Page 93 of Dead Drop

When I'm ready I pull him into me. One hand on his chest for leverage, his cock filling me from below—the stretch of it hitting every wall, the angle I don't get on my back, my body clenching around him while I'm still adjusting to the depth. His hands find my hips. Not guiding. Just holding on.

I move.

His groan shakes through his chest and into my palms. I feel it in the bone. His tail wraps my lower back—not controlling, just present, the warm pressure of something that can't stay uninvolved but is trying to let me lead. I ride him until the aerie dims and my legs stop holding their rhythm and his grip on my hips turns from restraint to help—the last few strokes his, deep and certain, because I've asked everything of him and he gives it.

I come with my face in his throat, his name in my mouth, his cock driving the sound out of me in waves.

He follows. The heat of it fills me slow. His arms pull me in close and stay there—holding the weight of both of us against the aerie wall, his heartbeat hammering against my cheek, the last pulses of him still working through us both.

After a long time, his tail traces my spine from waist to shoulder. Once. Easy.

"Good day?" he says.

A short sound escapes me. "Yes."

He carries me to the furs. We sleep before the canopy goes dark.

38

ADA

Night. The fire between us. My belly visible beneath the jacket—not large yet, but unmistakable.

A low curve that I catch myself touching without thinking, the way Corvin's tail catches itself wrapping around me without instruction.

He's across from me. Close enough to touch. He's always close enough to touch now, his body gravitating toward mine even when neither of us is reaching.

His tail is draped loosely around my calf. His cock quiet beneath the loincloth.

The light from the fire illuminates the ridges of his chest, the scars that cross his shoulders—old marks, pre-mutation, the legacy of whatever soldier he was before he became this.

The fire pops. A log settles, sending sparks upward into the dark.

The wasteland wind moves through the canopy above us, stirring the leaves, carrying down branches rubbing against each other—friction, movement, the small violence of trees learning to exist around each other.

Below, the stream makes its constant sound—water over stone, the same sound it's made for thirteen years while the world above it changed beyond recognition. Always present. Always indifferent.

"This shouldn't work," I say.

He waits. He's learned that I sometimes need a runway before the actual statement arrives. That I circle the thing before I land on it.

"You're—I don't even know what to call you. You were human. You're not now. I'm human. I'm carrying something that's half of each, and I don't know what that means."

I'm looking at the fire because looking at him makes the next part harder. "You caught me out of the air because your instinct told you to. I'm addicted to you because your venom rewired my nervous system.

None of this—" I gesture between us. "None of this is a love story. By any rational measure."

The fire pops. A spark lands on the stone ring he built around the pit.

The detail hits me—he built a fire ring. With stones. Placed deliberately. The kind of small, careful construction that says someone plans to be here a long time.

That plans to build fires again. That believes in the future enough to organize stones for it.

"I can't tell whether what I feel for you is real," I say. "Whether it's mine, or whether you put it there when you bit me and knotted me and vibrated against my clit for three weeks until I couldn't remember what it felt like to not want you."

I swallow. "Until I couldn't tell the difference between my nervous system and the venom that rewired it. Until the thing I wanted and the thing my body needed looked like the same creature."

I stop. The words are coming out more ragged than I intended. The fire crackles, and the heat of it on my face, on my palms.