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“Obviously hungry.”
His amusement rolls through me like a low purr, and I smile despite myself.
Rest now. We will go to the spring to wash when you wake.
I don’t know when I start falling asleep. One minute, I’m lying there with my cheek against his chest, fingers lazily tracing one of the ridges, listening to the den settle around us.
The next, my thoughts loosen, and the last thing I feel is Onyx’s hand covering mine, holding it over his heart as if he still cannot believe I chose to learn the body everyone else turned into a warning.
Before sleep takes me, I manage one more kiss against his skin. “Mine,” I whisper. “My beast.”
The words barely have sound, but the bond carries it anyway.
Onyx’s arms tighten around me, and his answer follows me down into sleep. Yours.
Maybe later I’ll have a crisis about the biology of my sex life. Maybe tomorrow I’ll stand in the ranger station pouring coffee while Parker complains about paperwork and have to pretend I wasn’t enthusiastically riding a forest guardian’s true form less than twenty-four hours earlier.
Right now, I’m too happy to care.
31
Lucas
Two months after the bond settles, I start getting greedy.
Not in a loud, dramatic way at first. Though I’d like to state for the record that nobody has ever become less dramatic by falling in love with an ancient forest guardian who can speak directly into their mind and has opinions about refrigerators.
It creeps in quietly, tucked inside all the sweetness we’ve built around each other since that morning in his den, inside the easy habits that would have scared the hell out of me if someone had told me about them a year ago.
Onyx touches me constantly now, not always with heat behind it, sometimes just because I’m within reach and he still seems faintly amazed that he’s allowed.
His hand at the small of my back when we walk uneven trails. His knuckles brushing mine when he stops at my porch steps and waits for invitation even though he’s crossed that threshold a hundred times by now. His head in my lap when he lets me comb my fingers through his hair, eyes half-shut, body too big for the couch and still somehow looking like he belongs there more than the furniture does.
We kiss. We touch. We sleep tangled together in his den or my bed, depending on which of us is being more stubborn about where I’m resting that night. We are so intimate it should probably come with a warning label, but we haven’t had sex again.
Not since I initiated it with him in his true form and learned the shape of his body in ways that still make me lose whole chunks of thought at inconvenient times.
I think about it too much. That’s probably the cleanest way to say it. I think about straddling a creature every story in Sweet Rivers warned us not to follow and feeling safer than I had in any human bed.
I think about how huge he was beneath me, how careful, how absolutely undone, and then I have to stand in my kitchen staring at burnt toast because my body has decided breakfast is optional when memories are available.
Onyx knows.
The bond isn’t wide open all the time, not anymore. We’ve learned privacy. Still, strong feelings spill. Want spills. Embarrassment spills worse because embarrassment is basically want wearing a stupid hat. Every time things go too far, Onyx pulls back. Not cruelly; that would be easier to be angry about.
He kisses me like it hurts him to stop. He rests his forehead against mine, breathing harder than he needs to, while the bond trembles with restraint so tight it makes my chest ache. He touches my face afterward, my hair, my throat, as if apologizing with every part of him.
Then he retreats into carefulness, into noble suffering, into that ancient martyr routine where he acts like wanting me too much is a weather event he’s personally responsible for containing.
He doesn’t want to lose control. I understand that, I do. He’s not a man in the ordinary sense, and even saying "ordinary sense" feels hilarious, considering I only recently discovered the word ordinary had been doing most of the heavy lifting in my life.
He’s Cervari. A guardian. A predator shaped by a goddess out of root and bone and old forest law, and when he wants, he wants with teeth.
I’ve never been with a man before him, much less a cryptid with antlers, a skull face, and a lantern hanging from one tine. I know how odd that sounds. I know there’s no casual way to say, “My sexual history went from almost marrying a woman who cheated on me to letting an ancient forest creature rearrange my insides.”
Two months is a long time to be kissed like I’m sacred and then left aching because the thing kissing me is terrified of how badly he wants to keep going.
So tonight, I decide I’m bringing it up again. Calmly. Maturely. Like a grown man with a badge, a mortgage-adjacent cabin situation, and a supernatural mate who can feel when I’m being full of shit.
