Take All of It September 2019

by Scarlett Skyes

  In reality it was a densely wooded area of gentle rolling hills that gradually peaked at the official summit. The real shadow it cast was its reputation.

  Some towns have their haunted houses, some have their abandoned psychiatric wards, we had Bearback Mountain. Nobody knew when the legends had officially started but even my parents knew about it from their school days, so they certainly went back a long way.

  Apparently, so the story went, there was a creature that lived in those woods, a beast so big and powerful that even when people claimed to have shot it at point-blank range they didn’t even slow it down. With long claws and razor sharp teeth set into powerful jaws, it was clear that this was some apex predator, the king of this particular forest. If it existed.

  How anybody would survive pissing off an animal like that, I had no idea, but there were enough anecdotes that it seemed the creature wasn’t overly interested in killing people. Indeed, the reports always talked about its eerily intelligent eyes and almost humanlike mannerisms.

  Mr. Bertram, our English teacher, had spent the afternoon exploring the old newspaper articles and discussing the legend with the class. What he didn’t talk about, what the school probably would have fired him over if he did, was the part of the legend where the beast abducted any virgin girls it found and took them deep into the forest where it deflowered them and deflowered them hard.

  Perhaps the school would have been in the right on that policy. I was sure I wouldn’t have been the only girl in the class to get a little hot under the collar if Mr. Bertram had started talking about such a risqué topic. He was kind of young for a teacher, but had always been professionally oblivious to all the puppy-dog eyes and longing sighs we’d lavished on him over the years.

  Personally, I’d never put much stock in the legend. People have always liked to tell stories, and that’s probably all it was. However, that didn’t mean I wasn’t apprehensive about the plans being discussed by my friends that day after school. A camping trip on Bearback Mountain.

  “C’mon, Kristie, you heard Mr. Bertram. It’s like a rite of passage around here. After this summer we’ll all be going our separate ways, it’ll be our last chance to do something really awesome,” said Brad, my ‘boyfriend’ of the past few years and star of our school’s football team.

  “Yeah, Kristie, don’t be a little pussy,” said John, linebacker for the same team, putting on his super-macho front.

  “It’s just a dumb idea, it’s not ‘awesome’ in any way. Can’t we think of something better?” I asked, stalling to try and give myself time to think of that something.

  “I think it sounds like fun. I mean, what do you have to worry about?” asked Mary with a butter-wouldn’t-melt kind of smile.

  Mary was the odd one out in our crowd, a real good girl. She never drank, she never did drugs, she was never the last one standing at the parties, she wasn’t a cheerleader like me, and she was even top of the class in some subjects. She was cool as fuck though, a blast to be around and one of the best people I knew.

  The emphasis she put on ‘you’ didn’t go unnoticed. She was the virgin of the group, having made it clear that she was waiting for marriage. Surely if anybody should have any worries about the camping trip it was her.

  Her sentiment, Brad’s, and John’s were echoed by the others and I was put on the spot. Peer pressure is a crazy thing, and I couldn’t tell them why I was so apprehensive.

  I was a cheerleader who had been dating the boy next door, the school jock, for a few years, we were fucking like rabbits, right? What did I have to fear from a virgin-hunting local legend?

  Well, the problem was that Brad was as gay as the day is long. We’d been friends since elementary school and I’d agreed to get into a fake relationship with him to save him from the harsh judgement of our old fashioned and downright backwards town. He was much more interested in giving John a reach-around than having sex with me.

  Everybody thought we were doing what young people in our situation had always done… but I was a virgin just like Mary. I glanced unhappily from face to face and finally caved. The stories couldn’t be true anyway.

  “OK, fine. I’ll come along.”

  *****

  I’d almost forgotten about the legend by the time I found myself sitting around the campfire by myself trying to rekindle the embers for a bit of light and warmth. I’d almost been asleep in my tent with Brad when John came a-knockin’.

  Brad had sheepishly asked if him and his linebacker-special-friend could have a bit of alone time. He would ‘owe me big time’ and all that.

