Ch. 35
Imported from SF2 with no description.
The morning saw me bright and happy. Rested, even enthusiastic. I was up with the dawn, whipping up breakfast over a cheerful fire, and singing to my girls as Wendy saw to Staccato. Penance lingered a bit before coming over to join me, making show of nuzzling against my leg as she greeted everyone.
“I’m surprised he can stand up, with how loud you all were last night.” She teased, as I poured milk into a sauce pan for her. She hesitated only a moment, but after the first taste there was no stopping her. Much to Cocoa’s delight.
“It’s a shame you didn’t come join us.” I replied, reaching down to run my hand through her thick fur. “Don’t be shy, now. We both know you thought about it.” I teased, before stirring the meal I was working on.
Tempest laughed at that, and swept an arm back towards the tent. “Still time. Cocoa and I can take care of this.” She said, with a playful nip at my shoulder as she came to my side.
Penance stared up at me, her thick, bushy tail wagging. “Tonight, maybe. For now, I’m just going to enjoy thinking about it.” She replied, nuzzling against my leg again.
Wendy finally came over, as I laughed at the exchange. Staccato in tow. Both seemed happy, and as she reached down to run her hand over Penance’s head, the affection was well received. “I’m glad you managed to get some sleep.” She said, looking up at me. “You kept us all up a little late.” She added, as she looked up at Tempest. “Is he really that good?”
Tempest laughed as Staccato shook his head, but before he could protest the subject, had already answered. “With as much practice as he gets?” She smirked, running her hand along Wendy’s cheek. “Don’t be afraid to sample the goods, honey.” She added, in a low, sultry tone. “If you’re going to be sticking around with us, it’d be a shame not to!”
“Alright, Tempest.” I said, peeling her away, her laughter ringing like a bell as she teased a kiss on my lips. “No sense teasing the poor girl this early in the morning.”
Wendy stared for a long moment, her expression one of lingering curiosity. “I have no idea what she said… but I feel like… woman to woman, I got that. The intent, at least.” She glanced at me, then back to Tempest. “Sorry, but unless Stacky says otherwise, that’s not on the menu.”
Staccato laughed, then shook his head. “That’s a conversation we are not having right now.” The statement was met with unanimous laughter. Even if Wendy didn’t know the words, she definitely understood the tone this time.
“Alright. We’ll change the subject.” She replied, glancing in the pot. “What’s cooking?”
Breakfast was a lively, animated affair. A welcome change of pace from the quiet, almost solemn nature of things before.
When we got back on the road, it felt like a new day. It felt like the whole world was new. I laughed, and even dared stretch my hands up to the sky as Staccato sprinted along the side of the road. I could tell he was being careful, and for just a moment, I felt like I didn’t need to.
Wendy’s laughter reached my ears over the roar of the wind, and after a while, Staccato slowed down, a happy little trot pushing us further down the road with the rhythmic clip-clop-clip of his hooves.
It was with no small chagrin that I realized I recognized the road we were on, and gave Wendy a nudge. “Hey, when we come over the top of this hill? Look for the house with the bright yellow roof.” I said, gesturing ahead of us to the left. “I doubt anyone’s home, but I still have the key in my bag somewhere.” I said, with a laugh.
“Oh? Well, welcome home, I guess!” She said with a chuckle as we came up over the hill.
I marveled at the sight of it, as if seeing my home town for the first time. I hadn’t been gone long, in the grand scheme of things. But it all felt a lot different, seeing it from this angle. From this side of things. I almost wanted to stop, but it wasn’t a luxury we could afford. It wasn’t a luxury without Claire, anyway.
So we rode through. I pointed out a few places I used to frequent, and the first martial arts dojo I trained at. It felt a lot smaller than I remembered, but then, I was a lot younger back then. The whole world felt bigger.
It was a humbling thought to think how much of it I had managed to see, and yet how little I really had. Even as a boy, getting sent here and there to study under different masters, I hadn’t seen much more than the inside of buildings.
The whole world felt different, once I had felt what it was like to stand atop a mountain, and see the horizon wrapped around me on all sides. Everything felt different.
It wasn’t long before we were through, and the road wound through the trees, not quite thick enough to make a proper canopy, sunlight warm on my shoulders as I let myself drift off a bit to the sound of Staccato’s steps.
For a while, my thoughts drifted to the journey, to where I’d been, how far I’d really gone. I remembered, really reflected on the day I met Claire.
I spent the early hours unable to sleep. I was too excited to even hold a coherent thought. I paced the empty house for what felt like an hour, until the combination of nervousness and anticipation forced me to head out in what was to my memory the middle of the night.
I practiced in my head, all the things I might say. Clambered through the brush and sought out something I could offer. Eventually hitting the jackpot with berries. I had no idea whether they’d be well received, and yet I picked them until my hands were stained from the vividly yellow sitrus berries.
“The act of doing”, my first sensei had explained to me, when I was still very young. “Is the weapon we turn against blind fear.” I hadn’t understood it, not at the time. But realizing that the dawn had come, that my nerves had settled, and I wasn’t blindly reciting meaningless greetings; that was the first time I understood what I was taught.
Training, sparring, working, any time I had a problem I would have otherwise just worried away at, I had always instead tried to find something I could do. The act of doing, regardless of what it was being done, was the shield I carried against all of my fears.
But I had learned something valuable that he had not taught me; the blind act of doing was a catalyst to disaster. I had done a lot of things in the past year that were very thoughtless. I had created many problems because of it.
