Ginosko – Chapter 8 – Trish of the Jungle

The world ended before I was born.

This… This little oasis of greenery is all that remains. All that could endure of a wilderness that once spawned an entire continent. The last thing that could be protected as the skies were torn open to allow radiation in, and the earth was poisoned by ill winds. It’s protected by a capsule of… something. Something I don’t quite understand, but that is meant to grow. To conquer back, inch by inch, everything that was lost.

And I’m meant to guard it.

I open my eyes and watch the night sky filtered through the lattice of violet and shifting orange hexagonal crystals that turn the air outside into something the trees and grass can take in, subsist on. That light up the white sands of my beach in shifting hues. That shields this place from a Sun that became an enemy of life.

That, thankfully, still allows stars to shine.

I’m almost naked on this small, recessed beach hidden between gray rocks, my back resting on the metal altar that sustains me each and every day. That allows me to live without drinking or eating, even if I still can do those things.

That keeps me young.

Strong.

Able.

So, taking in a deep breath that carries tamed seafoam with it, I stand up and step away from the platform of my glimmering altar, its shine as spotless as the day I first awoke under it.

It’s the altar to my mother goddess. To Elizabeth.

And I wish I could get her guidance, because, as things stand, I don’t know how long I’ll be able to go on without being lost.

I curl my toes over and through white sand, the small, powdered quartz particles sliding over my skin without delay before I turn my back on the calm sea and walk toward the thick treeline behind the semicircle of rocks guarding this last place where I can rest safely.

I can almost feel it when I cross the invisible line that marks when I am no longer protected. When I become prey to catch.

But… But I could also become a huntress.

One meant to catch him.

I close my eyes to allow the rustling of dark green fronds to map my surroundings, hoping nothing else will disturb the palm trees guarding Elizabeth’s altar, and I quickly step deeper into the jungle, the thick trunks with no branches giving way to papaya trees, with their broad leaves and long, straight boughs.

I climb up one of them.

And there, in the distance, deeper still where there are no longer papayas, and tall rubber trees grow, I see the fire of the… the sorcerer.

He came with the New Moon and immediately attacked.

Except… not quite. Rather he… he used treachery and guile to capture me. To… To trap me with tangled vines, my body suspended from the thick branch of a rubber tree as he stalked around me, observing my every movement with eyes that seemed to drink in the shade of my skin, the luster of my hair, the swaying of my upside down breasts, barely held back by the woven, white fibers of the small toquilla palms that grow on the Southern reaches of my domain fashioned into a single band around my chest and a broader one around my hips.

He… He wore nothing.

His body was exquisitely sculpted, muscles moving with feline grace under taut skin, and his blue eyes gleamed like burning ice while surrounded by skin as pale as mine, as untouched by the Sun’s kiss as Elizabeth’s blessing made my body. Yet he was marred.

Scorched metal dotted his spine, and, from it, scarred lightning leaped up his body, the punishment of the gods plain for all to see in the naked man’s broad back.

And, for a shameful, brief moment, I longed to run my fingers over it and soothe the pain he must still endure.

But he was an enemy, not somebody to be pitied, and so he stood in front of me, his eyes at the same height as mine as my long, black hair hung below me, swaying wider than I did as the wind chose that moment to run through my tresses.

“You will be mine,” he said, cupping my left cheek so that the tip of his fingers reached the line of my jaw as I gasped at his touch. “I have come to take you and everything you guard. I have come to conquer.”

I… I stared into burning blue.

I wanted to do it with defiance. To laugh at his claims. At his boast. I wanted…

A lot of things.

“But it won’t be today,” he said.

And walked out of the trap he had laid for me.

It took me a moment to catch my breath. To stop shivering at the memory of the first man to ever touch me, to ever… caress me.

To even look at me.

I was… confused. Afraid. Intrigued.

Where had he come from? What did he want? What did he mean?

