When she awoke the next morning, she took him from her mouth and gave him a giant kiss.

"You're still my adopted child for today," she said, "I thought we'd have a picnic on the lawn."

While they talked, he explained that he’d met her when she was 55, and that she’d made no mention of her new boyfriend then. She guessed that they must have broken up. The thought stayed with her.

That evening she ate him happily, and he spent the night in her stomach, until he was no more.

Years went by, and she thought of the implications of changing historical events. She realised that she could change his past in her future, when she was 55.

She lived her intervening years, looking forward to the arrival of the 14 year old Drake. When he shrank, she realised that for him, it had happened earlier too, and took him to the dining room to eat. She didn’t know how he’d escaped in her previous timeline, but felt that she could have both the memory of having eaten that version of him when she was 40, and the new experience of making sure he didn’t escape being eaten by her now in this timeline. Then he pinched her tongue and requested a night with her. Then she realised that this was when he had previously set up an escape. She did not tell him of  her encounter with his time travelling self in when she’d been aged 35-40. This time, she waited until it was time to go to bed, and then said, "I can't take a chance on your escaping from any cage I could put you in. So you're going to spend the night in my mouth. We'll have plenty of time to talk some more in the morning, and then I'll eat you for lunch. Goodnight, little friend. Just climb over my lower lip and onto my tongue, like a good little boy."

He did so.

She lay awake happily for a while, which he knew from the occasional movements of her tongue.

"From my point of view, I get to eat him twice, and the second time I'm older, but he's younger and more tender than before. From his point of view, he now won't have the love affair with my younger self, as his personal history gets changed. That means he'll never have been kissed in his life."

She opened her mouth, took him out, and dried his face on her nightdress. Then she kissed it.

"What was that for?" he asked.

"Did you like it?"

"Yes."

"So enjoy thinking that there'll be more kisses in the morning. Think of it as a down payment on a delicious lunch."

The next day she ate him at lunchtime.

In the moment that he was sliding down her throat, he remembered another time travel technique that he had learned. He could simply send his consciousness back into his younger self, by using a form of time travel hypnotism. The unique aspect, of trying it under these circumstances, was that he would be doing it after his physical body had already travelled into the past. This meant that he would be sending his mind into his younger self but years into the future relative to his current time period in Iris’s throat.

He made it into the body of his 13 year old self, the one who had not yet time travelled back to meet Iris in the first place. As he already had the knowledge of the earlier timeline’s romances and gobbling attempts in his memory, he saw no reason to go ahead and travel to Iris’s time when he turned 14 and learned all he could from Miss Corlani’s class.

He would always remember his incredible adventure, but would no longer bring it about. Time travel seemed to risky.