17. Darcy
17
DARCY
I thought being cold sucked the biggest balls, but nope. Warming back up was worse. Everything that had been numb before was now prickling with shocking pain. It was as if my limbs had been emptied of blood and now fluids were rushing back in at record pace, making everything snap and swell inside.
I wriggled and shivered in Fallon’s bed. I was sitting up against the plain wood headboard with blankets and the quilt pulled up to my chin so that my wet hair didn’t soak the pillows. Plus, Magnolia said I wasn’t allowed to lie down and fall asleep yet.
As if I could sleep while every single, strained nerve in my arms and legs was sending me a big, painful message that basically went, Fuck you, Darcy. You’re an idiot.
But despite the obnoxiously uncomfortable process of warming up, it was definitely working. I didn’t feel as desperately cold as before.
After I’d been brought in here, Magnolia had helped me into a nightgown and a pair of thick socks, as well as bandaging my right palm. Fallon had built up a big, crackling fire in a corner of the bedroom that I hadn’t even realized was a fireplace. The heat radiated nicely throughout the large room, easily reaching me here in the bed. I shook my aching head, remembering how Fallon had dragged the bed – with me in it – as close to the fire as possible, only for an ember to jump out and land on the blankets. Then he’d freaked out and pushed the bed back, humming and hawing over its position until he’d settled on leaving the bed right in the centre of the big room. Close to the fire, but not too close.
It had been kind of impressive, to be honest, how easily he’d shoved the big, solid wood bed around, especially with my own body adding to the weight. He hadn’t even taken his own wet clothes or boots off yet.
I’d make sure he did that the next time he came back in. Which turned about to be about thirty seconds later.
His soaked boots hit the ground with colossal speed and force as he hauled his big orange body into the room, not stopping until he reached the side of the bed. There was something crumpled in his fist.
Before I could take a breath or attempt to say a single word to him, whatever he’d held was dropped on the top of my head, briefly obscuring my vision until he scraped it back and wrapped it around my hair. Through the cool damp strands, delicious warmth radiated.
“This is for your hair!” he said, kind of chaotically, and definitely redundantly, as he was already quite obviously using the rag like a warm towel on my hair.
I swatted weakly at his hands. Even though I instantly regretted taking my arms out of the warm blankets, I tried to grab the rag from him anyway.
“I can do that!” I insisted, noting with satisfaction that my voice and clattering teeth only sounded winter-day-cold, not death’s-door-cold. “You need to dry off and warm up, too!”
Guilt churned in my stomach as I took in the soaked, heavy leather clinging to his legs and the sodden boots on his giant feet. The only reason he was that wet was because he’d had to charge in and rescue me. Bleh. I was glad that I’d gone and made sure that Sora and the calf were alright, but I hated that he’d had to help me. We’d been so close to clearing the creek on our own…
“I am fine. Zabrians have much more robust temperature regulation than humans. I read about it in the-”
“The book. Yeah, yeah. You’re a human expert.” I sighed and let my arms, now feeling extra heavy, drop. Fallon immediately started blotting at my hair with the rag/towel again. It felt alarmingly good to have him gently tugging and pressing on my long, tangled clump of soaked hair. “I still don’t like seeing you standing around in those wet clothes.”
“Then I will dispose of them immediately. Immediately after I get your rocks,” he amended.
“Rocks?” I asked, wondering if there was water stuck in my ears. Why the hell would he think I wanted rocks right now?
Without warning, he straightened, his cute, round little ears perking up.
“They’re ready! Magnolia is calling me!”
She was? I hadn’t heard a damn thing.
Definitely some water in there…
But when Fallon returned, he did indeed have a bunch of fucking rocks which he carried in a big tub in his arms.
“Do not touch them with your bare skin,” he cautioned. “They are hot.”
“What about you?!” I sputtered as he reached his own bare hands into the tub, taking out two large reddish rocks which he then shoved between layers of blankets near my feet.
“Not too hot for me,” he clarified.
Whether he was bullshitting or actually did have some kind of weird alien oven-mitt hands, he continued reaching into the tub without complaint and without any indication of pain, working until all the rocks had been placed at various points along each side of my body.
“How do you feel?” Fallon asked anxiously when he’d run out of rocks.
I felt like I’d gotten hit by a bus. A bus made out of ice. But a wife was never supposed to complain about crap like that to her husband. So I screwed a fake-ass smile on my face and said, “Better, thanks.”
Fallon watched me for a long moment, still and white-eyed at the side of the bed.
Then, without warning, he undid his belt and yanked his sodden trousers down to his knees.
“Holy… What are you doing?” I squawked.
“I… I am doing what you told me to do,” Fallon said, straightening up. “Should I stop?”
He still held the waistband of his pants, as if he was ready to pull the miserably wet, cold clothing back up the second that I told him to.
“No! Go ahead. I just…”
I just wasn’t expecting you to whip your dick out with such little ceremony.
But then again, considering what had happened at our wedding, should I have really been surprised?
I kept my eyes trained on the faded patches of the quilt, my face feeling way hotter than it should have for someone who’d narrowly escaped a bad case of human popsicleitis. Fallon resumed stripping. Wet thudding told me his boots had been kicked off. I dared a subtle peek his way, sending him a fluttering gaze from beneath my eyelashes.
His back was to me. He’d kicked his boots over to sit directly in front of the fire, and he was now hanging his trousers on a simple sort of rack by the flames.
