Chapter 17 Lurielle #2
Even when his sisters sniped and poked, even when they offered advice she hadn’t asked for, they meant well.
Even when their words had a sheen of malice, she knew that deep down, they genuinely meant well.
That was perhaps the hardest part to accept.
This wasn’t the snide, cutting world in which she had grown up.
She had no doubt that his sisters were more than capable of slicing her to ribbons, but they would be giving her a passed-down recipe, a homemade quilt, and advice that came from the heart in the same breath.
“You survived again, Bluebell. You’re gettin’ to be an old pro at handling this clan, I think.”
She laughed, dropping against him as his arm came around her, closing her eyes.
Lurielle breathed in the woodsmoke smell of the fire someone had lit at the back of the house.
Here, facing the woods, the forest stretched long and unbroken, and the smell of it had replaced the grass clippings from earlier.
“Does it ever get easier?”
His laughter was a rumble of thunder behind her. Their lives had changed so much since that very first weekend in Greenbridge Glen, but some things hadn’t. She still wanted to be caught in his downpour and always would.
“Easier? No. Never that. But you find your voice. And it gets easier to use it. And I think you’re already learning that, darlin’ . . . in any case, we won’t need to come back until his naming ceremony.”
At that, she turned in his arms, her brow furrowed.
“I don’t want to keep you from coming back, Khash.
This is your home. This is the family who loves you.
I’m not going to force you to come back if you don’t want to, but don’t ever think you can’t because of me.
I know I look dainty, but I’ll kick someone’s ass if I have to.
You married a survivor. I can get through a weekend with your sisters whenever I need to. ”
He was laughing before she’d even finished.
“Bluebell, you go talkin’ like that, what am I supposed to use as an excuse?
” She gasped, pushing against him lightly as he laughed, trapping her in the strong circle of his arms. “Well, you know I appreciate it, darlin’.
We’ll see. Once he’s a bit bigger. But when we get home, I think we need to take some time, just the three of us.
Let’s go to the cabin, put real life on the back burner another day or two. ”
“That sounds perfect to me,” she’d sighed, leaning into him.
Which was how she found herself, naked as the day she was born, her thighs stretched wide, straddling his body as he reclined on the picnic blanket they’d put down in the grass.
She would never get tired of this.
The thick shape of him inside her, stretching her open, the meat of him dragging against her inner walls in a way that made her breath hitch on every thrust. Her small white hands were splayed across the dark green expanse of his chest, her nails digging in for purchase as she rode him a bit harder, her clit finding the friction it needed against his pubic bone.
He had a hand at her hip, the other cupping her ass, keeping her steady, helping her ride his cock.
It had occurred to her, as she dropped her head back and he caught an engorged nipple in his mouth, that they had been here before. Exactly in this spot, on this same blanket, doing this exact same thing.
Now, though, the jiggliness of her ass and her dimpled thighs didn’t even register as a concern.
She couldn’t imagine being that elf again, putting herself through such trials over trivialities.
Now she had real things to worry about, like high-fructose corn syrup and the best brand of toothpaste for tiny teeth.
Being a good mother and setting a good example.
The width of her ass would never be important again. And it wasn’t actually important then.
His hands kept her tipped at just the right angle, allowing her to grind against him in the way she needed, and she was close. So close.
“Bluebell, I’m ready to fill this perfect pussy up. Are you going to come for me?”
The first pop of the fireworks above their heads made her gasp, falling forward against him.
Khash took the opportunity to catch her lips with his own, her whole face fitting between his thick tusks.
Her vision was spotty, her lungs unable to draw a full breath as they hitched, and when his thumb pressed between their bodies to move circles against her, she was lost.
A shimmer of sparks lit the sky, red and purple and gold.
Lurielle came with a moan, tightening around him, her muscles contracting around his shaft, her spine quivering when he came with a grunt.
She felt the hot pressure within her as another explosion boomed above them, and she continued to move against him, relishing the slippery wetness of it.
He continued to rub her clit until she tightened again with a small cry.
Weaker, but enough to turn her to jelly.
She dropped against him, limp as a fish, as Khash chuckled.
“Still my favorite song,” he whispered into her hair, kissing her neck.
She was able to hear the small, indignant wail coming from inside the cabin, almost falling sideways off his body in her haste.
“Darlin’, that boy’s not going anywhere. You’re going to wind up falling in the grass, twistin’ a little bitty ankle. Then what am I supposed to do? Carry both of you?”
She was laughing when she pushed herself to her feet. “You know what? Just for that, you go get him. I’m taking a shower.”
She had washed herself of the evidence of their dalliance in the grass, pantsless time with Bluebell and Khash, but it had been too late. There was no doubt in her mind that it happened that night, as the sky lit with fireworks once more, her son crying inside.
Kael’s birthday had passed shortly after, blissfully low-key.
A tiny cake, decimated by his fists, frosting in every crevice, up his nose, in his small, pointed ears.
His little baby teeth were perfect little pearls, and there, at the edges of his gums, the tiny bumps of his tusks, not yet ready to break the skin, but a pointed reminder that he’d be yowling until they did.
Khash had blown out the candle with him, as the whole clan cheered from the other side of the tablet screen. Kael had looked at the smoking remains of the candle with an open mouth, as if the absence of the flickering flame that had been there offended him utterly.
She’d stood watching, taking pictures, laughing with tears in her eyes, feeling as though she were simultaneously standing within the moment and standing outside it, a passive observer.
Surely, this wasn’t her life? She’d never dreamed of marriage, never picked out names for her fantasy children.
