Page 21 of Feral Keep

My hand moves.

Toward his palm, warm and heavy on my stomach. My fingers shift on the fur, a fraction of an inch, drifting toward his crimson palm before I know they’re moving.

Every old alarm goes off at once.

Don’t. Don’t lean toward the thing touching you. Don’t reach for the hand on your belly. Don’t⁠—

My fingers stop. Curl into the fur. The old warning wins this round.

But my body remembers which direction it was reaching.

I need a word for him.

Not it. Not the thing or the male or whatever is inside me. Those worked for the first two days, when what was happening didn’t need a name because what was happening was just endurance. Something to survive. You don’t name the weather. You don’t name the work line.

But the palm resting low on my stomach isn’t weather. The food at my mouth isn’t a work line. The crimson fingers, the gold eyes, the guttural good—those belong to something specific. Something that feeds me with the same hand that holds me down.

Red.

The word arrives without ceremony. Just the color of him, the blood-crimson that covers every visible inch of skin, that’s warm under my cheek when he holds me against his chest. Red. Simple. A camp name. The kind of thing you call something when you can’t afford to give it a real name because real names are for things you plan to keep.

My throat tightens around that thought before I can stop it. My mother used to name the plants she grew, silly small names for the herbs and the vine on our shelter wall, and when she died there was no one left to call them anything and they just went back to being plants. Naming something never saved it, never kept it. Calling this male Red instead of nothing feels like standing at the edge of that same mistake, except this time what’s looking back is bigger than a handful of leaves, and I already know I won’t be able to walk away from what he is.

No objection rises. A label isn’t the same as a name. A label keeps things sorted.

Except my fingers were reaching for his hand when the label arrived, and some old, wary part of me knows practical isn’t what this is.

Red does it again three hours later. Or four. Or two—time is the lull, then the height of it: the knotting and the fast fuck, the food and the silence.

The fast fuck. Tail cinched. Hard driving. The load building behind the ring while his body produces more. Then the release—the tail unwinding, the flood, the heat hitting my insides with a force that makes my belly tighten and my walls clench and my body pull everything in.

His palm finds my stomach. Presses.

“Keep it inside.”

Three words. More than “eat.” More than “good.” The most complex sentence his feral brain has produced, directed at my body through the flat of his palm.

I keep it inside. Not because he told me to. Because my body has already decided to. The walls clenching, the muscles contracting, everything below my navel working to hold the heat where it is. Somewhere under the awareness, the old watchfulness clocks it: my body is cooperating. It doesn’t have a follow-up for that.

He feeds me after every fast fuck.

His fingers at my mouth while his cock softens inside me. Meat. Warm, still carrying the smoke smell of whatever fire he cooked it over, and my mouth waters before my teeth even close on it. His thumb pushing the piece past my lips when I’m too slow to take it. I chew on the good side. His cum pools in my belly, thick and hot, and the food goes down on top of it. Two kinds of full. My body taking both on its own.

“More.”

I shake my head.

It’s the same argument as the first time. His jaw tightens. His hand stays where it is, food between his fingers, crimson knuckles radiating heat against my lips. Insisting.

I take it. He settles.

His cock gives one slow, idle flex inside me. Not the driving rhythm—just a pulse. A reminder that he’s there. His tip presses against the front wall in a lazy roll, and the sensation that sends through my pelvis is—I don’t know what it is. Not pain, not the almost-pleasure of the knot sessions—something in between. Something that makes my belly tighten.

I breathe through it. He feeds me another piece.

He fucks me again before the food is fully down.

No warning. His cock hardens inside me between one breath and the next—the prehensile flex snapping from drowsy to driven, his cock thickening against my walls. The tail cinches around his base. He drives in.