Jack did not sleep.
He tried. He lay on his right side beneath the roots, because the wound in his left hip objected when he put weight on it, and pillowed his head on one folded arm. The earth had kept the day's warmth. Dampness breathed from it against his skin, rich with the smells of root, stone, leaf rot, and the small hidden lives that worked beneath all three. Beyond the shelter, the Thornwood changed its voice for darkness.
The high birds had gone quiet one by one. In their place came chirrs without pause, the sawing of wings, and deep calls that traveled so far through the trees that distance stripped the creature from them. Water continued its patient descent. It struck broad leaves with a sound like fingers drumming on hide, gathered, spilled, and struck again below. Sometimes a whole branch released its burden at once, and rain fell beneath stars. Jack closed his eyes. The pounding at the back of his skull grew larger in the dark. He opened them again.
The road beyond the ferns had faded to a pale interruption among black trunks. He could no longer see his little stack of stones. Nineteen steps remained nineteen steps, he told himself. At morning he would find them. At morning he would get back on the road and keep walking toward whichever future his blind choice had purchased. Morning required him to wake. He shut his eyes once more and counted the drops striking the root above his face.
One. Two. Three.
At thirty-seven he lost the pattern and began again. The second count reached nineteen. The third never reached four. Jack jerked upright.
His hand was in the mud beside him. His neck had folded forward, chin nearly to his chest. He did not remember lowering his arm or closing his eyes. The forest looked the same. It might have been a few seconds. It might have been an hour. Nausea rolled through him.
He turned onto his hands and knees before his stomach clenched. Water and orange fruit came up together, not enough to account for what he had eaten. The acid burned his throat and ran in a thin line through the leaves. He spat until the string broke from his lip. The motion set his skull ringing.
Jack remained there with his forehead close to the ground, breathing through his nose. Light moved at the edges of his sight where no light existed. His left hand tingled. He flexed it, touched each fingertip to his thumb, then did the same with the right.
He remembered a first-aid lesson at school, desks pushed aside and a red plastic dummy laid on the floor. The teacher had corrected someone about head injuries. Sleep itself was not poison. You did not keep an injured person awake merely to keep them awake. You also did not leave them alone.
Someone stayed with them. Someone watched for vomiting, worsening pain, confusion, speech that changed, sleep from which they could not be woken. Someone else decided when tiredness became something worse. Jack had no one. He sat back against the root and said, "My name is Jack." The words came clearly enough.
"I was walking home from school. I am eighteen. I am..."
A Drake. The inherited name seemed a poor comfort under a fallen tree. "I am going to Thornfield Academy."
His voice had not slurred. He understood himself. He could move both hands. None of that changed the piece of night he had lost or the pressure swelling behind his eyes. At the base of his cock, the ring warmed. Jack looked down.
His erection had faded after the last drops. The shaft hung thick but soft between his narrow thighs, wetness trapped beneath the foreskin. His balls had loosened again in the close, humid air, low and heavy beneath it. "You already helped."
The ring pulsed. His cock began filling before he finished speaking. The change was steady and impersonal, blood moving at another will. The shaft lifted from its hanging weight and lengthened between his legs. His foreskin drew tauter over the growing head. His balls shifted closer as the erection rose. Jack wiped a new bead from the opening and tasted it.
Sweet beneath the salt. Warmth passed into his tongue, down his throat, and settled in the wound at his hip. The pounding in his skull softened for three breaths. Then it returned.
Another bead formed. Jack gathered it. Swallowed. Waited. The relief was smaller.
The ring tightened until the pulse in his cock became a hard beat he could see. Fluid welled again, more than a bead now, glazing the foreskin and gathering at its tip. Taste.
The demand contained no word and allowed no confusion. His mouth watered. His attention narrowed to the clear wetness and the living source of it. Fingers were wasteful. The ring wanted the shortest route. Jack stared at his own erection. "You cannot be serious."
The ring burned. "Right."
He brought one hand around the shaft. It filled his grip as completely as he had imagined on the road, smooth skin over hard pressure, heavier than its appearance prepared him for. His own touch traveled both ways. He felt the hand enclosing him and the cock enclosed by it, two sensations arriving together without agreeing on which one was Jack. His hips moved once before he stopped them.
