#Shiny Slaking | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

netherfeildren · 4 months ago

Text

Busy, Dying. Part 4;

Series Masterlist

Pairing: Joel Miller x F!Reader

A/N: CW for intense breeding kink, blatant unremorseful infidelity, and all the weird dystopia that comes with omegaverse sex. I feel like this chapter is a lot, verging on uncomfortable in some places (which is what I was going for), read at your own discretion.

Rating: Explicit 18+

Content Warnings: No Outbreak AU, A/B/O, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Soulmates AU, Infidelity, Cheating, Heat Sex, Knotting, ANGST!!!, Mating Rituals, Biting, Abandonment; Possessive Behavior, Guaranteed HEA, Scenting, Explicit Sexual Content, Dom/sub Undertones, Breeding Kink, Mentions of Potential Pregnancy but None Occurs, Aftercare, Touch Starved Joel Miller, Angst With a Happy Ending, Grief

Word Count: 6.0K

Read on AO3

Part 4;

Your heat seeps from you slowly, like dying smoke, melting, while you listen to the sound of his breathing in the dark.

When there’s only that last ember smoldering in your mind, dipping into your belly as if it had, at last, only one last grip around your ankle keeping you trapped within yourself; you drape your body over his.

You’d wanted to please him. For this to have been like nothing he had ever, or would ever experience again. You can’t be certain yet if you've achieved it, and yet—there’s still time. You still have a moment to work harder at this than anything you’ve ever worked at before, apply yourself entirely; with your teeth at his ribs, you promise yourself you’ll make sure he remembers this.

“That rib’s broken,” he says, alerting you to his wakefulness.

You kiss it once, twice, thrice; enamel against flesh again. You’d mend it with all you feel for him if you could. You’d mend him whole.

His body is built thick and strong—a working man’s body honed by hours of hard labor. His skin, golden like that of a distilled sunflower, even in the dead drear of incumbent winter. There are freckles and moles on the skin of his broad shoulders and strong back. When you kiss your hungry path down his belly, his arms lift to stretch with the easy joy of slaked desire, and you see the sweat darkened hair of his armpits. The sight makes you head dip, go woozy—no, no, focus. You need a moment to enjoy him with alertness before it all ends.

You steel yourself in rapt attention.

Despite the strength, there’s still a strip of fat around his belly button, belying his age. You like that it makes him soft and real, easier to dig your fingers into. He’s so masculine, he’d be entirely unapproachable if not for that little softness. The hair across his chest, running down his belly, the trail of hair that leads to the thick erection, long and dark, that hangs so heavy it can’t jut upwards against its own weight. The wide tip is an angry red, dripping creamy drool, the length of it shiny and wet like all the rest of him is, covered in your slick and fluids which sends a possessive flush of pleasure through your limbs. It lays heavily against his thigh where you mouth at it with a growling, hungry noise, taking it into your mouth to suck and lick. You watch the muscles in his chest and shoulders shiver, the thick ridge of his collar bone, the ligatures beneath his skin shifting, and it’s all so mesmerizing—a man to be possessed by, to give yourself to. To study and pick apart like a specimen.

His knot swells at the base, and as gently as you could ever possibly be, you drag the dull edges of your teeth against the soft, vulnerable skin. He lets out a whimpering sound as he comes, his chest flushing dark red.

“That’s not where that goes,” he growls when he’s able to catch his breath. But he’d made you come so many times. You want just one more chance to give him something only for him.

You want to look at all of him, touch all of him, know all of him. There’s something depraved in you that makes you want to look inside of him. Split him and know what the surface of his heart looks like.

When he pulls you draped over himself to taste his own come off your tongue, he makes a hungering sound, then changes the angle of the kiss to make it deeper, and you worry you’d commit an act of violence to keep him with you. Trying to promise yourself that it’s only the fever of heat making you delusional to the point of malice, but certain that an act of betrayal would be the least compromising act you’d commit to keep him only for yourself.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” you sob. He enters you with a gasp of desperation and then stills. “Why didn’t you tell me it would be like this?” The two of you lay together in the midst of the pink nest, face-to-face—your sobs quiet. “Why didn’t you warn me?” you insist, touching the tips of his eyelashes.

