Natural Instincts

by M. Raiya

  I hadn’t expected him to be so—outgoing? It was endearing and reinforced how young he seemed. Since I hadn’t considered myself sane for years, I wasn’t too worried about that. Yeah, I had questions, lots of them, but my only issue right now was that he’d stopped stroking my hair, and I wanted him to keep doing it. All the details and explanations could be worked out later. After being alone so long, now that I’d decided to trust, my body was making its needs known in a big way. The rigid controls I’d held my emotions under had burst wide open, and there was no reining them back in until they got what they needed.

  My heart was pounding. I pulled off my shirt.

  Jon stared down at me, looking a little startled. He had self-restraint. Likely he wanted to get to know me better before…. We were moving pretty fast. Way faster than I’d ever dreamed I would. The very strangeness of this situation should have made all kinds of flags go up in my mind. I’d never believed in love at first sight, or even in love at all, at least when it applied to me. Not after what had happened the last time.

  And yet…. This was different. He was different. This was right. And that was the best I knew how to explain it.

  My swimming trunks weren’t hiding what I was feeling at all. I felt my face get hot. Never in my wildest dreams had I acted this way. But this new me was holding nothing back, and I wasn’t about to get in its way. I kicked off my sandals, in case he wasn’t getting the message.

  He was. As he turned fully toward me, lowering the leg he’d had raised between us, I saw where his mind had gone too. Some last, tenuous shred of self-control fled, and I shed my swimming trunks. Gloriously naked, I stretched to my fullest, letting my arms fall above my head, tipping my chin up. I saw the sky for a moment, all misty and soft, and then Jon’s body blocked my view. I arched my hips up to him as he let his weight down on me.

  I felt myself melt.

  He gasped at my complete and instant submission. Did he understand what I was seeking? His hands slid up my arms to my wrists. I saw him register the rope scars there, and I saw him glance swiftly at the one around my neck, invisible unless seen up close. Then he took my wrists and drew them together above my head. Oh yes. He understood!

  “Kyle?” he breathed. “Is this…?”

  I nodded, boneless. He held my hands in place with one hand and reached down with the other to find my right nipple. For a second he rolled it between his fingers, and then he pinched harder and harder until I was writhing in silent ecstasy beneath him.

  “Oh, Kyle,” he whispered. “Oh, how are you so perfect?”

  My brain was going to a place that made it impossible to think clearly. It frightened me, but I pushed past it, coming quickly to the place where I could let go, relinquish control. And how I wanted to!

  A second later Jon grabbed my discarded shirt and tied my wrists with it. For a briefest instant, I was afraid my fear of being confined was going to return, but then I knew with an overwhelming sense of security that there was no way Jon would ever forget me. A moment later my rolled-up trunks became a blindfold. I almost came right then.

  “Listen, if it’s too much, you kick me twice, okay?” he said, and I think I nodded, but my world was narrowing down to what his incredible hands and lips were doing to both my nipples at once. Then his mouth went lower and lower. I gasped when he took me in his hands, pulling and stroking me into an erection like none I’d ever had before. The touch of his tongue on my tip almost made me lose it again.

  “Not yet, not yet,” he said. And I could not disobey him. This was so much more than sex. This was a whole other world.

  He worked back and downward.

  There wasn’t enough air to breathe as he spread me and slipped a finger inside. It burned and hurt, in a wonderful way. He’s inside me, I thought. A man is inside me.

  Someone cares enough to want to be inside me.

  It was an intense realization.

  Before I could savor it, the finger slid out. It returned very soon, much moister than before. Since he hadn’t touched me again with that hand, I knew where the moisture had to have come from. The thought that he was being that aroused by me made such a wave of desire sweep through my body that I rammed myself down over his finger, so hard he cried out, but there was no stopping me. I was like something possessed, wanting more and more and wanting it now! I struggled against my bonds until his hands spread me. Warm and moist, opening me. His pulsing, hot cock filled me in one solid push. Pain, but so much more. I lay still, my legs spread, utterly claimed. He lay over me, so heavy, his hair falling about my face. We were motionless.