I thought of my disastrous trip into the mine. The pitch black, constant echo of my own heartbeat and breathing. The feeling of being watched, and stalked and hunted. All the while I had somehow kept going further in, further down without really being aware of it. How lucky I had been that Tempest came for me, even in the dark. That she hadn’t waited for Claire, but ventured in so bravely.
For all that she had hurt me, she had atoned, in so many ways she had atoned and struggled with the guilt of it. This too, in some ways, she shouldered perhaps of that pain. The whole thing had marked us both. Scarred us in ways that we would carry forever. But we needed that, I came to believe. We both did. The scars bound us in a way no words ever could.
It also helped Mira and I. She and I had a complicated situation, to say the least. I realized, looking back on it, that she had really pushed herself, in a lot of ways. That she was trying to be someone she wasn’t, at first. Because she thought that was what she had to be.
I was glad that it had worked out, that things worked out alright. She was always the most gentle of us, perhaps always would be. She put herself between Claire and Tempest when they argued. Stayed close to me on those nights when the pain was still fresh. When all the hurting in my heart wasn’t going away. Kept me warm, inside. Even when I had a thousand reasons I might have felt cold or bitter.
I had come to rely on the purity of her love in a way that I never really thought about. Looking back on it, I realized that’s what had made our first real night together, the night she evolved, so special to me.
Claire had answered a lustful need. She was always my girl, and she wasn’t shy about it. If anything, she was the most enthusiastic lover a man could ever hope to find. But our first nights, she and I were exploring. Learning about ourselves, and each other. There was love, of course, but the need was different.
Tempest gave me something primal, something almost dark in its own purity. Whatever Claire had shared with her, what she gave to me was a kind of control, a sense of ownership that I had never felt for anyone, before or since. She wasn’t being playful about it, she wasn’t making a game of it. From the very beginning, when she gave herself to me, that was the end of the conversation. She was mine, and in those moments, I hers. I was her mate, her male. No other would do, for her.
But Mira… Mira gave me a pure love. What we shared was her heart, her feelings. Affirming to me that the choices she had made, she didn’t regret. That the love she had for me was the truth in her heart, as complicated or confusing as it might have been. The love she gave me embraced all of my feelings, washed away my every worry and doubt, and replaced it with a sense of relief. Of finding home.
Cocoa on the other hand, was somewhere in-between. She took her time, getting to know me, but there was always some kind of spark there. The way she looked at me, the way she treated me. When we finally crossed that bridge, she did so as a woman, as a woman who knew exactly what she wanted. She did it very genuinely, and when she placed herself in my hands, very thoroughly.
I chuckled at the recollection of it, Cocoa was not a woman to rush to any particular extreme, and her patience and steadfast nature had made her collectively our favorite. Mira loved her gentleness, and Tempest her tenacity. Claire on the other hand was relieved at her almost docile nature. She was many things, but a handful to get along with was not one of them.
Wendy finding me was a godsend. I was doing something stupid, again. “The act of doing”, once again to my detriment. Staving off the gnawing fear by blindly marching onward. She made me realize that, perhaps better than anyone had at the moment. But more than that, she had been stalwart in her own ways.
She was a lot of things, but she tried her best to help, to be good to me. Even though she didn’t know me at all. It hurt me, the ways I tried to help only seemed to hurt her. But Staccato and Penance both needed it. Needed to be able to talk to her. They needed help to make her understand all the ways she had hurt them. I was glad it seemed things would work out for her, for them. Even for Penance, though selfishly I spent a long few hours entertaining the notion of having her, in the worst ways.
It was a hard thing to really know about myself. That selfishness. Even though I had done the right thing, would do the right thing. Knowing that the selfishness was lurking there, behind it all, was hard for me.
I wondered what my girls thought of it. Thought of me for it. I wondered how Claire would react, knowing that in the middle of all of this, I had genuinely entertained the thought of taking another lover. Still did. Still might. Would she be angry? Would she forgive me? Would she encourage me?
Thinking on it, I found it difficult to imagine a situation where she wouldn’t encourage me, though I thought she would have been frustrated to not have had a chance to tease the growlithe before I took her for the first time.
Wendy herself was a slightly more difficult question. To say we had grown close would be an understatement. I knew we had come to rely on each other. We were very good friends, in a very short time, in a very difficult place in both our lives. That kind of bond… Complicated at best. I imagined neither of us knew how well it would hold up, but for the moment we needed each other.
I knew she had accepted that about me, my love for my girls, their love for me. That she had even explored a little bit of herself in that regard. At the very least, we understood something about each other that… would be difficult to ever talk about to anyone else.
I knew that she trusted me, that she relied on my honesty. But I had no real understanding for how she saw me, as a man. She teased, but there was always a bit of a barrier there, and with the reason for that currently carrying us down the road, I wanted to believe I understood. But did I? Or was I simply placing my own values on it and assuming she held the same? I wouldn’t have crossed that line without the okay from my girls, but whether she really felt the same way, it wasn’t something I had asked. Perhaps it wasn’t something I ever would.
We were many things, but it was hard for me to imagine a future where we were lovers, as well.
It had been the first time in a long time I really had the luxury to stop and just think on things, reflect and meditate. Again, I found myself grateful for Staccato’s easy, steady pace. For the comfort and confidence of Wendy’s hand on mine as I held her.
As quiet as things were, I found myself feeling sleepy, beneath the warmth of the morning sun, my ears picking up all the birdsong, the wind rustling in the leaves. The life. The love of it. It was a good day for a nap, I found, as sleep drew me a little closer to Wendy’s back.
If she had any objections, I never knew the difference. I was gone as soon as I let my eyes close.