Page 98 of A Wolfe in the Woods

Before I could think, I pressed my forehead to hers, holding her close as her breath broke against my mouth, her heartbeat climbing toward its crest.

The answer ripped out of me instinctively: “Come with me. Come on my cock.”

As if the command were a key turned in a lock, her thighs trembled. I felt her body seize, tighten, and then break open like a waterfall. I felt her begin to come all over my cock, flooding between us.

And at that exact moment, I erupted.

My mind split open, galaxies blooming behind my eyes. Constellations kissed the edges of my vision. The moon felt close enough to cradle against the blanket of the night sky.

Then everything dissolved.

A supernova.

Only light and shadow. There was no sound. My eyes fluttered, vision broken into flashes of white like a strobe. Every burst lit her differently—her face, her mouth, her eyes—hitting me in rapid-fire frames until I couldn’t breathe.

Afterward, when the world finally came to a soundless still, I wrapped my arms around her, pulling her gently against my chest, both of us settling into each other.

Her breathing slowed. Mine mirrored it. The wolf hunkered down.

Quiet.

Content.

Home.

And for the first time in a long time…I wasn’t fighting anything. I felt free.

For a long while, neither of us moved.

The storm outside quieted to a distant hush. Thunder rolled farther into the hills, the rain eased from a violent roar to a gentle patter. The fire dimmed, its last embers shifting like slow-moving constellations. And for a long, suspended moment, nothing existed except her breath on my skin and the faint pulse of the wolf settling—yes, settling—beneath my ribs.

And there we were.

Two people who were supposed to be strangers. Two people who had no business fitting together—and yet somehow did.

I felt…still. Not the brittle stillness I’d lived in for years. This was different. Warmer. Looser. Like something inside me unclenched without permission.

She rested her head on my shoulder, fingers tracing idle patterns across my stomach. Simple. Intimate.

What was this becoming?

In one quiet sweep of her hand, she softened everything that kept me up at night. The weight, the anger, the strain…they all melted away like sharp shards of ice under a rising sun.

I’d spent so long telling myself I didn’t want this. But now, with her curled into me, I wasn’t sure that had ever been true.

Maybe I’d been wrong about her. About myself. Maybe this was something neither of us had been meaning to find but had found anyway. Her presence filled the space inside me that had always been cold, a space I’d convinced myself was meant to stay empty.

The storm softened to a whisper. The world felt small and safe for once, wrapped in heat and dim firelight. I wanted to stay in this suspended moment, where her heartbeat lined up with mine and everything else—Graymore, my past, the pain I’d buried—felt distant and irrelevant.

Before I could speak, the lights blinked back on with a low electrical hum.

Blanche exhaled, half a laugh in her voice. “Now it comes on, when we don’t care.”

This felt like the beginning of something.

Something I wasn’t ready for.

Something I didn’t want to run from anymore.