by Joanna Bell
"A child of the North knows how to light a fire by the time she is six winters old," I said. "Who lights the fires where you come from if not the women? Do they not need the heat to cook?"
Heather tucked a lock of her thick, shiny hair behind one of her ears – and I found myself suddenly more taken by that little seashell of an ear than by the fire. It seemed as if it would be nothing to lean closer and press my lips against her flesh, to taste the salt of the sea air on her skin.
"We cook things in ovens," she replied.
I did not know what an oven was – probably some kind of cooking or heating device, I supposed. But surely it still needed wood – and fire – to work? Before I could question her further she reached up and touched her cheek gently, where the skin has begun to darken into a deep purple bruise.
"I'm sorry," I began, "I –"
"I might have to go to the doctor for this," she cut me off and gave me a rather pointed look. "Or I might have, if you'd hit me any harder. I might have needed stitches. I might have needed to go to the hospital! Do you know if there is a hospital nearby?"
I narrowed my eyes, not quite understanding her tone. "Do you think I do not feel guilty already?" I asked, choosing to assume that was the emotion she was trying to draw from my heart. "I see what I've done to you – and I've had enough injuries to know it must throb with pain. I'm truly sorry, Heather. If I had known it was you trying to help me and not –"
"Oh I know you're sorry," she said, waving her hand through the air in the manner of a Jarl's wife dismissing a thrall. "I just want you to tell me where the closest hospital is."
And just as she did not know how to light a fire, or skin a rabbit, or sharpen a stick into a spear, I did not know what this 'hospital' she spoke of was.
"A healer?" I asked, taking a guess at her meaning. "If there is an Angle village nearby they will probably have a healer. But I do not think it's a good –"
"Not a healer. A hospital."
Was she mocking me? Something in the way she looked at me, almost goading me to answer, made me think she was.
"I do not understand why you try to make a fool of me, girl!" I told her, a little more heatedly than I intended. "I'm sorry for hurting you – indeed, I am truly sorry. But I do not understand why you must poke at me when the rabbits I have killed for us are about to fill your belly and –"
"Magnus."
I looked up at her, and saw at once that I had it wrong – she was not goading me. Thankfully, she laughed.
"Aye, girl, it's hard to read the tones in your voice!" I smiled back at her. But she was not, in fact, finished with me.
"You don't know what a hospital is, do you?"
"No," I told her, because she seemed insistent on extracting the admission from me. "No, I don't know what a hos–, a hosh– "
"Hos-pi-tal," she said quietly, taking care now not to make it seem as if she was laughing at me. "You don't have to be embarrassed. I'm not trying to make fun of –"
"I'm not embarrassed."
Heather's grin got wider then, and it was impossible not chuckle alongside her.
"Perhaps I was a little embarrassed," I admitted.
"Well don't be," she said. "I don't know how to do half the things you do – who cares if you don't know what one word means."
The rabbits, balanced above the embers and turned every little while, were ready. To my great confusion, Heather at first refused to take one, wrinkling her nose once again in disgust. I could not understand it.
"Are you not hungry?" I asked, biting off a chunk of delicious cooked meat.
But she was hungry. Hungry enough that it wasn't long before she was asking to be given a small piece. And then, after chewing it slowly for what seemed like an unnecessarily long time before swallowing, she requested another.
Still she refused to take one of the whole rabbits into her hands, so I was obliged to do it for her, tearing off pieces of the meat and passing it to her as if she were an infant or a very old person. And even then, less than a half day since I had come to know her, I already found it difficult to find her quirks – which in another may have caused irritation – anything other than sweetly charming.
When the rabbits were eaten – in truth, I could have done with more to eat but I didn't want the little foreigner to go without – we sat back, relaxing in the way it is only possible to do with a full belly. I insisted on letting the fire burn low, almost to embers alone, because I was still worried about being found. Heather, too, was still worried. I could see it in her furrowed brow.
"Tomorrow we will find our way," I told her, wanting to provide some reassurance even as I understood it was impossible. "Tomorrow I will –"
"Are you going to find your family?" She asked. "Are you going to talk to them about what happened?"
She did not understand. It must have been different where she came from. "I'm not going to find my family," I replied softly, because it was a truth I myself was still having difficulty with. "I am not going to see them ever again. Not my father, not my brother – and not my mother. Not even Apvik, my home. I will have to find my way back to the North alone, and seek a different place to make my life. It's not as bad as it could be – if I were weak or old, no one would have me. As it is I am still young and strong, so I should be able to find a –"
"Wait." She said, shaking her head slightly as if I had spoken an unbelievable thing. "Wait. Never? You can never see them again? You can never go home again? Never ever?"
So beautiful was Heather in the firelight, so compelling, that even as she asked me about the things that sent cracks through my heart, I could not help but be taken with the smallest things about her.
"Never ever," I repeated, smiling in spite of myself – and my predicament.
"I mean, I'm just trying to figure out if you mean 'never' as in never-never or –"
"Aye I know what you mean, girl. It is your way of saying it that makes me smile."
