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A Warren of Our Own

My thighs were already wet before I ever sat down on the cushion, and that was the most embarrassing part of the whole morning.

Not my parents standing three steps away like they were watching me off to my first market day. Not the line of aunties pretending they weren't peeking over the cooking fires. Not even the way my dress (short, ceremonial, and frankly insulting in how little it covered) kept riding up over the gap between my legs every time I shifted my weight. No. The embarrassing part was the slick. Three weeks of breeding herbs in my morning tea, in my stew, in the little honeyed cakes Mama kept pressing into my paws, and now my body answered every stray thought like a bell being struck.

I tugged the hem down again. It rode right back up. Of course it did. That was the point of the cut. Wide hips like mine were meant to be on display today. Breeder-ready, the matchmaker had said when she'd measured me last spring, with the same satisfied tone Papa used when he weighed out good grain.

"Stop fidgeting, kit." Mama's voice was soft behind me. The bone comb moved in long, patient strokes down the back of my neck, through the soft brown fur between my ears, smoothing the longer fluff at my nape. "You'll muss your fur and Lumen will scold me."

"I'm not fidgeting."

"You're vibrating."

"That's different."

She laughed, a small, careful laugh, the kind mothers make when they're trying not to cry on a happy day. The comb caught a tangle at the base of my left ear and she worked it loose with her fingers. My ear flicked on its own. I couldn't help it. Every sound in the clearing felt enormous. The crackle of the ceremonial fire. The low murmur of drums from somewhere past the tree line. The wet shift of my own thighs when I crossed and uncrossed my ankles.

Papa stood a polite distance off, hands folded behind his back, doing the thing he always did when he was about to be sentimental, pretending to inspect the sky. He'd cried at my older sister's tenting. He was going to cry at mine. I'd decided that was fine. I'd decided a lot of things were fine this morning, because if I didn't decide they were fine I was going to bolt into the woods on my long young legs and not come back until sundown.

I was leaving their care today. That was the plain shape of it. I would walk into that red tent a daughter, and I would walk out a mate, and a bride, and, if the herbs and the gods and the boy all did their work, the founding doe of my own warren. My own burrow. My own kits. The thought sent a hot, ridiculous flutter down through my belly, settling low enough to make me shift again on the cushion and bite back a whimper.

The boy. That was the part my brain kept circling like a fox around a hole.

I didn't know him. I wasn't supposed to. Tradition said the doe entered first and waited in the dim, and the buck came in second, and neither of you knew the other's face until the ceremonial veil came down. All I'd been told was that he was my age, that he was from a different clan (Mama had pressed that point twice, proud of the matchmaker's work) and that he was, in her exact words, "a very good boy, Chloe, a really very good boy."

A good boy from far away. Strong bloodlines. Strong everything, hopefully. I bit the inside of my cheek and tried not to picture it and pictured it anyway and felt the cushion get a little wetter and hated myself for half a heartbeat before the herbs rolled the hate right back under.

"You'll like him," Mama murmured, like she'd heard the whole conversation inside my skull. The comb paused at the tip of my long left ear, smoothing the fur to a clean point. "Your father and I picked carefully. We wouldn't give you to someone who'd be rough with you."

"I know, Mama."

"He'll be nervous too."

"I know."

"And if he isn't, you bite him."

"Mama."

"I'm serious. A doe who doesn't bite on her first day gets walked on for the rest of her seasons." She set the comb down on the little cedar tray beside us and cupped both my cheeks from behind, tilting my head back so I had to look up into her warm dark eyes. "You are not a small thing, Chloe. You hear me? You go in there and you take what's yours."

My throat did something tight and stupid. I nodded against her palms.

The bell rang.

It was a small bronze sound, almost polite, but it cut through the clearing like a knife through bread. The drums under the trees stopped. My ears shot straight up before I could think about it. Papa turned from his sky-watching and his face did the thing: the soft crumple, then the firm set, then the small proud nod that meant he wasn't going to embarrass either of us by speaking.

The flap of the red tent parted and Lumen stepped out.

She wore the ceremonial rose, that deep dusty pink that only the tent-women wore, the long sleeves embroidered with running hares at the cuffs. Her own ears were silver at the tips with age. She didn't smile, exactly (Lumen never smiled at the threshold, that was tradition too) but she inclined her head to my parents in a way that said well done, the work is good, and then she turned that same calm look on me and waited.

I grabbed for my water skin.

Mama's mating draught had gone from bitter to actively foul somewhere in the second week, and the last mouthful at the bottom of the skin was the worst of it: thick, herbal, faintly green-tasting, like chewing a handful of crushed leaves dipped in honey gone wrong. I swallowed it down in three hard pulls and tried not to make a face. Mama would have scolded me for making a face. The herbs hit my tongue and then, almost immediately, hit somewhere much lower, a slow warm pull behind my navel that bloomed outward in a way I was getting embarrassingly familiar with. Three weeks of this, and my body had learned the taste meant get ready. The dreams I'd been having. Gods. The slickness between my thighs answered the swallow before my mouth was even empty.

I capped the skin. I handed it to Mama. My paw was steadier than I expected.

I stood.

The dress slid right back up my hips and I didn't bother fixing it this time. That was the point. Let the gap between my thighs show. Let the wet on the inside of them show. I was a doe walking to her tent. That was the whole job.

Papa made a sound that was almost a word and didn't finish it. Mama squeezed my elbow once, hard, and let go.

I followed Lumen into the red tent.

The inside of the tent was bigger than it had any right to be.

