Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 Late Bloomer

   (c) 1996 by Dragonfly

   (c) 2011 New edition with additional material

   This new version is in the short story collection, "Dragonfly Stories
Vol.  1: Tales of the Erotic and Strange," available on Amazon and
Smashwords.  Please support Dragonfly by purchasing her work so she can
write even more!

   ***

   "It's the most botanically significant find from my trip to the Amazon
last year," Dr.  Christina Jenkins proclaimed proudly in front of the
university arboretum's Board of Directors.  "I strongly suspect that the
bud will open in the next few days, and I want to be here when the vine
blooms.  The evidence leads me to believe that it's a night bloomer, given
the..."

   "Yes, all right." Dr.  Griffiths held up a hand, cutting her off.  "You
may stay in the arboretum and labs after hours for research purposes."

   The paperwork was hastily signed, and the last agenda item of the day
was mercifully over with so that the Board could leave early that Thursday
to get on with their various holiday weekend plans.  Dr.  Jenkins read and
re-read the sloppy signatures, thrilled.  She had only just recently gotten
her doctorate, and this would be her first time alone in the facilities at
night.

   She already possessed the needed key card, and instead of camping with
friends or family, she was looking forward to spending the four-day weekend
with her beloved plants.

   "There," she gasped, slightly winded.  Christina added her sleeping bag,
ice chest, pillow and laptop to the modest pile of supplies she'd brought
in on the first trip.  The lab was silent apart from the occasional hum and
click of a timer turning something on or off.  She left her stuff in an
unused cubicle, taking only the sleeping bag, pillow and laptop out to the
arboretum for her first night alone with her find.

   The first night was uneventful.  Christina got very little sleep due to
the excitement and unfamiliarity of the place, journaling on her computer
until the small hours of the morning.  She kept thinking that she was
hearing rustling in the leaves nearby, and thought she saw a mouse for
sure, but wasn't able to track it down.

   The next morning, eyes red from lack of sleep, she dragged her things
back to the cubicle and crashed there for a few hours.  The piercing shriek
of a lost child just outside the windows made her sit up in alarm, nearly
cracking her head on the side of a desk.

   She rubbed her eyes and went into the office bathroom to freshen up and
change into a clean dress, then got some coffee and went out to see how the
flower bud was progressing.

   Her vine had grown substantially since she'd taken the seedling along
with a few other botanical samples from the remote area of the Amazonian
jungle she'd been guided to.  The native people had warned her about
flesh-eating ants, jaguars, and all manner of deadly things in an effort to
try and dissuade her from exploring deeper, but Dr.  Jenkins plowed bravely
onward.  Her reward was the mysterious vine with the shockingly large
flower bud that just kept getting bigger and bigger.

   "Yes, and there you are," she murmured lovingly to the bud, which was
larger than the day before.  The sign below it simply read "Species
Unknown, Collected in the Amazon Basin," and she hoped fervently that last
half of the Latin name would soon read "jenkinsii" after the woman who had
discovered it.

   Christina noticed that the bud had lost all traces of green color and
seemed much fatter, now looking like an immense white tulip bud over twelve
inches in length.  She carefully measured it again and sat down with her
laptop on a nearby wooden bench, working on her report into the late
afternoon.

   After picking up some Chinese take-out, she returned to the arboretum
after the public had left for the day and the gates were locked.  She had
grown more possessive of her vine, and just wanted everyone out for some
private time alone with it.

   The plant itself had grown into a sprawling collection of branches and
tendrils that now covered the surrounding area and gripped the wall behind
the exhibit area it had been planted in.  Its growth had slowed just after
the bud had appeared, much to the relief of the Board who had begun to
discuss in the hallways if some kind of measures should be taken to reduce
its size in some way or confine its roots so that it wouldn't continue to
spread.

   "Reproduction," she typed into her report.  "The vines, thusfar, have
not showed any signs of taking root.  The appearance of the bud has either
taken enough energy away from the vines for its formation that growth has
stopped, or it somehow signals to the rest of the plant that it no longer
needs to grow larger since it is about to reproduce via seeds.  The gender
of the flower will be known when it opens."

   She looked up suddenly at the sound of rustling in the leaves of her
vine.

