by A. J. Downey
I hugged him close and looked up into his bright blue eyes.
“Your idea of fun and my idea of fun are two very different things, then,” I said with a faint smile.
“I live for the thrill,” he said, pinching his nose and wiping the streaming water from it and his beard.
“I just want peace,” I said quietly, the first misgivings beginning to stir.
He reached out and caressed my face, and I closed my eyes, turning into the touch.
“Then no worries,” he said. “I’ll protect you, do everything I can so your peace isn’t disturbed. I’m happy to take the heat.” He grinned as he said the last and winked at me, and I laughed slightly.
“I’m not sure that’s how it works,” I said.
“No?” he asked.
“No,” I said, drawing nearer and tipping my face up to his.
He brought his mouth to mine and murmured, “Well, I’ll figure it out.”
“Compromise, you mean?”
“Happy to, for you,” he whispered, and we kissed.
“Seems like I would be asking a lot,” I murmured when the kiss reached its natural conclusion.
He stroked my cheek, the barest whisper of a touch with his thumb and said, “I don’t give anything I’m not willing to give up,” he said. “I’m also not getting any younger, and if I’m going to keep up with this place, I’m going to need to slow down at some point.”
That I could buy into and I did, wrapping my arms around him and resting my forehead in the center of his chest. He held onto me, loosely, just letting me rest against him and soak up what I needed from him while the steam gently wafted around us.
When I shook myself as though waking from a dream, he smiled down at me and shut off the water.
“So, what do you want to show me today?” he asked.
“Show you?” I asked, taken a bit aback.
“Your life. You took the day off, it’s all you, baby.”
“And tomorrow?” I asked, and he gave me a wicked grin.
“Tomorrow, you learn about me.”
“Sounds exciting,” I said smiling.
“Should be,” he agreed. “Take a ride with me.”
“Are you asking or are you telling me that’s what we’re going to do?” I asked playfully.
The smile he gave me as he wrapped me in a towel and rubbed me down briskly through the material was playful, but his eyes were serious.
“It’ll be on very rare occasions that I tell you to do anything, usually regarding the club or club stuff. When it comes to that, no arguments. At least not until I get home, or it’s just you and me,” he said and his tone was serious.
“Okay,” I agreed.
“I mean it, Aspen,” he said, tipping my chin, making certain to capture my eyes with his. “It’s the only way I see this working.”
The seriousness in his eyes took my breath away. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t know what to say.
“I made my peace with what kind of man I am years ago,” he said, and the sadness in his eyes told me to the contrary, he hadn’t. He’d just perhaps convinced himself that he had. I doubted that Fenris didn’t do anything without his own reasons, however.
This was a part of him that was complex, confusing, and one that would require patience.
“You do a lot of reckless and dangerous things for the club?” I asked softly.
He shook his head. “No more than the next brother,” he said.
“That didn’t answer my question,” I said softly.
“Sometimes that’s the best answer I can give you.”
I stepped out of the tub and held the towel around me, handing him his with the other. He took it and dried off and it was a treat to simply be allowed to watch.
“You do a lot of illegal things for the club?” I asked softly.
“There’s a difference between legality and what’s morally right,” he said pointedly, and I thought about that for a minute.
“You’re right,” I said after a while, nodding. “There is.”
“All I can do is promise to keep you out of it,” he said. “Hence, why, if there’s a time I tell you to do something, I’m going to need you to do it. To keep you out of it. To keep you safe from any blowback from your world.”
“My world?” I asked softly.
“For now, still, yeah,” he agreed.
“Are they really all that different?” I murmured softly and looked up at him.
“On the surface, it doesn’t always seem like it,” he said. “Underneath, we couldn’t be more different, if you know what I mean.”
I shook my head. “I think you lost me, because I don’t quite follow, no.”
He smiled and hooked the back of my head with one big hand, dragging my forehead to his lips and kissing it soundly, pausing to soak in the gesture as much as I, myself, relished it. My muscles going loose beneath it as I soaked in his love and care – a pathetic, starving thing for love and affection that Fenris was proving to be ultimately patient with on that front.
Then again, perhaps he was just as starved in a way, as desperate to give it as I was to soak it in.
It didn’t seem like something to discuss, just something to enjoy while we each had the ability to enjoy it from one another.
“Thank you,” I whispered when he finally let me go.
“For what?” he asked softly.
“Everything,” I said simply. “For taking me in, taking me away from all that mess for a while and giving me a chance to breathe. For all of the care, for the amazing sex—” He laughed abruptly, and I smiled. “And most of all for all the orgasms,” I said laughing myself.
He hooked an arm around me and pulled me in to hold me tight, whispering in my ear, “The best is yet to come.”
I shivered with delight.
“I like the sound of that,” I whispered.
“Good.”
Alas, there was no rest for the wicked in my case. Amber called and said we were dangerously low on the colonial mugs that I made, which wouldn’t have been a terribly big deal except for the fact that they were the subject of the upcoming Thursday night Paint Night and I had twenty-three signups. I made my apologies to Fenris and he shook his head.
