Letting You All the Way In

A Jake and Neytiri Poll-winner Oneshot.

Jake woke up hot.

Not the ordinary Pandoran kind of warm, where the whole forest breathed wet against his skin and even the shadows held heat.

This was something under his skin, deep in the muscle, a restless and crawling warmth that had him awake before dawn, with his skin too tight and his queue dragging sensitive against the furs and his tail thumping once, hard, against the side of the sleeping platform.

Neytiri stirred beside him, her nose brushing up over his ribs where she’d spent the night pressed close, and Jake froze, lying there for one stupid second as though the tail belonged to somebody else entirely.

Her breathing changed—not fully awake yet, but close enough that he could feel the shift in her body. Her hand rested loose on his stomach, four fingers spread over the place where the heat seemed to have gathered itself into one tight, unhelpful knot.

His tail twitched again, brushing her thigh this time, and her fingers flexed against his skin in answer.

He had been Na’vi for a month now—a full month in this body, permanently, with no link unit waiting somewhere, no human shape folded useless and thin in a cold metal room, no waking up blind and heavy and small. This body was his, the long legs, the strong hands, the lungs that could take in half the forest at once, the tail that apparently had opinions before sunrise. He should have been used to it by now, and he was used to it, mostly.

A month in this body was also a month since Home Tree had fallen and taken almost everything with it, since he had stood in front of what remained of the Omatikaya and become olo’eyktan of a clan he had nearly gotten killed leading. Two thousand warriors, more or less—he had stopped trusting the exact number around the time it stopped feeling like a number and started feeling like a list of faces he hadn’t learned quickly enough. He did not sleep well most nights. This body carried that too, whether or not anyone thought to ask.

“Jake?” Neytiri murmured, her voice rough with sleep, soft enough that it did something strange to the heat in his stomach, his breath pulling low and sharp before he could stop it.

She went still.

It was frustrating how Neytiri noticed everything—a bent blade of grass, a snapped twig, a change in the wind no one else had heard coming; he had once watched her stop mid-step because some insect had gone quiet in the leaves above them—and even after all their time together, he still could not hide from her, especially not when his own breath was hardly subtle.

“Yeah,” he said, wincing at the scrape in his voice. “I’m good.”

It was a bad answer, too fast, too human, too guilty.

Neytiri lifted her head, and in the dark her eyes caught what little light the waking forest gave them—gold-green, narrowed with the kind of attention that had made warriors twice Jake’s size rethink their life choices.

“You are good,” she repeated, as if repeating them might make Jake reconsider them.

Jake tried for a smile and probably looked like someone had shot him with a stun round. “Morning.”

“It is not morning,” she said, utterly unmoved.

She tipped her head, unimpressed. “The sun is not.”

“The sun is wise,” she said, and somehow it landed like a verdict rather than a joke.

He huffed a laugh before he could help it, and it shook through him, turning halfway out into a breath he had to swallow down hard.

Neytiri’s gaze dropped, not far, just to his mouth, then his throat, then the center of his chest where his heart had decided to act like it was being chased. Her hand stayed on his stomach, every point of contact so vivid it felt as though her skin had left light behind, her palm warm and dry, her nails blunt against him, the small slide of her thumb whenever she shifted her weight.

Too much. Not enough.

Jake knew exactly what wanting Neytiri felt like, having learned that lesson well enough to embarrass himself in several languages. This was different. Want had shape and direction; want was her mouth, her hands, the warm weight of her across him before sleep. Whatever this was, it had teeth: his own body turning toward her before his mind had caught up, every nerve lit and leaning, his skin too tight, his queue too aware, the base of his spine full of a pressure that had nowhere decent to go.

Some older, stupider part of him—the part that still sometimes expected a human ceiling and a body two sizes too small when he woke—wondered if this was a bill finally coming due. He had not earned this body. He had been given it, over the dead body of his brother and Grace’s science and a war that had cost the Omatikaya far more than it had cost him, and some mornings that math did not sit right in his chest.

Jake closed his eyes, but that was not better. Behind his eyelids there was only the shape of her beside him, the remembered press of her leg against his, the scent of her hair, smoke and leaf and something clean beneath it, familiar enough to be home and new enough this morning to knock the sense right out of him.

He opened his eyes again to find Neytiri watching him, not alarmed, not yet, but with something held very carefully in her face, something she hadn’t decided whether to give him.

“What?” Jake asked.

Her ears flicked once. “You smell different.”

Oh. That was not a sentence a man wanted to hear from his mate before breakfast.

He pushed himself up on one elbow, pretending his body had not just taken that tiny movement as an invitation to make everything worse. “Different bad?”

Neytiri did not answer right away, which was also not comforting. She leaned closer instead, slow enough that he should have had time to prepare for it. Her nose brushed the side of his throat, just under his jaw, and his whole body went tight.

“Neytiri,” it came out lower than he meant it to, more warning than anything else.

Her breath moved over his skin, one inhale, deep and deliberate. Jake stared past her shoulder at nothing at all and tried very hard to remember he was the olo’eyktan of the Omatikaya now, a leader, a warrior, a man who had successfully ridden a great leonopteryx and not died, a man who had given speeches in front of the whole clan with blood still on his hands and smoke in his hair.

Apparently, his mate could reduce him to a useless heap just by smelling his neck.

Neytiri drew back, her expression changed, not much, and anyone else might not have seen it. Jake did, because he lived by those small changes now: the tiny shift at the corner of her mouth, the way her ears angled not back, not forward, but somewhere uncertain between, the look she gave him when she knew more than he did and was deciding whether to let him suffer for it.

“What?” he asked again, more wary this time.

She blinked once. “Nothing.”

“I have no nothing face,” she said, entirely too serene about it.

Her mouth twitched, and that helped, the heat in him easing around the edges, softened by the familiar shape of teasing her and surviving it.

Then her hand moved, only because she was sitting up, probably, only because she had to shift, but her palm slid once over his stomach, and the world narrowed down to that one touch. Jake caught her wrist, not hard, fast enough that they both looked at his hand, his fingers closed around her like they had been waiting for permission.

Silence settled between them. Outside, something called from the lower branches, a morning note, thin and questioning, answered by another farther away, and the cluster of trees that had become their shelter after Home Tree’s fall began to wake around them: distant movement, a hushed voice, the creak of woven platforms taking weight.

Everything pressed in on him at once—how close everything was, how close Neytiri was, how loud he was breathing.

He let go of her wrist.

Neytiri looked at the place his hand had been, then at him. “You are warm.”

“Pandora’s warm,” he offered, like that settled it.

She was not buying it. “You are too warm.”

“This is not a climate,” she said flatly.

“Jake.” It came out of her mouth strained with frustration.

He rubbed both hands over his face and immediately regretted it, because his own palms smelled like sleep and furs and her, everything smelled like something, everything meant too much.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “Okay. I’m—something’s off.”

Neytiri’s face gentled, which was somehow worse. She reached for him again, slower this time, giving him the chance to pull away, and he did not. Her fingers touched his cheek, then his temple, then followed the line back toward the base of his kuru, and the moment she came near it, his breath left him. Her hand stopped. His eyes shut. For a few heartbeats, neither of them moved.

He could feel her watching him through the dark, the question sitting in the stillness of her hand, and he made himself open his eyes.

“Don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said, the words coming out smaller than he liked.

Neytiri’s thumb brushed once along his cheekbone. “You are not wrong.”

“It is what you meant,” she said, unmoved.

He hated that she could do that, and loved it too—that was usually how things went with Neytiri, putting an arrow straight through the part of him he was trying to hide until somehow he wanted to thank her for the aim.

He swallowed. His throat felt dry, his whole body damp with heat though there was no reason for sweat in the hour before sunrise, and he thought he should get up, get water, check the patrol rotation, find something to do with his hands that was not grabbing his mate like a half-trained idiot.

He shifted to sit properly. The movement pulled the thin wrap at his hips tight, and Jake stopped. For one second, the whole world went quiet, and then his heartbeat came back too loud. He looked down before he could talk himself out of it.

At first, all he saw was the obvious. He was hard beneath the loosened wrap, more than hard, aching with it in a way that made heat break over the back of his neck. Embarrassing, sure, inconvenient, definitely, but not new—Jake had been alive long enough, and mated long enough, to know what his body did when he woke to Neytiri pressed against him.

Then he saw the rest. The swelling at the base of his cock had not been there before, not like that, not even close. A large, hard knot at the base that pulsed with each breath. Jake forgot how to breathe, horror settling low in his gut.

He jerked the wrap back into place, too fast. Neytiri’s eyes dropped, then lifted, and Jake could feel his ears going hot.

“Do not,” he said, voice strangled around the warning.

She had not said anything. Her face had gone still in that very particular way she had when she was trying not to react too much, which, coming from Neytiri, was worse than any scream. Her mouth parted once, not shock, not fear, something else, and that did not help.

“What is it?” she asked, too carefully.

Jake stared at her. “You tell me.”

Her ears moved, a small thing, a tell she would deny if he named it.

“Nope.” He pushed himself up too fast and immediately regretted being a person with blood. “Nope, we’re not doing that face.”

“I do not let you be an idiot,” she said, far too quickly.

He looked at her, brow arched.

Her mouth pressed flat. “Not always,” she amended.

He stood, which was a bad idea. The sleeping platform tilted, or maybe he did, heat rushing low and vicious through his body, a pulse so sharp it locked his knees for half a breath, the strange swelling throbbing under the wrap, new and impossible to ignore now that he had seen it.

He gripped the nearest support branch and Neytiri was on her feet at once.

“Do not say this,” she warned, closing the distance by half a step.

