Finch
Iwake up warm and sore and smelling like him.
My body wakes up before my brain does. Everything hurts in a way that’s hard to ignore.
My legs are sore, especially between them, and I can feel the ache from being knotted twice.
Muscles I never think about are making themselves known every time I move.
There are bruises on my hips, four on each side, shaped like someone’s thumbs.
My thighs are sticky with dried come. My jaw aches from clenching and my throat feels raw, probably from all the noises I made last night.
Even my cock is so sensitive that the sheet brushing over it makes me wince.
I’m in a bed. Private room. Amber light, not blue.
The bass is gone — either the music stopped or these walls are thick enough to block it.
I can hear my own breathing and his, slow and steady behind me, and his arm is heavy around my waist and his chest is warm against my back and his face is pressed into my hair.
I don’t move. I lie there and I let the memories come because fighting them would take energy I don’t have.
The scent orgasm on the floor. On my knees in the entryway with everyone watching.
His tongue on me, between my legs, his mouth shining with my slick while he told me about the seven Thursdays.
Riding him in the alcove, begging him to breed me, coming on his knot while I cried.
The lull. His hands on my back. Telling me about the animals. Telling me it doesn’t make you less. The way my chest cracked open when he said that, and the way I let it, and the way nothing terrible happened when I did.
The private room. Four orgasms deep and still going, his voice in my ear, pretty boy, give me one more, and my body obeying even when I was sure it couldn’t.
I stare at the wall. The light in here is warm, almost yellow. I can barely see my reflection, just a dark, curled-up shape. That’s me. I’m the one who did all that last night, said all that stuff, begged, cried, came, and meant every second of it.
I wait for the shame to hit. It always does. Last time it sent me running for the shower, trying to scrub everything off and pretend none of it happened. I’m bracing for it, like waiting for someone to punch me.
It doesn’t come.
The shame is there, hovering, but it’s not hitting me like it usually does. Maybe it’s his arm around my waist, or the way he’s breathing steady behind me, or just remembering him saying that’s allowed. Some tired part of me is actually starting to believe it.
His breathing changes. A deeper inhale, the arm around my waist shifting, and I feel his nose press into my hair. He’s awake.
I tense. I can’t help it — my shoulders go rigid and my hands curl into the sheet and my whole body does the thing it does when it’s getting ready to run. He feels it. Of course he feels it. He’s pressed against every inch of me.
He doesn’t tighten his grip. His arm stays exactly where it is, exactly how it is. Light enough to pull away from. Heavy enough to know it’s there.
“Morning,” he says. Sleep-rough. Quiet.
“Morning.” My voice sounds like I gargled gravel.
It’s quiet. Not awkward, just heavy. The kind of silence you get after something huge, when both people know what happened but neither one wants to be the first to bring it up in the morning.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“Like I got hit by a truck.” I shift, and my whole lower body protests. I wince. “Several trucks.”
“That’s fair.” His thumb traces a line across my stomach, lazy. “You need water. Food.”
“I need a time machine.”
He huffs a laugh against my hair. “To go back and not come?”
“To go back and not say half the things I said.”
“Which half?”
I close my eyes. He’s doing that thing again, being patient, asking questions he already knows the answers to and just waiting for me to say it. He did it last night with his fingers inside me, and now he’s doing it with his arm around my waist. Same deal. He’s steady, not rushing me, just waiting.
“All of it,” I say. “The — breed me. The please. The crying. Pick one.”
“What if I liked all of it?”
“That makes one of us.”
“That makes two of us.” His mouth is against the back of my neck, his words warm on my skin. “You liked it too. You told me. During the lull, you told me, and you were lucid when you said it.”
I was. That’s what messes me up. The heat was an excuse for the first time, maybe the second, but during the lull, when I sat in his lap and told him I liked the breeding talk and the way he called me pretty, that was all me.
I was clear-headed. I chose to be honest with a stranger about something I’ve been lying to myself about for months.
“I’m going to sit up,” I say. “And I’m going to look at you. And you’re not going to say anything devastating for at least thirty seconds.”
“No promises.”
I sit up. Everything hurts, but it’s a good kind of hurt, and also kind of embarrassing.
