“Where are you off to now, brother? You’ve only just come back.” Mary interrupted my thoughts as I walked down the hallway to the launch pad. The area was more a formality to let others know we were out and to keep track of who came in. Shifters could shift and fly out of a window if they wanted to, then grow larger, but father had implemented the launch pad a long time before we were even born. We’d always used it and it was habit now.

“I’m going to get Willow. She’s not learning what she needs to know in that place.” I spoke quickly and hoped she’d get the point. She stopped me with a hand on my arm. A delicate white hand with black-tipped nails.

“Is that wise, Henry? You know you can’t bring her here if that’s the case. Father won’t allow it.”

“I know, but this separation is unbearable and even Yohl says she won’t learn what she needs to know there. She has to be around more of our kind.”

I’d spoken with Mary more than once about the land Willow was in, the things she told me about the women there, and what she’d learned. It wasn’t spying, it was curiosity.

“She’s from an odd land, Henry. One where the men have woven tales about how it is them that were the dragon hunters, not the women. They are so misogynistic that they can’t even let the real hunters take the glory they earned. The men made the women so subjugated that the hunters don’t even know who they are now. It’s a strange land and I’m glad I was born here and a dragon. I’d kill somebody in that odd land of Willow and Arista’s.” She leaned against the wall and didn’t look like she was ready to stop the conversation any time soon.

“What are you saying, Mary?” I was a little annoyed with her, it felt like she wanted to say something and wanted to work her way up to it. We weren’t normally so polite or reserved with each other, and my sister’s attempt to be delicate unnerved me.

“I’m trying to say that it won’t be fair to drag you away from us, and she can’t come here. What if you guys have children? She can’t come here, and it won’t be fair to raise a girl child there. It’s crazy.”

Anger boiled hot and liquid to the surface and I inhaled deeply to tamp it down. She meant well.

“It’s not your place to worry about any child we have, Mary. We’ll deal with that when and if it happens. For now, just... fuck... I don’t know, try not to make things worse for us?”

I stalked away from her, shifted, and flew out of a window. I knew she meant well, but damn. Hypothetical children were something we didn’t need to worry about right now. I sliced my wings through the air, dispelling my anger as I went. Mary hadn’t meant any harm, but right now wasn’t the time to bring up more worries.

I just wanted to reach Willow, get her back to her world, and get on with our lives together. We’d have to live separately during the day, I couldn’t abandon my duties, but we could spend our nights together. We’d find a way to make it work.

My anger dissipated as I flew, it always did when I was in flight. Mary did have a point though, Willow’s inner circle was female, but her world was ruled by men and catered to men. It wasn’t like that in my world. Females could be, and were, just as powerful as men. We’d never had protests led by women who demanded their rights. They’d always had the same rights as men. Women didn’t live to please the male gaze or to get over on other females because they didn’t have to. It never entered our brains to try to subjugate females, and that would never change.

Would it be fair to raise a son or a daughter in a society that felt the son was more important because he’d been born with a penis instead of a vagina? Would it be fair to raise a daughter in a society that told her that her worth was based on her appearance and how submissive she was? I couldn’t raise a daughter like that at all. I knew Willow had been raised in a matriarchal surrounding but not all people thought like that in her world.

I pondered it all as I flew, I couldn’t think about anything else as I soared through the sky. We would find a way to raise our children in my world, if that was what Willow wanted, or her world, if that was what she chose. If we even had children. There was no certainty of that, after all.

Where are you? I buzzed her brain and waited for a reply. When it came, I noticed an odd tone to her voice. Something was wrong, she sounded stressed.

I’m at the cave, are you far away?

Just overhead, my dear. Are you ready? I shot down out of the sky towards her and shifted as my feet came into contact with the ground. Lush jungle and the wild cries of exotic birds went ignored. I only had eyes for my mate.

“What’s wrong, Willow?” My blood raced in my veins and my heart pounded as I looked around. I couldn’t see a threat, why had she sounded so odd?

“Nothing, Henry. Let’s go. I want to feel my piano keys and see my mother, and so many other things.”

