Chapter 13 #2
I go away with the intention of doing as he says, more or less.
I do need a home to bring her to. He’s right on that.
I want it to be a place she will feel at home.
I want to reclaim my pet. I want to house her well.
I want to have her by my side for the rest of our lives.
There is a lot to be done before that happens.
The days of swinging into a reality then abandoning it a moment later are over.
I have to stay here and build in the old-fashioned way.
Nothing will form itself around my desire simply because I have it.
I place the order for lumber with Mr. Bones. He is glad to take my money, and Mr. Gut takes almost all the rest. I find myself with a reason to go back to Mara’s father and petition him for some work.
“You’ve got a younger back than I do,” he says. “You can help shift and strip engines.”
“That sounds good to me, sir.”
He wastes no time in putting me to work.
This is a man who has more ideas than he has time to execute them.
His inventory is vast, and held in containers that used to be used for shipping freight when the original colony was settled.
They’re big, corrugated iron structures that sound hollow when you bang the walls, and have an eerie echo about them.
I’ve never been unsettled before. In my previous existence as a free Psyon, nothing scared me because I knew what everything was.
Now I can be surprised. It’s a fun little bonus.
As I work, I am aware of the fact that Mara is watching me.
I can feel her gaze on the back of my neck like a physical force.
I pretend not to know that her eyes are running all over me while I work.
I wear a singlet that keeps things modest the way the colony likes, but gives me range of motion and something to sop up the sweat I perspire while working with my hands.
If Alara could see me now, I am sure she’d consider me well punished.
I am filthy with grease, have blisters on my fingers and palms of my hands, and my stomach is growling with hunger.
But I am also satisfied. The act of taking mechanical things apart and cleaning them before itemizing them, oiling them, and reassembling them is satisfying in a way I would not have previously understood if someone was trying to explain it to me.
“Mara! Make us up something to eat before the big blue boy faints,” her father calls.
I look at him sharply.
“Blue?”
“Your overalls are blue,” he says, so deadpan I don’t know if he’s really referring to the overalls, or if he’s making a comment about something he really shouldn’t be able to see.
Mara can see me for who I am, I think. At least, partially.
Most humans won’t. I might be banished from the home realm, but I still have the ability to cloak myself in appropriate garb, including the aspects of my face, skin, and hair visible to those who look at me.
I am still myself. Alara could not take the fundamentals of my being away.
All she could do is banish me from a shared space.
For now.
Maybe forever.
Mara makes a mean mac and cheese dish with big chunks of streaky bacon and a side of sauerkraut. It’s a divine meal.
“I didn’t know you could cook so well,” I say to her.
“You don’t know me at all,” she smirks back.
I cock my head to the side. She can’t possibly remember me entirely. The fact that she has any inkling at all proves that humans do have access to what Alara calls the quantum memory. But I’m certain she does not remember everything. If she did, she’d be doing more blushing and less arch staring.
“Go and tend the counter,” her father says.
She trots off, obedient to him.
* * *
A couple of days later, my lumber is floated down the river and I go and get to work. I’ve been languishing in the position of yearning for my pet for what feels like too long now. I need to get myself busy and get this done for her.
So I get to work. I clear the land. I dig the holes for the piles. I even have bags of cement to stick them in place. Water from the river gives me much of what I need. Simple construction is a beautiful thing, and I would never have been able to experience it if it weren’t for this exile.
As I work, I find myself thinking less and less about the home realm, and more about my pet.
I know she will wait for me. I could tell the moment I laid eyes on her that she had touched nobody other than me.
She’s still bearing my mark. I can smell it on her.
I can see it in her eyes. No other male will be able to compare to me.
No matter how hard they try, they will seem wrong to her.
And her father is certainly not going to allow any casual suitors to approach directly.
I’ve got time.
Less time than I used to have, though. I used to have all of it.
A vast expansive of existence that went forward and backward and I could step from one place to the other never feeling the sting of aging.
I know that will not be the case anymore.