“I think…I didn't know before. But now— I think we might be…” he stops again, afraid like you are, for you already know what he’ll say. It’s obvious in this bed together. “We’re very compatible,” he whispers, simplifying the matter entirely.

“Don’t say it,” you touch his mouth now. “I understand.” How could you not?

Mates—were everything and the world outside of this room different—that’s what you’d be.

“It’ll be okay,” Joel tries to soothe when your tears start anew. The fever swells, rushes over you, drowns you in could have’s and would be’s, in the rightness of the moment and the unfairness of your reality.

“We were both looking for something in that church. Maybe—” you say. He shakes his head at you and it makes you angry and devastated. “I want to know you.” You rake your nails down his chest. “I want to be close to you. I—I would love you if you’d let me.”

Maybe I already do—you think. Maybe it was instantaneous and willed by fate or God, maybe God led you to that basement within his own house of worship to find the man he’d chosen for you himself.

His movements, his grip, they take on a frenzy. He’s impatient, clumsy with need when he rolls you over, pressing you belly down against the bed to stretch his long form over yours. Your bed had never been more comfortable than with the large, warm alpha stretched out against you, taking up most of the space. There’s giddiness bubbling up within you to match his ardor, and with his grip in your hair, he pulls your head back to kiss you, huffing hot breath against your face as if he could taste your need to be held and touched, but also your laughter.

“I want to tie you up,” he confesses. “I want to trap you. I want to force you to stay with me.” His weight leaves your back, leaves you gasping. “—Lift your rump, that’s it…gimme your cunt. Yes—good omega.”

Pulling your hips up up up, your face pressed into the sheets, his hand smooths back and forth against that raw place between your thighs.

“You don’t need to force me.”

You gasp as he enters you swiftly, the angle so deep and so sharp it brings tears to your eyes, a hot flush sweeping down your chest. The feeling of the wide cockhead pressed firmly against your cervix, painful and pleasurable.

“But I want to.”

“Then do it—I don’t care. Oh, oh—my tummy.”

“I know,” he coos. “I know it’s deep like this. It’s alright, this is where it goes.”

He soothes a big hand over the skin of your abdomen where your womb hides beneath, pressing gently to feel himself moving inside. His hips press against your bottom harder, forcing your back into a tight arc, the delicate muscles of your neck and shoulders scream in protest at the forced position of submission he’s folded you into.

He cups your cunt where he thrusts into it. “This is mine. Only I can have it, it belongs to me.”

His voice is a feral snarl, all alpha claiming his omega. Your skin shivers, sweats, tightens to the point of excruciating pain. He grinds and grinds against that tight ring of agonizing pleasure within you. Fucks up against it so roughly it’s like he’s trying to force himself into that sacred and untouched space inside of you.. Your cunt flutters and orgasms around him as he starts to come inside of you—knot swollen to hurt.

Yes yes. Yes yes.

“I’m as close to your womb as anyone will ever be. It’s mine. It belongs to me. I could put a baby in you—” his voice no longer sounds his own, lost to rut, so deep and graveled.

Again: “Yes. Yes yes yes.” You’re begging.

“Jesus fuck.” His body jerks, his teeth clamp around your shoulder—so close, almost there.

“Please, please, alpha.”

“Damn you—” his spit smears against your shoulder, up your neck to your nape, mouth sliding. “I thought you understood.”

“I don’t care.�� I don’t care I dont care I don’t care. Your knees slide against the bed, prone, spread, his. His lips are against your mating gland now when he speaks.

You almost have him.

“You said this was a selfish thing. I don’t care. Be selfish.”

Twisting your hair in his fist, he pins your head to the bed, muscles screaming in overstrained protest, your knees slide even wider the weight of him forcing your body to do as he bids. You realize he’s coming again, encouraged by your position, and your belly practically swells with it—your alpha hissing and growling and shuddering as your cunt milks more come from his oversensitive knot.

“Wha’dya want—me to leave my fucking wife—to breed your belly full’a me—oh, fuck—” You’re crying high pitched, wailing, the muscles of your pelvis overworked as they pull tight and shudder, contracting in a painful way. “God, help me—”

The fever is infectious and Joel is lost.

Maybe, at the end of it, you really are only animals.