“Let’s go then.” I shifted back into a size she could climb onto and then let myself grow as I flew us into the air.

I felt a faint buzz in the area where she settled on my back. Something had her agitated and she could not settle.

Willow, tell me, what’s wrong? Why are you so agitated? I can feel it buzzing through you like electricity.

I just have a lot to think about, Henry. Yohl had a few things to tell me before she let me leave. Some of it is... a lot to think about. I’ll be fine. Just get me home, please.

If you promise that we’ll talk once you’ve spent some time with your mother and settled in.

After a hot shower, too. God, I’ve missed running hot water. We had showers, a rather ingenious method the Amazons thought up, but most of the time the water ran cold before you’d finish.

Oh? How would they heat the water?

With great big bowls of water left out in the sun. The water would warm during the day, and the water would flow down a bamboo pipe they’d cut in half to pour down onto you through a plate with holes in it. It worked really well, but about halfway through you’d have cold water instead of warm.

I guess you need a long hot shower after weeks of that.

I do, and my bed. They had nice little beds, but I miss my memory foam mattress so much. It’s like sleeping on a cloud.

I remember. It is a rather wonderful invention.

It’s heaven. And I can’t wait to be in it again, so hurry up, dragon.

Her tone had changed to one of teasing now, and the stress had left it. I attributed her initial anxiety to a keen desire to return to her home, and flew on. I added extra beats to my wings to pick up the pace and we soared like a rocket through the sky. It was dark in her world when we landed, and Willow ran into the house of her mother before I could even blink.

She was glad to be home then. Her mother already had food in the microwave and a mug of tea in front of Willow by the time I made it into the house. She beamed at me and handed me my own mug.

“Thank you for bringing her home, Henry. I sure have missed my baby girl.” Rachel was beaming brightly, her naturally thin frame covered in a pair of loose jeans and blue and black plaid flannel shirt. Her hair, dark but graying at the roots, was just as long as Willow’s had been before her trip and trailed down her back in a thick wave.

“I’m glad to bring her back to you, Rachel. She’s missed you.”

“I still can’t wrap my head around the whole time thing. She’s been gone for months, but it’s only been a few weeks in that world?”

“Yes, time passes much slower in that place.”

Willow piped up to offer an explanation. I was glad she did because her mother seemed to accept the answers she gave without further questions.

“Well, whatever it takes to keep you happy and healthy, baby. Do you want cornbread with this? I can heat some up.” She put a bowl of some kind of brown beans in front of Willow.

“Cold is fine, Momma.” Willow grabbed a piece of the bread and crumbled it into the beans to make a mush. It didn’t look like the most appetizing food in the world, but the smell and the way Willow shoveled it into her mouth said it must be delightful. I’d try it one day, when I was hungry. For now, I watched her eat happily.

“I’ll, uh, head on over to Eve’s in a little bit. I’m sure you two want to be alone.” Rachel stood up and went to her room to grab some things before she went over to her sister’s house. Arista’s mother didn’t live far away, and Rachel insisted so I didn’t protest. I remembered the memory foam mattress Willow had spoken about. It was rather heavenly.

Rachel soon left us to our own devices and Willow hopped in the shower. She was gone for a long time and I decided to make a pot of coffee instead of interrupting her moment of shower-fueled bliss. When she came into the kitchen her hair was damp, her face was wreathed in smiles, and she had the fluffiest white robe I’d ever seen. I sat down the dregs of my first cup, turned the pot off, and crossed my arms as she grinned at me.

She came up to me, her eyes sparkling with twinkles, and pressed her lips to mine in a kiss meant to tease. Her lips were warm and soft, smooth, and she tasted of toothpaste. I’d tasted the cinnamon on her lips when my tongue darted out to lick her lower lip.

Her mouth opened and her tongue tangled with mine in the slow perfection we’d both settled on long ago. Slow, long licks that teased each of us with tawdry ideas of what else we could do with our tongues. My hand came up to caress her cheek as we kissed. I’d wanted her for my entire life, even before I knew her, I think. She was perfection to me, no matter what flaws she thought she had.

