by Dixon, Ruby
"Wutdoes datmeen?" she sobs. But she reaches forward and runs her hands along my face, as if touching me with the same concern that I touched her. "Har yew okay? Hurt?"
We can do word noises tomorrow, I decide. I do not like how tired she looks. Too sleepy, and she could fall into the fire. I get to my feet, gathering her against me. "Har-loh cave?"
"Oh." She shakes her head, even though she is wobbly with exhaustion. "No. Wehafta stayen protek dameet." She prods me to release her, and when I do, she gestures at the strips covering all the surfaces. "Food."
Aaah. I understand now…and she is right. It will require a lot of effort to pull everything inside so the predators do not snatch it from us. She is smart to sit out here with the food, but she is cold and tired. At least I can help with that. I sit down by the fire again and indicate she should sit next to me. To my relief, she comes to me immediately, pressing herself against my side and snuggling in. I wrap her cape around both of our shoulders and hug my mate close.
She sighs happily and slides her cold fingers against my stomach. "Weel tokabuddit inda mornin."
I think she tells me I am wise and clever for deciding to guard the food. Pleased at her praise, I press a kiss to her bright mane and stare into the fire. Her hands clutch me tightly, one curling around my tail as if she wishes to anchor me against her. It makes my cock uncomfortably hard, but I do not wake her for matings. Har-loh needs sleep. I hold her and watch the fire, and even though I am tired, I do not drift off. I can stay awake for a very, very long time if I need to, and right now Har-loh needs sleep more than me.
I watch over my mate until the darkness turns to a pale gray and the skies lighten. The twin suns will be up soon. If I am to find that dvisti herd again, I should leave before long. It is difficult, when all I want to do is hold Har-loh and watch her sleep, knowing that she is safe and comfortable and rested.
But holding my mate does not feed her, and so I quietly tug her hands off of me. I slip out of her grasp and get to my feet. I am sore, I realize, and there are a few scratches from one of the fiercer snowcats along my shoulder that ache this morning. I rotate one shoulder, testing my stiff muscles.
A hand goes around my tail, grabbing it and holding it still.
I look down and my sleepy-eyed mate is gazing up at me. "Where dyew tink yergoin?"
She is beautiful, and even though I am tired, my cock stirs at the sight of her. I tap her cheek with gentle fingers and then gesture at the hills. Her brows furrow together, and I think she does not understand, so I point at my spear.
Har-loh gets to her feet and moves to my spear. She grabs it…and then flings it away from us. It skids into the sand a short distance away and I look at my mate in confusion. Why did she do that?
She points at me. "Yewnmee needta tok."
"Har-loh." I move to go pick up my spear, but she makes an outraged noise and steps in front of it before I can. "Har-loh meat." I point at the kills I brought in last night, because I remember the word for food. "Meat, yes. Fur, yes. Har-loh, yes."
Her gaze goes to my catches, and then she shakes her head. "Staaaah," she says softly. She gestures at the ground, and it takes me a moment to realize that she does not wish for me to go. She wants me to remain here with her.
"Meat," I say again, but I worry she does not understand. "Yes meat." I point at the animals. "Yes. Yes. Yes." I make a gesture for an enormous amount of meat. "Har-loh meat." I pat my stomach, indicating I want her to have a full belly. "Mmmm."
Her hand goes to her mouth, and her lips twitch. I would much rather she smile and laugh than weep, and I smile back at her.
"Rukh," she says softly, taking my hand. She pauses for a moment, studying our surroundings. "Iyam tieherrrd." She pauses, and makes a great big yawn. "Tired." She points at the meat, and with each strip, she says her name again. She points at the fire and says her name. She points into the cave, and then gives me another weary look, then yawns again. "Har-loh tired." She moves toward me and brushes her fingers over my face. "Rukh tired."
I make a noise of frustration. How do I make her understand that it is my responsibility to make sure that she is fed and warm? That I am a poor mate if I cannot keep her comfortable? I indicate the hides on the animals. "Fur. Har-loh fur. No brrrr." I mock-shiver. "Rukh mate, Har-loh fur." I nod, as if this answers everything.
