Articulations of Aspen

The fact he felt safe enough to reveal this tiny flaw to you only endeared him more to you.

Made you truly believe that you'd made the right decision only mere months before.

Curtis Everett had been an acquaintance of your brother, a man you'd only ever seen in rare passings between the deals your brother made with others. A hired man, you eventually realized, who did what was needed for the right price and not a penny less. The same man you'd been forced to seek out to save your brother from another with more power and money. The same man who'd taken your sacrifice as payment with a small nod and a promise to see it done.

He'd kept his promise, and you kept yours.

All these months later, you'd grown attached to Curtis in a way you never thought possible. He hadn't promised you much when you accepted his terms, but his actions had always spoken louder than his words.

He'd brought you to this villa somewhere along the coast of Italy. A place of pure luxury and peaceful existence. It'd been a far cry from what you'd grown up around with both your father and eventually your brother. The villa was a safe haven that allowed you to pursue any of your favorite hobbies. A secret place that still allowed you face-timing and lengthy phone calls over secure lines and networks.

And all you had to do in return was occasionally entertain Curtis with your company and your body.

Such a small pittance really from your point of view.

If you were being honest, you wished he demanded a bit more for himself.

Because if he commanded it, you knew you'd happily hand over your heart to him.

A man who considered himself too scary and damaged but has shown you more softness and downright sweetness than you ever thought possible for yourself. A man who learned to read you in every mood you've exhibited and did what he needed just to see a smile grace your lips once more. It was like it physically pained him to see you unhappy, or worse, angry at him for even the tiniest of discomforts.

Then again, he hadn't really done anything to make you truly angry in a while. Not since that first (and last) time he'd come back from an assignment with a few scrapes and bruises. Ones you'd been quick to address before pressing the quickest, softest kiss to his lips, whispering, "So you'll heal faster."

That had been the day his walls had crumbled and you got the chance to glimpse it all: the good, the bad, and the ugly. He'd broken down and told you some of the worst things he'd done while admitting, "I never thought I'd have someone so sweet, so innocent, as you in my life. I'd only corrupt them, bring them down to my level."

His voice shook with each word as it fell from his lips.

When you would've reached for him, he backed away, his eyes meeting yours briefly before falling to his hands. The same hands that had taken so many lives yet had learned every part of your body intimately. The ones that had learned to make your body sing for him as he brought you to heights of pleasure you hadn't known existed before him. Hands of a man that had put your pleasure above his own more times than you cared to count by that point.

A rough breath escaped him, his voice growing quieter still as he admitted, "I wanna be better. I wanna be…"

His hands had clenched into fists before they released just as fast, his palms open and stretched towards you.

You stood frozen, waiting to hear him finish his thought. You knew he needed that moment despite your short acquaintance before you'd pledged yourself to him. The same as you knew that you'd do it all again, finding no regret in your decision as you watched and waited.

"Someone worthy of you," he finally finished.

This time, you didn't hesitate in reaching out and grabbing his hands, lacing your fingers with his. It helped he didn't fight you, either, because he could've if he really wanted. You'd stared so long at his hands before finally bringing them to your lips and pressing kiss after kiss along his fingertips. These hands might've held a lifetime of blood on them, but they'd never been anything but gentle with you.

A deep shudder rocked his body even as a wrecked sound escaped him.

Daring to look into his eyes, you saw how you affected him. His desire to fight had all but disappeared as he stared down at you, wonderment lurking in the deep blue depths of his gaze. The fight to stay in control of himself had fled as you continued your gentle ministrations of his hands. The man had become literal putty in your hands, almost eagerly awaiting whatever fate you had planned for him.

It was the moment you knew you held all the power.

For once in your life, you could bring a man to his knees in a way that your status as a mafia princess never could before.

Yet, you didn't want to because you wanted the same thing he did. You who yearned to find someone who'd be willing to fight at your side. For someone who'd stick with you until the end.

And you'd found that.

With Curtis.

As your thoughts remained fixed on that night, your hands began to wander over your still-sleeping mercenary. From his short-cropped hair to his fuller beard, your hands lingered a moment as they traced along his jawline until you could run a finger along his slightly parted lips. It was a path they'd learned the night everything had changed for you both as you'd turned the tables and worshipped Curtis in the very ways he'd been worshipping you.

Your fingers continued their leisurely tracing of his lips while your mind replayed every memory from that night. Slowly stripping Curtis of his clothes while pressing kisses to every new bit of skin you bared for your eyes alone. You didn't leave a single inch untouched, either. Oh, how you reveled in the shaky breaths and soft moans that escaped him every so often. His body hadn't disappointed, either, as it responded to your almost leisurely exploration.

Only when he was standing at full mass and dripping with the very same need he often got from your own body did you finally relent. Guiding him back to the sofa in your spacious living room until he had no choice but to fall back into the cushions. The smallest of grunts escaped him, but you gave him no time to recover or recalibrate as you straddled his lap. Still fully clothed but just as aching, you settled yourself so he sat behind your clothed folds, promising some friction for you both.

You hadn't rushed, either, wanting to take this time with him just as he'd done on multiple occasions with you. Occasions that had bordered on torturous even as he made your body sing with pleasure.

Even as his hands not so subtly tugged at your clothing, he continued to let you set the pace. His eyes had become hooded yet never missed a single thing you did while filthy but sweet praise fell from his lips. It was his encouragement that kept you bold that night. Kept you teasing him with occasional yet almost perfectly timed grinds of against him, providing just enough friction to have you both hissing and sighing in equal measure. To his credit, he endured it for far longer than you usually did, but he ultimately succumbed, begging in a breathy whisper, "Wanna see you. Really feel you."

Only when he added a ragged 'please' did you finally give in.

Making quick work of your clothing, you returned to his lap but not quite the position you'd been in before. Instead, you took hold of his cock and pumped him a few times, earning the sweetest groan for your efforts.

A needy warmth settled deep in your core as the memories continued.

Your thighs squeezed as you recalled sinking down on Curtis's length, never having felt so full before him. A part of you wished you dared to wake your sleeping mercenary so he could fill you right then, but you knew he needed the rest.

So, your mind continued to wander through that night's steamy events. You'd ridden him until your thighs burned burned and shook with exhaustion, the friction and feeling of fullness too great to pass up.

Curtis's hands had kept a firm grip on you as you rode him, too, only helping you when he sensed your faltering. He didn't truly take over though until you whined softly, begging him for help. Hearing your soft plea had been enough to have his hooded eyes softening even as his hands picked up where you'd left off. He lifted and dropped you with ease, using but also helping to find that explosive conclusion you both needed.

And what an ending it had been, too, you recalled with a soft exhale.

Not only had you seen blinding flashes of stars, but you'd both made quite the mess in Curtis's lap and the sofa beneath him. A mess that you'd blushed over when asking the hired cleaning service to take care of it the following day, but it'd been worth it for the shift in your relationship with Curtis that night.

Quite lost in your memories and their phantom sensations, you didn't realize that some of them weren't quite so phantom.

At least not until you grew aware that your mercenary had woken in the middle and discovered you needy and wanting of his attention. You had missed the soft grin that had spread across his features even as he shifted down until his beard brushed against your inner thighs. His hands had gently pried them apart so he could settle between them and enjoy the show of your arousal from a night that he, too, often revisited himself.

It wasn't until his beard brushed against your aching, swollen pussy as his lips sealed around your equally aching clit and sucked hard that you returned to the present.

"Curtis," you breathed, lifting the sheets to find him in one of his favorite places. His hands bracing your thighs, anchoring you to the bed, made you melt even as you managed to admonish softly, "You should be sleeping."

He gave another hearty suck before he let go, his thumb replacing his lips and rubbing concentrated circles to keep you right where he wanted you. His eyes sparkled with mischief as they met yours. In a husky tone, he cheekily replied, "Can't sleep when my goddess is left wanting. Aching for me to take care of her."

