by Rena Marks
“Does this feel good?” he asks, his voice sultry and deep. “Or would you like me in deeper?”
“It’s awesome,” I pant. “Don’t stop. Do just what you do.”
My fingers slide down the curve of his neck, tugging him to me for more kisses. His tongue dances with mine. I can’t help it, I gasp at the bolt of pleasure he brings me. My pussy is clenching with need, as if I’m trying to capture his finger and trap him inside.
“You’re so wet,” he groans.
“You make me hot,” I say. “I ache deep inside.”
His nostrils flare, and he pushes me down further as he climbs on top of me. My thighs are soaked. He always makes me want him desperately. I’d like nothing more than for him to slam into me and fuck me senseless.
“Baby,” he grits out. He pulls his fingers from me and I make a small sound of protest, but he replaces it with his enormous cock, rubbing the length along my seam. “Do you want me to reach that ache?”
The idea sends a shiver down my spine. Suddenly I’m aware of my breasts pressing against his chest. My nipples throb, and my breath catches in my throat as I look into his eyes. He’s beautiful, and sexy. His shoulders are massive, blocking the sun. So much stronger than me.
He parts my lips with the barest tip of his cock and a rush of excitement rolls through me.
“Yes. I want you inside me.”
“I want to be inside you. So very bad.” I hold onto him as he pushes inside me, stretching my body.
“You’re so tight,” he groans. “I’m trying not to explode.” There’s a husky tone to his voice that really does it for me.
“Doesn’t matter if you do, does it?” I murmur, and wiggle my bottom half. It feels like my pussy swallows him deeper. My moan of desire encourages him, and he thrusts again.
He knows what I mean. After a Blaedonian comes, their cocks vibrate like crazy, which empties their seed. It’s sure to push a girl right over the edge.
He thrusts again and I claw at the muscles of his back, knowing I’ve left scratches. Apparently he likes it, because he begins fucking me in earnest. With each pump of his cock into me, there’s a wet sound of sex. A slurp, followed by the wet slap of his testicles against my body.
I come apart on a scream, my back arching as my body stiffens. Still, he thrusts into me, reaching a depth inside that I can only imagine. Spots dance before my eyes and everything explodes inside me. Tendrils of flame lick me inside and burst through my skin.
“Atareek,” I shout. He surges into me one last time and we’re locked together. His entire body trembles and he leans down to clamp onto my shoulder with his teeth, marking me as he comes.
My breath is gone, my energy depleted, but his vibrations start. My sheath is already swollen and sensitive and the sudden sensation blasts me to the edge like I never left, only to toss me over. I come again, on a long, breathy moan. He nuzzles my neck and slowly withdraws and just as slowly slides his rippling cock back in. Another orgasm blasts again, and this time I think I can’t stand the pleasure.
But I do, and I crest back down inch by inch.
The world is still as we lay together, limbs tangled. We cuddle and whisper love words back and forth, until Atareek makes me giggle with the phrase, “I will love you ‘til the end of time.” Instead, he says, “I will love you until we’re out of time.”
“When will we be out of time?” I ask, puzzled.
“Now.” He scoops me up to carry me to the water’s edge. “We need to make use of the remainder of daylight so we can gather the herbs you and reverent mother want.”
“There’s a salve I’d like to make for nipples,” I agree.
He lowers us into the water just as a bird coos overhead. Very gently, he washes me.
“Let me wash you,” I say.
He pulls away. “Oh no,” he grins. “Trust me. We won’t get out of here.”
Keeping his laughing eyes focused on me, he washes himself while I chase him with a leaf we use as a washcloth to try to join in, waggling my brows lasciviously. He pulls himself just out of range when I almost reach him, leaving us both breathless and laughing.
Finally we haul ourselves out of the water to dry off and dress.
“I have an idea,” he announces. “You know how babies like to curl up their arms and legs when they’re born?”
I nod. “And so we swaddle them?”
