Page 126 of Stags

And then he fucked up into her in a series of enthusiastic thrusts, and she threw back her head and sighed out her pleasure into the ceiling.

“Wait,” he said, letting out a breath.

“Now what?”

“No, we were supposed to be doing this soft,” he said, very out of breath.

“Fuck that, just come,” she said. “Can you…?”

He nodded, rolling them over, pinning her down. “You sure?”

“Oh, yes,” she said.

He didn’t last very long after that. He fucked her with wild abandon, and she liked it, liked looking up at him, at his antlers and the gleam of the muscles in his arms, and the look of pure enjoyment on his face.

He pulled out at the last moment, spilling on her belly, and she touched it and wondered at herself for not having a conversation with him about protection and birth control and everything else. It was possibly because of the rite, she supposed, all that unprotected stranger sex being normalized. They’d talk about it later. He could come in her, though, she thought. She was on the pill, and they’d both been cleared of STDs for the rut weekend.

As long as they hadn’t been with anyone else, and they hadn’t, it should be all right.

He jumped out of the bed and went to get a towel from the bathroom. He wiped her clean, apologizing, and she said she didn’t mind it, that it was okay, not to worry about it.

Later, lying in each other’s arms, he said, “Uh, I guess I have to show you soft sex some other time.”

“Yeah,” she said, “I guess you do.”

“So, I get another time?”

“Yeah,” she said again, “I guess you do.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

IT WAS DECEMBERwhen Athos finally brought home the test.

Tawny dumped the bag out, peered at it, scoffed, and threw the cardboard box at him.

It hit him in the middle of the chest and he reached out and caught it.

“You keep saying you’re going to pick one up, and then you always ‘forget.’” Athos set the pregnancy test on his coffee table.

“Thanks,” she said breezily. “It’s better to do it in the morning, though. You get more accurate results. So, I’ll take it then.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

He was staring at her.

“What?” she said, as if she was very, very confused.

He hesitated. “Nothing.”

And she changed the subject to something else, something about his job, because Athos loved to bitch about shit and loved to talk about himself, and bringing up his job gave Athos ample opportunity to do both.

They talked, and they ordered food in, and then they had sex, and it was just like any other evening that they spent together.

In the morning, when she woke up and the pregnancy test was taunting her on the counter in the bathroom, that was when she knew she wasn’t going to take it.

She used the toilet without using the test, glaring at it, feeling as if she had gotten away with something, as if she had won something, though she knew that she was being ridiculous, that there wasn’t anything here to triumph over.

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