Gron's Fated

by V. C. Lancaster

  T’Lax had said the Gandry were unique in that the chip couldn’t translate their language. Looked like that animal had a language, one that could be translated. And Ruth could understand it. A chill went down her spine as she thought of what she had heard. The tiger-like predator had been talking about eating her. If it ever caught her, she would understand every word as it killed her.

  The woods suddenly weren’t safe for her anymore. She couldn’t leap to safety in a tree, not without Gron. There was no way she could outrun or fight it. She looked to Gron, her heart pounding with the knowledge that he had saved her life, again. He was looking down at the forest floor, watching for the beast. He glanced at her when he felt her gaze, but his face was set, stoney. He didn’t seem to be worrying about their relationship just then, instead worrying about keeping them both alive.

  He turned and nudged her to climb on his back. She did, ready and willing to get far away, keeping her head down as Gron took off through the trees in the direction of the village.

  Chapter 15

  Gron raced through the trees, terrified. The Eater was here. He hadn’t even seen it before they’d been in the tree. He hadn’t smelt it or heard it, it had just been a feeling, an instinct, and as soon as he’d recognised it, he had reflexively grabbed Ruth and taken them up into the branches. He knew she was still unhappy with him, and he had been rough with her, but he hadn’t been thinking. They were off the ground and safe before he’d realised what he’d done.

  The Eater was the only thing his people had to fear. The trees were a safe place for them, but on the ground, the Eater could get them. It knocked them down and ate their flesh until they died. His tribe had lost three males that way. It was the only thing they knew of that ate other beings, it was a monster. Even Queens were not safe from it, it didn’t care about anything other than feeding. It hunted without cease, looking for its next victim immediately after finishing with its first, day or night.

  He had grabbed Ruth by reflex before he’d even realised why, but the fear still circled through his veins as he took them through the trees. The Eater could have caught her, it could have caught him, it was that easy to lose her or for her to be left alone. If the Eater had attacked Ruth, Gron would have fought it to the death trying to save her. Then he at least would not have to live without her. But she still needed someone to look after her if anything happened to him. He would have thrown himself between them to give her the chance to run away, he still would, but he could do it with an easier heart if he knew she would not be at Grasta’s mercy without him.

  Ruth may fight him, and hate him, and punish him for it, but she needed another male. He didn’t know yet how he would get her one without losing her in the process, but he had to try. He would take some time to think on it first, this time.

  As he approached the village, he met one of his tribesmen, and called out to him “I have seen the Eater, it is in the forest, warn the others!”

  The other male looked up at him and dropped what he was doing, leaping into the trees and bounding away to spread the word, and soon the forest was echoing with their cries and the shaking of leaves as the tribe hurried through the branches to their platforms, dark brown blurs disappearing among the foliage.

  Then all at once the forest went silent. Gron had reached his platform and let Ruth slip from his back then hurried to the edge, looking down to make sure no one was left exposed. He could see others doing the same thing, checking on their neighbours. The tribe held their breath, not making a sound as they waited for the Eater to appear below.

  Slowly, the tension left the air as nothing happened. Several minutes passed of anxious watching.

  Then Grasta called out “Is everyone accounted for? Check your friends and neighbours. We stay in the trees tonight!”

  Gron allowed himself to relax a little. No one had been taken. Calls rang out from his people as they checked their loved ones were safe. Gron moved to the other side of his platform and looked for his mother’s which was further down on another tree. He saw that his fathers were with her, as was Mruin.

  “Mother!” he called, to let her know he was safe. His family looked up at him and acknowledged his wave. “I have Gruth here with me,” he told them.

  Brur looked relieved, and his mother gave him a dismissive wave before bellowing for Kranu, who dropped onto her platform a moment later, obviously disgruntled at being summoned like a child.

  Gron retreated, not interested in his brother’s petty complaints. Being stranded in the trees was only a small inconvenience for his people, but he knew Kranu disliked being kept in close quarters with others. No one would wander far tonight. Tomorrow, the bravest would venture to the forest floor again, and soon the rest would follow. For now, he was alone with Ruth.

  He turned to her. She stood far from the edge, looking a little shaken, but he had seen her look worse. She didn’t look like she needed his comfort. Normally when she was scared, her small eyes went wide and she stared at him as if to read his face. Now she was looking around at others, only glancing at him. He fought the urge to whine or crawl to her.

  He suppressed a sigh and walked towards the trunk of the tree where he stored what little he had. He would have to find food again tonight but that didn’t worry him. Instead his thoughts were filled with the night to come. She had slept in his arms every night since they had been in the cell. It still felt too early for them to drift apart.

  Gron understood that Queens did not sleep in the arms of their males every night of their lives, that he couldn’t expect to keep her attention forever. When she had other males, she would need to focus on them, especially while Bonding them at first, even more so if she chose to Prime them for her needs. Then Gron would be expected to make himself scarce, at least some of the time. He would not be the one to hold her.