   "Damn mice.  I hope it's not rats, that would be far worse," she
muttered to herself as she put her computer down to investigate.  After
searching the area for some time, she gave up and went back to work.

   Around three in the morning, she found herself nodding off and had to
get some fresh coffee from the vending machine.  When she returned, she
nearly dropped it at the sight of the bud, which was very slightly
beginning to open up at its tip.  With a thrilled squeal, she quickly
downed some of the coffee and began to write again frantically, taking
photos to document the momentous occasion.

   Four mammoth white petals slowly opened over the course of the next half
hour to reveal the sexual organs of the plant, which released a sweet, yet
musky fragrance.

   "It's a night bloomer, just as I thought!"

   Dr.  Jenkins photographed, measured, examined and documented the
flower's unusual features in minute detail.  The petals were surprisingly
soft and seemed to almost glow in the dim artificial lighting.  The inner
parts of the flower were dominated by the huge pistil which was the shape
of the handle end of a baseball bat, but with a few differences.  The flat
knob at the tip was ruffled and fluted, appearing delicate, but the
structure was actually quite firm to the touch.  Another interesting
feature, she noted, was the series of raised ribs encircling the shaft of
the pistil, and the complete lack of male stamens.

   "Flower of specimin female," she typed, not noticing her spelling error.
"Lack of stamens, ovary superior, style and ovary ribbed.  Total length of
pistil 7.75" (19.5 cm)."

   She rubbed her eyes, blinking, becoming a little disoriented.  The
flower's fragrance hung heavily in the humid atmosphere of the arboretum.
Her entries became little more than short data points.

   "Style and ovary ribbed, style .75" (2 cm) diameter at the narrowst
point, ruffled stigma head 1.5" diameter (3.8 cm), ovary 2.25" (5.5 cm) at
the widest point.  Entir flower highly fragarant."

   Turning her attention now to the literally intoxicating scent, she
leaned into the petals and breathed deeply.  The effect was immediate --
the world seemed to slant at an odd angle and she felt a tingling
throughout her body, something she suddenly realized she had missed in the
last couple of years.

   Christina stumbled to one knee, not feeling the twigs that poked her
from out of the half-rotted mulch.  She drunkenly reached for the flower
and watched her hands as they brought the massive white blossom to her
face, her mind becoming detached from the situation.  Her body breathed in
the wonderful perfume again, the second big dose causing the little tingle
inside her to flower into a deep craving.  The effect was cumulative, and
with each breath, she was drugged further and further into the plant's
trap.

   Her research forgotten, she began to reach under her dress, her eyes
half closed and almost unseeing, her body making the decision on its own to
keep inhaling the seductive perfume.  She didn't even hear the gentle
rustling of the leaves around her as she clumsily struggled to free herself
of her soaked panties.

   She kicked off her shoes and ripped her underpants trying to get them
off, but none of that mattered to her altered mind.  With a moan she found
her clitoris, kneeling before the great flower as if in prayer.  Part of
her wanted to lie back and frig to a blissful climax, but the rest of her
body and mind demanded that she stay on her knees in order to keep inhaling
the thick fragrance.

   The pistil's ribbed shaft began to exude tiny beads of nectar, and
Christina delicately lapped at the sweet, honey-like substance as if
pleasing a male lover.  The vines around her slowly moved closer.  She
moaned and writhed slowly as the first leaves touched her body, caressing
her, soothing her.  Her moans started to rise in pitch as she fingered
herself, her tunnel twitching and dripping.

   She had no clear idea of when the vines began to control her, but at
some point she became aware that her legs were being spread and her arms
pulled back out of the way.  The plant raised her several feet off the
ground, tendrils massaging her inner thighs and brushing her labia,
eliciting a groan of pleasure as Christina surrendered to it.  More vines
created a thick bower and pulled her in deeper, hiding her completely from
the outer world.  Only her moans gave away her presence from inside the
massive plant.

   The ghostly white flower began to move as well, shifting closer to the
woman and rising to the height of her hips.  Slowly, gently, almost as if
it had a human mind guiding its actions, the ruffled head of its sex
touched the swollen lips of her vagina.  She cried out with pleasure,
squirming a little to try and shift closer, but the vines held her firmly.
Her body burned with desire for it, her dripping tunnel pulsing and
twitching with anticipation.