The feeling of his teeth piercing your mating gland, the smooth, painful slide—he holds you there, caught by the nape. Yes, you really are only animals. He’s bitten you. Trapped like he’d wanted. Tears slide wet and hot over your face, immediately evaporating against the scorching skin. Your mouth pants wide open in a silent scream. He’s caught you, impaled you.

His mouth sucks and sucks, pulls back only to pierce again, deepening the wound.

It doesn't hurt in the usual way—more so, it’s a pain that feels as if it is meant to be felt, natural. Something that stings only in a comforting way, like gratitude on a ready tongue.

Between the two of you, the mating bond shivers and blooms awake, a chrysalis splitting open and alive.

Yes, you decide, this is betrayal—of the gravest sort—of sanity.

This is the miracle, this is the cure to whatever sort of malady life could ever infect you with. If only the animal could understand that…

Later, you blink open dry, gritted eyes to the site of a folded sheaf of white paper set against the pink pillow. On it, his handwriting, lovely and careful: Went out for breakfast. Be back soon. -J.

Through the window, you can hear the sad call of Mourning Doves.

Perhaps this is where the story book begins to end. All that came before was only a prologue to the real lesson to which you will now surrender yourself to: He’s gone.

Sitting up slowly, you take careful consideration of your body. The place between your legs shakes and pulls with tenderness, and the muscles in your lower back hurt. The heat is well and truly over with, he’d not have been able to pull himself away otherwise. Dust motes ring hollowly in the abandoned apartment, and there’s no such thing as a home without a family in it—you’re all alone. Tears begin to immediately fill your eyes and spill over as you press cautious fingertips to the still fresh wound at the back of your neck. Your mating gland is swollen, full and sore.

You try to struggle your way out of the tangled bed, limbs weak from overuse, shivering everywhere. The linens reek of his scent and his come and you have to get away. With a great wrench, you kick away the scent of him, covering your mouth as if you’d be sick from it, tumbling to the floor beside the bed. Your shoulder knocks against the leg of the desk and the bottle of golden perfume teeters on the dangerous edge. You watch the sunflower bright liquid slosh in waves within the cut glass until it settles serenely once again. With the tip of a finger, you push it back to safety against the rattle of some forgotten keys.

Joel’s—he’d forgotten them in his haste to get away from you and the selfish thing you’ve done.

With shaking fingers you slide them off the desk and into your lap. He has too many—who could ever keep track of so many doors needing opening? Different keys of varying shapes and sizes. Some silver, some gold, one a copper oxidized to green color that looks ancient. What could one single man possibly need so many keys for? You count them slowly, running the pad of your thumb over the teeth of every single one—twenty seven, as old as you are. You struggle to pry your fingernail between the tongs of the thick ring, forcing one of the keys free. An innocuous gold one—something medium sized that is neither too small to be terribly important, nor too large to be easily missed. It warms quickly in your closed fist before you slip it beneath the raised edge of the perfume bottle on the desk. The golden liquid camouflages the golden key beneath it, rendering the shape of it waved and indiscernible.

Now, there will be a place he’ll never be able to get into again without you. Somehow, the thought is comforting.

The ending unfolds now: he’d bitten you, and now he’s run away with a sorry excuse. There’s a strange, puzzling sound coming from somewhere in your home, frightening you until you realize it’s only your soft wailing at the loss of your alpha. He’s left you. He’s left you. He won’t come back, you know it. You’ll have to move. Burn down the building. You won’t ever be able to live here happily again with the memories that have seeped into the walls of this room. He hadn’t even said goodbye and you’ll never see him again and you’ll have nothing to show for this singular moment of incredible happiness for the rest of your life. How could he just—

“Baby?”

He stands there, big and dark with his hair disheveled and his cheeks pink from the cold. A white paper bag in one fist, two cups of coffee held in his other palm. The warm glow of the hall illuminates him from behind—your breath rattles in your chest, silly, panicked creature.

The tears dry instantly and then there’s a hollow buzzing that settles within you. The two of you stare at each other in silence for several long moments, and something in his gaze translates to understanding within you. You’ll be calm now, you’ll be prepared for whatever might come next. You think that this is what he needs from you.