She came closer. He held up one hand, which was a mistake too, because it left him gripping the branch with only the other. “Just—give me a second.”

Neytiri stopped. She did not like it—he could see that—but she stopped.

His chest tightened. “Sorry,” he said again, rougher this time.

Her expression softened, and she reached out anyway, her fingertips grazing his forearm, light enough to ask rather than take. “Do not be sorry for your body.”

Jake laughed once, without humor. “Yeah. Easy for you to say.”

“It is not easy,” she said quietly, and he looked at her.

For a moment, the careful thing in her face slipped, not all the way, just enough that he saw strain under the calm. Her breathing was too measured, her fingers had curled at her side, and something tight and worried pulled at the corner of her mouth before she caught it. Then she closed it away.

Jake stared, and his brain, which had been doing a heroic job failing at every available task, caught on that look and held.

“You know something,” he said.

Her shoulders stilled. The forest kept waking around them: voices below, a child’s laugh quickly hushed, someone calling for a missing strap, the small, ordinary sounds of a people learning how to be alive in a place that still felt borrowed. Neytiri looked away first, not far, to the furs, and Jake followed her gaze, because whatever she was looking at had to be safer than looking at her.

The sleeping space was softer than it had been two days ago, and properly visible to him for the first time: extra furs layered beneath them, a woven wrap rolled near the edge where his knee had been knocking against the platform in sleep lately, fresh leaves tucked into the corner, their scent subtle and clean, the kind Neytiri liked because it kept insects away and made the air feel cooler. He had thought she was tidying—Neytiri always made order out of whatever space they had, even this temporary one, this not-Home-Tree home among clustered trunks and grief-stubborn branches—but this was not tidying. This was preparation.

Jake looked back at her. She was not looking at the furs anymore.

Her ears lowered a fraction.

“I thought perhaps,” she said, then stopped, and that got his attention in a way even the heat had not, because Neytiri did not often stop once she had chosen words—she either said them or decided silence would serve better.

Her hand trailed once down his arm, unhurried, like she wasn’t ready to stop touching him yet, before she moved away to reach for her bow, not hurried, not fleeing, but still cold air slipped between them where her body had been, and every part of Jake wanted to follow her. He did not. That felt like a victory worthy of song.

“You have duties,” she said.

Jake blinked. “That’s where we’re going with this?”

“You have duties,” she repeated, firmer now. “And I have mine.”

She lifted the bow but did not look at him.

Jake’s stomach dropped, or rose, hard to tell, everything in him was moving wrong. “You know something,” he said again.

“I know many things,” she said, maddeningly serene.

“That’s not an answer,” Jake said.

“Those are not the same,” he shot back.

Now she looked back. For a moment, she looked almost amused, almost worried, almost hungry. Then the look was gone.

“You will hunt with Tarsem this morning,” she said. It sounded like a decision made in the wrong conversation.

“Bossy,” he said.

“Yes,” she agreed, without a flicker of shame.

The word left his mouth before he could kill it, and for one beautiful, terrible heartbeat, they both stared at each other. Then Neytiri’s eyes narrowed, and Jake wished for death, quick death, merciful death, maybe a thanator.

“I mean—” He cleared his throat. “You know. Temperature. Because we were talking about—”

“No?” One eyebrow rose, daring him to keep digging.

Her smile came back, slow this time.

Jake pointed at her. “Do not.”

“I have said nothing,” she said, the picture of innocence.

“Your face is screaming,” he insisted.

At that, she laughed, loudly. It broke open warm between them, and for a second the morning was only that: her laugh, his embarrassment, the sleeping platform full of furs she had definitely put there on purpose, and the new body he loved, betraying him in old, familiar ways. He could survive this. Probably.

He could live a lifetime of small inconveniencing betrayals if it meant seeing her smile like that.

Then another wave of heat rolled through his body, deeper than before, and his smile fell apart.

Neytiri saw.

She crossed the space between them before he had finished drawing breath, her bow landing silently beside the furs, one hand going to his shoulder, the other to the side of his neck, steadying him as if he had swayed. Maybe he had.

Her eyes sharpened.

He sighed. “I’m standing.”

“This is not the same,” she said.

Her fingers tightened, and the answer was in her face again, the thing she knew, the thing she was waiting to name or not name, and for the first time, something like fear slipped under Jake’s ribs. Not fear of her. Never that. Fear of being new wrong, of this body holding some rule he had missed, some lesson Grace would have explained with cigarette smoke in her voice and a tablet in her hand, muttering about endocrine cascades and idiot jarheads. Grace would have laughed at him first, then told him what to do. Except she never had. Four years of briefings before arriving on Pandora, whole folders of xenobiology he was supposed to read and mostly hadn’t, because none of it had seemed like homework for a life he’d actually planned on living. Whatever this was, it hadn’t made the syllabus—or if it had, he’d skimmed straight past it.

The thought landed hard enough to cut through the heat, straight into his chest.

Jake looked down. Neytiri’s hand moved from his neck to his jaw, making him look at her again.

“If it becomes too much,” she said, “you come to me.”

The words were simple; the way she said them was not. For a moment, he almost asked, almost pushed past the strange softness in her voice and the careful way she was holding herself away from him, almost said, What is this? What do you know? Why are you looking at me like that? What the hell is happening to me? But pride was a stubborn old thing, and so was fear, and there was a part of him, small and stupid and still human enough to be ashamed, that could not make himself say: There is something wrong with my body, starting low where I can’t explain it and spreading into everything else, and I need you to tell me I am not breaking.

So Jake nodded like that settled anything. “Yeah,” he said. “I will.”

Neytiri did not look convinced. Her eyes staying on him long enough for the gaze to press under his skin.

She was too smart.

She leaned in and pressed her forehead to his, and the laughter went quiet. Her breath touched his mouth.

“Go,” she said softly. “Do your duties. Come back to me when it worsens.”

“Comforting,” he muttered.

“Also this,” she agreed, unbothered.

He smiled despite himself. She stayed close another moment, her scent wrapping around him until the heat in his blood seemed to lean toward it, until his hands curled against his thighs to keep from curling around her. Neytiri noticed that too. Her gaze flicked down, and when she looked back up, the amusement had thinned into something else.

“Eat,” she said, and touched his jaw once, brief and warm, before letting her hand fall.

He gave a rough little laugh. “That’s your answer for everything.”

“It often works,” she said, entirely serious.

“No,” she said, and the word was too soft. “But still, you should eat.”

That did not help either.

He gathered his gear with as much dignity as a man could manage while overheated, aching, and being silently judged by his own tail, Neytiri watching from beside the furs, one knee bent, hair falling over her shoulder, her expression calm in a way that did not fool him at all.

At the edge of the platform, he paused. Below, the settlement was fully waking now: blue bodies moving through woven paths, children darting between adults, smoke beginning to thread upward from the cooking fires, the Omatikaya alive and rebuilding, clustered among trees that held them because Home Tree no longer could. His people, his responsibility.

Behind him, his mate. His home.

Jake took a breath, and the air filled with too many things: damp bark, ash, morning fruit, Neytiri. Always Neytiri. His fingers tightened on the strap across his chest.

“Ma Jake,” she called.

He turned. She had not moved. The early light painted her in grey and blue, all sharp lines softened by sleep and something she still had not told him, and for a second he thought she might say it, whatever it was. Instead, Neytiri lifted her chin toward the lower platforms.

She caught his hand on the way past, quick, her thumb sweeping once over his knuckles before she let go first.

He grinned, because it was that or ask her to save him from himself before the sun had even risen.

Her eyes narrowed at the human word, but the corner of her mouth gave her away.

Jake climbed down before his tail could embarrass him again, and it embarrassed him immediately: halfway to the next branch, it lashed out for balance, caught the rolled wrap he had knocked loose earlier, and sent it tumbling down into the shadows below. He and Neytiri both watched it fall. It landed with a soft, distant whump.

Neytiri looked at him. Jake looked at the empty space where the wrap had been.

“Needed a new spot,” he called up.

“Clearly,” she called back, not even looking down.

“You’re welcome,” he said, already regretting it.

Her mouth pressed tight, fighting another smile, and that, more than anything, made him feel brave enough to keep going.

He made it three branches before he had to stop and press his forehead against the living bark, breathing through another wave that rolled up from the base of his spine and spread through him like fire finding dry wood. Under the wrap, the new swelling pulsed with his heartbeat.

Jake shut his eyes. Not sick, he told himself. Probably not sick. Hopefully not sick. Definitely not thinking about Neytiri’s mouth. Definitely not thinking about the way she had looked at him when she saw.

He groaned under his breath, low and miserable, and a hunter passing on the branch below glanced up. Jake straightened so fast he nearly hit his head.

“Morning,” he called down.

The hunter blinked, confused. “It is not morning yet.”

Jake closed his eyes. “Yeah,” he muttered. “I keep hearing that.”

By the time Jake reached the lower platforms, he had convinced himself of three things.

One: he was not sick.

Two: if he was sick, he was not sick enough for anyone else to notice.

Three: if anyone else noticed, he would simply be normal about it.

This plan lasted almost eight minutes.

The first problem was the hunting strap.

It was the same strap he wore most mornings, worn soft at the edges, familiar beneath his hands, tied the same way it had been tied yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Jake knew how to dress himself. He had crossed that particular bridge a long time ago, somewhere between learning not to trip over his own tail and learning that Na’vi knots were apparently invented by people who had never once respected a man in a hurry.

Today, the strap might as well have been alive.

