Page 53 of The Orc’s Comfort

"I feel them. Don't stop."

He doesn't stop. He keeps going, slow, deliberate, each inch announced by another ridge catching and releasing, and I feel myself stretching around him and opening for him until one final push and he's fully seated. We both go still.

The fullness is staggering. I can feel him everywhere, not just where we're joined but through my whole body, a circuit completed. He's so deep and so present that when he shifts even slightly the drag of him makes a sound come out of me with no self-consciousness left in it at all.

"Julia." His voice is wrecked. He drops his forehead to mine, trembling, this enormous, controlled man, trembling with the effort of holding still. "You feel…" He stops. Tries again. "I've been imagining this for months and it doesn't…"

"Move," I say. "Please. I need you to move."

He sets a slow, devastating rhythm, out and back, and I feel every ridge every time. He shifts our position, sits back on his heels, pulls me into his lap, my knees taking my weight on either side of his thighs. I trace the markings on his chest, an anchor for my hands while my body works to hold him.

"Better?" he asks.

"So much better."

I find my own rhythm, rising and falling, watching his face go from careful to something closer to undone. In one smooth motion I'm on my back again, my wrists pinned above my head, his other hand at my hip, and he's looking down at me with eyes that have stopped being careful.

"Now," he says. "I'm going to take care of you properly."

He moves faster. Harder. There's nothing in the room but him above me, candlelight and blue-green stone-light moving over his skin, his tusks, every bit of his attention fixed on my face.

"Come for me," he says. "Let me feel you."

His mouth drops to my neck. I feel him pause there, his lips at my pulse, not moving yet.

"Julia." He says my name like it costs him something to stop, even for this. "I want to mark you. Now, if you'll let me."

"Yes." I don't hesitate. "I want it too."

He makes a sound against my skin that isn't a word in any language, and then I feel the sustained pressure of his mouth at my pulse, unhurried and deliberate, and the fullness inside me and the pressure at my throat arrive together and tip me over the edge at the same moment. I shatter around him, his name coming out of me in a voice I don't recognize. He follows, a sound tearing out of him, low and rough and completely undone, as he pulses deep inside me, his whole body shaking.

It’s the most intimate thing I’ve ever witnessed. Him, finally, not holding back, shaking in my arms as I hold on.

Eventually he releases my wrists and braces his weight on his forearms, his mouth still resting against the mark he's just given me, both of us breathing hard. His chest hums against mine, unguarded in a way I've heard before but never quite like this, never with his whole body still warm inside mine.

"So we're compatible?" I ask.

Something that might be a laugh moves through his chest, warm against my ear. "That is one word for it."

"What's your word?"

He's quiet a moment, like he's actually searching for one. "I don't have one. Not in your language or mine." His arms tighten around me. "I've never felt anything like that before."

"Me neither," I say. "Just so we're clear."

We lie here afterward in the glow of the stones, his body warm and solid against mine, and something clicks into place in me that's never clicked before. Anchored. Connected. Claimed. Home.

"I love you," I say. Not for the first time. But for the first time like this, everything said and done and chosen.

"My Julia," he says. "My mate."

The word should probably give me pause. Instead it lands on me like something I've been waiting to hear named properly.

The morning after is ordinary in every way that matters.

Rhazgar makes breakfast. Not healing broth, actual breakfast. Eggs from the farmers’ market, toast, and elderberry jam made by some women at the compound. He moves through his kitchen in soft gray sweats with the calm of someone who has stopped bracing for the world to snatch something away from him.

His chest is making that sound. The purr. He doesn’t know I can hear it from the couch, or maybe he does and has stopped caring. Either way, I wrap both hands around my coffee and don’t say anything, because some things are better witnessed than named.