Chapter Nine
Christa?
A month in, and I’ve stopped counting the days since I broke down on Tobias’s land not because I’ve lost track, but because I stopped needing the number to feel steady.
I have a drawer now, in the small cabin, that holds more than just the clothes I fled with.
He’s drove me into the nearest town twice, patient while I picked out things I actually wanted instead of things that are simply cheap and practical, watching me deliberate over paint colours for a mug like the decision matters, because to me, after years of not being allowed small preferences,
it does.
The weeks have moved quickly once they started moving at all.
I’ve learned the clan’s names before I’ve met a single one of them Marlow, the leader Tobias speaks of with real affection despite the old friction between them; his mother, who calls every Sunday and has already, by the sound of it,
started asking pointed questions about when she’ll get to meet the woman her son can’t stop mentioning.
I’ve started sleeping through the night without waking at every creak of the cabin settling.
I’d gone a full week, at one point, without once thinking about my ex’s face, and have only noticed the absence after the fact, startled by how much lighter I feel without that particular weight riding along behind every thought.
I’ve started thinking of the second cabin as mine.
Not permanently, not in any way I’ve said out loud yet, but in the quiet, unconscious way a person starts to think of a space once enough of themselves have settled into it, a chair angled just how I like it, a shelf of the few books I’ve bought in town,
my own particular chaos slowly organising itself into the corners of a life that had, a month ago, belonged to nobody but a man alone with his bear.
The kisses have become a regular part of our evenings, unhurried, easy, something that has stopped feeling fragile and started feeling like simple fact.
I still set the pace. He still lets me. But the pace itself has been shifting, week by week, the careful distance between us closing a little further each time I reach for him, until tonight, sitting together on his porch with the last of dinner cleared away, I find myself less interested in slow.
“Stay with me tonight,” I say, and watch him go very still beside me. “Not… not the small cabin. Yours.”
He turns to look at me fully, searching my face with the kind of careful attention he brings to everything, checking, I know, that this is actually what I want and not some performance of readiness I think I owe him. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” And I’m more sure of this than I’ve been of almost any decision in years, the certainty sitting solid and unshaken in my chest in a way that feels entirely unlike the frantic, anxious wanting I remember from my relationship with my ex, that need to prove myself worth keeping.
This feels like the opposite of that. This feels like choosing, freely, with nothing at stake but my own desire.
He takes my hand the first time he’s done that without me reaching first, small as it is, and I feel the significance of it anyway and leads me inside.
His bedroom is simple, like the rest of the cabin, but I notice, the moment he lights the lamp beside the bed, small details that tells me more than words could have the care in how everything is arranged, the quiet order of a man who keeps his space deliberately,
the way even the light he’s chose is warm and low instead of harsh.
He turns to face me once the door is shut, giving me the same careful stillness he always gives me, waiting for me to close whatever distance remains.
I close it.
My hands find the front of his shirt, working the buttons with fingers that shake slightly not from fear, I register with something like relief, but from the strange, unfamiliar thrill of wanting something this much and being allowed, finally, to have it.
He lets me undress him at my own pace, standing patient under my hands, and when I get the shirt open and push it from his shoulders, I let myself look, really look at the breadth of him, scarred here and there in ways that speak of a hard, solitary life,
warm skin over muscle built from years of physical work rather than vanity.
“Your turn,” I say, voice lower than I expect, and watch something dark and wanting move behind his eyes at the words.
He’s slower with me, deliberate, checking in with small pauses that ask permission without needing to voice it outright, a hand pausing at the hem of my shirt, waiting for me nod before he lifts it over my head, fingers trace light and reverent over skin that has, for three years,
only ever known hands that took.
His touch asks instead of takes. I feel the difference in it immediately, some old tension in my chest unwinding further with every gentle, patient inch of contact, until by the time we’ve made it to the bed, I’m aware of very little except him, his weight, careful and controlled above me,
his mouth finding my throat, my collarbone, murmuring something low against my skin that might have been my name.
He pauses there for a moment, lips just below my ear, and I feel him breathe me in slow, deliberate, some deep animal satisfaction in the sound that has nothing performative about it, just pure, uncomplicated want finally given permission to exist without restraint.
“You have no idea,” he murmurs, “how long I’ve wanted this. Wanted you like this.”