It caught wrong against his hip. Then too tight. Then too loose. Then, when he pulled it into place, it dragged over the swelling beneath his wrap, and the heat in his body answered so fast and sharp that his hand closed around the nearest branch before he realized he had reached for it.

For a second, he stood very still.

Below him, people moved through the morning paths with the ordinary purpose of a day beginning. Someone laughed near the cook fires. A child protested being handed a water skin. Two hunters passed beneath him with bows over their shoulders, talking low enough that he caught only pieces: tracks near the eastern rootfall, rain coming by evening, Tarsem already waiting.

Normal things.

The kind of things an olo’eyktan was supposed to be thinking about.

Jake exhaled through his nose and made himself finish tying the strap.

Not sick, he muttered.

His tail flicked hard enough to smack the branch behind him.

“Shut up,” he told it.

The tail did not care.

Tarsem was waiting where the western path bent toward the hunting trails, bow in hand, hair still damp from the morning mist. He looked up when Jake approached and did the thing most people had started doing in the last month: the quick, respectful dip of the chin that still made Jake’s skin feel too tight.

“Olo’eyktan,” Tarsem said.

Jake hated that he still had to fight the urge to look over his shoulder for the person actually qualified.

“Tarsem,” he said, and hoped his voice sounded normal. “You find any signs?”

Tarsem’s eyes moved over him once.

Not much. Not enough to call it staring.

Enough that Jake felt it land between his shoulders.

“There is fresh trail near the water roots,” Tarsem said. “A herd of ’angtsìk. Good wind, if it holds.”

Jake nodded.

Tarsem nodded, but his gaze stayed on Jake half a heartbeat too long. “You slept badly?”

“No,” Jake said, and it came out a bit more defensive than intended.

Tarsem blinked.

Jake heard himself and grimaced. “I mean—yeah. A little. Maybe. Tree was loud.”

Tarsem looked toward the enormous trunk beside them, as if considering whether the tree wished to defend itself.

Jake scratched at the back of his neck. That was a mistake, because his fingers brushed too close to the base of his kuru, and the sensitive pull of it went through him like someone had plucked a live wire down his spine. He dropped his hand, his jaw working through the ache.

“Let’s hunt,” he said.

For a while, that almost worked.

The forest helped. It always did, even when it was trying to kill him. Especially then, maybe. Moving through it gave his body something to do that was not noticing itself. His hands knew bark, vine, bowstring. His feet found holds without needing his full permission. The canopy opened and closed around them in green layers, every branch slick with damp, every leaf breathing out the night’s last coolness before the day turned heavy.

Jake followed Tarsem across a suspended root, then down through a curtain of hanging moss where water gathered in bright beads and broke against his shoulders. The morning air pressed wet against his skin. Usually he liked that. Usually the heat of Pandora felt honest, something outside him, something he could move through.

Today, it was too close to what was happening inside him.

The warmth under his skin had not gone away. It had settled lower, meaner, no longer just a feverish crawl through muscle but a steady pressure at the base of his spine, spreading forward in slow, inconvenient pulses. Every time he jumped down from one branch to another, the landing sent a dull ache through him. Every time his thighs pulled tight, every time the wrap shifted, every time his tail lashed for balance, his body reminded him of the thing he was trying very hard not to think about.

The swelling had not gone down.

If anything, it had become more present the more he tried to ignore it, a heavy, throbbing awareness tucked beneath the wrap.

A rustle moved ahead.

Jake stopped because Tarsem stopped.

Good. Great. See? Functioning.

Tarsem crouched on a broad branch and touched two fingers to a strip of torn bark. Jake crouched beside him, grateful for the excuse to be still until stillness made everything worse. The ache low in his body gathered under him, and for one stupid second he thought about Neytiri’s hand on his stomach, the careful drag of her thumb, her breath at his throat.

His own breath hitched.

Tarsem looked at him.

Jake looked very hard at the bark.

“Fresh,” Jake said.

“Yes,” Tarsem said slowly.

Then the wind changed.

It moved across the branch from behind him, sliding past his shoulders toward Tarsem, and Tarsem went still, his nose lifting into the scent and the line of his spine straightening.

The shift moved through Tarsem before Jake had a name for it: his eyes flicked once to him, then away, too fast to be natural. The small flare of his nostrils. The careful blankness that came over his face afterward.

Something cold moved under the heat in Jake’s skin.

“What?” Jake asked.

Tarsem rose. “The wind turns.”

Jake stared at him.

Tarsem stared back with the solemn dedication of a man who had just decided he would rather throw himself from the canopy than explain whatever he had noticed.

Jake stood too quickly. The branch rolled under his foot, just a little, nothing he would have missed on any other day, but his balance came late. His tail whipped out, his hand shot for a vine, and the world tilted green and bright around him before he caught himself.

Tarsem caught his arm at the same time.

The grip was firm. Respectful.

Alarming.

“I had it,” Jake said.

“Yes,” Tarsem said. “I saw.”

Jake pulled his arm back because the touch made him feel exposed in a way it should not have. Not because Tarsem had done anything wrong. He had helped. That was all.

But Jake’s skin was too awake. Every contact carried too much information. Every scent came in too sharp. He could smell damp leather, crushed leaves, the faint musk of the ’angtsìk somewhere below, Tarsem’s morning paint, his own sweat turning strange and hot beneath it all.

His own scent.

Different.

Neytiri had said that.

Jake swallowed.

The forest suddenly felt too crowded.

“Let’s move,” he said, voice coming out low and short.

Tarsem did not argue.

That was the part Jake hated most. If Tarsem had laughed, or challenged him, or told him he was acting like an idiot, Jake could have stood inside that. He knew what to do with friction. But Tarsem only nodded and adjusted their path without another word, and the quiet courtesy of it sat badly in Jake’s chest.

They tracked the herd for another hour.

Or maybe less.

Time got strange after that.

The hunt itself should have been easy: a herd of ’angtsìk moving toward water, wind imperfect but usable, two hunters above them and one below to turn the lead female back into range. Jake had done harder hunts while bleeding. He had done harder hunts with half the clan watching and Tsu’tey looking like he hoped gravity would finally correct Eywa’s mistake.

Today, his hands kept remembering Neytiri.

By the time Tarsem lifted a hand to signal the ’angtsìk herd’s turn, Jake’s grip on his bow was damp.

He drew.

The string came back smooth. His shoulders knew the motion. His eyes found the gap through the leaves, the quick flash of hide through the leaves, the place where the ’angtsìk would be rather than the place where it was.

For one heartbeat, he was exactly where he needed to be.

Then the pulse went through him again, low and vicious, and his fingers tightened wrong.

The arrow flew wide.

Not catastrophically wide. Not into another hunter, not into the empty sky, not in any way that would become a story children told for the next ten years.

But wide enough that it landed against bone instead of hide.

The ’angtsìk scattered around the sound.

Tarsem’s arrow struck true a breath later, clean through the operculum of the trailing ’angtsìk. The body went down hard in the undergrowth below. The rest vanished between the roots, leaves thrashing in their wake.

Silence followed.

Jake lowered his bow, jaw tight.

His heartbeat was too loud.

One missed shot. It was almost funny, the way something that small could still find the same nerve as decisions that had gotten people killed—as if his body had learned exactly one way to fail now, and meant to use it everywhere.

Tarsem did not look at the missed shot. He looked at Jake.

“Say it,” Jake said, voice tight.

Tarsem’s jaw worked once. “You are distracted.”

“Then yes,” Tarsem said carefully. “That.”

Despite everything, Jake almost laughed.

Almost.

The laugh got caught somewhere behind the heat and came out as a breath that sounded too close to pain.

Tarsem stepped toward him. “Tsyeyk.”

Jake’s chest moved around the name, a small ache at his new title.

“I’m fine,” he said, because apparently he had learned nothing from the morning.

Tarsem’s ears lowered. “You are not.”

The words hit differently from Neytiri’s mouth. From her, it had been intimate, worried, threaded through with something he had not understood. From Tarsem, it was practical. A hunter identifying bad weather before it broke over them.

Jake looked away into the leaves.

The whole forest seemed to breathe against him. Too warm. Too bright. Too full of scent. His skin prickled beneath the bands at his arms, and sweat slid down his spine though they had barely exerted themselves. Low in his body, the ache tightened again, a slow closing fist.

Not sick, he told himself.

But the lie had less force now.

Tarsem said nothing for a long moment. Then, quieter, “Do you need Mo’at?”

Jake’s head snapped toward him.

Too fast.

Tarsem’s face did not change, but he saw the answer land there anyway.

Jake opened his mouth.

No came first. Automatic. Stupid. Proud.

Then he thought of Grace.

Not the sharp grief from earlier, but the memory of her standing over him with a scanner in one hand and no patience in the other, telling him that if he ignored one more symptom because he thought masculinity was a medical plan, she was going to personally reassign his spine.

His throat tightened.

“I don’t know,” he said.

It was the most honest thing he had managed all morning.

Tarsem nodded once, as if that settled it. “Then we go.”

“You missed an easy shot,” Tarsem said.

Jake stared at him, offence rising up his face.

Tarsem stared back, very calm and clearly prepared to die there.

For half a second, Jake saw Tsu’tey in him—not in the face, not really, but in the absolute refusal to bend just because Jake was making the refusal inconvenient. The thought should have stung. Instead, strangely, it steadied him.

He looked down at his bow.

His hand was shaking.

Not much.

Enough.

“Yeah,” Jake said roughly. “Okay.”

Tarsem’s posture eased by a fraction, though he was polite enough not to look relieved. “We go to Mo’at.”

Jake nodded.

Then he made the mistake of letting his mind turn back toward home — toward the sleeping platform, the furs, Neytiri standing in the grey morning light as he left her.