"It's your fau—"

You sucked in a breath as he leaned down and licked a long stripe along your slit, ending with a flick against your already tormented clit.

Curtis dared to glance up at you with a smug smirk before he dived back in for another taste of you. He kept at it, too, until you were a writhing mess under him before coming away to say, "You were saying, my goddess?"

"Menace," you breathed, your hands fisting the sheets as he happily dived back into his task.

Your menace, my goddess, you silently supplied for him for he'd become quite engrossed in his task of taking you apart and putting you back together again.

His other hand had abandoned its position in holding your thighs open, allowing him to ease one, then two fingers into your sopping channel. He could easily add a third and has in the past, but your menace of a mercenary enjoyed bringing you to the brink over and over again, edging you until the only words left on your lips were please and Curtis. He could do that so easily with just the two that now sought out that soft, spongy spot within you that made you see stars.

When he found it, you nearly came off the bed with how quick your back bowed. Your toes curled even as the heat within you pooled until you could feel something tightening within you. It was so close and ready to snap. All you had to do was reach out and take that leap.

But, Curtis knew you too well and back off the spot just as quickly, dragging a whiny groan out of you. He showed you no pity though as he let you come down from the near high you wanted, teasing you with the softest of grazes against where you needed friction the most.

Huffing at him only earned you another flash of that smug smirk he wore far too often during these times.

"What's wrong, my goddess? Am I not bringing you pleasure?"

You shot him the best glare you could.

It lasted only a moment as he'd quirked his brow before diving once more between your folds. His tongue lapped at your fluttering hole while his thumb resumed its concentrated circles around your clit, quickly building you back to the very point where he'd deprived you before. Then, he'd stopped once more, getting you so close but keeping you from that leap you desperately wanted.

Again and again, he kept up his torturously sinful ministrations until you finally whimpered, "Curtis, please, I need to cum. Please, my love, let me cum."

Curtis stilled between your thighs. His head popped up to better see, the sheets long tossed away while he teased you up to this moment. While his eyes remained dark with want and possession, his features had softened. His lips took on an almost awed-like grin, glistening as they were with your slick, as he rasped, "What did you call me?"

It took you far longer than you'd ever admit aloud to recall what exactly you'd said in the moment. And even then, it'd taken you another long moment before you figured out why he'd stopped so suddenly, why his body looked almost ready to pounce on you and claim you in a way he never had before.

When it finally hit you, you couldn't help the soft smile that spread across your lips as you whispered, "My love."

Curtis's eyes closed briefly as a low growl escaped him.

When they opened, his deep blue eyes had blown fully black. His voice came out rough as he murmured, "Don't say it, my goddess, if you don't mean it."

Your hands moved from the sheets you'd been fisting until you could settle them against his jaw. As your fingers ran along his cheekbones, your smile stretched impossibly wider, realizing you'd meant the words the moment they left your lips. Your lips spread impossibly wider even as your eyes grew a bit misty. "I mean it with all my heart. How could I not with all you've done for me?"

Pressing a kiss to your inner thigh, he met your gaze once more, a quiet conviction taking over the black briefly. There was a promise in his words when he said, "I've barely started, my precious love, in spoiling you."

A final kiss to seal his promise to your inner thigh came before his fingers moved to tease along your dripping folds. It didn't take much before he had three fingers stretching you in the way only he could and finding that spot within you. His lisp returned to your neglected clit, licking and sucking for all he was worth.

Your mercenary was on a mission, and he wouldn't be denied what he wanted.

Not after the gift you've given him. Not when he held the most precious thing in his grasp and never intended on letting go.

No, your mercenary brought you back to the brink with a precision and quickness that had you gasping his name and 'my love' in equal measure. Unlike before, he didn't back off when he sensed you growing closer. He helped push you over with the promise of catching you on the way down. All it'd taken was a final flick of his tongue and his fingers working in unison to have you cumming harder than even you expected.

"I've got you," Curtis murmured over and over, his touch soothing against your skin. His fingers continued to work you through the final aftershocks and only easing from your sensitive hole when they'd stopped. His lips continued to graze your skin with every affirmation he whispered against it. "So beautiful like this. My own sweet goddess. My precious, precious love."

Reaching for him, you beckoned him up until you could properly see him leaning over you. Your fingers traced along his cheekbones, contentment seeping into your very being, as you said, "You're really pretty."

His cheeks warmed with your praise. He would've ducked his head if not for the fact you held him still, your fingers too content with their tracing of his features to quit then. Not even the remnants of your slick in his beard could get you stop as you continued murmuring praises for him.

"Keep this up, my sweet love, and you'll be getting a second round. I'm trying to be a gentleman here," he huffed at you. His eyes shone with such adoration, and dare you say it, love that you almost missed the way they'd darkened with his sinful promise.

A promise you wholeheartedly wanted to take on as you murmured, "Maybe I don't want a gentleman. Maybe I want to be stuffed so full that I'm leaking for days. Mark me so I know that I'll forever and always be yours, my loving mercenary."

You didn't miss the way his eyes darkened until the blue disappeared and his grin grew downright sly.

You were, however, unprepared for how quickly he'd flipped you over. A high-pitched gasp escaped as he manhandled you into place, his body draping over yours. His still hard cock nestled between your ass cheeks while his fingers laced with yours above your head. Effectively trapped, he pressed kiss after kiss across the back of your neck. Eventually, he nipped at the spot behind your ear, pulling a moan from you. As he kept it up, you couldn't help wriggling beneath him, eager to work his cock towards your weeping entrance where you wanted him most.

While he soothed the spot he'd nipped, he draped himself over you more, forcing you still beneath him.

A whine escaped you as you realized you wouldn't get your prize so easily this second time, either.

"Patience, my goddess," he breathed into your ear, nuzzling against you. "You'll get my cock once I'm done marking you. After I'm through with you, everyone will know that you're mine as much as I've always been yours."

The things you do for your sister. Always have. If it wasn’t tutoring her so she would pass her test and stay cheer team eligible, it was making sure she came home after each and every frat party or budgeting the pennies of your paychecks so she would have more to eat than protein shakes. And now this. Sitting in front of a powerful man, and negotiating.

“They aren’t yours. Kay didn’t send them to you,” you say, again, doing your best to keep your tone even. Though your patience is quickly fraying into desperation.

The man chuckles. His brows jumping in amusement.

“She sent them to dipshit. I was lucky enough to get them from him.” He shrugs. “If she didn’t want them leaking, she really should have shared them with someone she trusts.”

Your teeth clench, muscles aching from the strain of it. “She did trust him,” you growl between your teeth. His brow quirks and you breathe to calm yourself. “Please, it would ruin her career. You have to delete them.”

He clicks his teeth, fingers running over the bristles of his mustache. “But what do I get out of it?” he asks. “See with them, my hand and I have been having quite a good time. If I delete them, what’s gonna help me take care of my cock?”

A noise squawks from you before you can choke it down. He smirks.

“I—” Your gaze drops to your hands, fisting into the fabric of your pants. “I don’t—”

“Unless you’re volunteering?” He leans forward, elbows supporting his torso. His shirt strains over his biceps. A mischievous gleam in his eye. He tilts his head, face softening in a mocking pity. “I’m not a monster, you know. But you never get nothing for nothing, princess.”

You drop your gaze. A moment taken for introspection. This is too far. It has to be. Always there to bail Kay out. Something’s got to give. Doesn’t it?

“Mr. Hansen,” you start, but he quickly cuts you off with by saying, “You want a contract?”

Your brows raise. And before you even respond, his finger finds a button on his desk.

“Barber, get the fuck in here,” he barks.

“Mr. Hansen, that’s not—”

He shushes you and steeples his fingers on the desk. A minute later, a man walks into the room, a file in hand.

“There’s my guy,” Lloyd crows with a sparkle in his eye. “Tell her how nice it is to be owned by me, sweet cheeks.”

