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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

ON FRIDAY NIGHT , Lyall went back to his house, took a cold shower, and then climbed into bed and tried to go to sleep.

It didn’t happen.

Eventually, he jerked off, thinking about the fucking doe, thinking about her cute little tail, thinking about her wet-as-hell pussy, thinking about how it had felt to feel her clenching on his still-sensitive, just-climaxed cock and he came again, like a damned fountain.

Then, he slept.

When he woke up in the morning, he was antsy.

He tried to sit out on his porch and have his morning coffee, but he ended up abandoning it. He jumped off the porch and went out to the spot where she’d stood, looking up at him, and he caught her scent .

He tracked it to the tree, where he’d fucked her the night before. The scent there was potent, practically overpowering, and he liked the way it was twined up with his own. He had the strong urge to stay there and jerk off again, mark the tree trunk with his come or something ridiculous.

He didn’t do that.

But he did follow her scent all the way back through the woods until he came to the field behind the Center. He stayed in the woods and watched the Center until he started seeing people up and moving through the large windows in the Center’s dining room, the one that overlooked the field and the woods beyond.

What the hell was he doing here?

He could not be stalking this doe. What was he thinking? That he’d go up to her and convince her to let him go at her again? He’d run off on her the night before. Hell, he’d been kind of a jerk to her.

More than kind of, really.

She had scared him, but this, what he was doing right now, this scared him, too.

He forced himself to go back home.

There, he made more coffee—his other cup had gone cold and gross—and he sat in his living room and watched stupid, trashy, true crime TV. Not even the really in-depth, good documentaries, just the series which were like, “Relationships gone deadly” and that kind of thing.

He tried to turn off his brain.

Mostly, it worked.

He heated up a bunch of junk food to facilitate his binge watching and he ate too much and glared at the screen and reminded himself that he was a lone wolf and that he didn’t want anything like this in his life, that he never had, and that he wasn’t the kind of man who got this way about a woman anyway .

It was true.

At least, it had been for his entire life. When he was in high school, he remembered that other guys were starting to date girls or to get really obsessed over the idea of getting laid, and he had sort of not really gotten it.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have a sex drive. He did. He just sort of found it annoying and distracting to everything else he was trying to do, and it seemed to him that it was much more efficient to jerk off and get it out of his system than to try to bother with the whole complicated idea of getting a female to let him do things to her.

He was pretty sure he wouldn’t be any good at it, anyway.

After all, he wasn’t really good at talking to women.

Well, he wasn’t good at talking to people , truth be told.

No, that wasn’t it either.

He could talk to women and to men and to kids and to everyone, but… he just didn’t like it. It always seemed sort of annoying and distracting and a waste of time .

People always wanted to talk about stupid things, to go round and round, speculating on things they couldn’t know about, and they wanted to comment on things that were really obvious, like, Wow, really is warm today. I looked at the thermometer. Ninety-three degrees!

What did you even say to that? I looked at the temperature, too. It’s amazing we can both check the temperature. Wow.

People were offended if you said shit like that to them, though.

He knew better than to do that.

He didn’t enjoy offending people.

Anyway, he’d never had a girlfriend. He’d never been in a romantic relationship. He had never pursued one, and he’d never attempted to get into one.

When he would occasionally seek out companionship for a sexual encounter, he would be very clear with the person that they should not expect him to ever contact them afterwards, that it was just sex, just that night, and that was it.

He harped on it, and sometimes women were a little offended about it, but he would tell them that he had heard enough complaining from his sisters to know that he didn’t want to be the kind of man who led women on. I’m not built for it, that’s all, he would say. I’m a loner. It’s not about you. You’re really great.

And he never thought about those women after he fucked them, that was the thing. He would make sure they got home afterwards, getting them cars on apps or driving them back to their houses in the morning (or their cars, still parked in bar parking lots), making sure they were safe, and he’d kiss them goodbye and tell them he’d had a great time and then… it was like they ceased to exist for him.

So, whatever was going on with this fucking doe, it was weird.

Sometime after lunch, he went out looking for her scent again.

He didn’t know why.

But he couldn’t manage to fight it, so he simply did it. But now, there had been so many deerkin out there, so much fucking, so many scents, that he couldn’t find her trail back to the Center anymore.

They’d had another run in the morning, he realized. There was always one on Friday, two on Saturday, and then one Sunday morning.

Then, he suddenly did find her scent, on a tree stump, mixed with another scent, a male scent, a buck scent.

It made him howl.

Before he even could stop it, he’d thrown back his head and howled into the afternoon sunlight, howled out his pain and displeasure that she would let some other man into that pussy of hers.

But of course she would.

That was why she was here. She was in some heat or whatever, because the deerkin were in season, and obviously, she wanted to be fucked by a male of her own species, probably lots of males of her own species. She was a little preykin slut that he should not waste his time on—

Even though he never thought things like that about women.

Didn’t even get it, in fact. He had said this to other men before, that he didn’t understand why men would not want a woman who was eager to have sex. Being in a relationship with a woman who isn’t interested sounds frustrating, he would say.

I agree, his brother had said once. I’m not into it, either, but I think the allure is that, like, she wasn’t interested in anyone until you or something, like you make her interested, because you’re so good at sex.

Well, she wouldn’t know if you were good or not if she hadn’t had sex before you, would she?

I guess not.

So, the idea is more that you should just have someone who doesn’t know what good sex is, he had said.

And he and his brother had both laughed at the idiocy of other men.

But now, this, it was different, because he got it now. He wanted her to himself. He didn’t want anyone else to have her. He just wanted it be to her and him and no one else. He wanted her to want him the way he wanted her, and that was exclusively. And… and…

He followed her trail back to the Center.

This time, he went right up to the courtyard and inside.

He followed her scent over the carpet, looking like a crazy man, because he kept putting his nose on the damned floor. He followed her scent to an elevator bank, and then he figured he was screwed, because there was no way he’d able to find the floor where she’d gotten off.

Except he did.

He scented it.

And then went down the hallway to a room, which must be hers.

He stood there, in the hallway, outside the room, shaking his head, angry with himself.

But at this point, he’d come this far, hadn’t he?

He knocked on the door.

The door opened and there she was, wrapped only in a robe, her hair wet. She was startled. “I thought you were my room service,” she said.

“Sorry,” he said.

“How did you find me?” she said.

“I tracked you,” he said.

“Tracked me.”

“I smelled you,” he said.

Her scent suddenly spilled out into the air, an excited, aroused scent, and he didn’t typically just smell these things with women, but he was very attuned to her scent now, so maybe that accounted for it.

“Let me come in,” he rumbled.

She backed away from the door, making space.

He stepped into her room.

She shut the door behind him. “Did you come here because you wanted to, um, to…”

“I think so,” he said. He turned around to look at her.

She fingered her wet hair, chewing on her bottom lip, looking cute as all hell. “Okay,” she breathed.