His whole body answered the thought.

Heat rushed through him so hard his knees unlocked, and he had to catch himself against the trunk with his shoulder. Bark scraped his skin. His breath left him in a low, angry sound he could not quite swallow.

Tarsem was beside him at once.

Jake shut his eyes and pressed his forehead to the bark, teeth pressing tight together as he counted each breath.

The living wood was cool against his skin, a weak relief against the fire burning under his skin.

“Do not tell her,” he said, voice coming out weak.

Tarsem was quiet.

Jake opened his eyes.

Tarsem looked back at him, and there was something careful in his expression now, something that made Jake feel even younger than he already felt. “Neytiri?”

Jake hated hearing her name from someone else in that moment. Hated that even the sound of it moved through him. Hated that Tarsem, who was not stupid, had probably noticed that too.

“I don’t want her worried,” Jake said.

Tarsem inclined his head. “For now.”

They started back through the trees, slower than they had come.

Mo’at was not where Jake wanted her to be, which was a foolish thing to want, because what he wanted was somewhere private and empty and already prepared to receive one panicking olo’eyktan with no witnesses and no questions anyone would ever repeat.

Instead she was exactly where she always was at this hour, seated on the healing platform, surrounded by her baskets and water bowls and half-ground pastes, tending three people with very ordinary complaints. First, a child with a scraped knee and the tragic face of a great martyr, then a hunter cradling a swollen wrist, and a woman from the weaving circles who listened close with a bundle of herbs held to her chest.

Jake stopped at the edge of the platform with Tarsem a step behind him, and for one cowardly breath he considered turning back into the forest until his body either fixed itself or Eywa took pity on him. Mo’at looked up, her eyes finding him through the hanging leaves without the smallest flicker of surprise, and the plan he had never actually made began to fall apart beneath that steady gaze.

“Do you want me to stay?” Tarsem asked, low.

“No. Thank you. I got it,” Jake managed, which was such an enormous lie it should have shaken the canopy.

Tarsem inclined his head anyway, his mouth flat though his eyes stayed warm with something suspiciously like amusement, promised to send Ralu for the kill, and then—after one last careful, deeply annoying “For now”—vanished back into the leaves before Jake could decide whether throwing something at a hunter counted as poor leadership.

Mo’at was still watching him, so Jake straightened despite the heat throbbing low in his body and stepped onto the platform with as much dignity as he could pretend to. The child with the scraped knee breathed “Olo’eyktan” up at him as though he had come specifically to witness the emergency, and when Jake nodded gravely and pronounced it a brave wound the small spine straightened at once, putting something that was almost a smile into Mo’at’s eyes.

One by one, Mo’at finished tending to the three people on the platform, and slowly the platform emptied until only Mo’at remained, which was somehow worse than any crowd.

She rinsed her hands in a shallow bowl without hurry, the water slipping green over her fingers, and Jake stood very still while she took her time, because Mo’at had never once in his memory moved as though the world had successfully rushed her—not through war, not through grief, and certainly not through him.

When at last she dried her hands and looked at him fully, her eyes moved over him.

His shoulders tightened and he bowed his head in greeting, “Mo’at.”

“You come to me with a face that has already decided the worst thing,” she observed, settling back into her place by her baskets and herbs.

He scratched at the back of his neck, remembering too late what a bad idea that was, and quickly moving his hand back to his side.

“To the child, perhaps not.” She did not look up from her baskets. “To me, yes.”

He glanced toward the empty path Tarsem had taken, weighing one last time whether he could leave and call this something small that would pass.

“Sit,” she said, before his pride could try that.

He sat—not because she had ordered it, he told himself, but because the last wave of heat had left his legs untrustworthy and her face said she had already noticed.

The woven mat was rough against skin gone too sensitive, the air thick with bitter herbs and smoke and, beneath it all, his own wrongness. When he shifted and the wrap pulled tight and her gaze dropped to the movement, his ears went hot.

“Something is wrong,” he said.

She crouched in front of him. “Where?”

“That is the answer frightened people give,” she said, not unkindly, “when the true one is too hard to say.” Her hand rose to his face with the same unhurried care she had shown the child and the hunter, slow enough to be refused, and when he did not refuse it she read him through jaw and throat and the pulse beneath her thumb until he had the humiliating certainty that his body was confessing everything his mouth would not.

“You are too warm,” she said. “Not with fever. Fever scatters itself. This sits deeper.”

His gaze snapped up to a face that had barely changed at all. He hated healers, and Tsahìks, and anyone whose whole art was asking one question to hear the twenty answers hiding beneath it.

“She noticed,” he admitted.

“She would.” Her hands did not stop moving. “She knows the ordinary shape of you. She would see it change before anyone else understood what they were looking at.”

She released his jaw and turned one of his hands palm-up instead, pressing along his wrist and forearm.

He hesitated under her lifted gaze. “...Not enough.”

“Then Neytiri has sense, and you have none, for not listening to her.” She said it without heat, which somehow made it land harder. “You have been busy. Busyness is an easy place to hide.”

“Mm.” That low sound every Na’vi woman he loved seemed to have learned in the same place and sharpened differently.

She pressed two fingers to his chest, and his skin jumped under them. She did not startle. “What has grown too loud?”

“Skin. Queue. Scent. Sound.” He exhaled. “Honestly, all of it.”

He opened his mouth to say no, and the last several days rearranged themselves in his memory instead: the restless sleep, food gone flat or too sharp, the aimless pacing he had never been able to explain, Neytiri watching him over work she had only pretended to do.

“Maybe earlier,” he admitted.

“Your scent has changed.” It was not a question. “That is one of the answers your body has been giving while your mouth hid behind jokes.”

The platform seemed to tilt at the way she said it—not alarm, but recognition, clear and unhidden, like a tracker reading the last mark on a trail.

“What is happening?” he asked.

She did not answer right away. She sat back on her heels and studied him the way no one else had all day—not embarrassed, not careful, but as though his body were a language he had walked in shouting.

“Does it hurt,” she asked, “to be away from Neytiri?”

He flinched from the question, and she pressed it, patient and exact. “I am not asking if you miss your mate. I am asking what your body does with her absence.”

The distance between this platform and the furs he had left at dawn pressed in on him all at once—branches, paths, minutes, her hands no longer on him.

“It feels wrong,” he said slowly. “Not like an injury. Just—wrong. Like my body knows where she should be, and it’s pissed that she isn’t.”

“Worse and better,” he admitted. “Like standing close to fire while freezing. Except the fire’s the problem too.”

Mo’at looked at him for a long moment.

“Ah,” she said, very quietly.

Jake went still.

“What?” he said.

He tried to push to his feet, irritation rising in his chest. Her hand landed light on his knee and somehow kept him seated.

“Do not run from the answer before I give it,” she told him. “It has already found you. Standing will not make it lose the trail.”

“I was just gonna pace.” He snapped, and then clenched his teeth before he could say anything further.

The sound that escaped him might have been a laugh, if it had survived the trip.

Her hand stayed on his knee, steady and impersonal and grounding, and the sight of it did something strange to his chest, because Grace would have reached for instruments first—a scanner, a cuff, cold humming machinery she trusted a half-step more than her own eyes—while Mo’at had only touched his face, his pulse, his hand, and asked where it hurt and who it hurt to leave. The grief came soft this time, harder to swallow for its gentleness, and Mo’at saw that too.

“You feared your body was failing,” she said.

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. She pressed his knee once and withdrew her hand.

“Tell me the rest,” she said. “Fear left unnamed only grows.”

He tried to insist there was nothing. She only waited, until the silence got too heavy to keep carrying.

“There’s swelling,” he said finally, dragging each word out like it had hooks in it. “At the base. It wasn’t there before. It isn’t going away.”

Mo’at’s expression didn’t change, though when he risked a glance up her mouth had pressed into a careful line.

“You’re laughing,” he accused.

“If I wished to laugh at you, you would know it.” Something warmer moved under her words. “This is only me being true. Not unkind.”

The humor settled into something gentler. “You are not dying.”

“Okay,” he managed, “but that is a very low bar for good news.”

“You are entering your season,” Mo’at said.

Jake’s brain short-circuited, then handed him, absurdly, a dog. Not a Na’vi word half-caught at some fireside, not a line out of a folder he’d skimmed—an old brown mutt his family had kept when he was a kid, and the one ugly word his mother used for it every summer, low and irritated, over the back fence. That was the only shelf the word had ever lived on in his head, and it had nothing to do with people.

“That’s a—” He stopped, because saying it out loud only made it worse. “That’s a dog thing.”

“It is a body thing,” Mo’at said, unmoved. “You are not the first body to have one.”

“Nobody ever told me Na’vi even—” The sentence died before he finished it, because the real shame sat under the surprise: nobody had told him because he had never asked, and the reading he’d been supposed to do before he ever set foot on Pandora had gone unread, one more thing he’d meant to get to and hadn’t.

“No,” he said anyway, stubborn even now, “someone would have warned me this was on the menu.”

“It was not,” she answered, and then, before he could take it for another riddle, “Not before,” which stopped him harder than the word itself.

“No one kept a secret from you,” she said, her amusement giving way to something older and more exact. “Before, your body was Na’vi in every ordinary way. It breathed. It hunted. It bled. It desired. It could be wounded, and it could heal. But it always waited for you to leave it again. That is not the same as a body certain the spirit inside will stay.”

“Okay,” Jake said slowly. “So?”

“Rut is not only desire,” she said. “Desire can live in a divided body. Rut is deeper. It is the whole body calling from itself—certain enough to call at all.”