With the thoughts swirling through my head, I bent up to undo the knot holding my ankles together and then allowed the earth to claim my weight as I alighted over dark, wet dirt on the tips of my feet and the pads of my fingers, the dead leaves below barely disturbed by my fall as my long hair cascaded around me.

There was no trace of the man, so I, still confused, walked back to the one place I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt to be safe from him.

My altar. The place where I first awoke, where Elizabeth’s protection engulfs me as her energies replenish my body.

That was the first night of the New Moon. When the sorcerer came.

***

“I won’t take you. Not yet,” he said, standing above me as I held with both hands onto the single vine keeping me from sinking into a quicksand pit that was not there the day before.

He once more walked around me, skirting the treacherous edge of the disguised trap, staring at my shifting shoulder blades as I struggled with the weight of my body and the pull of the sands.

Then he squatted down, almost close enough for me to grasp at him and take him with me into the liquid earth, and he smiled in a cruel, predatory way that made me shiver with a cold I’ve never felt.

“Tell me, Trish,” he said, dragging out the single syllable and making me almost shake with renewed urgency, “what do you think will happen? How do you think I will defeat you?”

“I—my name. How do you know my name?”

“I know everything there is to know about you. Yet I hunger to learn more.”

Once more, burning ice held me down, and only the renewed pull of the swirling sands distracted me from his gaze.

“That is a contradiction,” I weakly argued.

“So are you,” he said, smiling at me for the first time.

I remained there, motionless, the sands no longer pulling at me as I just… as I just wondered at what the stranger claimed. At what he meant.

At his smile. The first one I’d ever seen anywhere but on crystal clear waters showing me Patricia staring back at me.

And then it hit me.

“Trish,” I said. “You’re calling me Trish.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Not Patricia.”

The smile faded as his eyes burned into mine.

And then, the sorcerer laughed.

“Patricia is your name,” he said, “but also a name. Trish is another.”

“Yes, but—”

“You will answer my question tomorrow. I will now give you time to think on your reply,” he said, standing back up and turning around, walking toward the jungle and away from—

“Wait! I can’t—the sands! They will take me!”

He stopped at my cry. At the thing I asked, even if it was not the thing I had first meant to ask.

And he looked over his shoulder, an insolent grin over the scar left behind by angry gods, and gave an answer:

“You can’t drown in quicksand, Trish; nobody can unless they are very unlucky. Just move slowly, twisting your legs in small circles to liquefy the sand around them, and lean to float on your back. You’ll be free in no time at all.”

I… I hesitated, wanting to ask more. To learn more.

But he left.

And I, trusting the word of the man who said he had come to defeat me, let go of the vine holding me aloft and slowly worked my way free of the sands’ clutches until I peacefully rested atop them, floating under a viridian canopy that rivaled in brightness the distant crystals above.

***

It is the third night, and I don’t know what further trick he will pull.

The first one, I understood: he treated me like the animals that no longer can stalk this place, hunting me through ancient methods from long before mankind was able to craft the metallic relics that stud my domain.

The second one still eludes me, the very earth shifting to trap me at his command.

And the question…

Yesterday, I came back to my beach, to the protection of Elizabeth’s altar. My clothes had been ruined, the mix of water and sand abrading the delicate, white fibers that had protected my modesty, and some of that sand still marred my skin.

So I… I walked into the waters of the sea, the waves far more violent outside the perimeter of violet and slowly shimmering orange crystals that filter the poison out of them, leaving me only with peaceful, almost playful cresting water lapping at my skin as I walked in, the cool eddies swirling around my legs and washing away any traces of the jungle and the sorcerer’s tricks.

Then I…

I thought about the naked, beautiful man. About his strong body, his careless grace, his burning eyes.

His nude form.

And I licked lips wet with saltwater as I clasped the top hem of the band wrapped around my breasts… and tore it.