  The knowledge that loons mate for life pulsed though my mind.

  He waited until I went boneless again. Then his fingers went for my nipples, and fire spread outward through me again. His mouth covered mine. When I was breathing only when he let me, he began to thrust. With each one, everything I’d ever thought I knew spiraled away into blissful oblivion.

  When we came, I finally understood in one stupendous, lightning-bright flash: all the knowledge in the world was nothing in comparison to sharing love with someone else.

  Chapter Four

  UTTERLY EXHAUSTED, I fell asleep afterward, or passed into some dreamlike state where I rested. The last thing I remembered was him gently freeing me, and that was all it took to let me fade, deeply aware of a sense of security stronger than anything I’d ever felt before. Perhaps urging this to happen so quickly had been my way of testing him. I’d needed to know up front if I could trust him. Now I could relax and get to know him. Backward, perhaps, but it worked for me.

  I woke hungry when it started to get dark. Jon sat beside me in human form, gazing at me as if I were some kind of work of art instead of the other way around. I’d never imagined being so appreciated. He was stroking my hair.

  I smiled. Then I arched my back slightly, offering myself to him again.

  He smiled back but shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I really should get some food into me. Before tonight. Worrying about you has wreaked havoc with my schedule lately.”

  Immediately I felt concern. Tonight, when he needed to—what did he do? I still didn’t know. And Hal had implied it was dangerous. By all means, he needed strength.

  Jon saw the alarm on my face. Quickly he bent and gave me a very thorough kiss. “Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing. I’ll be fine.”

  So it was dangerous! I whimpered a little, sitting up and touching his cheek with my palm, wishing desperately there was some way to protect him. If anything happened to him…. Already I understood what mating for life meant.

  He groaned and clutched me to him, and I pressed into his strength as tightly as I could, wanting to blend myself with him, truly become part of him in ways I’d never imagined I could feel. “Oh, Kyle,” he moaned. “You don’t understand what you’re offering me!”

  I thought I had a pretty good idea, actually. I wanted to become part of whatever he did and share it, make it easier for him. Before I could try to make him understand, someone blew a car horn on shore. Three times, loudly.

  “Shit,” Jon said. “That’s my brother. Hal takes his role of protecting me very seriously. He wants me to come and eat.”

  I pulled away, stood up, and began to dress immediately. Hal and I had a lot in common if we both wanted to protect Jon.

  He smiled wryly as he stood up too. “I can see I’m going to be outnumbered now. Very well, we’ll go and eat before we talk. Don’t worry. There’s plenty of time before midnight, and the world will go on turning until then.”

  I stared after him as he started toward the canoe. Jon kept the world turning? Did he mean that literally?

  He didn’t explain. I wondered if he was going to change form—part of me wanted to see him do it, part of me wanted him to stay in human form so I could kiss him as often as possible. Did he need to hunt in loon form for food? I had no idea.

  Jon stayed in human form and pushed the canoe back into the water. He held it and gestured for me to ge
t into the stern. “If that was your first time, you did an excellent job steering,” he said. “Carry on.”

  Feeling a little proud, I got in. He wrapped my towel around his hips and took the bow. Clearly he was a master with the paddle, but he was very encouraging despite me running him into two separate overhanging branches before I managed to get us into open water. It was amazing how much easier it was to make headway with someone strong providing the forward momentum.

  I’d been aiming for the beach, but he told me to go directly to my site. “We can keep the canoe there,” he said, “so we can go out again early in the morning. I’m not exactly worried about you stealing it, and since I’m the co-owner of the campground, I get my way.”

  I headed for the little bit of sand next to my rock. As we got closer, I saw that the other co-owner of the campground was waiting to catch the bow and pull us in.

  “Well, look at this,” Hal said, grinning.