Divided. The word landed with a dull, ugly weight, true in a way that still caught him, because he had been two things for so long that he sometimes forgot there was only one of him now.

“And now?” he asked.

“Now you are not divided. Now your body knows what Eywa has made true.” She held his gaze. “You are here, Tsyeyk. You remain. There are things the body does only when it knows it is home.”

The heat left him for exactly one breath before it crawled back under his ribs, changed by the words into something no easier but wholly different.

“This is not rejection,” she said.

He hated the word in her mouth, hated that she had found it without his handing it over—or perhaps he had handed it to her in every way that counted.

“This is not your body casting you out,” Mo’at went on. “It is the opposite. It is not sending you away from itself. It is calling from itself, fully, for the first time.”

“The opposite,” he repeated. “That deserves more explaining than that.”

“I am explaining,” she said, unbothered. “You are only trying to make the answer into something else while I speak.”

He let that land, and said the thing that had been waiting since her first question and now had teeth. “For Neytiri.”

“For your mate,” Mo’at said.

The phrasing hit him low and immediate, heat dragging through him before he could brace against it, and when his fingers curled, Mo’at watched it happen without flinching.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“For—” He gestured vaguely at himself, at all of it. “This. My body doing whatever it wants in front of you.”

“You will not apologize to me for proof that you are alive,” she said, and the mercy in it undid him worse than sharpness would have.

He pressed the heel of a hand to his brow. “It’s not just—” He stopped, started again. “I keep thinking there’s a bill coming due. Like I got to keep the legs, the lungs, the life. I got to keep her. Two thousand people didn’t wake up, and I did. So maybe this is the part where it stops working. Where whatever Eywa did doesn’t hold. Where my body finally figures out I wasn’t born in it and starts—sending me back.”

Said aloud, the fear sounded smaller than it had felt inside him, though it shook him all the same.

Mo’at did not answer quickly, and when she did her voice had dropped. “Look at me, Tsyeyk.”

He did.

She laid her hand flat over his heart. “This body is not borrowed. Not now, not anymore. It is not rejecting you, and it is not sending you anywhere, because there is nowhere else for you to go. You are already where you were brought to be.”

He would not meet her eyes.

“And this is not a debt,” she added. “Eywa does not measure what you are owed for the ones who did not stand where you stand. She did not give you this body to take it back if you cannot earn it.”

His eyes burned and he refused, fiercely, to do anything about it.

“Fear does not make you less Na’vi,” she went on, before he had to decide what to do with his face. “A boy born to this body would still mistake his first rut for sickness. He would still be fool enough to hunt on an empty stomach if he thought courage demanded it.”

“Great,” Jake muttered. “So I’m emotionally twelve.”

“You said this. Not I.” A pause. “But yes.”

The laugh finally cracked out of him, small and unwilling and real enough to loosen something in his chest.

“Listen,” she said, less a command than a preparation. “The heat and the pain will worsen if you fight them. Your scent will carry farther. The People will understand enough to move away, but you should not stay among them and force them to pretend otherwise.”

His laugh died on the reminder of exactly that clan, and his first month leading it, spent becoming a walking announcement for biology he had not known applied to him.

“Feels pretty shameful from here,” he said.

“Then do not feed what only bites you,” she said. “Shame will not steady you. It will only make you cruel to yourself, and silent with the woman who should hear you.”

He held her gaze and nodded once.

Mo’at sat back. “Go to Neytiri when we are finished here.”

His body answered before his mind could—heat and want and fear all at once, the furs, her hand on his jaw, her voice telling him to come back when it worsened, as if some part of her had already heard this coming.

“And Neytiri?” he asked, before he could stop himself. “She would have known? Before?”

The word came so cleanly that he blinked.

“She believed exactly as I did,” Mo’at said. “That while your body was not wholly yours, this would never come. She has not been waiting for you to stumble onto a truth everyone else quietly buried.”

Something in his chest loosened and ached at once.

“But this morning,” he said.

“This morning there was something to see.” She considered him. “She saw you. That is not the same as knowing all of what had begun.”

The relief was a strange one, since it erased neither the embarrassment nor the ache nor that his mate had understood more than he had, but it changed the shape of her silence: she had not sat on some obvious secret for weeks, only watched something unexpected surface in the man she loved, and chosen, for reasons he did not yet fully grasp, not to name it before he was ready.

“Does she know what to do?” he asked, and heard himself an instant later. “Stupid question.”

“It is a frightened question,” Mo’at corrected. “That is not the same thing.” She held his gaze. “She will know enough. What she does not know, you will learn together, as mates have since long before either of you had names to be embarrassed by.” She paused. “Neytiri has carried her own fire alone since she was a girl. This is not new to her body. It is only new to share it.”

He huffed, and it shook some of the terror loose.

She poured water from a covered bowl and held it out. “Drink. And eat before evening.”

“Always,” he said, smiling, and lifted the cup.

The water was cool and faintly bitter and struck his empty stomach hard enough to remind him he had been a fool on several fronts and had only begun to pay for it.

She waited until he had finished. “Does Neytiri know you came here?”

Her face did not change, though somehow that made him feel worse.

“I didn’t want to worry her,” he offered.

She only hummed. “Instead you left your mate with everything she could see, and no truth from your mouth.”

That landed sharp against his chest.

“I didn’t know the truth,” he protested, looking away.

“You knew fear,” she said, gently and without mercy. “Fear, while not the whole truth, is still enough to share with the one who has joined her life to yours.” She let that settle. “Neytiri is your mate. Not a child to be kept from hard things. Not a woman who loved you only while you were easy to understand.”

His temper flashed bright for a single clean second before it collapsed, because under the anger sat the uglier thing he could neither command nor joke nor shoot through.

“I was scared,” he admitted, low.

Her face softened just enough. “This is exactly why I speak plainly, and not gently enough for you to hide inside my words.”

He looked down and made his fists unclench against his thighs.

Then she rose, folded two leaves around something dried and dark, and offered it to him.

“I already ate,” he started.

“Not enough food,” she said, “for a stubborn man who should have listened to his mate earlier.”

He took it, because he was not fool enough to refuse her twice in one day, and ate it under her watchful eye though it tasted of bark, smoke, and personal failure.

“Mission accomplished,” he muttered.

Her mouth almost smiled, then settled. “Go to her.”

He looked toward the path. “What if I scare her?”

The words were out before he could stop them, the real question he had carried in beneath the swelling and the heat—what if his need was too much, what if Neytiri looked at him and stepped back.

Her eyes softened around it. She came close and tipped his chin up with two fingers, letting him be seen with none of the gentleness that would have let him look away.

“You will not frighten Neytiri by needing her,” she said softly. “You may find your need well met with her own.”

His breath left him.

“She is not soft because she loves you,” Mo’at went on. “She is strong enough for this. She has crossed war and grief and the remaking of the world at your side. Do not insult her strength because your own need frightens you.”

He swallowed.

“Getting a lot of that today,” he said.

He stood slowly this time, which felt like a small victory until his body reminded him that standing remained a whole situation, and Mo’at, mercifully, said nothing.

At the edge of the platform he stopped. “Does it stop?”

For the first time, her expression went almost kind. “No.” She let him suffer a single heartbeat. “Not by pretending it is not happening.”

Jake winced.

“It changes,” she said, “only when you stop fighting it and go where your body is sending you. To Neytiri. To your mate.”

His stomach pulled tight because some traitorous part of him liked that phrasing far too much.

“Go,” she said, before he could embarrass himself further.

He made it a single step onto the branch path.

He turned to find her standing in the green light, Tsahìk and mother and the nearest thing left to a healer who could promise him he was neither coming apart nor dying.

“Neytiri has been carrying worry since dawn with nothing to put it on,” she said.

He looked away, swallowing the urge to stay and avoid it altogether.

“Worry shared between mates can settle once it is given somewhere to land,” Mo’at said, her voice gentling by half a shade. “Worry left alone only grows heavier.”

His fingers tightened on his bow around that last arrow to the part of him he had tried to hide.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, quiet, and the human words twitched her mouth though she let them go.

This time, walking back through the trees, Jake did not bother telling himself he was not sick. He knew that now, and somehow the knowing made the walking harder, because what waited for him at the end of it was not a cure. It was Neytiri, and an explanation, and the thing his body had been reaching for since before dawn—and every branch between them felt like one too many.

Neytiri was not on the sleeping platform when Jake reached it.

For half a breath, the absence hit him so hard that he simply stood there with one hand braced against the side of the woven entryway, bow still gripped in the other, the whole long climb back from Mo’at’s platform tightening into one cold, stupid point beneath his ribs. He had known she might not be there. Of course he had known that. Neytiri had duties, she had told him so herself, and the clan did not stop needing her simply because Jake had discovered that his own body had kept a very old appointment without telling him first.

Still, the empty furs looked wrong.

The space smelled like her, which made it worse. Smoke and leaf, sleep-warm skin, the clean crushed-green scent of the plants she had tucked into the corners, and beneath all of it the faintest trace of something Jake had not known how to read that morning. He knew it now, or thought he did. Maybe not with Mo’at’s certainty, maybe not in the old, bone-deep way the People knew the cycles of their own bodies, but enough that the scent moved through him like a hand closing around the base of his spine.

He lowered the bow before he dropped it.

That felt like discipline.

It lasted until he took one step toward the furs and the ache low in his body answered, rolling deep and heavy through him, gathering in the same new swelling that had made him forget how to breathe before dawn. Jake stopped with a rough sound caught behind his teeth and pressed his free hand against the support post, trying to make the world stay the size it was supposed to be.

“Okay,” he muttered. “This is fine.”

It was not fine.