That was the first thing my brain managed to hold onto: that the red wasn't just a color, it was a whole room of color, hanging in long panels from poles I couldn't see the tops of, the canvas dyed so deep it turned the air itself pink where the lantern light caught it. The space went back and back, low-ceilinged and warm, broken into little curtained alcoves down both long sides like stalls at a market. Except the things being sold at this market were already very much in use.

I almost tripped.

The first alcove on my right had its curtain pulled most of the way open (on purpose, I realized, because that was part of it, the watching was part of it) and there was a doe in there I half recognized from two villages over, kneeling forward on her elbows on a pile of cushions, and there was a buck behind her with his paws gripping her hips so tight the fur was rucked up around his fingers, and she was bouncing. That was the word. Bouncing, in a steady rocking rhythm, ears flat down her back, mouth open in a soft round shape that wasn't quite a word and wasn't quite a sound, and between her thighs was a slow shining mess of white that ran down the inside of one leg in a line you could've measured with a ruler. Already taking, I thought, in a small clear voice that didn't sound like mine. Already starting her warren. The buck's eyes were closed. He looked like a man praying.

Would that be me in an hour? Would there be a line of wet down the inside of my own thigh by the time the lanterns burned low?

My ears went hot.

Lumen didn't slow down. She walked with the calm of a woman who'd walked this aisle a thousand times, and I scurried after her on legs that suddenly felt very young, and my eyes, traitor things, slid left.

The alcove on the left was bigger. Two cushions shoved together. A buck I'd never seen before, broad through the shoulders in a way the boys back home never got, had his mate pinned belly-down under him and was working into her in long heavy strokes that shook the cushions and shook her and shook, I was fairly sure, the floor under my own feet. His cock was... gods. I'd never. I'd seen drawings. I'd seen the carved fertility post outside the old shrine, which Mama had marched me past every spring with her paw firmly over my eyes until I was twelve. I had not seen a real one, pink and slick and very obviously bigger than the polite drawings suggested, sliding wet and shining out of a real doe and then back in, and the small sound that came out of my throat was not a sound I had given permission to leave.

Lumen's ear flicked back toward me. She did not turn around. She did not have to. I felt my face go the same color as the tent.

"Eyes forward, kit," she said, mild as morning.

"Yes, Lumen."

I kept my eyes forward. Mostly. The thing about keeping your eyes forward in a tent full of mating couples is that forward isn't a real direction when the sound is coming from everywhere: wet, rhythmic, soft-cried, sometimes a laugh, once a low buck-groan so deep I felt it in the bones behind my ears. The air was so thick with it that every breath seemed to carry something into me, salt and musk and the herb-sweet under-smell of Mama's draught coming off skin. My thighs were soaked. There was no other word. The hem of my ceremonial dress was sticking to me in a way that, three weeks ago, would have sent me running for a wash basin in horror, and right now I could not have cared less.

We walked the whole long aisle. It took years. It took maybe twenty steps.

At the very back, tucked into the curve of the tent's far wall, was a smaller alcove that Lumen turned us into with a small gesture of her hand. Calling it a room was generous. It was a square of woven mats on the ground, a low pile of fresh cushions in the middle, a single hanging lantern that burned a softer yellow than the rest of the tent, and around three sides a curtain of that thin pale gauze the southern weavers made, the kind you could see through if you squinted, and definitely hear through if you breathed. The wet rhythm from the alcove two over came through it like there was no curtain at all.

"This one's yours," Lumen said.

Two tent-women I hadn't seen approach were suddenly at my elbows, gentle and quick, and the ceremonial dress was lifted up and off over my head in one practiced motion before I'd finished deciding whether to lift my arms. Tradition. The doe enters clothed and waits bare. I knew. I'd known since I was small. Knowing didn't stop the small startled breath I took when the warm tent air hit my belly and my chest and the wet insides of my thighs all at once.

They guided me down onto the cushions. One of them (I think it was Lumen herself, the hands felt like hers) pressed lightly between my shoulder blades until I settled back on my heels, knees apart the way a waiting doe sat, paws loose in my lap. The other tucked a strand of fur behind my ear and murmured something soft and approving that I didn't catch.

Then they were gone. Curtain rustling shut behind them. The little yellow lantern swung once on its hook and steadied.

I was alone. Sort of. Aloneness in this tent was a generous description.

I waited.

My ears would not stay still. They flicked toward every sound and every sound was the same sound in different keys: the rocking from the right, the heavy slow buck two alcoves down, somebody laughing breathlessly behind me, a doe's voice rising up the scale in a series of small bitten-off cries that climbed and climbed and broke at the top into a long shuddering vowel that made my whole belly clench in sympathy. I knew that voice. I was almost sure I knew that voice. Reni from the river-side burrow, who'd held my paw last winter when we'd gotten into Papa's plum wine and cried about boys neither of us had spoken to. Reni was in this tent. Reni was, by the sound of it, already very, very far ahead of me, and a hot mean little flicker of something that was not quite jealousy and not quite competition curled up under my ribs.

She got hers first, a thought that felt less like mine and more like the herbs themselves, a warm green whisper in my blood. Where's yours?

I pressed my thighs together. That was a mistake. The slick made a small wet sound against itself and I flushed all the way down my chest.

Where was he?

A shuffle, outside the curtain. Paws on mats. A low murmur: Lumen's voice, and another voice answering, deeper, younger, careful. The curtain at the front of my little square shifted.

He had to duck.

That was my first thought, and it was a stupid one, because the ceiling wasn't even that low. He had to duck because he was enormous. Not fierce-enormous. Soft-enormous, the kind of big that registered slowly, like you kept finding more of him the longer you looked. Cream-and-brown fur gone fluffy at the chest and thick at the haunches, a little rounded at the belly in a way that made something in me want to poke it. His ears were not rabbit ears.

