My Black Python Wants My Eggs

At Cascadia Reptile Research Institute, Noah Hayes is handed the most difficult assignment: Avery, a huge and irritable white python who rejects food, drives off other snakes, and bites only him. Avery constantly coils around Noah like a jealous partner. Noah assumes the snake despises him, especially when Avery disrupts his work and refuses to behave. The tension builds until a routine breeding-season examination exposes an unexpected reality. What Noah took for hostility turns out to be something else entirely. Avery has been courting him, leaving strange gifts, guarding him from other snakes, and even appearing in his dreams as a silver-haired man. As Noah grapples with this revelation, he must decide whether to accept the possessive python's increasingly human-like affection or pull away from the creature who has claimed him.