Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 72515 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 363(@200wpm)___ 290(@250wpm)___ 242(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72515 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 363(@200wpm)___ 290(@250wpm)___ 242(@300wpm)
I gnaw on some jerky, and once the water is boiled and cooled, we drink some. It will be a long day if we continue to engage in this silent dance.
That is good, though. I hope it will be the longest day of my life. Because what I said remains true. Tomorrow, likely, she will be gone. So I will memorize these strange moments I have with her. However they pass, I am grateful for them.
I would prefer to repair whatever I seemed to break earlier. I have learned what it means to apologize by watching Hannah and Abaddon, so I try it. “I am sorry if I said something wrong earlier. I do not know many humans. My words are. . . perhaps bad?”
Her head jerks up from the cup of warm water she’s cradling in her hands, her eyes landing on my upper cheek. “No. No, your words are fine.”
I frown. “You. . . did not like them.”
She looks to the floor and expels a long breath. “It’s complicated.”
“I understand that words can be difficult. I do not require them.”
Her head comes up again. “You don’t?”
“I have gone many years without speaking at all. I. . . understand.”
“You did?”
I nod.
“Why?”
Without meaning to, my eyes lift to the church around us. When I am with her, I can almost forget where we are. If I believed in ghosts, this place should be choked with them. But I know better. The souls of this place have moved on.
I know because I was the one who took them all to the otherworld.
“Ah,” she says. “Some things are best without words.”
I nod, my throat thick, grateful.
We are quiet, then, but it is a different quiet from before. I feel together in intimacy with her, not apart in the discord of misunderstanding.
I do not know how long it passes like that before she finally says quietly, “I feel so lost. I don’t know what to do.”
“What do you want to do?”
Her head gives a quick shake. “What I want doesn’t matter.”
I frown. “Isn’t that all that should matter?”
She shakes her head quickly back and forth, and her hand goes to her thighs. She pulls out one of her knives and a small stone and quickly scrapes it across the surface, sharpening the blade.
“You are very good with your blades.”
She nods absent-mindedly.
I want to ask a hundred more questions. How did she come to be so good with knives? What does she do back in her other life? Where does she live? What is her family like? Is there. . . Is there anyone she cares for there?
“Also, I should have said earlier, I will be very sad when it is time to say goodbye,” I finally voice. “These moments with you have been very. . . precious to me. I have lived for a very long time alone. I will treasure the memory of these days with you for all eternity. It will be a great pain to me to part.”
She lets out a little cry and shoves her knife back in its hilt, springing up from where she’s sitting to come over to me. “Hold me.”
I almost throw down the cup in my eagerness to pull her into my arms, wrapping her tightly in the way I know she likes best, all three sets of arms around her small body. My soul only feels at rest again once she is secured against me, her face nested against my neck.
And when she says, “You asked what I want. I want you inside me again,” into my skin, I immediately harden beneath her.
She wriggles, and I release my arms around enough for her to whip her shirt over her head.
And then her gorgeous, bouncing teats are before my face. My breeches are painfully binding my length, and I’m eager to get her bottoms off, too. I lift her in one pair of arms, drag her pants down with another, and my breeches down with another still.
I carry her to the bed cloths, glad I stoked the stove so it radiates heat as I lay her sweet naked body down. Her legs fall open, and for the first time, I get to really see what I have only felt wrapped around me before. Immediately her scent rises to meet me, and I’m intoxicated.
“May I taste and lick you here?”
She squeaks, then nods and covers her eyes with her hands. “Please take control.”
I hesitate, then think about how pressure sometimes seems to calm her. “Can I restrain you?” I ask, moving my upper hands to cover hers.
She freezes a moment, then slowly removes her hands and nods, allowing mine to replace hers over her eyes. With her hands that are now free, she reaches for my middle pair of arms. “Yes. I’d like it if you held me down.”