I am subject to the same temporal rules as all mortal species.
I am aware now that every moment I do not have with her is a moment I will never get back. It is gone forever. The time we spend apart is a particular kind of brutality.
I want her. Keeping my hands off her is difficult. The way her father monitors her has made getting to her impossible.
This mere mortal form is impatient in ways my previous one was not. The urges are un-tempered by a sense of wise perspective. I am more animal now, and the animal wants to burst in, take her, and claim her for his own.
For the moment, I content myself by carrying more sacks of cement. Doing work is good for my mortal body, and probably good for my mind, though it does not prevent it from bringing up memory after memory of the most filthy acts that are possible to engage in with a human woman.
The ground is slippery and muddy after another good dose of rain. I did well when I ran the simulation for this planet. I solved an innumerable number of problems. These people will never know the suffering they would have encountered in a less, let’s say, designed universe.
I may be a creature of flesh and blood now, subjected to brutal mortality, but I have had a hand in the creation of all of this, and if I were to be called a god it would not be entirely inaccurate.
I wouldn’t call myself one, of course. That’s arrogant, but I do enjoy the satisfaction of seeing fertile crops and growing moss and knowing that it was I who tweaked the settings behind the curtain before it was brought down on me.
Her father expects me to build a house, not knowing that it was I who built his entire world. I wonder what he would say to me if he knew that I had saved his life in a dozen timelines and stopped a series of brutally unfortunate events. I wonder if he would kneel…
“Ah, fuck!”
All of that pride comes to an abrupt halt as I slip on the mud and slide unceremoniously down into the stream. Clambering out is messy and harder than I thought it would be, and trying to keep the cement bag out of the water is a whole mission in itself.
A cackle from the tree line accompanies my attempts to get out without getting covered in mud. They fail abysmally. The distraction of hearing feminine laughter does not help at all.
I turn to see who is laughing. It’s her. Mara.
I don’t know how she got here. I almost have the sense she simply appeared, though that cannot possibly be true.
She is sitting up in a tree where she has clearly been watching me for quite some time.
She looks comfortable up there, wearing a short brown skirt that allows her to move easily, and a tight green top that keeps her agile.
Her hair is bound up around her head in a braid.
She looks healthy and happy, and very well amused.
“What are you doing?” She laughs the question at me.
I am so pleased to see her, but my palms do itch with the way she is grinning at me.
“How did you get here?”
“I followed you,” she says. “Well, not followed. My father has your address in his files. He knows where everyone is. So I found where you were because I got curious. You said some very weird things on the day we met, and you did even weirder stuff.” She tugs at the hem of her skirt, which is short and gives me a look that makes me think she didn’t hate how I touched her as much as she pretended to.
I have replayed that moment over in my mind, mostly feeling as though it was a mistake. She doesn’t remember me, not properly. I very nearly groped her because I still think of her as being every bit my pet. But she does not know that, not yet anyway.
She’s still giggling, and she is adorable when she laughs. She covers her mouth with her hands, and screws her eyes and nose up and emits a series of high-pitches little snorts and gasps that only get more intense as she tries to stop them.
“Came to laugh at me, did you?”
“I wouldn’t have, if you hadn’t been acting so clownish,” she smirks disrespectfully.
She’s practically begging for a spanking, and who I am I to deny her?
I growl under my breath, close the distance between us, and grip her by the wrist. I enjoy the way her eyes widen right before I lift her out of the tree, prop my knee up on some lumber and toss her over it, throwing her little skirt up over her hips and landing a muddy handprint right on the seat of her generous rear.
“You come all the way out here alone to a single man’s homestead and you act the brat and think you won’t end up with your hide being tanned?
” I lecture her, spanking her just hard enough to make it feel stingy and good.
So much has changed about the world, but the way she responds to having her ass smacked has not. She starts to gasp and squeal and moan.
I forget all about propriety, and what is expected of me, and what will happen to me and my fingers if certain old men are to find out what I have done.