  I agreed, despite the inconvenience. I couldn’t help but feel some kind of sympathy for their situation, it couldn’t be easy. However, as time wore on and I grew bored of reading a book on my phone, that was all little comfort for me.

  The muffled sound of a, shall we say, happy young man came from one of the tents and I shook my head. They were going to have to be a bit more discreet if they didn’t want to get caught. It would be awkward for me, but the fallout for them would be so much worse.

  Then I heard something that I thought I must have imagined, the pleasured squeal of some girl in Mary’s tent. I rationalised it by thinking she must have relocated somewhere else to make way for another couple in a similar way to myself.

  I looked up at the huge full moon and sighed. How long were those guys going to take, anyway? That’s when I felt the first stirrings of nature calling.

  “Dammit.”

  That was just what I needed, to be wandering alone in the woods with moonlight filtering through the branches, but what choice did I have? I wasn’t going to pee in our little clearing, what if somebody came out of one of the tents?

  I stood and walked to the edge of the clearing where one of my friends had impaled a roll of toilet paper on a short and thin branch at about head height. Reaching up, I lifted it off the natural holder and my eyes were drawn to something a few feet higher on the trunk of the tree.

  Standing out clear against the dark brown of the tree bark were four deep diagonal slashes revealing the lighter wood underneath. The marks must have been ten feet off the ground, and without any lower branches of body-weight-bearing size it would have been difficult for one of my friends to do it as a joke.

  That had to be what it was, a joke. I hadn’t seen the marks earlier in the day, hadn’t heard the marks being made in that brief period of quiet between when everybody had gone to their tents and I’d been ousted from mine. It must have happened when I’d gone to bed early and a few people were still up and making noise.

  “Nice touch,” I murmured to myself.

  Far enough into the forest so that nobody would see me from their tents but close enough so I could still see the clearing, I did what I needed to do and had just done up the button on my jeans when I heard a sound infinitely more chilling than anything else I‘d heard in my life.

  A low roar coming from somewhere on the other side of the clearing. My heart practically stopped and I froze in place, not daring to make a sound myself. This was beyond what a sleepy high school jock could pull off as a prank, there was really something there in this forest that officially had nothing more dangerous than a deer living in it. And to get to the tents and our cars, I had to move directly towards it.

  On the outside I was quieter than silence itself, on the inside I was screaming for my legs to run, run, RUN, and take me to safety. It seemed like an eternity before any message got through to them.

  I was a cheerleader with a long history of ballet and dance forced down my throat by my parents. Some would have said I was athletic and graceful, but I felt about as nimble as a shambling zombie as I tried to get myself back to the clearing. No wonder the girls in those horror movies were always falling over.

  When I was finally at the edge of the clearing again I heard another noise that froze me on the spot once more. Snapping twigs, rustling branches, a low growl. There was something in the bushes on the other side of the clearing, I knew it w
ith every fibre of my being.

  Even with such foreknowledge there was nothing that could have prepared me for what suddenly burst out of the forest and raced across the clearing towards me. My jaw dropped open, the roll of toilet paper fell to the ground, and my legs felt like they were considering giving up their day job of holding me up.

  The simple task of running and falling over wasn’t an option for legs like that, I wouldn’t have made a good clichéd scream-queen. I was nothing more than a deer in the headlights as certain death bore down on me, running straight through the remains of the fire and scattering embers.

  It was huge, hairy and decidedly bear-like… but not a bear, the proportions were all wrong, the face was wrong. The front legs seemed more like arms and it ran kind of like a gorilla, sometimes on it’s hind legs, sometimes propelling itself forward with it’s arms.

  I sucked in a big breath, finally feeling that scream rising to the surface, but the wind was knocked out of me as the beast gathered me in it’s arms and slung me over it’s shoulder and my world became a blur of moonlit branches whipping by and the snapping and cracking of underbrush as it carried me away.

