Before I can tell him how disorientingly good this feels, his knot is growing, thick, inescapable, and he’s too busy hiking one of my legs back toward my chest to hear what I have to say.
This is how things should be, I think. Always.
AFTER WEEKS OF TRUANCY, MY APPETITE RETURNS AT THE WORST possible time.
I decide to give it the cold shoulder and focus on what’s rapidly becoming my favorite thing in the world: thrashing around and begging Koen to do something, anything, everything to me. Unfortunately, he really did educate himself about Heats. Not only did he memorize some doctor’s office pamphlet, but he’s also extremely literal about it.
We can start again after you have a strawberry, he tells me.
One more sip of juice. Like that. Be good. Give me one more.
Open up. No, not later— now.
You have to drink. A kiss against the flushed skin of my throat. Girls in Heat only get what they ask for if they finish their water.
“You know you’re not going to get a surprise visit from the Heat inspector, right?” I ask between shallow gulps of electrolytes. “There are no thumbs- up stickers for doing exactly what the textbook— ”
He grasps my chin and taps the pad of his thumb against my lips, pushing against them until I have no choice but to open. “Since it’s obvious that your mouth is not nearly busy enough, you’re having another glass before we continue.”
The nutrition is a boon. For the first time in months, I’m not exhausted or dizzy or confused. I don’t have a headache. In fact, I feel surprisingly healthy, even as I rub myself against Koen to get him to pay attention to me. The rational, cortical part of my brain knows he hasn’t so much as cast a glance elsewhere since the day we met. But as my Heat progresses, his scent becomes compulsive, and my wants snap into unprecedented focus.
Koen is perfect. Koen is strong. Koen is maddening and beautiful and mine, and I want what I am due. At my best, I am enamored with every inch of his body, with every word he rasps against my ear. At my worst, I am a savage, impatient, rude creature that tolerates no competition. Possessive. Impossible to reason with.
“Spoiled,” he mumbles against my lips, but there’s a touch of a smile at the corners of his eyes, in the webs of wrinkles irradiating from them. “Nuisance.”
So he seats me on his cock and splits me open, and as I strive to relearn how to breathe with him inside, he feeds me slices of fruit, whispering, Sweetheart. This is really fucking good. He rubs his thumb against my clit, and I clamp hard around him. My mind empties. I don’t think about the day I arrived here, unicorn waffles and too few chairs, and I bury my face in his throat as I try to finish chewing so that he can go deeper, so that we can move.
“Such a damn nuisance,” he repeats when my thighs squeeze around his waist, punching a grunt out of his chest.
I gasp for air, and he shouts out his pleasure when I suck his gland as hard as I can.
BY THE END OF THE FIRST DAY, WE’RE BOTH A LITTLE OUT OF OUR minds. The hormone bomb went off inside my body, but Koen wasn’t spared.
“Okay?” he asks, before starting to rock inside me the second his previous knot goes down. “I just can’t— ”
I nod. Lift my arms above my head, trying not to squirm as he kisses, licks, sucks, nibbles, worships my breasts.
“Fucking spectacular,” he says again. I cannot help my smile.
By now, he slides in like a dream, and I cognitively reframe the concept of having sex: not an act with a beginning and an end, but a continuous exchange of pleasure and hushed words. I know, rationally, that Koen and I are separate beings. It just doesn’t feel like it.
I come a lot. So does Koen. My ex- boyfriends are pale gray memories with no hope of bursting through the pink haze surrounding me. I do know, however, that sex has never been like this for me, and I cannot help but wonder, What’s the hinge? What makes the difference, really? The biology of the Heat? Or the fact that it’s with Koen?
I’ll never know. That’s the stipulation: afterward, we’ll go our separate ways.
I stroke my fingers through his hair. Pull him in for a kiss. Our eyes meet, and his face lights up with a grin.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.” I force myself to smile back and forget about after.
THINGS GET REAL ON THE SECOND DAY. I THOUGHT THEY WERE before, but . . . I should just accept that I know nothing and go with the flow. Yeah. That’s what I’ll do.
We don’t sleep through the night, but I do doze off at dawn, while Koen’s knot is inside me and he’s still twitching with pleasure. The last thing I remember is him coming and whispering in my ear, “Unbelievable, how fucking unreal you feel, soft and wet and warm and every good thing in the world, baby.”
I open my eyes to orange sunlight streaming through the window. Birds chirp in the tall trees surrounding the cabin, and Koen hugs me tight, my back pressed to his chest, both hands closed around my breasts.
He’s already moving inside me, shallow, staccato strokes that feel nothing like usual. I tilt the curve of my ass back to meet him, and his sharp inhale tells me that he wasn’t quite awake yet.
“Shit.” He buries his face in my hair. “Sorry.” My scent must broadcast how little I mind, because he doesn’t stop. His long fingers splay on my abdomen. Curl against my hip. He moves me against him in little circles, like I’m a doll, like my body is the most precious object he’ll ever own. He develops a quiet rhythm, chants things that have me questioning whether he’s still partially asleep. “This is it. How I want to wake up for the rest of my life.”
I must be asleep, too. I tell him, “Yes, yes, please.” Wonder: What if he just took me? What if I lived here, in this nest, hidden, stolen, stowed away? What if my entire life were just to be here, to make him happy? What then?
It sends him into a frenzy. He pounds inside me, his cock deeper than ever, bottoming out. I feel him in the back of my throat. With a snapping motion he splays my thighs open and rams me into the mattress. The heel of his palm presses between my shoulder blades, flattens me, and it’s sublime.
“Good. C’mon, killer, you can do it. Take it like— Good.”
Heat licks down my spine. Thrums in my belly. I try to grind against him as he swipes away the hair from my nape to find the green swirl on my upper back. Muffled obscenities vibrate through my body. Praises, slurred. His tongue against the thin, fragile skin of my gland.
He hasn’t touched me there yet, not since my Heat started.
One of his arms wraps under my rib cage to lift me up, fingers bruising me as his grip tightens. A hint of claws grazing against my flank, like he’s starting to lose control of the shift, the borders between man and animal becoming blurrier.
It’s the best thing I’ve ever known.
“Please,” I beg, not sure for what. But he knows. A low groan. He stuffs me so full, I wail at how good it hurts. Hot breath puffs against my hair, and he once again presses hot, open-mouthed kisses over my gland. I come instantly. His teeth scrape, then touch, then brace. He’s ready to pierce my skin. To sink them inside me.
It’s like the world stops spinning. Every cell of my body coalesces on my upper back, where my gland lives. Ready for Koen’s scar. Welcoming it.
I feel his knot starting to swell, and all at once I know what I’m asking for.