5
The snowfall wrapping the village in white was decidedly less romantic when Fawn was fleeing in embarrassment, slipping on the sporadic patches of compacted ice.
“Fawn, wait!”
Erryc called after her, but she didn’t turn around or slow down.
The festival was still in full swing, most of the distance Fawn was able to put between herself and Erryc was by slipping through the crowd easier. At a brisk pace, soon he was at least a hundred steps behind her.
It wasn’t just that he refused her, that she would never recover from the embarrassment. The worst of it was that she’d still shown her feelings when she thought she knew better. It hurt that what intimacy they’d shared wasn’t real, when she’d wanted it so badly. She had just taken what she could until she took too much.
Felt too much.
A thin, trickling creek wound down the hill, barely ten paces across, intersecting the main village road. The creaky wooden footbridge covered in a fresh layer of snow gave her pause as she reached partway across, her footing sliding uneasily on one board.
She stopped for breath there, leaning hard on the railing. The endless red burning her cheeks blurred her vision as well, her breath sharp and painful as tears fought exhausted gasps.
She didn’t want his apology, or an explanation. The rejection stung enough without salt rubbed in it. She didn’t need him to break her heart any further.
Despite herself, she looked back to him as Erryc reached her, and stepped up onto the bridge.
His eyes met hers for a heartbeat, his hand outstretched, her name on his lips, when the bridge groaned and the rotted wood finally snapped.
The bridge was not tall, and the creek was not very deep. The fall itself was nothing remarkable.
But the water was unlike anything she’d ever felt.
The plunge was so cold she could barely stand to open her eyes, it knocked all the breath from her chest. It burned, it pierced, it needled with a thousand pricks.
Erryc’s hands were under her arms, lifting her out of the water quickly. Somehow it was worse than being in the freezing water. Even a slight wind cut bitter slices through her every staggered step.
Burning with cold, Fawn did not have the wherewithal to argue, when Erryc said around chattering teeth, “Th-the t-tavern’s just up ahead. C-come in and dry off.”
Each frozen step was barely any better than the last as they made their way out of the creek up the road.
The tavern was still icy and dark inside, but being out of the wind was enough to feel like she could finally take in a deep enough breath.
As soon as the tavern door swung shut again, Erryc went immediately to the cold hearth, gathering bits of feathers and splinters from the ground under Fawn’s usual table and striking flint into the pile.
Though the wood was dry, the smouldering pile of tinder scraps took a long, slow crawl to catch on the bark. The logs wouldn’t fully burn for at least the better part of an hour.
Some small warmth emitted from the hearth, but it wasn’t enough to permeate the layers of wet clothing. Fawn bent down to blow gently on the young fire, begging it to grow faster.
Erryc shed his cloak and hung it up by the fireplace to dry it out quicker. Then he shucked his boots, tossed them haphazardly towards the fire as well.
Fawn glanced at him between violent shivers, constantly worrying that he was injured from the fall. If not for their current circumstances, she would have avoided looking at him entirely. She had not forgotten his rejection just yet.
However, she forgot to breathe, forgot that she was even cold at all, when she caught sight of him grab a fistful of the back of his shirt, and pull the whole thing off over his head.
The creek might have shocked the drunken gaiety from her, but apparently it hadn’t quenched other thirsts.
Fawn watched, rooted to the spot, as his hands began tugging at the laces of his pants, where the fabric was almost entirely soaked, chunks of snow and ice dripping off of him.
He looked up and met her eyes. Fawn blinked, supposed she ought to offer some normal, reasonable explanation why she’d been slack jawed and staring at him undoing the lacing to his cock, but all she could do was let her teeth chatter.
“You’re soaked,”
he said, and let go of the laces.
For a moment, there was only the loss of him taking off his pants, then he moved to her, kneeling down before her. His hands went to the fastenings of her dress. Fawn closed her eyes as hot tears welled up, turning her back to him.
Countless times she had wanted something like this to happen, and yet it was so hollow after his rejection. Her heart was tearing itself into pieces. She ground her teeth together, and swallowed her tears back. He would not know how much she cared. She would not give him that.