“It’s okay. I’m here,” he says, scooping you up off the floor, settling you with a deep groan. Taking you into his lap, he feeds you breakfast, watches as you take food from his hand. Your panic metamorphosizes, swoops and undulates like a wave.

When you’ve both finished your bagels and fruit and juice, he sits you gently on the desk chair and lets you watch as he changes the bed linens. You blink up at him in a daze, watching his quick and efficient movements as he tucks and folds and pulls. You wonder who taught him. Does a creature like this come from a mother like all the rest of us do? His profile is serious, his throat red, the glands at the sides are still slightly swollen, but cooling. Unmarred. Your molars ache, saliva pooling like the venom of a snake—something unfinished.

After the bed is made, he takes you to the small, shared bathroom. Perched naked and shivering on the counter, you watch now as he measures the temperature of the water in the shower until he’s certain it’s just right. You try to control the tremble of your skin, quietly observing, forcing yourself to hold the question on your tongue calm. You have a notion that if you stay calm, then he’ll stay calm in return. If you ask no rash questions, he’ll make no rash decisions.

But you realize, he hasn’t looked you in your eyes a single time since he returned with breakfast, and you think you know what will happen next. Something like terrible, heartbroken certainty settles within your body. The panic evaporates into the ether. What you can see of them, his eyes, they’re like some hallowed, vacant place.

“Joel?” You say.

He looks up immediately, piercing you with that stare, it’s horribly empty. You don’t have anything else to say.

You sit back, shocked with the clarity of his own metamorphosis. You can’t lie to yourself, and you cannot change a person.

No. Or…also—the lesson of your story book is very simple, you cannot fix another person. You can only fix yourself.

When is the abdication of all pride and sense? You’d told yourself you’d started this, from the very beginning, going to that first meeting, to better yourself, to be honest, to find something that was easy, that you wouldn’t have to fight for. Contradictory things… maybe. But logical in your own complicated mind where you best understood yourself. Similarly, he’d told you once that after him, no one else would have you. Now, you see the words for what they’d really been, not a warning, but an apology. Even if he was gone, how could there ever be anyone else after him? It would be too great a fight. You feel you’d bleed to death inside if you even tried.

Now, it says itself matter-of-factly inside your head once again, you cannot change a person.

It insists upon itself, this truth. Overriding biology or hormones or lust. You’ll let go of the silly notions of fate or God—there’s no room for that with the look on Joel’s face.

He soaps your hair in the shower, massaging your temples and the notch at the base of your skull with large, strong fingers. He doesn’t make sounds, he focuses very intently. Tears tighten your throat again, but you’re not in your heat anymore so there’s no reason to let emotions overwhelm your actions. You hold yourself still and compliant and you let him wash your back, your throat, fingertips ghosting over the claimed mating gland, under your arms and the heaviness of your breasts and between your legs with a gentleness that strangles.

When he dries the water from your skin, he presses a kiss to the corner of your eye, tasting the salt of grief. After, he tucks you into bed with clean skin, his heat against your back. He’s still hard for you and this is a comfort despite the pregnant tragedy that hangs above the bed.

He orders you to sleep, and with nothing else to do but let the end come, you obey.

A day and a night pass easily, and as dawn slinks into the quiet room, your quiet voice finally asks: “What will we do now, Joel?”

He squeezes you tightly for one long moment. You don’t want a lot, just forever. But you think he sees that, anyway. And then he lets you go, anyway, too. Rolling over, he sits at the edge of the pink bed, elbows to knees and head hanging low. Your heart does break for him, then. The defeated man.

“Nobody ever taught me how to love someone without hurtin’ ‘em. I won’t do that to you, sweetheart. I need fixin’.”

Behind him, you kneel against his naked back, pressing a tender kiss over his gland. Your heart skips, yearns.

When was the abdication of all pride and sense? That first footstep into a dark basement, taking a stupid pamphlet and hoping for a miracle, heedlessly pursuing a man who could never be caught.

“I don’t think you do.”

“You’re young—”

“I already told you, I’m not that young anymore.”