“There’s a stiff curl of tree bark that occasionally falls to the ground. It’s baby-sized, and shaped like the curve of their bodies. It would be perfect for them to sleep in.”
“Really? Let’s see it.”
“Now, that’s the other part,” he continues. “They’re only up high on certain trees. Sometimes they fall, but up from that height, they chip or break.”
“Well, how are we going to get them?” I wonder, holding my hand over my eyebrows to shield most of the sun so I can look up at the nearby trees.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he says, grabbing me and swinging me onto his back. “Hold on.”
I barely have time to gasp before he takes off running for a tree. Grabbing onto a low hanging branch, he uses his incredible Blaedonian strength to haul us both up, and then pulls a Tarzan, grabbing a vine and swinging.
He’s moving fast, and the wind is breezing through my damp hair, so I close my eyes and hold on for dear life.
I open my eyes when his feet land on a branch, thinking we’re done. I yelp and close them again as he leaps off the same branch, flying through the air until he grips another branch and stops our fall.
“Shh, it’s all right,” he whispers, knowing I can hear. “Just hold on to my neck and waist.”
I tighten my legs wrapped around him, but I’m afraid to squeeze too much with my arms. I don’t know if I’ll choke him. And I’m afraid to slip.
At the next ledge, which feels like a ledge because the tree branches grow oddly thicker as we climb higher, he pauses. He’s breathing a little harder, but not bad. Not as much as I am.
He pulls on my arms looped around his neck and twist me so I’m in front of his body. “Shh,” he murmurs against my ear, smoothing my hair down with his big palm.
I still have him in a death-lock, refusing to let go. Noises sound different up here, the birds are louder and they have strange shrills and whistles. I glance around nervously, expecting a giant dinosauric bird to pop out.
Atareek is rubbing a hand up and down my back, and it’s comforting. “The whistling is the wind in certain branches,” he says.
Oh. Well, that’s not so bad, then.
“It must be magical to live up here,” he says. “It would sound like tinkling music all day.”
“What about the night creatures,” I manage to choke out. He continues caressing my back.
“They don’t climb,” he assures me. “That’s why we have a wall. Why the shallgas live in trees.” A shallga is a tiny creature that’s crossed between a teddy bear and a monkey. It always looks pregnant because it stores nuts in a belly pouch that it uses for bartering.
“Are you ready to go higher?” he asks, and my eyes widen.
He kisses my forehead gently. “Not much further” he says. “But I’ll have to gather speed to catch that vine over there, so I’m going to have to run off this branch and fall through the air a bit.”
“I don’t know if I’m ready.” My voices rises with panic.
“It’ll be easier this time,” he assures me. “With you facing me.”
Oh, Lord, that’s why he started out with me on his back. So I’d enjoy the easier second round. I take a deep gulp and nod.
“That’s my girl,” he says, and kisses the top of my head.
His girl lets out a long wail when he topples over the sturdy branch we’re on.
The screech is choked off when he grips another vine and we’re suddenly pulled in a different direction.
But not long later, we’ve reached our destination. We pause on a branch, and the world sways.
“Steady,” he murmu
rs. “You don’t need to look down.”
“I wasn’t,” I gasp. The air must be thinner up here.
He smiles, and pulls a cone-like thing from the tree. It breaks away with a snap, and it’s a perfectly rounded little carrier. The very bottom is flat, but with rounded edges, so it can make a rocker that sits on the floor. The sides curl up and it’s just charming.
“We rub the top edge here to make it smoother, see? Feel inside.”
The inside is soft, spongy.
“What are they normally used for?” I ask.
He shrugs. “We never really thought about using them. I just thought of it while we were thinking about babies.”
“It’s perfect.” I rub my hand all over it—the polished smooth back, the sponginess inside.
“But how will we get it back down?”
He looks blankly at me. “Oh, shit.”
I giggle. “I imagine we can have a couple hard hats. Or tie a couple to some vines and lower them?”