   The irregular shape of the flower's stigma explored her, nudging between
her labia, recognizing the moisture there as the desired target.  She
continued to writhe, but the plant held her firmly in place, her fingers
and toes curling, her breath fast and shallow.

   The flower pressed against her more insistently, until finally her
opening gave up its resistance, allowing the rough head to suddenly push
inside.  Christina cried out, her tunnel twitching frantically against the
alien shape of the invader with a mixture of alarm and stimulation.  Still
the bloom pressed deeper, mindlessly fixed on its goal.

   She could feel every millimeter of its progress inside her, and just as
it brushed past her cervix, a new sensation made her moan.  She began to
encounter the raised ribs that encircled the shaft of the pistil, each one
making her twitch as they popped through her hole.  The deeper it went, the
wider the pistil spread her, ring after ring of texture pressing through
her opening, the ruffled tip exploring deeper and deeper.

   The style section of the pistil gave way to the much wider ovary
section, her moans becoming increasingly higher in pitch as she was forced
open wider and wider, her pleasure intensifying.  At last, after what
seemed like hours, the stigma encountered the back of her tunnel and could
go no farther.  It worked and shifted, managing to get one more ring of its
ribbed ovary past her hole, then stopped moving.  She twitched around it,
perpetually on the very edge of climax, trying her best to hump the shape
despite the tight grip of the vines around her body.

   The four cool, silky petals began to massage her thighs, clitoris and
anus, and she finally exploded into an all-consuming orgasm.  She bucked
and thrashed, screaming in pleasure, and the flower's organ twisted and
moved inside her, stimulating her beyond anything she had known before.

   Her climax began to wane, but the flower wasn't done with her yet.  It
began to add slow thrusts in and out to the twisting motion, causing the
ribbed shaft to work her lips and clit.  She approached orgasm a second
time, and felt a change in the plants pistil buried deep inside her.  It
began to enlarge slightly, then gave a great spasm as the thinnest part of
the shaft suddenly swelled to almost three inches in thickness.

   With a cry, she came again, and at that moment she suddenly felt a cool,
wet pressure against the back of her already stretched tunnel.  Her cervix
and vagina milked and spasmed and suckled at the shape and coolness inside
her, and gradually she began to feel some of it shift from the back of her
tunnel up into her belly just below her navel.

   Completely spent, all she could do was twitch and shudder as the shaft,
which had returned to its original dimensions, slowly pulled out of her
engorged and pulsating hole.  The vines set her down on the damp earth
gently, then returned to their former positions on the trellis structure
around her as did the flower.  It was as if nothing had ever happened.  It
took some time for the potent aphrodisiac to wear off entirely, but Dr. 
Jenkins did manage to sit up after about ten minutes of lying on the cold
ground.  Her computer had gone to sleep, along with one leg, and the sky
was just beginning to turn light outside the arboretum windows.

   "Wow."

   After a few more movements, she realized that her labia were slippery
and a bit sticky at the same time, the weird lubricated sensations making
her shiver.  With a dip of her finger she retrieved some of the odd,
viscous liquid and then stared at it for a while.

   The texture was the consistency of thin honey, the color a pale yellow.
She rubbed her fingertips together, feeling it, then sniffed it.  It had a
hint of the same aroma that the flower did, but muskier.  Unable to resist,
she tasted it, and was delighted to find that it was sweet like nectar,
just like she thought it might be.  It had come from a flower, after all.

   Her head clearing, she got to her knees.  Suddenly, a gush of the sticky
fluid ran down her legs and onto the mulch below.

   "Gotta save some," she gasped, looking around frantically for some kind
of ad hoc container that would work for the gooey sample.  She spotted a
discarded chip bag and waddled over to it shakily, her hand between her
legs and trying to keep any more of the substance from escaping.  The bag
in place, she let out a grunt of pleasure as she used her inner muscles to
push out a large blob of what the plant had left inside her.

   The stuff was getting everywhere: there was a trail on the ground from
the puddle where she'd been laying to where she'd picked up the chip bag,
it was all over her hands, it was running down the insides of her thighs,
it was on the inside of her skirt...

