Page 68 of Real

“Would that make you happy?” I ask. “To live in a cabin with me?”

He bites his lip. “If we could adopt children—”

I kiss him hard. There’s nothing else I can do. My heart is too full. Then I stop myself because I realize what I’d be asking of him.

“You could be happy with one of the Illusors. You could bear children together. You could be flesh and blood—”

“And I’d be his skatt. His gift from the Lights. I couldn’t be just Buddy with him.”

Just Buddy. I cup his plastic jaw and stare into his eyes. “But you’d be giving up so much to be with me.”

He lets out a breathy laugh. “What would I be giving up? The chance to be like everyone else? What if I’m not interested in that anymore?”

That’s when I stop arguing with Buddy. Because this isn’t just about him wanting me, I think it’s about him accepting himself too. I kiss his lips, his cheek, his nose. How could I ever express to him how much I respect what he just said? I know how hard it can be to love yourself, even as a person who has a standard human body. And here Buddy is, saying he doesn’t want to be flesh and blood. That he’s okay with his plastic body exactly the way it is.

I wonder if I can do that too—accept my body exactly the way it is. Not because Buddy loves my body but because it’s a part of who I am. Buddy makes me want to be better, braver. And not in a violent or aggressive way. He makes me brave enough to believe that I could have happiness too.

“Can I take you to the bedroom?” I ask. I need to have him underneath me. I need to be inside him.

“Oh, yes. Please.”

I pick him up like a doll. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe I need to express to him that I can love him exactly the way he is too. That I don’t need him to be different to be worthy of my devotion. He smiles up at me with tears in his eyes.

In this moment, I feel bad for people who have perfect bodies and demand that their mates have the same. They’ll never get to have a moment like this that’s not about appearances, but about seeing someone all the way down to their soul. That’s what acceptance is. It’s a moment when you lock eyes with someone and say, “I don’t expect you to be everyone else’s ideal. I want you exactly the way you are.”

I carry Buddy to the bedroom without stopping. This means I have to breathe heavily and sweat a little bit. I normally wouldn’t exert myself in front of someone else like this because I’d worry that they’d judge me for my weight or my level of physical fitness. Buddy maintains eye contact with me the whole way, and I don’t feel judged once. I lay him down on the bed and kiss his plastic lips. We kiss for a long time, writhing against each other. There’s a moment when I tense because he runs his hands along my belly, but I force myself to let him love me as I am.

It’s harder than anything I’ve ever done. I want to apologize, to pull his hand away, to brace myself for rejection. Instead, I show him the same bravery he showed me, and I unbutton my shirt. I let him touch my soft body and love my soft soul. Then I take off his clothes, and I kiss the seam along the top of his neck, the creases in the ball joint sockets of his knees, and lick along the divot of his belly button. Tears run down his cheeks the entire time, and I understand.

It’s strangely painful to let someone love you completely. It makes you acknowledge things that you’ve ignored to get through each day without wallowing in self-loathing. But you can’t accept yourself without remembering all those things. That would only be accepting the easy parts, and that isn’t what this is right now. There is nothing easy about the level of intimacy I’m experiencing with Buddy.

His cock isn’t hard in the beginning. The emotions in this moment are too raw to bring sexual desire into the bed. It isn’t until I’ve worshipped every inch of his body that a familiar scent fills my nostrils. Buddy’s slick. My cock reacts almost instantly.

It isn’t like the physical reaction I had to omegas in the pits. There, it was impossible to differentiate the scent of one omega from another. The smell was overwhelming and impersonal at the same time. But my inner alpha latches onto Buddy’s scent with a feeling of ownership I’ve never allowed myself to have before. Buddy ismine. I can feel it in my bones. I run my tongue over the bite mark on the crook of his neck. Every other scar or scuff on his body is gone except for the indentation in his skin that my fake teeth made.

A realization washes over me. My teeth aren’t any more fake than his skin. They’re man-made with molds, just like his joints and limbs. If he’s willing to accept his body, couldn’t he accept my bite too?

Couldn’t we simply decide our bond is real?

I suck at the skin in the crook of his shoulder, and he moans. “Please, Timothy,” he begs.

“What do you want, baby?”

His fingers dig into my back. “Make me yours the way you would if I was a red wolf shifter. Can I be yours?”

It’s like he can read my mind.

I sink my teeth deep into his skin. It gives way, and to my surprise, some kind of liquid seeps from it as if he’s bleeding for me. I pull back, a little unsettled by the sensation, until I see the deep red fluid pooling in the bite mark. Is that from my mouth? I run my tongue along my teeth, wondering if I ripped out one of my implants, but they’re all there.

Buddy furrows his eyebrows and dabs the crook of his neck with the tip of his finger, then holds it up. The sheen of red doesn’t surprise him as much as I thought it would.

“I thought you couldn’t bleed,” I say.

“I thought I couldn’t either. But it feels right. Doesn’t it feel right?” he asks with a certainty in his voice.

My inner alpha preens at the blood pooling in the bite. I allow instinct to take over as my inner alpha sucks at the bite, reinforcing it. My cock is rock hard now, and I feel an intense desire to knot Buddy. I want to expand inside him and stretch his walls with the base of my cock. I want him to squirm with pleasure—to feel overwhelmed by me.

“I have to get a pill,” I say, even though I haven’t been to a doctor about it in ages. “To knot you.”

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