As he passes, you hear the man grumble under his breath. A twitch in his jaw beneath his beard. He sets the file down and turns to leave. Not a comment made one way or another.

“Now, let’s look over this, shall we?”

“I don’t think we need to—”

“You wanna save your sister or not?” Mr. Hansen asks, a hard edge to his voice.

Your lips press together. Answer clear to you both. He pushes the stack of papers toward you.

“Sign,” he instructs, a pen flipping through his fingers.

You swallow and lick your dry lips. Staring at the black and white text. Letters mush together. Even when you can make out a word, the jargon reads incomprehensible. All of it a garble as you try to understand.

“Right there.” His fingers tap the paper right by a line. The one where you’ll sign away your soul—or whatever he’s asking for.

The pen shakes. Your fingers loose as you grip it. It’s the worst signature you’ve ever penned but it’s still legally binding. You know that. It sinks like a stone in your gut.

“Great,” Mr. Hansen crows, hands rubbing together. His smile breaks out under his mustache and fear trips up your spine.

He leans back, legs wide. He smooths the daunting caterpillar above his lips. A smirk prominent beneath.

“Why don’t you stand up and walk that pretty tush over here?”

“What exactly did I agree to?” you ask.

“Whatever the fuck I want,” he replies with a challenging quirk of his brow. “Now, come here.”

Your knees shake as you stand. Nerves buzz beneath your skin. A mounting roar in your ears as you skirt around his solid wood desk and find a place before him. His knees fall wide as he spins in his chair, following your path like a lecherous compass.

He palms himself and hums. “I make the best goddamn deals.”

You make no response. A sick feeling in your stomach, waiting for whatever he intends.

He crooks two of his fingers and points to his desk. “You can spread yourself out right here. Let me see what you’re working with.”

You swallow the bile that rises in your throat. Your limbs lock, but you force yourself. Each stilted step taken with determination of will. A sense of duty to your sister, to take care of her, protect her. He pushes away from the desk. Movement matching yours. His knees a cage around you, keeping you between him and his desk.

You face him. Head spinning, holding your wrist to stop the tremble of your hands. He stares and waits. Glinting mirth sharp as a knife at your throat. You swallow hard.

A finger of his raises in the air, circling. “Turn around,” he prompts.

Heat fills your cheeks. Pure mortification a buzzing cacophony your head. You stiffen further but manage to spin on your heel, facing his desk. Your contract staring back at you and sealing your fate while saving your sister’s.

“Now, bend over,” he purrs. A creaking shift accompanies the command—a sensual lilt to his tone and the clink of a buckle.

But it’s not until a hand presses flat to your back that you can comply. The pressure between your shoulder blades a gentle force to pin you against the wood.

“There you go,” he says. He tugs at the waistband of your pants. “Now, let’s see this pretty pussy.”

Seams pop and the button pings off his desk, but he manages to yank your pants down your legs. Your panties accompanying the humiliating descent. You whimper. The first brush of air has your spine locking. A fight waging as your first reaction is to straighten and hide yourself from his lecherous gaze. It is a monumental feat to restrain yourself.

Mr. Hansen hums behind you, pleased. Your skin crawls. His desk chair creaks. The weight of his stare like a boulder. His hands burning with their touch. One smooths up your twitching thighs. Fingers sweeping across intimate places, pulling at your flesh. A burst of light has your head whipping around.

“Sorry,” he smirks, unrepentant, “forgot to turn off the flash.” He wiggles his phone in his other hand before tucking it away. “Still took a pretty picture, though. I mean, look at you.” His attention refocuses on your pussy—displayed for him even as you shake in humiliation. The barest twinge of anticipation, deep in that untouched part of you, sets your stomach roiling.

“But—”

Your protest is short lived as he interjects, “if you want me to delete what I have of your sister, you’re gonna have to give me something to replace them.” His brow quirks. “It’s in your contract, sweet cheeks.” The conclusive smack to your ass jolts you.

You nod, tears welling on your waterline. You swallow back anything more you could possibly say. Letting it cement and harden in your belly. It’s this and then your sister will be in the clear. You can do this—even if you did sign more of yourself away than you ever wanted to.

His hands smooth over your ass and around your hips. You turn your head away, unwilling to see the gleeful glint in his eyes when he bends and dips his head toward you.

Though that doesn’t stop the startled gasp that escapes when his tongue swipes along the cut of you. A taste that leaves your hips bucking away, your foot lifting and ready to kick.

Not that he would let you. His hands vice-like on your body. Grip wrapped around your ankle in a moment. Hips stilled by an arm.

“Easy, princess,” he warns, a dark and delicious sin as he calms you like he might a wild animal. “We’re just getting started.”

He doesn’t return his mouth to you. Instead, he explores your sex with his fingers. Smoothing them up from your ankle to the center of you. They poke and prod in exploration. Skilled in the way they flick at your clit and coax arousal to coat them.

Heat kicks up your spine, flaming your cheeks and the tips of your ears. Your teeth sink into the flesh of your inner cheek as his fingers take their first plunge into you.

You gasp. Legs splaying wider to accommodate the stretch, twinging discomfort for more than one reason. But Mr. Hansen doesn’t give you the time to adjust. He finds his rhythm. Opening you up around his fingers as he makes intrigued noises and watches.

One hand thrusts into you, thumbing at your clit. The other spans your hip, grabs at your ass, pulls at your flesh before another flash indicates another picture taken.

You can’t stop shaking. Sensation overwhelming as he adds another finger. Another stretch to your pussy. Another layer of confusion as it pulls and drags pleasure from you.

His figure rises and drapes over you. A blanket of heat, hard against you even as he continues to work with his hands. His lips trace along the shell of your ear.

“You should see yourself,” he moans, hips beginning a slow but heavy imitation of his fingers. Driving against you in time with them. “You’re dripping already.”

And you don’t need to turn your head to see the smirk on his lips. Only close your eyes and hide from his victory.

“But I’m gonna need a bit more from you.”

And with ease, he pulls his fingers out with a wet squelch. Only a breath passing before you feel the prod of his length notching at your entrance.

He rams into you. Your breath hitches in your lungs. A sound choked out by his intrusion. An deep ache forming around it.

But he doesn’t have to wait for your comfort. The extent of his selfishness outlined beneath you in black and white. He pistons like a machine. Fucking you with a ferocious hunger that leaves your teeth rattling.

And yet you can’t help the way your lips fall open. Fervent, guttural sounds falling out of you. Animalistic and wild. Even as you hear him chortling from above.

“See, now that’s what I wanna hear,” he says without pausing his insatiable rutting.

But you’re beyond speech. Lost to his rhythm, his desire, his ravaging of your body. It squeezes like a fist around you, tightening until all at once it releases. Shattering you in its explosion. Your pussy squeezes and flutters around the continued pounding of his cock. No choice but to ride it out without mercy.

He grunts, his head resting against your shoulder blade. And only a few thrusts later, he fills you. His cock twitching as cum coats your walls.

“Jesus, princess, you drain a man dry, don’t you?” he asks with a few more greedy pumps of his hips into you.

You mewl in response and wait for him to vacate you. For the emptiness to set in and your world to return to its normal rotation.

Instead, Mr. Hansen stays where he is. Softening inside you. You rock to your tiptoes, hoping to coax him out. But he keeps his hips flush. Refusing your attempts at separation even as he hisses from sensitivity.

And then his left hand wraps over yours and slides something onto your ring finger. Your head turns atop the wood of the desk. Glinting back at you is a ring—diamond and big and heavy.

“So this is what’s gonna happen,” Lloyd says, out of breath, lacing his fingers with yours. “Wedding’s at the end of the month—”

“Did-did you just…propose to me?” you ask perplexed. Did you miss something? You never agreed to that.