   She sighed at the mess, then realized how light it was getting outside.
Using her discarded panties to pick up her laptop in an attempt to keep it
as clean as possible, she brought her things into the office, cleaned up
the best she could, then headed for home.

   Dr.  Jenkins sat on a folded towel at her dining room table, which
served as a modest home lab, and isolated a clean sample from the large
amount of goo in the chip bag.  Through the microscope, she was able to
recognize what looked like pollen grains suspended in a clear gel, giving
the substance its overall pale yellow color.  Even an hour later, it was
still slowly drizzling out from between her labia.

   She took a long, hot shower, using a squeeze bottle to wash her vagina
out thoroughly, her mind working on everything that had just happened.

   "It only appears to be a female flower, with no visible stamens, but
it's really the male flower.  The pollen must be stored inside what looks
like the ovary, in that viscous liquid.  How odd."

   She got a chill as another thought occurred to her, despite the heat of
the water.

   "If that's the case, then how does the plant reproduce?  What do the
female flowers look like?  Why did it...  take me?"

   She used the opportunity to rub herself to another small orgasm, then
she explored herself deeply.  Without hesitation, she sucked the resulting
slippery substance off her fingers.  It was slightly sweet, but mostly
musky and tangy.  She decided at that moment that she rather liked it, and
went in for another serving.

   In the subsequent months that she studied the plant and its blooms, the
only type of flower she saw develop were all like the one that she had
"encountered," and they died within just 24 hours of opening.

   "It must be a male plant that needs a whole separate female plant to
propagate, like many fruit trees," she speculated, sorry now that she
hadn't been able to observe their whole life cycle in the wild.  It still
didn't answer the question of why and how the vine had penetrated her that
morning, and she began to think it must have been some kind of
hallucination from the overpowering psychoactive fragrance of the flower in
bloom.

   Completely caught up in her research, it took her a couple of months to
realize that she'd missed one period and the usual start date for the
second had come and gone as well.  A home pregnancy test turned up
negative, so she went to see her gynecologist, who found nothing wrong. 
"Sometimes things aren't always regular," she was told, and she felt
completely normal, so Christina shrugged it off and went about her
business.

   Two months later, she was beginning to have more and more trouble
fastening her pants.  Another home pregnancy test gave another negative
result.

   After another six weeks, she had given up on her favorite jeans and had
taken to wearing dresses daily.  By now, there was a noticeable mound
between her navel and her pubic curls, and one morning while still in bed,
she pressed her fingertips deeply into that mound.

   Several hard, round shapes were hidden there, something like having a
belly full of small apples.  She pushed harder, twisting her body at
different angles trying to count them, and realized that she must be
feeling the contents of her womb.

   She gasped as all the pieces suddenly fit together, a coldness forming
in her stomach and down her limbs.  Her own orgasming cervix had worked to
suck up the pollen-laden slime the plant had stuffed her with, then somehow
it had impregnated her, but not in such a way that it showed up in normal
human pregnancy tests.  She was merely the carrier for whatever strange
fruit was now growing inside her.

   To her surprise, she found herself getting aroused by the idea, and when
she had finished bringing herself to a delightful climax with a few
different toys, she was able to delve back into the preserved sample of
what the flower had shot into her.  She could only do so much, she
realized, and settled in to wait for whatever was going to happen to her
next.  All she could do was pray that the things wouldn't turn out to be
anything bigger than she could push out when it was time, or she would have
a lot of explaining to do.

   "How many girls in the Amazon jungle have gotten knocked up like this?"
she wondered aloud with a slutty little smile on her lips.

   The shapes inside her continued to slowly grow larger, and she continued
to lack a normal period.  Christina kept a separate private journal of her
experience, a place to note any changes and keep a record of any theories
she came up with.  One such theory was that the fruits were using her
nutritious uterine blood to grow larger, because how else could they
continue to grow in such an isolated environment?

   It wasn't until several months later that anything remarkable happened.
She was getting into bed one evening and felt a slight movement inside her
womb.  She stopped and stared down at herself, unsure what to do, and tried
to feel the hard shapes inside her gently mounded belly with her fingers.
They were still there, and seemed unchanged, so she simply went to sleep
and wondered what she would encounter in the morning.

