Marcia grunted as she laid an egg in the nursery. A babbling gillbaby hung in a sling around her chest. At least now Bufo would stop having sex with her until the new egg hatched.
She left the nursery. The eleven half-satyrs she'd given birth to were playing nicely with their younger half-gillperson siblings. Somehow, she'd become a supermom. Marcia kept the house in order, the kids happy and well-behaved, and popped out eggs like clockwork. And she did it all without breaking a sweat. It helped that this gillman mate was much better than Amphibo.
Her mate of five years, Bufo, considered himself a "modern" gillman. That meant he didn't live in the swamp, had a regular job (he worked for a company that helped arrange marriages), and didn't make Marcia constantly lay eggs. Once an egg was laid, he waited until it hatched before trying to get her to lay another. The break in baby making was probably the best thing about Bufo.
That being said, Marcia had considered running away. Many times. She wanted to return to being Mark! But she held off. She worried that if she did run, she'd wind up with Amphibo again. Or even someone worse. She'd seen the way some of the men in town looked at her. She would take the boring but reliable life over such a high risk. She'd rolled those dice before, and got pregnant with eleven babies.
Marcia shuddered at the memory of that birth. It took two days for them all to be born, and she was absolutely enormous by the end of the pregnancy. No thank you, she would take laying an egg once a year over that.
The gillbaby in the sling grabbed at Marcia's bust. Marcia sighed and lowered her top so the baby could nurse. She went into the kitchen to work on dinner. Bufo said they would be having a guest over, and she wanted everything to be perfect. Even if she didn't know who the guest was...