It gave way easily, my strength always up to anything I’ve cared to demand of it, and my breasts pushed at their newfound freedom, finally spilling down as I destroyed my garment and allowed seafoam and breeze to play over my wet skin and hardening nipples.

He had been naked, walking through the jungle like he belonged there. Or it to him.

I bit my lip, and my hands glided down my sides, briefly tracing the waistline of my tight, woven skirt.

And I tore it as well.

He had looked at me, devouring everything of my form that was bared to his ice-blue eyes, taking in everything he claimed he had come to conquer.

How much more would he have looked if I had been as nude as he was?

How much longer would he have stayed?

I don’t know. And I don’t know what he meant with his question, nor how to answer it.

But… does it matter?

I am Elizabeth’s daughter. Born after the world ended. Tasked with its restoration.

And I shall ask my own questions.

***

I am atop the tallest rubber tree in the jungle, searching through the canopy for signs of him.

Of the only man I have ever met.

The ground is treacherous, not to be trusted, and filled with his cunning traps, but the trees… the trees are mine.

I am tempted to head toward where his fire crackled yesterday, and it may be, indeed, the only place where I can find him, but… But it will also be the one place where he will be strongest, his traps laid for as long as he’s stayed here.

I should, ideally, catch him in the middle of his preparations, when he expends his strength and before his efforts are rewarded, but…

But I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to track and stalk, not like he does.

So… the fire is my only lead.

I sigh as I carefully climb toward the nearest tree, never touching a ground I no longer trust as I approach the sorcerer’s stronghold.

***

He’s… laying down on a… a… blanket?

It is impossibly finely woven, I can’t even see any fibers from here, and its blue color seems to be more vibrant than any flower I’ve ever seen, even if it was possible to fashion something out of petals.

So, the sorcerer can conjure remnants of the old world.

I shouldn’t be surprised.

I nervously lick my lips as I grasp the next branch and swing as silently as I can to the next tree in my planned approach, only letting go when my momentum is spent, and I can alight on the foothold near the trunk without disturbing anything in my passage, grasping the reticulated bark with both hands to avoid swaying back.

And, suddenly, blue eyes meet mine.

I freeze, my hands clasping the bark so hard that it shatters, and white, sticky sap bleeds through it and over my fingers, but even that is not enough for me to look away from the naked man lying below me with his hands under his head, his chest rising and falling mesmerizingly, looking straight at me…

Smiling.

“So, do you have your answer?” he says.

I, silently, slowly, and shamefully, shake my head.

“That won’t do, Trish. I guess I should give you a hint.”

He does… something with his hand. Something arcane and mysterious, a gesture I know has meaning without knowing what meaning it has.

And, suddenly, I am kneeling on my beach, the white sands sprawling under me and the crystal-blue waters peacefully lapping at the shore.

I… I take a moment to clear my eyes, to take a deep breath, and try to understand how I have been transported without any memory of it.

And then I realize I can’t move.

“This is where your… altar? Where your altar rests. You come here to feel safe. To restore your strength,” his voice says from right behind me, caressing the tip of my ear with a warmth that rivals that of the filtered, purplish Sun.

I struggle against my invisible bonds. Against whatever it is that the sorcerer has paralyzed me with.

He laughs.

“Calm down, Trish. This is a dream, after all.”

My eyes fly wide open, and I struggle to look back at him, but, suddenly, he’s kneeling in front of me, his hand once more cupping my cheek, even if, this time, it’s his palm that caresses the line of my jaw and his fingertips that soothe my cheekbone, the line of tender skin where my ear meets my face, the trailing, soft touch lingering at my neck.

And, all the while, his blue eyes blaze over mine.

“You are beautiful, you know?” he says, taking my breath away.

His smile dulls into something softer than the hungry thing he’s directed at me until now, and he leans forward to kiss my forehead with lips that burn me, that brand me, that—

“Of course, that’s why you’re worth taking,” he mutters.

And something in me clenches.