“Show me,” I tell him, and feel him smile against my skin before he does exactly that.
He stands up and removes his boxers and my eyes widen in shock. “So big.” I whisper
“Tell me if anything’s too much,” he says, voice rough, as he meets my eyes. “Anytime. I mean that. I… I’ve never done this, I don’t want to hurt you.”
“What? You… you’ve never had sex before?”
“No,” he shakes his head. “My bear’s never wanted anyone other than his mate.”
“But… but what if we never met?”
He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter Christa. If we never met I would’ve just lived the rest of my life alone and celibate. So, please tell me if I’m hurting you, I never want to hurt you.”
“I know,” I say, and pull him back down to me, some last careful wall in my chest finally, fully coming down.
What follows is slow at first, careful, both of us relearning what wanting looks like without fear woven through it, his hands map me like something worth memorising rather than something to be used, my own hands finally, freely exploring the size and warmth of him without hesitation.
He’s attentive in a way that undoes me more than any single touch could have, watching my face, adjusting to what he finds there, giving without demanding anything back, until the slow unravelling of care between us builds into something less careful, more urgent,
my nails find his shoulders and his low groan against my ear is only sounds either of us needs to make.
The tip of his cock presses against my pussy, he eases in and out, sliding in a little more each time, inch by inch letting me get used to his size. I gasp as he finally pushes all the way inside me.
“Did I hurt you?” He pants.
I shake my head no. “No, feels so good. Please fuck me Toby. Fuck me like you want to, I don’t want you to hold back.”
He slides halfway out and then thrusts inside me, harder.
“Fuck…” He groans.
I lose myself in him more completely than I’ve lost myself in anything in years.
His name breaks from me more than once, and every time it does, I feel him respond to it like something precious, holding me a little tighter, moving a little more deliberately, entirely attuned to me in a way that leaves no room for doubt about whose pleasure matters most to him in this moment.
He pumps in and out a couple more times. “Oh fuck. Tobias! I… I’m going to…”
I don’t get to finish as I explode all over his cock. It’s so powerful I see colours behind my eyelids. Another couple of pumps and he tenses as he comes. Repeating my name over and over.
Afterward, we lie tangled together in the low lamplight, my head on his chest, his fingers tracing slow, absent patterns along my spine, and I feel something settle in me that I don’t have an easy name for, not just satisfaction, though there was plenty of that, but something closer to arrival.
Like I’ve been running toward this exact moment, this exact warmth, without knowing it, for far longer than the month it’s actually taken to get here.
“Stay,” he murmurs into my hair, half question, half something closer to a plea he doesn’t usually let himself voice. “Not just tonight. I mean however you want to define it. Just, stay.”
I’m quiet a moment, listening to the steady beat of his heart under my ear, thinking about the small cabin across the clearing, about the life I’ve been half-building there without letting myself call it permanent.
“Yeah,” I say finally, soft, certain. “I’m staying.”
He pulls me closer at that, pressing a slow kiss to the top of my head, and I feel him smile against my hair, six years of solitude finally, fully broken, replaced by something neither of us has let ourselves fully hope for until it has already, quietly, completely arrived.
I wake the next morning tangled in unfamiliar sheets that smells like him, sunlight cuts warm lines across the bed and lie there a moment just listening to him breathe beside me before he stirs, pulling me instinctively closer even half-asleep,
like his body has already learned the shape of me against him.
We don’t talk much over breakfast. I catch him watching me over his coffee more than once, something unguarded and pleased on his face that he doesn’t bother hiding anymore and find I don’t mind being looked at that way at all.
Word got to his parents faster than either of us expected, his mother called that same afternoon, having apparently sensed some shift over the phone the way mothers seem to manage regardless of distance, and I listened, half-amused and half-terrified,
as Tobias fielded a rapid string of questions with the patient good humour of a man who clearly adores his family even when they’re being nosy.
When he hangs up, he’s grinning in a way I haven’t seen from him before.
“She wants to meet you,” he says. “Properly. Dinner, next time they visit.”
I feel a flicker of the old anxiety rise meeting family, being assessed, being found wanting the way I’ve always eventually was and then, just as quickly, feel it settle, quietened by a month of evidence that this particular family might not work the way families have worked for me before.
“Okay,” I say. “I’d like that.”
And for the first time in longer than I can remember, I mean it completely.