She shakes her head again. "Stay," she says in the soft voice again. "Tired. Rukh tired. Har-loh tired. Fur later." She moves toward me and wraps her arms around my torso, pressing her cheek against my chest. She is warm and soft, and I am a weak, weak male. Stay at her side? I would like nothing more.
I pet her mane, loving the nearness of her, of the press of her skin to mine. "Lay-turr?" I echo. I do not know this word, but I suspect it means tomorrow. That we rest today and tomorrow I hunt again.
"Later," she agrees.
Very well. A day of rest, then.
19
RUKH
It is not a day of rest after all. The moment Har-loh and I eat a bite and wash it down with water, my mate gets to work. I thought that by leaving her behind, she would relax and sleep by the fire, waiting comfortably for me to return. This is not the truth, though. When I go into the cave we have claimed for ourselves, I see dried meat on every surface, the hides rolled up and the heads rotting in the corner of the cave. When I return to Har-loh's side, she is already hard at work, butchering the dvisti. She uses her small stone knife to hack it apart and to peel the skin away. She slices open the gut and pulls out the organs, then takes them to the water's edge to clean them out and hangs them to dry, too.
I cannot have my mate doing all this work, so I pitch in and help, and she tosses me a grateful look.
By the end of the day, I understand why my Har-loh is so tired. I understand now why she did not wish for me to run off into the mountains with the easy task of hunting. Preparing the meat and the fur is time-consuming, and messy, and exhausting. We work until the suns fall beyond the edge of the sky again and it grows dark. At the end of it, the skins are rolled up and bundled, and Har-loh makes motions that she will scrape them tomorrow. I think of all the skins waiting inside the cave, too. Of all the meat. Of the strips of reeds she dries so she can make something with them. Of the organs she carefully saves and gestures that she will make something with them.
It is very different from when I have hunted on my own. If I was hungry, I would kill something and eat it until there was no more meat. If I did not finish all of it, I would shove it into a snow bank and gnaw on the frozen meat the next day. I did not think about the future. But with Har-loh, we must think of many turns of the moon from now.
We must think of when our kit arrives. We must have everything ready.
HARLOW
Rukh stays after dark, and I'm so incredibly glad that he does.
I think his leaving before without saying a word was a misunderstanding. I don't think he hates me. I don't think he's tired of me. I think he's unused to having to discuss his actions with anyone else, so he didn't think anything of up and leaving. To him, it was no big deal. He doesn't realize how it looked to me. It just boils down to communication. We need to learn to talk to each other, and that starts with language. No matter how difficult it is, I've got to get more words into him and I need to learn how he thinks. We can figure this out.
Once the meat is cooked enough that it won't rot, we hang it in the cave to dry. There's an endless list of things to get done, and when the meat is all done, I work on getting the brains out of the skulls to use for the skins tomorrow. By the time I'm done, I'm so weary I want to fall over, and I barely have the strength to wash my hands before I collapse into the furs, exhausted. Rukh joins me and I curl up next to him and sleep like the dead.
When I wake up, the inside of the cave is cold and empty. I'm terrified that he's left again. "Rukh?"
"Har-loh," he calls back from outside.
Relief crashes over me and I fight back the sob that rises in my throat. I compose
myself, shove my feet into my boots, and trot out to meet him. To my relief, my mate's there by the makeshift fire. He's got it going again, burning the rest of the massive log that didn't completely catch last night. I see he's spread a few more strips to dry, and there's a pouch for breakfast tea hanging over the fire.
On the sand, Rukh has one of the skins unrolled and he's busy scraping the underside.
He's here. He's here and he's helping me. He's not going anywhere. I'm so relieved I sink to my knees and choke up again.
"Har-loh?" Rukh gets up from his spot by the skin and moves to my side. I watch through my tears as he studies his gross, blood-covered hands, as if he wants to hug me but can't. He drops to a squat next to me instead, tilting his head so he can see my face. "Yes?"
It's the wrong word, but I know what he's asking. I manage a smile and wipe my eyes. "I'm fine. Just emotional. Probably the pregnancy." Or that there's just been a lot going on for the last while, but I can't really tell him that now. "Thank you for staying."
