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CHAPTER EIGHT

RORA HAD TO push him away to make him stop, because she was too sensitive there.

Then there was some confusion. She was in the aftershocks, not particularly verbal, and he thought he had done something wrong, but then he realized she’d finished, and then he was holding her in his arms on the bed and they were kissing. She felt tiny and engulfed in the sheer size of him. She liked it.

He kissed her eyebrow and the tip of one of her ears and he stroked her bare flesh and whispered that he wanted her now.

She remembered that she was supposed to get to learn how to put her mouth on him, but she didn’t say anything about that. She wondered about logistics, anyway. If she got him off that way, he wouldn’t be able to have sex with her, and she did want to lose her actual virginity.

And then she thought about how that was reductive, and that if she were a lesbian, she would have lost her virginity, and she was being so very heteronormative, and not only that, was prioritizing the male experience over the female experience, and she wondered if she were babbling internally like this because she was nervous.

He stripped off his shirt and shed his pants, somehow, while they were kissing, while she was internally babbling, and then he was guiding her to touch him.

He kissed her temple. “Such tiny little hands,” he murmured. “I want you to stroke me, though. Have you ever stroked a man’s cock?”

“No,” she breathed, and something flipped in her belly.

“Well, have a look at it, little doe,” he told her in a strained voice as she wrapped her hands tight around the base of him. “If you’re curious, feel free to explore.”

She was curious. But she was shy again.

“Go ahead,” he urged her. “You can’t hurt it.”

She loosened her grip, staring down at him in the darkness. He was big—well, she thought he was, anyway. She had to admit she had no real frame of reference. She had never watched much visual pornography, and the romance novels she read didn’t go around giving descriptions of scale very often. Once in a while, someone would write that the man’s member was as thick as a baby’s arm or something, and if that was normal, his wasn’t big, but she thought that was meant to be really big, and probably rare, and probably an exaggeration, anyway.

She was still babbling internally. She loosely dragged her fist over the length of him.

He made a ragged noise, so very affected that she felt pleased with herself and did it again.

“You certain you haven’t done this before?” he breathed, nuzzling her ear.

She liked that. She set about exploring in earnest, finding his foreskin, playing hide and seek with the head of him, seeing if he was right about not being able to hurt it—seemingly so, because no matter how tight she squeezed, he seemed to like it.

She toyed with him until he stopped her, saying he couldn’t bear it, and pressed her back into the bed and slid his member against her sopping, just-climaxed pussy and then slipped inside.

She gasped.

He inched into her, and he suddenly seemed incredibly large, just huge, as she was pinned down under his girth and jammed full of his thick hardness. It was so much .

It wasn’t… bad.

It didn’t hurt, but she wasn’t entirely sure it felt good either, it was just… invasive.

That was exactly how she felt, yes, invaded. He was taking up so much space inside her and he just kept pushing further in, deeper in, sun and moon, how much more of him could there be?

Finally, he seemed to settle.

He drew in several hitching breaths, tracing her features. “Are you all right, little doe?” he murmured.

She nodded, quickly.

“You remember what I said,” he told her. “It can end anytime. You say the word, it stops.”

“Don’t stop,” she said, though she wasn’t sure why, not exactly. Because she didn’t really like it, though she didn’t dislike it. It felt sort of strange and intense and very bothersome, but it didn’t feel anything nearly as good as his tongue had felt. There was something powerful, however, in the fact that she had to give him entrance all the way into her like this, that she was trapped under him on the bed, all of that…

Well, anyway, she didn’t stop him, and she didn’t know why.

And he began to thrust.

It was more intense, very intense, quite, quite something.

She couldn’t say it was good, still couldn’t say that, but… she was certain now that she didn’t want it to end either. It felt transformative in a way she couldn’t quite explain.

At first, she had her eyes closed, but then she opened them.

He was shadowy over her, hulking, muscular, a bit of light gleaming on his bare muscles, on the tips of his impressive rack of antlers.

It was good, seeing him over her, feeling him in her, feeling her body stretched and filled so full of him, under him, taking him, yes, good .

She wriggled against him, gasping, beginning to moan.

It still didn’t feel the same way it felt to have a building orgasm, but it felt like something else, something she could not experience on her own, some experience that was borne only of two, of her and a man, and she was the receptacle and she liked it. Moon and sun, she liked it. She liked being split open and held down and fucked by a strong stag. She adored it.

LYALL KNEW HE should let go of the doe woman.

