Ellie
Ican smell how thirsty he is before he does anything about it.
His skin’s running hotter than it was. The hum’s gone ragged at the edges. There’s a dryness in his breath, a rasp that wasn’t there. His body’s been pouring everything it has into mine for days now, and it’s starting to run low.
So am I.
It lands on me late, the way my own needs land late now, always a step behind his, like the part of me that used to keep track got switched off and is only just flickering back on.
My mouth’s dry. My tongue sits thick behind my teeth.
He’s been holding water to my lips in the lulls, his hand cupped, tipping it into me before he drinks his own, and I’ve taken it half-asleep, the way I take everything down here, without deciding to.
I’ve never once been the one to say I’m thirsty. The Cage didn’t let me want out loud.
“I’m thirsty,” I say. Out loud. To him. Just to find out what it feels like to ask for a thing.
A sound moves in his chest. Then he gets up.
His wings come around me first—the membrane sealing me in, shutting out the cooler air, wrapping me into his heat.
His tail coils my legs up around his waist. They don’t meet on the far side; he’s too wide.
He stands with me still seated on him, the knot still in me, holding me to his chest with one arm like I weigh nothing at all.
He walks.
The gait rolls me on him with every step. His cock shifts in me as his body moves through the dark, a small motion, a slow shallow drag I didn’t ask for and couldn’t stop if I wanted to, delivered by nothing but him walking. I gasp into his chest. “Hah.” My fingers curl against his skin.
Every stride works him in me a fraction, not a thrust, nothing so deliberate, just the swing and settle of ten feet of male carrying my whole weight on his cock.
The knot holds me on him so there’s no getting off the drag of it.
I take a slow inch on the lift of each step and lose it on the fall, over and over, my body rung like a bell hung on him.
And the cold finds the parts of me he isn’t covering.
My back’s bare to the passage air, gone cool and damp this deep in the wood, while my front’s sealed to his furnace, so I’m split right down the middle, shivering and burning at the same time, every nerve I’ve got snapped wide awake to the slow obscene work of just being carried.
And I can hear the world change around us.
The close, sealed hush of the nest opens into something wider.
The drip and run of water gets nearer. The air turns cool, then wet.
There’s a smell I don’t have a word for—clean, mineral, sharp enough it’s nearly a taste.
Running water, somewhere ahead. Water that’s been finding its own way through this wood longer than anyone alive could account for, that nobody piped or measured or checked for compliance.
I love it.
The word shows up without asking me. I love being carried.
The doll-feeling of it—weightless, held, a small warm thing fixed to the front of something enormous.
The smallness doesn’t shrink me. It makes me warm.
The Cage kept me small by keeping me dim, by telling me small meant I needed handling.
This is just proportion. I’m small against him the way a bird’s small against a tree, and the tree doesn’t make the bird less. It gives it somewhere to sit.
I’m being hauled through a pitch-black forest impaled on a monster, and the loudest thing in me is that I don’t want him to put me down. If the Cage could see me. I push my face into his chest to smother something that’s half a sob and half a laugh at the thought of Mora’s face.
My face goes hot against his chest. I’m embarrassed by how much I like it, by the needy little sound I make into his skin, by the way my arms wrap as far around him as they’ll reach and don’t get far.
He stops.
His hands change. The arm cradling me grips my hips instead, lifts me clean off him, the drag of the knot pulling out of me tearing a cry up my throat—and slams me back down.
The breath punches out of me. “Ah!”
Three hard times. Just his arms, his grip, gravity dropping me onto his cock. Straight down, the full thick length of him driving up into me, deep enough it punches a sound out of me each time. “Uh! Uh!” Sounds I couldn’t make again on purpose if I tried.
My fingers dig into his chest. My head falls back. The wings catch the sounds and throw them back at me, louder, in the sealed dark.
The knot pops in and out of me with every lift, the stretch burning—burning in the good way, the way that makes my whole body want to give.
And then he laughs.
Low. Smug. Pleased. From deep in his chest, buzzing against my palms. Not the hum—a laugh. The sound of a male who knows exactly what he just did and is happy about it.
It stops me dead.
He laughed. The near-silent thing that speaks in single words and hums instead of sentences just laughed because he made me yelp. Because he knows what his body does to mine. Because he took it, and he’s pleased with himself.
That undoes me worse than the slam did.
“You’re awful,” I tell him, breathless, my face still tipped back. There’s no heat in it. There’s a grin in it, if anything, which is its own kind of shock. I didn’t know I still had one.
The laugh turns into the hum, low and warm, like he heard the grin and approved.
Then his hands go gentle.
He tucks me against his chest like something he’s scared of breaking, one big hand cupping the back of my head.
The knot swells and seals while he holds me, and the tenderness right on the heels of the rough is the thing that gets me every time.
I press my mouth to a raised line of old scar on his chest—not quite a kiss, more a claim, marking skin I still can’t see.
He goes still under it. Then the hum drops deeper, and his arm tightens.
At the stream I hear him cup the water. He brings it to my mouth first.
Cold. Sharper than anything the Cage ever poured into my labeled cup.
I drink out of his palm. It spills down my chin, over his chest, and I don’t care.
He fills his hand again, holds it to my lips, waits until I turn my face away—full.
Only then does he drink for himself, long and deep, his throat working under my ear.
It lands on me with the cold still on my tongue: he reached for my mouth before his own. Every time we’ve come down here, and I never once counted it as something done for me.
“Thank you,” I say. Quiet. I don’t know if the words mean anything to him. His arm tightens around me. Maybe they do.
We rest there a while, the stream talking to itself over the stones, and I work out something about myself I wouldn’t have believed a week ago.
I like the dark.
Not in spite of the fear—with it. The dark took the Cage off me. No mirror handing back the girl they built. No light crawling across the floor to tell me what hour to be. Down here I’m just a body that wants things and reaches for them and makes noise doing it. It’s the most honest I’ve ever been.
The cold comes off his skin where the water touched him, a shock against all that heat, and it’s clean, and I push my face into his chest and let myself think the things I’d never have let through up in the light.
Again.
Harder.
I want him to laugh again, and I want to be the reason.
I’m not going back.