It was, in fact, becoming dramatically less fine with every breath.

Jake shut his eyes, which did nothing useful at all. Behind them, Neytiri was still there in pieces: her fingers at his jaw, her breath at his throat, her hand trailing down his arm like she had not wanted to stop touching him. He could hear her telling him to come back when it worsened. Not if. When. He had thought that was ominous at the time, and he had been right, which was rude of the universe.

A sound moved below the platform.

Jake’s eyes opened.

Neytiri came up through the lower path without hurry, but not slowly either, bow across her back and a small bundle of gathered straps tucked against one hip. The sight of her struck him with such immediate force that he forgot to feel relieved first. His body answered before his mind could get a word in, heat dragging low and hard enough that he had to shift his stance, and Neytiri saw that too, because of course she did.

She stopped at the edge of the platform.

For a moment, neither of them spoke. The forest moved around them, late daylight shifting through the leaves, the settlement breathing below in softened bursts of voices and work and distant laughter, but inside their space everything narrowed to the line of Neytiri’s shoulders, the way her fingers tightened once around the bundle, the way her eyes moved over him and changed.

Not surprise.

Not exactly.

Concern first, sharp enough to cut through everything else; then recognition, followed by something Jake could not name because she tucked it away before it could fully reach her face.

“You went to Mo’at,” she said.

Jake swallowed. “Yeah.”

Neytiri set the bundle down beside the furs with careful hands. “And Tarsem brought you.”

Her gaze lifted.

The corner of her mouth did not move, which told him the joke had landed somewhere useless and died there. She crossed the platform toward him, stopping close enough that her scent wrapped around him again, close enough that his body seemed to lean toward her before he made it stay where it was. Her eyes searched his face, then dropped to his throat, his chest, the hand he still had braced too hard against the support post.

He had rehearsed this on the way back, which turned out to mean nothing, because every version had depended on Neytiri not standing in front of him looking like that. Worried. Hurt, maybe. He braced for anger anyway, out of habit more than evidence—Mo’at hadn’t actually promised him that part.

“She said I’m not dying,” he said.

Neytiri’s eyes narrowed. “That is where you begin?”

The name landed soft, but Jake could hear the warning beneath it. She took one more step, and when he did not move back, she lifted her hand to his chest, palm settling over the place Mo’at’s hand had been.

Jake’s breath dragged.

Her fingers spread. “Tell me.”

So he did.

Not well, maybe, and not all at once, but he tried. He told her that Mo’at knew as soon as she started asking the right questions. He told her about the heat, the scent, the way being away from Neytiri felt wrong in a place he had no polite name for.

Neytiri’s hand had stilled against his chest during the telling. Her eyes dropped—not down his body this time, but inward, as if something she had been holding loose in her mind had finally taken shape.

“Oh,” she said.

Jake laughed once, thin and helpless. “Yeah. Big morning for me.”

Her fingers curled lightly against him. “Mo’at is certain?”

That almost earned him a smile. Almost.

Instead, Neytiri looked away toward the furs, toward the little nest of extra softness she had built before either of them had been brave enough to say what it was for. Jake watched the line of her throat move as she swallowed.

“I did not know,” she said.

The words came quietly, but she gave them to him clearly, without making him ask twice.

Jake’s chest tightened. “Mo’at said you wouldn’t have. She said you probably thought what she thought.”

“That your body would not do this,” Neytiri said.

Her hand slid from his chest to his side, not leaving him, only moving because she seemed to need the proof of him beneath her palm. “We did think this.”

The admission landed gentler than he expected and harder than he wanted. “Nobody thought to mention it?”

Now she looked back at him, and there was something at last, though it was not the anger he’d braced for. It arrived narrow and aching instead, worry wearing the shape of an old wound. “Mention what, Jake? That there was a thing we believed your body could not do? That there was another way you might be reminded of what had been taken from you before Eywa gave you this life?”

He opened his mouth.

Nothing useful came out.

Neytiri’s jaw worked once before she continued. “Would that have been kindness? To tell you of a door we believed would never open, and then ask you not to stand before it?”

The shame hit him cleanly enough that he looked down.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Okay.”

Her worry softened almost at once, which somehow made it worse. She stepped closer, her hand moving up his side to his ribs, then his shoulder, then the side of his neck. He let his eyes close for half a second when her thumb brushed beneath his jaw.

“This morning,” she said, “I knew something had changed. I knew your scent was not as it had been.”

“To me,” she said.

He gave a faint, unwilling laugh. “That’s what your mother said.”

Now Neytiri did smile, small and quick, though worry remained in the shape of it. “She likes you.”

The laugh that left him was rougher than he meant it to be, too close to relief, too close to everything else. Neytiri’s expression shifted, and then both her hands were on him, one at his neck and one at his waist, steadying him before he had decided whether he needed it.

He did.

He needed her closer, needed the space between them gone, needed her hands to stop being careful and start being certain, and under all of it he needed not to frighten her with the size of that wanting. Mo’at had told him to trust what he knew, but knowledge and fear were not enemies; they could sit in the same body and tear it in opposite directions.

“Neytiri,” he said, and there must have been something in his voice, because her eyes darkened.

“You don’t,” he said, then immediately hated the words. “No. Sorry. I mean—”

“I know enough,” she said, and there was nothing soft about it now. Her fingers tightened at his waist, not painfully, but with enough command that his body quieted for one startled heartbeat just to listen. “And what I do not know, we will learn.”

That was almost exactly what Mo’at had said.

Jake stared at her. “You two rehearse this stuff?”

Neytiri’s ears flicked. “What stuff?”

Her mouth curved. “Perhaps you are very easy to know.”

This time, she laughed under her breath, but the sound faded as quickly as it came, because another wave of heat rolled through him and dragged his body toward hers so sharply that his hands caught her hips before he could think better of it. He did not grip hard. He still froze like he had.

Neytiri looked down at his hands.

Jake started to let go.

“No,” she said, quickly.

The word stopped him.

She covered one of his hands with her own, pressing it more securely against her hip, and Jake’s mind went blank around the contact. Her skin was warm beneath his palm, alive and familiar, and the simple permission of it hit him harder than any touch had a right to.

“You are allowed to touch me,” she said.

His throat tightened. “I know.”

He let out a breath that was nearly a laugh. “Everybody’s asking me that today.”

He looked at her, really looked. Her breathing was too measured, and her pupils were wide enough that the gold of her eyes had thinned around them.

“I know,” he said. “I just don’t know what I’m doing.”

Her hand rose to his face, and this time the touch was not a question. “Then do not lead.”

The words struck him low, impossibly low, and his fingers tightened on her hip before he could stop them.

Neytiri felt it. Her gaze sharpened around the touch.

He closed his eyes for half a breath. When he opened them, she was still there, close enough that her breath touched his mouth, her hand at his cheek, her body warm beneath his hands and her expression so intent that the whole forest seemed to fall back from it.

“We should talk,” he said, because some stupid, desperate part of him still thought talking might keep him human-shaped a little longer.

“We will,” she said. “But not here.”

That took a moment to land. Then he realized she was listening beyond him: to the movement below, the ordinary paths of the clan, the voices that rose and fell too close to where his scent was apparently announcing things he had not consented to announce.

His face burned. “Oh, right.”

“Yes,” she said, not unkindly.

She stepped back, taking one of his hands with her before he could mourn the loss of her against him too obviously. “Come.”

Neytiri looked at him and the question died instantly.

He shut his mouth.

“Right,” he said. “Following.”

They did not go far, but every step felt like a test designed with a personal interest in humiliating him. Neytiri led him along the inner branch path, away from the busier platforms, toward a smaller shelter tucked above and behind a curtain of broad leaves where the air was cooler and the settlement sounds softened to a murmur. It was still theirs, still near enough to the sleeping platform that the scent of their furs followed them, but more private, screened by leaf and height and the natural curve of the tree.

Jake noticed, distantly and with a kind of doomed admiration, that she had already thought of that too.

“You prepared this,” he said.

“I prepared many things,” she answered, and then glanced back quickly, her expression tightening when she saw his face. “Not because I knew. Because I wondered. Because your sleep changed, and your scent changed, and you would not tell me why your eyes kept leaving mine.”

He had not realized that last part.

“I know what you were trying to do,” she said as she guided him past the leaf curtain and into the shaded hollow beyond. “I also know what you did.”

That was fair.

The hollow held another layer of furs, a water skin, a small bowl of fruit, and the same clean leaves tucked into the seams of the woven floor. It was not elaborate. It did not need to be.

Jake stared at it.

Neytiri let him.

The ache moved through him again, slower this time, more dangerous for not being sharp. He could feel his body recognizing the space with the same terrible certainty it recognized her. The furs. The shelter. The mate standing beside him, waiting.

His tail thumped once against the woven wall.

Neytiri’s eyes dropped to it.

Jake closed his eyes. “I’m not responsible for him.”

Her mouth twitched, and the humor helped until it didn’t, because then she was closer again, close enough to lift both hands and begin unfastening the strap across his chest.

Jake caught her wrists.

Not to stop her. Not exactly.

She paused anyway.

The stillness between them changed. It was not the frightened stillness from morning. It was cleaner than that, sharper, with her hands held in his and his pulse beating hard enough that he could feel it in his teeth.

“You can say no,” she said.

The words went through him like a cool hand against the back of his neck.

He looked at her.

Neytiri waited, patient and immovable.

Jake drew a breath. “I can say stop.”

His grip loosened at once. “I stop.”

Her expression softened, but her voice stayed steady. “Good.”