He had her pressed into a tree trunk, her breasts against the bark, her belly against it, too. He had his pelvis against her, his very hard cock tucked into the crease of her ass. They were both clothed, but it was like they weren’t, really, at this point.

Sacred grounds, the way she smelled right now.

He’d fucked preykin women before. Who hadn’t, right?

He jerked off pretty regularly to videos of little rabbitkin women in very tiny sundresses, giggling as they were sprayed with water hoses and saying, in very sultry voices, Oh, no, I think this dress is too wet, can you help me take it off?

But even that… he didn’t tend to get into stuff that was too weird or too hardcore. He liked to think of sex as sweet. Women were sweet and small and pretty, like flowers or bows or something, right, and sex was about how nice it was to get your dick surrounded by all that nice, warm, gushy sweetness. Just stick your dick into it and be surrounded by cute, sunny—

This was raw, whatever he was doing right now.

It was not sweet. It was not cute. It was not sultry.

It was something entirely else, and he’d never scented anything like the way she smelled, not even when he’d taken cute rabbitkin women home from the bar in an attempt to act out his porn fantasies. Never.

She smelled…

Fuck, he didn’t know.

It wasn’t a food smell, not exactly, but the fucked up thing was that it wasn’t not a food smell. It wasn’t not a food smell, but it was definitely a sex smell. They were mixing together in this way that was making him feel woozy, and his dick had never been this hard in his damned life.

You really should let her go.

He ran a hand over her hip instead. He squeezed a handful of her flesh.

She hummed in approval.

Fuck him, why was she so receptive to this? She had run away from him. She had smelled like fear, this bright splash of redness that had overwhelmed his senses and taken him over. He hadn’t been able to think, just running mad and half-blind, chasing after the little bobbing white tail of her in the darkness.

Now… now…

He grunted. “I want to…”

“What do you want?” she whispered, leaning back her head, rubbing into him.

“I want to take off your pants and do you against this tree,” he said in a rough voice.

“Yes,” she moaned. “Do it.” Her voice was threaded full of need. She didn’t smell like fear anymore.

He caught her neck with his teeth again, and he growled against her. He wanted to protest to her that he wasn’t like this, that he didn’t do this, that this was very off-brand for him.

He was a lone wolf. He didn’t want a mate. He didn’t want any of this. He never did things like this, and he would have sworn something like this wasn’t even in him.

But he reached around and found the button of her pants and opened it, and she sighed.

One of his hands spread out over her belly, sliding up, under her shirt, until he had his fingertips against the swell of her bra-clad breasts. They were warm and soft and springy against his touch and he wanted to just sink his damned teeth deep into—

No.

He released his jaw, panting. He licked again, but his other hand was undoing her zipper, pushing her clothing down, out of the way.

She angled her pelvis into his hand, rubbing her body against his hand, whining.

Those whines she kept making, they were going to make him fall apart .

His fucking cock was straining to be free. All he had to do was undo his own zipper and he sprang out.

Then, his bare dick slipped between her legs, and holy fuck, she was wet, and he threw back his head and howled.

She jerked against him, pressing her backside against his pelvis, sliding her sopping wet center against his shaft, getting him slick and ready.

He pulled back his hips, angled himself, thrust forward and he was in .

She cried out.

He howled again.

She seized his hand, moving it around to the front of her body, holding it against her clit.

He thrust in and out of her in jerks. She was tight and warm and her sweet little pussy gripped him perfectly as he fucked her.

His other hand moved up and closed possessively over one of her perfect, springy little tits. He squeezed it and slammed in and out of her perfectly tight little hole.

She moved his hand on her body, making little half-whines, jerking her hips against his thrusts.

It was bliss.

He didn’t last very long. He erupted into her, filling her full of his come, going still as he did, even as she continued to make those little jerky thrusts, even as she moved his hand and kept whining.

He panted into her neck, confused, spent, but fucking relieved and happy, endorphins and pleasure rushing all through him.

She dug her fingers into his hand, and then he felt her come—against his fingers, around his cock, which was still inside her. He let out a little noise, one of sheer disbelief and joy.

This was insane, but it was possibly the best damned thing that had ever happened to him in his entire life.

She sagged into him.

He licked her neck again.

She turned her face and caught his mouth with hers.

They were kissing now, sloppy, satisfied kisses, the smacks of their mouths joining echoing into the darkness of the woods.

He banded one arm around her waist and held onto her.

AFTERWARDS, RORA LAY in the circle of Bruin’s arms and he lazily brushed his fingers over her shoulders and the swell of her hips and traced the underside of each of her breasts and murmured that he didn’t deserve this, that he was a very fortunate man to be here with her.