  His mother, Gryla, slept between her two males, and had done for most of their lives, but she only had two males, and they were both Prime Fathers. When Gron and his siblings had been children, they slept with them or they slept together at a small distance. He had never witnessed his mother Bond a new male. Grasta, on the other hand, spent days Bonding a male, but in the end she always returned to her favourite, the Prime Father. She slept with her arms around him on their platform, her stud and the young one nearby, her children together. Her Bonded Guards slept on another platform adjacent to hers.

  Gron couldn’t imagine sleeping away from Ruth. He thought it would be cold, colder than he had been as an unBonded male. He could do it as long as it wasn’t because she had rejected him, was thinking of other males, wanted his scent on her to fade.

  He looked through what they had. It wasn’t much. Mostly broken baskets and the like, things that hadn’t been useful enough to be redistributed by the tribe when he’d disappeared. He realised he was looking for something to do and that surprised him. He hadn’t been bored in a while, always needing to look for food, protect Ruth, bathe, something. There was always something that needed doing to make their lives safe and comfortable. Being confined to his platform made him feel suddenly adrift.

  Or was he just looking for something to distract him from Ruth, and the situation he had created between them?

  He could move between the platforms, visit his friends and family, gather food. That was what he would have done before. He could even take Ruth with him, but to what end? What good was it to drag her around so he could have conversations she couldn’t be a part of? Surely it was better to let her rest on the platform, but he would be ashamed to leave her alone, and she would surely get upset.

  Before, she had talked to him when they had nothing to do, in the cave or in the cell. She had bared her teeth at him and pulled his tail and climbed into his lap. Without that, what did they have?

  Gron almost jumped when Ruth moved into his peripheral vision, going for the bag she had brought with her. He tried to look calm, as if he hadn’t become so distracted he had forgotten where he was. He tried to look like he wasn’t watching h
er as she pulled the bag into the middle of the platform and sat down in front of it, opening it and taking things out one by one.

  She took out something that looked like a wooden carving a bit bigger than her hand and began pulling it through her long mane. Gron watched, having never seen anything like it before. It made a soft rasping, whispering noise as it passed over her mane, and she stopped regularly to tug at a specific spot that seemed to be tangled.

  Gron sat in front of her, and she glanced at him, and he thought he saw her lips pull up a little. She kept doing it, repeating the motion over every section of her mane. He inspected the items she had taken out of the bag. There were some small wrapped items he had seen her eat before, the bottle he had drunk from, some other bottles in a variety of sizes and colours, small packages that were a mystery to him, and what he considered to be a lot of fabric, that he assumed she would wear though he couldn’t figure out how. He fingered a particularly small piece of fabric, trying to figure out its purpose but failing. It even had big holes in it!

  Ruth made that bubbly sound he’d heard before when she was happy and gently took it out of his hands. She held the thing she’d used on her mane out to him instead, and when he didn’t know how to react, she walked on her knees over to him and touched it to his head. At first he jerked away because it scratched and tickled. Ruth made the sound again and showed him the object which was bristled like a plant that didn’t want to be eaten. She ran it over the pelt on his arm and he tried not to flinch away from the sensation of the bristles through his fur.

  Ruth started again on his mane, and he forced himself to sit still. After a moment, the soft rhythmic brush of it became quite pleasant and lulling. When Ruth moved it down the pelt on his spine, he shuddered. It still felt strange to have something tickle along skin that had always been protected.

  Ruth moved in front of him then and began work on the pelt that covered his chest, giving him the opportunity to look at her closely, which he had missed since that morning at the pond when Kranu had played with his mind and made him hurt her. He rumbled softly as he watched her pay attention to his body, sitting up straighter and offering her his chest.

  She looked at him and leant across to press her lips quickly to his. She didn’t tease or taste him, but he was grateful nonetheless. He rumbled again to let her know his pleasure, hoping to encourage her to do more. Ruth considered him, her face so close he could feel her breath on his tongue, then she came back to him, softly cushioning her lips against his and holding them there this time, just the gentlest of tensions trapping him.

  He moved first because he couldn’t hold still. It was almost nothing to shift his jaw and slant his mouth against hers and offer her the tip of his tongue, but he was still terrified it would dislodge her, that he was overstepping his boundaries and she would reject him, that he was taking too much and revealing that he didn’t know his place, didn’t like his place except when it was under her and holding her and at her side.

  Instead Ruth’s hands came up to cup his jaw as she tilted her head and took his tongue with her own, leisurely climbing into his lap. His hands rushed to her hips to help her navigate over his legs and again he was struck by how small she was. His male-part was quickly readying for her and he wondered if he should cover it with his tail for now. But she did this to him, he reminded himself. His body was responding to her, in the way that she had taught it.

  Ruth didn’t seem to mind, lowering her hips over him so that his shaft nudged against her sex. He flinched at the sensation; she was covered somehow, there was fabric separating her from him. Why? He didn’t like it, he wanted to feel her. She seemed to think nothing of it though because she pushed against him, rubbing herself against him.

  His tail came up to wrap around her arm, anchoring to her skin anywhere it could. Ruth slid her hands down his neck, burying her fingers into his pelt and flicking his nipples with her thumbs before exploring the muscles at his sides where there was only skin. She moaned softly before she pulled away. She studied him for a moment, and Gron waited, hoping and dreading her judgement, praying that whatever had made her choose him in the first place was still there and that she would see it.

