CHAPTER 8
Digging posts for fences and stringing fenceline involves a startling amount of physical labor. By the end of the first day, my muscles prove they are capable of doing something I never suspected: scream. They’re silent, of course.
But I’m not.
“Are you okay? You keep hissing through your teeth—” Becky starts.
My reply is cut off by the sound of loud screeching.
It’s the screen door’s metal hinges.
Then the door bangs shut.
Then the hinges screech again.
“QUIT TOUCHING THE DOOR!” I bellow at the jackass who’s playing with it.
Paco’s hooves shuffle, making the porch boards groan.
Yesterday, after I patched the hole of our dwelling made by the murderous gunman’s bullet the day of our arrival, I patiently taught Paco how to descend the steps by himself, and to thank me for my trouble he’s hardly left our porch. If I had the ability to move at a run, I’d chase him down the steps just to be sure he remembers how to use them.
“Are you okay?” Becky asks again, brows peaked, a wince on her face as she stares at me and takes the chair opposite mine at the dinner table, slowly sinking her slight frame onto the little padded cushion tied to the seat .
I have a padded cushion on my seat too, but I may as well be sitting on a brick of plascrete. My lower spine feels fused, my hips are protesting, and I believe I can feel my back muscles swelling.
“No ooo,” I reply, scowling as the word exits me in a full-body groan. “I may have discovered my physical limitations on land today.”
“So… what you’re saying is, you’re hurting in your superior muscles?” Becky asks me—and then she quickly grabs up her mug of steaming liquid and holds it high in front of her face.
“Yes,” I confirm. “Why are you doing that?”
She twitches, her eyes going wide. “Doing what?”
My gaze narrows. “Hiding your mouth with mass-produced ceramic. I can see your lips curving up behind it.”
She expels a rough noise, followed by a series of smaller bursts that originate in her throat but shake her shoulders, which she hunches.
I’ve seen something like this in vids.
“Are you… snickering?” I ask in disbelief.
“No!” she claims, and she slams her mug down and covers her face with her hands, hunkering down low along the table.
I stretch out my arm, baring my teeth when my deltoids, triceps, and biceps shake and tighten like they’re about to snap. With stiff fingers, I pick up a stray lock of her hair that’s escaped her tight bun, and flick it out of her plated mashed spuds and gravy.
She rears back at my touch, and her eyes take note of my hand’s placement—and then her gravy-laden strand of hair.
One corner of her mouth quirking up, she pinches her hair between her forefinger and thumb, strips it of gelled animal by-product, and pops her digits between her lips, sucking them clean.
For some reason, as I watch her do this, my lower abdomen’s frontal contents tighten and begins to heat.
I stiffen and frown. “Just when I think everything hurts, my body develops new pains. ”
Becky meets my eyes, her face softening with sympathy. “Would you like a shoulder rub? I do it…” Her eyelids turn alarmingly puffy. “I used to… take care of Joel,” she whispers.
I start to shake my head—but the movement is arrested, my neck muscles spasming, and I hiss again, just as she accused me of doing.
Becky’s chair makes a dull screeching noise across the scuffed wood floor as she stands, forcing it back, and she rounds the table, nearing me. Her hands flutter over my arm, then my shoulder, and finally settle on my neck. “Here,” she mutters. And she places her thumbs just under my skull, and presses hard.
I groan, feeling a measure of relief flood to the area.
“Pressure points,” she murmurs, fingers working down my neck, digging into knots of muscle.
Too soon, she drops her hands away.
“Noooo,” I protest, nearly pushed to weep like a human.
“Hang on,” she says. She tentatively gives the blade of my shoulder a squeeze. “I’m going to get a salve. Sit sideways in the chair so I can have access to all of your back.”
When she returns and her salve-coated hands meet my back muscles, I make a broken, beaten groan. It sounds pained, and I am in pain—but somehow her touch is giving me relief too. “Yesssss.”