He watches me, then moves in and kisses the top of my head. "Tea?"
"Oh." I get all sentimental and blubbery again, but I hide it better this time. He knows the word for tea. "Tea would be great, thank you." With just that small gesture, everything seems right in the world again.
* * *
Having Rukh's help makes everything not seem quite so daunting. Before I know it, all the meat is smoked, all the furs are scraped and the brains rubbed into the underside of the skin. It's not the best job I've ever done on skins. I know there are more steps to be taken to ensure the skin is the softest it can be—lots of stretching and drying, stretching and drying. But our priority is quantity rather than quality—quality can come later.
When I finish with my last hide and look around, I don't see anything urgent that has to be done. For the first time in days, there's nothing so pressing that it can't wait until tomorrow.
I want to collapse with relief. Instead, I just wipe my sweaty brow and give a hearty sigh. "I think we're done for now, baby."
Rukh frowns at me and wipes at my brow with his thumbs. Oh. I must have smeared something. I glance down at my hands…and grimace. I am utterly disgusting. My fingernails are ringed with dirt, my skin is covered with dried bits of unnamable things, and I'm sweaty and nasty. I glance over at Rukh and it's the same for him. He's dirty, too, and his long hair is sticking to his skin.
Now that the worst of the work is done, there's nothing I want more than a hot bath. "Let's wash up, shall we?" I make a scrubbing motion at my mate, indicating cleaning. "Wash."
He nods. "Wash."
As we've worked side by side today, I've gone over basic words with him. Hide. Meat. Scrape. Rock. Wave. Sea. Anything I could point at or easily do, I gave words to, and Rukh repeated them. I'm not sure if he'll be able to recall everything that we went over, but I'm hoping that day by day, we'll fall into an easier understanding of one another.
I poke the fire, stoking it, while Rukh fills up both of our pouches with water to warm over the flames. There's a few smaller rocks that I keep warming near the fire that I slip into the heated water to warm things faster as Rukh disappears into the cave again. To my delight, he returns with my soap-berries. "Wash," he says again, and gestures at the small, dried fruits. "Repeat?"
He's asking for the word for them. "Soap-berry," I say, and add a few to the water. They've withered because I've had them for so long, but I'm hoping that heating them in the water will squeeze a bit of the cleansing juice out. If nothing else, we'll smell nice and fruity.
As the water warms, Rukh moves toward me. I smile at him, tired. I'm half-expecting another word question, but instead, he tugs at the laces on my tunic. "Wash," he murmurs. "Wash Har-loh."
"I am pretty dirty." I smile up at him, standing still so he can pull at the ties. "Days and days of dirt. It'll feel good to get clean."
He narrows his eyes at me and I can tell he's trying to follow along with my words.
I put my hand on a smear on his rock-hard abdomen and brush at it. "Dirty," I tell him. I rub at another stripe of dirt on his arm. "Dirty."
Rukh grunts. He peels open the front of my tunic, revealing my breasts. My nipples prick at the cold, and his gaze goes there. A hungry ache starts low in my belly, and I wonder if this is going to turn sexy. But Rukh just pulls the tunic off of me and then eyes my lower arms and the grime there. "Dirty."
Yeah, I am pretty gross. I suppose it's a good thing that we're not getting sexy…though to be honest, I'm less and less concerned with how I look around Rukh. I know he likes me no matter what. My hair could be a disgusting mop and he'd still think I was beautiful. It's a rather freeing feeling. I rub my fingers over his chest, because I'm tired and sore and filthy but I'm also getting turned on. It's been days and days since I've had sex with my mate and I miss it. I miss him.
Plus, the way he says “dirty” in that caressing way is pretty damn hot.
He's completely naked—like usual—and I want to run my hands all over him. I want to take his cock and rub those ridges until he's so hard that he's leaking, and then he'll lose control and fling me down onto the sand and we'll have hot, filthy sex.
Except the sand is pretty nasty, and my skin is, too. I sigh at the thought, because I'm sticky and a bit itchy. "Dirty dirty Harlow."