“That’s an excellent idea,” he says. “We are above the water. We can lower them, and swing to those lowered branches. Lower them again…until we finally drop them into the water. We can retrieve them once we reach the ground.”
He reaches for a vine, tests it for strength. Naturally, the vines here are thick and strong. So he pulls the bottom up, and it’s so long it takes a while to get anywhere. Meanwhile, the top of the vine is twisting and getting out of control. He loops it around a tree branch to hold it, like he’s storing the garden hose. Finally, the end is in sight and so he begins the arduous task of wrapping the tiny baby basket in the vine, round and round. He allows it to sink down about five feet, and it’s just hanging there, so he peels another “basket” from the tree, snapping it away, and then begins to twine it. As he loops it, the first basket lowers more. Then he reaches for a third.
“How many are we gathering?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Ten for now? We may lose some on the trip home. Or a couple may not work out. We’ll weed the defectives out when we gather them from the lake.”
It doesn’t take long, and we have a string of baskets lowering down. He unwinds the vine from the hooked branch on the tree, and we wait until the entire vine is loose.
“Now what?” I ask.
He grins and pulls his knife from his leg, and then hacks the vine. Then he turns to look at me.
“Hope they make it,” I say.
He grins. “They’re cushioned. They have a thick vine wrapping, remember? Now come here and climb on.”
Like a monkey, I cling to the front of him, and he kisses me. Beneath my spread legs, I feel a bulge beginning to press against me.
“No way,” I murmur. “Not happening up in a tree. I can barely breathe as it is. You want me to pass out?”
He gives me an endearing smile that makes him look like a youngster, and then, without warning, leaps.
“Holy shiiiiiit.” My voice echoes down.
The entire time we head down from the trees, my head is spinning. We seem to be freefalling faster than before, looping in a circle down the grove of trees. The entire time I wonder how we’re going to make that final leap from tree to ground. With me on his front, how’s he going to keep from banging his chin on top of my head? Finally, he lands on a branch that I know isn’t far from the ground because it’s not as thick and sturdy as the higher branches.
“Okay, baby,” he says. “I’m going to lower us down a vine.”
Even as he speaks, he’s climbing down, fireman style.
Oh. That was easy enough.
“I don’t know how deep the water is here,” he says. “We may have to swim.”
“Okay,” I agree, looking right below us. The baskets are floating on the water surface, still wrapped in vine. He lets us drop into the water, and once we submerge, we break apart. I surface, and wait for him. When he pulls up, I grab an end of the vine and begin swimming back to shore.
We climb onto land, hauling our wet baskets. It’s amazing how fit you have to be to live on this planet. I can barely remember how lazy we used to be, back when just taking a daily walk was considered active. Now it isn’t unusual to hike for miles, to run, to climb, to swim. And that’s all in one day.
“Let’s tie these underneath the tree,” Atareek says. “We’ll go on exploring, possibly find some shelter for later, and on the way back we can pick these up. Maybe make one of those travois that we carried Niki on when she was sick?”
I nod. “That sounds like a good idea.” I’m looping the cradles around the tree, because I don’t want them to blow in the wind.
“Hopefully none of the night predators smash them.”
“They’ll be seeking food. They’ll have no reason to gather round a tree,” Atareek says.
We walk along the shoreline, and eventually see the spot where Atareek tied our backpacks to the first tree. “We’re back,” I say unnecessarily.
We approach the tree, where he pulls them down, and I loop mine over my shoulders. I turn to him, ready to move on, but wondering why he isn’t strapping his backpack on.
“Vee,” he says softly.
I raise my brows.
“Are you ready to gather herbs? Do you know what you need?”
I nod. “I looked at everything reverent mother showed me. Repeated their names in my head. Associated my mind’s pictures with the names, so I wouldn’t forget.”
He sighs, and looks pointedly at a straggly bush near my feet.
