I should move. I should extract myself, put distance between us, reassert the terms of this arrangement: heat, biology, nothing more. I should do what I did in the clearing: run.
I don’t move.
His thumb keeps its rhythm. Back and forth. The calluses on his hand are rough against my skin, and the roughness feels good. And I’m not going to think about why it feels good or what it means that I’m lying still and letting it happen instead of driving my elbow into his ribs.
His hand drifts up. Slow. Still half-asleep, or pretending to be. I can’t tell, and the not-knowing is part of what keeps me still. His palm skims my ribs. The underswell of my breast. His fingers trace the curve, unhurried. When his thumb brushes my nipple, I feel the touch in the pit of my stomach and lower, a slow curl of want that’s nothing like the heat’s brutal demand. This is quieter. Warmer.
I should stop this.
His mouth finds the back of my neck. Not the bite mark — the other side. Soft skin below my ear where no one’s ever put their mouth because I never allow this kind of intimacy. His lips are warm, and his stubble scrapes. The combination sends a shiver down my spine that I can’t hide.
“You’re awake,” I say.
“Mmm.” Not a word. A vibration against my neck.
“This isn’t—”
“Shh.”
He rolls me toward him. Slow, easy, his arm guiding me onto my back. He’s propped on one elbow, looking down at me, and the expression on his face stops whatever I was about to say. No smirk. No challenge. No alpha display. He’s looking at me the way a man looks at something he can’t believe he’s touching. The openness of it makes my chest tight.
Don’t. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t be a person. Don’t make this harder than it already is.
He kisses me.
It’s wrong. All wrong. Not the violent collision of yesterday, not the angry crash of two wolves tearing at each other. This is… his mouth on mine, slow, his hand cradling the side of my face. He’s kissing me like he’s asking a question. Like the answer matters. Like I’m something worth being careful with. No one has ever accused Briar of being something worth being careful with.
I should bite him. Shove him off. Snarl something vicious that puts us back on familiar ground where I hate him, and he wants me, and neither of us pretends it’s anything else.
I kiss him back.
My hand comes up to the back of his neck without permission, and I pull him closer. The kiss deepens into something slower. His tongue against mine, tasting, not taking. His hand slides from my face down my throat, over the bite mark — gentle there, careful, and the care makes my eyes sting — down between my breasts, over my stomach.
He settles between my thighs. His weight, familiar now, but different. He’s not grinding against me, not driving. Just resting there, the hard length of him against my heat. Every inch of his skin is against every inch of mine, and he’s looking down at me with molten brown eyes, and the wolf is barely there. It’s just the man.
He pushes in. Slow. So slow I feel every inch of the stretch, and this time I don’t brace against it, don’t grit my teeth. My body takes him in with an ease that saysI know you now.
He moves. Long and deep and unhurried. Each stroke reaches something the rough fucking didn’t touch. My hands find his shoulders. His arms. The scars I gave him, silver lines on his forearms, and I trace one with my fingertip while he moves inside me. The gesture is so far from the knife that made it that I almost can’t connect the two.
“Briar.” My name. Low. Not a growl. Something softer that I don’t want to hear and can’t stop hearing.
“Don’t,” I whisper. “Don’t say my name like that.”
“Like what?”
Like it means something. Like I mean something.
I pull his mouth back down to mine instead of answering. The kiss swallows whatever he was going to say, and we move together. It’s slow and deep, and the pleasure builds in long rolling waves instead of the sharp spikes of last night. When I come, it’s quiet. A shudder that moves through my whole body, my face turned into his neck, my arms locked around him. The sound I make is small and broken and nothing I’d ever let another person hear.
He follows. Not the roaring, wolf-driven release of last night — a groan pressed into my hair, his hips stuttering, his arms tight around me. There’s no knot this time, just warm pulsing as he comes inside me. My wolf settles with a contentment that would have horrified me yesterday.
We lie there. Connected. His weight on me, his face in my hair. My hands on his back, my fingers tracing the ridges of his spine without deciding to. What I feel coming from him isn’t the claiming drive or the shock. It’s something quieter. A warmth that matches the warmth of his body.
He slips free. Rolls to his side, pulling me with him, tucking me against his chest like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Like we do this. Like we’re people who hold each other after and breathe together and let the silence be warm.
We’re not those people. I’m not that person.
But I stay where I am.