Her petticoat came off quickly, the back of her dress opened up as he unlaced the bodice. She tugged at her sleeves and started to shrug out of it, stopping when she realized she would be naked after removing it.
Holding her cold wet dress to her chest, Fawn turned to Erryc, looking over her shoulder up through her eyelashes. She saw the same realization strike him as the icy weight of the water pulled the dress down, slowly peeling off her shoulders as she tried to hold it up.
“I’ll look away.”
Erryc had volunteered a touch too quickly, Fawn thought. There was awkwardness between them, and then there was him not wanting to see her naked even a little. It reaffirmed the realization she’d had at the fountain, that he had pulled away from her. He didn’t want from her what she had wanted from him.
Feeling all too much like a petulant child who’d been denied a treat, she kicked off the icy, soaked garment, leaving it in a puddle on the floor. She sat down in front of the little fire and hugged her knees to herself.
She might have felt self-conscious of her nakedness if she’d still hung her hopes on the daydream that one day he might see her and be so taken by maybe her tits or something that he realized that she had been worth loving all this time, that all this time she’d only needed to find the courage to take that first step.
But Fawn had known all along how silly a hope it was, nothing more than a fantasy. She just hadn’t wanted to believe it. What did it matter now, if she bared her cold and clammy skin to him, with bits of silt and sand still sticking to her?
She supposed she ought to feel equally indignant that he thought she was useful as a deterrent for the other girls with their eyes on him, but right now what stung the most was that she’d gotten so twisted up in their game of make-believe that she’d forgotten it was only that.
“Uh, Fawn? Is it ok with you if I take off my pants? They’re freezing.”
“Yeah, whatever,”
she muttered against her knee, deciding to rest her attention in the corner of the hearth. The bronze handle of the fire poker was polished from the many times it had been used to stoke the fire. Colors swirled in the warped metal, Fawn slowly began to understand what she was seeing.
She dropped her eyes back to the floor as soon as Erryc stepped out of his pants and she glimpsed the sheer length and girth of Erryc’s cock swinging between his legs.
She winced at herself, hating herself for still feeling that little thrill of desire and curiosity that zipped through her stomach. Years of yearning could not be undone in an instant.
Fawn had glimpsed his cock once before, she’d stepped outside behind the tavern and accidentally glimpsed him relieving himself. She’d spent so many nights stroking herself over a glimpse of his broad, hairy chest or the massive stretch of his torso, the thickness of his forearms and wrists, or even those massive hands, that seeing all of him at once was completely overwhelming.
It was so long and thick, like nothing she’d ever seen on a human man, but on most horses. There was real heft and weight to it, curling down in a gracefully curved pointed tip while it was soft.
“You should lean against me, it’ll help you warm up,”
Erryc offered, his tone not unfriendly, but clearly he did not enjoy the idea. Salt in a skinned knee.
“Fine. I don’t want to get sick any more than you do,”
she muttered, too cold to imagine refusing, even with her pride. “We will simply bear it, despite the indignity.”
“Indinginity?”
he repeated, as if in disbelief she would choose such a word.
Fawn stared resolutely at the floor, refusing to elaborate. She held still, shoulders tensed and raised up by her ears.
After a breath or two, the floorboards creaked under him as he crossed to her side, his joints crackled as he knelt down behind her on the bearskin rug.
Fawn refused to find any sort of pleasure or comfort in the slow-growing tepid temperature of his skin against hers as he stretched his legs out on either side of her, drawing a knee up. She could barely feel the touch of his inner thigh against her side, the hand he rubbed up and down her arm. Her throat grew tight as she felt her skin begin to thaw.
After tonight, they might not even be friends. No, worse. Tomorrow perhaps, Erryc might find it in himself to still offer her friendship, but her pride was too injured to allow her to receive it. She would never visit the tavern again. She would find a different path to walk, she would reroute her entire life around avoiding ever seeing him again.
Erryc’s hand rubbing her arm slowed, dwindling down to just his thumb brushing back and forth over her shoulder.
“Can we talk about what happened at the fountain?”
“I’d rather we didn’t.”
“Clearly,”
he grumbled, blowing out a breath. “You would rather we shiver on the darkest, coldest night of the year than have a conversation.”