  “Just shut up,” Jon said, getting out with perfect coordination. I followed with much less coordination. Jon might think we were going to be back on the water at sunrise, but we weren’t if my knees weren’t feeling any better. To say nothing about the set of blisters I now had on each hand. Ever solicitous, Jon made sure I got out okay. I let him and Hal pull the canoe up onto the edge of the site and roll it over while I hobbled to the picnic table and sat. I was sore in many, many places in ways I didn’t think had come from the canoe. And I didn’t care a bit.

  Hal had brought dinner. The table was spread with a real cloth tablecloth. Arranged on it was a vase of daisies, a candle inside a clear globe, a bottle of champagne, two glasses, a large covered bowl that smelled really good, a salad, a loaf of bread, butter, and a plate of brownies.

  “Damn you,” Jon said.

  Hal chuckled. “We need to celebrate what we can.” He handed his brother a small duffle bag. “Some clothes,” he added, shaking the bag a little until Jon took it. “Not that you probably care, but this campground can only survive so much nudity. Enjoy, gentlemen. I’ll pick up the dishes when I drive around the next time.”

  “I’m not going to thank you,” Jon said.

  Hal just waved and got into a dark green pickup he’d left on the edge of the road. Jon stared sourly after him for a moment, then turned to me.

  “I love him deeply,” Jon said, seeing what must have been a shocked expression on my face. “And he knows it. But that doesn’t mean I have to like him being right.”

  He opened the bag. I watched him pull on a pair of briefs and then jeans and a soft black shirt that fitted loosely, flowing with his muscles.

  Darkness closed in gently. Through the trees, I could see the glow of a few campfires and heard someone laughing. I caught myself listening for the loon. But it was far better hearing his voice when he put his arms around me. For a long time, I let my head rest on his chest.

  Hal’s words were bothering me a little. What had he meant by “celebrate what we can”? I needed to know what danger Jon faced. And I needed to know what the reality of our relationship was going to look like.

  But Jon needed to eat. I pulled away from him and sat at the table, facing the water. He sat across from me, straddling the bench, keeping one eye on the lake and one over my shoulder at the road. I waited quietly as he opened the covered pot. It was filled with a delicious-looking beef stew. While Jon served us, I buttered some bread. I didn’t know anything about champagne, but the bottle looked old and the label was in a foreign language.

  There wasn’t a corkscrew among the silverware.

  Jon picked up the bottle with his left hand and passed his right hand over the top. There was a pop, and the cork flew into the air. Jon caught it as it fell, then laid it before me with a smile. The champagne inside foamed up but didn’t go over. As Jon poured into one glass and then the other, I saw he was watching me closely.

  I reached out and picked up the cork. It was strangely warm. It felt good in my hands. I raised it to my face, sniffed—the champagne smelled delicious, though I was no judge—and then kissed it.

  “Kyle,” Jon said, sounding a little strangled.

  I pointed at his stew.

  He began to eat very quickly.

  I was starving too, but I ate more slowly. The stew had herbs in it I’d never tasted before, exotic and flavorful. The champagne was sweet and bubbly. It went straight to my head. I kept finding myself gazing at Jon. And he was always gazing right back at me.

  “Wow, you got company fast,” a voice called from the edge of the road. “Is this why you didn’t come to the beach when the sun came out, Kyle?”

  Shit. It was Sue. I’d been so deeply asleep on the island that I hadn’t even known the sun had burned through the mist and come out.

  I started to turn, afraid she would recognize Jon from her photo and unsure how to get rid of her. But before I could do anything, Jon raised his left hand and made a gesture toward her site, as though directing her to keep walking. And to my amazement, without another word, she kept going.

  “I hate doing that,” Jon said quickly as I turned away from Sue’s departing figure. “But it’s probably not a good idea for me to speak to her right now, considering I was seriously thinking about murdering her when she hugged you. To say nothing about that damn photo she got of me. I don’t get caught by surprise very often. And yes, I know about the other one she’s got, but she’ll never figure it out.”

