Page 68 of Stags

He tracked it to the tree, where he’d fucked her the night before. The scent there was potent, practically overpowering, and he liked the way it was twined up with his own. He had the strong urge to stay there and jerk off again, mark the tree trunk with his come or something ridiculous.

He didn’t do that.

But he did follow her scent all the way back through the woods until he came to the field behind the Center. He stayed in the woods and watched the Center until he started seeing people up and moving through the large windows in the Center’s dining room, the one that overlooked the field and the woods beyond.

What the hell was hedoinghere?

He could not be stalking this doe. What was he thinking? That he’d go up to her and convince her to let him go at her again? He’d run off on her the night before. Hell, he’d been kind of a jerk to her.

More than kind of, really.

She had scared him, but this, what he was doing right now, this scared him, too.

He forced himself to go back home.

There, he made more coffee—his other cup had gone cold and gross—and he sat in his living room and watched stupid, trashy, true crime TV. Not even the really in-depth, good documentaries, just the series which were like, “Relationships gone deadly” and that kind of thing.

He tried to turn off his brain.

Mostly, it worked.

He heated up a bunch of junk food to facilitate his binge watching and he ate too much and glared at the screen and reminded himself that he was a lone wolf and that he didn’t want anything like this in his life, that he never had, and that he wasn’t the kind of man who got this way about a womananyway.

It was true.

At least, it had been for his entire life. When he was in high school, he remembered that other guys were starting to date girls or to get really obsessed over the idea of getting laid, and he had sort of not really gotten it.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have a sex drive. He did. He just sort of found it annoying and distracting to everything else he was trying to do, and it seemed to him that it was much more efficient to jerk off and get it out of his system than to try to bother with the whole complicated idea of getting a female to let him do things to her.

He was pretty sure he wouldn’t be any good at it, anyway.

After all, he wasn’t really good at talking to women.

Well, he wasn’t good at talking topeople, truth be told.

No, that wasn’t it either.

He could talk to women and to men and to kids and to everyone, but… he just didn’t like it. It always seemed sort of annoying and distracting and a waste oftime.

People always wanted to talk about stupid things, to go round and round, speculating on things they couldn’t know about, and they wanted to comment on things that were really obvious, like,Wow, really is warm today. I looked at the thermometer. Ninety-three degrees!

What did you even say to that?I looked at the temperature, too. It’s amazing we can both check the temperature. Wow.

People were offended if you said shit like that to them, though.

He knew better than to do that.

He didn’t enjoy offending people.

Anyway, he’d never had a girlfriend. He’d never been in a romantic relationship. He had never pursued one, and he’d never attempted to get into one.

When he would occasionally seek out companionship for a sexual encounter, he would be very clear with the person that they should not expect him to ever contact them afterwards, that it was just sex, just that night, and that was it.

He harped on it, and sometimes women were a little offended about it, but he would tell them that he had heard enough complaining from his sisters to know that he didn’t want to be the kind of man who led women on.I’m not built for it, that’s all,he would say.I’m a loner. It’s not about you. You’re really great.

And he never thought about those women after he fucked them, that was the thing. He would make sure they got home afterwards, getting them cars on apps or driving them back to their houses in the morning (or their cars, still parked in bar parking lots), making sure they were safe, and he’d kiss them goodbye and tell them he’d had a great time and then… it was like they ceased to exist for him.

So, whatever was going on with this fucking doe, it was weird.

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