Page 68 of Animal Tamer
“Lie down on the bed,” I say.
He blinks. “Wren?—”
“Lie down.”
“What are you?—”
“Do you trust me?” I interrupt.
His throat moves. His eyes go from my face to the feather and back.
“Yes,” he says.
He lies down on the narrow bunk, on his back, arms loose at his sides, and I can see his pulse going in his throat, fast and hard.
I walk to the bed and stop with my knees an inch from the mattress edge, careful, so careful, my body a full hand's width from his everywhere. Then I lower the feather anddraw the soft edge along the tally marks below his collarbone.
He makes a sound like a man being shot.
“Too much?”
“No.” It comes out mangled. “No. Don't stop.”
I don't stop. I trace the Proverbs lines, one by one, the feather barely bending against his skin, and his breath goes ragged, and then the tears come. They slide from the corners of his eyes into his hair, and he doesn't wipe them, and I don’t wipe mine either. I follow a row of scars down his ribs. The Numbers. The feather whispers over each ridge, replacing—not erasing, nothing erases, butreplacing, laying a new sensation over the old one like ink over scar tissue.
His hands fist in the blanket. “This is soft with nothing before it.”
“This is soft with nothing before it,” I repeat, and draw the feather down the raised braid of his left forearm, over the neat lines and the rough ones, his and Harlan's alike, all of it, every inch, because all of it is him and all of it gets touched tonight.
His breathing changes somewhere around the third pass up his ribs. The tears slow. The tension in him shifts, and when I glance down his body, I see that he's hard, leaking over his stomach, and the flush on his face turns into mortification.
“I'm sorry.” He starts to sit up. “God, I'm sorry, you're doing something—this isn't supposed to be?—”
“Shh.” I press the feather flat against his sternum, the gentleststayin the world, and he stays. “Rowe. Your body just learned that soft can lead somewhere good. That's not a betrayal of the moment. Thatisthe moment.”
He stares at me. Lies back down.
I set the feather on the blanket beside him, and I strip.
Not slowly like last night. Fast, sure, my clothes hitting the floor in seconds, because I'm not shy anymore—not for him, not ever again. His eyes go molten watching me, tracking every inch, and when I pick the feather back up and stand naked at the edge of his bunk, his cock jerks against his stomach.
I lower the feather and drag the edge up his shaft.
The noise he makes is obscene. His whole body bows, hips lifting into a touch that can't be chased—that's the cruelty and the mercy of a feather, there's nothing to thrust against—and he collapses back down, panting.
“Wren—”
“Look at me.” I slide my own hand down my stomach, between my thighs, where I'm already soaked, and his eyes lock onto my fingers like a drowning man onto a rope. “This is what you do to me. All day. At breakfast, I could barely sit, I was so sore from you, and Ilikedit. I sat next to your whole family aching where you'd been, and I liked it.”
“Fuck.” The feather traces the underside of his crown and his cock jumps, dribbling onto his stomach, a thin strand connecting him to his own skin. “Wren, that's—I can't?—”
“You can.” I circle my clit slowly, letting him watch, letting him hear how wet the movement sounds in the quiet trailer. “You lie there, and you take the softness, and you watch me touch what belongs to you.” The feather ghosts down to the base and back up, and up, and his stomach is glazed now, his thighs shaking, sounds falling out of him that aren't words. “I'm going to be in those trucks in eight days. Every town. Every night. This body, in your bed, chained open whenever you want it?—”
“Please.”
“—and every scar on you is going to learn my—” My own rhythm betrays me. The orgasm has been building faster than I planned, fed by the sight of him wrecked and glistening andmine, and it slams through me mid-sentence. My knees buckle against the bunk frame. I cry out, fingers working, his name in it somewhere, my whole body shuddering in the lamplight where he can see every wave of it.
He breaks.