“Oh? You didn’t like that, did you? But that’s how it is, Trish: you are so beautiful that I can’t stand not having you. Not stealing you. From this place, from your duty. From everything. I can’t stand the mere thought of there being anything in this whole, small, broken world that could distract you from being mine.”

My heart races, and I, yet again, futilely struggle to break free.

“Let me help with that,” he whispers right in my ear.

And my lips are set free.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask. The most important, burning question other than all the ones I don’t know how to ask.

“I just told you. Because I want you. Because I want you badly enough that nothing else matters. Not even what you want.”

My nipples harden at the words, and I don’t know why.

“I could… we could… We are the last humans in the world. We could just—”

“No. No, we can’t. Because anything that allows for the possibility that you will resist me is not an option. The dream is quickly fading, Trish, so ask your last question.”

My mind whirrs as I try to come up with something, anything, that will let me understand, that will let me win against this… this…

“Is it only because I am beautiful?” I ask, pitifully and not knowing why the thought feels so… sad.

Blue eyes stare down at me as the ocean fades away and takes the gentle lapping of the waves with it, leaving us in complete silence as the sands shrink until only a small white circle of lit, powdered quartz remains to hold my kneeling body under his burning gaze.

“No,” he answers with that same soft smile. “It’s because you are you,” he says.

And then everything but two blue eyes fades away as the words keep repeating themselves over and over.

When I wake up, my hands are stained with white sap, and I stand in the middle of the path that leads toward my altar.

***

“Trish,” he whispers in my ear, the voice so hot that I feel like I could burn just with it.

“Trish,” he growls before he bites down on my neck, the heat of his chest on my back making me squirm and whine as his hand finds its way down my belly, his touch light enough that I spasm under him, the rhythmic contraction of my muscles breaking and resuming our contact.

“Trish,” he murmurs with something dark and hot that slithers down my spine as his cock slides between my thighs, pushing soft flesh aside, rubbing up against my sex without entering my body, just making me yearn to be filled by him, to be taken, to be conquered.

“Trish… wake up,” he says.

And I, disoriented and aroused like I’ve never been before, blink bleary eyes as the cool touch of the altar on my back makes me miss the burning presence of a man’s broad chest.

… What?

My dreams. His magic lets him walk in my dreams.

And I… Have I been changed by it? How much of a person would remain if not even their dreams were their own? How much can he shape my desires, my needs, if he whispers in my ear all through the night, his words becoming my thoughts, the dream of him my world—

Stop.

Stop, Trish, you… you can do something. You have to do something. It’s not too late if you can still ask these questions. You can just find him and…

And what?

What can I do against him that will end in my victory when he can stun me with a gesture, furthering his conquest with every dream he brings me? How can I ever avoid my defeat if he ends up making me… yearnfor it?

The world swirls around me in my confusion, making me question if I am inside of yet another dream, my wants and needs taking the shape of his designs for me. Slowly becoming the beautiful woman he wants under him, at his mercy, under his touch…

My nipples harden, and heat burns between my wet thighs.

Is this… is this the mark he’s already left? Is this the loneliness of a life apart from any other finally catching up with me? Is this… Is this something of mine?

Or something he has given me?

My hands rest on my belly like his own, broader one did in my dream, and the trim flesh abruptly tightens once more at the memory. At a dream that does not fade with waking. I follow the path he traced down with tremulous fingers as my right palm rises to my lonely breast, to cup it and squeeze it, digging furrows in my flesh that I imagine him filling with his touch, his tongue, his…

My fingers find my wet, burning lips below, and my eyes shoot wide open.

The metal of the altar at my back barely anchors me in the moment, allows me to resist the sheer need for him even as my whole body screams at me that it wants it. That it wants to be taken despite what I want to want.

But… I won’t allow it. Not like this. Not when I don’t know who he is or what he truly wants. What his plans are for this piece of reclaimed world I have sworn to protect.