The blanket drops to my waist, and the air is cold on my chest. I’m covered in marks—a bite on my shoulder, red scratches on my thighs I don’t even remember making, his handprints on my hips in purple bruises.
I look like a walking reminder of last night.
He sits up next to me. He’s marked up too—half-moons from my nails on his arms, a scratch across his chest, a bite mark on his shoulder that matches mine. He’s still wearing his mask. So am I. We’re just two strangers in a bed, covered in each other’s marks, and suddenly it feels kind of dumb.
“This is ridiculous,” I say. “I’ve had you inside me four times, and I don’t know what your face looks like.”
“Five, technically. If you count the fingers.”
“I’m not counting the fingers.”
“I’m counting the fingers.” He turns toward me, one leg folded on the bed, and he’s close enough that I can see his eyes clearly through the mask for the first time in decent light. Brown. Warm. Crinkled at the corners like he smiles a lot. “Hi.”
“Hi.” My heart is hammering.
I reach for him.
It surprises both of us. My hand moves before my brain signs off on it, but it’s not heat this time; it’s not biology making choices for me, it’s just want.
Clear, lucid, unmedicated want. My fingers find his chest, spread flat over his sternum, and I feel his heartbeat under my palm.
Fast. Faster than his composure suggests, the discovery that he’s as scared as I am does something to the knot in my chest.
I slide my hand down, over his ribs, his stomach, the line of hair below his belly button.
He goes still. His breathing gets shallow, and I can feel his abs tense under my fingers.
I’m touching him because I want to, not because of heat or anything else.
Just me, my hand on his body, in this room that smells like sex and us.
“You don’t have to—” he starts.
“I know.” I look at my hand on his skin. My fingers are shaking slightly, and I don’t try to hide it. “That’s the point.”
I wrap my hand around his cock. He’s half-hard, getting harder in my grip, and it feels different now that I’m not out of my mind with heat.
I notice things I missed before—the weight of him, how his skin feels, the way his breath catches and his hips push into my hand without him meaning to.
I stroke him once, slow, from base to tip, and his hand comes up and grabs my wrist. He just holds on, doesn’t try to stop me.
“Baby.” He doesn’t know my name yet, but the word he uses instead is soft and rough, and it makes my chest hurt. “You don’t owe me—”
“I’m not paying a debt.” I stroke him again, and his cock hardens fully in my hand, and his fingers tighten on my wrist. “I’m choosing. This is me choosing you without heat. Without my body making the decision. Just me.”
He drops his head forward, pressing his forehead against mine. His breathing is rough, and I can feel him shaking, little tremors running through him. Realizing I can make him shake like this—not because of scent or heat, just because I want to—hits me harder than anything else tonight.
I keep stroking him, slow and steady, and he lets me.
He just rocks his hips into my hand, breathing hard against my mask.
His hand stays on my wrist, just holding on.
When he comes, it’s quiet—a low groan, his cock pulsing in my grip, his body curling toward me.
No drama, just letting go, and trusting me enough to let me see it.
I wipe my hand on the sheet. He huffs a laugh that’s mostly breath.
“That was—”
“That was me,” I say. “Without the heat. That’s what I’m like when biology isn’t driving.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. His hand is still on my wrist. Then he lifts it and presses his clothed mouth to my pulse point, a kiss filtered through fabric, and the gentleness of it compared to everything else we’ve done tonight makes my throat close up.
“I’ll go first,” he says. He reaches up and pulls the elastic over the back of his head, and the mask comes off.
He’s younger than I thought. Maybe mid-twenties, about my age.
Dark hair, pushed back, the kind that falls in his face if he doesn’t keep it there.
Strong jaw, a few days of stubble, and a nose that’s been broken at least once—crooked, but it suits him.
His mouth is what gets me. It’s curved, not quite a smile, just relaxed, like he’s always about to laugh.
There’s a dimple on the left. He looks like someone who laughs for real.
He told me he works with animals. Rescues. Scared ones. Looking at his face, I believe it.
He looks nothing like the mask. The mask is aggressive, angular, and dark.
His face is open and warm, and the dissonance between who he is in the dark and who he is in the light is the exact same dissonance I’ve been torturing myself about for five months, except on him it doesn’t look like a contradiction. It just looks like a person.
“Nico,” he says. Holds out his hand.