Page 53 of Dark Mate

He doesn’t. The water cools and he reheats it one-handed, the other never leaving my back—one hand for the water, one for her, both get done, neither gets dropped.He reheats it twice more, and each time the hand on my back stays, steady and hot, sayingherewithout a word in it.

I cry until I’m empty. It takes a while. He waits it out like he’s got the rest of his life for it.

That night the shaking comes back, and the fog with it, and I do the thing the Cage girl never would have: I reach for what I need and don’t pretend I don’t.

I wake in the furs with him curved behind me, looser than the rut-hold now, his grip gone fromminetohere,which is a small difference that turns out to be everything. My skin itches from the inside. My thoughts won’t hold a shape. Three days off his cum and my whole body knows exactly what it wants and is too proud to—no. I’m not too proud. That was the old me.

I turn over and face him. Asleep, the watchfulness falls off his face and what’s left looks almost young—the ghost of whoever hewas before the change made him this. I put my hand flat on his chest, over the furnace of him, and slide it down.

I find his cock. Wrap my hand around as much as it’ll reach, which isn’t much. Even soft he’s more than my fingers can close on. He flexes once against my palm—that seeking thing his body does, knowing me before his mind’s caught up. I stroke him, slow, and feel the blood answer, the heat climbing.

His eyes open. The amber finds me, the sleep burning off in one breath, and what’s left is raw.

“Ellie.” Sleep-rough. My name as a question.

His hand comes up and hovers by my face, not touching. Asking. I turn my cheek into his palm and his thumb finds the dried salt of the tears from the bath, and the gentleness of it from something this size makes my chest hurt.

“I’m sure,” I tell him, before he can spend the words asking. “I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.”

I guide him in and sink down in one slow slide, and because he’s still half-soft it’s all heat and give, no stretch, no burn. And then the part that makes my breath catch: he hardensinsideme, swelling to fill me by degrees while I hold still and feel every bit of it. The rut took me hard and already-desperate. This is the opposite. This is his body waking up inside mine.

He lets me set it. A low groan grinds out of him, helpless. “Hrrn.” I can see what it costs him not to grab my hips and drive. It’s in the cords of his neck, the shake in the arms braced on either side of me. He holds still and lets me take what I need, and the restraint of it is more than any force he ever used.

I ride him slow. The knot swells, smaller than the rut’s, and seals us, and the hum starts low in his chest. A groan rolls out of him, then a word shoved out rough and whole against my hair. “Hnnh… good. So good.” Then the first surge, hot and thick, settling behind my navel, and the moment his cum hits me, the fog lifts.

Not slowly. All at once. Like a window thrown open in a room that’s been shut for years. My thoughts snap sharp and clean. The shaking stops. The itch stops. I canthink.

And the thought that finishes itself, clear as glass:I was kept dim for thirteen years, and the thing that clears my head is the cum of the monster who took me through a wall. And I chose it. I’ll choose it again tomorrow. The choosing is the whole point.

Because that’s the difference, and it’s the only one that counts. The tea and this might be doing the very same thing to the very same wiring, for all I know. But the tea got poured into me by people who needed me quiet and smiled while they did it and called it the morning routine. This I reach for with my own hand, eyes open, knowing exactly what it is. Same water, maybe. Drowning or swimming is all in who’s doing the choosing.

The orgasm breaks over me, half his cock, half the sheer relief of my own mind coming home, and I come back to myself on a sound I didn’t know I had, something between a gasp and a sob. “Hah… oh…” The sound of waking up.

He holds me through it, both arms, his chin curled all the way down to the top of my head. The hum runs through both of us, matched.

“Better?” he asks, low, watching my face.

“Yeah.” Steady. The blade’s been honed. “Yeah.”

He doesn’t ask if I’ll need it again. He already knows I will, tomorrow, the next day, every day the clear runs out—and the way his arm settles over me isn’t braced for me to bolt. It’s just settled. He’ll wait. He’s got a patience I could build a house inside.

I put my forehead on his chest, and the wanting sits in me, mine, the first thing in thirteen years with my own fingerprints all over it. I’ll need more. The needing isn’t weakness. It’s the first honest sentence I’ve said since the Cage.

I sleep without shaking.

29

ELLIE

He takes me down, not up.

Not toward the bright upper canopy where the sun crashes through. Down, into the root structure, the lattice of fused trunks, the wood going darker as the light thins. The air turns cool and damp, thick with moss and the mineral smell of water moving through stone. The passages shrink around my shoulders. He turns sideways, ducks, folds his wings flat to fit. These weren’t carved for him. He moves through them anyway like he’s done it a hundred times, his tail trailing back to brush my wrist now and then.Here. You’re not doing this alone.

We drop through three levels before he stops.

It isn’t a nest. No furs, nothing shaped for sleeping. A storage hollow, the fused wood making natural shelves, shapes sitting on them I can’t make out in the dim.

He stands aside and goes still—which I’ve learned means he’s braced for something. He’s letting me find it myself.