45. Maeve #2
Cora is in the sleeping hollow with Marta beside her, arms around the girl, holding her through the shaking.
I checked on her an hour ago. The withdrawal is worse at night, the last of the venom warmth draining out, the pain settling into bones that forgot they were broken.
Cora whimpered when I touched her hand. She sounded very young, and in the kind of pain that has no ceiling.
I couldn’t stay. The pregnancy and the exhaustion wouldn’t let me sit on the hard floor of the hollow. I hated leaving. Marta nodded at me. Go. I have her.
Red finds me by the fire. He’s done building for the night: four new shelters, a windbreak, a second fire pit. The Stained’s claw marks are crusting dark on his forearms, and the cracked rib announces itself in the hitch of his breath as he lowers himself down.
He settles close, his thigh against mine, warmth bleeding through where we touch. His palm rests low over my stomach. The twins answer with a kick, then another, the greeting that has become their language with their father. We’re here. You’re here.
“Fifty-two,” he says. The number settles in his mouth like a stone.
“Fifty-two.”
He’s quiet, eyes on the fire, the flames gold in his pupils, the light making his crimson skin glow like something forged. He’s working through the size of what we’ve taken on: food, shelter, room.
“I need to build more,” he says. It isn’t a complaint. He says it the way he says the fire needs wood or your feet need wrapping.
“You need to heal first.”
“I can build and heal.”
“You can build and break the rib again.” I lean into him, my head against his arm. His shoulder is too high to reach. “One night. Rest one night. Build tomorrow.”
His jaw works. His body is telling him provide, protect, build, and his mate is telling him stop.
“One night,” he says, grudging, in the voice of a man who will be awake before dawn with his hands in the earth.
His fingers wrap around mine and my whole hand disappears inside his fist, warm, rough with callus. I turn his arm over. The Stained left thin dark lines across his forearm, and I trace one with my fingertip. I’m not tending it. I’m saying I know what his body did today so mine could stand here.
“Thank you,” I say.
He looks at me, the gold eyes warm with firelight.
“You don’t thank me for that.”
His voice goes low and almost ashamed, like violence done for me is a debt he’d rather I look past. I won’t look past it.
“I just did.”
His mouth curves, the muscles still learning the shape on a face that spent years without one. It’s the closest thing to a smile he can make.
He pulls me into his lap, slow, the cracked rib limiting him, his hands minding the twins between us.
I settle against his chest. His arms come around me and his wings fold forward, and that is Red’s version of a room: the membrane blocking the wind, the firelight filtering through the red translucence, the safest place in the territory.
Walled off in here from the smoke and the crowded shelters, he smells like himself again, warm skin and something like river stone. I breathe it until my heartbeat slows to match his.
My body should want nothing but sleep. For a while that’s all it wants. Then his thumb moves against my hip, one slow absent pass, a man checking that I’m real, and something else wakes up under it.
“Maeve.” His voice is low, a warning and a question inside one word. “Rest.”
“After.” I turn in his lap, careful of the rib, careful of the belly between us, and look at him in the red light coming through his own wings.
His eyes are gold. The gash on his cheek has gone to a pink seam.
We are both alive, and knowing it sits in my body like heat that needs somewhere to go.
“We’re alive. I want to feel it all the way through. ”
There was a time the wanting couldn’t find words. It came out as hips and silence, because the camps had stripped every other language off me. Tonight the words come out whole, in my own voice, and I watch them land in him like a struck match.
His cock stirs under me before he’s decided anything.
It thickens against my thigh, the tip already lifting, seeking, the way it always knows before he does.
I rise up on my knees, pull the wrap aside, and sink down onto him slow.
He enters me the way he only can when the rut isn’t driving, soft first, curling, finding his way deeper in stages while my body opens around the width of him.
The stretch still takes my breath. It always takes my breath.
My body still has to make room for him, still burns sweet at the rim of itself, still answers.
He exhales through his nose, long and controlled. His hands settle at my waist, minding the twins, minding the rib, minding everything.
