A claim.
He lunges and his mouth crashes into mine and I feel it everywhere — his hands finding my waist, grip bruising,dragging me into him like he's been waiting to do exactly this since the first day at the fence and is not interested in taking it slowly now. I don't want slowly. I want his hands and his mouth and the proof that there is no fence anymore.
I kiss him back with everything I have.
He stands, taking me with him, and walks me backward until my back hits a tree. The bark bites through the thin fabric of my shirt and I don't care — his hips pin mine and I feel how hard he is, how much he wants, the full weight of months of chain link and outside time and supervised distance pressing into me.
"RJ—"
He drops his head and drags his teeth along my throat, right over my pulse, and the sound that comes out of me is not dignified. His hands push up under my shirt and find my breasts and his mouth follows — hot and insistent, his tongue working one nipple and then the other, sucking hard enough that my hands fist in his hair and pull him closer instead of away.
He groans against my skin. Low. Rough.
"Still here," I say. Breathless and wanting.
His hands work my clothes with an impatience that is almost clumsy and is entirely him — not practiced, not smooth, the urgency of a man who has had months of not and is done with not. I help him. He helps me. The cold hits my skin and then his hands are everywhere and the cold doesn't matter.
When he pushes into me, I feel every inch, my head drops back against the tree. My legs wrap around him and I need more.
He stills. Both of us breathing. The bond blazing between us so loud it's almost sound.
Then he moves.
It's not gentle. His hands grip my hips and hold me steady and he thrusts into me hard and deep and I take it — meet it, match it, my nails dragging down his back hard enough to mark. Every time he says my name against my throat the bond flares and Ifeel it in my whole body, the pull that has been running hot since the fence given everything it was asking for.
He sucks at my throat. My collarbone. Back to my nipples, his mouth hot and demanding, his hips never stopping. I have the tree at my back and his weight against my front and his cock filling me and his mouth marking every piece of skin he can reach.
"More," I say.
He gives me more.
When I come it hits hard and fast — the mark at my wrist blazing, both of us shaking, his face buried in my throat, my name in his mouth broken and rough and real.
He follows me over the edge with a sound I feel in my chest.
***
Afterward he doesn't let go.
He pulls me down with him and locks his arms around me and presses his face into my hair and breathes. I lie against his chest and feel his heartbeat slowing and the bond running between us — warm now, settled in a way it hasn't been since before the yard.
Not the bruise it was. Something that knows it's been answered.
I press my palm flat against his chest, right over his heart.
He puts his hand over mine and holds it there and doesn't say anything and neither do I and the trees are still around us and the cold is irrelevant.
***
I feel Dalton before I hear him.
The bond between us pulls warm and present and I know his tread — the deliberate pace of a man making enough noise to be heard before he arrives. RJ feels it too. His arm tightens around me and then he's upright, putting me behind him, the dominant alpha reading an approach in the dark.
Dalton steps into the clearing.
They look at each other.
RJ is still — the held quality of a wolf deciding what something is. Not the feral vacancy of the yard or the drive-blind violence of the campus. Present. Calculating. His hand finds my arm behind him, fingers closing around it. Not pushing me back. Anchoring.
