Page 75 of Stags

What was going to happen when she was done eating?

“Are you going to want to chase me again?” she said finally. “Are you going to want me to run?”

“I think that’s a bad idea,” he mused. He was seated on the bed, elbow propped up on his knee, and he was all furry broadness, too big for her bed, too big for her room, too big to be inside a building. He seemed like wildness incarnate. “I’d like not to lose control. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Much,” she said, and she was taunting him.

His ears pricked up and lay back down and he didn’t respond to this.

“Will you want us to leave the room?” she said.

His gaze darted around and then settled back on her. “It’s not like I don’t fuck in a bed like a normal person, you know.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said.

“You think I’m going to damage stuff in here?”

“Are you?” Her voice was breathless.

He let out a raw chuckle. “Untie your robe.”

“No,” she said, even as she was doing it, was obeying him.

He shifted on the bed, rolling his head on his shoulders, looking her over. “Show me one of your tits.”

“I’m still eating,” she said.

“Bullshit, you are not. You haven’t eaten anything in a while now.”

It had barely been a couple minutes, but she was done with it, she guessed. She considered him. “You take off your shirt.”

He stripped it off immediately, showing her all the rippling heft of his broadness.

“Do you, like, lift weights while you’re coding?”

“No,” he said. “But I do shit outside a lot. I, uh, make things.”

“Things.”

“Like furniture and things. Sometimes just dumb shit, garden decorations or whatever? I do carpentry and welding. Mostly out of trash, or things people don’t want. Heavy things, I guess.” He surveyed himself. “I walk a lot, too. I like to walk and think through coding problems.”

She blinked at him. “So, you’re an artist, too.”

“I’m not an…” He raised his gaze to hers. “Sort of, maybe.”

They looked into each other’s eyes for a while, and then she reached down and deliberately pulled aside her robe, baring her body to him.

He drew in an audible breath. “Show me the other one, too.”

She hesitated, and then she did it.

He stared at her for a very long time, and he didn’t say anything, and she didn’t say anything.

She could practically feel his gaze on her bare breasts, or maybe it was the air on them, or maybe it was the way that paying attention to something always seems to make it more sensitive.

He got to his feet.

She stayed where she was, sitting across from him with her breasts sticking out of her robe, as he advanced on her with all his girth and his height and his fur.

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