“Head on into your shop,” he said. “I’ll get some shit done around here and ride on over when I’m through. The day’s not completely shot. It’s nothing to worry your pretty little head about.”
I smiled at the memory as my hands crafted the bodies of the mugs on my pottery wheel in the back.
It took some doing, but I was good at these ones. The time-consuming part came with attaching the handles, to be honest, making sure the edges wouldn’t fire up sharp and that they didn’t have any burs or spurs.
I smiled when I heard Fenris’ bass growl out in the front of the shop, asking after me. Amber seemed a bit tongue-tied.
“Back here, baby!” I called out, my smile growing when he batted aside the curtain to my little workspace back here.
“Tight quarters,” he said, looking at all of the looming shelves and the pocket of kilns. It was warm back here, the kilns firing, and I had the back door propped for some fresh air.
“Hi,” I said and tipped my face up for a kiss, keeping my hands rooted on the lump of spinning clay and silt-water on my wheel. “Watch yourself, I’m a mess,” I declared.
He laughed and said, “You look happier than… and don’t take this the wrong way—”
“A pig in mud?” I asked, finishing his thought and smiling pleased. “You’re not wrong. Getting my hands dirty is one of the best parts of this job.”
He found a seat nearby and with great effort, I trained my eyes back down to the clay on my wheel as I began to shape it.
Fen made an incredulous noise and said, “That’s crazy.”
“What?” I asked, smiling with charmed pride.
“You make it look so easy,” he said, and my smile grew.
“Ah, just practice. Lots and lots of practice.”<
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“How many more of these have you got to go?” he asked.
“Oh, let me see.” I glanced up at the worktable and asked, “How many are up there?”
“Uh,” he stood up from the folding metal chair in the corner and counted, “fourteen.”
“I probably have a few hours left. I’d like to get up to twenty, then I need to roll out some flats and make and attach handles to each one. That’s the labor intensive and time-consuming part.
“Then what do you do?” he asked.
“Load up those shelves there and wait for the kilns to be available to fire them into bisque.”
“Then what?”
I smiled to myself. “Then put some out front and have the rest ready for the paint night this week. They get glazed and then fired again and there you have it, a finished mug.”
“Neat,” he grunted and asked with a sniff, “You got a broom back here?”
“Uh, yeah, why?”
“Mind if I work on a little somethin’ somethin’ of my own?”
“No, not at all. Go right ahead.”
“Cool.”
He pulled out a whittling knife, clipped to his jeans pocket and brought out a Crown Royal bag from his inside jacket pocket. He slipped out a chunk of stick and began peeling off the bark with his knife while I looked on curiously and let the mug’s body, I was working on, warp.
“Oh, shoot!” I turned my attention back to my work.
Fenris chuckled and looked up and over at me, blue eyes sparkling.
“I got it,” I muttered and fixed my inattentive mistake.
“What are you making over there?” I asked a time later.
“Oh, just carving up some rune sticks for a buddy of mine,” he said. “It’s a trade.”
“Oh?” I asked. “What are you trading for?”
“Some arrow repairs,” he answered. “It’s a fair trade.”
“Good deal,” I said. “You do that a lot?”
“What? Trade?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, I do. It’s a lost art. One of the oldest forms of commerce, I dig it. Especially when I get a good deal.”
“Nice,” I murmured, and smiled at my work. I loved that. It sounded so simple, even though I was sure there were hidden complexities to it.
“There are a lot of folks around here involved in the SCA and the local renaissance fairs. I do a lot of bartering with ‘em – mead, goat meat, some handcrafted shit like these runes. It keeps the old ways alive.”
“What do you get in return?” I asked, mostly to make conversation, partially because I was curious.
“Bows, hand forged knives better than you can get in any store nowadays, sometimes help around the farm, that sort of thing.”
We chatted amicably while I worked at my wheel and fell into a comfortable silence as I rose to make and attach handles to the heavy clay, pot bellied tankard type mugs that I called part of my colonial line.
“So, what do you do with all this?” he asked and glanced up as I made the score marks in one of the mugs where I would attach the handle with some slip.
“Some I fire to make into hard bisque like those ones,” I pointed indicating a shelf full of hard, white, fired clay vessels, “so that patrons can glaze their own.”
“Yeah? What about the rest?”
“The rest I leave like this, unfinished, so that they can be carved and underglazes can be used.”
“Carving sounds cool, underglaze sounds just like what you would think it would be.”
“Yeah.” I smiled faintly. “Some of them underglaze decals get used.”
“What, like sheets?” he asked.
“Precisely,” I said with a bigger smile.
“Sounds easy, which means it’s probably hard as fuck to do,” he said, and I laughed.
“Easier than you’d think. Hard in that you really do have to get placement just right on the first try. A lot like getting the stencil placed for a tattoo.”
He looked up. “You don’t have any tattoos. How would you know that?” he asked.
“My brother, Copper,” I said. “He took me with him once, lost a bet and I got to pick his next tattoo.”
“Oh, man. I hope you picked something awful.”