A hare.

Mama had said a different clan. Mama had said strong bloodlines. Mama had not said hare, and I was going to have a very pointed conversation with Mama about that on the other side of this morning, assuming I survived it, which at the moment I was not at all sure I was going to.

That almost made me feel better. He was nervous too.

He blocked the doorway, hunched and uncertain, half-hidden behind his own forearms like he'd wanted to vanish through the tent wall instead of walk inside. His eyes flicked away from mine, found them again, and the rest of him caught up a heartbeat later: the trembling inhale, the way his chest rose, the almost shivering twitch of his paws where they fisted at his sides. I knew that look, even though I'd never seen it before, because it was the look I'd had for the last three weeks when my body was soaked and desperate and I'd tried to pretend it was just the weather.

His gaze dropped.

Gods, he was looking at me. Not in the clinical way the matchmaker had, not in the sizing-up way that grown bucks did when they thought you hadn't noticed. He looked like he was about to start drooling, and a bolt of smug, wicked pride ran straight through me. His pupils had gone huge. His tongue flicked over his lower teeth, nervous, hungry. For a long, deep second, he just stared at the glossy heat pooling down my thighs and the way my hips splayed out on the cushions, and I watched his sheath stir. The first slip of pink broke out, impossibly thick, glistening at the tip, and my whole insides clenched down hard enough I had to dig my claws into the pillows to keep from shaking.

My chest hurt from how hard my pulse banged against it. I wasn't supposed to look. I wasn't supposed to care. I cared so much I almost laughed. Forget the matchmaker's measurements and the smug talk in the marketplace; if he could even get that into me, he'd be making good on every promise my hips had ever made.

His eyes caught mine again. No point in pretending. I let him see how I was staring. Let him see the flush spreading down my chest, the way my fur stood up at the nape. If anything, it made him even shyer; the tip of his nose went pale, his ears pressed flat, and he looked like he wanted to melt right through the floor.

Then he spoke, and oh, the voice. It was deeper than I expected for someone as anxious as he looked, and it came out half-choked, tangled in embarrassment, like it was his first time using words.

"I, uh, um..."

He gulped. Literally gulped. It was adorable, pitiful, and made something in me want to sink my claws into his fur and not let go.

He stuck out his paw. To shake. In a mating tent. I stared at it. He stared at it. We both stared at it.

"Sorry," he said, and pulled it back, and then didn't seem to know what to do with it, so he sort of pressed it against his own sternum like he was trying to push himself back out through the curtain. "My ma said I should..."

His nose twitched. Just once. Then again, slower, like he was checking. His whole face went very still in the way a face goes still when the rest of the body stops listening to it.

"You're…" He stopped. Not like he'd thought better of it, more like the word had simply run out of road. He shut his mouth hard enough I heard his teeth click. His ears, which had been plastered flat since he walked in, began to rise. He wasn't doing it on purpose. That was obvious. He looked almost offended by his own ears, like they'd betrayed him in front of company.

They kept going anyway.

So did something else.

I didn't look away. He noticed that I didn't look away, which made the tips of his ears flush dark, so I didn't.

His paw was still pressed against his chest like it was the only part of him still following instructions.

"Your ma said you should what?" I asked.

His mouth opened. Closed. "Introduce myself," he finally managed. "Properly."

I wanted to gloat. No, worse: I wanted him to lose control first. I wanted to watch a nervous boy's composure burn right down to nothing, right in front of me.

We stared, the sounds of the tent fading until there was only our breathing. My heat was a low, constant pressure, a silent dare. I held myself still, an open invitation, wanting him to see just how ready I was, how badly he needed to take what was so clearly offered.

Another heartbeat, then Lumen cleared her throat behind him.

Her look was the kind of thing only old women perfected, a glint that was equal parts honored elder and lecher holding in a laugh. "Well," she said, "don't keep her waiting, boy." Then, with a strength that had no business in her dry old bones, she gave him a push.

It wasn't gentle. He staggered forward two full steps, tried to steady himself, and then landed directly over me, his paws bracing on either side of my thighs, his chest brushing my knees. The smell of him hit me hard this close. Under the musk and the heat of him was something herbal, green and faintly sweet, not quite like mine: a different blend, a different clan's recipe, the same intention. My body answered with a fresh welling of slick that ran hot down my leg, wet and shameful and exquisitely right.

"You two have fun," Lumen called, already halfway out the curtain, "I'll tell your folks not to wait up."

She left us alone, buried in the bright red hush and the smell of sex, the gauze drawn around us like the thinnest possible wall between our little square of breathing and the whole rutting tent beyond it.

For a moment, neither of us moved.

I could have waited forever. The sight of him so close, paws trembling, sheath heavy and slowly unsheathing more of himself with every heartbeat, was almost enough to milk out a climax right there. There was so much of him. My mind kept circling back to it, measuring, imagining, wanting. He was bigger than the statues at the shrine, bigger than my wildest, herb-drenched dreams. I caught myself whimpering, quietly, without any effort to smother it.

He heard. Gods, he heard. Something hungry flickered in his gaze. He reached for my hip, not a polite touch, not a careful one, but an instinct, something that ran right through both of us at the same time. His paw spanned the curve of my hip and sank in. He groaned a little, biting it off before it could get loud.

I arched into his grip, wanting more, needing more. My thighs slid open for him and the hot-wet sound of it probably would have mortified me in any other moment. Now I wanted him to hear. I wanted his nose in it, his tongue in it.

