Page 10 of My Halloween Hunter

It isn't all he does.

He shuts the stove door and stays crouched there with his back to me, shoulders rising and falling, the firelight running along the side of his face. When he stands and turns around, his face has gone somewhere I haven't seen it since the north slope. Dark. Set. His eyes on me the way they must have been on me that first night, from the trees, when I was something moving at the edge of his ground.

"Cade—"

He crosses the room in three strides, takes me by the back of the neck and the hip, and puts me down on the rug in front of the stove.

It isn't rough, exactly. It's certain. The rug under my back, the fire roaring beside us, his whole weight coming down over me, his thigh shoving my knees apart. His mouth takes mine, and it isn't a kiss. It's a claim. He bites my lower lip, and when I gasp he takes that too.

He drags my sweater up over my head and my arms tangle in it, and he leaves them there, trapped above my head in the wool, and pins my wrists to the floor with one hand. With the other he opens my jeans and yanks them down my thighs, underwear with them, off one leg and left hanging from the other ankle. He doesn't bother with his own clothes. He tears his belt open, and his cock is out, hard and dark and heavy, and when his hand goes between my legs and finds me already soaked, he makes a sound low in his chest like an animal that's found something it buried.

"Mine," he says.

He pushes into me in one stroke.

It knocks the air clean out of me. He's so deep I feel him in my throat, and he holds there, buried to the root, his hand locked on my wrists and his face an inch from mine, breathing like he ran here.

"Say it."

"Yours."

He pulls almost all the way out and slams back in, and the rug skids on the floorboards.

After that there's nothing careful in him anywhere. He fucks me like he's trying to drive something into me that can't be taken back out, hard and deep and relentless, the heel of his hand grinding my wrists into the floor, his other hand hooked under my knee and shoving it up toward my chest so he can get deeper. The stove roars. My heel drums the floor. I'm not quiet. I can't be. Every stroke knocks a sound out of me, and every sound makes him go harder.

He puts his mouth on my neck, under my ear, and sucks. Hard. Harder. It stings, and I arch up into it.

"Everyone's going to see that," I gasp.

"Good." His teeth drag lower. Another mark, at the side of my throat. Another on my collarbone. He pulls my bra down with his teeth and sucks a dark bruise into the soft skin above my nipple while he drives into me, and then lifts his head and looks at what he's done, and his eyes go black.

"Mine," he says again. "Every place I put my mouth."

I come so hard I scream.

He doesn't stop. He fucks me through it, and before I've come down he pulls out and flips me onto my hands and knees on the rug, my sweater still tangled around my arms. He fists his hand in my hair and pulls my head back and pushes into me again from behind, and his other hand spreads flat and heavy across my belly, holding me back onto him.

"Going to fill you up," he says into my ear. His voice is barely human. "Every night. Till you're so full of me you can't walk straight."

"Yes—"

"Going to breed you. Right here on my floor." His hand presses harder into my belly. "Mine. Every inch of you. Mine."

He says it over and over into my hair and against the marks on my throat, mine and keep and fill, and every word goes into me like a hook. I push back onto him and beg for more of it, and he gives it to me until I'm shaking and sobbing and coming again, clenching around him so hard he swears.

He drives into me three more times, brutal, and comes with his forehead pressed between my shoulder blades and a sound torn out of the bottom of his chest, holding me locked on his cock while he empties into me, his hand crushing my belly against him as though he can keep it all in there by force.

Afterwards he carries me to bed and holds me tighter than he ever has, his hand spread over my belly all night, heavy, as if he's keeping something from getting out. He said mine a hundred times tonight. He never once said stay. I lie in the dark with my eyes open and my throat aching where he marked it, waiting for one of us to be brave, and neither of us is.

Ray “fixes” the car on Halloween morning in forty minutes.

"Nothing wrong with it," he says, wiping his hands on a rag. He's a big man in flannel with the resigned face of someone who's said that sentence before. "Happens up here sometimes, this time of year."

That’s the only explanation I get. Nothing was wrong with the damn thing. I shake my head.

I drive it down to Edna's to settle up.

The store is full of kids in costume, and Edna is behind the counter in hoop earrings and a fringed shawl with kohl smudged around her eyes, a fortune teller and fully committed to it. She takes my money, then takes my hand and turns it palm up to study it.