Page 20 of Feral Keep

But the lulls.

His cock stays inside me. It hasn’t withdrawn since the claiming, since he first entered me in the furs, since the knot locked and his body decided that my body was where his cock lived now. His chest is a wall of heat at my back, and the smell that comes off his skin there—warm and dense, something like hot stone and old iron—has soaked so far into the furs I can’t tell anymore where the den ends and he begins. During the lulls, the knot softens. The vibration eases, barely there, a hum in my back teeth more than my pelvis. The cock goes soft. Not absent. Soft. The prehensile flex slowing to a drowsy pulse, the tip pressing forward in idle rolls that are almost gentle.

Almost.

The gentleness is what makes the lulls worse than the peaks. During the peaks, my camp-brain has a script. Endure. During the lulls, the script runs out. There’s nothing to endure. There’s just his cock, soft, inside me. Warm. Moving in slow lazy flexes that don’t demand anything, don’t use, don’t hurt. Just... present.

And when the lull stretches long enough, when the softness persists and the warmth settles, my body does something I don’t give it permission to do.

It notices the absence.

The warmth of the flood fading. His cum being absorbed or cooling or whatever it does when the hours pass. My belly cools by degrees, the fullness leaking out of it. My body has started to associate that warmth with the absence of pain, and when it fades, the pain tries to come back. The venom holds most of it. The ribs stay quiet. The shoulder stays manageable. But the deeper ache, the starved, bone-deep cold that comes from a body running on nothing, creeps back in during the lulls like fog through a fence gap.

My body wants the warmth back.

Wanting anything back is new. In the camps, wanting was the fastest way to lose whatever you wanted. You didn’t want extra bread, you didn’t want a warmer blanket. Wanting made you watch for it, and watching made you careless, and careless got you noticed. I buried wanting so deep it stopped feeling like an organ I owned. Now it’s back, small and stupid, aimed at a strip of warmth in my own belly, and I don’t know what to do with an organ I thought I’d cut out years ago.

Something in me slams a fist down on the thought: no. You don’t want anything from the thing inside you. You endure it. You don’t want it.

But my hips tilted—toward him, toward the place where the warmth was strongest. A small movement. Not a choice. My body reaching before my mind could veto.

I pull the tilt back. Flatten my hips against the furs. Don’t lean toward the thing touching you. Don’t.

My body already leaned.

Behind me, his tail drags once against my calf—slow, idle, almost nothing. Like he felt exactly which way I moved and isn’t going to say so.

The fast fuck is different from the long knotting.

I learn this on day three. He shifts behind me—the slow lull ending, his cock hardening inside me, the prehensile flex intensifying from idle rolls to deliberate, curving presses. But this time the knot doesn’t swell to seal. This time his tail wraps around the base of his own cock—the crimson coils tightening at my opening, the squeeze of his tail against his own body.

He drives in.

Hard. Sudden. The lull-softness gone in a single thrust. His cock filling me to a depth that rocks my body forward into the furs. The girth drags fast—a pull of friction, that impossible width against swollen tissue.

No slow grind. No rotation. This is a driving rhythm. His hips snapping against me with a force that shoves me into the furs on every stroke. Sweat breaks on my skin, sharp and salt, and under it his own smell thickens with the effort, going darker and heavier the way a fire smells different once it’s really burning.

The tail grips tighter.

I don’t understand what he’s doing. The camp didn’t brief us on the details of how they fuck—Shayla covered the broad strokes of the rut, the knot, the claiming. Nobody mentioned the tail wrapped around the base of his own cock, squeezing, the pressure building with every thrust.

His balls are heavy against me, fuller than before, swollen. The tail-ring holds everything in while his body produces more.

He’s building a load.

The realization arrives through the body, not the mind. His cock driving in with a purpose that isn’t about the grinding or the vibration or the slow sustained lock. This is faster. More deliberately productive. Like the difference between the camp’s daily labor and a rush order—the same motions, compressed, urgent, aimed at output.

He comes.

The tail releases. The surge is—massive. A flood of heat so sudden and so much that my belly cramps with the volume, and the smell of it rises between us at once, hot and thick and mineral, like a struck coin held too close to my nose. His cock pulsing in long, hard contractions, driving the cum in with each pulse. I hear myself make a sound—not a word, not even close. A grunt, pushed out of me by the sheer physical force of being filled that fast with that much.

His palm lands on my belly and presses down. Pushing the cum lower. Keeping it inside me.

“Good.”

The word in the furs. His palm flat against my lower abdomen, burning against skin that’s already burning from the inside. Two warmths. One from outside, one from inside. The fullness so total that the ache of starving disappears entirely—not just dampened by the venom but drowned by the flood of whatever his body just delivered into mine.

The furs hold my weight, his palm warm against my stomach. His cock still inside me, softening now, the lull beginning again. The heat pooling in my abdomen. Full. The ache gone.