This is the part of the story where I'd like to say that we pulled back from each other, introduced ourselves properly, talked things out like the well-bred rabbits we were supposed to be. We did not talk things out. One moment he was staring, eyes wide and pupils blown black at the slick heat between my thighs, his breath coming in short little huffs that hit my inner thighs, and the next I had grabbed him by the ears and pulled him into it, pushing his muzzle against me and grinding. The sound he made was muffled and desperate and perfect. Names could come later. Much later.

He didn't fight it. That was the thing I'd remember later, when I had the wherewithal to remember anything, he didn't fight it for even a second. The whole nervous, shaking, paw-pressed-to-his-chest boy went somewhere else the instant his nose touched me, and what came up in his place was something with a tongue and absolutely no manners.

The first long drag of it nearly folded me in half.

I heard myself make a sound I'd never made before, high and broken and not at all dignified, and my paws clenched harder in those ridiculous black-tipped ears. He took that as encouragement. Of course he did. He pressed in deeper, that broad blunt muzzle working into me, and the tongue, gods, the tongue, flat and hot and wide, dragging up the whole soaked length of me in one slow stroke that ended with a flick right where I needed it and didn't know I needed it until it was happening.

My back came off the cushions.

"There," I gasped, because apparently I was the kind of doe who gave directions now, "there, do that, do that again..."

He did it again. He did it again like his life depended on it, like the only instruction his mother had ever truly drilled into him was this. His paws crept up the backs of my thighs and gripped, hauling me up onto his muzzle, and I let him, I let him lift me right off the cushions and arrange me however he wanted because at this point my legs had stopped being mine and started being his. The herb-warmth bloomed up through my belly in a wave I couldn't get ahead of. Three weeks of build, three weeks of slick and dreams and biting my own paw in the dark, and it was all rushing toward the edge at once.

Behind the gauze, somewhere off to the right, Reni's voice climbed and broke again. I didn't care. For once in my life I wasn't behind her. I was right there, right at the cliff, and the boy with no name and no composure was the one shoving me off it.

"I'm..." That was all I got out.

I came apart with my claws in his ears and his name still unknown to me, my thighs clamping down on either side of his head, my whole body locking and shuddering while my ears went flat against my skull. He didn't stop. That was the worst of it, the best of it: he groaned into me and kept going, drinking it down like the foul green draught had been honey all along, riding the spasms out until I was pawing weakly at his ears, not to push him deeper, but to tell him mercy, mercy, too much.

He pulled back.

His muzzle was a glossy mess. His ears stood straight up now, both of them, proud as flags, and whatever shy thing had ducked through that curtain was nowhere in his face anymore. He licked his lips. He looked, I thought hazily, extremely pleased with himself for someone who had tried to shake my paw four minutes ago.

"Hi," he said.

I burst out laughing. I couldn't help it. It came up out of me cracked and breathless and undignified, and his ears flicked at the sound and a slow, helpless grin spread across his soaked face, and that (somehow that, the grin, after everything) was the thing that did me in completely.

"Hi," I said back.

Below the grin, where he'd risen up enough that I could see all of him at last, the rest of him was very much not finished being introduced. He'd unsheathed fully now, thick and flushed and shining, twitching against his own belly with every breath he took, and the sight of it sent a fresh clench through me that hadn't even had the decency to wait for the last one to finish.

His grin faltered. His eyes had dropped again (to my face, to where my thighs were still spread wide and slicker than ever, to my face again) and the nervous boy flickered back for just a second, throat bobbing.

“Can I...?"

"Not yet."

I put a paw flat on his chest and pushed.

Not hard. Hard wasn't what this needed. Just enough that he sat back on his heels and let me up off the cushions, and then, because the herbs had decided I was a doe with a plan now, apparently, I rolled forward onto my knees and crawled the long slow length of him.

He froze. Every muscle in him froze. I could feel it under my paws, the way his belly went tight when I dragged a palm down it, the way his breath caught when my own fur brushed his thighs. I took my time. I had decided, somewhere between the laughing and the hi, that he was going to learn what it felt like to be the nervous one for a while.

I slid my chest down his chest. I slid my belly down his belly. I dragged the wet insides of my thighs along the tops of his and felt him shudder under me like a bowstring being plucked, and the small whining noise that came out of his throat was the most flattering thing anyone had ever said to me.

And then I met him.

I sat back between his knees and stared.

Gods. Oh, gods. The shrine carvings had lied. The drawings the older girls passed around at solstice had lied. Even Reni, who liked to claim she'd seen her brother's once and had described it in unhelpful detail behind the wash-house, had lied, or had simply never seen anything like this, which was the more charitable read.

He was massive.

The flushed pink of him stood up against his belly, twitching in a steady little rhythm that matched the pulse in his throat, and the tip was tapered the way the drawings had gotten right, but everything else about it was so much more. Slick already. A clear bead welled at the very point of him while I watched and rolled, fat and lazy, down the underside, and the smell that came off of it hit the back of my nose and went straight down through my whole body. Sweet. Musky. Warm. Honey gone right, for once. My mouth filled with water so fast I had to swallow, and even that swallow felt obscene.

Below, because there was a below, there was so much him there was a whole geography of him, the base sat heavy in a soft nest of cream fur, and the pair of them under there were round and full and pulled up close to his body in a way that, even with all of three weeks' worth of whispered auntie-knowledge in my head, I understood immediately to mean ready.

I reached.

My paw looked small on him. That was the first thing. I'd never thought my paws were small, I was a tall doe, long-limbed, broad through the hip the way Mama always crowed about, but when I laid the flat of my palm against the side of him my fingers didn't go all the way around, not even close, and the heat of him went right up my arm.