Something in him unclenched then, something that had been braced not against her, but against himself. He let go of her wrists. She did not immediately resume what she had been doing. Instead, she stepped in and pressed her forehead to his, breathing with him until the next wave passed through his body without knocking his knees out from under him.

When her hands returned to the strap, they moved slowly.

Too slowly, maybe.

Jake made a sound under his breath and reached to help, but Neytiri caught his hand before he could fumble the knot loose by force. Her fingers closed around his, firm enough to stop him, gentle enough that the order lived in the touch rather than the strength of it.

“Let me,” she said.

His body liked that far too much.

His voice came out rough. “You’re enjoying this.”

“No,” she agreed, and pulled the first knot free.

The strap loosened across his chest. Air touched skin that already felt too awake, and the faint brush of it made him shiver. Neytiri saw. Her gaze moved over him openly, not devouring, not embarrassed, but present in a way that made him feel the difference between being looked at and being seen.

“You are beautiful,” she said.

Jake huffed because he did not know what else to do with that. “I’m sweaty and losing my mind.”

“Yes,” she said, dragging the strap away from his shoulder. “And beautiful.”

She set the strap aside and touched his chest with both hands, palms spread, not teasing now. The contact grounded him for one second and ruined him in the next. Heat moved under her hands, or maybe toward them, and his whole body leaned in so helplessly that he heard the breath catch in her throat.

Not just him, then.

The knowledge struck hard.

“Neytiri,” he said, voice coming out broken.

Her eyes closed briefly, and when they opened again, the composure in them had thinned. “I am here.”

“You’re—” He stopped because the word affected felt too small, and wanting felt too obvious.

“I am here,” she repeated, and guided one of his hands to her waist, then higher along her ribs, holding it there when his fingers trembled. “You are not alone in this.”

He bent his head before he could think better of it, pressing his mouth to the side of her neck where her scent was strongest. Neytiri’s breath broke, small but unmistakable, and the sound went through him so cleanly that his hand tightened.

He froze.

Her fingers slid into his hair, not pulling him away, only holding him there. “Slow.”

The word should have frustrated him. It did, somewhere far away. Mostly, it calmed him. The instruction gave the need a shape, and the shape gave him something to obey.

He kissed her throat more carefully, feeling the pulse beneath his mouth, the warmth of her skin, the small tremor that moved through her when his teeth grazed but did not bite. Her hand tightened in his hair. His tail, traitor that it was, curled around her ankle and tugged.

Neytiri looked down.

Jake did too.

For a moment, they both stared at the offending tail wrapped neatly around her like it had made a decision on behalf of the entire household.

“I swear to God,” Jake said.

Her laugh came out lower this time, breathless, and Jake felt it against his mouth because he had not managed to fully lift his head from her neck. He wanted to live there. He wanted to crawl out of his own skin and into hers.

Neytiri unwrapped his tail with one foot and then, because she was cruel and perfect, caught it lightly in her hand instead. The touch jolted through him, not unbearable but close enough that his knees bent.

“Careful,” he rasped.

“Yes,” she said, and the word was not apology. It was promise.

She let the tail go and reached for the tie at his waist.

Every part of him went still.

Neytiri noticed the change and stopped before the knot was undone. “Look at me.”

He did, barely.

“We do only what you want,” she said.

His laugh came out wrecked. “That list is getting real broad.”

Her mouth curved, but her eyes stayed serious. “Then we begin with this. Do you want my hands on you?”

His body answered with a pulse so hard he had to breathe through it. “Yes.”

That stripped him bare more effectively than her fingers had.

“Yes,” he said. “I want your hands on me.”

Neytiri held his gaze as she untied the wrap.

There was no good way to be dignified after that, so Jake stopped trying. The cloth loosened, slipped, and left him exposed in the shaded green light with his skin damp, his cock hard and aching, the swelling at the base fuller than it had been that morning. Shame tried to rise and failed because Neytiri stepped closer before it could get its hands around his throat.

Her palm settled low on his stomach first.

Not where he expected.

Not where he needed.

“You are shaking,” she said, voice soft and low enough for the small space.

Jake tried to smile. “Yeah, well. Big day.”

Her thumb moved once over his skin. “This frightened you.”

That went straight through him, a low, broken sound coming up his throat before he could stop it.

He looked away, but she caught his jaw and brought him back.

“It frightened me, that you went away from me with this,” she said, and the honesty of that hit harder than if she had raised her voice. “But I am more glad you came back.”

Her hand slid lower, fingers trailing down his stomach, leaving a path of heat in their wake. When her fingers finally wrapped around him, Jake’s breath broke out of him in a sound he could not have swallowed if the whole clan had been listening. His head fell forward against her shoulder, eyes pressed shut as the touch lit up every part of his body.

Neytiri’s ears flicked, her own breath changing.

“Too much?” she asked.

“No,” he said immediately, then forced himself to be honest because her eyes demanded it. “A lot. Not too much.”

She nodded once, accepting the difference, and moved her hand slowly. The first stroke was gentle enough to be mercy and firm enough to prove she knew better than to treat him like he was fragile. Jake’s head rolled, his nose pressing back into her neck where her scent was strongest. His hands found her hips, then stopped there because he did not trust them farther.

Neytiri pressed her face against his temple, breathing him in. “You can hold me.”

His heart stumbled, and he pressed his fingers a bit more firmly into her hips. She moved her hand in response.

The pleasure hit different after that. Not easier, not less urgent, but less lonely. It moved through the same heat and pain, through the same frightening pressure gathering low in his body, but now Neytiri’s hand was there too, steady around him, making the ache answer to rhythm instead of panic. His hips tried to move too fast. She slowed him with her other hand flat against his lower back. His fingers dug into her waist. She murmured his name and he loosened before he could be told twice.

Somewhere in the middle of it, she was trembling too.

Not much.

Enough.

That changed everything again. His eyes opened against her shoulder, and he pulled back far enough to see her face. Her control was still there, but it was work. He could see it in the set of her mouth, in the brightness of her eyes, in the way her breath caught each time his body answered her hand.

“You too,” he said.

She did not pretend not to understand. “Yes.”

Her hand slowed, and for one terrible second he thought he had ruined something by asking. Then Neytiri leaned in and pressed her face into the side of his throat, breathing him in deep, her hand tightening around him with enough restraint that he could feel everything she was refusing to spend all at once.

“When your scent changed,” she said against his skin. “Perhaps before. I did not know what it was at first, only that my body knew before I did.”

Jake groaned, and the sound vanished into her hair.

After that, the world became her hands and her mouth and the patient, devastating certainty with which she took him apart. She wrapped her hand around him, slicking what had already gathered at the head down his length until his hips rolled up to meet her without his permission. She pressed a flat hand to his chest and walked him backward until his knees found the furs, easing him down beneath her before she followed him there.

The furs were softer than he thought they would be. Or maybe every nerve in his body had become a witness with an opinion. And when her mouth found him instead, hot and slow and unhurried, the sound that tore out of him was not a word he could name later, one hand coming up to press against his face while the other settled on her shoulder.

She was thorough about it. Her tongue worked the underside where he was most sensitive, found the new swelling gathering at his base and traced it until his whole body shook, and she did not let up even when he begged her—brokenly, uselessly—to slow down, to give him one second, to please, God, just wait.

She did not laugh at the begging, which was good, because he might have died of the shame of it. She only drew back long enough to press her mouth to his hip and tell him, low and close, that she wanted this to last, that he was to breathe, to stay with her, to let her feel the exact moment it became too much. Each instruction went into him like a hook and held.

By the time she lifted her head, her mouth swollen and slick from him, Jake no longer knew whether he was obeying because she was right or because obedience had become the only thing keeping him from shaking apart.

Neytiri knelt over him, hair falling around her face, grey daylight and green shadow moving over the blue of her skin, and even from beneath her he could see how wet she was, how her thighs trembled faintly with holding herself back. She had shed her own wraps with the same economy with which she did everything, but there was nothing detached in her now. Her breathing had changed. Her scent had deepened, thick and unmistakable in the small space, and the sight and smell of her together hit his body so hard he had to turn his head into the furs.

Neytiri’s hand landed on his chest. “Look at me.”

He looked back at her in outrage.

There was the smile, sharp and sweet and gone almost before he could hold it.

Her body settled over his, skin to skin, warmth to warmth, and Jake could feel exactly how ready she was, wet and swollen where she pressed against his stomach, and the last coherent parts of his mind began quietly evacuating. He touched her, hand moving over her waist, her thighs, the strong line of her back, until his fingers moved between them, between her thighs, pressing two fingers into her folds. Her breath broke on a sound that undid something low in his chest. She guided even that, not with words at first but with her hand over his, showing him pressure, pace, patience, rocking herself into his hand until her thighs shook and a low, helpless sound climbed out of her that he wanted to hear again immediately.

She finally shifted forward, the head of his cock dragging slow between her legs, catching against her clit, until he pressed just against her entrance. Jake’s vision sparked white at the edges. When she lifted herself and took him in her hand, lining him up with the slow care of someone handling fire, notching just the head of him inside her and going still there, shaking, Jake’s hands clamped around the furs instead of her hips.

Neytiri saw.

Her expression softened and sharpened at once. “Touch me.”

“Touch me,” she repeated.

He did.

She sank down by inches, her body opening around him with a slow, shaking give, her nails biting small crescents into his chest, her breath catching audibly with every inch she took, and Jake lost whatever sentence he had been trying to build somewhere around the third.

It was not gentle in the way gentle meant easy. It was slow because she made it slow, because she controlled the first inch and the next, because each tight, slick stretch of her around him dragged a sound out of him that made her pause and breathe through her own. He could feel the new swelling at his base pressing against her when she took him deeper, not inside her yet, not fully, but present, undeniable, a blunt promise his body understood better than he did.

