19. Maeve #2
His breathing is deep and slow. Each inhale brings the scent of me—my skin, my hair, my cunt—directly into his system. His cock swells where it presses against my back, and he makes a small sound that might be contentment.
“Yours,” he says into the top of my head. “Growing.”
The warmth in his voice is strange—satisfaction, even as his cock hardens against my back. An ownership that means he’s pleased because I’m healing, because my body is doing impossible things and he gets to witness it.
His talons find a section of the new growth and lift it, examining it again like he’s checking on something precious. Like my hair is a project. Like I’m a project.
Wanting is dangerous. That’s camp-law, older than my own name.
Want a bigger ration and you get watched.
Want a kindness and you get it taken away in front of you so you learn better.
But my shoulders have gone loose against his chest, and somewhere under my ribs a small, traitorous thing is unfolding, easy as that, with no punishment coming to slap it back down.
And the terrifying part is that I’m starting to like being his project.
The feeding thing has been escalating for days, and I only just realized what I’m doing.
It happens during the evening feed. He’s got something wrapped in soft leaves—some kind of bird, I think, the meat dark and seasoned with whatever grows around here.
Smoke and something sharp and herbal cling to the leaves when he peels them back, and the smell alone makes my mouth flood before I’ve even seen the meat.
He tears pieces off with his teeth and offers them to me, watching with that intensity he brings to everything.
It’s efficient. It’s how he makes sure I eat enough.
It’s also, I’ve slowly understood, deeply erotic for him.
The first time he did it, I took the food directly from his claws, careful not to touch his skin. But that’s not how it’s evolved.
Now, when hunger hits me—when my ribs remind me they’re still learning how to hold weight—I reach for him.
I don’t think about it first. My body just does it. My hand finds his wrist, gentle but clear, pulling his talons and the food and the warmth of him nearer to my mouth. I’m reaching. I’m choosing to lean in. I’m asking with my body instead of words.
The understanding comes half a second after the doing, and it stops my breath.
In the camps you never reached for food.
You waited for it to be handed down the line, and you took what landed in your bowl and were grateful it landed at all.
Reaching got your hand slapped away, your name called out as an example.
My fingers are already wrapped around his wrist before the old fear even finishes arriving, and it arrives anyway, cold down my spine, a half-beat too late to stop me.
He stills when I do it.
I don’t look up, but his awareness sharpens, his breathing catching slightly. His tail lashes once, hard, and then goes very still. Very controlled. Like he’s holding himself in place by force of will.
“Good,” he says, so soft I almost miss it.
The next piece of food is closer to his skin.
I have to lean in harder to reach it, and when I do, my mouth brushes against his palm.
His claws flex. A sound comes from his chest—not quite a purr, something deeper.
More primal. He holds the next piece even closer, testing. Seeing if I’ll lean in again.
I do.
Each time, his breathing gets rougher. His cock hardens against my back, and he shifts slightly, trying not to seem like he’s trying. Failing. By the time the food is gone, he’s fully hard, pressing against my spine, the wet heat of his tip spreading against my skin.
But he doesn’t push for more than this. Doesn’t move his hand down to my cunt or suggest we take this to the furs. He just holds me, lets me finish eating, and the intimacy of it is sharper than any fuck. Wind moves through the canopy, carrying the smell of wet bark and sap from somewhere outside.
I’m learning that with him, reaching is its own kind of giving in—one I choose instead of one that’s forced from me.
The night of day nineteen, he’s different.
We’re in the furs—we’re always in the furs by nightfall.
His cock is soft inside me, just barely, the weight of him against my back like being pinned by something warm and massive.
His arm is across my waist, palm spread over my belly.
This is how he sleeps most nights now. The heat coming off his skin carries its own smell, char and something like fresh-turned earth underneath, and I breathe it in without meaning to, the way I used to breathe shallow just to take up less space.
But his hand is moving lower.
His palm slides from my navel down toward my hip, and I think he’s just resettling. But then his fingers spread wide, pressing into the space below my navel. Lower. Into that soft pocket of belly that the camps never let me keep because a soft belly means weakness and weakness meant punishment.
His fingers press there, deliberate, and he makes a sound.
It’s not quite a rumble. More like a groan that gets caught in his throat, and his hand presses harder, warm palm possessive.
He’s pressing into the space where his seed pools inside me, and something in his breathing shifts.
His cock twitches, swelling slightly inside me, responding to his own touch through me.
“Changing,” he says, his voice rough against my ear.
I don’t understand what he means. He’s not saying I’m pregnant. I’m not, and his feral brain knows the difference. So what is he tracking? What is he sensing with those claws pressed into the soft tissue of my belly, the place where no one’s hands have been allowed since the camps took me?
My stomach drops before my head sorts out why, a fast cold lurch like missing a step in the dark.
Something is happening in my own body that I can’t see, can’t name, and the old wired-in reflex behind my ribs doesn’t like that one bit, wants a number, a schedule, a way to brace.
There’s none of that here. Just his palm and his one word and the not-knowing sitting heavy under my ribs.
His hand stays there, pressing, and his breathing stays deep and controlled.
Like he’s reading something. Like his feral brain is tracking the shifts happening inside me—the blood moving warmer, the earliest preparations my body is making.
He’s not touching my cunt. He’s touching the space above it.
The place where the body starts getting ready before conception does.
He presses lower, and another groan works out of him.
It sounds almost pained. Almost desperate.
The air inside the warren shifts—the thermal vents warming the chamber, the stone beneath us radiating steady heat.
His hips shift slightly, pressing his cock deeper in response to whatever he’s finding, whatever he’s monitoring.
“Mine,” he says. “Growing.”
The statement settles over me heavy, and for a moment, I forget to breathe.
He’s not saying he wants me to conceive.
He’s not making some claim on my body beyond what he already owns.
He’s saying something smaller and somehow infinitely larger—that whatever is happening inside me, the changes in my bones, in my blood, in the way pleasure moves through me now, those are mine.
That my body is mine and he’s just honored to be the one shaping the landscape inside it.
His hand presses deeper, possessive. His palm sinks heavy into the soft space, the curve of my belly rising slightly under his touch. He’s tracking the way my body is changing—toward him. Toward being able to hold his size, his heat, his seed without breaking.
I reach back and find his forearm, run my fingers along the muscle there. His hand presses harder against my belly. His weight shifts, his entire body settling into that position like it’s the safest place in the warren.
I let myself lean back into it. That’s the part that scares me more than the hand on my belly ever could—not the size of him at my back, but how easy it is to stop holding myself up.
Four years I kept my own spine straight because nobody else was going to.
Now I’m letting his chest do the work, and some small, stubborn piece of me keeps waiting to be punished for going soft.
Like he could stay there forever.
Like holding that stubborn line down my spine is enough.