He made a sound.

It wasn't a word. It barely qualified as a noise. It was a small punched-out huff that came up out of his chest before he could stop it, and his thighs twitched on either side of me, and when I glanced up his eyes had gone enormous and his ears, which had been so proud a minute ago, had flicked half-down again like they didn't know whether this was the kind of thing to be brave about or not.

"Easy," I murmured, because that was what Mama said to skittish does at the market when she was about to weigh them, and because the herbs had decided I was the steady one in the room now. "I just want to look."

I trailed my fingers up. Slow. The skin of him was hotter than the rest of him, and softer than I'd expected, soft over something that was very much not soft, like the velvet on the carved post outside the shrine except the post had never twitched under my hand the way he twitched now. I followed a long thick vein up the underside with the pad of my thumb and he made the huff sound again, louder, and his paws fisted in the cushions on either side of his hips.

Two alcoves down, a buck groaned through clenched teeth, a long low rolling sound that ended in a soft slap of hips meeting and a doe's breathless little oh, oh, oh. I felt the rhythm of it in my own belly. I did not look up. He had all of me.

I cupped my hand around the tapered tip and the bead that had been gathering there smeared warm across my palm, and the smell of it bloomed up between us so thick I could taste it on my tongue. I was drooling. I noticed that distantly. I was drooling like a kit in front of a sweets stall, and I did not care.

"You're..." His voice cracked. He tried again. "You don't have to..."

"I know." I dragged my thumb through the wet at his tip and watched his whole stomach jump. "I want to."

I slid my hand down. All the way down. Past the thick of him, past the soft cream fur at the base, and cupped the heavy weight of him underneath in my palm.

Oh.

They were heavier than I'd been ready for. Dense. Full. My hand sagged a little under the weight before I caught it, and I had a sudden, vivid, dizzying picture of what was inside them and what it was for and where, specifically, it was meant to go, and the picture rolled through me so hard I had to press my thighs together against another hot pulse of slick.

Empty into me, I thought, and the thought had no decency in it at all. Empty all of that into me. Fill me up so full it runs down my legs the way it's running down hers, two curtains over. Start my warren in one sitting. Send me back out of this tent already round with it.

I made a small noise. I think it was a noise. He certainly heard it; his thighs jumped again and a fresh bead welled at his tip and ran down over my other hand.

The aunties had been very specific.

I'd sat on a low stool in Auntie Pell's kitchen two nights ago with three of them around me and a cup of that gods-awful draught cooling in my paws while they'd talked at me about today like they were giving me directions to the next village over. Rub firm down the sides, Auntie Pell had said, with that big knobbly hand of hers in the air making the motion. Firm, Chloe, not pretty. Pretty is for later. Today is for work. And the first load, Auntie Mol had cut in, leaning forward over her tea, the first load you taste, kit, you hear me? You taste it. Lets the body know him. Lets him know you took it. None of that wasted on the cushions for a first.

I had nodded and gone hot to the tips of my ears and tried to commit it to memory through the haze of the herbs.

I remembered now.

I shifted up onto my knees and walked them forward on the mat until I was settled in tight between his spread thighs, my chest against the heat of his belly, my face level with him. He had to look down at me to see me, and when he did, his throat bobbed in a swallow so big I saw it travel.

"Hi," I said, because turnabout was fair, and then before he could answer me I curled my smaller paw around the thick of him and squeezed.

His head went back.

Just an inch. Just a little tip back, ears flattening down the line of his skull, eyes going to slits, a soft startled gh sound coming up out of him that he tried to bite off and didn't entirely manage. I felt him jump in my hand.

"Oh," I breathed, mostly to myself. "Oh, you like that."

His ears flicked. He didn't answer. He didn't have to.

I tightened my grip, firm, like Auntie Pell had said, not pretty, and started to move. Long slow strokes at first, root to tip, the way I'd been told, the slick from his own tip easing my paw the whole way up and back down. He was so much that I couldn't cover him with one hand, so I added the other, stacking my paws around him, and the sight of how much of him still showed above my fingers made the inside of my belly clench.

"Good boy," I murmured. I didn't know where the words were coming from. I'd never said anything like them in my life. The herbs, maybe. The smell of him in the back of my throat, maybe.

He twitched.

That was the first thing, a deep, rolling twitch that ran the whole length of him and shuddered up into my palms like a struck bell. Then his pulse changed. I felt it, felt it the way you feel a river when the current picks up under you, that low urgent throb shifting faster, harder, the thick veins under my fingers going tight and insistent. His hips rolled once, involuntary, chasing the grip of my hands.

I knew. Even without the aunties having spelled out every detail, some older part of me knew.

I didn't think. I leaned in and took him into my mouth.

He made a sound that I would be hearing in my sleep for the rest of my life.

The flex came first, a hard, shuddering clench under my tongue, then another, then the whole of him jerking against the roof of my mouth in a rhythm that had nothing polite in it. His balls, still heavy in my free palm, pulled up tight and pulsed, and then I felt it, the surge, that was the only word for it, a long hot rush traveling up the underside of him from root to tip like water through a pipe, and then he was spilling onto my tongue in thick, slow waves.

I pulled back to just the tip. Pressed my lips there. Let it fill me.

He pulsed and pulsed and pulsed. I counted without meaning to, eight, nine, ten, each one rolling onto my tongue with that same salt-sweet warmth, and I kept my lips sealed and let none of it go until he'd given me all of it he had.