“You can’t know what it’s like to live the sort of life I’ve lived. Cold and—and not myself. Just…a thing that isn’t real. Doing the things I thought I should for no good reason other than that if I didn’t do them I feared I’d lose myself entirely. My memories, my name, my brother was already gone. Not letting myself feel or taste anything. You understand me? I—I lived like that, in a sheltered and delicate world, and I thought I was living.” He shakes his head cupped in his hands, and you kiss his neck again. “I was hibernating. So restless.” Once more he says: “I can’t believe I found you.”

He pulls himself from your touch suddenly, too big body jerking up to his feet, naked, animal-like, pacing the five meager feet of your small space restlessly, too quick for caution. On a pivot, his knee slams against the desk leg, sending the bottle of golden perfume to shatter on the floor. The scent of honey and vanilla and spice layered over orange blossom floats in the air, choking you, but Joel doesn’t seem to notice.

Amidst the shards of glass, you can see the golden spark of his stolen key.

“I’m broken. I’m broken, baby. And I gotta fix it. I need a miracle.” You close your eyes to his own blindness, your broken gland throbs with hurt. “If we go back to the Emmanuel…or, or—Maria had said… it’s Wednesday. If we— the both of us—”

“I’ll help you. Let me help you.”

He gives one violent shake of his head, like an absolutely not, and rakes his hands through his hair, turns again to pace the five feet backwards. The tendons in his neck strain. He can’t seem to look you in the eye.

You don’t understand, he murmurs, but you aren’t sure which one of you he’s speaking to. “I turned my only child into a nightmare and it’s the worst thing I could’ve ever done,” he says, face averted. “I have to fix it. Maria sent details. There’s a medical facility northwards, on the outskirts of the city. It’s all very straightforward. We’ll go and we’ll take the cure they’re offering. It’ll help us. It’s a miracle. That’s what they tell you. A miracle cure for loneliness.” You can see that the muscles in his back are shaking almost uncontrollably. “We were both looking for something when we started this thing—”

“Then I’ll help you,” you insist. “Together we can—”

“How?” he cuts you off, his voice is a violent thing. “You can’t. It was so long ago, and yet it’s the only thing that matters. And I can’t let it go. I cannot let her go. I need something more. Something that will rid me of this—this,” he chokes. “Grief—”

At that moment, you find your anger hard to sustain in the face of lost fatherhood.

“There’s something rotten inside of me and I have to burn it out. Look at what I did. Look at my life. I married a woman I didn’t love. Why would I do that?” he asks you as if he’s genuinely hoping for an answer. “I was so lonely and I thought that was a good enough reason. I was so lonely. And I had a daughter and now I don’t. And I tried to build a life and do the things I was supposed to but I couldn't. It didn’t work, none of it, and so I couldn’t fix myself, and now I’ve found you and I wish you could fix it all—everything, my whole heart. But you can’t, it doesn’t work that way. And I’m sorry.”

You want to ask why you can’t be enough, but there’s no bravery left in your heart. And after all, you do understand. His shame, his need to turn away, but you are here and you are still because you do understand—you cannot fix a person, they can only fix themselves.

When was the abdication of all pride and sense? Here and now.

You aren’t going anywhere. Even if he is.

“Okay,” you say, your voice sounds strong, sure. You’d promised you’d be gentle with him. Hadn’t you? “We’ll go. If this is what you need, I’ll go with you.”

He finally turns to look at you. “You will?” There’s pain, maybe panic in his eyes.

There’s nothing in you that thinks to mention the bite that throbs alive and painful at your neck—the bond that sings and cries with the sorrow of what’s about to be done to it. You can feel him there at the end of your mind unfurling like a long stretching sigh, beating like a heart, and your own heart races against it, vying for the end or trying to escape what will happen to you afterwards. It will fade, you know, slowly and painfully, some slow agonizing trek back to your alone-ness. He does not look happy, there’s satisfaction in that, in the great tactical advantage of being the one to whom the wrong has been done.

“I—I started this. I have to see it through. I have to know.” There’s only himself left to convince.

He kneels at your feet to dress you. Jeans and a camisole, thick socks and boots. You don three sweaters and a coat but fear you’ll never be warm again. When you rise from the bed where you’d felt that first unfurling blossom of love, where you’d felt the truth of what it was to be an omega so honestly, he presses his face to your belly where a baby could have grown had he chosen you and not his grief. His voice breaks on a sob of your name, but there are no tears from you, not yet.

