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They didn’t stop often, but when they did, it was always somewhere nameless.
A town with one gas station and a string of crumbling motels. A place too small to matter. There was always the same yellowed ice machine outside. Always the same humming sign. Always the same clerk behind the glass, too busy to ask questions. And that was what Anton liked. Places that asked nothing. That demanded no explanation for the man with the dead eyes and the woman who sat beside him, silent as a storm.
She’d stopped looking at road signs a long time ago. They passed too quickly to remember. Each one was just another name she’d forget by morning. The only way she marked time now was by the pull in her gut and the waves of emotion she couldn’t get ahead of. Some days, she felt bright and electric, almost full of something worth surviving for. Other days, like now, everything felt off. Her jaw ached from clenching. Her chest was tight. Everything Anton did set her teeth on edge, and she hated herself for it. He hadn’t done anything wrong, really. But he existed beside her, and it was too much. His silence felt like a mirror, too clean, too clear. It showed her the worst of herself.
In the passenger seat, she shifted, legs curled under her. The afternoon light was low and gold, brushing Anton’s face with soft angles as he drove. She stared out the window, her vision unfocused, heart heavy. She wasn’t crying. Not yet. But her body felt strange. Irritable. Electric. Her breasts were sore. Her legs tingled. She knew what it meant, deep down, but couldn’t bring herself to name it.
She hadn’t bled in weeks. Maybe months. The constant motion, the food, the anxiety, it had scrambled her. Her body kept secrets from her now. And this secret had a long, jagged edge.
They pulled into a motel as the sun dipped out of view. The sky was violet. The air heavy. Anton parked, got out, and opened her door with the same mechanical grace he always had. She didn’t thank him. Her stomach hurt. Her skin crawled. When he shut the trunk with a dull thud, she snapped her head toward him and hissed through her teeth, “Do you always have to slam it like that?”
He didn’t blink. Just looked at her, quiet and unmoving.
She stormed past him, keys in hand, into the room. He followed after a long pause.
Inside, the air smelled like old bleach and bad decisions. She dropped her bag too hard on the bed. Anton placed the takeout bags on the dresser. Burgers and fries. Grease seeping through paper. She wasn’t hungry.
They ate without speaking. She chewed mechanically, her stomach sour. When she looked at him, at the way he sat, composed and slow, eating each bite with the care of a man who had never rushed a thing in his life, she wanted to scream. But the anger wasn’t real. Or maybe it was. Perhaps it was just misplaced. Her blood felt too thick in her veins. Her throat dry.
Halfway through the meal, she folded the wrapper closed and pushed it aside. Her hands trembled.
“I’m sorry,” she said abruptly, not looking at him. “I’m, just, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Anton chewed once more, swallowed, and wiped his fingers on a napkin before standing.
She froze when she heard the soft creak of the floorboards as he stepped behind her. Then, the feeling, his hand at the back of her head, fingers weaving through her hair, slow and deliberate. He scratched her scalp, his nails dragging gently over skin, not hurried, not hesitant. She shuddered.
Something in her cracked.
“I think I’m losing it,” she whispered, eyes burning. “I feel like I’m two people. Like I’m mean for no reason, and I hate it, and I don’t know how to stop. I feel ugly inside.”
“You’re not,” Anton said, voice low. He kept scratching, kept holding her in that terrifyingly gentle grip. “It’s passing through you.”
“What is?” she asked, already crying.
He didn’t answer. But he didn’t stop, either. She wept into her hands while he touched her scalp like he was brushing dust off something precious.
She woke in the middle of the night to pain. Deep, cramping pain that pulled from her hips and wrapped around her back. Her thighs were sticky. She groaned, hands between her legs, and when she pulled them back, they were streaked red.
A bloom of blood in the cotton of her panties.
The pad in her bag. The ache in her womb.
She stumbled to the bathroom, turned on the shower, and stripped slowly. Her thighs were already smeared with brown-red streaks. She felt dizzy.
Behind the curtain, the water scalded, and she let it. She leaned against the wall, forehead to tile, letting the warmth press into her until the pain dulled enough to breathe through.
Anton said nothing when she emerged, wrapped in a towel, wet hair stringing across her shoulders. He didn’t need to ask. She saw the way he watched the trail of red she’d left on the inside of her thigh. Not judgmental. Not disturbed. Just… watching.