The last pulse came smaller, a shiver more than a surge. I pulled back one careful inch and turned my eyes up to his face and opened my mouth and let him see.

The noise he made had no name. His ears shot fully upright. His whole body went rigid like I'd pressed a hot coal to his spine, then went slack all at once, and the expression on his face, gods, the expression, was the most gratifying thing I had ever witnessed in my entire life. He looked like a boy who had just seen something he had no framework to put away. Like the sky had opened and done something unexpected.

I swallowed.

He exhaled like he'd forgotten how.

Mama, I thought, you were right again. You were so insufferably right.

I crawled up the length of him while he was still collecting himself and pressed the flat of my body along his, chest to chest, belly to belly, my chin on his sternum. He was warm. Hotter than the tent air, hotter than the lantern, warm the way the breeding draught was warm, low and thorough. His heartbeat under my ear was still hammering, still working its way back down from wherever it had gone.

I let him have a moment. I could afford generosity.

His arms came up, slowly, carefully, like he still wasn't sure he was allowed, and folded around my back. Not gripping, just resting. His chest rose and fell under me in long, deliberate pulls.

I breathed with him.

The smell hit me then, properly, now that I wasn't occupied with anything else. His herbs, whatever they'd had him drinking, different from mine, sharper, a little bitter under the sweetness, the kind of smell that lived in the back of a mortar and pestle. It rolled off his skin warm and foreign and settled into the back of my throat. I found myself pressing my nose flatter against his chest without deciding to, pulling in a slow breath, cataloguing him.

He smelled like preparation. Like somebody's family had been just as careful with him as mine had been with me.

That thought sat somewhere unexpected. I turned it over.

"Your clan's draught," I said, into his fur. My voice came out lower than usual, rougher.

A pause. His chest moved under me in what might have been a laugh that didn't quite make it out. "Every morning for three weeks," he said. "It tastes like the bottom of a pond."

"Mine tasted like grief," I said.

A silence settled between us, easy rather than awkward. Then, quietly, almost to himself: "Do you think they actually work," he said, "or is it all just ceremony?"

The answer pressed warm and insistent against my belly before the question had finished leaving his mouth.

I didn't need to say anything. I reached for him instead, set my paw lightly on his shoulder, and pushed him back down onto the cushions. The muscles under his fur jumped at my touch, a little shiver that ran from his collarbone all the way down the curve of his chest. He was softer than I expected, almost fluffy, but broad too, so that my claws didn't even reach all the way around. He didn't resist. He didn't do anything except look at me like I was some irresistible miracle.

Slow, steady, I urged him back with gentle pressure. He scrambled to follow, big paws bracing on the mats, until he was lying on his back and blushing to his ears, staring up at me in wonder and terror. He looked so utterly lost that I wanted to laugh and bite him at the same time. The gods alone knew what he must have been thinking.

I let my eyes move over him slowly, cataloguing each detail.

His cock twitched against his belly, flushed deep pink at the tip, thick and gently tapered, wider than my own paw, with a heavy sack below that looked taut and ready. I had seen nothing like it in the drawings or even in the alcoves on the way through the tent. He looked up at me, pleading, and for a heartbeat I just let him watch me watching him. I wondered what that was doing to his head. Judging by the way his cock throbbed and left a clear smear against his own fur, it was doing plenty.

I shifted over him, spread my knees wide on either side of his hips, and lowered myself until the heat of me rested along the shaft. I could feel every twitch of him, every frantic heartbeat, and it made me wetter by the second. There was a reason Mama never actually described this part. Not the mechanics. Not the first awkward touch. This: the breathless little pause before joining, when the ceremony fell quiet around me and all I could feel was the boy beneath me, shaking as badly as I was.

He whimpered. I smiled.

I rocked my hips, slow, lazy, letting his length slide through the mess between my thighs, wetting him as thoroughly as I could before I even thought about letting him in. The whole time, he just watched, chest heaving.

I could have done that forever, just teasing both of us, but the hunger in me was too loud. I reached down, gripped his shaft at the base, and lifted my hips so that the tip pressed right up against my entrance. Gods, I was trembling. My thighs shook with it. Something deep in my core clenched and released. His paws hovered uncertainly in the air, like he couldn't decide if he was allowed to touch.

I looked him in the eye and didn't blink. Then, very slowly, I relaxed and sank down.

The first inch was pure pressure, nothing like what I'd imagined, and then the tip slid in. There was a hot, sharp stretch, so new it almost hurt, and I moaned for real this time, letting the sound pour out. He answered with a groan that made my skin prickle everywhere. His cock was thick, so thick I had to go slow, easing myself down a little at a time, letting me adjust, letting him adjust. Every fresh push made me see stars for a second.

This was sex. For all the warnings, for all the rules, the actual moment of it was something bigger than anything I'd been prepared for. My insides clamped down hard around him, greedy, desperate, and I slid a little lower, whimpering again when the stretch grew wider. He twitched under me, hips jerking up half an inch in reflex. That almost made me leap off him, but I made myself stay, made myself breathe, and after a second the sharpness dulled into warmth, into need. I could feel every ridge, every throb, every pulse of hot blood through his shaft.

I braced my paws on his chest for balance and started rocking myself up and down, a little experiment each time. Down, feeling him spread me open another fraction, then up, letting him slide wet out of me, then down again, a little braver, a little lower. Every time I sank back onto him, more of his cock disappeared into me. Every time I lifted up, I could see myself glistening on him, ropes of slick strung between me and the length of his shaft. Gods, no wonder I had so many siblings. If this was how it felt, I'd have done it every afternoon until I couldn't walk.