“Oh! Is that one? Yes, yes it is,” I laugh. I remove my backpack, pull my knife out, and get to work hacking at the plant. “She gave me rolls of this soft stuff to wrap it in. It’ll draw the moisture out of the leaves to help them dry faster. When we get to a cave I can help the process by spreading them around a fire and then storing them in special woven pockets of my backpack.”
It takes about fifteen minutes to strip the herb bush, and roll it in the fabric. Then I pack it tight, and stand. My thighs protest from the time spent in the squat.
“Ready, beautiful?”
“Yes. Let’s find the next one.”
Instead of walking up the shore, he cuts a trail through the trees and we seem to walk uphill. Occasionally we stop and find what we need, and he gives me a hand with harvesting.
“Are you going to know the way back to get our cradles?”
“Yep,” he grins, a piece of mint strung between his teeth. “There’s only one way in and out through where we’re going.”
“And we’re headed there because there’s a special plant that reverent mother needs?”
“It’s the only place I’ve ever found it. The last time we harvested it was years ago, but every plant that reverent mother had from the harvest has died now.”
“Where will we stay the night?” I ask, looking at the sky. I’m not sure why I bother, because a time-teller, I’m not.
He laughs. “That was a nice try. But it’s nowhere close to evening.”
“It’s not?” I squint at the sun again.
“No. We’ll harvest the special plants and have plenty of time to find a place to sleep tonight.” He pulls me to him with an arm hook around my neck. “Relax. Don’t I always take care of you?
I smile sheepishly. “You do.”
Chapter Seven
He won’t tell me much about where we’re heading other than we’re close.
“Tell me about the next place we’re going.”
“It’s different. Not many have visited throughout the years. It’s why reverent mother requested the herbs from here. When we leave, we’ll pull up an entire plant and transplant it at home. Then she can go many more years without another visit here.”
Suddenly I stop talking, the words lost in my head as I come to an abrupt halt. Instead of staring at the monstrosity ahead, Atareek is watching me with a smile on his face. I’m speechless, taken aback by a monstrous, skeletal forest. A forest of bones.
Ribs tower from the ground like pale-white trees. Long, bony protrusions th
at look like tails sweep upward in macabre amputations. The forest extends for miles.
“What is this?” I whisper.
“We call it Land of the Dead.”
“When did they die?”
He shrugs. “I do not know if these giant skeletons are from creatures existing in the night now, or if they lived long ago. It is uninhabitable here because of the lack of water. See how nothing grows? But you will find the items that you need.”
“What about the herbs? I guess they’ll find everything at the north point?”
“There are a couple of herbs that grow here, in the center of the forest. That is the only location that has any vegetation.”
“Without water?”
He shrugs again. “I do not question things. I just know what reverent mother requests are rare plants and we have run out. We’ll need another original one to transplant. Make sure you stay on the path.”
The “path” looks like hardened ground. The trail gets much more narrow as we trek through it. Atareek insists I walk in front of him, so I do. But I think he’s surprised that I’m not panicked like the other humans would have been. He doesn’t understand the differences between them and me, and how could he? He’s not from our planet. When I visited America, I was shocked at the differences between countries. At how pampered Americans had become from easy living, with their paved walkways and jogging paths. But here, where we look for the odd shaped shells and herbs? Here it is more like my own village. This, I’m not afraid of.
“There,” he says, and points off the trail a bit. I see it, a round bush that looks out of place. It’s beneath a huge, black tree with a trunk the size of a small house. It has long, spindly branches. They look sharp, and hang nearly to the ground, but they look incongruous with the size of the tree. The trunk itself is massive, at least two lengths of me wide.
I take the sword he’s given me and hack at some of the branches. It sounds loud in the eerie forest of nightmares.
Atareek keeps an eye on the skies. The beautiful pink is turning darker. A gray I’ve never seen.
“Is night approaching?” I ask.
“No, not yet. We haven’t been out that long. It’s just this area. Still, we need to look for a back up cave, just in case.”
