Chapter 43
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
MILO
I barely had time to take a full breath before he moved.
One second I was standing in front of him—close enough to still feel the heat of his mouth, the weight of what we’d just said—and the next, he bent at the knees and hauled me into the air.
I expected the usual, the cradle of his arms, the way he carried me sometimes when the trail got rough or when he just wanted me close.
That wasn’t what happened. He hooked an arm under my hips and tipped me forward, and the world inverted, and I landed face-down across his shoulder with the easy efficiency of someone hauling home a kill.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. The sheer surprise of it punched the laugh out of me before I had time to think. “Oh my god—Calder—what are you—“
He started running.
The laugh died in my throat, because he wasn’t playing around. I felt it through the lock of his arm across the backs of my thighs, the precise way he had braced me, the absolute certainty in the line of his body.
He wasn’t joking around. He wasn’t being cute. He was taking me somewhere.
He had decided something while he was kissing me, and he was acting on it, and my entire body figured this out about half a second before my brain did.
The forest moved past us in a blur of green and brown. He ran the way he ran when he was hunting—silent, calculated, every footfall placed. I was upside down with my chest pressed to his back and his arm bracketing me like a bar, and I should’ve been scared.
I should’ve been at least slightly nervous. After all, I was slung over a seven-foot cryptid’s shoulder while he ran flat-out through a Wisconsin forest. It probably should have triggered something.
I didn’t.
I trusted him.
I trusted him so completely that the only thing happening in my body was heat. The grip of his arm. The bunched muscle of his shoulder under my stomach. The way I could feel his breathing—even, controlled, not even slightly winded—through the press of his ribs.
He was carrying me the way a wolf would carry something that he deemed as his, and I was so far past being okay with that I was actively, embarrassingly into it.
I could feel myself hardening against his shoulder. He noticed. Of course he noticed. His hand tightened, fractionally, against the back of my thigh. He didn’t slow down. He didn’t say anything, but the hand tightened, and I knew he had registered it, and that almost finished me on its own.
I closed my eyes and basked in the glow of him carrying me.
The light changed. Cooler, dimmer—we’d left the open trees and entered the denser pines that grew up around the rock outcrop where his den was. I knew the path even upside-down. I’d been here dozens of times by now.
I knew the smell of it: pine resin and cold stone and the faint smoky musk that was just him, layered into everything he touched.
He ducked through the entrance of the hollow, the light darkening, past the furs and the ring of stones around the cold firepit and into the quieter part where the cave widened out and the floor was soft with old furs and dry grass.
He stopped, then slowly and carefully lowered me from his shoulder the way you’d unwrap something you didn’t want to bruise, his huge hands bracketing my ribs as my feet found the ground.
I looked up at him. He looked down at me, and neither of us said anything for what felt like a long time.
He was breathing harder now, but it was far from exertion. His eyes had gone almost dark, and his mouth was slightly parted, and one of his hands came up—slow, like he was approaching a wild thing—and brushed the hair back from my face–desire.
I leaned into the touch. “Hi.” My voice came out rough.
“Hi.”
“You ran.”
“Yes.”
“With me on your shoulder.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He considered the question the way he considered everything. Carefully. Like he wanted to give me the right answer and not the closest one.
“I needed to be here,” he said finally, “with you. The walk was too long.”
I laughed. It cracked in the middle. “Okay. Yeah. Okay.”
His hand moved from my hair to my jaw, and he tilted my face up, and brought his mouth down to mine.
It was different from the kisses we shared minutes ago.
Those had been escalating, something between us building ever since we said we loved each other for the first time.
This one was yearning, hungry. His free hand came up to frame my face, and I had to close my eyes, because the way he was looking at me right before he leaned in was far too intense for me to handle right then and there.
I wound my hands into the fur at his chest, anchored myself there, and angled my head to deepen the embrace.
We stayed like that for a long time. Just kissing, standing there in the dim of the den, his huge body curled down to meet mine, my hands moving slowly through the soft pelt at his chest and shoulders.
Grounding ourselves, letting the words we had said earlier be true in our bodies, not just in our voices.
Eventually I broke the kiss to breathe, and he chased me—short, gentle, a brush of his mouth against my forehead instead. I laughed quietly.
I unbuttoned my jeans, Calder watching every flick of my fingers. That part still got me–the way he watched, like every time he was seeing me for the first time. Like the simple fact of me undressing in front of him was a privilege he hadn’t earned and was determined to deserve.
Once I was bare, he pulled me against him again, and oh—oh, the heat of him, the size of him, the unmistakable pressure of his cock against my stomach.
He was huge in this form. Since our first time by the stream, he had fucked me plenty of times, in both forms, whether standing up against trees, lying on his bed and once memorably bent over a flat rock by the cabin, and every single time I had to take a moment to recalibrate.
Tonight was no different. I rested my forehead against his chest and just breathed for a second.
His hand stroked down my spine. Slow. Patient.
“Milo Hart.”
“Yeah?”
He went quiet. I felt him gathering the words. He did this sometimes—got to the edge of something he wanted to say and had to take a run at it.
I waited.
“I want you to fuck me.”
I went very still. I raised my head from his chest and gazed up at him. He was watching me steadily. His face was perfectly composed, the way it always was when he wanted something badly enough that he was prepared to lose it gracefully.
“You—“ I had to clear my throat. “Calder. Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve never—“
“I know.”
