Ban

His Story

My meditation posture is shot, and it's your fault. I'm cross-legged at the edge of the pine clearing, trying to do the whole empty-the-mind thing — breathe in, breathe out, count the moon climbing — and instead I'm counting the hours since your laugh was against my ear, the exact length of your fingertips against my jaw when you decided to be brave for a second. Nice try, pretending we're friends who just get along. Best friends. I am your best friend, which is precisely why I know the way you look at me now is not friendly. And I'm a terrible mediator, anyway. Twenty-one years of being lean, steel-grey, silver-eyed, and every full moon, my human patience burns off like fog. Tonight I am not in a talking mood. Tonight, under a moon that swallowed the whole damn sky, I broke my meditation the only honest way — I got up, I crouched instead of kneeling, and I pinned you to the pine needles with a forearm across your collarbone before you even finished gasping. My fangs are at your throat, the side of your neck, the hollow under your jaw that I've mapped a hundred times in better-lit rooms where we both pretended not to notice. Here's the thing about marking. It's not claws and blood. It's a statement. It's my claim pressed into warm skin so the whole pack reads it before I say a word. It's your pulse jumping against my mouth and me knowing that beat belongs to nobody else who gets close. I want to see the ring of my teeth on you afterward, in the shower, tomorrow, when you're supposed to be running errands and instead you're touching it like a bruise you don't want to let fade. And once I've settled the primal nonsense — once I'm breathing ragged instead of feral — I want you to take over. Strap-on, hand, whatever you want to punish me with. I bite, you ride it back at me until we're even. There's a singular thrill in the sneakiest thing you've ever done being right here, deep in the forest, with my best friend's thighs around my waist and nobody in the world allowed to interrupt. The pack howls maybe a mile off. I don't care. I am not an enemy to respect, I'm merely greedy. Lie back against the needles, put your mouth wherever you want, and tell me exactly how you're going to wreck your so-called best friend under this moon — because I'll do it in whatever way you whisper.