I backed her into a wall, and the belt on her robe fell open as she moved. Our lips clung together as we moved. We spent a little time relearning each other’s taste with languid licks that dragged out the pleasure the moment of freedom without worry about interruptions.

Her hands fluttered to my waist, as if she was not sure of where she wanted to touch me first. They moved, came around to my chest, then along my neck, before they settled on my shoulder blades. She wanted me close, she’d decided. I moaned into her lips as I felt her breasts press into my chest.

“Are you sure you want to do this in your mom’s kitchen and not the bedroom, princess?” I slanted my lips down her cheek and over her neck, to that spot that stole her breath away when I nipped at it. She loved that spot and what it did to her, so I knew when I blew on it that I’d get a reaction. Her knees went weak and she sighed in pure happiness.

“I don’t care where you fuck me, Henry, so long as you fuck me, baby.” Her light brown eyes drilled into mine and I grinned.

“After so many nights in a cave, my love, I think a nice, proper bedroom would make a rather wonderful change,” I said before I pulled Willow in the direction of her bedroom.

“Your wish is my command, Henry,” she responded, and followed along behind me eagerly.

“I somehow doubt that, princess, but I’ll take that answer for now.” I kicked the door shut as she came through it and pushed her down to the bed with just enough force that she grinned at the motion. She bit her lip in an eager way, a way she only did when she was contemplating something especially naughty.

“You’re the one in control, my love. Show me what you want from me.”

She sprawled there on the bed, her legs open and her feet planted on the edge of the bed frame. Her stomach had grown flatter over the weeks as she toiled with the Amazons, and her legs were shapely and tanned now. All of her was tanned, as a matter of fact.

“How much time did you spend naked at that place, exactly?” I looked over the beautiful canvas of her skin, the delicate ridges of her ribs, down her abdomen, to the very center of her that I wanted to taste so very much. I bent down to my knees in front of her and parted her thighs a little wider.

“Oh, I only put clothes on when you came to visit.” She spoke with a breathless giggle and I knew she was breathless because she anticipated the feel of my tongue in her hot folds.

“But you only took them off again as soon as you came into the cave. So you must have been naked every hour of the day.” That made me harder than I thought it would. I liked the idea of Willow nude, comfortable, and carefree.

She shook out her length of light brown hair, and I felt my hands clutch together. I so wanted to get my hands in those silky strands, wrap them in my fist as I guided her mouth over me, up and down, and fuck, I’d blow if I didn’t stop it. She had learned some skill at taking my dick in her mouth, and she sucked me as sweetly as I knew she would.

For now, I wanted to taste her more than I wanted her to taste me.

I was about to swipe at her with my tongue when she sat up, let the robe fall from her shoulders, and placed her hand over the hard bulge in my pants. She must have changed her mind about who was in control because she looked up into my eyes with a seductive glance before they fell down to my pants again. She pulled the belt loose before she unbuttoned my pants. Her tongue snaked out to wet her now dry lips and I knew she was as eager as I was for what came next.

Oh, so eager.

I kicked my boots and socks away before I let my pants fall to my feet.

I was barely breathing by the time she wrapped her delicate fingers around me and grinned up at me with a wanton smile. She licked me from the base of my dick, all the way to the super-sensitive tip. I nearly rocked back out of her hand when her lips wrapped around me. I looked down and realized how huge I looked in her hand, how small her mouth was when she began to swallow every single hard inch of me.

I watched, my breath held as the thick rope of my dick disappeared between her luscious lips and down the back of her throat.

When she sucked her way back up my shaft I let my head fall back and gave a groan that felt like it came from the tips of my toes. She sucked at my cock with her cheeks and made my world rock on its axis when she swiped at me with her sweet little tongue.

My hands were soon buried in her hair, to guide her exquisite movements.

My moans grew louder and groans slipped from between my gritted teeth as she sucked at me. “Fucking hell, Willow. You suck my dick so fucking good!”

I have to admit, by this point, I’d forgotten I wanted to eat her pussy until she screamed my name, because all I wanted to do was come straight down her tight throat. She made it even harder to hold back when she swallowed every inch of my cock that she could.

