Page 59 of Dark Mate

“Shocking,” I say. He doesn’t smile. I don’t think his face does that, but something moves through the amber, and neither of us bothers pretending the parallel isn’t sitting right there.

The birds spiral up and out of sight, and I’m left looking at him.

At all of him, for the first time, in full light.

In the nest I learned him by touch, by the slivers of him the dark allowed. Up here the sun gets the whole of him at once—the near-black of his skin gone warm where the light lands, the hollows gone almost blue-black. The wings half-furled, the membrane thin enough in the sun to show the branching veins, the leading edge a hard black line. The broken horn. The pale throat scar. The amber eyes lit from the inside to the color of the light coming down through the leaves.

I’ve been claimed by this in the dark. I’ve never once chosen it in the light.

I want to.

“Hey,” I say, and my voice does something I feel in my own chest. He turns his head. I don’t have a speech ready. I put my hand flat on the warm plane of his chest, not that he’d move unless he wanted to, but he reads the want in it and goes still in the way that means I have all of him, and I climb into his lap there on the branch, the canopy dropping away on every side, the light all over us.

His hands come to my hips. Careful. A question.

“Yes,” I say. Out loud. In the light, where I can watch his face hear it land.

He doesn’t drive. That’s the thing the dark never gave me—this. He’s soft against me when I settle over him, and then he isn’t, the change happening slow as I move, him thickening and finding his way, the blunt heat of him nudging until it’s right and easing up into me by degrees with no rush in it at all. I sink down onto him the way you lower into warm water. Inch by inch. The stretch of him is the same enormous fact it always is, but this time I set the pace of meeting it, and that changes everything about what it is.

“Oh,” I breathe. Not a broken sound. A whole one.

He’s all the way in me, the sun’s on my back, and his wings come up, not the snap of the rut, a slow flare, the membrane catching the light and washing it down over us in shifting amber. I look at him lit gold from below and think: nobody made me do this. Nobody put anything in my tea. I climbed up here on my own legs and chose this with my eyes open.

I move. He lets me. His hands stay loose on my hips, guiding, never gripping, letting me find the roll of it, and I do, the slow grind that drags him against the place he taught my body to want in the dark and now lets me reach for in the light. A grunt rolls out of him on every grind down. “Unh.” The wind moves over my bare skin. Far off, the mated pair calls. The slick sound of us is a small thing under all that open air.

“Look at you,” he says, low, his eyes never leaving my face. “Look what you took.”

I come with the sun on me and his name in my mouth, not bitten off, not stolen, just said. “Riven.” And I feel him follow, a groan breaking out of him into my hair. “Hrrah…” His cum spills hot up into me, his knot swelling to catch and hold. Smaller than the rut’s. Gentler. An intimacy now, not a sentence. The vibration starts soft against my clit and I ride the last of it out with my forehead dropped to his sternum, his mouth coming down to the crown of my head, his breath stirring my hair.

His knot eases after a while, the way it does now—softening, letting me go without the old finality. I climb off him on loose legs, and we sit in the light a while, his arm around me, the wonder of the open world and the wonder of what we just did in it folded into one bright afternoon.

“I’ve only ever had you in the dark,” I say.

A rumble under my cheek. His arm tightens, all of me gathered against all of him.

“Now you have me everywhere,” he says.

I could stay up here forever.

Then a sound from below, and we both go still.

Something big, moving through the understory, wood cracking under real weight, leaves rushing, smaller things scattering out of its way in bursts of wing and claw. Not a bird. Not wind.

His body changes in a breath.

One second he’s the contained, almost-careful thing beside me. The next his wings are half-open with a sound like canvas snapping taut, his tail’s rigid and lifted off the branch like a blade, and the amber’s fixed on a point below us with an intensity I’ve seen exactly twice—the night he came through my wall, and the last peak of the rut.

I follow his eyes. Down in the green-shadow, a shape moves. Seven feet, maybe. Mottled gray-green, near-invisible against the bark. It doesn’t run, itflows,low to the wood, fast, the limbs working in a way built for this place. I get two seconds of it. A long body, an angular head, and the limbs—too many limbs? I can’t tell. It’s gone before I can be sure. The branch it crossed sways twice and the canopy closes over the space like it was never there.

He doesn’t relax.

I watch the tension hold in him, the cords standing in his shoulders, the claws dimpling the bark, his tail rigid a full minute after the thing’s gone, the amber tracking the line it took.

“What was it?” Quiet. I’m not scared yet—that comes later, when the rush wears off. Right now I’m too busy reading him.

“Unmade.” One word, flat. It carries weight I don’t have the whole of yet—something from his world, the dark underside of the same change that made him.

“What does that mean—unmade?”