Page 32 of Dark Mate

Ifind out what real hunger is in the dark.

Not the Cage’s version. Cage hunger was polite, it showed up at mealtimes and got fed with porridge in a measured bowl, and the tea smoothed it down before it could get loud.You’re hungryturned intoyou could eat.No edge to it. They fed you before you had time to want.

This is a mouth. It opens up in my belly and won’t close. My stomach cramps around nothing, hard.

His tail finds my lips. A berry, warm from being held against his skin. I bite down before I’ve thought about it, the skin splitting, juice running down my chin, and I’m reaching for the next one before I’ve swallowed the first.

“More,” I say. The word just falls out of me. The Cage never let me hold that word. The tea madeenoughfeel like everything.

He gives me more. Berries, then strips of something dried and salted that I tear off the tip of his tail with my teeth, the savor of it hitting so hard my jaw aches. He feeds me slow and patient, finding my mouth in the black without once fumbling for it, and a low sound runs under his breath the whole time—pleased, steady, like feeding me settles something in him too.

Then something sweet.

The smell of it reaches me before the taste—deep and floral, a wild note under it I have no word for. His tail draws a thick line of it across my lower lip. Honey, but warmer, and nothing like the careful spoon of sugar they measured into the morning cup.

I lick it off and my whole body shivers.

It’s reckless, this sweetness. It floods my mouth and aches in my back teeth, and I have no name for whatever flower it came off, because the Cage never stocked one single thing that grew on its own—wild, untended, answering to nobody. I think about that while it melts on my tongue. Something out there made this and no one managed it. No one measured it. It was just allowed to be sweet.

“What is that?” I ask. My voice comes out sticky with it. “It’s nothing like the cup. It’s nothing like anything they ever gave us.”

He doesn’t answer. Maybe he can’t—maybe the words are as locked up in him as mine were in me. But his tail comes back with another slow thread of it and paints it across my lip, and the low sound that runs through his chest tells me he likes that I asked.

“So that’s a no on the recipe,” I say, licking it off. The sound deepens, pleased, and I decide I like making it happen—poking the giant predator and getting a purr back instead of a bite.

I want more of it. I want more of everything down here that nobody decided I was allowed.

I take the tip of his tail into my mouth.

Not to eat. To get the last of the honey off the muscle. My tongue works the underside of it, slow, and the tail goes still—then twitches, a tight little jerk against my lips.

The sound that comes out of him is a short, choked grunt. “Hk.” Nothing like the feeding sound. This one tells me my mouth means something to him that food doesn’t.

So I don’t stop.

I draw on it, soft, my tongue moving on the slick muscle, and his breath goes ragged behind me. The cock still seated in me tightens—not hard yet, just a pulse, a question. His tail trembles between my lips like a held hand that wants to grip and won’t let itself.

I learn something, doing that. The Cage taught me to take what I was given. Nobody ever taught me I could give something back and watch it land.

There’s a gap between the surges. A space where the drive rests and the bodies rest and the dark just breathes.

I move into it.

No real decision. I press myself against his chest, palms flat, his heart going under my hands. My hips find his—the cock still in me, soft in the lull, idling. I rock. Forward. Back.

It answers. I feel it, the slow thickening, the soft going firm, swelling against my walls as I move, like I’m waking it up by hand. The stretch builds back, familiar now, my body opening around it because it knows the shape of him.

And his hands stay in the furs.

Palms down. Claws sunk in the pelts beside my knees. He’slettingme. The thing that pins me and drives through me every peak is lying still under my hands, letting me ride it from soft to hard, and I can feel what that costs him. The groan low in his chest. The helpless half-push of his hips he kills before it finishes. A shudder that runs all the way up through his ribs into my palms.

“You’re letting me.” I say it out loud, half a question, my hips never stopping. “You could throw me off and take it however you want. You’re not.”

The sound he makes is wrecked. “Hrrgh.” His claws drag furrows down the pelts. But he holds still for me anyway,shaking with it, and him choosing the shaking over the easy thing does something to me I’ll be untangling for a long while.

“Okay,” I breathe. “Okay. Then I will.”

I set the pace. Slow, grinding down on the thickness, my breath breaking into little gasps. I press harder on his chest and feel his heart going like something trying to get out.