I feel the shift before I'm fully awake. The weight of him moving behind me, the press of something thick and familiar against the curve of my ass. Still half-hard. Still warm from sleep.
His arm tightens around me, and his hand slides from where it's been resting on my breast—when did it move?—down across my ribs, my hip, until his palm flattens over my belly. The same gesture he makes every time now. Pressing. Claiming. Like he's already memorizing the shape of what's growing inside me.
I hold my breath. The milk on the window is a dried white smear now, catching the pale morning light, and I can see the treeline through it. Empty. He said he dealt with it. I don't know what that means.
"You're still wet."
His voice is rough, scraped from sleep, and I feel it against the back of my neck. His fingers trail down, past my belly, through the slick mess he left in me hours ago, and I am. I'm soaked. His cum has been leaking from me all night, and my body is swollen and sore and hungry in a way I don't know how to name.
He finds me. Two fingers, sliding into where he's already been, and I'm so wet there's no resistance—just the soft, obscene sound of him pushing into me, into his own seed, and I gasp before I can stop myself. My hips rock back against him before I can stop that either.
"That's it," he murmurs. "I know. I know, sweetheart."
His fingers move slow. Deliberate. Like he's not waking up, like he's been awake this whole time, waiting for me to open my eyes so he could start. His thumb presses against my clit, and my whole body jerks.
I'm not ready. I'm still tender from what he did to me against the window, from his mouth on my breasts, from the way he drank from me like I was something he'd been starving for. And now he's inside me again, and his cock is getting hard against me, pressing into the cleft of my ass through the wetness he's working into me, and I can't think.
"Kaelen—"
"Shh." His teeth graze my shoulder. "Let me feel you."
I shouldn't let him. There's a knock coming. I can feel it in the air, the way the house is waking up around us, the way morning light is filling the room. His family is downstairs. His mother. Amanda. Liv.
But his fingers curl inside me, searching for that spot he's already memorized, and my thighs fall open like I have no say in it anymore.
Maybe I don't.
His hand presses deeper, and I feel his cum slide down my thigh, warm and wet, and he groans against my neck like the feeling of it undoes him too.
"All night," he says, his voice rough. "I felt you leaking on me all night. Every time you moved. Every time I woke up, you were still wet with me."
His fingers speed up, and I bite my lip to keep quiet, but a sound escapes anyway—a broken little whimper that I'd be embarrassed about if I had any dignity left. I don't. He took that from me days ago, piece by piece, until there's nothing left but the raw wanting.
He's pressing into me from behind now, his cock sliding along my folds, not entering, just—rubbing. Slick and hot and wrong and right, and his fingers are still inside me, and his thumb is circling my clit, and I'm going to come again, I'm going to come right here in his bed while the sun rises over the house where his family sleeps.
The knock shatters it.
Three sharp raps. A voice I recognize—Liv, bright and unselfconscious, the way children are before they learn to be careful.
"Uncle Kaelen? Grandma says breakfast is ready."
I freeze. Every muscle locks. My eyes fly open, and I stare at the window, at the dried milk, at the treeline beyond, and I'm suddenly aware of everything—the wetness between my legs, the weight of his fingers still inside me, the mess we've made of his sheets, the way I'm wearing nothing but his t-shirt and the evidence of his body.
But Kaelen doesn't stop.
His fingers keep moving. Slow now, but there. A lazy, deliberate rhythm, like he has all the time in the world. Like she's not standing on the other side of that door.
He lifts his head slightly, just enough to pitch his voice toward the door. "Tell her we'll be down in twenty minutes."
His voice is steady. Calm. There's no strain in it, no evidence that he has his fingers buried in his wife while his niece talks to him through a locked door.
"Okay!" Liv's footsteps retreat, light and quick, fading down the hallway toward the stairs.
The door is still closed. The lock is still engaged. And Kaelen's fingers are still moving inside me.
"She's gone," he says, his mouth against my ear. "Now where were we?"
His thumb presses down, circles once, and I come. It's not the shattering kind, not the kind that leaves me blind—it's a small, tight thing, a clench that ripples through me and leaves me trembling, and he feels every pulse of it around his fingers.
"That's one," he says. "I owe you more."
He pulls his fingers out slowly, and I feel the loss like an ache. He brings them up, and I watch—half-lidded, still catching my breath—as he puts them in his mouth. Tastes himself on me. His eyes close for just a second, and when they open again, they're dark.
"I'm never going to get tired of that," he says.
He shifts behind me, and I feel his cock, fully hard now, pressing against my thigh. He doesn't push inside. Not yet. He just lies there, his hand sliding back to my belly, pressing flat again.
We have nineteen minutes. Maybe less.
I should tell him. I should tell him now, before we go downstairs, before I have to sit across from his mother and smile while his cum dries on my thighs. Before he spends another hour thinking he made this baby on purpose, when the truth is so much uglier.
"Kaelen."
