Page 21 of Dark Mate

He finds my entrance. Notches the head there, against the place my body’s gone molten, and holds. One breath. Two.

He enters me hard.

A snarl rips out of him as he drives in. “Hrrnnah.” The first sound out of him since the wall came down. No hesitation now, no slow build. The rut has him rock-hard, the shaft iron and driving, and he’s in before my body’s made any peace with the size of him.

The sound I make is not a scream. It comes from somewhere deeper, under my throat, under my lungs, the sound of a body finding out it can take more than it knew. “Hhn… uhh…” The stretch is enormous. He fills me all the way, the head pressing so deep my vision pulses white in the dark, my walls clenching around something wider than anything the tea could have softened me for. My hands claw his chest. My hips try to back away and his hand pins them to the furs. He drives deeper.

Nothing has ever been this far inside me. Thirteen years and not one touch, not even my own, and now this width forcing me open around it, the rim of me burning where it stretches past anything it was ever asked to hold. He’s so deep. Deeper than I knew a body went. The blunt head of him drags against places that have never once been touched, presses all the way to the end of me, and there’s nowhere left to put him and still he comes, filling every inch I have and asking for more.

And under the burn, under the fear, something in me cracks and pours. I didn’t know I could hold this much at once. Split open, stretched, taken, terrified, and somewhere beneath all of it a low hot pull that answers him, that wants the very thing undoing me. There’s nowhere to hide from it. The dark won’t let me. He won’t let me. My own body won’t.

“Oh god—” The words tear out of me. “Oh god, oh?—”

I can’t see any of this. That’s the thing the dark does—it strips everything down to the body, to the raw fact of what’s happening inside me. There’s no watching. There’s only being.

He fills me completely, and even buried to the root he doesn’t go still. His cock moves inside me on its own, alive in a waynothing should be, the thick length of it curling and flexing against my front wall, seeking, pressing forward to find the spots that make me clench and bearing down once it finds them. The weight of his body settles over mine, his chest against my breasts, his breath hot at the crown of my head, because even braced on his forearms he’s so tall his mouth can only reach the top of my skull.

His tail stays wrapped around my thigh, holding me open. His hips drive into me, hard and deep and relentless. A low growl rolls out under every breath. “Grrr.”

The wet sound of him moving in me fills the nest. Every thrust shoves a noise out of my mouth that isn’t a word. Every pull back drags a slick, obscene sound from where we’re joined. My fingers grip the furs. My hips are rising to meet him, not a choice, my body moving toward the thing splitting it open, because the venom has rewritten every signal intomore.

I’m crying.

Not from pain, the venom took the pain and made it into something else, something that lives next door to pain but burns the other direction. I’m crying because my body is answering with a hunger I have never once felt.

The tea blunted hunger. Blunted wanting. For thirteen years it kept the wanting in a locked room where it couldn’t reach me, couldn’t make me ache, couldn’t make me press my hips toward anything.

The locked room’s open. The wanting’s out. It has my body and it’s using it without asking me, my hips grinding up, my walls clenching around him with every thrust, my own wetness making sounds I can hear in the dark, slick and steady and obscene.

This is wanting at a volume the Cage never allowed. I’m drowning in it. My back arches. My heels dig into the furs. Amoan comes out of me I don’t know—low, raw, dragged up from somewhere the Cage never got to. “Hnnnnh…”

His hips slam forward and the wet slap of his skin on mine fills the nest. A hard breath punches out of him on every drive. “Hnf. Hnf.” The sound is brutal and honest. The sound of bodies meeting with no words, no theology, nothing at all between us. He drives in again and it repeats—louder, wetter—and I clench around him so hard my thighs shake.

His cock flexes inside me. Not just thrusting, pressing, the prehensile muscle of him finding my front wall from the inside, stroking it on a rhythm all its own, separate from the rhythm of his hips. Two rhythms at once. The drive and the inside stroke.

My walls grip him, squeeze, and the squeeze pulls a groan out of him—low, guttural, from deep in his chest. “Grrh.” It vibrates down through his body into mine. I feel the groan in my nipples. In my clit. In the soles of my feet.

The sound belongs to a thing taking what it came for. What it came for is me. The groan is satisfaction. The satisfaction makes me wetter.

“Ah—” I’m gasping into the furs. My voice is high, broken, nothing like the voice I use in the Cage. “I can’t—it’s too?—”

A grunt punches out of him with the next thrust. “Hgn.” Short, hard, all animal. His hands shift on my hips, thumbs pressing into the crease where my thighs meet my pelvis, claws tucked, the pads of his fingers digging into me. He tilts me. The angle changes and his cock drags over a spot that jolts my whole body.

“Oh—” The sound is wrecked. “Oh, right—there?—”

His tail tip finds my clit. The pressure is exact, instant, eight months of stalking, of breathing through the wall, and now his tail finds my clit in total dark with the accuracy of a thing that’s already learned every inch of me by scent. A slow, firm circle that lights up every nerve the venom hasn’t already taken. The tailand the cock and the thrust—three points of pressure closing on me like a fist.

I come.

My whole body seizes. Every muscle from my jaw to the arches of my feet locks tight, my back bowing off the furs, my hands clawing his chest so hard his hot skin catches under my nails. The orgasm rips through me with a force I didn’t know my body had in it. It doesn’t crest and fall. It opens. My walls spasming around his cock drag another groan out of him, rough and raw. “Grraah!” His hips drive through it, fucking me through the clench, and the clench doesn’t end.

The theology called this divine union. The theology can rot in the ground. This is a body being broken open by a thing it was never allowed to want, and the wanting is so much bigger than the theology’s careful words that the words burn off like ash.

The knot.

I feel it building at the base of him—a swelling that presses my entrance with each thrust, growing wider, pushing harder. Every drive forces it against me, asking in, stretching my already-spread entrance wider. My hands fly to his hips, pushing, not to stop him, I can’t stop him, my hands are nothing against the mass of him—but because the stretch is passing what even the venom can rewrite.

“I can’t—” I hear myself. “It’s too much, I can’t take?—”