  For a brief moment I vaguely heard the screams of my friends back at our campsite, but we were soon too far away for that. My breath returned and I began beating on it’s back with my fists, yelling to be let go, trying to release it’s grip.

  It was no use. I might as well have pushed against a cliff face in an effort to stop the world from turning. I was being carried away by a force of nature, something so powerful that defying it would be as difficult as defying the laws of physics.

  My heart was pounding against my chest at a frantic pace as panic set in, it felt like I couldn’t get enough air in, especially being bent over that powerful shoulder as I was. My mind whirled at a similar rate, my life flashing before my eyes, but then one idea stuck.

  If this was the creature from the local legend (and what the fuck else could it be?) then I wasn’t just going to be eaten or something… I was going to get my virginity fucked away. At that moment I felt a clawed hand come up and help shift my position on it’s shoulder as it continued to run.

  That hand lingered for longer than it needed to on my ass, and I screamed as I felt consciousness slipping away from me. The last thing I heard was exactly what you would imagine a grizzly bear would sound like. If a grizzly bear could chuckle.

  *****

  Coherent thoughts came back slowly, like a camera gradually gaining focus. At first all I could remember was a blur of branches and fur in the moonlight, and it just didn’t fit with the silence I could hear around me now or the soft surface I was lying on.

  A woodsy pine kind of scent was put in context when I opened my eyes and saw that I was on a bed in a log cabin, with a fire behind me at the opposite side of the room casting my flickering shadow towards the wall in front of me. Through the window I could see that it was still the middle of the night, but I had no idea how long I had been out for.

  My heart started pounding again as I cautiously sat up and looked around the room, trying to make sense of the situation. I didn’t have to look far before I found I was being watched, and I was greeted by a deep voice I recognised.

  “I’m so glad you waited for me, Kristie,” said Mr. Bertram.

  “Mr. Bertram? Where am I? How did I get here?”

  My English teacher approached and I took in the fact that he was wearing an unbuttoned shirt, a pair of boxer briefs, and nothing else, revealing that chiselled physique that had captivated the female half of our class the time the gym teacher called in sick and Mr. Bertram filled in for the day.

  I may have had daydreams about very similar scenes to this, but they had been the idle thoughts driven by teenage hormones. Sitting on a bed as the most perfect male specimen I had ever seen approached, I suddenly felt self-conscious. It was a little fantasy, it couldn’t really happen, he was my teacher, what would a man like him see in me?

  “You’re in my cabin, I carried you here,” he answered.

  Everything came rushing back, my midnight bathroom break, the thing that carried me off into the night, everything. I scooted backwards on the bed as Mr. Bertram sat on the edge, until my back was against the wall.

  The solid feel of it gave me some tiny feeling of safety as my eyes darted around, looking for some sign of that thing, as if something that big could hide anywhere in the single room of the cabin. My gaze kept returning to the window, the weak spot in this little fortress.

  “Did you kill it?”

  “No.”

  “How did you get me away from it?”

  “I didn’t. I said I carried you here, Kristie.”

  Mr. Bertram flashed a wicked one-sided smile and a deep rumbling came from his chest. For a moment his body seemed to swell, his face began changing… and then with a flicker of firelight it was just my mild-mannered English teacher again, only a lot more cocky and hungry-looking than I’d ever seen him before.

  “You… you’re the Bearback Mountain Creature?”

  “Yep. Been around these parts a few hundred years, I’m even the one that named the area. I thought it was… fitting… for a werebear that does the kinds of things I do.”

  “Please, Mr. Bertram, please let me go! I promise I won’t tell anybody!”

  “Oh Kristie. You know that’s not how the stories go. And you’ll talk eventually, just enough to keep the legend alive. Just enough to make sure you tight little virgins keep on camping in my woods. But first,” he said, crawling slowly across the bed towards me, “I’m going to fuck your brains out. You’ll struggle at first, they all do, but soon you’ll be getting wet, then your body won’t let you fight it anymore and you’ll be a slave to my cock. You’ll moan like a whore. They all do.”

