It’s unacceptable, his adoring expression. I hide my burning face in my knees and scramble for something, anything to say, but my mind is blank and—

“Hey.” He pulls me closer, into his arms again. “It’s a Heat. It’s normal, feeling unsteady. I’ve got you, okay?” I nod, and he twines his fingers with mine. Lifts my arm and inhales the skin in the crook of my elbow, where my scent pools. “I could live here,” he murmurs. “In this crease.” A kiss, soft lipped.

“I thought my elbows were too ‘fucking sharp’ for your distinguished taste.”

He smiles. Nips at me. “It’s going to build up again. Soon. You’ll feel more and more out of control.”

“More out of control than earlier?”

“Yes.”

“How do you even know?”

“I’m the Alpha of this pack. I know everything.”

I squint. “What’s the square root of pi?”

“Zero point nine.”

“Okay, I should have asked you a question I know the answer to. I’m just surprised, since you’ve never had the exigency of spending a Heat with— ”

“I educated myself when you started smelling like you’d have the exigency.” He lifts me into the curve of his body. Spoons me. “Just fucking believe me for once.”

“Hmm.”

“Rest while you can,” he orders.

Why not? This is nice. Perfect, even. I fall asleep nestled under his chin. Still thinking that— worse than earlier? Probably an exaggeration. I’ll be fine.

IT’S NOT. (AN EXAGGERATION.) BUT I AM. (FINE.)

Better than.

It hits me halfway through the first day, in the late afternoon light, a fleeting spell of clarity as I stare at Koen’s wide shoulders glistening above. He rocks inside me slowly, a languid, wet rhythm. I just came. A couple of times. He hasn’t yet. He tries to make it last as long as possible, every single time, and this is the best I can recall feeling in years. My world, when narrowed to just Koen and our nest, is light and kind and full of revelries.

I lean back. Study his slack mouth. His eyes, closed, squeeze tighter with every thrust. Like he has to brace himself. Build a dam every time, to keep his orgasm from spilling out. Pleasure is written all over his features.

I smooth his damp hair back with my palm and say, “Koen.”

His eyelids flutter open. He nuzzles into my hand like a big, half-tamed beast. Presses a biting kiss into the flesh right undermy thumb, an invitation to continue. It makes my insides spasm.

“Thank you,” I tell him. “For this.”

“I told you not to— ”

I arch to shut him up with a kiss, and with a soft curse he slides one arm between my back and the mattress to pull me up.

“You’re welcome. Lucky for you, I’m so fucking”— a harder stroke— “selfless.”

I inhale sharply, already quivering along his cock. My orgasm builds quickly, violently, a warm rush that has my thighs locking around his hips. “No, I . . . Thank you. For making this so— ”

Before I can tell him how disorientingly good this feels, his knot is growing, thick, inescapable, and he’s too busy hiking one of my legs back toward my chest to hear what I have to say.

This is how things should be, I think. Always.

AFTER WEEKS OF TRUANCY, MY APPETITE RETURNS AT THE WORST possible time.

I decide to give it the cold shoulder and focus on what’s rapidly becoming my favorite thing in the world: thrashing around and begging Koen to do something, anything, everything to me. Unfortunately, he really did educate himself about Heats. Not only did he memorize some doctor’s office pamphlet, but he’s also extremely literal about it.

We can start again after you have a strawberry, he tells me.

One more sip of juice. Like that. Be good. Give me one more.

Open up. No, not later— now.

You have to drink. A kiss against the flushed skin of my throat. Girls in Heat only get what they ask for if they finish their water.

“You know you’re not going to get a surprise visit from the Heat inspector, right?” I ask between shallow gulps of electrolytes. “There are no thumbs- up stickers for doing exactly what the textbook— ”

He grasps my chin and taps the pad of his thumb against my lips, pushing against them until I have no choice but to open. “Since it’s obvious that your mouth is not nearly busy enough, you’re having another glass before we continue.”

The nutrition is a boon. For the first time in months, I’m not exhausted or dizzy or confused. I don’t have a headache. In fact, I feel surprisingly healthy, even as I rub myself against Koen to get him to pay attention to me. The rational, cortical part of my brain knows he hasn’t so much as cast a glance elsewhere since the day we met. But as my Heat progresses, his scent becomes compulsive, and my wants snap into unprecedented focus.

Koen is perfect. Koen is strong. Koen is maddening and beautiful and mine, and I want what I am due. At my best, I am enamored with every inch of his body, with every word he rasps against my ear. At my worst, I am a savage, impatient, rude creature that tolerates no competition. Possessive. Impossible to reason with.

“Spoiled,” he mumbles against my lips, but there’s a touch of a smile at the corners of his eyes, in the webs of wrinkles irradiating from them. “Nuisance.”

So he seats me on his cock and splits me open, and as I strive to relearn how to breathe with him inside, he feeds me slices of fruit, whispering, Sweetheart. This is really fucking good. He rubs his thumb against my clit, and I clamp hard around him. My mind empties. I don’t think about the day I arrived here, unicorn waffles and too few chairs, and I bury my face in his throat as I try to finish chewing so that he can go deeper, so that we can move.

“Such a damn nuisance,” he repeats when my thighs squeeze around his waist, punching a grunt out of his chest.

I gasp for air, and he shouts out his pleasure when I suck his gland as hard as I can.

BY THE END OF THE FIRST DAY, WE’RE BOTH A LITTLE OUT OF OUR minds. The hormone bomb went off inside my body, but Koen wasn’t spared.

“Okay?” he asks, before starting to rock inside me the second his previous knot goes down. “I just can’t— ”

I nod. Lift my arms above my head, trying not to squirm as he kisses, licks, sucks, nibbles, worships my breasts.

“Fucking spectacular,” he says again. I cannot help my smile.

By now, he slides in like a dream, and I cognitively reframe the concept of having sex: not an act with a beginning and an end, but a continuous exchange of pleasure and hushed words. I know, rationally, that Koen and I are separate beings. It just doesn’t feel like it.

I come a lot. So does Koen. My ex- boyfriends are pale gray memories with no hope of bursting through the pink haze surrounding me. I do know, however, that sex has never been like this for me, and I cannot help but wonder, What’s the hinge? What makes the difference, really? The biology of the Heat? Or the fact that it’s with Koen?

I’ll never know. That’s the stipulation: afterward, we’ll go our separate ways.

I stroke my fingers through his hair. Pull him in for a kiss. Our eyes meet, and his face lights up with a grin.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey.” I force myself to smile back and forget about after.

THINGS GET REAL ON THE SECOND DAY. I THOUGHT THEY WERE before, but . . . I should just accept that I know nothing and go with the flow. Yeah. That’s what I’ll do.

We don’t sleep through the night, but I do doze off at dawn, while Koen’s knot is inside me and he’s still twitching with pleasure. The last thing I remember is him coming and whispering in my ear, “Unbelievable, how fucking unreal you feel, soft and wet and warm and every good thing in the world, baby.”

I open my eyes to orange sunlight streaming through the window. Birds chirp in the tall trees surrounding the cabin, and Koen hugs me tight, my back pressed to his chest, both hands closed around my breasts.