“Not exactly, but there’s nothing you can do about it, is there?” he asks in return. His hand snakes to squish your cheeks, shaking your head in a mocking commiseration. The contract, messy with drool and tears you didn’t realize you shed, beneath your chest.

He finally pulls out, your pussy spasming at the loss. With a sigh, he falls back to the chair, but you can’t move. Propped against the desk, sure to collapse if you move a muscle. Unable to look away from the ring on your finger.

Until a quiet slap sounds from behind you and you crane your vision over your shoulder. Mr. Hansen sits with his legs splayed, cock shiny with your combined releases.

“What do you say to turning around for me?”

And it’s phrased as a question, though you know it’s not. You use all your remaining strength to flop over and lean against the desk. A trickle of his semen spilling down your thigh. Unable to keep from sinking to your knees as your legs give out.

“Oh, perfect,” he crows, scooting closer. He looms over you, too intelligent and too strong. Your chin captured between his fingers. “Now you can clean me up and keep me warm.”

You swallow, lick your lips, and open them wide.

And then his left hand wraps over yours and slides something onto your ring finger. Your head turns atop the wood of the desk. Glinting back at you is a ring—diamond and big and heavy.

The contract, messy with drool and tears you didn’t realize you shed, beneath your chest.

This element just strikes such a cruel for the reader but satisfying to read chord in the story! This and the second flash with the photo - blatant signal he doesn't care/wants you to know he's taking photos since he clearly didn't turn it off after the first one.

“It’s too much,” you panted as you sagged against the bed, your sweaty cheek sticking to the rumpled sheets as Ari’s big hands framed your hips and kept your ass up. “Please.”

Not even the broken, pathetic quaver of your voice earned you a reprieve. Instead, Ari just cooed at you, “It’s not too much, and I’m the better judge of how much you can take.”

You whimpered as he retreated slowly before shoving into you hard, just toeing the line of too rough and too much, but in that delicious way that absolutely melted your brain and rocked your world. 

Ari was the best lover you had ever had. He knew you–and your body–so well, and you liked the way he took charge and could make you feel helpless and vulnerable in all the ways that made your cunt gush for him. 

Sometimes, you still couldn’t believe he was a robot. And sometimes, it’s what made the most sense, because real men couldn’t hold a candle to Ari–not a single one of them. 

“You haven’t passed out on me, have you?” Ari gave another thrust as he played with the plug in your ass, a small dose of revenge since your full attention wasn’t currently on him.  

But it was now, and you moaned at the dual sensation, hands fisting the sheets. “Ari.” 

He husked another laugh at your plea, the gravelly sound making your cunt flutter and clench. 

Humming as you squeezed him like a vice, Ari started to slowly fuck you, fingers digging into you hips–prepping you for bruises. “Love it when you beg me, sweetheart, Even if I never give in to it, I fucking love it.” 

Giving a particularly hard, deep thrust that had you keening, Ari curled over your bare back, pausing a moment so he could press his lips to the nape of your neck and murmur into your skin, “Better buckle up, you’re in for a long night.”

“This is for your own good, sweetheart,” Steve’s deep baritone rumbled over you. “It’s your day off, and you know the rule: work is prohibited.”

“But I was just checking my email real quick,” you argued, pouting even more as Steve finally finished with the restraints and gave you his full attention. 

Your belly swooped as he leaned close, in your space on purpose, making your body perk up in hyperawareness–in anticipation. 

As your greedy gaze drank in his ridiculously handsome features up close, it really was hard to believe that Steve was a machine and not a man, because he presented as all man, and you had the soaked pussy to prove it. 

“And now you’re gonna face the consequences,” Steve murmured. 

Just from his words alone, you felt a fresh gush of arousal seep from your cunt, further ruining your underwear. Your squirming increased as you watched Steve straighten to his full, intimidating height and tug off his shirt. There was a spark of knowing in his gaze as he did so, because it wasn’t a secret at all how much you loved his body. 

You had custom designed it after all. 

Your breath hitched as Steve moved closer, his touch somehow careful and a little rough as he undressed the lower half of your body. He watched you for a moment, gaze drinking in the naked state of your lower half as he pondered, and then he reached out and tore your shirt and bra clean in half before shoving them off your body, too, leaving you completely bare. 

You choked on a whimper at the impressive show of strength, eager now as you watched Steve climb onto the bed. His hands were warm and calloused as they landed on your bent knees. He eased your legs open, pushing them as wide as they could go to reveal your bare pussy, which was shining with your slick and leaking even more under his smug gaze. 

Eyes flickering up the length of you before meeting your embarrassed stare, Steve raised an eyebrow, wordlessly acknowledging just how wet you were. 

For him. Like always.  

“You’re not supposed to enjoy your punishment,” he husked, lips quirking ever so slightly as he leaned in and whispered, “Bad girl.” 

You whined as his thumb drew up the messy cut of you, sagging back against the pillows in complete surrender. 

“This won’t be the only part of you I have crying,” Steve promised, shifting to stretch out on his stomach, so his face was mere inches away from your cunt. “Cause I won’t stop eating this pretty pussy until you’re boneless and begging and work is the furthest thing from your mind.”

You had been collecting in the forest since you were old enough to walk, trailing after your mother and grandmother, learning the difference between the bluebells that gave you headaches and the white wood sorrel that soothed them, the shapes of roots that would clot blood, and the berries that would stop a heart. But as you gathered elements into the basket on your arm, the familiar paths felt different. The knife tucked in the fold of your skirt was less for harvesting and more for caution after the fear that had taken root since the maiden from your village went missing.

You yourself sensed a difference in the forest—a heaviness to the air, the moss a little gray, the birds silent in the middle of the day, a wariness that seemed to rise from the soil itself, urging you back. But you were determined. You and your mother and your mother’s mother before her supplied the village with many medicines and balms that were not commonplace, not trusted by everyone, but were integral to many.

The lake at the edge of the trees was swollen with rain and the melting snow, the water so high that it had eaten half the lower meadow. You would have to cross damp ground and pick your way over drowned logs. And you did, pressing on until you reached the stunted willow on the northernmost part of the shore, where you knew the wild violets would bloom first. You were the only moving thing in the marsh, a fact that landed with an unnerving weight. Your own breath seemed to fog the air, as if you had walked into a story from before time.

You were kneeling, fingers plucking and gathering the papery layer of new leaves from a cluster of green, when you heard a splash. Not a fish jumping, but something large breaking through the skin of the water. Your hands went still against the leaves and you stood, knife steady in your hand, and you forced yourself not to imagine the threat.

You scanned the underbrush and waited as your mother had taught you, letting your breath go thin and quiet. That was when you spotted the man, tall with broad shoulders, a deep chest, and limbs that were unquestionably strong and formidable.

As if sensing your gaze, his head turned your way, and he locked eyes with you. He didn’t move right away. You watched how his hands hung at his sides, open, the fingers stained with earth and perhaps something darker, though at this distance you could not be sure. His hair was a mix of golden chestnut and birch, and his face was clean-shaven. There was something unusual in the way he stood, something not-quite-human in the perfect symmetry of his features, the strong jawline, his shockingly blue eyes.

You did not call out. There was no one for miles and if this shape was a threat, it wasn’t the kind that would be cowed by a girl’s bluff. Instead you held your position and waited, the knife a cold certainty in your grip.

He moved toward you, nothing hesitant in his approach. The sodden earth gave under his feet, the water lapping at his calves. As he drew closer, he seemed to grow, revealing a height you hadn’t realized, solid muscle beneath the strange patchwork of clothes, brambles clinging to the rough fabric of his jacket. His eyes didn’t blink, glass-bright and inhumanly clear and blue, and they looked you over with curiosity as if measuring your resistance.

He spoke first, and the voice was all wrong: too deep, carrying a timbre like wind in a dead trunk, creaking and full of hollow space. “You’ve come further into the forest than others have in weeks,” he said. “You’re not afraid.”