The shelter was narrow, but not too narrow. He cleared twigs and stones from the space between his feet, then sat with his back away from the root wall and spread his legs. The long muscles behind his thighs resisted when he straightened his knees. He bent them again, planted his heels, and rolled his hips until the erection angled toward his stomach. He leaned forward.
His ribs met his thighs. The wound at his hip pulled sharply. The head of his cock remained an accusing distance beneath his mouth.
Jack reached lower with his hand and drew the shaft upward. His lips came close enough to feel warmth from the glans. Pain drove through the back of his skull.
He recoiled and nearly struck his head on the root above him. Nausea rose, weaker than before but present. He sat with one hand buried in the wet leaves and waited until the white sparks left his vision. The ring continued leaking over his knuckles.
"I know," Jack whispered. "Give me a second."
The absurdity of negotiating with jewelry did not make the negotiation less real. He considered the problem as he would have considered a stubborn fitting or a wire that would not lie where it belonged. Force had put his neck in the wrong position. The reach had to come from his hips and spine together, not from crushing his chin toward his chest.
Jack widened his knees. He moved his heels closer, let them fall outward, and tilted his pelvis. One hand braced behind him while the other controlled the shaft. He breathed out and folded from the hips, allowing his back to round a little at a time. The new body knew the range even if Jack did not.
His stomach compressed. The scar at his hip burned. His mouth reached the head. For one suspended moment his lips rested against the foreskin. The ring went still. Jack opened his mouth. He drew the skin back with his thumb and took the exposed glans between his lips.
The first sensation was heat. The second was the living weight of the head settling against his mouth. Its surface yielded softly beneath his lips, while the erection beneath remained hard enough to hold its shape. A clear thread touched his tongue. Sweetness spread through him. Jack closed his eyes and swallowed.
Warmth crossed his tongue, throat, chest, and stomach in one unbroken line. The ring answered at his groin. Something seemed to pass through the circle at his base and return by the same path, a current finding ground. The pain behind his eyes loosened.
Jack held still. His lips remained around the head. His own pulse kicked once inside his mouth. Then again.
He felt each beat twice: a firm movement against his tongue and a deep answering throb at the root of his cock. The doubled sensation stole a sound from him, small and muffled around himself. He could stop.
The command had withdrawn. His mouth no longer watered with desperate compulsion. The ring had cooled enough that it did not hurt. The nausea was receding, and the headache had drawn back from a crushing pressure to an ordinary ache. Jack could release the shaft, unfold, and collect whatever else the ring produced with his fingers. Instead he moved his tongue.
He pressed the broad part of it against the underside of the glans and licked slowly upward. The flesh gave softly at the surface, moist and smooth, then resisted with the hardness beneath. His cock flexed in his mouth. The pulse struck his tongue again, stronger. Jack shivered.
"Oh," he tried to say, and felt the muffled vowel hum through his own cock.
That was new enough to make him do it again. His lips worked farther over the head. The foreskin moved with them, drawing back when he sucked and sliding partly forward when he eased away. He learned the motion by feeling both sides of it. His tongue found the rim beneath the glans, traced it, then flattened along the underside where the shaft joined the head. Pleasure rose at the base of his spine.
The ring had gone quiet. This was Jack choosing pressure, angle, and the small push of his hips because the result felt good. His cock. The words returned with greater force than they had on the road.
He sucked again. Saliva escaped the corner of his mouth and ran down the shaft into his hand. He spread it with his palm and stroked the length he could not reach, slowly at first, matching the movement of his lips. His shoulders trembled from holding the fold. His wounded hip complained each time his body tightened, but the pain was distant and diminishing. Jack took another inch.
The fullness stretched his lips. He breathed through his nose and felt the shaft's pulse travel against the roof of his mouth. When he drew back, the glans pulled at his lips before slipping free to the rim. He did not let it leave. His tongue circled, broad and wet, and his hand moved once from the ring to the base of the head. The pleasure sharpened.
His balls drew upward. The loose weight beneath the shaft tightened close, and the ring warmed with every stroke of his hand. Jack's breathing became too fast for the position. He paused with only the head in his mouth, drew air through his nose, then resumed more carefully.
