Page 59 of Mate

“Such a damn nuisance ,” he repeats when my thighs squeeze around his waist, punching a grunt out of his chest.

I gasp for air, and he shouts out his pleasure when I suck his gland as hard as I can.

BY THE END OF THE FIRST DAY, WE’RE BOTH A LITTLE OUT OF OUR minds. The hormone bomb went off inside my body, but Koen wasn’t spared.

“Okay?” he asks, before starting to rock inside me the second his previous knot goes down. “I just can’t— ”

I nod. Lift my arms above my head, trying not to squirm as he kisses, licks, sucks, nibbles, worships my breasts.

“Fucking spectacular,” he says again. I cannot help my smile.

By now, he slides in like a dream, and I cognitively reframe the concept of having sex: not an act with a beginning and an end, but a continuous exchange of pleasure and hushed words. I know, rationally, that Koen and I are separate beings. It just doesn’t feel like it.

I come a lot. So does Koen. My ex- boyfriends are pale gray memories with no hope of bursting through the pink haze surrounding me.

I do know, however, that sex has never been like this for me, and I cannot help but wonder, What’s the hinge?

What makes the difference, really? The biology of the Heat? Or the fact that it’s with Koen?

I’ll never know. That’s the stipulation: afterward, we’ll go our separate ways.

I stroke my fingers through his hair. Pull him in for a kiss. Our eyes meet, and his face lights up with a grin.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey.” I force myself to smile back and forget about after.

THINGS GET REAL ON THE SECOND DAY. I THOUGHT THEY WERE before, but . . . I should just accept that I know nothing and go with the flow. Yeah. That’s what I’ll do.

We don’t sleep through the night, but I do doze off at dawn, while Koen’s knot is inside me and he’s still twitching with pleasure.

The last thing I remember is him coming and whispering in my ear, “Unbelievable, how fucking unreal you feel, soft and wet and warm and every good thing in the world, baby.”

I open my eyes to orange sunlight streaming through the window. Birds chirp in the tall trees surrounding the cabin, and Koen hugs me tight, my back pressed to his chest, both hands closed around my breasts.

He’s already moving inside me, shallow, staccato strokes that feel nothing like usual. I tilt the curve of my ass back to meet him, and his sharp inhale tells me that he wasn’t quite awake yet.

“Shit.” He buries his face in my hair. “Sorry.” My scent must broadcast how little I mind, because he doesn’t stop.

His long fingers splay on my abdomen. Curl against my hip.

He moves me against him in little circles, like I’m a doll, like my body is the most precious object he’ll ever own.

He develops a quiet rhythm, chants things that have me questioning whether he’s still partially asleep.

“This is it. How I want to wake up for the rest of my life.”

I must be asleep, too. I tell him, “Yes, yes, please.” Wonder: What if he just took me? What if I lived here, in this nest, hidden, stolen, stowed away? What if my entire life were just to be here, to make him happy? What then?

It sends him into a frenzy. He pounds inside me, his cock deeper than ever, bottoming out. I feel him in the back of my throat. With a snapping motion he splays my thighs open and rams me into the mattress. The heel of his palm presses between my shoulder blades, flattens me, and it’s sublime .

“Good. C’mon, killer, you can do it. Take it like— Good.”

Heat licks down my spine. Thrums in my belly. I try to grind against him as he swipes away the hair from my nape to find the green swirl on my upper back. Muffled obscenities vibrate through my body. Praises, slurred. His tongue against the thin, fragile skin of my gland.

He hasn’t touched me there yet, not since my Heat started.

One of his arms wraps under my rib cage to lift me up, fingers bruising me as his grip tightens. A hint of claws grazing against my flank, like he’s starting to lose control of the shift, the borders between man and animal becoming blurrier.

It’s the best thing I’ve ever known.

“Please,” I beg, not sure for what. But he knows.

A low groan. He stuffs me so full, I wail at how good it hurts.

Hot breath puffs against my hair, and he once again presses hot, open-mouthed kisses over my gland.

I come instantly. His teeth scrape, then touch, then brace.

He’s ready to pierce my skin. To sink them inside me.

It’s like the world stops spinning. Every cell of my body coalesces on my upper back, where my gland lives. Ready for Koen’s scar. Welcoming it.

I feel his knot starting to swell, and all at once I know what I’m asking for.

“Do it,” I say. “Please.”

He groans.

“Please.”

“God fucking damn.”

