10. Silar
10
SILAR
T he ride back to the ranch seemed impossibly long, though the position of the sun told me I was making expected time on the journey. I spent most of the trip trying very hard not to touch my wife, because every time I did it felt as if I’d been hit with the lowest setting of a stunner. Not enough to knock me out, but enough to send every nerve bristling with hotly distracting sensation.
So I sat up straight and did not touch her, keeping my eyes on the road ahead and sweeping them side to side every now and then, watching for ardu serpents and other creatures that could cause us trouble. Luckily, larger predators like genka and ortu did not typically hunt out in the open. They were more trouble in the trees near the ranch, which was why keeping fences mended was one of my top priorities.
By the time we plodded up the last stretch of the road to the ranch, I knew my ears would be badly burned. Spring sunburns crept up easily. The sun wasn’t hot enough to feel it.
I didn’t feel it yet, but I would later. At least it was only our ears prone to burning. The rest of our hide was made of much stronger stuff. Unlike Cherry, who looked vulnerable and soft everywhere. Alarmingly so.
“Oh, wow! This is it?” she asked from the saddle in front of me, tilting my hat back on her head to get a better look.
“Yes.”
I looked at my property, bestowed upon me as part of my conviction by the Zabrian Empire, and wondered what she saw. I’d grown so used to the place, having been here so very long, that I found it difficult to observe my home with a stranger’s perspective.
Directly ahead, a lane branched off from the main road and led up to my lumber-walled house. It looked suddenly small. It had never seemed that way before. But before, it had only been me.
Beyond the house stood the shuldu stalls, the large winter barn, the grazing pastures, and the gardens, everything enclosed by fencing I meticulously maintained. Behind it all, the mountains glinted pinkish-gold on the horizon, their tops still dusted with snow. Between the mountains and the fencing of my property stood some woods with a creek, swelled higher now than it would be in summer due to winter’s melt.
I did not need to turn Tarion onto the lane to the house. He knew where to go. I relaxed my hold on the reins further. Normally, by this point in the journey home, I’d be feeling much more at ease, away from other people, alone with my animals and plants and thoughts.
But now, I was not alone. And instead of my usual feeling of serene solitude I instead prickled with something hot and harried, my throat and the crotch of my pants feeling uncomfortably tight.
“It’s lovely!” Cherry said as we rode up to the house. I felt an awkward relief at that. If she hated the place, I was not entirely sure what I’d be able to do about it. Of course, I could try to make whatever adjustments to the property she requested, but my time was severely limited.
But other than her room and her bed, which I still planned to build, perhaps I would not need to do much else. That was good. The cattle were high maintenance enough without adding my human wife’s wishes into the equation.
I could not deny that the relief I felt was not solely about less work to be done.
A part of it was because, in her pronouncement of liking the property, it felt that she was making a judgment upon me by proxy. I’ll marry someone else. Anyone else. Her earlier words, which she seemed to have forgotten, still clanged in my head like metal on metal.
But she liked the property. That was a start.
I quickly dismounted, needing to not be so very near her for a moment. It was not a long moment, though, because despite her awkward wiggling and rolling, she could not get down on her own. All she managed to achieve was getting onto her belly and lying sidelong on the saddle, the backs of her legs facing me, her rump directly at my eye level.
I could barely remember what Zabrian females looked like. I’d certainly been too young to look at their backsides like this with any sort of appreciation. I did not know if backsides were even meant to be looked at, to be coveted. Whether this was typical for a Zabrian male, or some terrible result of my excision from good society, I had no idea.
But whatever the reason, for better or worse, I could not rip my gaze from my wife’s rump.
It was pertly curved, taut and round as she strained awkwardly on her belly. My throat contracted, my claws flexing with impotent hunger when I realized just how perfectly my hands could mould themselves to that part of her. The lack of tail was so very odd, but in a way that felt distinctly perverse I realized I rather liked it. I liked the strangely naked view it gave of her, even while she was fully clothed.
“Sorry, Silar. I think I’m stuck,” she admitted, her voice muffled by Tarion’s belly. A dust-softened thud let me know my hat had fallen off her head to the ground. Cherry kicked her legs, making her backside bounce up and then down, her hips wiggling in a trapped movement of frustration, the sight of which made my belly and groin feel startlingly hot.
“Silar?”
I shook myself. She’d be stuck there all day if I didn’t do something.
The fact that I could have stared at her like that all day was beside the point.
I turned my gaze to the blank blue of the sky, grasping her hips firmly and yanking her down to the ground without looking at her.
“Thanks! Sorry about that. I swear, I’m not usually so useless. I’m a quick learner. I’ll get used to everything soon. I promise.”
There she went again with her promises. Why did she feel the need to promise me anything when I was already so wholly undeserving of her?
