“Brody…”
“I’m here.”
“I know. I can feel you.”
And he could feel it. Everything. Brody’s weight on top of him. He felt the beat of his heart against his own. The scorching heat of his skin. The scent mingled between them until it formed something new, something that wasn’t just raisins and walnuts but also something that smelled like Ren, like the two of them together, mixed, inseparable.
Brody prepared him with his fingers. Patiently. Using Ren’s own lubrication, he slid one in first, then two. The movements were deliberate and attentive, seeking not only to open but to loosen, reading every reaction, every tension that gave way beneath his hands. Ren had always had to prepare himself. This was nothing like that. Brody was taking his time as if Ren’s body were something that deserved to be cared for. As if Ren’s comfort mattered more than his own urgency, and Brody’s urgency was clear—Ren felt it against his thigh, saw it in the contained tension of every muscle in the alpha—but Brody controlled it and forced it to wait.
Ren clenched his fists around the sheets, then around Brody’s neck, then around his shoulders, not knowing where to grip, not knowing how to contain what was building up inside him.
“Now,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Brody.”
“Okay.”
When Brody finally entered him, it was slow. Very slow. Stopping every inch as if asking, as if waiting for an answer. Ren stopped breathing. Not because of pain—the pain was minimal, almost nonexistent after the preparation—but because of the fullness. Because of the impossible, absolute sensation that something that had been out of place his whole life was finally falling into place. Brody stopped inside him when he reached the bottom. Ren’s head was flanked by his trembling arms. His forehead was pressed against Ren’s. Their eyes closed for a moment.
“Tell me if…”
“Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping.”
Brody moved. Slowly at first. Deeply. Finding the angle with methodical patience until Ren made a sound he hadn’t planned to make, and Brody stopped right there, at that exact spot, and returned to it again and again as if he’d marked it on a map. Each thrust was a wave that coursed through his entire body and, as it receded, left something warm and bright behind, like foam on the sand. Ren wrapped his legs around Brody’s waist, and Brody changed the angle, and the world fragmented into points of light behind Ren’s eyelids.
The pace quickened. Brody buried his face in Ren’s neck and took a deep breath, a desperate, ragged sound, as if Ren’s scent were destroying him just as his own was destroying Ren. Brody’s fingers clenched around Ren’s hip hard enough to leave a mark. Possessive. Territorial. But even that was different—not the careless mark of someone grabbing what belongs to them, but that of someone holding on to what they don’t want to lose.Ren felt the pressure, and something inside him responded with a surrender so deep it frightened him.
“Mine,” Brody growled against his neck. The word vibrated on Ren’s skin like an invisible mark.
“Yes.”
He didn’t know if he said it or thought it. It didn’t matter.
Brody lifted his head. His gray eyes were black, completely dilated, and Ren saw in them something wild and ancient struggling against something human and conscious. Brody’s mouth opened. His fangs emerged. The alpha’s gaze fell on the junction between Ren’s neck and shoulder, that exact spot where the skin was thinnest and where a bite would seal the bond forever.
Ren saw the struggle. Brody clenched his jaw tightly. The muscles in his neck were taut as steel cables. The superhuman effort to resist an instinct screaming at him to bite, to claim, to complete what biology had begun.
Brody turned his head. He sank his teeth into the pillow next to Ren’s head. The fabric tore. A sharp, brutal sound that contrasted with the gentleness with which his hips continued to move inside Ren. That control, that Brody respected his independence, sent Ren plummeting beyond the abyss. He screamed without restraint, shaken by the longest, most perfect orgasm of his life. As he calmed down, he felt Brody tremble against him, reaching climax as well.
The knotting began slowly. A growing pressure, different from penetration, wider, deeper, filling Ren beyond what he thought possible. It wasn’t pain. It was too much to be pain. It was his body recognizing something it had been made for and responding to it with an intensity that took his breath away. Ren had never experienced that with any alpha. He dug hisnails into Brody’s back and screamed again as he felt a new orgasm shake him. Brody held him. Without moving. Without demanding. Holding the weight of Ren’s reaction with his arms wrapped around his back, his chest pressed against Ren’s, the knot expanding inside him until the two were joined in a way that allowed no separation, that admitted no distance, that made them one.
Ren trembled. His whole body vibrated with the spasms of the orgasm and with something else, something that throbbed in the center of his chest and that felt all too much like what he didn’t want to name. Brody’s head rested on his shoulder. The alpha’s breath warmed his skin in uneven bursts.
Brody’s hand traced his side. Slowly. From his hip to his ribs. A gesture that was nothing sexual. That was just tenderness. Just presence.
Ren looked at the ceiling. Tears slid down his temples onto the sheets before he could stop them. He didn’t know why he was crying. Perhaps out of relief. Perhaps out of loss. Perhaps because he had just crossed a line he didn’t know how to uncross. Perhaps because no one had ever touched him like that before. And now that he knew how it felt, he would never stop longing for it.
Brody kissed his temple. His eyelid. The corner of his mouth. Without words. Without demands. Entwined with him, inside him, around him.
And Ren, for the first time in twenty-one years, stopped fighting.
Consciousness returned like murky water clearing little by little. First the ceiling. White. Unfamiliar. Then the weight of the comforter on his naked body. Then the dull ache between hislegs and in his thigh muscles, as if he’d run a marathon. And finally the sound. A soft, rhythmic snore, animal in its cadence. The snore of someone sleeping with the absolute peace of one who has been satisfied to the core.
Ren turned his head on the pillow.
Brody was sleeping face down. One arm stretched out toward Ren, fingers splayed on the sheet as if they’d been clutching something that was no longer there. His bare, broad back, crisscrossed by red lines left by Ren’s nails. The comforter covered him from the waist to mid-thigh. His black hair fell messily over his forehead, and the torn pillow still bore the marks of his teeth.
