Ellie
I’ve stopped counting in hours. There aren’t any down here.
I count in cycles now—peak, lull, peak, lull, the tide of him going out and coming back. Somewhere in the second turn of it the last of the agitation burned off, the itch that lived under the muscle, the withdrawal finally done.
What’s left is clean. The venom, warm and gold. His body. The dark. Me. That’s the whole world, and I’ve stopped pretending I want out of it.
There’s a hunger in me now that doesn’t quit.
It lives where the tea used to keep everything quiet—a coal in the middle of my chest that won’t dim.
It puts my hands on him in the lulls, makes my fingers grip his ribs and hold on.
It puts more in my mouth when his hips slow, again when the vibration fades.
The Cage girl would’ve waited to be told she was allowed to want a thing. This one doesn’t wait for anything. Most hours now, she’s the one running my body, and I’ve stopped fighting her for the wheel.
The lull goes long this time. The knot eases—not enough to let him go, the seal still holds, but the hard fullness loosens, softens.
He’s still in me. He’s been in me since the night the wall came open, and I’ve gotten so used to the fact of him that the absence of it would feel like a missing limb.
And it hits me that I’ve never once faced him.
Not that I’d see anything if I did—the dark’s the dark. But the whole time, I’ve been against his chest, his front to my back, his arms around me from behind. Held, and turned away. Like there’s still a wall between us, just a warmer one now.
I want to turn around.
“I want to face you,” I say into the black. My voice comes out steady. “Hold still. Let me.”
I press back against him, grind down on the softened knot until the pressure makes my breath catch, get a hand back, find his hip, and push. A sound from him—low, half-asleep, not protest. He lets me.
I work us over together. Slow.
His cock stays inside me the whole way around, and that’s the part that steals my breath, the long thick drag of him turning with me, the shift of him over every nerve I’ve got as my body rotates on him, a slow grind from one side of me clear to the other.
The angle changes as I go, the head of him pressing places it doesn’t usually reach, and I have to stop halfway, panting, just to ride out what the turning alone is doing to me.
He holds. His hands open and steadying on my waist, letting me take it at whatever pace I need.
By the time I’ve made it all the way around I’m chest to chest with him, his heart slamming under my palms, the new angle seating him so deep I have to breathe through it before I can move.
This is closer. I don’t have a better word for it. His front against mine. I’m so much smaller that facing him just brings me up against his sternum—right over the place the hum lives. I press my mouth there, on the sound.
For a second I just stay there and let myself be in it.
The dark total around us. The canopy somewhere far overhead doing whatever it does at night, wind moving through the high leaves, water finding its slow way down through the roots, the small things that live in the wood ticking and shifting.
A week ago the dark was the worst thing I knew.
The Cage kept a light on me every hour of every day, soft and gold and always watching, and they called that kindness.
I know what it was now. The dark is the first place in my whole life nobody’s been able to see my face—nobody grading it, nobody deciding whether I was serene enough to deserve the morning cup.
Just me, and him, and whatever I decide to do with my own body.
So I decide.
Then I move.
I set the pace this time. I lift up until the head of his cock nearly slips free, then sink back down and take him to the root, and do it again, and the drag of all that thick heat through me on every rise pulls a sound out of me I don’t plan. “Hnn!”
And I feel him answer.
He’s soft from the lull, but he doesn’t stay that way.
He thickens inside me by degrees as I ride.
I feel every increment of it, the shaft firming, the head swelling to press harder against my front wall, all of him going rigid to fill me wider because my body’s the thing asking him to.
It’s the strangest power I’ve ever had. The whole of him going hard under me, for me, because I rolled my hips and asked.
His hands settle at my waist, not lifting me, not steering, just holding on while I do this.
“You’re letting me again.” Half wonder, half something warmer. I roll my hips and feel the groan travel up through his chest into my mouth. “I think I like that you let me.”
He hardens all the way—rigid, huge, the stretch of him this deep punching the air out of me.
I keep moving. Up, the long drag, the head catching at the spot that makes my breath stutter.
Hold there. Then down, the deep seat, the knot starting to swell at the base of his cock and catch a little harder at my entrance each time I come down on him.
He bends.
All that size folds down over me, curving, until his mouth finds the top of my head, then lower, my forehead, the bridge of my nose, his breath washing over my whole face.
He can’t kiss me the way a smaller thing would.
He’s built too big for it. But he brings his mouth to me anyway, clumsy and deliberate, pressing it to my forehead while I ride him, and the tenderness of that, coming off something this huge, nearly knocks the rhythm out of me.
“You’re a sweetheart,” I tell ten feet of apex predator. He goes still under me when I say it, like nobody’s ever once accused him of it, like he doesn’t know what to do with the charge.
Then I grind down hard, and the knot pops through, and the seal locks us tight.
I cry out. “Ahh!” The stretch of it, the suddenness, the fullness blooming wide where the knot seats against the cluster of nerves behind my clit. And then the vibration kicks in, right there, right where I’m grinding down on him, and it climbs up through me and lights me from the inside.
I ride it. My pace, still mine, slow circles that drag the knot over that spot again and again while his cock throbs deep and he hasn’t even come yet. The pleasure builds low in my belly, a tide instead of a spike, gathering with every grind, the vibration feeding it higher one degree at a time.
I come like that. Sitting up over him in the dark, my hands splayed on his hammering heart, my back bowing, my whole body clamping down on the knot in long waves I can’t stop.
He goes over a breath behind me. His hips drive up, breaking my rhythm with one hard thrust, and his cum empties into me, hot and thick, pulse after pulse I can count against my walls, his roar muffled in my hair. “Rrgh!” His hands grip my waist hard enough to leave marks.
And the heat of his cum spilling that deep, the knot still vibrating, drags a second one out of me right on the tail of the first, smaller, a tremor riding the wake of the wave, my body tightening around him once more before it finally lets go.
After, I stay there. Draped down his chest, sealed, full of his cum, his heart going under my cheek.
I turned us over. I wanted his face and I reached for it and took it.
I set the pace and rode him and chose every second of it.
The girl in the Cage didn’t do things like that—she lay where she was put and thanked them for it.
Whoever just climbed on top of a monster in the dark and made him shake apart, that’s not her.
I don’t know yet who it is. But I’m starting to like her.
His mouth comes back to my hair. He holds it there a long moment, breathing me in.
His chest works. The first try comes out wrong—a low rough sound, half a growl, no shape to it at all.
He stops. I feel him gather himself and go again.
And this time a word shoves its way up out of that throat that hoards them:
“Mate.”
It lands in me and sinks, slow, all the way down.
I don’t know everything it carries. I know what it isn’t.
It isn’t captive. It isn’t prize. It isn’t one of the words the Cage would’ve used for a woman handed over to a divine instrument in a white dress.
Mate. Like I’m half of a thing. Like he’s the other half, and he’s telling me, with the one word he can get out, that he knows it.
I should be more scared of how much I want that to be true.
“Yeah,” I whisper into his chest. “Okay. Mate.”
The hum rises up around the both of us, and I hold onto the word in the dark the same way I’m holding onto him—with everything I’ve got.