Heather sat back, also smiling now. Gods, she was fair. So fair that even as I contemplated the ruination of my life, it seemed all I could think of was her.
"So...?" She prompted, when I forgot we had been in the midst of a conversation.
"Yes," I told her. "I mean never. It is clear you are from a different place, and I assume your customs are different, too. Where I come from – the North – it is forbidden for a second son to take up a weapon against a first son. It is especially forbidden if their father is a Jarl. You saw them chasing me today – if we ever meet again, we will not part without one side or the other losing their life."
"And you said you can, um – you can never go home again, either? Why?"
"Because that's where my father – the Jarl – will be. I will be killed if I go home again."
"Do you have a mother?"
I nodded. "Yes, that is where my mother awaits our return. Her heart will be broken to hear of what's happened. But she will not go against my father, girl. She loves me, but she will not go against him. It – it isn't how it's done, in the North."
As we spoke, I pictured the things I spoke of. I pictured the look on my mother's face, the exact way the tears would spill from her eyes – eyes exactly the same dappled color as my own – when she heard of the fight between Asger and myself. I pictured Apvik, the little village on the coast where I knew every hillock, every path, every stone of the shoreline. I would never see the place again. I would never see my mother again.
I did not weep. It was not in me to weep then, as a young man. But the truth ran through my heart like a knife, causing me to bend forward and put my head in my hands. And when I did, Heather reached for me and closed her soft hand around one of my wrists, wanting to give me comfort.
And comfort she did give me. Comfort and, when I lifted my head to look at her, desire. It happened in an instant – or so it felt. All it took was the meeting of our eyes and I think we both knew it then. Did she see the same thing? Did she see the future in that moment beside the campfire? Perhaps.<
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I held her with my gaze, reaching down to touch the soft flesh of her arm and running my fingers up to her slender wrists where she touched me. How was it that just the feeling of her arm – her arm! – did such things to me? At once there was the familiar feeling of heaviness against my thigh, desire unfurling through me like a vine as it reaches up for the sunlight.
Heather felt it, too. She did not look away when I reached for her and did not flinch or recoil when I pulled her onto my lap. She hesitated slightly before our first kiss, when her lips trembled so close to mine I could feel her soft breath on my neck.
"What is it?" I asked, aching to taste her. "Do you hear something, girl? Is –"
"No," she whispered. "No. I just – I thought I –"
"Is it too much?" I asked, knowing enough about girls to know that the way their desires worked was not always the same as those of a man. "Is it too hasty?"
It was not too hasty for me. But I was aware that there is no such thing as 'too hasty' for a man of ten and ten and three. She stirred my blood. I felt it from the start. Had she pulled me behind the stump of that tree earlier in the day and slid her hand up under my leathers without so much as telling me her name, it would not have been too soon.
"It's not too much," she said, and her voice was slow and quiet the way the sky is slow and quiet before a summer storm blows in from the sea. "I thought it would be too much – but it isn't."
Her lips opened for me, then, and I felt as if I was drinking from a deep well of lust. She kindled in me a fire, bright and hot and all-consuming, and when I moved to pull her dressings off over her head, she helped me.
"Gods," I breathed, when she sat naked-from-the-belly-up on my lap and I saw that her body matched her face for its perfection. I reached up with one hand, almost overcome with reverence to touch such unmarked flesh as Heather's, and drew my fingers under the bottom curve of one of her breasts. And as the nipple tightened in front of my eyes, without being directly touched, I stiffened under my leathers.
Chapter Nine
Heather
I thought I had known desire before that night on the bare, warm earth in the forest with Magnus. I thought I had known the need of a woman for a man. I'd wanted it before, with boys. I'd thrilled to the feeling of being undressed, or kissed hard, or fucked. But whatever it was the man from the North drew out of me, it came from a deeper place than any those who came before him had reached. When he ran his fingers along the underside of my breast – slowly and while looking me right in the eyes – I gasped with what it awoke in my body. Warmth flooded my belly and, when I moved my hips slightly so I could better feel him against me, I felt that my panties were slick.
I looked down, almost in awe, as his fingers slid up, up to my nipple and then over it, his thumb nudging it back and forth until I reached out for his shoulders, pulling him to me, desperate for more.
And the whole time, Josh Muller was further from my mind than he had ever been. I felt none of the old fear. With each touch, Magnus made me hunger for more.
I smiled when he ducked his head and drew my nipple – the one he had teased and played into a state of such oversensitivity it bordered on painful when he withdrew his touch – into his mouth. I didn't smile because anything was funny. I smiled because I couldn't believe what he was doing, and because I loved it so much.
My fingers wove themselves into his dark blond hair and my mouth fell open.
"Oh," I breathed, as his warm, wet mouth sent a bolt of pure lust straight down between my legs. If he didn't stop, he might make me come right there, just like that.
It didn't matter where I was anymore. The fact that an ocean had appeared in upstate New York was no longer my concern. All that mattered was Magnus. And me. And the things he was doing to me.
His hands were big and the skin felt rough against my breasts as he caressed them, squeezing gently, stroking his fingers over each curve until it almost set my teeth on edge to have my pants – and panties – still between us.