When she sat on the edge of the bed to put on clean panties, he moved toward her. The room was dark, the only light from a single buzzing lamp on the desk. She struggled with the pad, fingers shaking, the adhesive awkward, the cotton stiff. Anton knelt in front of her before she realised what he was doing.
His fingers touched her knee, then trailed slowly up the inside of her thigh. She gasped, reflexively, but didn’t stop him.
“I don’t,” she began, but he silenced her with a single glance. Not cruel. Just final.
“You’re bleeding,” he said softly, almost reverently.
She nodded.
He didn’t go for her mouth. He didn’t strip her. He just touched, just enough to slip his fingers beneath the edge of her underwear. She hissed, the sensation too much.
Anton watched her face as his fingertips slid lower, collecting the blood-wet heat of her. He withdrew, lifted his hand in the dim light, and rubbed his thumb across his middle finger slowly. Then, like it was nothing, he pressed those same fingers to the skin of his inner thigh. Smearing it. Testing the texture. Sticky. Viscous.
A sound left her throat. Not a word. Something primitive. Confused. Scared. Touched.
“You smell like copper and salt,” he murmured. “Like something ripe.”
She couldn’t breathe.
He leaned in, face beside hers, not kissing, not pressing, just there. His breath in her ear.
“I’ve thought about this,” he said, voice barely a breath. “How you’d feel when it came. How you’d taste. How hot you’d be.”
Her whole body tightened. She felt raw, flayed open like a wound.
He reached for her again, pushed the fabric aside more boldly this time, and she didn’t stop him. Couldn’t.
He rubbed her slowly, and she felt the blood mix with slick arousal that bloomed despite her embarrassment. He was unbothered. His hand moved with care, with intent. He didn’t care that she was bleeding. If anything, it seemed to excite him.
When he slipped two fingers inside her, she whimpered and clutched at his shoulders. The stretch, the ache, it was too much and not enough. Her body wasn’t sure how to hold it. The cramps flared around the intrusion and then softened, like they’d been given something to wrap around.
He held her open like that, working her slowly, watching her face the entire time.
“You’re softer like this,” he murmured. “More open.”
“Anton,”
His thumb brushed her clit, and she jerked, the sensitivity almost unbearable.
“I’ll take you in the dark,” he said.
And she nodded.
He stood, undressed quietly. She watched, transfixed. Something was frightening in how still he was, how composed as he stripped away the layers. She lay back on the bed and turned her face toward the wall.
When he climbed over her, she didn’t look. The room was too dim now to see clearly, and she was glad. She didn’t want to see the blood. Didn’t want to see him seeing it.
But he knew. He knew exactly what he was entering. When he pushed into her, slow, endless, agonising, she heard him exhale like it was the first breath he’d taken all day.
She clenched around him, painfully sensitive. He stilled. Then moved.
They rocked together in silence, blood-slick and trembling. Every thrust was a drag against soreness, every breath a prayer. Her face crumpled. She turned her head into the pillow.
He cupped her face gently. His thumb smeared a streak of blood across her cheekbone as he held her.
“You’re not sick,” he whispered. “You’re bleeding. That’s all.”
And somehow, in the dark, it didn’t feel like a curse.
He fucked her slowly, deliberately.
Each thrust measured and purposeful. He could feel the slick heat of her, the subtle drag of blood mixing with her arousal. It made him harder. Made him want to bury himself deeper. To mark her. Claim her. He brought a hand down to where they joined, feeling himself slide in and out of her folds. Collecting the evidence of her cycle on his fingers. Bringing it to his lips. Tasting. Savoring. Her body tensed and released around him, fluttering. Crying out softly into the pillow. He leaned down, bit at her earlobe, and licked the blood on her cheekbone.
“All open. All mine.”
She tangled her fingers in his hair, gripping tight as he took her. Pain and pleasure coiled in her belly, sharp and sweet. She arched into him, desperate for friction, for release. For something to anchor her in the storm of sensations. Her body betrayed her, clenched around him, soaking him, staining him. The sheets. The world blurred. Only the rhythm of his hips mattered. Only the weight of him above her. Around her. Inside her. She sobbed his name, muffled into the damp pillowcase.