His hands shook on her hips, breaths coming in fast as he tried to keep himself still.

Neytiri leaned forward until her forehead touched his. “Still with me?”

“Yeah,” he said, though it came out nearly broken. “Yes. Please.”

He made a helpless sound.

Her hips stopped.

Jake’s eyes flew open.

Neytiri held him there, half-mad and pinned beneath the weight of her gaze rather than her body. “Words, Jake.”

He could have moved her. Physically, maybe he could have. His body wanted to try, wanted to thrust up and chase the place where every nerve was pointing, but the thought of disobeying her landed wrong in him, sharp and sour beneath the heat.

“Please move,” he said. “Please, Neytiri.”

Her composure cracked, and he felt the warmth of her constrict tighter around him.

Then she moved, pulling herself up before sinking back down onto him.

The first roll of her hips nearly took him apart, his head falling back into the furs. She rode him slowly, face-to-face, controlling depth and rhythm with maddening precision while he lay beneath her and tried to remember that he had once commanded clans. That felt unlikely now. Fictional, maybe. A lie told by someone who had never had Neytiri above him like this, eyes bright, mouth parted, one hand braced on his chest to keep him exactly where she wanted him.

Jake’s tail thumped against the furs.

Again.

Then curled around her calf.

Again.

Neytiri looked down, breath catching on what might have been a laugh if she had more room for it. “He agrees?”

She smiled, grinding herself down harder onto him, the swollen base pressing against her entrance with promise, tearing out a loud moan from both of them.

After that, the pace changed, not faster exactly, but deeper, her hips rolling with a purpose that dragged the knot at his base against her with every downward stroke. Jake felt the first true pressure of it then, the swelling catching, his body trying to hold where she was still choosing movement, and panic flashed through him bright enough to cut the pleasure.

Neytiri felt him go rigid.

She stopped at once.

He could not breathe.

Her hands came to his face, firm and warm. “Look at me.”

He did, because she had taught him how.

“That is normal,” she said.

Her expression changed then, something fierce and tender moving through it so quickly he almost missed the tenderness. “You will not. I am here, and I am telling you what is safe. Trust me.”

His breath shook and his hands settled on her hips, more so to hold on than for anything else.

She pressed her forehead to his and breathed with him as she began to move again. Her body opened around him by fractions. Her hand stayed at his jaw, her thumb stroking once each time he remembered to breathe. The knot pressed, then slipped deeper with a sensation so intense that his whole body arched.

Neytiri’s own sound broke low in her throat.

That sound did something to him, something in his chest coming undone as the heat spread hotter through his body.

Jake’s hands moved before he could think, gripping her hips and rolling them both. One hand slid back on instinct, closing around the base of her tail, and the sound that tore out of her at that was unlike anything he’d heard from her yet.

For one heartbeat, he took the rhythm.

Neytiri gasped, her body tightening around him so hard that his vision went white at the edges, and the part of him driven by instinct surged toward that sound with frightening joy. He wanted more of it. Wanted all of it. Wanted to pull every careful piece of her apart until she sounded as wrecked as he felt.

Her hand closed around his wrist.

Not hard.

Enough.

He stopped.

The obedience was instant enough to shock him, a broken whine coming from his chest that would’ve mortified him if he’d had any sense for anything else.

Neytiri’s breathing was ragged now, her pupils wide, her control visibly frayed but not gone. She leaned down until her mouth brushed his ear.

“I know,” she whispered. “I know. But not yet.”

His whole body trembled under her.

“Sorry,” he said, trying to slow his breathing.

“No,” she said, and lifted her head to look at him. “You stopped. That is what matters.”

The praise hit him embarrassingly hard.

Neytiri must have seen that too, because her mouth softened into something almost dangerous. “Good,” she said.

Jake made a sound that was not language.

Her hips moved again.

This time, when control shifted, it did not break loose from her; it bent between them. She let his hands guide for a few strokes, let him pull her down into the rhythm his body needed, and then she took it back with a change of angle and pressure that made him curse into her shoulder.

The heat climbed between them.

It gathered low and deep, around the knot and through his spine, into his thighs, his hands, his teeth. Somewhere in the tangle of furs the tie at the end of his queue had come loose, and he felt the air hit it, bare and far more sensitive than he expected.

Jake froze.

Neytiri felt him go still and followed his gaze down to where the fine tendrils lay uncoiled against his shoulder, close enough now that the barest movement would bring them to the dark fall of hers. The sight of it should have embarrassed him more than anything else had all day, but by then embarrassment had been burned down to something rawer.

His queue found hers before he had decided to move it, instinct closing the distance faster than conscious thought, the loosened end curling toward her like it already knew where it belonged. Neytiri’s breath caught. She did not pull back.

She met it with her own, pressing her forehead to his and guiding the bond into place before either of them had said a word, her hair falling around them until the world became green shadow and warm breath. When tsaheylu took, it was not like falling and not like waking, but something worse and better than both.

With the knot seated deep and neither of them able to chase the old rhythm anymore, Jake found a new one instead—small, deliberate rolls of his hips that ground the swollen base of him up and forward inside her, no longer thrusting so much as pressing, insistent, against the one place that made her breath tear apart. Neytiri’s head fell back. Her hand found his and pressed it flat between them, guiding his fingers to where she needed them, and when his thumb found her clit and moved in time with the grind of his hips, her whole body seized around him.

“There,” she gasped, the word half through the bond and half aloud. “Jake—there.”

He kept the same deliberate angle, the same slow, rolling pressure that dragged the knot inside her until her control shattered all at once. Her pleasure opened inside his, sudden and complete, her hips stuttering as her own release broke over her, a hard clench around him that tore a soft cry out of her before she could catch it, her spine bowing, her nails cutting small half-moons into his chest. His need struck through her and came back doubled, shaped by her answering heat as she kept shaking apart above him, still tightening around him in slow, uneven pulses.

Jake snarled, teeth clenched tight as his hands moved back to her hips, holding her down against him.

Neytiri did too, her voice breaking open above him, unguarded for the first time all day.

The sound of her, inside the bond and outside it, broke the last careful thing in him.

The knot swelled fully as he came, locking deep with a pressure that would have terrified him if Neytiri had not been there, if her hands had not framed his face, if her voice had not reached him through the blinding rush.

“Stay with me,” she said, or thought, or both. “Jake, stay with me.”

He did.

Barely.

His teeth found her shoulder because instinct moved faster than thought, and he stopped at the edge of it, shaking, until her hand tightened in his hair.

“Yes,” she breathed. “I am here.”

His teeth pressed into her shoulder, a broken sound coming from his chest, a helpless press of teeth and mouth against her skin as the climax took him under. Neytiri answered with her own mouth at his neck, sharp enough to follow the heat moving through the rest of him. The bond lit with both of them at once: heat, pressure, release, her body tightening around him, his body locked inside hers, the whole forest seeming to pulse beyond the leaf curtain as if the world had noticed and decided to breathe with them.

For a while after, there was no room for words.

That was probably for the best.

Jake came back to himself in pieces: the furs beneath his back, Neytiri’s weight against him, the hot, joined place between their bodies where the knot still held, the tender ache in his neck where her teeth had marked him, and the slow tremble passing through her muscles as she breathed against his skin.

He lifted one hand with great effort and set it on her back, pulling her tighter against him, careful not to jostle where they were tied.

Neytiri made a small sound.

“You okay?” he asked, voice ruined.

She took a moment to answer, which scared him until she lifted her head and looked at him with eyes gone soft and dark and very much alive.

“Yes,” she said. “Are you?”

He considered the question.

His body was still hot, still aching in places, still locked inside hers in a way that should probably have alarmed him more than it did. His mind felt like someone had taken it apart, washed it in river water, and put half the pieces back in the wrong order. His chest hurt, but not with fear now.

“Define okay,” he said.

Neytiri’s laugh came out breathless and low, and he felt it everywhere they were joined.

His laugh shook them both and immediately reminded him that moving was not the best idea.

Jake went very still.

Neytiri’s mouth twitched against his skin. “You remembered.”

“Hard to forget,” he said.

She looked far too amused for a woman currently stuck on top of him. “Not yet.”

He stared at her.

Then the implications of not yet drifted through the bond, warm and wicked and entirely unhelpful.

“Oh,” he said.

Neytiri’s smile deepened.

His body, exhausted traitor that it was, gave a slow pulse of interest.

Jake shut his eyes. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“No,” she said, and brushed her mouth along his jaw. “This is only the first.”

He groaned, but there was laughter in it this time, and something like awe beneath that. “I’m not surviving this.”

He opened his eyes and met hers, smiling despite himself.

She was watching him.

“Teach me, then,” he said.

Neytiri’s expression changed, and the look that moved through her was worth every humiliating moment of the day.

Her hand slid into his hair, careful of his queue, and she pressed her forehead to his, breathing him in, a promise rather than a beginning.

“I am,” she said, eyes bright.

Outside the leaf curtain, the clan went on living. Voices rose and fell. Branches creaked under familiar feet. Somewhere below, someone laughed, and somewhere above them the first evening insects began to sing. The world did not stop because Jake had finally caught up to his own body.

Inside the hollow, Neytiri settled more comfortably against him, still joined, still warm, still his, and Jake let himself stop fighting the pull that had been under his skin since before dawn. It was not sickness. It was not rejection. It was not the body casting him out.

It was Neytiri’s breath against his mouth.

It was her hand over his heart.

It was his own body, strange and beloved and finally certain, holding him exactly where he was.

Home.