Bronwyn & Steele
Her first-time doggy
The shelter smells of hay and wet concrete, and a stray doggy odour that clings to my scrubs no matter how many times I wash them.
I've been here since six this morning, hauling forty-pound bags of kibble, hosing down the outdoor runs, doing the thousand small brutalities that keep thirty-seven dogs alive and halfway sane.
My hands are raw from the cheap institutional soap.
I'm crouched in Run 12 with a trembling cattle dog mix when I hear the gate clang.
Heavy boots on concrete.
Visitors are usually surrendering animals they can't keep or adopting ones they shouldn't.
Either way, they want someone else to handle the emotional labour.
"Bronwyn Phillips?"
The voice stops me.
Low, scraped, like someone who spent years shouting over machinery.
I straighten, knees popping, and find a guy watching me through the chain-link with eyes the colour of faded denim.
He's wearing a faded work shirt with "Davey" stitched above the pocket, sleeves rolled to show forearms thick with sun damage.
A farmer. I know the type.
Grew up surrounded by them in Mount Isa, men who measured worth by what they could fix and what they could endure.
"That's me," I say, wiping my hands on my thighs.
"You here about the kelpie?"
"Steele Davey."
He doesn't offer his hand, just nods.
"Came to look at the blue heeler pair. Heard you had two from different litters, surrendered close together."
I feel something shift in my chest, recognition of a kind.
Not attraction, not yet—just the alertness of finding someone who speaks my language.
"Blue and Rusty. Eight months old. Smart as whips, both of them. Too smart for the families that had them, apparently."
I unlock the gate and step out, close enough to smell diesel and sweat on him, the honest odour of someone who works outside.
"I'm guessing you're not looking for pets."
"Working dogs."
He falls into step beside me as I head toward the back runs.
"Got a property north of here, cattle. Lost my best bitch to snakebite last month."
I slide the bolt on Run 15 and Blue immediately launches himself at the fence, all teeth and manic energy.
Rusty hangs back, watching with that calculating stillness heelers have. They're beautiful animals, coats like storm clouds and rusted iron, muscles already showing the compact power of the breed.
"Close bond," I say.
Steele crouches at the fence, and I watch his hand extend through the diamond gaps. Blue snaps, then sniffs, then presses against the wire with his whole body.
Rusty approaches more slowly, nostrils flaring.
"Good structure," Steele murmurs.
"See the angulation in the hindquarters? Clean lines."
He looks up at me, and I notice for the first time how his mouth curves slightly at one corner, like he's perpetually amused by something private.
"You know dogs."
"I grew up with them. My dad ran a station near Mount Isa." I say it casually, but the words pull something loose in me, homesickness I usually keep buried under work and study.
"I wanted to bring my red heeler with me when I moved down for uni. Apartment regulations."
I make a face. "Frickin' body corporate."
Steele stands, brushing dust from his knees.
"Where you living?"
"Share house with three other vet students. One of them has a rabbit in her wardrobe, which is apparently acceptable, but a dog in the actual living space violates someone's ancient rule."
He laughs, a real sound, rusty from disuse.
"Apartments," he says, like it's a complete explanation of everything wrong with the world.
I find myself wanting to keep him talking.
"You want to see them work? I've got a ball in the office. We could take them to the back paddock, see how they respond to direction."
"Thought you didn't do test drives."
"I don't."
I meet his eyes, feel heat rise to my cheeks that has nothing to do with the morning sun.
"For you, I'll make an exception."
The paddock behind the shelter is technically for staff use only, a scrappy rectangle of buffalo grass bordered by a sagging fence and a drainage ditch that fills with frogs after rain.
I've brought countless dogs here, watched them remember what their bodies were built for after months of concrete and cages.
Blue and Rusty explode through the gate like corks from champagne, tearing figure-eights through the grass, nipping at each other's heels in that herding dialect that needs no translation.
I throw the ball—cracked rubber, scent of a thousand slobbery retrieves—and Blue snatches it mid-air, lands already turning for more.
"They've got drive," Steele says.
"Are you taking both? They really should stay a pair."
Blue has lost interest in the ball. He's circling Rusty now, hackles half-raised, a different energy in his movement. She stands her ground, tail curved over her back, and I recognise the posture a second before he mounts.
"Oh, shit," I say, stupidly.
They're not fixed.
The shelter's policy, plus the backlog at the clinic, the endless calculus of resources against time.
We've all seen dogs mating, plus as a vet it's clinical and expected; but never with someone watching.
Never with someone watching me watch.
Steele doesn't look away.
"Natural behaviour," he says.
"See how she stands for him? No fear. She's ready."
Blue's hips are pumping, quick, urgent thrusts. Rusty's head is lowered, ears flat, a whine escaping her throat that sounds almost like pleasure.
The sound of it, the raw functionality of it, makes my mouth dry.
I like sex, but I've never been taken doggy.
So fuckin girly vulnerable.
"She's not in heat," I hear myself say.
"This is... practice. Establishing dominance. Social bonding."
"Practice," Steele repeats the word like he's tasting it.
"For when she's ready."
I should move.
Should call the dogs apart, return to the professional boundaries that keep this job a routine.