“Please,” she begged. “Don’t stop.”
He didn’t stop. He couldn’t. Not with the way she clung to him, not with the sounds spilling from her lips. He rolled his hips faster, harder. Chasing his own release even as he focused on hers. One hand snaked between their sweat-slicked bodies to rub tight circles on her clit. The other gripped her hip bruising, holding her in place as he pounded into her. “That’s it,” he growled. “Give yourself to it.”
He could feel her tightening, fluttering around him. Closer. So close. He changed the angle of his thrusts, grinding against that spot inside her that made stars burst behind her eyelids. Demanding her surrender.
She shattered with a choked cry, convulsing around him. Wave after wave of pleasure crashed through her, mixing with the dull ache of her womb. He followed her over the edge with a guttural moan, spurting deep inside her. Filling her. Marking her. Claiming her in the most primal way possible. They collapsed together, sweaty and spent, the cooling stickiness of blood and come painting their thighs. He gathered her close, uncaring of the mess. In the aftermath, he stroked her hair almost tenderly as she shook apart in his arms, overwhelmed by the intensity of it all.
The room was so quiet she could hear the walls hum.
Outside, the parking lot light flickered like a dying firefly behind the blackout curtain. Inside, her skin stuck to his, slick with sweat, her thigh smeared with blood. The pad she’d been wearing was crumpled somewhere in the sheets, useless now.
Anton hadn’t moved in a while.
His body was still inside hers, unmoving, his weight braced above her on one elbow, his breath calm. Measured. Like he was listening for something inside her, some proof that she hadn’t cracked open for good.
Her arms ached. Her thighs trembled from the exertion. Her chest felt raw, used. But not in a way that made her want to pull away.
“Are you done?” she whispered, not knowing why she asked it that way.
He didn’t answer immediately. Then he withdrew, slow and wet, his softening length dragging against her aching walls with a slurp that made her flinch. She was too full, too empty, all at once. She didn’t move.
When he climbed off the bed, she curled inward, clutching the hem of her shirt down to cover herself. There was a smear of red on her inner thigh, a pooling warmth between her legs. She stared at the wall, stomach twisting. The scent of sex and iron clung to the air.
Then she heard it.
Water running.
The bathroom.
She heard drawers opening, the hollow clunk of the plastic ice bucket being set on the counter.
And then he was back.
He knelt beside the bed without a word, a damp washcloth in hand, still warm from the tap. He parted her legs gently, like he was undoing a knot.
She winced. “You don’t have to,”
He wiped between her thighs with quiet precision. Not sexually. Not lewdly. Just… attentively. The way someone might clean blood from a knife they meant to use again.
The cloth dragged sticky red from her inner thighs, then the backs of her legs. Her breath caught when he pressed it lightly to her sore, swollen slit. She whimpered.
His eyes flicked up once. Checking.
“You’re more sensitive,” he said flatly.
She nodded.
He dipped the cloth again into the water and wrung it out, folding it before continuing. He wiped the crease of her hip, then her belly. Her pubic bone. Blood and mucus and sweat, gone with each pass.
No part of him recoiled.
When he finished, he disappeared again and returned with one of his own shirts. He helped guide it over her head without asking. She didn’t have the energy to lift her arms on her own. She felt loose, clumsy, half-conscious.
When she finally met his eyes, her throat tightened.
“Why do you do that?” she asked, voice hoarse.
“What.”
“Treat it like it’s holy.”
He didn’t answer. Not in words. He simply looked at her like she was a wound he’d learned how to dress.
Anton climbed into bed behind her, pulled the sheet up, and wrapped his body around hers like a containment field. His fingers found her scalp again. Scratching. Stroking.
She choked on a sound that might’ve been relief. Her body curled back into him.
“I think something’s wrong with me,” she whispered.
His voice was low. Right against her ear.
“There is.”
She stilled.
He brushed her hair back.
“It lives in your blood. Comes once a month. Shifts your shape.”
She swallowed.
“But you come back.”
“And if I don’t?”
He was silent for a long moment. Then: “I’ll find you.”
It should’ve terrified her. Maybe it did.
But she slept better that night than she had in weeks.