Page 33 of Dark Mate

His hips twitch up. Just once. He can’t help it.

Then the surge takes him, and the letting-me is over.

His hands leave the furs and close on my hips. The conversation’s over. He flips me, one arm, no effort, like I weigh nothing, and drives in so hard my breath leaves in a grunt I don’t recognize. “Ungh!”

From here it’s a different cock entirely. Folded forward with my cheek down in the pelt and my hips hauled up to take him, he drags over a place the riding never reached, higher, meaner, a spot that tries to bow my spine clean off the furs every time he seats. He’s caught both my wrists in one hand at the small of my back. After an hour of running him, of setting every inch of the pace myself, the helplessness of that sends a hot, shamed pulse right to where we’re joined. I gave the orders. Now I just take what he gives me, and my body opens for it like it’s been starving for exactly this—to be the one held down for once, with nothing left to decide.

The wet slap of him fills the nest. My fingers claw the pelts. My cheek’s in the fur. The sounds out of me are graceless and constant. I don’t care.

He fucks me until my thoughts go to static. Until I come so hard my whole body locks around him and the dark behind my eyes goes white. “Aaah!” His cum pours into me, sealed in, the knot swelling and locking, and then it throbs to life against me in a hard pulse, dragging me up into another peak before I’m down from the first. He pumps me full and the pulsing won’t ease and I keep coming, one breaking into the next, until I’m wrung outand shaking, held there pinned and full while the last of it shakes through both of us.

For a while I just lie in the overload, every nerve still reporting at full volume, and the dark has never been louder. I can hear insects in the wood walls—the small click and rasp of something with somewhere to be. I can hear his pulse through the cock still seated in me, each beat a soft press against my walls. And I can smell us. Not him, not me,us,his musk and my salt and the sweet-sharp smell of days of this, layered into something with no name that belongs only to the dark.

The canopy is dangerous,Mora used to say.Full of things that were never managed.She wasn’t wrong. She was just incomplete. She never told us the things in the dark would mostly be small and busy and bound somewhere of their own, that most of them wouldn’t know I existed and wouldn’t care if they did. She made the whole world out to be one big mouth, waiting. It isn’t. It’s a thousand living things going about themselves, and for the first time I’m one of them instead of a thing kept safe behind a wall from all of it.

After, I lie still and try to take in what I just did.

I started that.

It wasn’t the venom, or him dragging my hips back, or the rut. I crawled across the furs in the dark and put my body on his and rode him from soft to hard because I wanted to, and he let me.

The girl from the Cage didn’t do things like that. She waited. She received. She saidthank youin a soft voice and meant it because the tea made her mean it. Whoever moved my hips just now wasn’t her.

I don’t have a name for it.Hunger’sthe closest. But it’s not just for food. It’s in my hips, my chest, the coal that’s been burning since yesterday, the part of me that saysmore,that reaches and takes, doesn’t wait to be handed anything.

I think the thing underneath might be me.

When my breathing slows, I press my ear to his chest.

The knot’s still going—that low buzz that’s part of what his body does to mine, the rut grinding through. But under it, the other sound. The deep one out of his sternum. The one that has nothing to do with what’s happening between my legs.

And lying there in the dark, I finally get it.

The buzz is the rut. The hum is him.

One takes. The other gives.

He’s choosing to do that.

Five words, and they knock the floor out from under everything. Because if the sound is a choice, then not all of this is instinct. Not all of it is some blind thing running its program in the dark. Some of it, this exact warmth, pitched right to the spot my chest answers back—some of it is a decision.

Which means there’s somebody in there making it.

A person. Behind the horns and the size and the cock that’s been buried in me for days, somebody is choosing to hum because I’m here. Because I’m close. Because it quiets me, and he wants me quiet, not the Cage’s kind of quiet, poured in from outside, but this kind, the kind that has a floor under it.

“You’re in there,” I whisper. “Aren’t you.”

Something rolls up out of his chest, the front of a sound that wants to be a word, I’d swear it, before it falls back into a huff of warm breath against my hair. He hasn’t got words for me yet.

So he gives me the hum instead. It drops lower. Settles. Wraps all the way around my ribs and holds.

It isn’t a word. But it’s an answer, and I take it, and somewhere in the dark between his heartbeat and that chosen sound I stop being only afraid of him.

I don’t know what that makes me. I’m not going to figure it out tonight.

But the shell’s on the windowsill, empty, and whatever climbed out of it is down here in the dark with a monster who hums—awake, and starving, and not going back.

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