“Yes, my dear Protrudi,” said Murray softly, “I guess I have.”

“PRO-Trudi,” she said, “Are you resorting to indefensible insults now?”

“I’d never use any insults on you. You know that we always make jokes and puns when you’re about to eat me. I’ve just had several of the best views of your tongue PROTRUD-ing. So you’re my beautiful Protrudi,” said Murray, watching her radiant smile returning as she understood the pun, “I wasn’t insulting you, and yes of course I’ve accepted that this is my last chapter.”

“That’s what I meant, when I said that we hadn’t really done it the first time, not like this. In the next few minutes, you’re going to face the effects of being really, irreversibly and conclusively eaten,” said Trudi, “Doesn’t that add a huge new element of excitement to the whole experience, one which simply wasn’t there before?”

“There’s still one hope I can hold out for the next few minutes,” said Murray, “After you’ve had all those other chapters in your life, maybe when you’re in your sixties, you might miss your youth, and you could time travel back and start all over again.”

“I don’t know if I’ll feel like that when the time comes,” said Trudi, “It’s decades into the future that you’re talking about, much further even than the future in which you met me when I was in my late thirties. Maybe I’ll want to keep on going.”

“Well it doesn’t make any difference to me how long you let an old timeline continue, before time travelling back and starting a new one,” said Murray, “It’s not as if I’d be waiting all those decades for you to do it. I’d just end up in the new timeline, without any knowledge even of this meal having taken place now.”

“I can’t say whether I’ll want to relive my youth in a new timeline or not,” said Trudi, “But I can promise you one thing. If I do decide to relive my youth, it will have to start again tomorrow morning. I wouldn’t be coming back to a point in time before my digestive processes will have permanently welcomed you into my inner self some time in the night ahead. This meal will  remain unchanged, whether I remember it in one lifelong timeline, or two or even more.”

“Wow!” said Murray.

“So now I’ll ask you the question again: Does knowing that immutable fact add any new element of excitement to this final instalment of our five month interlude, that wasn’t in your thoughts on any of the previous times we’ve talked about me gobbling you all down?”

“I can’t deny it,” said Murray.

“Well now that you at last have that fully in perspective, in you go,” said Trudi.

“She licked him again with a tongue that was no longer tainted with any whipped cream, and then opened her mouth wide and fed him into it. This time she gave him fifteen minutes of lying on her tongue, so that both of them could fully appreciate the ramifications of the gulping which was soon to follow.