Under me, he was trembling. His paws hovered just above my hips, fingers twitching every time I moaned. I grabbed his hands and pushed them down, pressing them firmly into the plush curve of my hips. It was a silent plea: hold me, help me. He squeezed, claws dimpling my fur, and guided me as I set the tempo.At first, we moved together in slow, careful rises. Up, then down, taking another half-inch, then up, then down, a little more. Each time I shuddered, the edge of pain dulled, giving way to a new kind of pleasure, a full, desperate ache that had my whole body clenching around him.

He figured it out almost the same time I did. The rhythm. The way to move his hips, lifting me up and then pulling me down onto him, slow at first, then a little braver, a little more greedy each time. The noise of it was shameless. I could hear my own wetness every time our bodies met, hear his cock squelch in and out of me, and it only made me want more.

My back bowed, my head tipped back, and I let myself dangle on his cock, fucked open by the raw insistence of his body. The effort he was putting in was obvious; every muscle in his arms and chest strained as he lifted me, rocked me, let me fuck myself down on him. We kept going, faster, harder, and the only sound was the frantic slap of our bodies, my needy cries, and his hoarse gasps.

The rest of the tent faded away. There was only the thick spike of heat between my legs, each thrust pushing deeper, each one feeling like he might finally bottom out, and then he did, the first time, and I screamed, shaking, clenching down so hard I couldn't hold a single thought in my head. He stopped. I didn't. My body just kept going, twitching, shaking, riding orgasm after orgasm like I'd never known anything else. Somewhere in the haze, I realized I was pushing myself back onto him, using him, milking as much pleasure from the moment as my body knew how.

He groaned for me. The sound was desperate, wild, and only got wilder as he picked up the pace, rutting into me so hard I lost the power of speech and could only keen, open-mouthed, while my hips rolled and bucked. His thighs tensed under mine, and I realized I was so full it felt like I might burst.

It built and built. There was a clumsy rhythm to it, but I loved it, loved the awkward pawing, the hopeful, frantic way he handled my body. We learned together. When his paws shifted grip, I shifted, too, seeking the angle that made him hit the deepest spots, the angle that made my belly clench and my breath stutter. Each time he adjusted, I met him, until we fell into a perfect, messy kind of harmony.

There wasn't even language anymore. Only gasps, groans, and the wet pulse of movement.

I could feel him swelling inside me, thickening, stretching me tighter. It drove me wild. I humped down on him as greedily as I could, ignoring the faint ache, needing the pressure, needing to be claimed, ruined, flooded. The slick between my thighs made it easy. Any thought I'd had of being shy was gone, replaced by the raw pride of knowing his cock was coated in me, that my body was pouring approval down his length every time he drove back in.

He tried to warn me. I caught the start of a word, a helpless, "I..." and then he was there, both paws locked tight around my hips, pinning me down to the base of his cock, holding me so perfectly still I could feel every twitch, every tiny jerk.

The first hot spurt caught me by surprise. Deep inside, a sudden, sticky pulse, so warm it made my toes clench. He flooded me, over and over, his whole body shuddering, breath catching in his throat as another rope of seed shot up into my heat. It filled me, spilled out around where we were joined, oozed down the back of my thighs and onto the cushions. I kept twitching, kept milking him, greedy even now, while he emptied himself in desperate, broken pulses.

After the last, he slumped, chest heaving, arms still clamped around my waist. I let myself collapse forward onto him, cheek against the soft fur of his shoulder, still impaled and still shaking from the aftershocks. He didn't let go. If anything, he held me tighter.

Heat and wetness pooled between my legs, and the smell of us was overpowering. The tent might as well have vanished; there was nothing left except his cock twitching inside me, my own aftershocks, and the slow, dreamy comfort of being held. Cozy. The word barely did it justice.

He stroked my back, a little uncertain, but it felt good. I purred into his fur, letting myself melt. His heartbeat slowed under my cheek by degrees, going from frantic to merely fast to something steady I could have fallen asleep to. He hadn't slipped out of me. I didn't want him to. Every time my breath dragged in too deep, I felt him there, thick and softening but still filling me up, still keeping us joined the way we were always supposed to be joined, and his arms stayed locked around the small of my back like he had only just found me and was not ready to let go.

A new mess came with each little shift. I could barely even picture myself as the girl who'd walked into the tent, shy and embarrassed. I was bred, I was dripping, I was spent. And I liked it. I'd do it again. And again, until I was smeared and ruined and whimpering for each next go.

But for now, there was only this.

"Chloe," I said, into his fur. It came out muffled. I turned my head so my muzzle wasn't pressed flat to his chest and tried again. "My name. It's Chloe."

I should have blushed. I'd just told a boy my name with his seed still leaking out of me and his cock still nested deep, and that was backwards, that was the whole thing done in the wrong order, and somewhere my mother was probably feeling a disturbance in the proper way of things. But I was too giddy to be ashamed. I felt light. I felt scrubbed clean and lit from inside. I propped my chin on his sternum and grinned at him like an idiot.

His ears flicked. One of his paws came up off my back to scratch awkwardly at the side of his own face, and he looked at me with those big dark eyes, still a little dazed.

"Bram," he said. The deep voice had lost its choke. It rumbled up through his chest into my cheek. "I'm Bram."

"Bram," I tried. It fit him. Big and soft and a little clumsy.

"My favorite season's fall," he added.

I blinked.

"My favorite food's cabbage," he went on, very serious now, the way you go serious about something that matters, "and I don't much like the snow."