We seemed to reach for my fly at the same time, but the jeans were too tight to pull off. It was only with some effort that Magnus' fingers found themselves slipping down, into my panties, between my slippery folds until I was burying my face in his neck and clutching at his shoulders.
He knew what he was doing, too. He didn't spend five minutes rubbing my labia, as one unfortunate boyfriend had seemed to think was the key to unlocking my orgasmic potential. No. Magnus seemed to sense exactly where I needed to be touched, and how. He almost pushed two fingers inside me – and I wanted him inside me so badly I whimpered when he took them out again. But what he did next, using my own wetness to trace light circles around my clit until I was rocking my hips frantically down against him, almost pushed me over the edge. I felt something opening deep in my belly, a door to some essential part of me swinging wide and the orgasm I could feel building in my core – coaxed along on Magnus' expert fingers – rushing through it.
But just as I was about to throw my head back and let the wave of bliss take me, he stopped, taking his hand away and pulling me back in for another kiss.
"No," I panted, beyond the point where I cared about looking desperate. "Magnus, no. Please –"
He stopped kissing me and pulled away, just far enough to see my face.
"I like the way you say my name," he told me, kissing me again, curling his tongue up underneath my own and then stopping again. "I can hear how much you need me in the way you say it, girl."
I tightened my legs, knees bent and wrapped around his hips, around him, grinding my body against his until he exhaled heavily and sank his fingertips into my ass, pulling me down even harder.
"How do I take these off?!" He asked a moment later, when my jeans once again proved almost impossible to remove. I lay back and lifted my ass up off the ground, hooking my fingers into the waistband and pushing them down. Magnus helped, and we yanked and pulled until they finally, finally came off. And along with the jeans went my panties, soaking wet with what he was doing to me.
When I went to sit up again, to pull myself back into the one place on earth I wanted to be – his lap – he stopped me.
"Not yet," he smiled, gently pushing me back down. "I want to see you. Show yourself to me, girl. Show me what's mine."
There was no showy machismo in his tone, no theatre. Magnus wanted me to show him what was 'his' because he knew already that it was. And so did I.
Warm beside the fire, my skin lit with the glow from the flames, I allowed my thighs to fall open. Sensing my vulnerability, loving it, he reached up and took one of my hands in his own as his eyes took me in from neck to breasts to belly and then... lower.
"Gods," he whispered, sitting up and beginning to work frantically at the ties that seemed to hold his leather garment around his waist. I stayed where I was, on my back, knowing what was coming and pleased, in some primal way, to witness the feverishness of his lust, to know that I was the cause of it.
What can I say about the first time I saw Magnus without any clothes on? He was – I didn't have any words for him at the time, because there was no room in my mind for words. All the room available in my body, mind and soul was his, taken up by his broad, muscular torso, the little half-smile that played on his lips as he saw how I looked at him and the full, thick, glistening length of him as he cast his leathers to the side.
I moved to sit up when I saw him in full – and how much he needed me. But he just reached out and put a hand on one of my knees, pushing it to the side just a little, opening me. I looked up at him, realizing even as I spread my legs and welcomed him between my thighs that I had never been so willing, never so ready as I was at that moment.
"You need it," Magnus whispered, settling himself deliciously, torturously between my legs without putting himself inside me, and then chuckling and taking my hand away when I tried to do it for him. "Not yet, girl. Tell me. Tell me how you need it."
"I need it!" I told him at once, wrapping my arms around h
is neck, pulling him frantically down against me. "I – I need it! Please..."
But he laughed again – a deep laugh that rumbled away through the night air – and sat up so he could look down at my body again with a look of such hunger in his eyes I thought I might be in danger of being devoured.
Not that I would have said no.
I arched my back and opened my legs even wider, until I saw his resolve shake. And when I did, I reached down, pushing my fingertips over the shiny, swollen tip of him until his breath came out in a long sigh.
"Magnus," I said breathlessly as his eyes closed. "Magnus..."
Whatever inner resources he had been using to hold back snapped as I whispered and stroked his own wetness down the length of his cock. He took himself in his hand, leaning down to kiss me as he pushed just the head into me, and then asked me again to tell him that I needed him.
"I need you," I cried softly against his muscled shoulder, my body almost trembling with anticipation of what it was about to receive. "I need you. I need you, please, I –"
And then I got him. Every sweet inch, all at once, until my head was lolling back in the dirt and my mouth was whimpering his name over and over and over.
"Voss," Magnus breathed into my neck – a word I had never heard before. He dragged it out – 'vossssss' – as he pushed himself all the way into me, and then he slid his tongue between my lips and kissed me deeper and dirtier than I had ever been kissed before.
He went slowly at first – I say he because it was his doing, not mine. I wanted more, right from the start. I lifted my hips up to him and put my hands on his ass, trying to get more of him – and faster – but he was the one who held back. It meant that the mountain I was so eager to rush to the top of was scaled more slowly, more carefully. And even as I begged him and bit his earlobes and kissed his thick, muscled neck, I knew he was in charge. I knew I was going to come when he wanted me to come. And that drove me almost out of my mind with lust.