“Fuck, Willow, stop. Princess, please, you have to stop. I’m going to come in your mouth if you don’t!” I pulled at her hair gently, tried to move her face away from my painfully hard dick, which was its own torture, but she only paused for a second to look up at me with a cheeky little grin.

“We have time, baby, it’s not like you won’t be hard again in five minutes, anyway.” Her words had made me groan in anticipation before she sucked my hard flesh into her mouth again.

I cupped her face gently while her lips and throat worked me into a state I could not turn back from. It felt selfish, but I couldn’t help but love it.

Sex with Willow was mind-blowing because we eventually came together as one soul, but when we focused on giving the other an orgasm and didn’t join together, it was a whole different world. An orgasm times a million. She’d get her own back, as she predicted, within five minutes anyway. I didn’t play around.

She moaned, and the vibration went up my shaft, straight to my balls, and before I could warn her, the first drop of my essence had landed on her tongue.

“Fuck… Willow,” I ground out as she swallowed the last drop, so greedy she left no traces of what she’d done anywhere.

She gave me enough time to catch my breath before she pulled me down to kiss me.

I pulled her up to my mouth and kissed her deeply. She pushed me down to the bed.

She straddled my waist, her eyes hungry to look at every inch of me, followed by fingers that teased and skimmed all the sensitive places she’d discovered I had. Her lips prolonged the tease with kisses that lingered, or a stroke of her tongue against silky skin. My hands wound in her hair again, a rope between us that I fed out as she trailed down the length of me. Her eyes, oh her eyes nearly made my heart burst with all the emotion they contained. She made promises with those eyes, promises about the future, about her love, and about right now. The only moment that really mattered out of them all.

It was well past time I gave her what she gave to me, and I rolled over to drop her on the bed beneath me. My legs straddled her slender hips, and I gave her the same slow exploration that she’d given me. I felt my dick press into her abdomen, a soft resistance that was its own pleasure, but ignored the temptation to just slip into her. I wanted my mate to be incoherent with need when I slid into her.

I took in her flesh with my eyes, then kissed my way down her neck before I pulled away to look at the breasts that had always overfilled my hands. They seemed, somehow bigger than they had only hours before but perhaps that was just my imagination. I didn’t imagine her response as I grazed the wet tip of my tongue on her right nipple.

Her hips surged up into me, and her eyes went wide. They were glazed with lust, those beautiful brown eyes of hers. I teased one dark tip and then the other with a long, hard suck in the wet heat of my mouth. Her hips began to twist beneath me with each tug of my lips, and I chuckled quietly under my breath. She loved it when I teased her.

My hands stroked a path down her ribs, over her stomach, and down into the naked temptation that was so sweetly responsive. I felt her body buck beneath me as pleasure burned through her. My questing fingers found her clit and that’s when our souls began to feather around each other.

I felt her pleasure as my own, in places that still felt new and wonderful to me. A woman’s pleasure felt different to a man’s and from past experience, I learned that the orgasm wasn’t the only part of sex that could be good for a woman. The getting to it could be just as much fun, in its own way.

I tugged a little harder at her nipple, to the point of pain but not over that threshold, when my fingers slid into her. I opened her gently with two fingers, and her slick walls grasped at me in a ripple of delight, so I tugged a little harder on her nipple.

“Henry...” she gasped my name in a way that made my rock-hard body throb in response. I loved the way she panted my name. It was so needy, so sweet, so sexual.

I rearranged my hand so my thumb pressed into the sensitive button of her clit tightly, just the way she liked. Willow didn’t want soft and delicate, she wanted to know she was being pleasured, she wanted to feel my touch on her. She’d never get off with soft kisses and butterfly touches, not my mate. She had to know I’d been there.

“My little savage,” I said with her nipple between my teeth. “So fucking savage.”

Her nails raked down my back as I spoke, and I felt her pleasure start to bloom. I wasn’t a part of her, at that point, but I was a part of her pleasure. I felt the way her walls clenched and rippled around my fingers in my own groin, I felt the way her muscles tensed from her toes to the top of her head, and then exploded in rippling waves. My own breath exploded from me when hers did, and she screamed my name.

