Page 13 of Stags

“To firsts,” said Eiren, lifting her glass.

“To firsts,” the others echoed, clinking their glasses.

Then all of them drank deep.

The night was still young.

CHAPTER FOUR

BRUIN RAPPED ONthe door of his son’s room that evening.

No answer.

He tugged out his phone to send a text, and then there Stockton was, rounding a bend and coming down the hallway. Bruin put his phone away, feeling a surge of pride and love, the way he always did seeing the boy.

He wouldn’t have traded this for the world, this relationship they had. He had read thinkpieces in various journals about how bucks couldn’t bond with their offspring the way males in predatorkin species could, and he knew that was utter bullshit.

Mammals all had the chemical building blocks for it, and birds, too. Bonding was an adaptational response. If there was a mother-child bond, there could be a father-child bond or a mating bond. It just really wasn’t as complicated as people liked to make it.

Of course, he knew that “natural” was different than “chemical.” Natural encompassed a whole host of other behaviors and social traditions and everything else.

Life was complicated.

But he had a son.

About fifteen years ago, he’d gotten a vasectomy before participating in one of these ruts, and then he didn’t tell anyone. It was a cowardly choice, he supposed. He could have abstained. He had—once—made overtures towards Stockton’s mother, but she hadn’t been interested in being what she called “tied down.” He thought this was ludicrous, considering the woman had three children and numerous familial obligations. How did she think of herself as free, exactly?

But, regardless, he could have made a number of other choices. He could have pursued another woman, one of any species at all. If he’d wanted a pair bond enough, he could have gone after it.

He hadn’t wanted it enough, he supposed.

But he also knew that if he had fathered another child and had been prevented from being able to form a relationship with the fawn in the way he’d had a relationship with Stockton, it would have broken him inside somewhere, rather badly.

So, vasectomy.

And then, he indulged in this breeding rite, anyway. And he wasn’t sure if that was entirely fair, though he did his best to avoid women who were marked as breeding. If he were to take up a woman’s time in that way, when she was actively trying to get pregnant and he couldn’t do it, it would have been wrong, he thought.

However, this did cut out the bulk of the women at these sorts of gatherings.

Women didn’t often show for the thrill of it. He wasn’t sure why that was, not exactly. He thought that women had just as many sexual fantasies as men, after all. He wasn’t sure if women were intelligent enough to understand that most fantasies were better never acted out, or if it was that women did try acting out their sexual fantasies—and often found them painful, awkward, and frightening in real life, so stopped that nonsense rather quickly.

Whatever the case, if women showed up for these sorts of rites, most of the time, they were here to get knocked up.

“Bruin!” called Stockton. He’d never called him ‘Dad’ or anything like that and Bruin had never pushed. Their situation was irregular enough without putting pressure on the boy, he thought. “There you are. Did you get my text?”

“Sure,” said Bruin, grinning at him. “I saw it. You said you checked in and gave me your room number, which is why I’m here.”

“Moon and sun, Bruin, you could have texted me back.”

“I didn’t have anything to say,” said Bruin.

Stockton let out a guffaw. “Okay, sure, whatever. I’m going to have to give you a crash course in text etiquette, I see.”

Bruin laughed. “All right, you do that.”

“Yeah, when you were young, they didn’t even have cell phones.”

“They did not,” said Bruin. He was in his late fifties. He hadn’t been young, not exactly, when he’d sired Stockton. He could have other children, maybe, from the years before. He’d made attempts to find that out and come up with very little, however. Tracking down those women from his twenties proved practically impossible. Lots of times, the interaction had been so brief and casual, he hadn’t gotten much more than the woman’s first name. And that wasn’t atypical for deerkin, not in the season.

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