There was no question in his words. You found your tongue regardless. “I have reason to be cautious, but I’m not afraid, no. I know this forest.”

The man—if he was a man—cocked his head, smiling in a way that made you think of a wolf in sunlight: beautiful, hungry, and so unbothered by your blade it might as well have been a thorn.

“What a curious thing to say,” he remarked. “You think you know the forest, but you cannot possibly know all its secrets, and the forest does not always agree with you.”

You had no answer to that, not one that would make him believe you. “I only mean that I know enough,” you said. “Enough to respect it.”

He stalked a slow circle, just beyond the reach of your knife yet always within lunging distance. An old, deep instinct in you recognized this dance, this patient assessment before a strike.

“You are the daughter of healers,” he said, “the one who finds bones and stones and wild remedies for the sick. You think you are unseen, but the forest always has eyes.” He stooped then, picking up a half-buried stone and turning it over in his palm. The hands, you noticed, were not quite right. The fingers were a shade too long, the skin thick and tight over the bones and veins. “Your presence is noticed. Even now, when you twist violets and dockweed in your clever hands.”

You recalled your grandmother’s lessons: never admit a name, never turn your back, never let a stranger dictate the space between you. “Then you know I am no threat to you or yours,” you said, and made yourself believe it, even as your heart raced. “The forest has given me its blessing,” you lied.

Something shifted in him then—not in his expression, exactly, but in the quality of his stillness, the way a predator goes motionless not from patience but from decision. “Your ancestors were blessed because of their bargains,” he said, weighted and deliberate. “They made their pacts and honored them. The land was shaped by their bargains, just as they were shaped by the land. But your generation—” he trailed off, gesturing at the bruised sky, the muddy water, the hush where birds used to cry. “No agreement has been struck. No tribute paid. The exchange must continue, or the balance will tip.”

“What exchange?” you demanded, pulse quickening.

“It has given many things to your kind,” he replied, pronouncing ‘your kind’ with a curious, almost academic detachment, “but there is always a toll, and it is different for each generation.”

“My mother still leaves honey in the hollows; it is a tradition I can continue.”

He shook his head, movement clipped, as if the neck itself was bored with the charade of human flesh. “Tokens are not tribute.” His tone was not cruel, only factual, and you realized, with a cold bloom in your belly, how many kinds of hunger there were in the world. “There is a price for the peace your village enjoys. Something must pass from you to the forest, same as it ever was.”

You tried to parse this—what your forebears had truly given, what they had perhaps hidden in their stories. “What price did the forest ask of them?”

“Your mother was clever enough to ask for nothing but safe passage between the trees. She left offerings. She did not take more than she needed. Your grandmother,” he paused, and here a ripple of amusement crossed his face, “your grandmother made a more interesting bargain.”

The wind pressed through the grasses, flattening the young reeds against the mud. A memory stirred—a story your mother told in the hush before sleep, stories half-forgotten. But his voice cut through the past, speaking the words you were beginning to recall.

“Your grandmother was greedy. She wanted safe passage and she wanted the voice of birds, the green touch, the sense for what flourished and what would die. She wished to heal but also to know when healing was hopeless, in her own marrow. Understand: the forest cannot birth a gift without first devouring the seed. When your grandmother asked, she gave up her dreams.”

You remembered the quiet unease of her sleep, the way she would doze sitting up, hands braided in her lap, or walk the lanes of her mind in silence for hours. She never dreamt or, if she did, she never remembered. You’d always assumed it was age—some feature of withered time. But even as a child you’d known there were no stories or nightmares waiting for you in her lap, only the faint comfort of her skin and the steady thrum of her heart.

You looked at the man—or the not-man—standing so tall his shadow cut the lake in two. His words hung between you, like frost in early spring, uncertain and unwilling to melt.

“What are you?” you asked.

He smiled, and it was as if a branch bent and split under its own weight. “I am not the forest, but I am of the forest. Some call me Waldgeist—the spirit of the green. I walk the trees as you walk your own paths. I am the mind that grows beneath the bark, the will curled in every root. You have seen me before, though not with these eyes.” He stated it not as a boast, but as a simple fact that had always been true.

You swallowed, tongue dry as birch. You remembered not just the old tales, but the feeling itself—a shadow in your childhood room that was too tall, a silence in the woods that felt like a held breath. You remembered the certainty, even then, that you were never truly alone among the trees.

“Why do you look like a man, then?” you asked, pulse quickening. “Why come to me at all?”

He shrugged, a gesture that sent a ripple through the nearby trees. “I take a form you can understand. “A bargain must be struck between equals; this shape makes us so. I am here to collect.”

The words buckled the hush between you. You clutched the basket closer to your chest and kept the knife steady, but you knew, in some deep, marrow-knowing way, that neither would help you if he truly intended harm.

“What will the forest take from me?”

His blue eyes shifted, and with the next blink you saw the gold in them, as though some animal watched from behind the skin of a man. “That is for you to decide. You may attempt to make a bargain, if you wish. Or you may leave now and accept what the forest will claim in time.”

“Has the forest not already laid its claim by taking one of our young women?”

He did not answer right away. Instead, his lips thinned, losing all softness, and the blue of his eyes darkened like a storm. For a moment, he became as implacable as the roots beneath the soil. When he did speak, his voice was careful, measured, as if you had stumbled onto a delicate membrane between two worlds.

“That was not my doing,” he said. “The lake has its own demands, its own bargains. It is not forest.”

The words struck you as both a warning and a promise, a declaration that the world was layered in negotiations far more ancient than the bargains of your ancestral line.

He glanced down at the bruised violets shivering at your feet. “The creatures that dwell in water are older and stranger and more varied than you can imagine.” His eyes found yours again. “Do not worry for the lost girl. Her fate is with the water. Your business is with me.”

You gathered the violets into your palm, feeling an ache in your fingers as if the mere act of picking a flower now implicated you in an ancient cycle of debt. The Waldgeist waited, patient and unobtrusive, but you felt the pressure of his presence, the sense that the moment for negotiation was finite and slipping away like dandelion seeds on the wind.

“If I try to bargain,” you finally said, forcing your voice to work, “will you truly honor it?”

“I have always honored my contracts,” he said plainly.

You squared yourself and let your breath settle. Out here, feeling small amongst a vast web of nature, you managed a plainness you hoped was strength. “If my grandmother gave up her dreams, and my mother only left honey, what do you want of me?”

“Each generation pays a new price,” he said. “The forest never takes the same thing twice. It adapts. It learns.” The Waldgeist, the not-man, walked nearer. “You come to this place for the plants that nurture your people. You heal, but healing is only one side of the balance—life and death, and the line between them. I want the possibility that both can flourish.” He let the words flower in the air between you. He continued, “The forest wants to plant its seed in your womb. It wants you to swell with its green life, to birth the next guardian from your own blood and breath.”

The air left your lungs all at once. Your body as tribute. Your womb as a clearing for the next green thing. You had imagined many prices—your sight, your voice, your years—but not this. This was so much more intimate, more invasive, than you’d ever imagined. But as you stood in the hush, with the Waldgeist’s gaze upon you, you sensed he was not mocking. Not even predatory, not in the way of men, though the need in him was elemental and absolute. It was the same law that pulled the river to the lake.

“The only thing you have to offer that’s of any interest to me,” he said, his voice lowering to the hum of sap rising in the spring, “is that sweet, warm place between your legs.”

It wasn’t even a vulgarity, the way he said it. If anything, it was a kind of reverence—a hunger for the continuity that pulsed under everything alive. But a hot flush crawled up your neck, and your hands clenched the fabric of your skirt so hard you felt stems of violets snap between your knuckles. The leaves in the trees did not shudder. The entire forest waited, patient and unashamed.

