Chapter Twelve Healing #2
First, she had to heal from her burns. Then, she had to heal from many rounds of vigorous lovemaking, which she insisted on completing, even though she claimed she was too sore.
Soreness is apparently no competition for arousal, especially not if I can soothe the soreness by giving her sweet little pussy lots of attention and making her come with my mouth.
Andrea seems to think that each time I make her come that way, she is obligated to pull me inside of her, and I have to explain that it isn’t so.
At some point. When she pouts up at me, rubbing my cock to her swollen pink lips, there’s no way I can resist following her directions and sliding slowly inside, losing myself in the magic of her squeezing muscles and soft cries.
I am healing. I didn’t even think I was injured. I think I thought I was damaged. Damaged inside, and that these things—the pains of the past, the brokenness of seeing horrible things—were permanent.
Gordon Rockland is cold, silent, and unfriendly.
It’s safer that way.
That’s what I thought.
It turns out that Gordon Rockland just needed the right medicine—a woman with music in her smile and a cat on her windowsill.
I could stay here forever, happy in Andrea’s little apartment.
“You have to go back to work today.” Andrea sighs.
I stir against her, arm draping over her little body. “I will come back home,” I promise.
She smiles at me, a soft, warm smile that is pure enchantment. “Home?”
“I mean, to your home. If you want.”
“I want. But I also want to go cabin-camping. And my boyfriend totally owns a cabin.”
“This is true.”
“You know... I think I like my stay-cation better than any cruise. I didn’t think I would, but there’s something really nice about finding what you want in a person, not in a destination or an event.” Andrea yawns, stretches, and kisses my cheek.
I nod, eyes wondering. My Andrea can just say things like that, deep, powerful things. Simple, sweet things that touch my heart.
No one has ever spoken to me, or with me, in this way.
I didn’t think I would ever like hearing someone speak to me, especially since, while growing up, all talking was short, sharp, and usually vicious in nature.
“Finding what you want in a person is even better than finding what you want in a place,” I say with the seriousness borne of experience.
Andrea, my perceptive sweet, picks up on it at once. After my youth, I enjoyed the silence.
Funny, but I might be starting to like conversations even more. At least with Andrea.
“Is Pine Ridge your special place, then?”
“Yes.” Inside, something twists. I want words to come out easily for Andrea, all the time, not just sometimes. I especially want them to be easy now, when we’re lying naked together in bed, a safe place for both of us.
An incredibly delightful place, where we don’t have secrets. My hand strokes over her cheeks and down her shoulder, daring to stroke her breast. And she lets me, smiling and snuggling closer.
“So, how did you find this place? Did you run right from home to here?”
“No. Uh.” I cough and try to tell the story without all the hard parts.
“I told you my father made the decision that we would live like humans—in a way. We had the trailer, and woods to hunt in, and highways to walk on to head to the factories and industrial farms that didn’t ask questions and would let my father work nights.
My parents couldn’t go out in the sunlight, but my brothers and I could.
We explored far and wide in the daytime.
My father told us things about the human world when he was awake, mainly about how to kill and steal and not get caught, and about which things weren’t acceptable—killing a human and getting caught outside during the sunlight hours were the deadly sins.
Talking to a human or letting one see you was risky.
‘You never know when a human can see the truth,’ that was his mantra.
He wore a bandana over his mouth and nose, a hat, and safety goggles for most of his work.
He felt safe that way. He said some monsters were foolish enough to live together with humans, risking temptation and exposure.
He mentioned Pine Ridge. It was the place to mock, the place monsters would go to meet a sticky end. ”
“So he must have hated when you came here?” Andrea says softly, rubbing my neck with soothing fingers.
“He never knew. He and my mother had a fight, and she hurt him badly enough that he ran out of the trailer. Turned to stone.”
Andrea gasps and sits up, horrified. “Oh, Gordon. No.”
“I know I should be sad, but I’m not. That spot in my mind is numb.
My mother immediately began changing the rules.
The killing humans changed to only killing humans no one would miss, humans lost in the woods near our trailer, humans who we had followed for days and were sure wouldn’t be found.
