19. Epilogue - Soren #2
Oh. Well. That’s just rude, but it’s true, and it makes me clench around him so hard he groans into my skin. I’m dripping. I can feel it, slick running down my thighs and pooling where we’re joined. Every roll of my hips makes a sound that used to embarrass me, but now just makes me want more.
My cock is hard and leaking against my stomach, bobbing with every roll of my hips. I reach down and wrap my hand around myself, and the dual sensation, him filling me up, my fist tight on my own dick, makes my thighs shake. Wren watches my hand move, lips parted, breathing ragged.
“Keep doing that,” he says, low and rough. “Want to watch you.”
“Bossy.”
“Asking.” His thumbs press into the crease of my hips, and slick drips down around his cock where we’re connected. “Asking nicely.”
Bronte wobbles on the headboard. We both freeze, watching her teeter. She settles.
“If that falls on my head during sex, I’m filing for divorce,” I say.
“We’re not married.”
“I’m filing preemptively.”
He laughs and flips us. My back hits the blankets, soft and warm, and his weight settles over me. He’s still inside me, and the new angle pushes him deeper. I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him closer.
“Slow,” I say. “I want to feel everything.”
He goes slow, giving me long, deep strokes that make me feel everything, his forehead pressed to mine, our breath mixing. My slick makes it easy, smooth, and messy. It soaks into the blankets and smears across my thighs and his hips. The nest will smell like us for days. I like that.
“I want to be old with you in this bed,” I tell him between kisses. “Gray hair and bad knees and you still carving me birds when we’re eighty.”
His rhythm stutters. His arms shake.
“Soren, you can’t just—“ He buries his face in my neck, breathing hard. “I’m trying not to come in thirty seconds and you’re talking about growing old together.”
“Then come. I’ll be here when you’re done. I’ll be here tomorrow. I’ll be here when we’re eighty and you’re carving me a bird with shaky hands and it’s lopsided and I’ll still put it on the shelf.”
“Fuck.” He thrusts harder, once, like my words punched it out of him.
“Keeping you. Every morning. Every—“ His voice breaks. His knot is swelling, there at the base of his cock, thickening with every stroke, catching at my rim on every pull back. The stretch builds and builds, that impossible pressure that’s half too-much and half not-enough, my body clenching around it, trying to drag him in and hold him.
“Give it to me,” I whisper. “All of it.”
He pushes through. The knot pops past resistance with a wet, obscene sound and the sudden fullness locks my body up, back arching, fingers digging into his shoulders, a sound tearing out of me that I couldn’t control if I tried.
My hole clenches tight around the base, and every pulse of him inside me radiates through my pelvis, my thighs, the soles of my feet.
Wren’s hips stutter as he starts to come, thick and relentless, every hot pulse filling me while his knot holds us locked together.
“Mine,” he says against my throat, voice wrecked. “Mine, mine, mine.”
His mouth finds my claiming bite and his teeth press in, not breaking skin, pressure, there, and the bond lights up like a live wire.
I get my hand around my cock. It only takes a few strokes, his knot stretching me full, his mouth on my bite, the wet grind of him still pulsing, and I’m coming so hard my vision goes bright and narrow.
Cum stripes across my stomach and his, hot and messy between us, and my hole clenches in rhythmic spasms around his knot that make him groan like I’m wrecking him.
My purr hums through both our chests, vibrating in my sternum, and the answering rumble comes back from his ribs.
We stay like that. We have to; that’s the whole point of a knot, and it’s my favorite part, the twenty minutes where neither of us can go anywhere and nobody wants to.
He eases his weight to one elbow so I can breathe and stays as deep as he can, and every so often he rolls his hips, slow, barely moving, just enough to remind my body it’s full, and I make a sound each time that he collects like he’s saving them.
“Heron,” I say eventually, when I have words. “For where?”
“The bathroom. Above the towel hook.” His thumb traces my eyebrow. “You said the bathroom was the only room without a bird in it.”
“I said that as a complaint about my life.”
“I heard a request.” Another slow roll. My toes curl. “Someday we’re going to need a bigger place. With a real workshop. I’m not carving a heron in Jude’s old bedroom for the rest of my life.”
Someday. He says it like it’s just another Tuesday.
A year ago, I would have flinched at a word that big and tried to make deals with the universe.
Tonight, I pull his face down, kiss the graphite off his jaw, and say, “Somewhere with a porch. I want to sit outside and watch you work with your shirt off.”
“Deal.”
His knot pulses. My body answers, another slow clench that drags a groan out of both of us, and he kisses my bite again, and I pet his hair while he shakes, and that’s the whole conversation.
After, we’re a disaster. Slick and sweat and cum everywhere, soaking blankets, smeared between us, drying tacky on my hand.
Wren is half on top of me like a weighted blanket, still locked inside, face pressed into my throat.
One hand tangled in my hair, the other on my ribs, thumb tracing slow shapes.
Every few seconds his knot gives a small pulse and my body answers with a flutter that makes us both twitch.
Bronte survived. Still on the headboard, wings spread, judging us with tiny wooden eyes.
I close my eyes. The apartment is quiet in a good way.
Not empty-quiet, but full-quiet—the kind where you hear the person next to you breathing and the fridge humming down the hall.
Wren’s tools are on their shelf by the door.
Sawdust is in the hallway. My birds sit on their Knox-built altar, glowing amber in the lamplight.
In my head, I can imagine what the rest of my friends are doing.
Jude rehearsing wedding vows in Rhys’s bathroom mirror while Rhys pretends he can’t hear through the door.
Milo bookmarking apartments in three cities while Callum quietly sends him listings in a fourth—the one with the program Milo actually wants but won’t let himself say out loud.
Benji and Knox arguing about font choices for their joint gallery show invitations in a fight that will either produce genius or end in mutual homicide.
Shay expanding the brunch menu at Byrne’s and Declan calling it an act of love disguised as a profit margin.
Life keeps moving. It wasn’t jinxed. It just goes on.
The voice that used to whisper you’ll jinx it is quiet tonight. Not gone. I don’t think it ever fully goes. But it’s buried under Wren’s heartbeat against my ribs.
This is mine.
It’s not a wish or a prayer whispered at an empty bench at midnight. It’s a fact, plain and warm and boring in the best way.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. Its screen casts blue light over the birds on their shelf. Jude’s sent something. I can tell from the preview it’s a meme about alphas and IKEA furniture.
I smile. And I leave it.
I press my nose into Wren’s hair, breathe in pine and sawdust and home, and let myself fall asleep.
***
I can't believe we are at the end of this series! I love, love, love all these boys and it was such a joy to explore each of them finding their mates. And especially satisfying (and a bit tear-jerking, if I'm being honest lol) to give Soren his HEA.
Thank you for reading!