He lifted his chin, as if he had tasted the shape of your resistance, and made clear that there was no shame or cruelty in the offer—only the certainty of the seasons, the calm of a thing that had always been true. “You may refuse,” he said, “and if you do, the forest will find another way to balance what has been taken from it. But should you choose to accept, you may name your own terms. I will match them if I can. If you wish to leave this place with no bargain, as I said you could earlier, I will not hinder you. The path out is always open, though it may not lead you back the way you came.”

You swallowed, the reality of the choice settling like a stone in your gut. He would not touch you—he had offered that dignity. You could walk away, unchanged, and let the seasons turn. But a different kind of cold crept in at the thought: the forest, left to its own devices, drawing its tribute in some slow, unpredictable, and perhaps far crueler way.

You looked up at him—the way he stood entirely at ease, as if a body was just a garment to be worn when convenient. The blood-and-earth in his veins seemed almost visible, his presence an axis on which the wind and the water now turned.

“What is your name?” you asked.

He did not hesitate, but you sensed the concept of a single name was foreign to him. “I have no name your tongue could form,” he said. “But your people have need of them. There was one who called me Steve.” The word landed, dry and spare. “You may use it, if you wish.”

It was so ordinary, so unburdened with myth. You turned the name over in your mind—smooth, plain, almost laughably small. Children did this, you remembered: named the thing under the bed to make it small. But the trees did not shrink. The wind did not shrink. And neither did he.

“Steve.”

What a small name for such a vast thing.

Something moved in his face—not a smile, not quite. The corners of his mouth drew back the way bark splits open in heat. “If you ask for a name,” he said, “I gather you agree.”

Your heart twisted, then steadied, and you nodded.

Steve stepped through the reeds and the cold lake water, the space between you closing until you could smell the wildness on him, the sharp green tang of willow bark and moss. He stopped with his face a hair’s breadth from yours, searching you with those ice-blue, wild eyes. As Steve leaned in, his gaze flicked from your mouth to your eyes, measuring your anticipation and fear with the patience of a tree waiting for the wind.

He lowered his head, tendrils of his hair brushing your cheek, and the animal warmth of his skin woke every nerve, every inch of scalp and spine. He waited, poised, until your chin tipped upward, an invitation.

The tip of his nose nearly grazed yours, and you could see the sweep of gold and green in his irises.

“Your kind,” he said, the syllables vibrating just above your jaw, “often begin their coupling with a kiss. Would that please you?”

You did not know what you expected—a command, a taking, some gesture of force, but his hands hovered at your waist, not touching, not yet, as if some ancient etiquette held him back until you gave consent.

You met his gaze, the question hanging between you. This was the first step, the seal on a pact you barely understood. The instinct to flee warred with a curiosity that held you fast. “Yes,” you breathed, the word both a surrender and a choice. “I would like to be kissed.”

You felt the air shift, the certainty of the woods folding up around you. You had imagined your first kiss as a hush in the honeyed dark, a stolen moment behind a barn or beneath the hush of twilight. You had not imagined the sensation of a mouth as wild and strange as the lake wind, nor the certainty of a hand—large, warm, with fingers a shade too long—drawing you in. Steve cupped your jaw, his thumb spanning the distance from cheekbone to chin, and when he bent his head, there was no trembling or hesitation—only a gentleness so deliberate that you understood, even through your shock, how hard he worked to contain himself.

His lips were cooler than you’d expected, but they pressed to yours with a strange, melting pressure that drew the air from your lungs in one startled, high gasp. Your knees gave, not from weakness, but as if the ground itself had softened beneath you. His other hand closed around your upper arm, bracing, the grip light but immovable, like the gentle crook of a branch against a windstorm. The kiss was not the fluttery, weightless thing you’d read about in stories—it was a gravity, a falling through the earth. His touch radiated from your jaw to the soles of your boots, a hot, heady rush that left you breathless.

You let your basket fall, soft, to the mud and reeds. The knife fell from your loosening grip, but you did not care, not with his hands now cupping your face and the tangle of your hair wrapped around his knuckles.

Steve’s kiss was a demand and a question, and you felt yourself answering in the way your mouth parted for him, in the soft gasp that escaped you when his hand slid—firm, careful—down your neck to the slope of your shoulder. There was a steadiness to the way he touched you, as if he already knew you would break otherwise. When you shivered, he drew you nearer, until your body was bracketed by the length of him, the heat of him, the certainty.

Steve coaxed your mouth open further, the velvet of his tongue not so much probing as mapping. He kissed you with such unwavering patience that you began to ache, not from fear now, but from wanting the next gesture enough to hurt.

Your hand found his hair, feeling the strange, thrumming life under your palm—a rhythm denser and more vital than any human's. There was an ancient knowledge in the kiss, yet beneath it, a clumsy hunger, a desperate restraint. You felt his effort to keep from overwhelming you, and it sparked an unexpected tenderness.

His mouth relented, drawing back only enough that he could see how your face looked in the aftermath. You opened your eyes, though you found no words behind your teeth, only air and a low, helpless sound of longing. He smiled, a gentle recalibration of his features, as if observing minor marvels.

Steve’s gaze was so intent you had to look away, but his hand coaxed your jaw to center, thumb brushing over your lower lip as if to see how much of you he had changed already. “You are doing very well,” he said, his voice low and calm, the kind you’d use to soothe a frightened deer at the forest’s edge.

He cradled your wrist, and you saw the knots of lichen just under his skin, veins running wilder than any human’s. He gestured to the bare ground, and from the mud a fresh cluster of violets bloomed in an instant. He plucked one and tucked it behind your ear with a reverence that made you feel like the forest’s own altar.

Steve guided you backwards, his steps gentle and unhurried, until the soft earth gave beneath your boots and you realized the ground itself had changed. The waterlogged moss and churned mud had, in the span of a breath, thickened and risen into a plush, living mattress of green that welcomed the weight of your body as he guided you down. The rush of green scent was dizzying, a perfume of leaf-break, and violets, and deep, wet bark. You braced yourself on your elbows, startled by the way the bed molded around you.

Steve knelt in front of you, balanced and quiet, his hands braced on either side of your hips. The air around you felt altered, denser, each sound of the forest amplified, as if the world had shrunk to only the patch of earth the two of you occupied. He watched you for a long moment, letting you breathe, or maybe just savoring the fear that had turned itself, somewhere in the last dozen heartbeats, to anticipation. He leaned on his hands and bent toward you, the whole scaffold of his body arranged with an a predator’s poise that sent a shiver through your blood.

“Are you afraid?” he asked, his voice low enough that you felt it more than heard it, a vibration that moved from your jaw down through your sternum.

“Yes,” you said, and then, as if your hand had its own will, you reached up and touched the side of his face. “But not—not the way I was before.”

Steve’s answering smile was frightening in its understanding. “That is good,” he said. “Fear makes everything sharp and honest.”

His hands were impossibly strong at your hips, the pressure just shy of command. One moved up your ribcage, charting the landscape of your bones. You gasped at the intimacy, and at the strange paradox of feeling safe. You sensed he would not take what was not offered, even as you knew he could take anything he wished.

He bent his head again but this time his mouth pressed not to your lips but to the angle of your jaw, your ear, the frantic beat hidden shallow under the skin. The weight of him, looming, should have been terrifying, but instead you were frayed with a kind of anticipation that would not have been out of place on the cusp of a summer storm. You forced your hands not to tremble as you cupped the back of his neck and felt the heat of his skin. Steve’s breath was cool on your neck, the hint of it unsettlingly gentle. You tipped your head back, a motion of surrender you didn’t recognize as your own, and he followed the column of your throat to the hollow at its base, then lower, to the line of buttons fastening your blouse.

He made a sound, not quite human, almost a purr or a buzz, and pressed his face against your sternum as if he could inhale your very shape. His hands, so careful at your ribs, curved around your waist with a certainty that left you breathless. He did not tug at your clothes. Instead, he pressed his face to the thin linen and breathed you in, as if scent itself was the substance of desire.

