12. Maeve #3
He waits. Holds the meat in front of my lips.
His eyes stay on my jaw, watching the muscles work.
When I open my mouth he puts the next piece in and I almost smile, because the patience is so thin, so barely held, the tremor in his crimson fingers the only sign that the rut is still running under the surface.
I eat from his hands. My body is full—food in my stomach, his cum in my belly, the venom warm in my blood.
The shaking has slowed to a tremor, then to nothing.
My walls have relaxed around the knot, though the aftershocks still come—each one making my abs tighten and my breath catch and his eyes drop to my belly.
His palm spreads over my stomach. The familiar press. The familiar check.
The check should feel like a guard counting stock at shift change, clipboard, move along. It doesn’t. My belly tightens up under his palm, but not the flinch-tightening from before. Something closer to leaning in, if leaning in was a thing my stomach muscles could do on their own.
I’ve tried before. My own hand in the barracks dark, biting my lip so no one would hear, chasing something I half-remembered from the settlement—a feeling more than a memory, warmth between my legs, pressure that meant something good.
It never worked. My body was too starved.
Too clenched. Too busy surviving to spend energy on anything that wasn’t keeping me upright.
And once—Lisa. In the back of the storage shed during a rain delay, the air thick with wet burlap and mildew and the mineral smell of rain coming through the gap under the door.
Her hand between my legs, mine between hers.
Both of us trying to find something the camp hadn’t taken.
Her fingers were rough from the clearing work, careful in a way hands hadn’t been careful with me in years.
I got close. A flutter, a warmth, a tightness that might have been the start of something.
Then a guard’s boot on the gravel outside.
We froze. The flutter died. We never talked about it.
I wanted Lisa’s hand to keep going. I wanted my own fingers to find the right place at the right speed. Those wants were small, quiet, ashamed of themselves. They lived in the dark and died in the dark.
This want screamed. This want arched my back off the furs and tore a sound from my chest that filled the warren and I didn’t bite it off. I didn’t go quiet. I didn’t go upstairs.
I wanted.
The thought. That’s the thing that changes everything.
Not the orgasm. My body did that on its own.
But the thought—I wanted—means my mind was in the room.
Somewhere in the scream, somewhere in the arch of my back, my mind was here, not floating above the furs watching it happen. Here. In my body. In his lap. Wanting.
I wanted more.
His thumb moves against my stomach. Absent. Slow. Like he’s marking time with it while I go somewhere he can’t follow.
Before the camps, my mother’s hands were gentle. The women in the settlement were gentle with each other, mostly. I had eight years of being touched without pain behind it before the Ordained came and took everything gentle out of my life in a single night.
Four years of camps undid those eight years completely. Four years of everything that touches you hurts you. The lesson hammered in until the settlement was a fading dream and the flinch was all that was left.
And now a nine-foot monster made my body do something it’s never finished before, something the camp never let it complete.
The flutter with Lisa was the closest I got—a warmth that never caught, never burned, never ripped a sound from my chest. This caught.
This burned. This tore through me so hard I screamed and didn’t stop screaming and the silence the camps taught me couldn’t find the brake.
That’s the most dangerous thing that has happened to me since the fence. Four years of camp know it in the same place they know not to eat snow and not to look the Eunuchs in the eye. Wanting is dangerous. Wanting means you have something to lose.
Probably, that instinct is right—the one that kept me alive for four years.
I think of all the days I didn’t let myself want anything more than the next meal, the next unbroken bone.
Years of it. I could have wanted something all that time and I didn’t, because wanting cost more than I had to spend.
I grieve those years right now, small and furious about it, here in the furs with a monster’s cum still warm in my belly, because I’ll never get them back and no amount of this, whatever this is, pays that debt.
His hand is warm against my stomach when I close my eyes. The knot hums. The tail tip rests against my clit—not pressing, not circling. Just there. A point of warmth.
A promise.
Promises aren’t something the camp let me keep either end of.
The ones who made them broke them for sport, and the ones who believed them broke worse.
I let this one sit in my chest anyway, a small stubborn ember, because, young and stupid about it, I want to believe a body can promise something a voice can’t take back.
“What the fuck,” I whisper again. Softer this time. Almost to myself.
His thumb strokes my belly. Back and forth. Slow.
I sleep. The dreams are not nothing this time. The dreams have heat in them.