Something in my chest went soft and strange. I knew this. I knew it the way I knew the smell of our breakfast fire, the creak of Papa’s chair, the foolish little look he gave Mama when he thought no one was watching. I had heard him do it a thousand mornings, offering up some piece of himself over tea: rain, roasted chestnuts, the way crowded markets made his ears itch. And Mama would answer in kind, summer peaches, winter quilts, the neighbor’s rooster that screamed before dawn, both of them trading those small, ordinary truths like they were vows.

Now Bram was giving them to me.

His clan did it too. A whole valley of hares away, and they did it too.

"I like summer nights," I said. My voice cracked on it. "And melons. The little green ones." I swallowed. "And I don't like the snow either."

He went very still. So did I.

For a long pause we just stared at each other, the tent breathing its red breath around us, somebody two alcoves down crying out and not mattering at all. Then we both moved at once, which was a mistake, because his nose bumped my nose and my teeth clicked against his and for a second it was a disaster of muzzles, all wrong angles and stifled laughter. I tipped my head the other way. He followed the wrong direction. We bonked again.

"Sorry..."

"No, you, here..."

I caught his jaw in both paws and held him still and just pressed my mouth to his, clumsy, too hard, our front teeth in the way, his breath huffing against my cheek. It was nothing like the things people whispered about kisses. It was awkward and damp and we didn't know where the noses went. But I didn't pull back, and neither did he, and somewhere in the middle of it we figured out the tilt of it together, the soft give of it, his mouth going gentle and mine going greedy and then finally, finally, the two of us landing on something that worked. By the end he was kissing me like he meant it, slow and sure, one paw cradling the back of my skull, and I'd forgotten entirely that we'd started off bumping snouts like a pair of fools.

When we broke apart we were both breathing hard again. And I felt him, gods, I felt him, thickening back up inside me, swelling against my walls until I had to bite my lip, fully hard again before I'd even caught my breath. I was already soaked all over again, wet as a river in September, my whole body humming yes before my head had decided anything.

I rolled my hips. Slow. A grinding little circle that dragged him through me and made us both gasp.

"Again?" I asked.

He nodded.

We stayed in that little gauze-walled square for three whole nights. The lanterns burned down and were replaced by hands I never saw. Food appeared and went cold and got eaten anyway. I learned the ticklish spot behind his knee, and he learned the exact place between my ears that made me go boneless. Somewhere between the joining, the kissing, and the long warm sprawl afterward, we stopped being awkward about any of it. He told me about his valley. I told him about my mother's plum wine. By the time the third dawn came pink through the canvas, I had to be helped to my feet, sore and dripping and stupidly, enormously happy.

We exited the tent in the order we'd entered it, which meant Bram and I came last, shuffling down that long red aisle past alcoves now empty and aired out, the cushions stacked and the gauze tied back. At the threshold Lumen was waiting with the bundle of dried sage and a knowing glint in her eye, and behind her, through the parted flap, I could hear the whole village gathered in the morning light.

There was a tradition for the exit too. Of course there was. The new pair walked out hand in hand, naked, so the whole village could see the proof: the marks, the mess, the unmistakable look of a doe who'd been well and thoroughly bred. I was half tempted to skip it. I had my dignity, what little of it survived three nights in a row, and the thought of walking out bare into all those cheering faces had my ears trying to flatten themselves into my skull.

I never got the chance to decide.

Bram bent down, hooked an arm behind my knees, and tossed me clean over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

I wanted to scream. I think I did scream, a little, as the tent flap whipped past and the daylight hit and the crowd lost its collective mind. The cheering went up like a wave. I was upside down over the broadest shoulder in three valleys, my tail no doubt giving everyone a perfect view of exactly how much work we'd done, and I had never wanted the earth to open up and swallow me so badly in my entire life.

"Oh my," somebody called, "look at all the work those two did!"

"Look at the cock on that one!" hollered another, and I felt Bram's whole shoulder go hot under my belly.

"Look at the gape on her!" an even louder voice cried, gleeful as anything. "I'd bet she's got a full warren started already!"

I went redder than the tent. And then I went redder still, because that last voice, that bright, carrying, absolutely shameless voice, was my mother's.

"Mama!" I wailed, muffled into the small of Bram's back, and the crowd only roared louder.

The heckling ended as quick as it began. Lumen raised her sage and her dry old voice rose over the noise, and we were blessed and released: pronounced mated, pronounced bound, pronounced free of our parents' warrens and founders of our own. I twisted enough to wave at the blur of faces. I cried a bit, the happy kind, the kind that just leaks out when you're too full to hold it. I was carried past my childhood burrow, past the breakfast fire where my father stood weeping openly into his sleeve and nodding, nodding, nodding, and then down a few streets to where our own new warren waited, dug fresh, smelling of clean earth and cedar.

I'd like to say Bram carried me straight to the bath.

That's what I want to say. But we didn't make it past the new kitchen (the door barely swung shut behind us) before he had me up on the counter and I had my heels hooked behind his back, and we were at it again like the rabbits we were. He filled me up against the cabinets while the morning sun came through the window and the bless-the-warren cakes Mama had left went entirely ignored, and I bit his shoulder to keep from waking the whole street, and he laughed into my fur and didn't slow down even a little.

The cabinets, it turned out, were not the last surprise of the day. Or the bed. Or the rug by the cold hearth, which we christened that same afternoon, and the doorway, and once, scandalously, the little garden bench out back, where I clamped a paw over his mouth and we both froze giggling when a neighbor's footsteps passed the fence.

We had a whole warren to fill, after all. And cabbage to plant, and melons, the little green ones. And a long string of summer nights ahead of us, none of them with any snow in them at all.

We got to work.