"Stay tonight." Her voice drops. Steady. "The whole night."
The words land on my chest like a hand pressing down.
"Holly—"
"I'm not asking you to move in. I'm asking you to be here when I wake up. Once." Her fingers tighten on my jaw. "One time."
I should say yes. The word sits right behind my lips, easy, free. Three letters. One syllable. The simplest contract a man can make.
I kiss her instead. Slower this time, my lips against hers. She kisses me back and pulls me deeper with her heels against my spine, and the pace changes.Everything changes. The urgency drains out of the room and what's left is worse. Longer strokes, my cock dragging out of her until only the tip stays inside, then rolling back in deep enough that her breath catches in her throat. We watch each other in the dark, and that's worse than anything she could say.
Her scent shifts underneath the arousal. I catch it between one breath and the next, a darker note threading through the warm base of her, bruised and salt-edged. Grief. She smells like grief, and my scenting goes haywire because the wanting and the hurting are tangled so tight I can't pull them apart.I've never noticed that before. Or I have, and I've never let myself stick around long enough to name it.
I press my forehead to hers. She cups my jaw in both hands and breathes my name, and I feel her pulse against my palms where I'm gripping her thighs, her heartbeat hammering into my fingertips.My hips grind into hers, deep, slow and deliberate, her pussy clenches around me with her eyes still locked on mine. I feel everything. The heat of her, the way her inner walls ripple and tighten when I hit the right angle, the small broken sounds she makes into my mouth when I grind my pelvis against her clit.
"Fuck," she whispers. Her nails rake down my back and her hips rock up to meet mine, and none of it is for show. Just Holly, under me, needing me in a way I don't deserve and can't walk away from.
I come with my mouth pressed to her neck, breathing her in, pulling her scent into the lowest part of my lungs where it'll live rent-free for weeks. The orgasm tears through me and I bury myself to the hilt, my cock pulsing inside her while her walls squeeze around me in long rolling spasms that drag me under. In the white-hot centre of it, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, the word detonates behind my eyes.
Mate.
The old language. The one no foster home taught me, no social worker explained, no orc I grew up around spoke where I could hear. A word that lives in my blood, not my brain. It surfaced the first time Holly touched my tusks six months ago. It surfaces every time her skin meets mine and my body recognizes what my mind won't accept.
I shove it down. Pack it deep. Bury it under the sound of her breathing and the creak of the mattress and the rain on the window.
Holly falls asleep with her hand on my chest. Her palm flat over my heartbeat, her fingers curled against my chest, possessive even in sleep.
I lie rigid, staring at the ceiling, counting her breaths the way I count mile markers on a highway.
Mate.
The word circles back. I stare at the ceiling. Holly's apartment is warm and dry and smells like her, and my brain drags me back the way it always does when I'm lying still in someone else's bed.
My parents died in the Emergence. I was nine. The social worker who picked me up didn't know what to do with a green kid—none of them did.
The foster home in Bend. Three months. They sent me back the week before Christmas because the biological son didn't want to share his room.
A kitchen that smelled like bleach. A locked door. The social worker's car idling in the driveway with the back door already open.
The clock on Holly's nightstand reads 3:07 a.m.
I slide out from under her arm. One inch at a time, holding my breath, watching her face for the twitch that means she's waking. Her fingers curl against the warm spot I leave behind and her brow creases in her sleep, but she doesn't wake.
My jeans are on the floor by the bed. My shirt in the hallway. I pull them on in the dark, muscle memory and silence. I've done this so many times I don't make a sound. My boots sit in the hall by the front door where I kicked them off. I crouch and thread the laces.
Holly's face catches the streetlight through the bedroom doorway. Her lips are parted. Her hand still reaches across the sheets where I used to be.
I should put my boots down. I should walk back into that room and get under the covers and let her wake up to the weight of me beside her. I should say the word out loud and let it land where it lands.
Instead, I lace my boots faster and slip out the front door.
The coast highway at 4 a.m. is a black ribbon stitched to the edge of the continent.
No headlights. No taillights. Rain and salt spray and the Pacific hammering the rocks two hundred feet below the guardrail. I open the throttle until the engine screams louder than my head. That's why I ride. Fast enough and there's nothing but the road and the roar and the rain.
I'm fifty miles north of Nightfall Cove when I spot it.
A vehicle at the overlook. The pull-off above the cove where tourists park in summer to photograph the harbour and the lighthouse. No tourist on the planet is up here at 4 a.m. in January in the rain.