So I, slowly, painfully, let go of my tingling breast and take away eager fingers from yearning lips as I slump back, sliding down the metal altar until my bare back rests on its base and only my head touches the vertical part of it, still cool despite the morning Sun.

I look at it. At a Sun that needs to be cleansed before its light is allowed to touch my forest. My jungle.

And, slowly, an idea blooms inside of me.

***

I stand on a thick branch of the last tree I walked on before he caught me.

The rubber tree in front of me still weeps white blood.

And I nervously lick my lips.

He’s there, lying on his blue blanket.

Looking at me.

And I take a last step and allow the ground to claim me, the very tips of my toes sinking through fallen foliage before my knees bend with smooth elasticity and my thighs stretch open.

I slowly stand up, brushing my hair behind my shoulders with the back of both hands and spread fingers as I keep staring at bright blue eyes that drink my every motion.

“You want me,” I say with absolute certainty as I slowly walk toward him, my hips swaying wider than ever with every smooth step over dead leaves and twigs.

He silently nods.

I smile.

And he hardens.

“Is this it?” he asks, his voice rougher than in my dream. “You are already defeated?”

“I didn’t give you my answer,” I tell him, squatting down before reaching the edge of his blanket, my hands spreading open over wet, yellowed leaves.

“Oh?” he inquires with a hint of amusement in both his tone and infuriating eyebrow.

“Yes. Oh,” I answer, suddenly miffed, wanting him to demand I clarify rather than just willingly explain myself to the sorcerer.

“Well then, what is it?” he says after a brief silence in which his eyes roamed my bare body, delaying on both my breasts and sex.

I slowly lick my lips.

“You want me. And you want me to want you. To needyou. And that’s how you plan to defeat me: you’ll drive me mad with desire after every little victory until I can’t even stand the thought of winning against you,” I tell him as my blood rushes and my breath harshens. “You will… You will bring me burning dreams in which I melt under your touch, and then you’ll trap me with your tricks and spells, make me helpless before you.”

I pause, taking in yet again his exquisitely carved body, not even the spite of the gods upon his flesh taking away how strikingly handsome he is as he rises up, first on his elbows as his abdominal muscles tighten delightfully, then sitting up, his legs crossed, and his member standing straight between them.

“That would be the start of it,” he says. Invitingly.

I… I lean forward, shifting from a crouch to being on all fours, on my knees, my breasts hanging free between my arms as I look up into blue eyes above me blazing in icy blue.

And I continue to say what he wants to hear.

“Yes. Before long, you will touch me as you do in dreams. You will bring me higher and higher, each encounter teasing me with how much I still have to learn about what true pleasure is. Can be. You will… You will caress my breasts, my buttocks, my thighs. You will lick my sex, and then wait for me to beg you before going further and spreading me open with fingers thicker than mine. You will make me moan, and whine, and cry at the absence of your touch.”

“I will,” he promises, his cock throbbing at my words.

I… I sway my hips behind me, my ass rising higher than my head to draw his eyes to the seductive, animalistic display.

“All the while… I will only touch your cock in dreams. You will… You will brand me with it, dragging it all over my skin, making me swim with your scent before you mar my lips with its tip, forcing me into an obscene kiss that will be my first. That will forever mean the first thing I kissed with love and devotion was your member.”

He licks his lips.

So do I.

“You’re surprisingly insightful, Trish,” he says, the emphasis on the shortened form of my name making me shiver and my sex clench against the rustling breeze caressing the inside of my thighs.

“It’s… It’s obvious. The way you look at me. The way you speak to me. The way you make me dream of you.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Do you know what else is obvious?” I ask, still swaying my ass, ignoring the steady trickle of moisture seeping down my thighs, almost as thick as yesterday’s white sap on my fingers.

“What?”

“That I am faster than you,” I say.

And I leap.

