Page 68 of Feral Keep

I pull his face down. His neck bends—he has to bend far, the height difference putting my mouth at his collarbone. I grab his horns. The white bone is warm under my palms, smooth, and the grip gives me leverage. This close, the smell of him is overwhelming, char and salt and something underneath that’s just heat, and I press my mouth to the tendon in his throat.

He growls, something from underneath, rougher than the rut-growl, surprised.

I bite—not hard enough to break skin, just the flat of my teeth closing on the tendon, the way his teeth close on my throat when he’s inside me. The pressure sends a shudder through his whole body. His hands tighten on my waist. His cock presses against my thigh through the furs—thickens.

The bark-strip crumples under my shoulder when he pushes me down. I don’t care. His body over mine, the wall of crimson blocking the firelight, his weight braced on his forearms above me. His cock pressing against the inside of my thigh, the tip seeking, finding the heat, the slick that arrived the second I put my hands on his horns.

He enters me in one slow, devastating drive. My back arches off the furs. My hands grip his forearms—the muscle underneath like heated stone. The stretch fills me completely, the girth pressing my walls apart, the tip curling forward to find the spot that draws the first gasp out of my throat.

“Red…”

He drives, something between the patient thrust of the rut’s lulls and the brutal force of the escalation—chosen, deliberate, each stroke pulling almost all the way out before pushing back in with his full weight behind it. Every inch of the withdrawal, every inch of the return. My walls grip him on the outstroke and my body shudders on the in. His forehead presses against my hair. His breath is hot against my scalp.

The reading lesson is on the furs beside us, THE WOMEN ARE BUILDING crumpled beneath me. His hands—the hands that held the bark with such care, that traced letters with such patience—are gripping the furs on either side of my head, his claws leaving furrows in the hide.

I wrap my legs around him, gripping the taper of his waist—his body too broad to reach all the way around, always too broad—my heels digging into the small of his back. Pulling him deeper. Demanding more.

He gives more.

The pace climbs. His breathing goes ragged. The firelight catches the sheen of sweat on his crimson skin, the dark veins in his membrane-folded wings. His cock drives into me with a rhythm that matches the one we built over weeks of rut, except the rut was his body’s decision and this is his. Both of ours.

The orgasm builds from the base of my spine. Slow, dense, pulling tight like a fist closing. His cock hits deep on the next stroke and the fist opens and I come with my teeth in my lower lip and his name—”Red”—forced out through the clench of my jaw.

He follows. Three more strokes—hard, desperate, the restraint cracking—and he comes with a groan that vibrates through his chest into mine. The flood of cum is hot, the knot swelling enough to press against my opening without locking, the post-rut version that fills without trapping. Warmth pools where his cock pulses inside me. My walls milk him through the aftershocks, my hips rolling slow, drawing out every pulse.

He drops his weight to one side. Pulls me against his chest, my back to his front, his cock still inside me, softening, all of him relaxing into the idle flex that used to be constant and now comes in chosen moments. His arm across my waist. His hand settles over the warmth low in my belly.

The bark-strip is on the furs beside us. The letters facing up. THE WOMEN ARE BUILDING.

“Read it again,” I say. My voice is rough. My body is still humming.

His chin settles against my temple. His chest rises and falls against my back. His cock flexes once, lazy, inside me.

“The women are building,” he reads. Slow. Sure. His voice in my hair.

My hips settle into the cradle of his body, and my eyes fall shut. The cooling sweat between us. His hand is warm on my belly. The fire is dying down, the light softer, more orange.

The canopy shifts outside. Wind in the roots. The wall beside the fire catches the embers: the A carved deep, the backwards B, the L that became a scratch, the CCCC that became a scar. Thirteen years of a teacher’s hands reaching for shapes his mind couldn’t hold. Until now.

Until me.

He rebuilt my body. I’m rebuilding his mind.

The thought sits strange in my chest, heavier than I expect it to be. Being needed like that is new. Being needed used to mean being used up, worked until there was nothing left to take. This feels different, and I don’t fully trust the difference yet, but I don’t want to stop finding out either.

His cock pulses inside me. Not a flex. A pulse. The small movement of post-sex release, the body settling, the knot gone but the connection still there. My walls soften around him. I could sleep like this. I want to sleep like this. His body around mine, his warmth at my back, his palm resting low on my stomach, the smell of sex and fire and crimson skin mixing with the smell of root and earth that fills the warren.

The thing between us is becoming clear, taking shape.

Teacher and student. Builder and rebuilt. The man who carved letters into a wall for thirteen years, trying to hold onto language, is finally speaking. The girl from the camps is learning that someone wanted to read the shape of her voice badly enough to spend thirteen years keeping the alphabet alive in his hands.

The thing between us is not love yet. But it’s the smell of it. The sound of it. The exact shape of two broken things becoming whole.

28

MAEVE

We visit the grave on our own feet.