Your mind reeled. The other girls’ whispers, your mother’s warnings—they all spoke of pain, of a force to be survived. You had braced for a claiming, but Steve’s hands seemed to know nothing of that script. The warmth that bloomed low in your belly was not fear, but a bewildering curiosity. He brought his fingers to the top button of your blouse, unfastening it with a patience that was its own kind of power, pressing a kiss to each new inch of skin. The sensation was like a lightning strike, and your spine arched involuntarily.

He paused then, waiting, gaze fixed on your face as if he required your permission at every increment. You nodded, or maybe whimpered—whatever escaped you was enough for him to continue, and the next button, and the next, his fingers working each button loose without ever scraping your skin or snagging a hair. Only when your sternum and the pale slope of your breasts were exposed to the soft, damp air did he let the backs of his knuckles brush you, not quite a caress, more a sampling. Steve’s lips and hands traveled the exposed skin, tracing the hollow of your clavicle, the soft undersides of your breasts, his mapping every new inch as if memorizing a terrain he might never traverse again.

When his mouth closed around your nipple, you jerked, startled as if pricked by a holly leaf, but the wet heat had you keening the next instant. Steve groaned low in his chest, and the sound was so animal you felt it thrumming through your bones. His mouth was soft and deliberate, his tongue flicking where the air itself had barely touched you before. His hand stayed broad and steady at your hip, anchoring you so you didn’t float away.

He took the time to explore, open-mouthed at the soft edge of your breast, then the other and the valley between, all the way up to your throat, where his teeth found your pulse. Marks: not of violence, but of tribute, the press of a thumbprint onto fruit to test its ripeness. You shivered beneath him, alive to every place his tongue mapped and every inch of you that burned in the aftermath.

As glorious as that was, you knew what surely would come next, the act described in so many whispers and warnings: the press and pain, the split-second of being claimed and broken open. That was how it always happened, in the barns and haylofts and cold, wet fields, the wedding nights, the way the boys made the girls bite down on a hand or a sleeve, their haste to have it over with. You readied yourself to be bruised, to be stretched and split and left sore.

You braced for the press of his body at the split of you, the forceful push. Instead, Steve drew your skirts up methodically, slowly, and the cool air shocked the skin beneath as he exposed it to the forest. He planted himself between your thighs, the solidness of his shoulders between your thighs coaxing your legs to fall fully open to accommodate the breadth of him. Air stalled in your throat as you felt the heat of his gaze, unflinching on your most intimate place. He made a low sound in his throat that resonated through you and the trees, something between approval and hunger. “You’re wet here,” he murmured, his voice thick with wanting that hollowed your stomach. “Like the forest gives sap in the spring—slow, and sweet, and ready.”

He bent closer, the brush of his breath raising the fine hairs of your thigh, and he let his mouth hover over your slick, exposed folds. He watched your trembling, then the way your hips bucked when his tongue finally, shockingly, flicked at the bud of you. His gaze was open and unhurried, as if he had all of time. He groaned with the first taste, a deep and honest sound that made your hands fist into the moss, tearing up strings of it beneath your nails. Each pass of his tongue was a deliberate, patient movement, spreading your wetness with reverence, savoring you, as if tasting the salt and iron of the earth itself.

You moaned, the sound ringing out over the water, and he answered it with a pulse of suction that wrung more from you. His hands anchored your shaking thighs apart. He did not stop, even when the sensation crested past bearing and you twisted against him—whether to escape or to pull him closer you could not have said—but he wouldn’t let you go. From the creases of his palms, where his lifelines ran deepest, thin green vines emerged from his skin the way shoots push through soil in early spring. They wound around your upper thighs in slow, tightening loops, textured like the underside of a leaf, faintly cool where your skin was heated. The vines didn’t pull you wider, but held you just as you were, their cool, living pressure a patient, unwavering claim on the surrender you already offered.

You keened yet again, and Steve soothed it away with a tongue so dexterous and insistent he taught you a new way to live inside your own body, a way of being you'd never conceived. Your hands found his hair, and a sudden audacity took you, pulling him closer, grinding his mouth against you, feral and greedy and no longer a healer of the village but something wild, as much earthen as blood. He laughed, low and delighted, and you felt it where his mouth was still pressed against you—a terrible, gorgeous thing. He did not slow. He did not falter. He moved as though the wanting of you was its own kind of knowing, as though desire itself had handed him a map. His tongue traced your sex with an accuracy that made you wonder, briefly and wildly, if this was what it meant to be known—not seen, not touched, but learned, the way a river learns the shape of its banks over centuries of insistence.

When the wet, velvet heat of your climax broke over you, it did not snap or spark, but rolled up from your core in a long, rising wave—a secretion of you into the moss, into the air, into his mouth, which did not lose rhythm but drank and drew you further, until the only thing left was the trembling of your thighs and the stunned, empty ache where your voice used to live. Your eyes filled with tears, not of pain—never of pain—but of astonishment, as if every nerve in your body had just flowered at once, a bloom of both petal and thorn.

You had never known this could happen. That a tongue, a mouth, a pair of hands could make you forget yourself, undo the careful braid of your dignity and leave you sobbing for a mercy that, when he finally gave it, cracked open every seam in your body.

Your thighs still trembled against his cheeks when he slowed, his tongue drawing smaller and quieter shapes, the way rain gentles after a storm has spent itself. He did not stop, but his movements gentled and slowed. Your belly clenched once without warning, a small, wet sound leaving your throat before you could catch it, your spine curling involuntarily around the spasm. He raised his head at that. Steve pressed his lips, closed and warm, to the inside of your thigh. Then he moved up the length of you until his eyes were level with yours, his hands releasing your thighs, though the vines remained, loose now, a garland rather than a grip. You found his gaze before you meant to—bright with something that was not quite pride and not quite laughter, but lived fluidly in between. He kissed your mouth, unhurried, and you tasted yourself on his tongue, dark and unfamiliar, the flavor of a thing that had always been yours but that you were only now being introduced to.

He pressed his brow to yours and let you breathe, your own chest heaving against the solid warmth of his. The moss beneath you was velvet; the sky above, the dizzying blue, the gold of late afternoon flickering through willow fronds.

Your hunger had changed, no longer a storm but a strange, quiet hum beneath your skin. In the throb between your legs was both a memory and a promise, an echo of what he’d done and a question of what he still meant to do.

For a moment, Steve said nothing, only nuzzled into the hollow of your throat, the line of your jaw, as if the hollowed-out shape of your pleasure was a thing to be tended, not merely consumed. You lay in the aftermath, skin flush against the living bed of moss, feeling the pulse of your heart reverberate through your every limb. The world seemed sharper than it had ever been, each smell and sound and taste layered and immediate: the greeny wet-earth smell of the moss, the close heat of your own body, the lake’s cold mineral current threading through the trees, and him—less a presence than a gravity, one that didn’t pull you toward him but simply held you to the earth.

You did not want to move, but you wanted more, and he read both truths in your body. His hand slid between your thighs, fingers slicked with what he had drawn out of you, and he pressed the pads of them into you—not to hurt, only to test, to see how easily you would yield.

“The forest gives,” he murmured against your collarbone, the words a vibration you felt more than heard. “But it also takes. It’s only right you should receive first. It bargains in full measure… and now it is my turn.”

He stretched you open, one finger first, then two—so patient, so careful, you only realized you were being claimed when the green heat crested in you again, this time burning languid and low, like embers tended under moss. His hands were indecently strong, but he used them as if comfort was the primary goal—pressing, stroking, coaxing your body to soften around him. The first bite of pain was a shimmer, quickly edged away by the wet insistence of his movements and the wildness in your own hips. You rocked into him, greedy and bright, and the hesitancy that might have undone you was snuffed by a need to see how far, how deep, the pleasure could run.