  It made me warm to think that Jon had been bothered by her hugging me. I didn’t think for a minute he’d really considered killing her. But something told me he could if he wanted to. The way she’d turned and kept walking….

  He searched my eyes, trying to read me. I thought about reaching for my phone to show him words for the first time, but then, I wasn’t sure how I’d frame what I wanted to know. It was hard to reduce the concept of who and what Jon was to something that would fit on a screen.

  “I need to explain,” he said, rising. I got up quickly too. He’d eaten a whole bowl of stew and a piece of bread, and I trusted him to know if that would give him enough strength for whatever he had to do later.

  Jon drew me away from the table until the tent blocked us from the road. Then he cupped my shoulders in his hands, my hair brushing across his fingers. “I know,” he said. “There’s a huge ton of stuff that has to get dealt with, and it’s not all going to be easy. And even putting it into a phrase like that isn’t doing it justice. I can’t just say ‘I’m a loon’ and expect you to go along with it, no problem. And my other—form—is a small part of the picture.”

  I’d already gathered that.

  Jon’s hands moved up to my neck, gently massaging, as though his touch would keep me calm. It worked, until his next words. They made my heart clench. “Hal and I are very old, Kyle. We’re part of the land here, part of the balance of the way things were before any humans walked this ground. We answer to old, long-forgotten powers, and sometimes certain sacrifices are demanded of us.”

  I thought of him on the table, his arms raised to the sky.

  His right thumb brushed my jaw; his other hand slid through my hair to cup the back of my head. I felt the strange sensation that he controlled my breathing again, as he had when he’d kissed me. If he forbade me to draw breath, I would not do it until he said I might. And knowing that brought not fear, but a deeper sense of connection than I’d ever felt to anyone before.

  He pressed closer to me. I was glad my tent blocked us. He was arousing me deeply again.

  “I still feel bad that I didn’t ask if you wanted to become part of this.”

  The way his fingers were touching my face, it would have been impossible to shake my head had I wanted to.

  “When you saw me the first night, I was just coming out of a ritual I need to complete every night.” He paused. “It has to do with maintaining the balance of the old gods, who were here long before humans.”

  His dark eyes seemed bottomless as I gazed into them. I knew he was being cautious about how I
would take this. So he made offerings to old gods? Was that what he was saying?

  “No, Kyle. I’m not one who worships them.”

  I felt my heart begin to pound. What was I about to hear?

  He hesitated a moment, as though searching for words. “It’s a bit like how the CEOs of your human corporations go through the ritual of sitting down with fellow executives.”

  That lost me for a second. Then the connection hit me. What the hell? Was Jon saying that he was a god?

  “Yeah,” he said quietly and gazed into my eyes.

  I gazed back and felt a tingling chill sweep my body. As I struggled to understand, a deep part of me wondered if he wanted me to worship him. And a deeper part knew that I already did.

  “I need to keep the balance,” he went on. “If I don’t….”

  He will be punished? I wondered.

  “I will cease to exist,” he said.

  My heart almost stopped. I felt my very soul opening, his for the taking if it would give him strength.

  “And terrible things will happen to the earth,” he went on. “Hal and I chose to come here to do this long ago. Those who remained behind do their part to keep us alive. The ebb and flow of power benefits us all, and the land. And it hurts us all when things go wrong.”

  I swallowed. A god was holding me against him, and we were both very, very hard.

  “Do you begin to see?” he asked.

  I thought so.

  “Of late—well, a long time ago to you—humans have begun to tip the balance away from the old gods to favor themselves. Their violence, their wastefulness, their cruelty all conspire to hasten the end of all they know, and yet they continue to race toward their own destruction. It becomes harder and harder for me to keep their might in check. When I fail come the floods, the storms, the earthquakes—nature striking back.”

  I thought of how, in the last few years alone, the planet had turned deadly very often. It was blamed on climate change. But Jon was saying there was far more to it.