Surely this happily ever after had found her by mistake?
She was loading the dishwasher that night, after the destroyed cake had been cleared away, as Khash gave the birthday boy his bath. Lurielle glanced at her phone, noticing a missed text from her mother.
Thinking of you and our boy today.
Thinking of you. Now that you matter. Now that I’ve deemed you worthy of my attention. She hadn’t realized until after she closed the washer door that her mother hadn’t even wished Kael a happy birthday.
Because that’s not why she’s texting you. Lurielle already knew. Her mother was seeking the response. Was seeking the validation that came with being perceived as a good grandmother, which was evidently achieved via text message and the occasional phone call.
The first video call with her mother had gone exactly as well as she had assumed.
All of that big energy, the daily phone calls and messages, the now that you’re important to me subtext, the attitude that Lurielle had finally done something right, something of which she could boast .
. . well, it had not gone entirely crashing down, not the way Lurielle had feared.
More like that little candle being blown out. A wavering light one moment, and a puff of smoke the next. Disappointment. Expectations unmet.
She genuinely thought her mother was assuming that she wasn’t going to give birth to an orc as if Khash were incidental.
She had watched her mother’s face closely on the tablet screen, watched the rapid blinking of her eyes as she saw her little grandson for the first time, chubby cheeks and dark hair, big chocolate brown eyes like his daddy, his skin the soft color of a new leaf.
She had seen enough.
When her mother stopped calling every day, Lurielle was unsurprised. For the best, she told herself. That was what she told Despina in therapy. That’s what she repeated to herself in the mirror. What she whispered into Kael’s feather-soft hair as she put him to bed that night.
She was never going to be her mother. And it was for the best.
And now she had peed on her hand again, and the tremulous shape of the routine they’d been building was another little candle flame, just as easily extinguished.
“Were you joking about wanting another one?”
Khash ducked his head around the doorway, eyebrows drawn together, his mouth full of toothpaste. She grinned as he turned back into the bathroom, rinsed and spit.
“Lurielle, what kind of question is that to give a man when he’s trying to settle down for the night? You better be naked under those covers if you’re gonna taunt me that way.”
“I’m not taunting!” she laughed. “I’m just asking. You said you did, before he was born. Do you still?”
She thought about his big family — noisy, bickering, so many expectations, so many opportunities for failure.
She tried to envision her perfect little sunny house with two little ones, underfoot, fighting with each other, throwing toys, spilling food.
She didn’t have any sort of relationship with her brother.
She didn’t understand sibling bonds, not the way Khash did.
But then again, she could also picture Kael, a little older, looking at a book with a little brother or sister beside him, coloring with a sibling at his little table, two of them running and giggling outside. She didn’t understand it, but she could still see it so clearly.
The bed jostled as Khash climbed into it, stretching out beside her. His voice was careful.
“It’s a lot to consider, darlin’. I don’t feel like we’ve even found our feet yet.
Don’t go listening to my family trying to bully you into something.
We both love what we do. We’re not the couple who are gonna piss and moan about going back to work.
I’ll be honest, staying home with him . . . I didn’t think I was gonna make it.”
She began to laugh in the darkness, envisioning him overwhelmed with the baby in the middle of the day on his own, lunch tipped over, toys everywhere, spit-up on his tailored suits.
“You go on and laugh. I loved every minute of it. I wish I’d gotten the same time that you did with him. That don’t mean I wasn’t ready to put my suit back on by the end of it. And I know you were too.”
“I love my job,” she confirmed. Speaking it into the space of their bedroom made it take on weight in a different way than it did in her head.
“I genuinely love it. I love using my brain, and I love solving complex problems. I love building things. Do you know what happens when a woman leaves the workplace to care for her children? She leaves the workplace and the door closes behind her. It doesn’t matter the species.
The workplace doesn’t stop moving. By the time she goes back to it, she’s missed five years or more.
If I were to miss five years, I’d have to go back to school.
The way tech is advancing? Five years of hands-on practical experience with whatever the new tools are by then.
Five years of promotions. You can’t ever regain that ground once you lose it.
I’m not saying that’s the correct choice.
It’s not the choice for everyone. But right now it’s the choice I want to make.
Because if I don’t, I’m the one who has to live with the ramifications of it for a long, long time. ”
That, too, held a different weight when she said it out loud.
“Lurielle, I would never ask you to stay home. I know you better than that, darlin’. You said yourself — schools here are excellent. The daycare is too. There’s nothing wrong with the way we’re doing it. You don’t need to look at my family as a blueprint.”
“What am I supposed to look at then? Because I sure as fuck can’t look at my own family blueprint.”
Khash chuckled into the space between them, and she edged closer, closing the distance. “We’re not getting any younger, Lurielle. At least, I’m not.”
Her face heated, tears burning their way into existence. “So did you mean it? When you said you wanted another one?”
“Bluebell—”
“I’m pregnant,” she blurted, tears overflowing. She didn’t know if they were happy tears or just terrified tears. She was going to lose another version of herself, she realized.
Lurielle 2.0 had been replaced after she had met him, once she got serious in therapy.
Lurielle 3.0 had been shed once they married.
Motherhood had introduced the 4.0 model.
And now what? Will you still be the same Lurielle with two?
She didn’t know how many versions of herself she could install before the original operating unit broke down.
“I love you, darlin’.”
“I love you too,” she confirmed, his lips finding hers in the darkness. “And I’m going to need you to remind me of that in a few months when I can’t see my feet.”
“You don’t need ‘em.” His mouth was hot, and his hand tightened around hers. “Because I’m here to carry you.”