You did not see his cock at first. When you felt the nudge of it, hard and impossibly hot against the inside of your leg, you looked down and saw that he was already bare, as if the forest itself had shed his clothes for him. The sight of him made your breath catch—he was built the way old trees are built, with a density that seemed to belong to something older and less tame than any man you’d known or could imagine.

An absurd, animal instinct made you shrink back, but his hands caught your hips and held you with tenderness—firm, but tender. The head of it was wet, already slick, crowned by a bead of clear fluid that you watched, dazed, as he thumbed down and pressed to your folds. You’d seen men before—quick glimpses, awkward fumbles in haylofts or behind market stalls—but this was not a man’s cock. It was a thing grown for a single purpose, and each time he guided it up your seam, parting you further, it was as if a new, second pulse had been hidden in your body, one that beat only for this.

He pressed the blunt head of his cock to your entrance and held it there. His eyes had gone wolf-bright, fixed on yours, reading the tremors that ran through you. The stretch was immediate, shocking—a white-hot claim of space where there had been none. Your body arched, seeking more instinctually, and a low rumble started in his chest, the sound of stone shifting deep underground. When he pushed past the first ring of resistance you gasped, a sound somewhere between agony and relief.

A white-hot seam of pain stitched through your hips and along your spine, pure and electric, and then, impossibly quickly, it was overtaken by the burning, desperate pleasure of being filled and filled and filled until you could not imagine more, and still he pressed deeper. You made a strangled noise that was half groan, half sob, your arms thrown up to brace against his chest, nails biting into the patches of moss-and-bark that surfaced between stretches of smooth, human skin. There was no logic to the fit of him, no sense in the physics of it, but he did not force. He gave, and your body took, the slow press of him unfolding you like a new language written into your bones.

His breath came hard through parted lips, but his eyes—his eyes did not move from yours, and what was in them was not hunger, or not only hunger… it was something older and more careful, the look of a man who understood exactly what he was holding, taking. The tendons in his neck stood out like roots finding purchase in stone, and he breathed through his nose in one long, deliberate pull, as if holding himself back from splitting you entirely. Inch by inch, he worked himself deeper, and you wept out loud when your body finally yielded and he was all the way inside you—a thickness that was almost unbearable, a depth that felt impossible as every nerve lit up and you did not think, for a moment, that you could bear another inch, even as his root dragged and pressed into a place you had never known you had. Steve made a soft, shushing noise, a caress of wind in your ear, and stilled inside you with a gentleness that nearly undid your sanity.

Your pulse beat hard in your throat. You felt full—so full—and with every tiny shift of your hips, every tentative intake of air, he seemed to bloom larger inside you. You didn’t think you could breathe until he gave you leave, and then you shuddered, the air shoving out in ragged, surprised gasps. The pain faded as swiftly as it had bloomed, replaced by the eerie awareness of being shaped from within. You were aware of every inch, every subtle shift, and it was intolerable and perfect.

He tilted his hips, a fractional shift that sent the cock inside you pressing higher somehow, grinding a spot that burned and throbbed with every minute twitch. All you could do was shudder and hold on as his hands ran up your body—stroking your sides, reverently palming your breasts, the whole time never pulling back, never pulling out, as if the very idea of separation was foreign to him.

He bent his head again, kissing all the places he could reach: your throat, wet with your sweat and the lake air; your ear, where he whispered words you barely understood, half in another tongue, the syllables soft and full of promise. His hands mapped you, his body claimed you, but it was not a violence, not an invasion. Something older than memory was being pressed into you, the way a name, spoken enough times, becomes the only word a mouth knows how to form.

He moved, slow at first—less a thrust than a rolling flex of pelvis and hip, a careful rocking as if he were teaching your body how to say yes. The first withdrawal was exquisitely, almost cruelly, slow. You felt every millimeter of him slide back along the walls of your cunt, a velvet scrape that left you gaping and gasping for more. Before you could mourn the loss, he pressed forward again, filling you deeper, the new angle making you see stars. Your hands clung to his shoulders, to the strange lattice of moss and bark beneath the skin, the unreal heat of him burning into your palms.

He began to fuck you then, not with the frantic, selfish rhythm of a man, but with the slow, inexorable certainty of a season turning. His eyes never left yours, reading every flutter of your lashes, every catch in your breath, as if cataloging the ways your body learned to take him.

That rhythm was slow and considerate, but soon the tempo changed. Steve braced his hands in the moss at either side of your head and moved with deliberate, rolling thrusts that grew in force and speed. Your gasps, your shivers, the dull percussion of your bodies meeting each other—it all became the rhythm of the forest, mingling with the hush of wind, the wet shudder of leaves. You felt the moss bed beneath you shudder, the roots trembling, as Steve’s hips snapped forward with more force. The careful, reverent worship of your body became an urgency, a drive, and it overtook both of you—his hands pinning yours above your head, his mouth finding your throat and holding it there, as if he could root you to the earth by the pulse alone.

He did not ask if you were ready. He did not have to. Your body gave its own answer, arching up, knees drawing higher and wider to accommodate the relentless, beautiful force of him. With each thrust, the forest blurred into green-gold strokes, the sky itself seeming to fall away, leaving only the bright, unspeakable ache of being filled and fucked.

You came apart, succumbing to it like a riptide. You clung to the filaments of his shoulders, body locking in great, shuddering spasms around the cock that was still splitting you. The sound that tore from your throat was not yours, or not one you had made before, and he drove into you through the whole shaking length of it, unhurried, relentless, the way weather moves through a valley.

Your cunt rippled, clamping, until you felt the answering quiver in him—a hardening, a climbing tension, the way his entire body drew up. Steve bowed over you, his hair a whisper against your skin. A grimace of pure ecstasy pulled at his mouth, and a low growl built in his chest as he fought for the last vestiges of control, holding himself back from breaking you completely. Only when you sobbed his name—ridiculous, simple—did he splinter, driving into you with a force that shoved all the air from your lungs, holding you impaled as his cock pulsed inside you, hot and fevered, a flood that felt like it was remaking you from within.

You were pinned to the earth not merely by his body, but by a force that had nothing to do with choice or want, something closer to gravity than desire. Even after he stilled, the moss beneath you continued to tremble in sympathetic rhythm with the frantic ricochet of your heartbeat. Steve did not move at once—he seemed to savor the heat of you, the locked and wet hold of your cunt, the way your body shuddered around every last pulse. When he finally withdrew, you felt the loss, whimpering at the stinging ache, the slow, deliberate slide of him from your body.

Steve knelt between your legs, cock smeared with your blood and his own seed, and in a motion so gentle it nearly made you weep again, he bowed his head to you. His tongue drew shudders from your body, tracing reverent patterns over newly awakened nerves, and you basked in the deliberate, shocking care of it.

When he was satisfied with his work, Steve moved back up over you, and his lips brushed your temple. “Hush,” he murmured, the words a soft vibration against your skin. “Again and again, until there is no question. The forest wants its fruit… and I will make sure it takes root.”

You could only nod, your body still caught between tremor and euphoria, your chest rising and falling in time with the damp, living earth. The words he’d spoken echoed in your mind: the seed, the fruit, the next guardian. You had thought life a slow accrual, a distant, speculative thing. But there was no speculation now. As your blood quieted, a stillness gathered deep in your womb—a heavy, waiting calm that confirmed the change was not coming, but had already arrived.

Lake monster Curtis being a bolotnik meant that when I incorporated another creature, I wanted to draw on more European folklore and play with the elements, and that's how rooted around until I found mention of the Waldgeist. I definitely took liberties in my interpretation, but just like I did with bolotnik!Curtis, I wanted to play around with the lore the way we've so commonly played with vampire and werewolf lore.

This was its own vibe to write - it flowed from beginning to end, and felt very magical-realism, and created its own kind of creative track in my head that was very different from some of the ideas and projects I've been working on lately, and so I hope it was as immersive to read as it was to write!

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