“Let me just grab your hat. Thank you for that, by the way!” she said, jogging to where the hat had fallen as Tarion ambled away in search of water. I’d have to go follow him, get the saddle and everything off him. But for the moment I found myself once again wholly occupied by the sight of my wife’s backside, this time as she bent down to retrieve my hat from the ground. My cock pulsed.
I think there is something wrong with me.
It was a thought I’d had countless times before. Not many men could kill someone as a child as I had and not think so at some point or another. But for once, the thought was not about that dark day back on Zabria. It was about my new obsession with Cherry’s rump.
I wanted to clasp her hips while she was bent over like that.
I wanted to rub my cock on it.
There is definitely something wrong with me.
Such a desire could not be natural.
But then again, I had very little idea what constituted natural between Zabrian males and females, let alone a Zabrian male and a human female. I wondered if two of our kind had ever even been bonded before. Even if they had, I doubted a good Zabrian male from the Empire would currently be imagining dragging his hard, pulsing cock across the roundness of his human’s flesh the way I was.
Something very, very wrong.
I was sullied and broken and if my wife only knew the thoughts filling my head now then she would run from me the first moment that she got.
Thirty days. I had thirty days to learn how to control myself. Thirty days to patch up this strange, new, broken need inside me before she found out just how terrible the man she’d married was.
She had to know some of it. My conviction, of course. But she did not know this. This curl of vicious hunger that made me feel more animal than man.
Empire help me, I did not deserve her.
I was going to do everything in my power to keep her anyway.
“Seriously. Thank you for this,” she said as she came back to me. “I would have gotten super sunburned if I hadn’t had it.”
I took the hat and held it awkwardly in front of my groin. If she saw my erection, she’d no doubt know just how wrong I was inside. She’d know I’d been staring at her backside, feral and white-eyed and hard-cocked, and she’d go running back to the warden the first chance that she got.
“Hey, your eyes are all white again,” she said, shading her face with her hand and squinting up at me.
“Yours are still white,” I told her in rather defensive response.
“Well, yeah!” she said with a little laugh. “They always are, at least around the outside.”
I marvelled at that. I could not imagine going through life feeling my emotions so keenly at all times that my eyes were permanently white. I was not sure I would survive it.
Zohro had said that humans were weak. But this could not be true if Cherry could smile and chatter and go through life with her eyes gone-white and her insides tempestuous with wild feeling at all times. How did she even sleep?
Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she did not require a new bed at all.
Human females are powerful indeed.
Powerful or not, I’d apparently been right about the possibility of human sunburn, and was glad I’d given her my hat. I was beginning to notice the sting of sunburn on my own ears now, but paid it little mind, thinking of more important things. Cherry would need her own hat for daily use. I had a couple of different ones, but they were all too large to be comfortable for her on a long-term basis.
Except…
“Come on,” I grunted, turning to follow Tarion to the shuldu stalls. I was pretty sure that it was still there…
And there it was, hung on a low hook, untouched for cycles now and much too small for me.
But not too small for Cherry.
I patted dust off of it, hoping it didn’t smell too badly of shuldu, and passed it over to her.
“You can have this one.”
“Oh! Thank you!” She tried it on, then gave me a smile that for some terrifying reason made my heart feel as if it had stopped. It clattered rather painfully back to life, loping unsteadily in my chest as I studied her in the old hat, memories surging up against a present, a female, I never could have seen coming.
“Perfect fit!” she said, still beaming, still stopping and starting my heart at unexpected, lurching intervals. “This must be way too small for you, though,” she went on. “Did it belong to someone else?”
“It’s mine. From childhood,” I clarified.
“Oh, wow,” she said softly, casting her eyes up at the underside of the brim and touching it gently. “That’s so cool.”
Was it cool? That was good, I supposed. I didn’t want her head getting too hot.
“I don’t have much left of my childhood. Except my pan. It was my mama’s.” She indicated her bag, still attached to Tarion, and I got to work untying it for her.
I did not have much left, either. At least not from my life on Zabria.
Once Cherry’s bag was untied. I hoisted it over one shoulder with my tail while I removed the saddle and reins from Tarion and quickly rubbed his hide and horns free from dust. I could feel Cherry’s eyes on me as I worked, sending prickles of discomfort down my spine, though I could not say why. It was good she was watching, learning what needed to be done around here. There was no reason for me to feel so strange about it.
“Do you have other shuldu?” she asked as I gave Tarion another yellow sweet-nut – his third of the day, lucky beast. I nearly dropped the thing.
“Of course,” I answered immediately, not wanting her to find my animals lacking. I left the stalls and she hurried to follow me. “There is my wagon,” I told her, aiming my tail at the wooden contraption with its cattle hide cover and large wheels.