And she believed him.

She shut her eyes and basked in the sense of having been entirely and utterly incorrect about her assessment of herself.

There is nothing wrong with me, she thought again and again, in wonder.

“Will you stay?” he asked her. “Sleep here with me until morning?”

“Yes, of course,” she said, snuggling into his broad, firm chest, cocooned against him. She ran her fingers through the faint brown fur on his chest.

There was more kissing and more of his gentle, awed strokes as he explored her, and she felt possessed and claimed in the loveliest of ways.

He fell asleep first.

She tried to sleep, but she began to feel frightfully uncomfortable. He was huge, and he was in the center of the bed, wrapped around her, which was nice while she wanted to be in his arms. But it became clear there was no way to mold herself against him that was comfortable. If she faced him, one of her arms became trapped. One of his legs was thrust between hers, which had been nice at first, but then she had to wriggle her leg out from beneath his larger one, because it was far too heavy. Then she had to contend with his leg.

She tried rolling over, her back to his front, being the little spoon, but his leg was still in the way. She tried scooting all the way over, not touching him at all, but then she had a sliver of the bed to sleep on, and her arms were dangling off the bed no matter what she did.

She kept checking the clock in the room, noting how much time had passed. After two hours of sleeplessness, there was nothing for it. She had to go back to her room.

She got up, found her clothes, and dressed.

Oh, she should leave a note or something, shouldn’t she?

Was there paper in the room?

Using the flashlight from her phone, she searched around for something, and voila! There, on the table next to the bed was a little notepad with the Center’s name and address emblazoned at the top of each page.

But what about a pen?

She hunted through drawers, unable to find anything.

She had not taken a purse down to the bar before, thinking she might go running off into the field for the midnight run. She didn’t think she kept a pen in her purse anyway.

It would be much easier if she’d somehow gotten his phone number, wouldn’t it? She could have sent him a text.

She debated just getting back into bed with him for some time.

Then, exhausted, she determined she would simply find him in the morning and explain it.

You could wake him up, said a voice in the back of her head. Wake him up and tell him to sleep on his own side of the bed.

But the thought seemed horrifying to her, and she recoiled from it. She couldn’t ask him to inconvenience himself for her whims. She never did that, not with anyone.

She fled.

She took the elevator to her own room and she shed her clothes and collapsed into her own bed, alone. She was asleep in moments.

HE WAS TOYING with her tail.

Eiren had her cheek pressed into the bark of the tree, and her hips jutted out, and her pussy full of wolf cock, and he was behind her, fingering the fur of her tail, his fingers sometimes trailing down to the place where they were joined.

She wondered what it looked like from his angle, seeing her split open like that for him, seeing her opening stretched wide to take him. The thought was so erotic it made her clench around him.

He groaned in appreciation.

They still weren’t really talking.

She knew they would have to, eventually, but it would break the spell, whatever this was, some kind of hazy sex curtain that was gently resting over everything, and she didn’t want it to end, not yet.

That…

Well, she’d obviously had sex during the season before, and season sex was always heightened, always good, and it was always much easier for her to orgasm during estrus, but she didn’t think it had ever been that easy.

Hmm. Sometimes, there were those times, when she hadn’t masturbated in days, when just touching her clitoris seemed to send her stratospheric in two minutes flat. So, it wasn’t unprecedented, she supposed, but it usually took her longer to reach a climax with a partner than solo, and she usually needed a lot more stimulation. It was very rare for her to come while a man was inside her. Usually, it was easier for her to come first, before he even penetrated her.

So, whatever this had been, it hadn’t been typical.

No, it had been wondrously atypical, a fever dream of sex, the kind of sex that she hadn’t even thought was possible in real life.

He stroked a hand over the fur on her tail.

“You like the tail, huh?” she found herself saying. Damn it, don’t talk yet, Eiren, you’ll ruin it, she thought.

“Fuck yes,” he rasped. “I’ve never… with a deerkin.”

“Mmm, me either,” she said, shutting her eyes. “I mean, um, with a wolf.”

“Uh… I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“Me either,” she was quick to respond, turning round to look at him.

“This isn’t even like me.”

“Me either,” she said, but that was maybe a lie. This was, in fact, a lot like her, like the impulsive part of her, anyway. The other part of her was a measured person. In her day-to-day life, she was a slave to routine, rarely varying her schedule, happy to stick to herself much of the time, efficient and no-nonsense and kind of boring. And then, crazy Eiren came out to play now and again.

