Chapter 2
Rex
Holly opens the door in my flannel.
The green one, the heavyweight one I left on her bathroom hook three months ago and never asked for back.
The hem hits her mid-thigh. She hasn't buttoned it past the third one, and the collar sits wide across one bare shoulder, exposing the line of her collarbone and the shadow of the hollow at the base of her throat.
"Rex."
I should turn around. My brain has been screaming it the whole ride here, a clean feed of static overlaying the pull in my chest that won't let up, the heat behind my ribs that flares every time I get within a mile of her apartment.
I should get on my bike and ride north until the fuel runs out and refill and keep riding.
But my feet carry me over the threshold because they know the way. My hands find her waist because they never forgot. Her skin burns through the flannel and the scent hits me, bourbon and dark cherries and a warmth underneath like sun on leather, and every circuit in my skull blows at once.
The door shuts behind me. My boots come off in the hallway, toed off and left where they land.
I kiss her against the hallway wall. My fingers thread through her hair, fisting at the base of her skull, tipping her head back.
She tastes like the lip balm she puts on before bed and the whiskey she poured while she waited for me, and the fact that she waited, that she knew I'd come, coils a fist of shame under my ribs even as my mouth opens against hers.
Holly doesn't wait for me to set the pace.
Her fingers dig into my tattoos on my forearms, nails dragging along the sleeve ink, pulling me closer.
My gold tusk caps drag across her collarbone when I break the kiss and drop my mouth to her throat, and she hisses through her teeth, a sound I've memorized alongside every other noise she makes that I have no right to keep.
"Take me to bed." She says it into the curve of my ear.
Her legs wrap around my waist when I lift her, barely spanning me, her ankles not quite hooking behind my back.
I carry her down the hallway with my nose pressed to her neck, her weight nothing in my arms, inhaling her, pulling her scent so deep into my lungs I'll smell it for days.
I set her on the mattress and she pulls me down by my collar, and the flannel falls open between us.
Her breasts press against my chest, nipples hard through the gap in the cotton, and my hands close over them, thumbs dragging across the peaks until she arches into my palms with a hiss.
She yanks my shirt over my head in one motion.
Fast. The way it always starts. Her hands know where to go and so do mine. My jeans hit the floor. Her underwear follows. I mouth my way down her body, throat, sternum, the flat of her stomach, and her fingers fist in my hair when I settle between her thighs, my shoulders pushing them wide.
"Rex—"
I lick through her folds. One long stroke, base to clit, tasting the full heat of her, and her hips roll off the mattress.
She's soaked, slick against my tongue, and her arousal floods my senses until the bedroom narrows to this: her thighs on either side of my head, her fingers gripping my hair, the taste of her pussy against my tongue.
I pin her hips with one hand and slide two fingers inside her with the other, curling deep while my tongue works her clit.
She squeezes around my fingers, her inner walls clenching in rhythmic pulses, and I fuck her with them in slow, deliberate strokes while I suck her clit between my lips.
Her thighs lock around my head. She comes with my name splintering off her tongue, her back bowed, her fist white-knuckled in the sheets, her pussy gripping my fingers so hard the pressure shoots straight to my cock.
I don't let her come down.
I drag her hips to the edge of the bed and line up, my hands spanning her hips, thumbs nearly meeting at her navel.
I notch the head of my cock against her entrance.
She's swollen and slick from her orgasm, and when I push inside she sucks in a breath and her fingers clamp down on my forearms. I stop and let her adjust. Her body opens around me in slow increments, the stretch pulling a raw sound out of both of us.
Her walls flutter around my cock in the aftershocks, and I grit my teeth and hold still because every instinct I have is screaming to fuck into her hard, but she needs the time to stretch around my width and I'll give it to her even if it kills me.
She digs her heels into my lower back and says "Move," and I give her what she wants.
Hard and deep, the headboard knocking the wall, the bed groaning under my weight with every thrust. I fuck her the way she likes it, the way I know she likes it because I've memorized every sound she makes, every dig of her nails that means harder and every loosening of her hold that means stay right there.
This is what works. This is what I'm good at, making her come apart on my cock until neither of us has to think about what comes after.