Instead, I find myself watching Steele's profile, the way his jaw tightens, the movement of his throat as he swallows.
"They don't pretty it up," he says.
"No pretending. Just need, and taking what's offered."
My breath catches. I tell myself I'm imagining the subtext, the deliberate weight he gives certain words.
But when I glance down, I can see the shape of him through his work pants, the unmistakable line of arousal, and he makes no move to hide it.
"Mr Davey—"
"Steele."
He turns to face me fully, and I see that his eyes aren't just blue; they're flecked with gold near the pupil, the colour of grass seeds in summer.
"You ever watch something like this and feel..."
He doesn't finish.
Doesn't need to.
I feel it too, the heat pooling between my thighs, the sudden awareness of my own body as creature, as something that wants without reason or permission.
"There's a staff room," I hear myself say. "Inside. Air conditioning."
He smiles, and it's wolfish, completely without pretence.
The shelter office is a converted supply closet, desk buried under adoption paperwork and veterinary journals, one narrow window overlooking the parking lot.
I lock the door behind us with fingers that tremble slightly, telling myself it's the temperature change, the blast of refrigerated air after the morning heat.
Steele doesn't pretend to look at the room.
He's watching me, watching my hands as I twist the lock, my throat as I swallow, the way my nipples have hardened against the thin fabric of my scrub top.
I see him seeing, and the knowledge makes me wetter.
"You've got filthy thoughts," he says.
"You're projecting."
"Am I?"
He takes a step closer, and I smell him again, that compound of sun and labour and male skin.
"Because I'm thinking about how you'd look on your knees. How you'd sound."
My laugh comes out breathless.
"You don't waste time."
"Wasted enough already."
Another step.
We're almost touching now, my breasts nearly brushing his chest with each inhale.
I understand my body is screaming at me to close the distance, to press against him and feel the hardness I saw outlined in the paddock.
"Tell me what you want me to do to you."
His hand finally makes contact, thumb brushing my lower lip, and I taste salt and engine grease.
"Use the words you know."
I think of Rusty in the paddock, the readiness in her stance, the acceptance. I think of my own body, wet and aching and tired of being ignored.
"I want you to fuck me. I want your cock inside me."
"More specific."
His thumb presses into my mouth, and I suck instinctively, tasting him, feeling the texture of his skin.
"Tell me where."
"Dog me, you prick, like the bitch on heat I am."
He lifts me onto the desk with hands that know their own strength, papers scattering, a stapler hitting the floor with a plastic crack.
My scrubs come down with my underwear, both tangled at my ankles, and he looks at me there, spread open on institutional laminate.
Yep, thank God I trimmed up last night in the shower.
"Fucking beautiful," he mutters.
Then his mouth is on me, not gentle, not exploratory—he's eating me out.
He's slurping with his tongue.
Sucking with his lips.
Filling me with wads of spit.
His tongue finds my clit, and I cry out, hands fisting in his hair, my hips bucking against his face.
"Oohh! Fuck! Yeah! Fuck, that's good! Oohh! Oohh!"
He doesn't let me control the rhythm.
He holds my thighs apart and works me with lips and teeth and the flat of his tongue, varying pressure in ways that keep me hovering, never quite cresting.
Fuck, his tongue is divine.
The lap, the lap, the lap.
Fuck, it's good.
When he slides two fingers into me, curling to find that spot inside, I hear myself making noises I've never made before, guttural and desperate.
"Uh-Uhh! Uh-Uhh! Hnnghh!"
He lifts his head, mouth shining with my fem-slick, and his eyes are almost black with want.
"Say it, Bronwyn"
"Your cock. Please, Steele."
"He pulls his fingers free, and I whimper at the loss, but then he's there, thick and hot and pushing into me, and the stretch is sweetly perfect.
He doesn't pause once he's started, drives forward until he's buried to his pubes, and we both grind, breathing hard, feeling the pulse of skin where we're joined.
He starts moving, and I forget how to think.
I'm filled.
I'm filled.
Beautifully stretched by a hard, stiff boner.
The desk creaks beneath us, something plastic cracking under the force of his thrusts, and I wrap my legs around his waist to pull him deeper, to meet each stroke with my own urgency.
God, I'm wet.
I hear the pucky, pucky squelch of rapid coupling.
Christ, it's a hot fuck.
I'll peak for sure.
Then he rolls me over.
My body splayed across the desk.
His foot spreads my legs.
My buttocks quiver.
I'm so vulnerable.
He kisses my butt cheeks.
Licks my tush.
"On all fours," he says.
God, I'm ready for doggy.
Steele frickin mounts me and stabs in his rod.
Hard, fast and indecent thrusting.
The type of fucking that makes you nearly stop breathing.
I'm a bitch on heat taking stiff man meat.
I feel my clench.
I feel his stretch.
I love his balls slapping into my arse cheeks.
I crave being fucked on all fours.
My fingers and his join around my swollen clitty.
My orgasm starts its meander through my body from my pink nub.
Tingles and pricks of escalating delight.
Fem-pleasure cresting.
"Uh-uhh! Ahh! Ahh! Uhh!"
My doggy-gasm.
He smears his jizz wad across my butt cheeks.
After the paperwork, Steele invited me out to his property for my Uni semester break.