Page 38 of Dark Mate

Down here, his wings come around me.

Both of them, doubled, the membrane sealing me in. And inside that—nothing. The storm goes far away. There’s his heartbeat and the hum and my own breathing, and the sky can throw everything it’s got at the canopy and not one drop reaches me. I lie there and work out that the safest I have ever been in my life is inside a monster while the world comes apart over our heads. A week ago that sentence would’ve made no sense to me. Tonight it’s just true.

Of all the ways I used to picture the end of the world going, I never once landed oncozy.

Wrapped in here, in his heat, I can feel my own body the way I never could up in the light, every inch of it awake and reporting, the tea long gone, nothing left to dull the signal. And it’s a different body than the one they kept. Stronger under his hands. Marked where he’s had me. Running hot from the inside, like whatever he keeps pouring into me has stoked a fire the Cage spent thirteen years keeping banked low. I lie in the warm dark and take quiet stock of the strange new fact of myself.

And I start to talk.

I don’t decide to. It comes up on its own, the way the memories have been surfacing since the tea bled out—never all at once, just pieces, rising and slipping back under. But this one I catch and hold, and I say it out loud into his chest, because the storm covers everything and the dark makes it safe.

“There were yellow curtains,” I tell him. “In a kitchen. Mine, I think. Before. There was a window over a sink, and the curtains were yellow, and when the sun came up it came through them and spread all over the floor—this warm yellow, moving when the wind moved.” My throat goes tight. I keep going anyway. “And somebody was singing. A woman. I can’t get the words. I’ve been trying for days and the words won’t come, just the shape of it, the up and down, and her voice.”

His heartbeat stays steady under my ear. He doesn’t move. He’s letting me.

“I think that’s my mother.” Saying it out loud cracks something. “I’ve never told anyone that. In the Cage the before-time belonged to them—the old world was broken, the asteroid was a mercy, we’re the lucky ones who got remade. A kitchen with yellow curtains and a woman singing in it doesn’t fit that story. So I folded it up small and kept it somewhere they couldn’t reach.” I push my face into his chest. “I was eight when it ended. They collected me two years after. Everything before that, they want me to believe was a nightmare we all woke up from.”

More of her comes the longer I let it. Her hands, bigger than mine, flour worked into the knuckles, the way they’d cup the back of my head. The kitchen always smelled of yeast; she made her own bread, in a world where you could still do a thing like that for no reason but the warmth of it. I can almost reach her face. It slides away every time, the way the words of her song slide away—but the edges of it are warm, and they’re mine.

And then the storm drags up the last of it, the part I’ve never once let myself look at. Because that’s what the end was. A sound. Not thunder, bigger, the whole sky coming down at once, the floor jumping under my bare feet, the yellow light going gray in a blink like someone snuffed it. Her singing stopped mid-word. I don’t have what came after; there’s just a hole where it should be, the part the tea ate and never gave back. But I have the moment the world broke, and her voice cutting off, and I have known for thirteen years without letting myself know it that the gray is where she stayed.

And then it keeps going, past the gray, into the part I’ve never had at all. Two years live in there somewhere. The tea ate most of them, but pieces float up. A long building full of children and no parents. Cold floors. Gray robes moving between the cots, soft-handed, soft-voiced, the same gentle I’d learn years later to drink out of a cup. They were the ones who taught us the story, that the old world had gone sick and the sky came to wash it clean, that what fell was a mercy, that the men it took were remade into something holy and the girls it spared were the luckiest of all. I was small enough to believe it. We all were. You believe the people who feed you.

Then a morning the gray robes packed a few of us into a covered cart, and we rode a long way in the dark. The doors opened on a courtyard with a fountain running in the middle of it. A woman with silver coming into her hair crouched down to my height, smiled, called melove,and folded a warm cup intomy two hands.Drink,she said. I was ten. The cup had my name painted on the bottom, though I couldn’t read it yet. I drank because she was kind, and the cup was warm, and two years of gray rooms had already taught me the kind ones are the ones you do what they say.

That was the last clear morning I had for thirteen years.

I make myself say the last part.

“It wasn’t a nightmare. It was a kitchen. It was yellow. Somebody loved me in it.”

Then I’m out of words, and there’s just the storm, far off, and his heart going under my cheek.

A sound moves through his chest. Low. Not the hum—shorter than that, rougher, pointed. It isn’t a word. But I’ve learned his sounds the way I once learned the Cage’s corridors, and I know what this one is. It meansI heard you.

His tail finds my hand in the dark. Wraps my wrist, the lightest hold, the tip settling right over my pulse, like he wants to feel it ticking. Like the proof of me alive is a thing he needs under his touch.

I hold onto him and the storm and the one yellow memory all at once, and for the first time none of them feels like it’s slipping away.

Then his breathing shifts, and the rut climbs back up out of the quiet, and his body and the storm go looking for each other.

He moves in me on the same beat as the thunder.

I feel it the second it starts, his hips rolling up to meet the roll of sound overhead, each deep drive landing as the percussion lands, like the storm’s keeping time for him. The thunder cracks and he drives to the root. It rolls and he grinds slow.

My whole body’s strung between the two of them, the storm outside the wings and him inside me, and there’s no telling anymore which one’s shaking the dark.

I’ve got hands now, and a voice, and a whole language we built down here without a single word in it, and tonight the storm’s loud enough that I use all of it at once. I reach back and find his hip and pull,closer, and he comes closer, folding down over me until there’s no air left between us at all. I drag his hand up off the furs and set it flat over my throat, over the bite he put there days ago, and press. And he understands, the way he always understands, his palm tightening just enough that I feel my own pulse beating up into the heat of his hand. A growl rolls out of him, pleased. “Grrr.” It says what no word of his could:you ask me for the strangest things, and I will give you every one.

He turns us without leaving me, a slow roll that drags him through me sideways and tears a cry out of me halfway round, until I’m on my side with my back curved into his chest and the storm crashing against the far side of his wings, and he takes me like that, deep and rocking, his hand still spread warm over my throat.

His cock fills me on every stroke, the thick drag of it pulling all the way back and feeding home, and I take it, open and slick, past caring how loud the want in me gets.

The knot builds. The stretch goes bright and full, catching wider at my entrance with every drive, swelling toward the lock. His tail leaves my wrist and slides down between my legs and finds my clit, circling it on the same beat his hips keep, and I’m climbing fast, too fast, my breath breaking apart, my hands fisted in the warm leather of his wing.

I come on a thunderclap.

And I scream. “AAAHH!”