Carefully Becky makes circles with her knuckles, her fingers, her hands. She kneads, presses, and digs into me until I’m panting and sweat breaks out on my brow.
“You’re really tight here,” she tells me, grimacing and offering sympathy that my brain reacts favorably to. I absorb it, enjoying how it makes me feel. How it warms me, inside and out, until my stomach, and something lower, tightens even more. I don’t know how to describe what this new feeling is—it’s painfully pleasant though.
Becky’s skillful, incredible hands move all over my back, then my shoulders. When she bends over my stretched-out arm, I catch a whiff of her scent—and my neck arches, my nostrils flaring and pulling in more of her smell. It is also… pleasant. She smells like our meal, and a strange, warm odor. Feminine musk, I suppose this is.
However, I have a concern. “It seems I’m experiencing tightness in a new area,” I share, and glance down to my lap. “And it’s growing concerningly rigidified.”
“Growing?” she asks—and she rips her hands away from her ministrations and retreats a step.
I glance at her, surprised. “What’s the matter?”
She watches me, eyes oddly wary. I watch the activity lighting up her skull, confused as to what this reaction is. “Nothing. A shower might help work out your muscle stiffness later. For now, food’s getting cold. We should eat.”
With a grunt, I draw my arm back to my side, and turn my attention to my food. “Yes. And thank you for the meal. Also for the massage. I’m mighty grateful.”
Carefully, slowly, she seats herself and from the side of her eyes, observes me almost cagily.
She’s still acting strange when we bed down together, but at my hisses and low snarling as I lower myself into the bed, for some reason she relaxes.
Before I bedded down, I struggled with my clothes, stripping my body in order to partake in a shower. Once cleaned, I dragged on Joel’s boxers, which was as much fussing with movements as I cared to stand. My efforts were rewarded: I’m relieved not to have to suffer the stench of my sweat and musk. I’m also relieved that the hot water somewhat eased my muscle soreness. Enough that I don’t audibly roar in pain.
However, my movements in this bed as I attempt to get comfortable on my aching back continue to telegraph my overtaxed state. And for some reason, my agony as I work through this pain-filled process sees Becky relaxing even further.
As I lie beside her, too mired in suffering to make sense of her mind’s activity, she burrows into her side of the bed, and drifts to sleep .
The next morning, I wake with my face in Becky’s pillow. Like our previous morning, she’s left the bed, and while I ponder how I ended up on her side of our arranged sleeping quadrants, my forehead is tightly furrowed and my whole body is tense.
I hurt everywhere—but concerningly I seem to be experiencing a hematoma or edema in my genital region. Gritting my teeth, I roll to my back, grip the blankets, and raise them until I can see my undergarment.
It’s tented.
With dread, I grit my teeth and stretch my arm out and hook my thumb in the waistband of my garment and draw it down and over my uncomfortable front to reveal the cause of my pain. My pissing organ is so stiff, it bobs with my heartbeat, and as I watch it, it fills with more blood until it’s standing straight up.
“What the hell?” I ask no one, flummoxed. Yonderin don’t experience erections; those base responses are saved for species who struggle with primitive breeding drives.
I wonder if the extreme physical labor I underwent the day previous damaged blood vessels somehow. Muscle tissues feel swollen everywhere—perhaps my reaction is due to injury.
In order to rise up and force my body into a sitting position without screaming, I have to bite down savagely on my lip. Everything on me feels like it’s burning and at the breaking point.
I manage to clamber to my feet and shuffle to the siphon room. Yesterday, following Becky’s direction, I dragged in a mostly-clean horse trough for the purpose of self-soaking. It had seemed like too much work to finish cleaning it yesterday evening so I forwent using it, but I see that Becky was kind enough to finish cleaning it and has even left it partially filled with water this morning. I use the bucket she’s placed inside it to transfer hot water into it, then I ease myself into the long but narrow water-holding source .