“I’m not the one who broke the bridge.”
“You couldn’t stop and just talk to me anywhere else?”
“I stopped there because I thought it was the only place I thought you wouldn’t follow me! We fell in the creek because you did!”
“Fawn, I– no… you’re right. I’m sorry that I brought this on our friendship. I shouldn’t have involved you in my problems. I wanted to spare the feelings of others without even making them self conscious. I thought our friendship could withstand a little embarrassment. When I make a fool of myself in front of you, it’s easy to bear. You always just laugh it off, think nothing of it. I had imagined... perhaps you felt the same way about me.”
Fawn gritted her teeth together, then sighed. “I’m sorry, I don’t.”
He might have been the only person in the world she couldn’t stand to think of her as foolish, even in the slightest. It stung to hear how he perceived their relationship as so inconsequential that it didn’t matter what she thought of him.
She kept her gaze adamantly in front of her. The fire was starting to catch the rest of the log, its radiance finally permeating the room. The pair of them fell into silence, the room filled with only the crackle and occasional popping sound from the fire.
Her defensiveness died down as the moments stretched on, nothing said between them. It wasn’t true anger, only shame and regret. It cooled into sadness, the realization that even now, Erryc’s first priority was making sure she was warm and safe. She didn’t know how to put aside her damaged pride and just be truly vulnerable with him.
Drier, somewhat thawed, she suddenly felt more aware now of her nakedness than she had when she had first peeled her clothes off. Her body had been so cold it hadn’t felt like being exposed, but now that her blood had heated she felt every sensation that had been dulled before. His skin brushing against hers, the hair on his legs bracketing her, her naked pussy against the fur of the rug. Her nipples drew tight as he shifted behind her and something grazed her lower back.
Fawn swallowed back a moan as the sensation rippled through her, every part of her body becoming aware that she was sitting directly between his bare thighs– her clit pulsed awake, butterflies zipped through her middle, her core achingly empty and suddenly slick.
It was torture for him to keep touching her like this, to continue lighting sparks in her veins, to keep kindling lust with each caress. It shouldn’t have aroused her the way it was. She hugged her knees in tighter to herself, putting the smallest sliver of space between her body and his, just to keep from touching.
“Do you really hate me that much?”
Erryc sighed, and she thought she felt his hand tense against her, before he removed it from her.
“I don’t hate you,”
she murmured, “But I... wish I had not revealed so much of myself to you.”
“If I had a change of dry clothes here, I would–”
“Not my body, Erryc. My... feelings towards you,”
she said haltingly. Even beginning to voice it made her stomach contort with discomfort. “I don’t know how I can ever face you now.”
“I thought I had stopped things soon enough–”
“You couldn’t have prevented me from making a fool of myself.”
“Fawn, no. You did not.”
“Didn’t I? I did what all the rest of the girls do, flirting with you. I’ve seen so many try and fail. It was a mistake.”
Fawn dared a peek over her shoulder at Erryc. His mouth was set in a hard line, his hand balled up in a fist on his knee. “The fault is mine. I was selfish.”
She closed her eyes in exasperation. The last thing she wanted was Erryc to think he should have let her kiss him just to keep the peace between them. “It is not selfish to say no–”
“No, I... I was selfish in that I wanted it to go on. I waited over a year trying to find the right moment, and then you kissed me. You were stumbling down drunk, I didn’t know if you would even remember what you did in the morning and I let you go as far as you did because I wanted it. I wish I’d been stronger to do the right thing.”
Fawn frowned. Were they even speaking of the same thing? She had kissed him, and she had drunk a lot more than she usually did. She hadn’t realized how inebriated she must have looked to him, that he was concerned she couldn’t truly consent to her actions.
She held still, trying to swallow back the hope fluttering up her chest.
“You... wanted me to kiss you?”
She watched his expression carefully, how his pupils darkened and his nostrils flared, the way his eyes dipped briefly from her face to her bare breasts, and then pointedly away from her.
“Yes,”
he admitted, lashes dark against his cheeks, “Badly enough that I would even take a meaningless drunken kiss.”