“Don’t mind me,” I say against his jaw. “I’m not glass anymore. You made sure of it.”
“The women—” His voice is already rough. Ten shelters, fifty-two sleepers, Gretchen’s tuneless humming still drifting thin across the clearing. The warren taught us to be loud. This place is going to teach us something else.
“Then keep me quiet.”
I take his hand off my waist and put it over my mouth.
Something goes through him, through the whole nine feet of him, a shudder that starts where I’m seated on his cock and climbs.
A guard’s palm over a mouth was the last thing some women ever felt.
I know what I’m handing him. That’s the point of handing it.
His hand is bigger than my whole face, hot, smelling of woodsmoke and split wood, and it rests over my lips lighter than a hand that size should know how to rest.
Then I roll my hips, and neither of us is gentle after that.
He drives up into me with the force I asked for, short and deep, the angle his to control from beneath, the pace mine.
The wet sound of us stays small, trapped inside the wing-tent, the slick rhythm of his cock and my body meeting in the dark like a secret.
His tail slides up my thigh and finds my clit, the white tip pressing slow circles that refuse to match the rhythm of his hips, quicker, meaner, exactly what I need.
My sounds come anyway. They come muffled into his palm, small broken things his hand swallows whole, and his eyes stay open on mine and burn brighter with every one he catches.
“Feel it,” he says. Two words against my ear, almost no voice in them at all.
I feel it. I feel all of it. The girth of him splitting me open on every stroke, the furnace of his chest against mine, the fire through the membrane painting his face the color of his own skin.
My teeth find the heel of his hand. I bite down when the first wave hits, and I come apart around him in silence, my cunt clenching him in pulses, my whole body shaking inside the cage of his arms, while ten shelters away the humming goes on, unbroken, nobody in this clearing knowing their monster is being wrung out by the smallest woman in it.
He follows me down hard. Three more thrusts, his rhythm breaking, his breath tearing, and then the knot swells at my opening, catches, seals.
The vibration starts the moment the lock is done, dragging a second orgasm up through the tail of the first before I’ve finished having it.
His cum floods me in long hot pulses. His face presses down into my hair, and the sound he makes into it is quiet and ruined and mine.
We stay locked. Post-rut, the knot is a small tight promise instead of an hours-long law, and I ride the last of the vibration with my face in his throat and the taste of his skin, salt and smoke, on my lips.
When his hand comes away from my mouth, he looks at the half-moon marks my teeth left in the heel of it like they’re something worth keeping.
The knot eases. He slips from me, and for once the emptying doesn’t ache. My body doesn’t reach after him the way it has reached for months. He isn’t going anywhere.
“You said you’d keep me,” I tell him. His words from the grave clearing, weeks and a whole war ago. “My turn. I’m keeping you.”
“Good,” he says. His oldest word. It has never once sounded like this.
Fifty-two women are asleep in shelters he built.
His heartbeat comes up through my cheek where it rests against him, slower than mine, the steady rhythm of something built to last centuries. It’s the same beat that thudded through me during the rut, when I was too broken to feel anything else.
The canopy shifts above us, the mutated oaks creaking, the nightsounds of a world that rearranged itself around an asteroid and kept going.
Under it I can hear the women breathing.
Lisa’s low voice moves along the perimeter one more time before she sleeps.
Gretchen hums the tuneless way she does when her hands are idle.
A settlement, Lisa said.
My hand is on his chest and his hand is on my belly, the twins turning between us. I carry three heartbeats, mine and theirs, and the one under my palm brackets them all.
It doesn’t feel like the ending the camps would have promised me, clean and simple and earned in a straight line.
It feels like this: tired down to the bone, one girl shaking in a hollow, one grave four miles south with my guilt still sitting fresh on it, one woman alone by choice in a place with no fences left to keep her.
I used to think peace would feel like nothing left to carry.
Turns out it just means I get to set some of it down long enough to sleep.
A settlement. Something that stays.