  My body, apparently having decided that freezing on the spot hadn’t worked out so well last time, surged with adrenaline and I sprung from the bed with a turn of speed that surprised even myself. I was still mid-air and on my way to the door when the werebear’s hand shot out and caught me by the midriff, slamming me to the bed on my back and holding me down.

  Mr. Bertram quickly straddled me as I struggled against him, kicking against the bed to try and move myself away, pushing against him to try to move him away. My efforts were utterly useless. As I pushed, one of my hands slipped inside his open shirt and landed directly on his well-defined abs.

  His skin was almost hot to the touch and it was with no small measure of shame that my hand moved against his body more than it really needed to in my resistance. None of the guys in my classes had a body like this, it was the kind of thing a girl’s dreams were made of.

  “There’s that look in your eye, Kristie. There’s that slut trying to get out. Tell me. Tell me you want me to fuck you till you scream.”

  “No!” I yelled, my determination renewed as I pushed and thrashed against him even harder.

  My English teacher only chuckled and caught both of my flailing arms, gathering both of my wrists in the iron-grip of one of his strong hands. I could no more pry myself loose from that clutch than I could have ripped a pair of handcuffs off as he raised my arms above my head and pinned them on the mattress, leaning in close and breathing in deeply through his nose.

  “Mmmmm. You smell so good, Kristie. It’s been driving me crazy waiting for you to be ready, knowing how wet you get whenever you’re in my class, worrying about some dumbass popping your cherry before I could break you in.”

  “I don’t get wet in your class,” I lied, turning my head to the side so he couldn’t see the truth in my eyes.

  “I’ve got one of the strongest senses of smell in the animal kingdom, Kristie. I know you’re pretty much in heat whenever you see me. You’ve probably thought about my big cock pumping in and out of your little pussy more than I have.”

  Mr. Bertram’s lips found my neck and kissed me hard, his prickly stubble tingling all around the centre of suction as I squirmed helplessly. He pulled back a fraction of a
n inch and I heard the release of his kiss, knowing that he was leaving a mark, a mark of his territory.

  A jolt of unexpected pleasure between my legs made me gasp in surprise as I tried to fathom the power of this ‘werebear’. I was strong and athletic, in the prime of my youth, but he was physical perfection.

  The man-beast holding me down planted a trail of kisses slowly upwards until I felt my ear-lobe squeezed between his lips for a moment before he whispered in my ear. Another tingle of pleasure made me quiver.

  “You’re all mine for as long as I want you, Kristie. Mine.”

  With his free hand he reached under the long t-shirt I had been using as a nightie and I felt his fingertips sliding up across my taut navel towards my breasts, which no man had ever seen, let alone touched. Instinctively I began squirming again, the fact that a man was going to be forcefully groping my tits against my will reminding me that I was supposed to be trying to escape. It was against my will… wasn’t it? I was getting more confused by the moment.

  Either way I was pinned down and going nowhere. When his hand cupped my full breast I sucked in a breath and paused mid-squirm with my back arched, pushing my chest against his grasp.

  For the first time since he had straddled me, I looked him in the eye and saw a raw lust smouldering there, lust for me. I couldn’t help but respond to that desire.

  I’d always known he was an older man, maybe in his late twenties or early thirties, and that it was just a silly schoolgirl crush that brought on my fantasies about him. Apparently he was much older than that though, and he really did want me.

  He didn’t just want to make sweet, tender, candle-lit, love to me, he wanted to take my virginity, fuck me until I screamed and leave me a quivering wreck.

  A little squeak of pleasure escaped my lips before I clamped down on it as Mr. Bertram kneaded my firm teen flesh with his hand, pinching and rolling my swiftly hardening nipple until it was almost unbearably sensitive.

  I looked up at him, breathing heavily and wordlessly begging for him to let me go. I was just as wet as I had denied being in his class, the battle for my body had been won. My mind, however, was still grasping at straws for any chance that I might leave this cabin with my virginity intact. My mind still had hope that that my plan to give that gift to my first real boyfriend in college was still intact too.