I’d be frustrated at the limitations of the trough—this feels absolutely nothing like floating in the ocean I know and love—but I’m too grateful, because the heat from the water is helping to loosen and ease the innumerable screeching flares of agony happening in my tormented muscle tissues.
Eventually the spontaneous sexual-seeming response in my pissing organ eases, which is a relief. But my breeding sac aches terribly, which makes my mood an irritable one.
I forego breakfast, not wanting to spoil Becky’s morning with my strangely aggressive, out-of-sorts mood. In the barn, I consume the entirety of the edible contents of my saddlebag, and my temper worsens when I find that I despise all of the packaged options.
None of which holds a candle to what Becky could have made for me.
I vow to myself that I will beg her to make me my meals for always.
Day two of building a fence is even more horrible.
Day three nearly kills me.
By day seven, I can’t get out of bed—and don’t. I’m grateful when Becky brings me water, and food. She tries to coax me to the siphon room, but I refuse. “I can hold my water and stool,” I tell her—and watch her eyes fly wide, then squinch as she makes a scrunched face.
“What?” I pant, teeth bared as my body protests even my breathing.
“Nothing,” she finally says, shaking her head at me. “Can you get on your stomach?”
“No.”
“Here. Let me help you roll.”
“I. Can’t,” I insist, sullen.
“Please? I want to try something.”
With her assistance—she pushes at my shoulder as I rise, helping me flip over on arms too tight to hardly extend—I make it into a prone position, my head turned toward her. “Now what? ”
Stomach causing her some trouble, she climbs on the bed beside me, and begins to rub my muscles.
Her ministrations are heavenly. At one point, I tell her she must be a land-bound angelic being, and it makes her laugh, but I’m quite serious.
Her heavy stomach compresses against my lower spine as she leans over me, and her stomach feels as if it almost… I’m not certain. I believe I feel almost a fluttering kick. A tadpole’s greeting, I ascertain. But I find I don't mind the weight or sensation and certainly not the pressure or warmth.
I hope the salve she retrieves eases her as well. Her hands have to ache from tending to me, but she tells me it’s no trouble as she laboriously clambers off the bed, one hand over her belly, and leaves me in a much more comfortable broken heap than when I started.
Thanks to her efforts, the next day I’m able to exit our bed.
And the day after that, fencing hurts me, but doesn’t incapacitate me. Paco steals tools from my pockets, which keeps me limber as I leave my work to chase him in a vain effort to get them back.
Two full weeks of the torture sees me able to withstand the physical strain, and my muscles have adapted, the damaged fibers repairing themselves so admirably that I’m even stronger.
My arms look permanently swollen.
My chest has gotten firmer, and I’m developing slight lumps along my abdominals. I’m examining them one night before bed, dressed only in underpants, when Becky asks in a high, choked voice, “What are you doing?”
I glance up at her. “I wonder if I’m having some sort of reaction. A work allergy maybe. Look at this,” I tell her, and poke my stomach in the places where my skin has bubbled up.
“You have a six-pack,” she shares, voice oddly breathy.
I frown at her. “A what?”
Her eyes sweep down then dart away from me, and she waves a hand at my midsection. “It’s called a six-pack, when your muscles do that.”
“Do what?”
“Get—hard.”
“Oh.” I watch her, discomfited that I can’t read her reaction. Of late, I’ve been congratulating myself on how well I believe I can now read her.
The activity in her skull is heating up in an area I’m unfamiliar with, and there’s a slight smell in the air—I don’t know what it is, but when I inhale it, my skin tightens. All of me tightens.
I sigh as I feel myself developing a six pack at my groin too. It happens nearly every morning and it's troublesome.
I’m strangely riled as I get in bed beside her. And it takes me a great length of time to fall asleep. Instead of thudding unconscious care of a bruising, hellish physical labor-induced coma as I have been each night, I find myself watching her in the dark, my gaze moving up and down her blanket-covered body.
And distressingly, my breeding sac aches all night.