He had never wanted a penis before. He wanted this one now. The admission passed through him without shame because there was no room left for shame beside hunger, pain, rain, and the feel of his own glans moving beneath his tongue. Jack rocked his hips.
The first motion was small. The second carried the head deeper. His mouth tightened by instinct, and sensation burst outward from his cock so strongly that his hand slipped against the wet shaft. He nearly stopped.
Not because he wanted to. Because the pleasure frightened him in the same way the body's strength had frightened him: another capacity already present, waiting for him to discover it. Jack set his hand again and continued.
The forest receded without becoming silent. Water fell. Insects sawed and clicked. Something large moved far beyond the road, breaking one branch and then another. Beneath the roots, Jack heard the wet pull of his own mouth and the roughening breath through his nose.
His hand stroked. His lips held. His broad tongue worked the soft surface over the hardness beneath until every pulse in his mouth answered at once through his belly and spine. The climax gathered quickly after that.
Jack recognized it too late to pretend he had not chosen the road toward it. His balls tightened. The shaft swelled against his lips. He drew the head deeper. The first pulse struck his tongue hot and thick.
Jack swallowed from surprise. The movement closed his throat around what little of the shaft he had taken, and the answering pleasure broke the rest of him open. His hips jerked. A second mouthful followed, salt-sweet and warmer than the drops before it. He swallowed that one deliberately. The ring flared. Gold light showed faintly through the wet skin around its edge.
Jack came again into his own mouth. He felt each contraction at the base, in the shaft, against his tongue, and in the tightening pull of his lips. The circuit left nowhere for sensation to escape. His hand milked upward once. Another pulse spread across the glans. He held the head between his lips and swallowed until the contractions weakened and the flow became a final sweet thread. For a while he could not unfold.
He rested with his forehead near one knee, lips still touching the softening head, his whole body trembling around the difficult curve. Rain breathed through the leaves. The gold at the ring faded. Jack released his cock.
The foreskin slid forward over the wet glans as the erection softened. Saliva and the last clear fluid shone along the shaft. His balls loosened slowly beneath it, descending again in the humid warmth. He sat upright one careful piece at a time. Silence filled his skull.
Not true silence. His heartbeat remained in his ears, and the damaged place at the back of his skull was tender beneath his hair. But the crushing pressure was gone. His eyes focused cleanly on the roots before him. When he turned his head, no sparks crossed his vision.
Jack touched his cheek. The long cut had sealed from eye to jaw, leaving a tender raised line beneath his fingertips. At his hip, the swollen edges had drawn together into a dark new scar. He bent one knee, then the other. The wound pulled but did not open. Even the small cuts beneath his feet had closed, leaving grit embedded against smooth new skin. The healing was nearly complete. His hunger was not.
It struck while he still had two fingers pressed to the scar. One moment his stomach was empty. The next it cramped so violently that Jack folded over it, arms locked across his middle. Saliva flooded his mouth with no sweetness in it. His jaw ached with the need to chew. Three fruits might never have existed.
The ring had not made life from nothing. It had taken water, fruit, blood, and whatever reserves remained in the body and driven them toward repair. Even the fluid Jack had swallowed had come from him first. He had closed a circuit, not found a source. The body was whole enough to feel how starved it was.
Jack crawled to the mouth of the shelter and searched the dark verge as if food might have appeared there while he was bent over himself. He could see only fern, road, and the pale undersides of leaves turning in a breath of wind. Going back to the fruit tree in darkness would mean leaving the shelter, retracing hours of road, and probably dying with greater efficiency. He returned beneath the roots.
The ring sat warm and quiet around his softened cock. No command followed. No fresh erection answered the hunger. Whatever had acted through it considered the emergency finished. "Easy for you," Jack muttered.
He lay on his right side again, one hand beneath his head and the other pressed over his stomach. His thoughts remained clear long enough to hear the forest settle around him: water descending from the high leaves, the deep call from the north, the near whisper of a lizard returning to the shelter it had surrendered. Jack had no one to wake him. For the first time that night, he believed he would wake anyway. He fell asleep with the road a pale line beyond the ferns and hunger gnawing cleanly beneath his hand.