   She tossed and turned all night, her dreams vivid and erotic.  Finally,
the shifting, creeping sensations below her navel nudged her into
wakefulness, and as she lay there in bed, she realized that she was now
feeling something happen inside her vagina.

   She flipped back the covers and looked down, shivering as something
tickled her tunnel from the inside, closer and closer to her opening.  As
she watched in amazement, something white poked out from between her labia
and lengthened slowly before her eyes.  It was exactly like a ghostly
carrot, its width increasing as more and more of its length found its way
out of her.  It was covered with fine white "hairs," and she recognized it
as a very quickly germinating root, searching for earth to grow in.

   Almost without thinking about it, perhaps because she was foggy from the
poor night's sleep, she waddled carefully over to a large houseplant in the
corner of the room and let the root touch the moist soil in the pot.

   Almost immediately the white root burrowed into the large pot, and she
was stuck, making her panic as she realized she was quite literally rooted
to the spot.  She cried out and tried to pull away, but her belly cramped
painfully, forcing her to give up.  She had no choice but to sit there on
top of the pot and let the root continue to burrow deeper and deeper as her
legs trembled.

   Christina had begun to envision all manner of nightmare scenarios,
including someone finding the dried out husk of her body with the plant
happily growing up through her remains, when the cramping increased, and it
was all she could focus on.

   Just as suddenly, the cramping stopped, and there was movement in her
tunnel.  She had the urge to push, and she cried out as a dark brown seed
the size of her fist popped out of her slippery vagina with a flash of
stretching pain.

   Almost as soon as the first seed had worked its way out of her, another
white root began to emerge.  She didn't notice it until it was too late,
and she again found herself attached to the soil.  This time she knew what
the result would be, however, and carefully observed everything that
happened.  The second seed came free easier and faster than the first, so
when the third root tip pushed out from between her labia, she quickly got
up and found another large plant.  The hairy root that emerged eagerly
burrowed deeply into the new pot, and a third seed was born.

   After a few more had come, she ran out of large pots in the house, so
she strode carefully out to the back porch, looking for that bag of potting
soil she had left over from last summer.  The roots seemed to come faster
and faster, eagerly looking for somewhere to burrow.  She got as far as the
middle of the yard when she felt a yank on her womb, and looked down to see
that two more white roots had anchored her to the spot.  She had to squat
there and wait for the huge seeds to pop out of her hole, one right after
the other, before she could finish making her way to the shed.  She got the
door open and stepped inside, but another powerful root stopped any further
progress.  Gratefully, none of her neighbors seemed to be around that
morning.

   After waiting for this seed to come, she went in and found the soil. 
Naturally, just as she got the bag open and sat down on it, she felt no
more movements.  Just to be sure, she remained there for some time, but the
seed at the door of the shed seemed to be the last of them.  Relieved and
exhausted, she dozed, her naked sex still sitting on the moist dirt, her
back against the warm wall of the shed as the sun moved higher into the
sky.

   It took a couple of years for the plants in her bedroom to mature.  But
one fall night, just as she was slipping out of her clothes to get ready
for bed, she caught a familiar musky fragrance in the air.  Christina
smiled, turned toward the pot in the corner of the room, and saw the huge
flower as it began to open.

   All the flowers from her children were exactly the same as the one that
had taken her that morning so long ago.  They appeared to be female but
actually contained the male genetic material inside what looked like the
ovary.  A return trip to the Amazon and some genetic tests had filled in
the rest of the story: chemicals in the plant stimulated the female mammal
to produce multiple eggs, which were inseminated by the pollen granules,
and which then matured into ripe seeds while inside the nutritious,
protective "fruit" of the female womb.  The plant's older, simpler genetics
dominated the process, enabling it to simply make copies of itself instead
of a hybrid life form.

   "Let's make babies," she murmured to the flower as she inhaled its heady
aroma and lapped the beads of sweetness off its shaft.

   She lay down on the bed and was rewarded as the leafy tendrils twined
around her, pulling her legs apart and holding her arms back in what almost
seemed like the tender grasp of a human lover.  A familiar ruffled shape
touched her labia, seeking entry, and she writhed with pleasure, moaning as
it finally pushed inside deeper and deeper.