Chapter Ten #2
“Oh good… Tobias.” She whispers and the sound settles deep inside me.
I close my eyes as her pussy clamps around my cock, she throws her head back and screams as my cock plunges into her, over and over. She’s milking me for everything I have and I can’t hold back any longer, I explode with a roar inside her.
I slowly pull out and tuck her against me, she has a goofy smile on her face and her eyes are drooping.
“That…” she pants. “That was amazing, you’re amazing my big bear.”
“Go to sleep baby.” I say as I kiss her forehead.
The weeks after that night passed in a kind of contentment I still have to remind myself is real and not some elaborate, undeserved dream.
Christa started talking about the future in small, tentative ways.
Mentioning things she might like to try, places she might like to see someday, plans that assume without either of us saying outright, that I’ll still be there to see them with her.
I treasure every one of those small assumptions more than I know how to say.
She also started a garden bed of her own near the small cabin, insisting on doing the digging herself despite my offer to help, and I understand as I watch her work at it stubbornly through an entire aching afternoon, that is isn’t really about vegetables.
It’s about plating something and getting to watch it grow, on her own terms, in soil that’s actually hers to tend.
She started sleeping easier too. I notice it most nights now, the way her breathing evens out faster, there’s the absence of those small, restless movements that used to mark the first hour or two of her sleep in the early days.
Whatever nightmares had been chasing her when she first arrived seems to be losing ground slowly, against three months of ordinary safety.
Mornings that started the same way, evenings that ended the same way, usually with multiple orgasms.
A life with edges predictable enough that her body has apparently started to believe it.
I still wake sometimes to find her hand fisted tight in the sheets, obviously some old vigilance not yet fully realised even in sleep, but those nights are rarer now than they’d been a month ago, and rarer still the month before that.
I should have known better than to let myself get comfortable with predictable.
It’s Tuesday, unremarkable in every way that matters, when my bear first picks at something wrong in the air, not the sharp, urgent wrongness of that first night finding her stranded, but something smaller, more distant.
A low unease I almost dismissed as nothing.
I’m gathering firewood at the edge of my land, close enough to the old logging road that I catch myself glancing toward it more than once, some part of me remembering exactly what I found here three months ago and half expecting to find something there again.
There’s nothing. Just the road, empty and quiet, exactly as it should be, just sunlight where her car had once sat dead and dark.
I stand there for a moment longer than I need to, axe loose in one hand, listening to the ordinary sounds of an ordinary afternoon.
Birds, wind through the upper branches, nothing that should have set my bear on edge at all.
I tell myself it’s nothing. Tell my bear the same thing, more than once, as the unease refuses to fully settle no matter how many times I reason it away.
Six years alone has made me prone to reading meaning into small things, I tell myself it’s just an old habit from a life with too much silence in it.
Maybe that’s all this is. Maybe a man who once had his entire world upended by a feeling this exact isn’t ever going to fully trust the quiet again, even once the thing I’ve been waiting for has already, finally arrived.
But some old instinct, the same one that pulled me out of my yard three months ago and straight to a stranded woman I didn’t yet know is my entire future, keeps nagging at me for the rest of the day, low and persistent, refusing to be entirely ignored.
I find myself more than once glancing up from whatever task I’m doing to scan the treeline without quite meaning to, some animal part of me keeping watch while the rest of me tries to carry on as though nothing has shifted at all.
I don’t mention it to Christa that night.
Don’t want to hand her worry over something that might turn out to be nothing at all, not when she’s finally started sleeping through the night again, not when the life we’re building together has finally began to feel less fragile than it had at the start.
I watch her across the dinner table instead, laughing at something small and ordinary, utterly unaware of the low current of unease still sitting under my ribs, and tell myself that whatever this is, I can handle it without dragging her back into the fear she’d only just started to leave behind.
But I’ll keep the axe a little closer to the door this week than I usually do.
I also find myself checking the treeline a little more often than habit alone could explain, not obsessively, not in a way that will worry her if she notices, but consistently enough that some part of me understands, even without proof, that my bear rarely raises an alarm over nothing.