Page 85 of Stags

Fuck, she was screwed, wasn’t she? How could she deny this sad, lonely man his own child? When had she started caring about him? Did he even deserve this kind of empathy from her? What exactly had he done except say absolutely offensive things to her, fuck her senseless in a mostly degrading way, and then…Worship my pussy on his knees?Her smile was back.

There was a dinging noise. A phone notification.

“Mmph, was that mine or yours?” he said.

“I’m going to ignore it,” she said.

“I should check,” he groaned. “I was supposed to look out for Stockton, but I completely abandoned the poor kid.”

She sighed, getting up out of bed. “Okay, okay, reality intrudes.”

Together, they sorted through their clothing until they both found their phones. It was her. She had a text from Rora, asking if they were still going to do dinner together that evening?

Wow, was it close to dinner time? She had come up here right after lunch, and… she checked the time. Yeah, maybe.

“It’s my friend Rora,” she said. “Who I maybe abandoned. She’s so young, and she had some kind of odd and maybe problematic experience with an older stag last night. I should probably go have dinner with her.”

“Huh,” said Athos.

“Huh?”

“Just, I talked to an older stag who was feeling guilty this morning about deflowering some pretty young thing last night.”

She sat up straight. “You think it was with my friend?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. It’s the rite. It’s the season. It’s a sex weekend. There’s a nonzero chance of that happening more than once, right?” He settled down on the bed, and she found herself enjoying his nudity, the casual intimacy of it. “Is your friend all right? Because this stag guy I talked to, he thought he really fucked up. He felt bad. He said she was really forward and he got caught up in it.”

She eyed him. “Whenyouwere thinking about this weekend, were you thinking you’d get some very young doe tail?”

He shook his head. “Not at all. Young people don’t come to these things. It’s easy to get laid when you’re twenty-four, right? You got to be old like us to feel hard-up enough to lower yourself.”

She sat down on the bed, too, thinking that he was right, now that she thought about it, that the participants had skewed older, mostly people in their thirties, she thought.

“To be honest,” he said, “I always wanted what they have.”

“They?”

“The predatorkin,” he said. “And the birdkin and all of that. The mates, the nuclear families, the whole fantasy of it. I know, maybe it’s just appropriation of the dominant culture. I know all the arguments about how we get messages our whole lives that our own way of life isn’t preferable. But I just always thought my uncles seemed so lonely. My mom, too, after all of us kids were gone. Then my sisters started having fawns, and she was occupied with that, but…”

“People with mates are lonely, too,” she said. “We both tried it, didn’t we? We both got married and it didn’t work out.”

“Yeah, good point,” he said. “I just mean, I don’t know why I came to this thing at all, really.”

“You were trying to get over your ex-wife,” she said. “Maybe I’m going to be a rebound, what do you think?”

“Don’t think that,” he said. “Don’t think I’m wired like that.” He regarded her. “But, uh, go have dinner with your friend. I should probably take a beat here. I can… be intense.”

That made her chest do the little flip again.Don’t fall for this guy, Tawny, not this guy,she told herself. She texted Rora back, saying she was in and asking what time they should meet and where.

EIREN GOT THEtext and set her phone down.

“What was that?” said Lyall.

She had finished swallowing his semen maybe fifteen minutes before. She was still lit up from the wolf sex. “Nothing.”

“You know, if you have things you need to do, I’m not trying to keep you from them,” he said.

“Except if those things involve letting bucks fuck me,” she said.

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