Page 30 of Dark Mate

My hands won’t stop shaking.

All those years of being kept smooth, gone at once, in a body that’s already running the hottest thing nature ever cooked up. The venom with nothing left to soften it. My whole self at full volume for the first time since I was a kid, and the first thing it gets to feel is him moving in me in the dark.

The next peak comes and it’s wrong.

Not worse. More. So much more that when his hips drive up the whole of it hits me at once with nothing in between to take the edge off, and my body convulses. Not pleasure, not yet, just the shock of all that landing on raw nerve.

The sound that comes out of me is high and thin and scared.

He stops.

Everything stops. His hands, gripping my hips a second ago, go loose. His cock stays in me but his hips go still. His tail, wrapped on my thigh, eases off. The hum drops to almost nothing. He’s gone dead quiet, holding, listening, reading whatever my body just told him, because it wasn’t the sound I usually make and he caught it.

His hand leaves my hip. Slides up my spine, slow, and cups the back of my skull—his whole hand around my head, holding me against his chest like something that could break. Low, against my hair, he pushes out a word. Rough. Barely shaped. “Still.” Then again, softer, more breath than voice. The hum starts back up under my ear, low and even, something steady to set my breathing on.

I breathe. The shock rolls back. My muscles let go in stages—thighs, then stomach, then the fists I made in the furs.

“I’m okay,” I get out. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “I’m okay. It’s just—everything’s turned up too high. It’s too much. Not in a bad way.” I drag in air. “Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.”

A pause. His thumb moves on my hip—one slow circle, reading my skin, asking the question his mouth can’t.

“I mean it.” My hand finds his where it’s spread on my belly. I press down on it. “Go.”

He goes.

Slower, this time. He’s watching me with his whole body now. I can feel it, the way he’s gone careful, every drive of hiships measured against the sounds I make instead of the ones the rut wants. Long, deliberate strokes that drag the thick of his cock over the spot near the front of me and give me time to feel every inch on the way. The first one pulls a gasp out of me. “Hah!” The second one he holds there, pressing, and my walls clamp around him without me deciding anything.

He does it again. Same drag, same spot, same hold. He learned it yesterday. He’s using it now. Every time my walls clamp down on him, something rumbles out of his chest, low and pleased. “Mmrh.” Like I’ve told him a thing he wanted to hear.

His tail finds my clit.

Not the frantic buzz of a peak. Slow circles, steady pressure, building heat in layers—warm, then a pulse, then a throb that lines up with my own heartbeat. And his other hand slides up and covers my breast, the whole of me lost in his palm, his thumb working my nipple on the same slow beat as everything else.

Three things at once. His cock dragging deep. His tail on my clit. His thumb on my nipple. All of it on the same rhythm, and my body can’t hold all three and keep its head.

It stacks. It braids. The separate threads of it pull together somewhere behind my navel into something I’ve never had a name for. Not a wave. Something that starts in the middle of me and pushes out every direction at once.

“Oh—oh, that’s?—”

He shifts the angle a hair. The head of him presses somewhere new, higher, into a spot I didn’t know was there, and the whole thing jumps from a build to a roar.

“There—right there, don’t change it?—”

He doesn’t. Holds the angle. Holds the rhythm. Holds all three points exactly where they are and lets me come apart on them.

His teeth find the back of my neck. Not biting, just set there, holding, a weight that saysminewhile the rest of him works me open.

I don’t crest and fall. I expand. It starts behind my navel and goes everywhere—down my thighs, up my chest, into my throat, out to the soles of my feet. My back arches off the furs till only my heels and shoulders touch. The sound out of me isn’t a moan or a scream. It’s both, dragged out of the bottom of me. “Aaahh!”

The knot swells. Slow, not the violent shove of the first days, a steady fattening, my body stretching to take it. The burn’s cleaner without the tea over it. Brighter. A line of fire I cross without slowing down.

It seats. The vibration starts, the hum of the knot pressing right on my clit, and I come again before the first one’s even finished, the second one going off inside the first, no gap between them, the whole thing doubling until it’s almost too much to live through.

His cum floods me, hot, sealed in by the knot, the heat of it pooling deep and heavy below my navel. His groan rolls down through his chest into my spine, long and satisfied. “Hrrm.”

When it lets go of me, when the shaking slows and the white noise fades and my muscles come unlocked one at a time. I’m shaking so hard my teeth knock together. Not cold, not scared. Just too much, everywhere, all my nerves still going at full.

When I can talk again, what comes out is, “You could warn a girl.” He doesn’t, of course. He just gathers me in, the smug thing, like wrecking me is a service he’s proud to provide.