“Oh, right! So you said!” she said brightly, appearing to give the wagon an approving look that made my insides feel simultaneously too tight and too loose at the same time, as if such a thing were even possible.
Once past the structure of the stalls with the wagon behind, I pointed out the gardens. I stared at their paltry yields with a critical eye, feeling the need to defend the sparse sprouts.
“It is only just the beginning of spring,” I said, my tail twisting around the hook on the back of my belt. “There will be more soon. And some of those trees at the edge will blossom and then bear fruit later in the cycle.”
The trees, too, were not particularly impressive. At least not yet. If she’d come when she was supposed to in twenty-two days, it was likely that at the very least the tuhla trees would be in full, white bloom. But despite this, Cherry turned to me with her eyes wide in astonishment.
“Fruit?” she gasped. “You grow fresh fruit here?”
She said it with such feeling that I almost worried it was not a good thing. Was fruit bad for humans? I hadn’t yet gotten to the nutrition section of the human manual book.
“Yes,” I said uneasily, but she smacked her small hands together and beamed at me as she had done before.
“That’s amazing!” she said. “Fruit is so expensive on Terratribe I that I practically never get to eat it.” She gave a small laugh. “That’s where my name comes from, you know. Cherry is an Old-Earth fruit. They still grow cherries on Terratribe II, but I’ve never actually had one. I’ve always wanted to, though…”
“You are named for a fruit that you have never tasted?”
“Mama tasted one. Only once. Before I was born, some big-wig politician came to visit the shuttle factory to announce an investment into a new arm of infrastructure there. They really rolled out the red carpet for him and his team. There was a massive fruit tray with the most amazing assortment of stuff.”
She smiled, but not as happily as before, staring at the still-naked trees.
“The regular factory workers weren’t supposed to touch any of it, of course. It was only for the fancy-pants boss-types and the politician’s team. But Mama managed to sneak one little cherry off the edge of the tray and pop it into her mouth without anybody noticing. She said it was the sweetest, most beautiful moment of her life.”
Cherry rubbed the back of her hand across her eyes and gave an oddly wet-sounding inhale through her nose before continuing. “She said that me being born was the only thing that had ever eclipsed the experience of eating that cherry. Her new most beautiful moment.” She laughed shakily. “Plus, my face was as round and as red as a cherry when I was born, so I’m sure that contributed to the name choice.”
She cleared her throat and blinked many times. Then she sighed and said, “If I’m talking too much, you just let me know, Silar. They used to call me Chatty Cherry at school. It won’t hurt my feelings if you tell me to shut my trap, I promise.”
It was good she knew how to set traps for vermin, though I pondered what this might have to do with her propensity to fill near-every moment of quiet with chatter. All this talk in that high, pretty voice was loud and strange and not exactly comforting, but…
I could not ever see myself telling her to stop.
At my lack of reply, she sent me a questioning look.
I cast about for an appropriate response. “They call me Silent Silar,” I told her at length.
A smile unfurled, slow as sunrise, as she took that in.
“Sounds like we could be a perfect fit, then,” she said. “Just like this hat!”
A perfect fit. Maybe this really would work out. Maybe, after the thirty days were up, I would not have scared her off and she would stay with me. She would really be my wife.
At least, that’s what I thought.
Until she broke all those thoughts apart and ground my brain to a halt with what she said next.
“So, was this your parents’ ranch, then?”
She gazed up at me innocently as I felt my eyes blaze hotter white, my entire frame bristling with tension. My parents’ ranch?
“I mean, since you’ve been here since childhood,” she explained, her brow now puckering at my expression. “You said this was your hat from when you were a kid, right? Were you born here?”
She came here without knowing this is a penal colony.
And perhaps even worse than that…
She married me without knowing that I’ve killed a man.
How could she not know? How could she not have been told? Was this because she’d come here so early, before the others?
Would she still have married me if she knew?
Questions pounded through me while hers hung unanswered in the air.
I have to tell her.
And I would. I knew I would. Just…
Maybe not quite yet.
I would use my thirty days to show her how calm, controlled, and decent I could be. To prove just how hard I’d work to take care of her. I’d show her who I was, besides a convicted murderer who apparently wanted to do unnaturally perverse things to her backside, that is. If she could learn to like me, or at the very least respect me, before I told her why I was here, then maybe she would stay…
I did not say any of this to her, of course. I simply shoved her bag at her, told her to “take this into the house,” and immediately stalked stiffly away to inspect the property’s fences. I retreated into the monotonous safety of physical labour, telling myself it was because I was going to work hard for my wife.
I ignored the fact that work – even the hardest, most tail-breaking work – was just so much easier than the truth.