Truce
Chapter twelve
Ethan was going to die.
It had been three days now since his ignominious injury, and he and Mara had settled into something of a routine.
The morning after, she had grudgingly fetched him a few more necessities, including his armor rack and, thankfully, his portable camp toilet.
She’d arranged them around his tent so that he could access everything without overly straining his injured ankle.
And then, with a scathing farewell, she’d vanished into the ground like the Wicked Witch of the West.
And then returned every hour to check on him.
It was unnerving, how her hands could be gently replacing his bandages or wrapping his sprained ankle while her eyes were glaring daggers at him.
And meanwhile, she spoke as little as possible, replying to his jokes and conversational gambits with dry mockery and occasional reluctant laughs.
She helped him change into clean clothes and inspected the various bruises that had bloomed overnight all over his body, a testament to his struggles, with no apparent embarrassment even when he was down to his boxers.
And she deflected his attempts at flirtation—wisely made when he was not down to his boxers—deftly and firmly, whisking herself away whenever he asked anything remotely personal.
But then there were moments he would catch her looking at him with an expression that he wanted to define as hunger, her green eyes intense and…
He couldn’t think of a word that described them, actually.
Inhuman seemed rude; magical was too cliché.
But they were somehow other, not of his world, and they entranced him, even though he knew there wasn’t any magic involved at all.
It was just her, the goddess-ish truth of her, and he was under her spell.
And god, he wanted her. He was going to die from wanting her. Just expire on the sand, leaving his body to be eaten by bobcats and his bones to be bleached by the sun. Here Lies Ethan, Victim of His Own Hubris.
It wasn’t only her lush body or the symmetry of her face, the flow of her hair or the earthy green-dappled brown of her skin.
It was the way she moved, entirely lacking in both self-consciousness and coyness.
She did not care if her movements were beautiful or ungainly, though every action held a natural, earthy grace.
Her expression was remarkably still at rest, but expressive and unmasked when she laughed or smiled or scowled.
She seemed entirely without artifice when she was speaking to him.
And when she did not want to speak to him, when his questions pushed too far or he flirted too overtly, her face and her body closed, impenetrable as a fortress.
She was like a bud refusing to bloom. Not a rosebud—never roses. Roses were too common for Mara, too commercial. An orchid cactus, perhaps, or a night-blooming cereus. A flower whose blooming would mandate a celebration.
He wanted desperately to make her bloom. To see how her mobile, expressive face looked softened by real affection, brightened by a true smile. Heated by desire. He wanted her gasps and her cries, his name on her lips, her gentle, healing touch turned to passionate caresses.
She would never give them to him. He knew that. She despised him.
But he wanted her nonetheless. Yearned for her like the desert yearned for the monsoon rains, like plants yearned for the sun, inevitable and irresistible, helpless before their need for sustenance.
When she appeared, he turned to her like a magnet, unable to look away from her until she was gone and he had to settle for the stars, for the sky, for the desert that had always been the home of his heart.
For the few mundane entertainments he’d brought on a research trip, which was not a lot.
Especially with his phone long out of charge.
He could ask Mara to plug it into his generator, but it was a waste of time.
There were only so many times he could read the field guide to invasive plants of the Sonoran Desert or his own research notes. And he didn’t want to read them.
All he wanted was to look at Mara, and when she was gone, all he wanted was to remember her—every last snippy insult and eyeroll.
She was the desert, the soil and the plants, and he could not imagine leaving her.
He had to admit it. He was down bad.
Also bored.
Also horny.
He still had use of his hands, of course, but it was uncomfortable, pulling his dick out all alone in the desert, knowing that he wasn’t all alone, that Mara could at any time be watching him invisibly.
Judging him. Maybe ready to bury him in sand like his lantern and his drone if he shouted her name at the wrong moment.
It just felt weird, and the one time he’d tried it, the weirdness had cock-blocked him—he wasn’t sure if that term could technically be applied to masturbation, but that was how it felt—and he’d ended up desperately envisioning the least sexy movies he’d ever watched just to get out of his horny quandary.
(Eraserhead finally got the job done. Thank you, David Lynch.)
So here he was, lying on the ground with his ankle propped up on his cooler, both yearning for and dreading Mara’s inevitable appearance. Not even sure which feeling was stronger.
Thank god the dizziness had mostly receded.
He still felt like shit, but at least he felt like coherent shit.
Like he could hold his own in a conversation.
Like if his fantasy came true and Mara decided to apply her gentle touch to his aching groin, he’d be compos mentis enough to give enthusiastic consent.
Though of course, the more compos his mentis became, the sooner he would have to depart. He’d promised he would leave, promised he would admit defeat.
And Mara was not likely to be lenient.
Which was why when she finally emerged from the sand, the morning sun lighting up her eyes, he let all his stoicism fall away and allowed his pain to show in his face.
“You are awake,” she said in a clipped voice.
“Good morning,” he replied politely.
“Hm.” He heard her it would be a better morning if you weren’t here as if she’d said it aloud.