My voice comes out thin. He hears it—I feel him still behind me, the way his hand stops moving.
"What is it?"
I roll over. Face him. His grey eyes are sharp now, fully awake, watching me with that predator stillness that used to terrify me. I meet them anyway.
"I need to tell you something. About how I got pregnant."
His hand doesn't leave my belly. If anything, it presses harder. "You said you didn't know. That it happened before I touched you."
"I didn't lie." I swallow. "But I didn't tell you the truth either."
The silence stretches. The clock ticks on the nightstand. I can hear birds outside, the distant hum of a car on the road, the sounds of a world that doesn't know this conversation is happening.
"Tell me now."
I close my eyes. And then I open them, and I say it.
"You came home drunk. About nine weeks ago. You were—I don't know what happened. Something at work. You were angry, or sad, or both. You came to my room."
His face doesn't change. He watches me, utterly still, and I force myself to keep going.
"I was asleep. I woke up and you were—you were on top of me. Already inside me." The words feel like broken glass in my mouth. "I told you to stop. I said your name. I said 'Kaelen, please.' But you didn't hear me. You didn't even know it was me."
Silence.
I can't read his face. I've never been able to read him, not really—I've spent eleven years watching him, and I still don't know what the stillness in his eyes means. Is he angry? Horrified? Guilty?
"You were rough," I say, the words falling now, unstoppable. "You were—you were the Animal. The one from the screen. And I couldn't stop you. I didn't know how. You finished inside me, and then you passed out, and I lay there until morning, and when you woke up you didn't remember any of it."
I stop. My chest is heaving. I didn't realize I was crying until I taste salt on my lips.
"I never told you. Because I knew—" My voice breaks. "I knew if you knew, you'd hate yourself. Or you'd hate me. Or you'd think I was lying. I didn't know which one was worse."
He still hasn't moved. His hand is still on my belly, and his face is still unreadable, and I'm shaking, and I can't stop shaking, and I don't know what happens now.
He says, "Good."
I blink. The word doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit in the space between us, not after what I just told him.
"What?"
"I said good." His voice is quiet. Not cold—quiet. Like he's pulling each word from somewhere deep. "I didn't plan it. Not consciously. But I wanted you. I'd always wanted you. And when I'm drunk enough, the leash comes off."
I stare at him.
"I thought about it," he says. "After I found out you were pregnant. I couldn't figure out how it happened—how my body had already claimed you before I ever remembered to look at you. And I wondered. I had fragments. Memories that didn't make sense. A dream where I had you under me, and you were crying, and I couldn't stop."
His jaw tightens.
"I thought it was a dream. Because I couldn't have done that to you and forgotten it." His eyes meet mine. "But I did."
I don't know what to say. I thought he'd be furious. I thought he'd be disgusted—at himself, at me, at the whole situation. I thought he'd look at me like I was evidence of his worst self, something he wanted to bury.
Instead, his hand presses harder against my belly.
"You're carrying my child," he says. "My seed took root in you, and it grew. Whether I was conscious when I planted it or not—it's mine. And you're mine. And no amount of ugly truths changes that."
I'm crying harder now. Ugly crying, the kind that comes with hiccups and snot and shaking shoulders, and he pulls me against his chest and holds me there while I fall apart.
"I'm sorry," I gasp. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I'm sorry I lied. I'm sorry—"
"Stop." His hand cradles the back of my head. "Stop apologizing for surviving."
I feel his lips against my hair. His chest is warm and solid, and his heart is beating steady, and I press my ear to it and listen.
"You've been carrying this alone," he says. "For weeks. All those times I touched you, all those times you opened for me—you were carrying this too. And I never saw it."
His hand slides down, cups my chin, tilts my face up until I'm looking at him.
"I'm not going to apologize for what I did. I don't think you'd believe me, and I don't think it would help. But I am going to spend the rest of my life being the man who doesn't have to be drunk to show you exactly how much I want you."
He kisses me. Soft. Almost tender. His tongue brushes my lower lip, and I open for him, and the kiss deepens into something that tastes like forgiveness and salt and promise.
When he pulls back, I'm breathless.
"We still have fifteen minutes," he says. "And I owe you more than one orgasm."
I laugh. It comes out wet and broken, but real. "Your family is waiting for us."
"They can wait." His hand slides down my body again, finds me still wet, still swollen. "Or they can wonder why we're late. Either way, I'm not done with you yet."
His fingers push into me, and I gasp, and he swallows the sound with another kiss.
Fourteen minutes. Thirteen, maybe.
His mouth trails down my neck, and his hand keeps moving, and I stop counting time. I stop thinking about the window and the milk and the figure in the treeline. I stop thinking about my father and the clinic and the impossible timeline.
I just feel him. The Animal. My husband.
The father of the child I'm carrying—a child he planted in me while I cried, without knowing it was me, in a darkness I've never told anyone about until now.
And he said good.
His fingers curl inside me, find the spot that makes me see stars, and I stop thinking altogether.