I giggled. “I did!” The memory made me laugh so hard I cried. When I finally got ahold of myself, I said. “It was so awful, but it wasn’t very big. It was a pair of cherries, but instead of stems, it had a cock nestled between them, half flaccid and dripping cum.”
“Holy shit, I’ve seen those flash art pieces and just – why?”
“He was being a dick, that’s why! I didn’t expect him to go through with it. I mean, it was utterly ridiculous, but he did, right here.” I tapped the outside of my ankle over my jeans. “I told him he could cover it up, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He kept it, and any time anyone would ask him, he would say his sister picked it and he was so proud of it.” I shook my head. “This little half-mast dick with its little cherry balls.”
Fenris laughed, and laughed with me, then wiping a tear from his eye said, “Well, you’re never picking one of my tats if that’s what I’m going to end up with.”
It spurred another peal of laughter out of me and I shook my head.
“I wouldn’t do that to you unless you really deserved it. Copper was something else,” I said with a heavy sigh. “We went back and forth, you know?”
“Yeah,” he said quietly, evenly. “It was the same between me and my sister, Lacy.”
I looked up and our eyes met, a silent understanding of each other’s pain passing between us and that one look spoke such volumes to me and was probably the most singular expression of you are not alone that I had ever seen or felt.
“Thanks,” I whispered softly, and he must have felt it too, because he didn’t question me at all. He simply ducked his head in a nod, and we went back to our respective creative endeavors.
It was nice – peaceful, sweet, soothing to the soul which was just what I needed right then.
“Got any big ideas on what you want to do tonight?” he asked.
“Mm-mm, no. I figured we would just go with the flow,” I said with a gusty sigh.
“You feel up to people?” he asked me, and I appreciated that he did.
“Maybe tomorrow. I mean, I didn’t know what you had planned for tomorrow, if it involved anyone else.”
“Actually, now that you mention it,” he said. “Yeah, my boy Dump Truck and his girl Little Bird were going to join us on our Sunday ride.”
I perked up a bit at the thought of meeting some of his friends and club.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, I mean is that cool with you?”
“Yes! Absolutely! I just get tired after all day of something like this and I don’t know if I would make good company for other people.”
“That’s fair,” he said with a nod. “I get the same way after a long day of farm chores sometimes. Other times, I just want to get out with some people after all day with the goats.”
“Oh, believe me, I get that,” I said with a laugh. As cute as they may be, they were a lot of work.
“So, a quiet night in?” he asked after a bit. “Maybe watch a movie?”
“That sounds absolutely lovely,” I declared.
He grinned at me. “Good deal.”
Chapter Sixteen
Fenris…
I called up Mav just to make sure I wasn’t needed for anything tonight. He put me off and told me to relax and take care of my lady friend and I thought that damn, word traveled fast. Of course, with Little Bird, Marisol, and Dahlia as thick as thieves, that didn’t really surprise me much. All roads led back to Mav when it came to Marisol and Dahlia.
I sighed and looked up, taking another hit off the joint in my hand as I waited for Aspen to come out the back door. I was going to ride, she was going to drive, but I still didn’t much feel like leaving without her.
Today felt good. Like she was hitting the apex of the curve o
n her grief. That any second, she would come around the bend and follow it out onto the open road of her new beginning. I had yet to brooch the topic of a new lawyer. I had no desire to kick her back into the pit of despair that she’d only begun to crawl her way out of.
She was doing good. Doing much better, much quicker, than I expected. I was glad I’d been right about taking a break from that place, but I knew it couldn’t be forever, that she’d have to go back soon and face the ghosts of memory, and tackle the piles of stuff and the thoughts and whatnot that came with them.
I got the impression that Aspen’s childhood had somehow set her up for failure when it came to her douche lord ex-husband. I cracked knuckles and sighed. There would be no putting a hurt on the asshole. Aspen just wasn’t that way and I was far from wanting to corrupt her so thoroughly as to bend her that direction. Violence was my gig, the thing I had to reckon with. The demon that raged inside my skull and gods be praised; the thing that was finally fucking quiet when I was around this woman.
She had me know peace, a feat that was not easily managed when it came to me, but one she managed to make look like it was as effortless as breathing. Like when she molded the earth between her hands into such beautiful things.
I closed my eyes and pictured her slick fingers, pressing against the mound of shapeless clay as it spun on her wheel – giving it form, giving it life, turning it into something useful and beautiful.
I felt like she was doing the same to me, shaping me into a better person by just her mere presence and it was nice. It felt good, and I liked it.
Like I had meaning again aside from the usual: being a blunt weapon of force.
“Fenris, what’s wrong?” she called from the back door, shutting it tightly and turning back to it with her keys, locking it up.
“Nothing!” I called back, and I went to take another hit off my joint only to discover it’d gone out. I tucked it behind my ear instead as she practically skipped down the back steps to come to me.
“Oooh.” She pulled back and wrinkled her nose.
“Not a fan of the ganja?” I asked.
“Not the smell, I don’t care about it otherwise.”
“Oh yeah? You use?”