She fell to her knees beside the cooler, and he held his breath in anticipation, letting it out on a sigh when her warm fingers stroked his calf just above the Ace bandage.
“How does it feel?” she asked, shifting to sit cross-legged and then setting his foot in her lap as she began to unwrap it.
“About the same.” He sighed as the compression was released. “Maybe better. I can probably drive, if you—”
“No,” she said sharply. “It will not be safe.”
Was she trembling? “I’ve driven with worse.”
“Because you are a fool,” she said, though her voice was soft again. She finished removing the wrap and started running her fingers over his ankle and foot. “It looks worse. This bruise.” She traced the green-purple splotch.
Ethan could feel himself melting into the sand at her touch. He closed his eyes and called on his de-hornifying savior David Lynch again before other parts of him perked up. “That’s because the swelling went down. Trust me. It’s getting better.”
“If you insist.” Her fingers kept tracing along his skin, up and down the instep.
Thank god he’d turned his spray bottle of vodka on his feet the night before, so they weren’t as smelly as they could have been.
He’d been going bootless since his injury, which could have been a real problem if Mara hadn’t somehow cleared his little campsite of cactus spines and bitey insects.
Almost as if she liked him.
She’d been silent for a long time, he realized, and he shoved up on his elbows. “Do you need me to wrap it again myself?”
“What?” She blinked at him. “Oh. No. No, I will…” She looked down at his foot in her lap. “I have been thinking.”
“A dangerous pastime,” he joked.
She didn’t laugh. Her fingers curled around his calf. “I wish for you to leave,” she said, flickering a glance at his face. “But as you must remain a short while longer, I have been considering…a truce. A compromise.”
“I thought the war was over. You won.”
“I did.” She darted another sidelong glare at him. “You are making this difficult.”
“That’s my specialty,” he said. “Or so I’ve been told.”
“So you have been annoying other women. Should I be jealous?”
He wasn’t sure how to answer that. Was she flirting or just mocking him? “Don’t worry,” he said at last. “I only have annoyingness for you.”
“You saved it all just for me,” she mused, spraying his Ace bandage with the vodka, then draping it along the cooler to air out. “How kind of you.”
“It’s not like I’ve never, um, annoyed another woman before.
I went to college.” He was starting to get lost in their wordplay.
Was annoying a code word for flirting? Or dating?
Or sex? Or was it not a code word at all?
Maybe Mara really was just talking about the fact that he was a pain in her ass.
But why was she back to stroking his foot?
David Lynch could only do so much. “You said something about a truce.”
“I have been considering,” she said in a steady voice, “allowing you to complete your research.”
Ethan gaped at her, wondering if maybe he had hit his head again. “You’re going to let me what?”
“I do not believe,” Mara went on doggedly, “that you will learn anything. I have told you that the answer lies in my magic and not in the world of science. You will not find your precious tenure here. But I may have been…impolite…in my refusal to allow you the opportunity to fail on your own.”
Summing up a campaign of weaponized cacti as impolite was certainly a choice. But Ethan wasn’t about to call Mara on it. Not when she was offering an olive branch.
An olive branch that might have secret thorns, to be sure, but a gesture nonetheless.
“Thank you,” he said.
She shrugged and picked up the Ace bandage again.
“You are stubborn and determined,” she said as she began to wrap his ankle snugly.
“If you leave without your curiosity being satisfied, you will no doubt return to annoy me again. Or perhaps another scientist will. If you do your work and tell your fellow scientists that there is nothing to be found here, I may have my peace again.” She raised her unearthly gaze to his.
There was that glow again, predatory and searching.
“So I will ensure you are satisfied before you leave.”
By the time he consciously parsed that last sentence, his subconscious had leapt on it like a hungry coyote, and not even David Lynch could save him now. No, his only hope was that Mara was either too innocent or too annoyed to care that he had a full-on erection straining at his jeans.
He essayed a casual smile, just in case. “You’re very kind.” Nothing to see here. Especially not down there. “I’ll do my best not to get in your way.”
Her lips curved in a sly smile. “I know it will be hard for you.”
“I… Yeah. I do take up a lot of space.”
“You are not so large.” Her smirk grew.
There was no fucking way she was throwing out innuendo on purpose, but damn if he didn’t wish she was. That he’d somehow woken up in the HBO version of his life and she was about to pop the button on his Levi’s and go to town on his poor neglected dick. Which was a perfectly acceptable size.
But it was the real world, and she just fastened the clips on his bandage, set his foot back on the cooler, and stood up.
“When you can walk,” she said coolly, “I will take you to where you may begin your research, then. Is there anything else you need this morning? Shall I look at your head?”
“No,” he said faintly, managing a smile. “You’ve done plenty.”
“Then I will be off.” She ran a narrow-eyed glance along his body. Ethan braced for her shocked denouncement, but instead she simply smiled and sank back into the sand.
“Bye,” he said belatedly.
And then he was alone with his thoughts, his throbbing ankle, and desperate arousal that was destined to go unquenched.
She was definitely trying to kill him.