The Storm (The Getaway)
#12 of The Getaway (Thriller)
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Hello, and welcome to the "Getaway", my furry suspense-drama-thriller! Hope you're eager for this chapter, and I look forward to your feedback!
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I pressed my nosepad against the glass panel, rubbed it with a thumb, and squinted.
"It's coming down hard," I said. "Hard to tell how much it has snowed...looks like...could be half a foot, maybe."
"Hmmmmmm?" Ken's sleepy mumble was picked up by my ears.
I snorted. It left a fog over the glass.
"There's a snowstorm," I said. "It looks really severe."
"Hhmmmmm..."
"I bet it has already covered the paths," I said, "I hope it hasn't swamped the hooks."
"No fishing today?" Ken asked.
"By the looks of it, nothing today," I said. "It's really coming down hard."
"I never had a snow day in school," Ken said.
"Because it never snowed enough in Florida," I said.
"It snowed...once, maybe?"
I chuckled. I pulled the blanket tightly around my shoulders and tip-toed back over to the fireplace. I picked a couple of logs from the basket and pushed them into the embers before giving it a stoking with the wrought iron poker.
"Can't sleep all day," I said. "We have to get the fire going, make water, make breakfast, lunch. Keep busy."
"There's nothing to keep us busy here," he said. "and if you say there's no chores, can't we just rest?"
"WE had a rest day after the cabin trip," I replied, "that was planned. This really isn't. And we have to stick to a schedule."
"Ohh what's the harm?" Ken mumbled, now near me, since he was another blanket burrito on the mattress.
I put the poker down and simply sat there, watching the embers glow and start making work on the bark on the dry wood now piled to the remains of last night's fire.
"I just don't like surprises," I said.
"One day won't harm," he said. "You need it. You need to rest. When did you last just have a nice good downtime?"
I rubbed my muzzle.
"I can't remember."
"Point made!" Ken-blanket said.
The fire was starting to grow around the bottom log. That looked promising. I didn't even have to give it an extra poke.
"Well, we still need to get water done if we want breakfast."
"I'm hungry," he said.
We were hungry all the time. The morsels of fish that we fried for every meal were just about enough to keep us going. How tired we were after the trip to the cabin was proof enough that we'd spent every single reserve stock our bodies still possessed. Funny. I didn't have more than...what...three, four pounds in my paunch on my belly, not even a gut, really. Now there was nothing but the outline of abdominal muscles, when I felt it up. Now, Ken, he had a six-pack, right good one that I liked to fondle and kiss when we were going at it. Even that had become a faint memory by now. Ken had shrunk and he didn't like it.
"I'm hungry, too," I said.
I wanted toast, coffee, fried eggs, Corn Flakes...no, Frosty Flakes, preferably. Hadn't had those since I was a little cub. Sugary cereal, coffee, toast dripping with butter that'd smudge the touchpad on the computer while I was looking at the news online, and none of the news would be about paraherpes.
"So, any snow day treats for us?" Ken peered at me from under his blanket, still not planning to get up.
I thought about it for a while. The pro was that for a while, we'd feel less hungry. The con was that there might be one day when we were even hungrier, and that'd be the day when every little scrap of food mattered.
To hell with it.
"We can open one of Wilcox's cans," I said. "How about that?"
"Sweet!" Ken sounded perky.
I even managed to get him out of the bed with the promise of extra food. His tail was bouncy while we did the chores. Get some snow and some cold, freezing cold water from the tub I kept in the kitchen against the brick wall of the fireplace so that it would melt at least partially during the night. It spared a little bit of time, and it was a relatively new innovation of mine. I was glad I'd loaded it with nice, clean snow last night. There was another in the kitchen for water carried in buckets from the lake, for doing washing. There wasn't need for that now. The fire was slowly growing, and I fed it more wood from the basket before pouring the water into the pot to be swung over the fire. Good start, that.
Ken's smiling waned a little when I got the fish, sliced and wrapped in a piece of newspaper and kept close to the door leading from the kitchen to the outside where it could thaw - another of my innovations. I wondered how furs used to live 100 years ago with no power and no freezers or refrigerators. Did they do stuff like this? I wasn't sure. At least I was doing something that was better than nothing.
"Fish, huh?"
"At least we've got salt!" I smiled.
We'd found an almost full packet from Wilcox' cabin and that had cheered us up to no end. Even a little pinch of it was going to make all the difference between bland and delicious, we believed. It was almost a religious ritual, kneading that tiny amount of the white grains onto the pale-colored flesh. Maybe it was just our imagination, but even the smell seemed better, when they were being roasted on an old, rusting skillet over the fire, no fat, just fish sizzling in its own juices. I had to scrape burnt skin and fish bones off it before they'd stick on it for good, but the meat was still warm and nice once we sat down to eat by the fire, plates over our knees.
