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Touched her.
Tasted her.
There will be another chance, I said inside, if only to soothe myself and keep from gutting Oxriel on the spot as he offered me a fresh loincloth. But as Fiona walked ahead of us through the valley to rejoin her friends, I worried that it was not true.
Once she was out of earshot, Oxriel’s awkwardness turned to eagerness.
“How did you manage that?” he demanded in that inevitably intrusive way of his.
“I thought you saw nothing,” I growled low in my throat, a warning if there ever was one. One which he promptly ignored.
“I saw enough to know that she was sitting in your lap and stroking your bare, hard cock!”
I hurled my torn loincloth at him, wishing rather grimly that it had been a spear. The fabric caught on one of his ears, and he nearly leaped out of his own hide, swiping at it the way a nervous child might swat at a drizelfly until it fell to the ground.
“I brought you a new loincloth, I did not say I’d take your foul old one!” he said. For good measure, he flicked the ruined garment even further away from him with the tip of his tail.
“And I did not say I was prepared to discuss Fiona with you,” I snapped, tying the new loincloth in place.
I expected him to accept this as I turned and started striding swiftly away.
Why I had such reasonable expectations, I did not know. Because he immediately caught up to me and said, “Why not? We Sea Sand men must help each other, you know. You are very, very lucky – undeservedly so, I might add! – to have gotten a new woman to touch your cock.”
“I did not get her to do it. She did it on her own,” I hissed.
Oxriel faltered, then caught back up once more.
“But how did you entice her? Did you merely display it for her? Did you invite her to do it? Did you falsely convince her that stroking your cock was part of the healing process?”
His voice turned darkly suspicious at that last question, as if he thought I’d done something to manipulate her and that she now needed his protection.
“I am not Gahn Thaleo,” I spat. “I do not need to scheme and go the long way ’round to get to the things I want.”
“Oh,” Oxriel said, sounding relieved. “So you just told her what you wanted outright, then?” He made a clearing sound in his throat, then said, as if in rehearsal or perhaps imitation, “Hello, new woman. I would like you to touch my hard cock.” After a slightly thoughtful pause, he quickly added, “Please.” He tossed me an inquisitive look. “Did you say, ‘please?’”
I could not remember saying much of anything when she’d touched me, because her fingers on my genitals had entirely obliterated my ability to speak. But I wasn’t about to tell Oxriel that.
“I am not discussing this with you,” I said.
By now we’d re-emerged into the main part of the valley where the vaklok was held. Fiona was already seated. She clutched the pay-pur with my face and name on it close to her heart, and I hoped that it might mean something. I could not glean any such meaning from her face. It was well shadowed by her hood and her eye-shells hid her gaze.
It was probably good that I could not see her face. Because, completely distracted and my hide hot with the memory of her, I floundered in the rest of the vaklok. The remaining events were ones I should have done well with – tests of balance, of endurance, and hunting skills – but my head was too full of her to focus on anything else. And every time I made a stupid mistake, knowing that she was watching, my frustration mounted and that only made me perform even worse the next round.
It got so bad that Oxriel actually beat me and won one of the remaining rounds. I could not help but notice his hopeful expression, no doubt wondering if he’d get to choose an unmated woman to go tend to him like I had. But apparently that was only tradition for the injuries sustained after the combat round, and idiotic Oxriel did not get a chance to ask Tilly or Nasrin to “touch his hard cock, please,” which was probably for the best.
As the sun began to set, sending shadows spilling across the stone like the ink on Fiona’s skin, the vaklok came to a close. More food was brought out, and once again I had to sit among the other men and watch Fiona feed them. Unlike before, where I was able to keep her by my side for a significant amount of time, she avoided me, bringing her tray to the other men first and clearly meaning to leave me for last.
I was able to stand it only for the first few Deep Sky men she brought food to. But when she reached Oxriel and held out her tray to him, I got to my feet and stormed over, forcing my body between them.
“Dalk?” Fiona asked, looking startled. Now that it was getting darker, she’d removed her eye shells. The black sight stars in their rings of brown were very large and dark and deep. It made a man feel like he could fall right into them.
“If this,” I said, gesturing towards Tilly and Nasrin moving through the crowd of seated males with their trays, “is meant to signify something about one’s future mate, then I refuse to watch you feed even one more man.”
One more man who isn’t me, that is.
“But I’ve already said I don’t look at it that way,” Fiona said. “Everybody worked hard today and I know they’re hungry. And I’ll add that we women also worked really hard to cook all this stuff. I don’t want to see any of it wasted.”
“It won’t be wasted,” I told her. “I will eat it.”