“I want to make sure I’m hearing you right. You want me—“ I touched his sternum, palm flat, looked up at him. “You, like this, in this body—you want me inside you.”
“Yes.”
He’d said the word himself. “Fuck.” He’d never used it before—he’d let me say it, had picked it up the way he picked up other human shorthand, but he’d never put it in his own mouth. And he had just used it about himself. About what he wanted me to do to him.
My pulse was doing something stupid. “Okay,” I babbled. “Okay. Yeah. Of course. Come here.”
I drew him down. I had to, because there was no version of this where I was reaching him standing up.
He understood. He let himself be guided, and that—that—undid something in my chest, the way this enormous being folded himself down at my coaxing, the way he let me arrange him on the furs on his back, knees up, looking up at me with absolutely no hesitation in his expression.
I knelt between his thighs.
He was so much bigger than me that even with him on his back, my whole body fit between his knees with room to spare. I smoothed my hands up the insides of his thighs, slow, watching his face. His breath hitched. His hands curled into the furs on either side of him.
“Tell me if anything hurts or feels wrong,” I said. “Any of it. At any point. You stop me, okay?”
“Yes.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
I leaned over and claimed his mouth. From this angle, I had to stretch, brace on his chest, and he made a small sound against my mouth that I had never heard him make before. Softer than usual, a little high in his throat, like he was already overwhelmed and we hadn’t even started.
I took my time.
I had to. He’d done this for me, the first time and every time after—he had taken his time with me, had watched my face, had checked in, had treated my body like something worth being careful about. I owed him every bit of that back and more.
I placed open-mouthed kisses down his sternum, through the soft fur of his chest, over the harder muscle of his stomach.
I wrapped a hand around him—even my whole hand didn’t close around him, in this form—and stroked him slowly, and watched his head tip back against the furs.
His throat worked. He made another of those small sounds.
“Good?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me if I should change anything.”
“It is good. Milo Hart. It is good.”
I had brought oil. I always carried oil now. Calder kept a small carved wooden jar of it in the den, and he watched me reach for it. He watched me coat my fingers, and I saw him track the motion, and I saw the precise moment he understood.
“This will be cold,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“I do not mind.”
I worked one finger into him. Carefully, so carefully.
His whole body went rigid for a second. Not in a bad way—in the way mine had so long ago when I’d bottomed for the first time, the body’s startled negotiation with a sensation it hadn’t budgeted for.
I held still. I rested my free hand on his hip and stroked my thumb across the soft fur there and waited.
“Breathe,” I said.
He exhaled. Long. Shaky.
“There you go.”
“It is— “ He paused, hunting for the word. “It is more than I expected.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s a lot at first. It gets better. You want me to keep going?”
“Yes.”
So I did.
I added a second finger after a long while, and eventually a third, and I watched his face the whole time, and I learned him—the way he had learned me.
The angle that made his jaw drop. The depth that pulled a low, helpless sound out of him I would be hearing in my dreams for a week.
The moment where his hips started to roll with my hand, small, involuntary, like his body had figured out what it wanted before he had.
“Milo Hart.”
“Yeah.”
“Now.”
“You sure?”
“Now. Please.”
I slicked myself, lined up, and pushed in slowly, watching him the whole way.
He was tight—first-time tight, his body still figuring out what was being asked of it—and I had to stop twice on the way, my hand stroking his thigh, my voice low and steady, instructing him to breathe and telling him he was doing perfectly. His eyes never left my face.
When I bottomed out, he made a sound that wrecked me.
I stopped there and held still, bracing over him on shaking arms, this huge body laid open beneath me, and I bent down and kissed him. Slow. Open. Letting him have a minute. Letting myself have one.
“I’ve got you,” I whispered against his mouth.
“I know.”
“Tell me when.”
He took his time. I felt his body adjusting around me, the gradual ease, the way the rigid line of him softened under my chest. His hand came up and cupped the back of my neck, thumb stroking my thumping pulse.
“Move,” he demanded.
So I did, slow at first with shallow strokes, watching him for every flicker of feedback.
When he nodded, I gave him more, again when he made that sound.
His knees raised higher, opening wider, and I sank deeper, and the noise he made was so unguarded I had to stop kissing him and just press my forehead to his and breathe.
“Milo Hart.”
“I know. I know.”
“It is—“
“I know.”
His arms tightened around me, held me down against his chest while I moved with deep thrusts, and that was the moment—that one, right there—where I understood what he had been trying to say to me earlier with the run and the fireman carry and the way he had set me down here.
It wasn’t about wanting to be on the bottom.
It was about wanting me to know he was mine the same way he was already sure I was his.
It was about equality. Equal weight. Equal claim.
I kissed his throat, settling into a rhythm.
He came first. I hadn’t expected that, but I felt him go.
The long hard clench of him around me, the way his breathing broke, the way he said, “my heart,” over and over, low and rough into my hair.
His release pulsed warm and wet between us.
The sight of him unraveling beneath me was too much.
I followed him over the edge a few thrusts later, buried as deep as I could go, my face pressed into his neck.
We stayed there a long time. The cave was very quiet. His huge hand stroked up and down my back, slow, settling.
“Milo Hart.”
“Yeah.”
“I love you.”
I lifted my head. He was looking up at me with that same naked, undefended face. He had figured out, at some point in the last hour, that he could just say it now. That he was allowed.
“I love you too.”
He pulled me back down against his chest. I let him. I closed my eyes against his warm fur, listened to his heartbeat slow under my ear, and let the den hold us.