“Please don’t hold it against me. I won’t be able to live if you do.”

“I’m on birth control. You should know.”

He looks up at you from his place at your knees, big man that he is, and there’s heartbreak on his face.

“I’m sorry,” he tells you. You’re sure that he is.

“Of course.”

The drive to the rented space of the medical facility, an old and drab building on the outskirts of Boston, is long and silent. He grips your hand the entire way there, determined, like he has to do this no matter the consequence to either of you. And as he drives, you watch him. That brightness you’d thought you’d seen before, it must have been a feign, an outright lie, for now, all you can see is a broken man on the precipice of his own end. As soon as you’d realized what was inside, you’d had to do everything he’d asked of you.

It turned simple.

The facility seems some relic of a forgotten era. Outdated, ascetic concrete and harsh architecture. It doesn't feel right to be here, and you shake beneath the clothes he’d put you in.

You search for Maria’s face in the crowd, hoping for some false sense of comfort or understanding but she isn’t here. Why would she be? This is only a place for broken creatures, and she was but the shepherd that had offered him his choice.

Paperwork is signed, consent forms read and reviewed, the two of you sit side by side in hard, plastic chairs. There are other demihumans here for the same thing as well, desperate for a cure for their own loneliness. You can smell it leaking out of their pores. The medical personnel are distant and professional, all betas, and you wonder if they know what it is they’re doing to the people they’re administering these drugs too.

In the fineprint you read: By signing this document the subject agrees to the risk of the loss of all emotional feeling, even that which is associated with the designation alpha or omega. The drug administered today carries the potential side effect of leaving demi-humans in a biological state similar to that of a beta. Sexual desire, as experienced by the designations A/O are likely to be altered or extinguished. Therefore, the possibility of a future heat or rut is unlikely post administration. Any existing mating bonds run the risk of potential severing.

But he would get his miracle cure. And you can’t find it in your heart to hold that against him.

He holds your hand in both of his while he waits for his name to be called, his head cast forward as if in prayer.

When it’s finally his turn, the two of you walk down the long hallway to the administration room hand in hand. His large wide palm is comforting, his strong fingers holding you in a tight clasp. This is your last moment, and you stop him just before you enter the large room where you can see two rows of chairs facing one another, bodies lining the seats with nurses in clean white smocks moving slowly from one to the other. They have trays in their hands, with little white cups on them. Each person eagerly takes their own dose. It seems like you’re the only one here with any sort of doubt.

You miss the stilted comfort of the old church.

And suddenly, you feel the weight of your designation over your skin so heavily. It’d never been something to bother or shame you, but now, very nearly alone again and badly used, you feel it.

Clearing your throat, you try to rally courage you don’t actually have and move to continue forward, but now he’s the one to pause.

“Give me a moment,” he begs, voice rough.

Joel is cold, frozen again, beneath his returned coat. It smells like you, and he hopes he cares enough after he’s done with this place which he’s beginning to fear he never should have brought you to. This is no place of worship.

“Give me a moment,” he says again.

There are so many people here, he’s surprised. Do they know what they’re giving up by doing this? Does he?

The heat of your body beside his feels like it wanes and wanes until you’re shivering also. You’re cold, it's his responsibility to keep you warm and safe and happy and he’s giving that up for something else. He has the notion that he’ll never be warm ever again unless he is with you.

But this grief, he thinks, it insists upon itself.

If he has his miracle, maybe he’ll be able to stay or to come back, to be fixed so that he can be right for you and fix his whole life so that everything will be able to be okay again. It’ll all be simple, perfect, miraculous.

“I need this,” he says aloud. His words are so rusty, so ugly, so false and weak. Nothing but lies. “I need this," he says again.

He looks down at you and your eyes are wide and dry, so determined, no tears from the girl who’d sacrifice so readily for this thing he thinks he needs.

“Do you think that your loneliness comes from your grief?” you ask him then.

“Yes.”

“So you’ll never be able to mend your loneliness unless you cure your grief.”

“Yes.”

“I see,” you say. “I understand.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. You struggle. You’re angry. I understand.”

