start, noticing he's staring back at you with the widest, clearest blue eyes you've ever seen. Fear is written deep into them - he knows he's food - but you can't be terrified all the time, and its the layer of weariness and resignation coating it that gets to you more.

And he's only one of dozens of males in the second-floor semi-circle alone.

Jamie's shop-window is bright, to better display its stock, and it makes the restaurant within seem dark. You don't even see the slender arm till it stretches into the light to seize the boy's own.

Neither does the boy.

His eyes widen – there's nothing covering the terror now – and his mouth opens to scream. You can only hear it in your imagination. Whether the silhouette looming behind him belongs to waitress or patron you've no idea.

Not that it matters, in the end. That slender, feminine arm wrenches him back into the gloom faster and harder than you would've believed possible, if you hadn't lived most of your life with your wife and daughters, vores all.

“Mmm,” Elizabeth purrs. She'd seen that, too. “Watch the road,” she screams, as you launch into the roundabout at something like twice the appropriate speed. The tyres scream as you twist the wheel and the z4 grips the road for dear life. Somehow, you hold it together, though you miss your exit and are forced to do the complete loop.

You're careful look elsewhere than Jamie's, as you've done many times before. Doing so, you notice saliva-spots marking the windscreen. Elizabeth's spittle, sprayed out by her shocked shout, no doubt.

But in her mouth because, for your wife, that scene had been mouthwatering.

You pull the z4 into an angled space between Bailey street and its nameless frontage road. Elizabeth takes your arm as you walk from the car, and you're glad of the support. Your legs feel more than a little weak and tremulous, and your knees might as well be knocking.

At least on this level, the stock displayed in Jamie's curved window is uniformly a little older, though the pyjamas and the entirely accurate sense of edibility are apparently a theme carried throughout. There's something of a gender spread, too. Maybe one in five is female. Though your analytical brain's locked up as to whether its the normal ratio of the devoured, or if there's a selection effect at work. Are males more the sort of thing you'd order in a restaurant? Or are unlicensed girls hard to tell apart from vores on the street?

You're prevaricating, you realise, about going inside. It takes your wife's palm, pressing gently but inexorably against the small of your back, to steer you into the building's portico.

The door's glass is etched with the United Nations logo, and you think it a nice touch, till the subtle wrongness of it jars you to realise that the olive branches around the world have been replaced by lips, suggesting a devouring mouth popping down a sweet.

Vorish humour, and faintly horrible.

Elizabeth smiles slightly at the, presumably for her, familiar sight of it.

It short-circuits your ingrained gentlemanly behaviour and you freeze reaching for the door, Liz's hand still pressing on your back.

Do you...