Rukh chuckles. He leans over and puts a soft leather rag into the water, swishing it like I do when I'm bathing. Then he pulls it out and presses it to my skin, a look of intense concentration on his face as he washes me. A girl could get used to this. I sigh happily, holding my hair up off my neck as he mops me with the lukewarm water. I try not to look at the trickles of water creeping down my skin, because I'm sure they're discolored and gross and I just want to focus on getting warm. "You wash me first and then I'll wash you," I tell my mate as he bathes my arm. "Sound good?"
"Rukh wash Har-loh," he says in a low voice, sliding that bit of damp leather over my skin. "Good, good."
He's definitely a fast learner. My nipples are tight and hard with need, and when Rukh turns to washing my front, I don't complain. It's not dirty—my tunic protected me from the worst of the grossness—but I desperately need his touch over my sensitive breasts. He grazes one tip and I suck in a breath, hot arousal flooding through me.
But all Rukh says is "dirty" and keeps washing me.
When I'm clean, I feel better. Much better. I'll wash my hair tomorrow, maybe, but for now it's enough to just be clean and sweet-smelling. I sigh happily as he tugs my filthy leggings off and then gets to work on the rest of me as I wash my hands and scrub at my nails. By the time he's happy with how clean I am, I'm shivering and wearing nothing but my boots, body chilled as the breeze dries my skin. It's Rukh's turn now, though. I take the small rag from him and soak it, then gesture that he should turn around. "Now I'll do you."
He doesn't even hesitate. Rukh presents me with his back, his tail flicking back and forth languidly, and when I touch him with the warm cloth, he makes a sound of pleasure in his throat. My body responds, my pussy growing wet as I wipe down his strong limbs. God, he's pretty. I'm so lucky to have him. Even our “issues” aren't big ones. We can't communicate all that well, we had to leave everyone behind and strike out on our own, but they seem like small things in the wake of having this big, gorgeous man at my side. I can forgive everything in this moment, which means I am super, super hard up for some sex.
The thought's an amusing one and I make sure to scrub at Rukh's skin as quickly as I can. The moment he's clean of gore and grime, I'm absolutely going to jump his bones. Part of me wants to turn this into a sexy sponge bath, but there's too much blue skin that needs to be cleaned and it's too chilly to loiter.
Unsexy sponge bath first, I decide, and then into the cave. Then we can be as sexy as we like.
I'm having a hard time sticking to my own plan, though. Rukh was naked as he helped me, which means he's dirty everywhere. It's hard to tell myself to wait and be patient when I have to towel off
his perfect, hard buns. Or when I run the washcloth down each strong leg. As I make my way to his front, I notice he's not unaffected, either. His cock has stiffened and is standing proud and erect as I wash up his thighs.
Well, I just have to make sure he's clean there, too, don't I? It's my duty as a loving mate.
So I wet the rag again and take great care washing his sac and every ridge of that big, thick cock. I wash his spur, and then give a little sigh of disappointment when I work my way up to his chest. I'd rather stay between his thighs, but that won't get the rest of him clean. By the time I straighten to do his shoulders, he's watching me with a glittering, intense stare that takes my breath away.
"I think I'm done," I manage, tossing the rag into the last of the water in the pouch. "All good. Now—"
He shakes his head, trapping my arm before I can leave. "Har-loh dirty."
"Still?" I glance down at my body, holding my boobs to look at everything underneath. I'm not as sparkling clean as I would be in a hot shower, but I thought we'd done pretty good. I feel refreshed and good. I feel more than ready to have my mate touch me, which I couldn't say an hour ago. "Where?"
Rukh makes a noise in his throat and then leans over the fire pit, pulling out the towel again. He gives me a scorching look. "Rukh wash."
And then he drops to his knees in front of me.
I…oh. My breath comes faster, and I think about how much I enjoyed cleaning his cock, even though I didn't have to. Perhaps I spent a bit too much loving time on it and he got ideas in his head. Or maybe he just misses my touch as much as I miss his. Whatever it is, I'm not about to complain. "Rukh," I breathe, brushing strands of hair back from his face. "Where are you going to wash me, baby?"
He gives me a sly look that takes my breath away and then presses the warm rag right between my thighs.