We devoured it. There was no other way to describe the action of eating. The little fillets disappeared quickly into out muzzles and were washed down with mugs of warm water.
My promise was a promise kept, too.
"Hmmmm..." Ken seemed to be salivating at the idea of opening the tin of...peaches.
"Let's be careful, we don't want to feel sick from eating this too quickly," I told him, as we knelt there, forks in paw and staring at the bright yellow globes in the tin, swimming in their own juices. The smell in the air...I could have drooled as well.
"Dear Lord, blessed be these carbs we are about to consume," Ken pontificated.
"I never heard peaches called that," I told him.
"When's the last time we had any proper amount of carbs to eat?" Ken said. "We've been on a ketosis diet for months."
"Keto-what?"
"When your body doesn't get any sugar, it makes energy anaerobically using fats and proteins from the meat we are eating," he explained, "it's like the Atkins diet, though we aren't exactly swimming in fat like those who do it."
"I'll trust you to know this stuff," I told him with a smile.
"Why do you think we only take a crap once a week and our breath stinks like shit?" Ken said.
"Don't remind me," I said.
"So what are waiting for with these?" he pointed his fork at the tin.
"Sorry, just dig in," I replied.
We finished the fruit in a matter of slurping bites, followed by the juice that we shared in a couple of sugary gulps. It tasted sickly sweet after such a long time since we'd had any considerable amount of anything like it, at least in such a short time. Usually, whenever a can was opened, I'd made sure that it lasted for at least two days, between the two of us.
A few forkfuls of soggy canned fruit was outright gluttony.
"Oh, man," Ken licked his lips. He was purring occasionally with his breaths, fork still in paw.
"Delicious?" I said.
"Great, it tastes just great," he said. "Though now I wish I'd have some pistachio ice cream and chocolate sauce..."
I chuckled.
"Where'd that come from?"
Ken purred.
"The little part of my brain that keeps making up menus for the time when we go back to civilization and I'm going to be eating until I feel like throwing up."
I snuffled.
"You still keep doing that?"
We did a lot of that before, when the rations turned meagre and less varied, and there was more and more fish to be had. We'd talk about it...coming up with all sorts of dishes, meals, massive food fests of succulent meat dripping with sauce, cream, ice cream, chocolate, fruit platters, cheese, pork chops, mutton, venison...osso bucco...
It was like...food masturbation, really, we'd go at it until we felt bored, as if we'd just gorged out bellies full. Just like after an orgasm, there was a time when you just felt disinterested in it. It'd be time for the proverbial cigarette by now.
We didn't have any tobacco products with us. But what we did was that we rolled onto the pile of blankets and mattresses in front of the fire. It wasn't exactly...a passionate embrace, but we were there, body to body, my bony hips to his, and we nuzzled and kissed, tongues still covered in peach juices. His body felt...smaller than before, since we both had shrunk into bony bags of fur and skin, but there was warmth, fur and kisses and paws stroking over stripes.
"We don't do this enough..." Ken breathed while I was exploring his neck with my lips.
I pushed a paw under the hem of his shirt and stroked his belly. He was purring in broken, moaning breaths. I wasn't too far from that either. It was easy to fall into it, the pleasure, the heat of the moment. Our bodies writhed together for quite some time, despite the fact neither of us had really been getting off recently.
He came first and then it was me, in a series of spasmodic thrusts against his belly. We were messy, but we didn't mind. A few wipes with a tissue, and once we put our clothes back on properly, we could settle back onto the mattress to enjoy the afterglow for a few moments more.
"Phew..." Ken huffed, "that really took it out of me."
I chuckled, chuffing into his mane.
"Drained you?" I asked him lazily.
"Either the sex is better than I remembered or we're more exhausted than I thought," he mused.
Probably the latter. A few minutes of frottage and making out didn't count as the most mindblowing sex imaginable, but in our current condition, even that was probably a stretch. We were most likely breathless for wholly different reasons than the fact we'd made each other's toes curl. There was a little bit of that going on when we were at it, and that was fine.
"Maybe," I nuzzled the side of his neck, as gently as I knew. He sighed, and sought my paw into his own.
"We don't do a lot of this," he said.
"I guess we don't," I said.
"Guess burnt fish isn't an aphrodisiac, no matter what they say," he said.
I chuckled.
"That's awful," I smiled.
"Thanks."
For a while we just breathed.
"That did feel good."
"It sure did."
"Hope we don't have to get up soon," Ken said.
The wind rattled the roof.
"No," I said, "we don't have to. We have all the time in the world."
Perhaps we did.
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Thank you for reading! Do leave a comment if you like, and I'll see you soon!