Page 66 of Feral Keep

The cum floods hot. No knot-lock. Post-rut, the knot swells but doesn’t seal, the flood filling me without the hours-long trap of the feral cycle. Warmth pooling. His cock pulsing inside me, the tip pressing forward against the front wall, dragging the last waves of my orgasm out in slow, shuddering aftershocks.

I fall forward onto his chest. His arms come around me. His heartbeat under my ear. His cock softening inside me, slowly, every inch of him going easy, going quiet.

His hand settles into my hair. The new growth, dense 4c coils, oiled with the tallow he worked through them days ago. His fingers spread across my scalp. Gentle. The gentleness he denied himself during the rut, surfacing now because the man is back and the man can choose to be soft.

His other hand finds my belly. Covers the warmth. Presses.

The dead boys’ names are still in the room. Billy. Sam. Dickie. The grief is still in the room. The sex didn’t erase it. The sex didn’t try to.

It just took up space alongside it. The way the women in the camps slept side by side—grief and survival in the same bed, neither one winning, both of them present.

His thumb strokes my belly. His breath is slowing. The fire crackles. The canopy murmurs.

“Thank you,” he says. Two words. Quiet. Not for the sex. For staying.

Nobody ever thanked me for staying. In the camps, staying wasn’t a choice worth thanking anybody for, it was just what a body did until it stopped being able to. Something in my throat swells up thick and I have to swallow twice before it goes down.

I press my face into his chest. The crimson skin is hot against my cheek. His heartbeat is steady now. The tremor is gone.

“Yeah,” I say. Camp-speech. The pragmatist’s answer to everything. But my hand covers his on my belly, and the warmth underneath is steady, and the silence between us is the kind that holds.

27

MAEVE

The wall has letters on it.

They caught at the edge of me during the rut—dim, half-formed shapes carved into the root wood at the back of the warren. Scratches I couldn’t focus on. The venom was in my blood, his cock was in my body, and the world was filtered through the haze of being fucked and fed and kept. I put them away for later. Later is now.

I stand in front of the wall. The wood here smells old and dry, dust and something faintly sweet like rot that never quite finished, nothing like the living green smell of the canopy outside. The carvings are deep in places, shallow in others. Some are confident—clean lines, smooth curves, the hand of someone who knew what they were making. Some are barely scratches, abandoned mid-stroke, the claw that made them catching and skipping, losing the thread between one letter and the next.

Letters. They’re letters.

An A, carved deep, retraced so many times the lines are twin grooves. The point worn down to a blunt curve. An H beside it—incomplete, the left vertical solid but the crossbar fading halfway across like the hand lost conviction. The backwards B next to that, and now I know what he meant about it being wrong. The curves bulge the wrong way. Someone knowing they fucked it up and leaving it there anyway because the next carving might vanish too.

An L that starts as a true vertical, the top bar crisp, but then curves—no, doesn’t curve. Turns into a scratch. Like the claw skipped or his hand forgot what an L looked like mid-stroke and just dragged through the bark instead. The scratch goes deep. Raw frustration scored into the wood. Then nothing. A blank space. And then an R, half the size, tentative.

More symbols cluster below: territorial marks, symbols that might be letters, symbols that could mean anything. But mixed through: SCHOOL, maybe, but the O is too big and uncertain, the letters around it compressed like he was running out of space or running out of memory. A D, a E, an F. Some letters repeated over and over in a cluster, CCCC, scratched so frantically the marks blur into one deep gouge.

Thirteen years. He carved these letters into this wall for thirteen years, knowing they’d disappear from his mind. Knowing the feral would take them back. Carving them anyway.

My finger traces the A. The groove is worn smooth from being retraced, polished by the same claw, the same hand, coming back to this spot again and again. This one he kept. This one he remembered enough times to carve it deep. The rest slipped away—the L that became a scratch, the CCCC that became a scar, the O that got too big because he couldn’t hold the shape.

But the A. The A stayed.

“You did this,” I say. Not asking. Stating.

He’s behind me. Heat blooms off him, the bulk of his body in my peripheral vision. His breathing changes when he looks at the wall, quicker, tighter.

“Trying to remember,” he says. The words come out slow. “Couldn’t—the letters would come and then they’d go. I’d have them for a day. An hour. Then the feral—” He stops. His hand rises past my shoulder and his finger—massive, crimson, the claw retracted—touches the backwards B. “This one. I knew it was wrong. I couldn’t remember why.”

My chest hurts.

Not the sharp hurt of the camps, not the wrenching, howling hurt of watching someone die. This is the slow, spreading hurt of understanding that the man standing behind me spent thirteen years alone in this warren, carving letters he couldn’t hold onto, losing them to the feral state, carving them again. And again. A teacher’s hands on a wall, trying to keep the thing the mutation couldn’t quite strip away. The thing that made him human, the thing that let him sit in front of children and watch them learn, and then lost it, lost it, lost it, and still his hands remembered. Still something deep in him kept reaching for letters he couldn’t hold in his mind.

Camp-blunt: thirteen years of this, alone. Thirteen years of forgetting and carving and forgetting. That’s not a man. That’s grief that never got to end.

“I can read,” I say.