Chapter 7 #4
And it didn’t matter that she’d just had a mind-blowing, out-of-body experience. When he nudged her with the head of his cock, need gripped her all over again. She opened for him.
A moan tore through her as he, slowly, slowly, entered her. All she could do was wrap her arms around his neck and go still for a second—just a breath, just long enough to feel the stretch of him, long and thick, filling her in a way that was not only physical.
Then he started moving, and she lost contact with everything that was not pleasure.
Her hands tried to take in all she could, as if she needed to map his body to make him hers.
She rose with him, the taste of him and them in her mouth, the weight of him, the pressure building, building.
There was gentleness but no finesse, no detours into the land of pleasure.
She wanted none, not now. As if nothing else mattered but the end.
Awareness started to blur.
She didn’t understand what was happening to her. In her body, in her soul.
It was as if he were everywhere at once.
Not just inside her body, but inside her mind, inside her heart, filling something she hadn’t known existed, let alone being empty.
Her consciousness scattered in a million directions, and somehow that felt right—expansion rather than loss.
Pleasure, thick and golden and deep, went beyond words, beyond consciousness, beyond everything she’d ever had a name for.
And still there was more for her to get, somewhere, somehow.
She grabbed him, held on, and anchored herself to him while the world dissolved at the edges.
And then, as the orgasm crested, as that fullness became almost too much to hold, something older than thought moved through her. An instinct she’d never known she had. She probably never did. She turned her head to one side, baring her neck.
His teeth found that soft place between her shoulder and her neck.
And everything exploded.
Her sense of self burst open in light and stars and brightness, shattered in the most glorious possible way, and then—fulfilled, joyfully—put itself back together.
More. It was more, and it was deeper. Feelings she’d only half-sensed, thoughts she’d never quite finished thinking, an awareness that had been reaching out but never touched her, they all rushed in at once, vivid and certain and real.
Her soul made room, instinctively, like it had always known this space was there. Like it had been saving it.
For him.
When she managed to open her eyes, it was almost a surprise that the forest was still there. That the sky still held. That everything was just the same, unchanged, while she felt like an entirely different person had assembled herself in the same body.
She lay still and relished the weight of him, his breathing as ragged as her own, the warmth of him the only thing keeping her tethered to the earth.
He raised his head to look at her, eyes all but glowing.
Happiness, pride, a feeling so vast and unguarded she felt it bloom in her chest, as glorious as coming inside from the cold.
She knew, without doubt and without question, that it was all for her.
She could feel it. Not just see it, feel it, deep and certain and new.
He smiled. And she could almost hear his voice in her head.
Moonbeam. Mine.
She blinked.
Wait. She could actually hear his voice in her head.
Which was—okay. Okay.
She’d just had the best orgasm of her entire life, and she was not in a position to process new information, but that was definitely his voice, definitely in her head, and she was going to need a moment with that. She tried to sit up to look at him properly.
He held her down, gently. “We need a moment,” he said. Growled, actually. It was an excellent growl.
“Okay?”
“If I—” He cleared his throat. “If I move right now, I’d hurt you.”
“Oh.” She considered that. Then it clicked. “Oh.” She put her arms around his neck and kissed him, which turned into a longer thing than she’d intended, but hey, they couldn’t go anywhere. “I thought I’d imagined it,” she said against his mouth. “It getting, you know, bigger.”
“You didn’t imagine it.”
“Okay. Good. That’s—” She closed her eyes as he kissed the side of her neck, registering, vaguely, that it was sore. Something else was coming up from her lust-filled memory. Slowly, through the warmth and the happiness and the general state of her brain being completely offline. “Did you bite me?”
“Yes.” What was on his face was extremely complicated. Guilt, pride, possession, more guilt. “I’m sorry. We didn’t talk about it—the technicalities of the mating bond. I should have, and I should have been able to stop, I—”
She pressed her palm to his lips. “Relax, Rex.” She looked at him, at his beautiful, complicated, guilty face, and smiled. Because what she was about to ask him made her feel so incredibly hot and happy that it probably required some studying. Later. “Did you claim me? Is that how it works?”
He blinked. “Yes. I'm sorry—”
"Stop apologizing.” She traced his jaw with her fingers. “I like it. I like it quite a lot, actually.”
Some tension dropped out of him. She felt it leave as if it were her own.
“Can I claim you?" she asked.
“You already have.” His voice was low, raspy. It made her want to press her face into his neck again. “Your scent is all over me. It’ll stay there.”
“What if you shower?”
“Still there.”
“What if—” she thought about it hard. “Ah! What if you get third-degree burns all over your body and grow entirely new skin?”
He looked at her, disbelieving, and chuckled. “Still there. You’re part of me now, Moonbeam.”
“Oh.” The tears that threatened were completely unreasonable, and she was choosing not to acknowledge them. “Oh, I like that.”
He rolled onto his back then, taking her with him, settling her against his side. She went without protest, because she was boneless and he was strong and hers, and some decisions made themselves.
And also, where else would she want to go, honestly?
She lay in the warmth of him, in the quiet of the clearing, under the moon beginning its slow descent and the trees standing patiently at the edges, and she heard it. Faint, like a word spoken in another room.
Perfect.
Yeah, okay. She lifted her head. “Rex.”
“Yes.”
“Please don’t freak out, but I think I can hear your thoughts.”
He looked at her. Blinked once. A small frown formed between his brows. Not alarm, more like a man doing quick mental arithmetic. “There’s a resonance between mates,” he said. “It gets stronger the stronger the wolves are.”
“You’re the Alpha, hence the strongest, so it checks.” She frowned. “But I’m human.”
“Strength means very many things. You’re plenty strong, Zoe.”
“So we can speak to each other’s minds?”
“Not exactly. But we get—” He searched for the word.
“Close,” she supplied.
“Very close.”
“Can you hear me?”
“I can.” He looked at her, and what was in his face was so open and unguarded that she had to look away for a second, at the sky and the stars, which were politely minding their own business. “Does it bother you?”
She thought about it honestly. “Ask me again when I’ve slept.” She settled back against him. “Right now, I don’t think anything could bother me.”
He pressed his lips to her hair; she felt him smile against it. And the forest held them, and the moon moved on, and the clearing was very quiet and very content, which was, she thought, plenty nice of all of it.