Then Holly puts her hand on my chest.
"Wait."
I stop. Mid-stroke, buried to the hilt inside her, every muscle strung tight. She pushes against my chest, just enough to make space between us, and looks up at me.
"Look at me."
I am looking at her. My cock is inside her. How much more present does she need me to be.
"No." Her palm slides up to my jaw. She tilts my chin down until our eyes lock and there's nowhere to go. "Look at me, Rex."
Her eyes are dark brown, almost black in the low light. Her pupils blown wide. The violet streak in her hair fans across the pillow. Her thumb traces the edge of my tusk cap, the gold warm under her touch, and a shudder runs through me that has nothing to do with sex.
"Stay tonight." Her voice drops. Steady. "The whole night."
The words land on my chest like a hand pressing down.
"Holly—"
"I'm not asking you to move in. I'm asking you to be here when I wake up. Once." Her fingers tighten on my jaw. "One time."
I should say yes. The word sits right behind my lips, easy, free. Three letters. One syllable. The simplest contract a man can make.
I kiss her instead. Slower this time, my lips against hers.
She kisses me back and pulls me deeper with her heels against my spine, and the pace changes.
Everything changes. The urgency drains out of the room and what's left is worse.
Longer strokes, my cock dragging out of her until only the tip stays inside, then rolling back in deep enough that her breath catches in her throat.
We watch each other in the dark, and that's worse than anything she could say.
Her scent shifts underneath the arousal.
I catch it between one breath and the next, a darker note threading through the warm base of her, bruised and salt-edged.
Grief. She smells like grief, and my scenting goes haywire because the wanting and the hurting are tangled so tight I can't pull them apart.
I've never noticed that before. Or I have, and I've never let myself stick around long enough to name it.
I press my forehead to hers. She cups my jaw in both hands and breathes my name, and I feel her pulse against my palms where I'm gripping her thighs, her heartbeat hammering into my fingertips.
My hips grind into hers, deep, slow and deliberate, her pussy clenches around me with her eyes still locked on mine.
I feel everything. The heat of her, the way her inner walls ripple and tighten when I hit the right angle, the small broken sounds she makes into my mouth when I grind my pelvis against her clit.
"Fuck," she whispers. Her nails rake down my back and her hips rock up to meet mine, and none of it is for show. Just Holly, under me, needing me in a way I don't deserve and can't walk away from.
I come with my mouth pressed to her neck, breathing her in, pulling her scent into the lowest part of my lungs where it'll live rent-free for weeks.
The orgasm tears through me and I bury myself to the hilt, my cock pulsing inside her while her walls squeeze around me in long rolling spasms that drag me under.
In the white-hot centre of it, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, the word detonates behind my eyes.
Mate.
The old language. The one no foster home taught me, no social worker explained, no orc I grew up around spoke where I could hear.
A word that lives in my blood, not my brain.
It surfaced the first time Holly touched my tusks six months ago.
It surfaces every time her skin meets mine and my body recognizes what my mind won't accept.
I shove it down. Pack it deep. Bury it under the sound of her breathing and the creak of the mattress and the rain on the window.
Holly falls asleep with her hand on my chest. Her palm flat over my heartbeat, her fingers curled against my chest, possessive even in sleep.
I lie rigid, staring at the ceiling, counting her breaths the way I count mile markers on a highway.
Mate.
The word circles back. I stare at the ceiling. Holly's apartment is warm and dry and smells like her, and my brain drags me back the way it always does when I'm lying still in someone else's bed.
My parents died in the Emergence. I was nine. The social worker who picked me up didn't know what to do with a green kid—none of them did.
The foster home in Bend. Three months. They sent me back the week before Christmas because the biological son didn't want to share his room.
A kitchen that smelled like bleach. A locked door. The social worker's car idling in the driveway with the back door already open.
The clock on Holly's nightstand reads 3:07 a.m.
I slide out from under her arm. One inch at a time, holding my breath, watching her face for the twitch that means she's waking. Her fingers curl against the warm spot I leave behind and her brow creases in her sleep, but she doesn't wake.