Koen rips himself away. He pulls out and turns me around, landing me on my back. His hand hooks under my knee, spreads me open, and he knots me like that. I come again. So hard, I think I see the edge of the universe.

“Don’t let me do that again,” he orders, catching his breath.

I peer up at him, trying to gauge his tone. I’ve never seen him so serious. “What?”

“You don’t want me anywhere near the back of your neck right now.”

“Why?”

“You smell beyond belief. And . . .” He covers his eyes with his palm. “I don’t know my limits. I might not be able to stop myself and might just bite you.”

It’s exactly what I want him to do.

I don’t say it, but he hears it anyway.

“No.” He gathers me closer. “It’ll just make things worse when you leave.”

Any response that comes to mind involves me shouting at him that I know what I need. I know what he needs, too, and it involves his wolf teeth as deep inside me as physics will allow. But I just came, and I’m too clearheaded to push his boundaries so shamelessly.

So I let him kiss me. I let him tell me how much he loves every single part of me, even as he doesn’t mention the whole.

I let him touch the place where we’re joined together, where his come and my slick overflow and dribble out, like we’re the only thing that matters in the history of the universe.

I let him make me come again, and I massage his knot till he’s coming, too.

I let him do everything he wants, and pretend that we have more than a short time left together.

I WAKE UP IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON AND WATCH HIM SLEEP.

MY heart flutters and my stomach bubbles at how beautiful he has grown to be to me , specifically.

Everything that his face means. The sides of him no else can see .

Cheekbones that dust with dark olive when I loop my arms around his neck.

The long, straight nose he scrunches as he calls me a nuisance.

The scars that split his face when he cannot help a smile, and the shallow dimples hidden under the stubble he can’t be bothered to shave.

I could spend the next hundred years cataloging new things about him, and never be done. He could be the project of my lifetime.

Just like I’m his.

The Heat mounts, but I let Koen get some rest and I go to the kitchen to grab a new bottle of water, trying not to dwell on how wrong it feels, being out of my nest.

That’s where he finds me two minutes later, and he immediately crowds me against the fridge. The stainless-steel presses against the backs of my thighs, and I shiver.

“Are you wearing fucking clothes ?”

“It’s just your sweater. I can— ”

“You’re not supposed to leave.”

He’s not joking. He’s genuinely upset that I . . . walked twenty feet and put on a hoodie? Hormones, man.

“I’m sorry,” I say, appeasing. He can’t help this any more than I can. “I didn’t mean to worry you. Let’s go back to bed.”

But we don’t. He silently flips me around and bends me over the table, uncaring of the papers scattered all over or the bottle rolling into the living room.

He maneuvers me until one of my knees is on the edge, and once I’m spread open, he pushes inside me so roughly, I come halfway through the first thrust. He knots me quickly, in a few unceremonious, glorious strokes.

For him it seems to be more about locking me closer than about coming, but my thighs shake with my orgasm and the effort to stay upright.

“Poor killer.” He hugs me and kisses my cheek. “She didn’t do as she was told, and now look.”

It doesn’t feel like punishment, not when his knot grinds inside me. That little bit of friction, coupled with his hand strumming my clit, makes me come so many times, I don’t even remember making it back to the bed.

ON THE MORNING OF THE THIRD DAY, THE URGENCY SUBSIDES. Somewhat.

“Is it over?” I ask Koen.

He scoffs. Twenty minutes later, when I climb on top of him, desperate for relief, I understand why.

But it is getting better. Less intense. With longer spells of normalcy. The fuck or die is waning in favor of . . . “Fuck or cry, maybe?” I tell him, and he laughs.

The end of this is in sight, and I do not want to look at it.

I feel good enough to take a shower, but Koen tries to talk me out of it, protesting that I won’t smell like him anymore.

“We are in your house. You are right here. There’s no way I’ll smell like anyone else.”

He grumbles for a while, even as he joins me and helps me clean up, looking morose the entire time.

Cute. He’s so cute .

For the first time in weeks, the water doesn’t sucker punch my skin into submission.

“What came before Neanderthals?” I ask him afterward.

He shrugs. Pouts.

“Whatever they were, you’re the one before them.”

He tosses me an apple, and his shut up and eat look is wry enough, I think I’m forgiven. But I’m deluding myself, because afterward, once the fever rises again, he makes me pay for it with his mouth on my cunt.

“I didn’t mean to— ”

“You didn’t mean to wash away my come like it’s a bad thing?” He sucks on my clit so hard, I almost pass out.