He was naked. My husband was completely and utterly naked.
That sunset-vivid orange hide took on a shadowed, velvet look in the firelight. It was fully dark outside, with nothing but the flames to cast their glow and the occasional lick of lightning blasting its electric rage through the window. Fallon’s hair was now a deeper, tawny gold, the silken strands darkened by rain and creek water. The hard, carved lines of his shoulders and back led down to a tapered waist, a slinky tail, and what was possibly the most spectacularly sculpted ass that any human girl had ever had the privilege to witness. Not that I was looking. A decent wife would never ogle her husband.
Nope. I definitely wasn’t checking out Fallon’s ass. Which also meant I definitely didn’t get an eyeful of big, orange, alien cock when he suddenly spun around.
I averted my gaze, finding a very interesting whorl of wood on the bedframe to examine. Except, the more I looked at the whorl the more I realized it was shaped like a dick.
Delightful.
“I’ve got your tea!”
Magnolia’s voice was loud enough that I heard it that time. Fallon instantly turned towards the door to receive her, massive cock swinging.
With more energy than I should have been capable of producing in my only very recently thawed limbs, I launched like an angry cat from the bed, looped both my arms around one of his, and yanked him down.
Or, I tried to yank him down. It was like pulling as hard as you could against some big boulder. Nearly threw my fucking back out.
“Sit down!” I hissed, hearing Magnolia’s footsteps approaching. There was no time to get some clothes on this idiotic, naked man.
“But I need to get your tea!”
“Not like that, you don’t!”
I was fairly certain that if Magnolia came through the doorway and was confronted with Fallon’s bare genitals then she would legitimately pass away. Just… fall to the floor, her sweet, kind soul instantly leaving her body. That, or sustain third degree burns when she dropped her tea in shocked horror.
“Not like what?” Fallon had the nerve to ask.
“Not naked !” I snapped, giving another hard tug on his muscled, immobile arm.
“Why not?”
Oh my God. Kill me.
“Magnolia does not want to see your… your penis, that’s why!” I whisper-shouted. I didn’t need blankets or fires or hot rocks to warm me up. Pure embarrassment was doing that just fine now.
“Oh.” Fallon’s face buckled as he tipped his chin down. “Is there something wrong with it?”
Why, God? Why was this happening to me?
“Just sit beside me! Sit beside me right now or I’m going to go jump in that fucking creek again!”
That got my husband’s attention. His eyes, which had softened to warm brown, went white. Immediately, he sat, making the thin mattress sink with his weight. It was like saying “Down!” to a very well-trained dog. I chucked the quilt over his lap and legs just as Magnolia walked in with a mug of steaming liquid.
“Here you go,” she said as she circled the bed to my side. She placed the mug down on the wooden table nearby and then pulled out her temp gauge. After checking my ears, she beamed.
“You’re doing amazing. Your temperature has already risen!” she said, clearly pleased. I tried to mirror her happy face and decided not to tell her that this current surge of heat was being powered solely by frantic humiliation and sheer fucking stress. But she hadn’t burned herself on the tea, and Fallon hadn’t taken anybody’s unsuspecting eye out with his dick, so maybe everything would be alright after all.
“Thank you so much,” I said to her, eyeing Fallon from the side to make sure he hadn’t lost the quilt I’d so helpfully dumped on his lap. Luckily, he hadn’t. In fact, he seemed to be holding it in place now, as if he’d finally gotten it through his thick alien head that greeting a nice human lady with your alien Johnson just bouncing around in the breeze was absolutely not acceptable.
But despite my impression, it seemed Fallon wasn’t thinking about his nakedness or Magnolia’s feelings or propriety, because he fastened his intent white gaze on her face and asked,
“What do I need to know? To care for her through the night?”
“You don’t have to care for me through the night!” I groaned. I wasn’t some sad Old-Earth orphan with smog sickness. I was fine now. Mostly.
“It’s either he stays with you through the night to make sure you’re alright, or I do,” Magnolia challenged in a sterner voice than I’d ever heard her use before. She raised a black eyebrow.
After a moment, I nodded. I didn’t want her to lose sleep or be inconvenienced because of me. And I guessed Fallon had to sleep here, anyway. This was his bedroom, after all.
“She just needs to be kept warm,” Magnolia said to Fallon. “I’m not worried about her going to sleep now. If you could stay in the bed with her and share your body heat, that would be ideal.”
Sharing body heat ? Would be ideal ?
“Oh, I’m sure that isn’t necessary,” I said, balking, trying my darndest not to notice the way that Fallon was already eagerly sliding beneath the other layers of blankets on the bed and scooting ominously closer. “I have all those hot rocks in here!”
“They won’t stay hot all night,” Magnolia replied. “Besides, there’s a lot of evidence about skin-to-skin helping balance body temperature and leading to better hypothermia outcomes.”
I narrowed my gaze at her, trying to figure out if she was shitting me. But she just gazed straight back, steady and serene.
Skin-to-skin. Oh, God.
Fuck you, science.
“It is a good thing I have already removed all of my clothes!” Fallon said, sounding way too proud of himself. “I am ready to put my skin on your skin!”
“Um, actually, maybe you should stay,” I babbled as Magnolia moved towards the exit.
She looked like she was doing everything in her power not to laugh as she went through the door. Just before she closed it, she choked out, “I think you’re going to be just fine, Darcy.”