I pointed out that we could just help them to safety.
I almost ended up like my father, except when she hurled me out of the trailer, I didn’t turn to stone in the sun.
I got up, brushed myself off, and left. For a year or two, I lived in the woods and made clear, unmistakable trails to the highway.
I carved arrows into trees. My older brothers tried to undo some of the trails at my mother’s orders, but she couldn’t check on their work by day, and her vision wasn’t the best at night.
Anyway, eventually, I thrashed my older brothers enough and remade the trails they wrecked often enough that they were tired of it all and just told my mother it was done.
Growing up not eating humans,” I glance at Andrea’s face, see how she looks disgusted by this part, and hurry on, “my brothers and I didn’t want the hassle of hunting them anyway.
I personally knew it was wrong, and I dreamed of finding Pine Ridge.
One day, I met an older couple hiking in the woods, and I asked if they could give me directions to it.
They had to use their phones to find it, but they did.
And that’s how I got here. I walked. I lived alone in the woods for a while, off and on.
Spent a lot of time in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania, then the Catskills in New York, skirting towns and people.
But eventually, I decided I would risk it all.
Came into Pine Ridge and lived in the woods for a few weeks before I met Calder, the kraken who lives in the river.
Well, he has a townhouse now, with his wife and kids, but at the time he was single and living in the river.
He helped me find some other folks to talk to, and that’s it. That’s how I got here.”
“That’s how you got here. A whole documentary in a paragraph, Gordon. Holy cow. Like... you survived such evil. Such heartbreak. What about your brothers and mother? Do you hear from them?”
“No. I don’t have much hope for my older brothers.
They were very much my mother’s pride and joy, her pets.
She liked turning them against my father.
My little brother, Hugo? I have high hopes for him.
He was a scrawny thing, as trolls go. My mother didn’t like him.
She would have starved him or thrown him in the river as an infant if my father and I hadn’t protected him.
He was... Hm. He was maybe thirteen when I left.
I hope he survived. If he did, he’ll have found a way to escape my mother.
He was smart, and he lived by his wits instead of his muscles, which irritated her. Not very troll-like.”
“You just keep all of this bottled up inside, Gordon?”
“Nothing is bottled. There’s nothing there, Andrea,” I confess.
“My heart became hard and stony early. Everything that was supposed to build it or fill it—love, family, good memories... They didn’t exist. My life began when I left the woods and my old life behind.
Now I have a community. I have the option to be with the people I like.
I even have someone to love. Trolls are fiercely protective.
Territorial. It’s always been directed at land, kills, spoils.
” I pull Andrea to me, and this time I dare to roll on top of her and keep myself elevated over her, on my elbows.
She immediately squirms to capture my cock with her hand, sliding her palm up and down the length.
“I will be incredibly possessive and protective of you. And the cat, too,” I add as an afterthought, but it’s true.
“I’m sorry for all you went through, but I’m so happy I can be part of your good memories. Happy future. And I think you’ve marked your territory a lot in the last three days.”
I chuckle and bend my head so that it rests on hers. Her legs drape over my calves, and her warm, wet center rubs my tip as Andrea pushes us together. “I hope you don’t mind. I intend to do it a lot in the future, too.”
“No kidding,” Andrea laughs as I slip inside of her, feeling her tight walls pop and then grip around my cock, making us struggle together for a second before we fit smoothly, and the simplest, most natural thing happens, after years of not fitting in with a family of trolls, and not knowing how to fit in with humans and all sorts of bright, jovial monsters, either.
I fit with Andrea, unlikely as it is. I know how to move with her to make my love cry my name in pure ecstasy, to make her beg for more.
I don’t need to say anything but simple, honest statements when I look at her, when I feel her.
My much larger frame lets her set the pace, the dominant right-hand melody in a piano piece, and I’m the steady, stable chords that support all of her beauty and creativity.
It’s peace. It’s heaven. It’s love.
I don’t want to leave unless I know I always get to come home to her.
“Will I always get to love you? Make love to you? Come home to you?” I ask, my hips rocking and gliding, a gentle motion that requires no thought, no manners, no cunning, just love and trust. Instinct.