She could be termed promiscuous, she supposed. She’d had her share of one night interludes. But not in a while, really, not recently.

Recently, she’d been trying very hard to settle down, to tame her impulsive side, not to succumb to the siren call of it all. Maybe she’d thought the rite would be a good way to give in to this side of her, but in a socially acceptable way, one that affirmed her culture’s traditions and all of that. It had seemed wholesome in an odd way, as wholesome as a weekend of randy sex with strangers could be, at any rate.

“I, uh, this sounds like a pretty fucked up to thing to say, but I don’t really know what came over me.” He stroked her tail, and his voice sounded pensive.

“Me either,” she whispered, because it had felt like being overtaken by some savage force in a way. She had liked it, but there had been elements of danger all threaded through it, elements that had made it heightened, but if this wolf had actually hurt her…

Well, she liked to say she didn’t do actually dangerous things when she was feeling impulsive, but this little situation might be a counterpoint to that claim. Huh.

“You’re all right, though,” he said, and this wasn’t a question. It was an assessment. His hands left her tail and went seekingly over her. He brushed his fingers over her neck. “I think you might have a bruise here, but I didn’t break your skin.”

Now that he mentioned it, there was a tenderness there, but the little bit of pain sent a a jolt through her that went straight to her clit. She clenched on him again.

He gasped. He thrust into her. Fuck, was he still hard?

No, she could feel he was sort of half-mast, thick in her, but his skin had some give to it.

“You keep doing that,” he said in a strained voice.

“It’s involuntary,” she whispered.

“Uh… I should…” He cleared his throat. “I should take my body out of your body, probably.”

“I mean, you should ,” she said. “But you don’t have to.”

This was met with a wry chuckle. “Yeah, I should let you go so that you can scamper back there and find yourself one of those bucks. Is this what you does are like during your season? I’ve heard that it’s a big free-for-all and you just get mounted by one after the other of your men.”

“I…” She bit down on her lip, and she was feeling shame out on the corners of her consciousness, shame at having done this thing, shame at her wanton behavior. “I don’t know. This is my first time attending the rite.”

He was petting her tail again. “I see.”

“But I’ve been through seasons before. I’ve never had sex with two different people in one night,” she said. “Well, this one time, I had a threesome, but it was me and a guy and another girl, and I don’t know if that totally counts.”

“A threesome.”

This was going against her assertion that this wasn’t even like her, wasn’t it? She grimaced.

He let out a breath. “Let’s, uh, maybe not talk about things that are going to make me get hard again and want to, um…”

She couldn’t help but grin. “Sorry.” She wasn’t sorry at all.

Suddenly, his hand was at the back of her neck, holding her in place.

She gasped, wriggling against that, clenching again, liking that.

“Stop,” he ordered, his voice deep and resonant.

It made her freeze, like she had before, looking up at him on his porch.

“Good,” he said, letting out a ragged breath. “Here’s what’s going to happen, little doe temptress. I’m going to pull out of you and put my dick away. You’re not going to move. You’re going to stare at the tree trunk, just like that, with your little ass bare and my come sliding out of you and you’re going to count to… let’s see. A hundred. By which time I’ll be gone.”

She made a noise in the back of her throat. Why had he gotten so cold?

“If you decide this was, I don’t know, anything except consensual, even though you vocally consented more than fucking once, I’ll just… deny it.”

She smirked. “With your semen sliding out of me?”

“Fuck,” he grunted. He yanked his cock out of her.

The sudden movement made her feel shocked and then empty and then cold. She shivered. Despite whatever the fuck he’d said, she yanked up her pants and started hurriedly buttoning herself away. “You didn’t have to be an asshole,” she said.

He was backing away, zipped up, his wolf ears alert and pointed straight up. “This isn’t like me,” he said again, and it was a plea. He lifted his shoulders, a helpless gesture, then lowered them, and then turned his back on her and slunk off into the woods, his tail down and curling around one of his legs.

She shivered again.

She watched him disappear into the darkness.

Then she made her way back towards the Center.

As she went back through the woods, she saw that some of the breeding lairs were occupied, and she saw deerkin—bucks and does—streaking through the woods, laughing as they ran.

She kept her head down, her hands jammed into her pockets, though.

She went all the way back to her room and then she took a very hot shower, trying to wash the wolf entirely away.

Lying in bed, she looked up at the ceiling and considered that it was maybe time to get on some meds or something. Maybe this impulsive part of her was getting out of control.