“I’m angry?” Your cool tone irritates something that still feels possessed by your earlier heat. He needs to learn to let that go. “Why the fuck arent you angry? I’m abandoning you. I bit you,” he says the terrible words out loud. “You should be fucking angry at me.”

He’s immediately speared by a lash of guilt so agonizing his vision blurs, and your determined look turns to one of vulnerable desperation for a single and brief moment, doubt, one which a good man would protect fiercely. He’s certain now that he should not have brought you here. Every instinct inside of him tells him so. And he wishes desperately that a man could learn from anything but his own mistakes.

“When you go in there, what will become of me?” Your voice is quiet, slightly trembling.

“Look at me,” he demands, smoothing his large hands over your head to gently cradle your skull in his palms. “Kiss me one more time.”

You press up on your toes, and he thinks of yesterday morning, when he’d woken to find your fever gone before he’d gone out for breakfast. The way you’d looked sitting at the edge of the bed where so much had happened to you together, hair draped over your shoulders. He’d taken you into his arms and you’d taken him into your body when you’d begged him for just once more, and with his cock throbbing hot and deep against your womb, with the fever of heat and rut burned away, your words had strangled his heart with terrifying clarity. Just once more? And never again? Could this truly be what he was choosing?

He kisses you, your mouth firm and unresponsive for a moment.

“Now you punish me?”

“Now I remind you.”

“Kiss me back,” he demands. “Give me your mouth.” He doesn’t need reminding of what he’s losing here. He is, more than anything, painfully aware.

He pries your jaw open, tasting the salt of tears, and finally, you kiss him back with a heated, almost heartbreaking urgency.

“You’re so determined to hurt me,” you cry.

“No, no. To save you.” He cups your cheeks gently, thumbs smoothing the wet, smooth skin beneath your eyes. His mouth pulls softly at yours, taking one last fervent taste. “You weren’t supposed to be mine, but you are. You are.”

The feeling that he is making a mistake and yet that it is absolutely necessary crashes over him stronger than fate or biology or even God—that this path he’d set himself upon was one he is now trapped in without any other way forward.

“Don’t forget. Don’t forget about me,” he presses against your mouth.

“Thank you for showing me this.”

“I’m the one that should be thanking you,” he says, heart-sick.

You pull away from him, out of his embrace.

“And I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” he demands.

“For changing the game. For wanting more.”

“No—” he makes a cutting motion with his hand, “No. You have nothing to be sorry for.”

The idea of you apologizing for something he was doing to you infuriates him.

He remembers the way you’d met, the green of the willow, the way you’d taunted and teased him with your words and your smiles and your questions, sent him careening into you until he’d no choice but to take you for himself.

You smile that sly smile again now, but there are tears in your eyes when you stick out your hand for him to shake. “No hard feelings?”

A bilious, sick feeling forces its way up his throat. “None. Never.”

He feels the warm air between your fingers as your hands fall away from each other, as though they still touched. Anticipation. Then loss.

And then nothing, your hand falling away. Something inside Joel screams.

The nurses sit you across from one another, explaining that you’ll take two pills and then have to sit and rest for observation for an hour before you’ll be permitted to leave. In the interim, a series of questions will be asked to ascertain that you’re of sound mind and health for release. A follow up visit will be scheduled at four and twelve weeks to record progress.

They advise that the effects should be instantaneous. An immediate cure of all loneliness. Grief wiped away for a clean slate.

You nod your head serenely up at the nurse as she explains to you, and Joel feels himself harden at the sight of you—your hair, your face, the slope of your shoulders, the thought of your marked gland at the back of your neck. He runs the risk of losing this—of never feeling the lust he’d just gotten back. Never feeling that burst of warmth in his chest you’d forced to live within him once more.

His own nurse comes to perform the same speech, and places two, perfectly round blue pills in his palm. Across the aisle, you hold your own palm up and waiting, imitating his movements, letting him choose for the both of you.

Don’t give up on me, please, he almost shouts at you. Don’t forget me.

In front of him, the nurse looks down at him very curiously. “Get busy fixing your heart or die trying, Joel Miller.”

He takes the pills into his mouth and tears prick his eyes. He’ll never cry again after this.

Still before him, you watch as he swallows.

Only getting up to go once he has. Your own cure untasted.

Epilogue;

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