I rode the waves with her, higher, and then higher, and lost all sense of space and time as she found a dark place where only pleasure existed. We floated there, me tied to her through our spirits, until we came back to the real world.

I caught my breath beside of her and watched her face. I knew she wasn’t quite finished yet and grinned when her eyes came open.

“We aren’t done yet, right?” she asked with a slow smile.

I looked down at the evidence of my desire to carry on, and looked up to see her eyes were in the same place.

“No, I don’t think we are, do you?”

“Not at all, Henry. Come here.” She rolled over to find my lips with hers; a sweet kiss that soon turned into so much more.

She didn’t just straddle me and get on with it, she took her time, and built us both back up.

“I’ve waited so long to have this kind of freedom with you,” she said softly, her lips just below my ear. I inhaled the scent of her hair as my fingers wound through it. I never wanted this time together to end.

She moved then, her passion aroused once more as she touched my skin. I could feel her heat between us, wet and hot, and so ready to take what I had to give. She sank down onto me, and her back arched as she sank halfway down. She paused, her delicate internal muscles squeezing to make me shiver as she looked right into me.

“I never want this to end,” she whispered as she took the final inches of me into her. She waited for a moment to let her body adjust to me all over again, and then she started to move. Those sweet, subtle hitches that soon turned into a keening cry, a wild ride, and the sensation of leaving my body to join with hers.

“I’ll never let it end, Willow,” I promised as she bottomed out on my dick, every centimeter of her pussy full of me.

She moved against me and my hands tightened on her hips as she looked down at me. Her eyes caught on my parted lips and she traced their outline with a finger I soon sucked between my lips, an imitation of what we did much lower.

Willow gasped, and her pussy went tight around me, a perfect glove for my thick dick.

She moved on me with experience now, an expert in how to massage me straight to the place she wanted me to be. I moved my hands over her breasts, to flatten them in my palms. Her left hand came up to cover mine as her right hand pulled away from my mouth. I watched as the finger that had left my mouth now moved down between her thighs, to the liquid smooth velvet of her clit. My fingers clamped down on her nipples as she moved her hips and ground her clit into her finger while she fucked herself on my dick.

My shy but curious little princess had turned into a wanton vixen and I loved every minute of it.

My body responded to the gasped sighs she let go and my dick grew even harder. It was too late to fight it now, I’d waited for this moment for too long. I felt her nails dig into my chest as her left hand grasped at me, and I responded with a desperate thrust into her wet heat.

“That’s it, Henry. Come with me, baby. Come with me,” she urged me to follow her as my hands dropped down her waist, one going to her hair, the other clutched onto her ass. My hand clenched at her ass, massaged it and guided her movements before I sought out a part of her that was deeper, pushing between the globes of her ass to find the dark little secret that hid there. Willow gasped above me and clenched on top of me as my middle finger teased at the entrance. I wondered if she’d be brave enough, what it would feel like, to get inside of her there.

“What are you doing?” she panted, and I felt my eyes widen and my lips spread in a grin.

“Finding out what makes you come the hardest, princess, what else?”

Her only response was a garbled moan as the tip of my finger teased at her there. Her back arched as my finger slowly slid into the tight passage, just enough to let her feel the invasion. The response was immediate and noticeable as she started to come apart around me.

My dick surged as she cried out my name and her sweet little pussy tried to swallow me. I groaned as the first hot jet of me filled her, and then our souls danced together, fused just along the edges. This time, when we found each other, we became one, our bodies abandoned as we merged into a single soul, and forgot the world existed.

Her leg clenched around me, and I pulled her head down to invade her mouth with my kiss. Her nails raked at my skin as she writhed above me in my arms, all mine, body and soul. I worked my hips to thrust up into her, I knew she came a lot harder when I did that, and so I pushed up into her, deep and hard.

I looked into her eyes as we fucked, as we fused, and sucked on her bottom lip. She was mine and I was hers, and that was all that mattered.