Chapter 4 #2
I turn her onto her side, my chest against her back, one of her legs hooked back over mine.
The tent’s too small for anything else and neither of us minds.
I take her slow—slower than before, the first edge of the rut worn down enough to let me—and she reaches back and gets a hand in my hair and tips her head against my shoulder.
I put my mouth to her throat and say things I don’t have words for in daylight.
She says them back. Different words but the same meaning.
“You’re going to give me everything,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Every time.”
“Yeah.” I push deeper. “Every time. Going to put a baby in you and you’re going to be full of me long after.”
She makes a sound into the crook of my elbow that isn’t a word. Then: “Do it.” Low. Certain. “I want that.”
I go still behind her. Then I give her exactly what she asked for.
She pushes back into me and says “good” and means it. I follow her over, and the knot locks us together for the third time. She turns her head until her forehead finds my jaw, and we breathe the same air in the cramped dark.
We stay there until the light shifts outside the tent. She asks me questions—not panicked, just curious. What the shift feels like. How long I’ve been a shifter. What the pack was like. I answer what I can. Some of it I don’t have words for. She doesn’t push on those.
By the fire, later, I cook again. Different menu—simpler—and she sits on the log across from me with a blanket around her shoulders and watches the flames.
“The rut,” she says, around a mouthful. “Does it hurt?”
I think about it. “It did. Before you.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s just loud.”
She considers that. “What do you need?”
She keeps asking me that. I don’t know what to do with it—someone asking what I need instead of telling me what they expect. “Sleep, tonight,” I say. “Food. You, after.”
The corner of her mouth lifts. “I can do all three of those.”
“I know.” I hand her the bowl. “Eat.”
She takes the bowl and starts eating. The fire burns low. I try to figure out how someone spends three years being fine—honestly, completely fine—and then loses all of it in two days.
She moans at the food. Even simpler camp food. Even tonight.
I close my eyes and breathe through it.
“Decklan.”
“What?”
“I can hear you wanting to drag me back into the tent.”
I look at her. She’s watching me over the rim of her bowl, eyes knowing. “Eat,” I say.
“I am eating. I’m a multitasker.” She puts the bowl down half-finished and stands and walks around the fire to me and I don’t move. She swings one leg over and sits in my lap, back to the fire, facing me. My hands go to her hips without a decision. Her arms go around my neck.
“There,” she says. “Better.”
It is better. The rut settles slightly—proximity helping, my wolf quieting by degrees. I pull her closer and she lets me arrange her and rests her forehead against mine.
“I’m going to fill you up and keep you full,” I say. “Every time. Until the rut’s done. Is that?—”
“Yes,” she says. Simple. “Yes. I told you I wasn’t going to run.”
“It’ll be days.”
“I know.” She tips her head and looks at me. “I wasn’t going anywhere anyway. Even if you weren’t a wolf shifter. I wasn’t going anywhere.”
My throat works. I don’t say anything.
She gets my belt open with the blanket still around her shoulders, and then she reaches down between us and finds me, already hard again, and I let out a breath through my teeth. “I’ve got you,” she says, echoing me from the canyon. “I’ll take care of you.”
She shoves her leggings down off one leg and sinks onto me slowly, right there by the fire, the blanket pulled over both of us.
“Don’t move,” she says.
“Gemma—”
“I mean it. Hands down.” She takes my wrists and sets them on the log on either side of me, and I leave them there, and she starts a rhythm so slow I feel every inch of it go in. “You’ve been doing all of it since the canyon. Let me.”
I let her. It costs me something. She knows exactly what it costs me and she doesn’t hurry a single stroke.
“You’re going to be so full of me,” I tell her, and I keep my hands where she put them, and it is the hardest thing I have done on this mountain. “Tonight and tomorrow and the walk out. Dripping with it. Anything with a nose inside twenty miles is going to know exactly whose you are.”
“Yes—”
“Say it.”
“I’m yours.” She’s got both hands in my hair. “Everybody knows. I don’t care. Decklan?—”
She comes on me by the fire with her forehead against mine, and I hold on and don’t follow her, because I want this one to last.
Then she starts talking.
She murmurs it into my neck—how the fire sounds, how cold the air is on her shoulders where the blanket slipped, how full she is, whether the moon is up.
Random. Fast. It’s what she does when something has gotten too big to sit inside her quietly, and she’s been doing it since the parking lot, and I have listened to every word of it for two days.
I put my hand flat on the back of her head and hold her against my shoulder.
“Quiet,” I say.
She stops.
She lets it go, all at once, like she’s been waiting two days for somebody to tell her she’s allowed to. Her whole body comes down against mine. Her breathing evens out. There is no sound anywhere on this mountain except the fire and the creek and the two of us not saying anything.
I have wanted quiet for three years. I’ve had nothing but quiet for three years. This is the first time it’s ever been worth anything.
“Every word,” I tell her, after a while. “Since the parking lot. In case you were wondering whether I was listening.”
She wraps her arms tighter around my neck, drops her head to my shoulder, moves in the firelight. The knot begins to rise. I keep her close and breathe her in, and the rut hums lower—sated, not gone, but sated. The fire burns down to coals. Neither of us goes anywhere.
The rut has me for three more days. She doesn’t seem to mind.
She never once tells me to stop.