  Her hand went to his shoulder and pushed gently, and he went to his back gratefully. They had mated only that morning, but he knew they needed this. He needed this, to be forgiven, to be useful, to be cherished. He needed to know that whatever had changed between them was over and done. That nothing had changed, he was still hers.

  But Ruth did not straddle his hips as he expected. He watched, propped up on his elbows, as she moved away, further down his body, kneeling between his legs. She trailed her fingertips up his thigh until she stroked softly over his maleness. She was watching his reaction, but he was watching her, waiting for her to guide it into her body. Instead, Ruth leant forward and opened her mouth, then swiped her tongue over the head of his shaft.

  Oh.

  He remembered this. She had done this before, in the cave. It was a test. She was testing him. Her confidence in him was not yet restored, but she was giving him a chance to prove he was worthy of seeding inside her.

  Gron groaned but lay down, ready to endure. He pressed his hands to his head and pushed his fingers through his mane. It would be difficult, but he could do this.

  Ruth held his shaft with a steady hand and licked the head, her tongue deliciously wet, and Gron exhaled on the edge of another groan. He lifted his tail to his mouth to bite it for control before remembering that his Queen didn’t let him do that. His tail thudded to the platform next to him and his back bowed as Ruth sealed her mouth over him, giving him nothing but wet heat and tight sucking pressure trying to pleasure him into seeding early. Her hand tightened and rubbed against him and a deep rumble escaped him.

  He tried to think of other things to calm himself but there was always Ruth, her lips and slow dragging tongue tightening his belly, demanding to be felt. Her mouth sunk down on him and he moaned. It was a lost cause trying not to feel it, not to be overcome by it. His Queen could not be ignored or resisted. She should not be.

  His muscles began to shake with the effort of keeping still and he caught himself moaning in time with her movements. He had the idea of stopping her somehow, but as soon as his hands touched her head they sunk into her mane, so soft, the long locks wrapping over his hands as if tying his hands to her. His hips twitched as he approached his end, and he whipped his tail savagely against the platform, hoping to feel enough pain to wash the liquid fire from his blood for an instant.

  He was losing the battle for his control and he knew it. He couldn’t stop his hips from rocking, or the rumbling growl that dragged from him when her fingers slipped from his shaft to his sack. He held desperately to the knowledge that if he proved himself unworthy now, gone were the nights spent under her. She would want more than a stud, she would look for a male to breed with, and then he would take Gron’s place at her back, and Gron would sleep by himself, to be picked up and put down as Ruth desired.

  He didn’t want that but to be asked to endure what she was doing now was too much. She wanted to finish him, wouldn’t let go until he did. To fight her off would be a worse failure. So with a heart-wrenching gasp his end came, shooting uselessly into her mouth while he cupped her head in his hands and writhed on his back, tail twisting.

  Gron watched as Ruth pulled away from him and walked to the edge of the platform, her pelt-less body so lithe and sleek and beautiful. She held her mane away from her face and she hunched her shoulders as she spat out his unwanted seed. Gron did not wait to watch her come back. Instead he curled onto his side, away from her, drawing his knees up and folding his arms over his chest. He suddenly felt ice-cold. He felt it when Ruth knelt behind him and placed her hand on his side, but he didn’t want to look at her. He didn’t want to see it in her eyes that he had failed.

  Chapter 16

  Ruth slept on her back behind Gron that night. She didn’t know what had gone wrong. Okay, she hadn
’t wanted to have full sex with him when she’d gone down on him. She didn’t feel like she had forgiven him enough for that, but she had wanted to show him that she would soon. She’d wanted to let him know that she still loved him and wanted him and wanted to stay together, even if she was still hurt by what he’d done.

  But as soon as he came, which took a lot more time and effort than Ruth had expected, Gron had rolled onto his side and curled up and ignored her. Maybe once he got his, that was that? She tried to tell herself that was the reason, or maybe he’d fallen asleep, and be mad at him for it, but it didn’t feel right. Something told her something was up. She felt like she’d done something bad to him and she worried over it.

  She’d tried to get him to respond to her but he hadn’t even looked at her, just stayed curled up like he was cold, or in pain, his tail tucked and hiding away. She didn’t know what to do, so she just got her blanket and lay down behind his back to try to sleep. She wanted to throw it over him but unless they were spooning like they normally did, the blanket wasn’t big enough to cover them both. She was peeved he’d reacted that way to her oral sex skills; they weren’t that bad. So instead she just tried to sleep.

  She hadn’t had much luck. Everything suddenly seemed strange without Gron holding her. The forest was too loud, the platform was lumpy where she lay on it and it was too high up and precarious. The air was too thick, and she was aware of the other Gandry around her as if they were beacons keeping her awake. This was not her home. It wasn’t her bed, or her flat, or her planet even. It wasn’t the home she had made with Gron, it was just a lonely strange place where she was the only one of her alien kind.