Both my fingers and toes claw for purchase at the earth below me before I explode forward and crash against his chest, taking him down to the blue blanket as I, without looking, grasp his wrists and force them above his head.

My eyes are on icy, mocking blue.

And thus, I avoid any arcane, meaningful gestures that would bring me to my next defeat.

“You are. Faster than I am,” he answers, completely lacking in concern as my breasts grind against his chest and his trapped member pulses against my belly.

“And stronger,” I say, my lips almost touching his.

“In many ways,” he answers with that soft smile I do not understand but still crave. Still need, even if he hasn’t fully claimed me.

And… And we remain there, his heart powerfully beating under me, making me… relax. Relax as I lie on top of my enemy, both of us naked.

Both of us excited.

Both of us… ready.

“You would have… You would have slowly claimed every part of me,” I tell him, continuing my earlier explanation. “You would have marked my skin with your seed, made me swallow it, made me quench my thirst solely on it for days on end until just a trace of your scent and taste would bring me to my knees in eager expectation.”

“I would have,” he murmurs, his low voice making the short hairs on the sides of my nape rise up.

“And you would… You would have licked me and kissed me. Touched me. You would have made me learn to come at the merest hint of you wanting me to. My pleasure at your command. My sanity at your pleasure.”

“Yes,” he says, his head lifting below mine so that his lips almost brush along mine.

Almost kissing me.

“And then… Only after I begged you. Only after you were certain I was already claimed, you would have… you would have…”

“I would have?”

“Fucked me. You would have grasped my hips as I begged, almost insensate, and pierced me, stretched me wider than your thick fingers had. I would have come just at that. At your cock inside me. Between my thighs. In my pussy. I would have come and come, again and again, just at having your cock where it belongs for the very first time.”

He licks his lips, and I can feel the wet heat from his open mouth rising up to meet my own dry lips.

“You would have enjoyed it. Every single second of it,” he promises.

“No. I would have loved it. With every fiber of my being. That was the whole point, wasn’t it?”

And his blue eyes pierce mine yet again, something shifting inside of them, paralyzing me, making me wonder if the magic was not in his gestures but in him. If it was him all along that had the power to hold me and bring me under dreams of raw desire.

“No. That was never the point, Trish,” he says, as I learn that it was never ice that tinted his eyes blue.

That it was lightning.

The fury of the gods blazes inside of him, invisible except for the way it makes my naked body shiver atop his, and he slowly rises up, his speed that of a glacier.

And his lips brush mine.

I moan as I open my mouth and press down, my tongue slowly, deliberately, seeking his own to tangle with it as I undulate over him, never letting go of his wrists as the heat of his member rubs up and down my belly and my legs spread open to surround his, my knees resting on an impossibly soft, blue blanket that I will soon soil with my passions.

He answers me, his hips pushing up, the outside of his legs rubbing against the insides of my thighs, his lips giving moisture to mine before his tongue untangles from my own to lick me, to soften me, to take my breath away.

I don’t realize when my eyes close, only that… that the darkness tastes of him. Of something I never found in my jungle but that I can’t imagine living a single day without.

And I pull back, staring at caged lighting and the sorcerer who would unleash it on me.

“What…” I hesitate to ask. “What was the point?” I ask with a quivering voice.

“The point was to trap you utterly and completely. To make you my captive in the worst way I can imagine. To make you love me as much as I love you.”

My heart thunders.

“I would have loved it,” I repeat.

“Yes. Why did you refuse?”

“Because I… I can have all of that. Without losing,” I say.

And slowly, carefully, without letting go of his trapped hands, I slide up his body, my trapped nipples making me clench my teeth as they rub up his hard, unyielding chest, my pussy tightening when it first touches the underside of his cock as I grind down on it, momentarily stopping to enjoy the full sensation of his hardness against my softness. Of what will be inside of me still being outside, still promising the pleasure to come.

He waits for me, the muscles on his thighs against mine pulsing with restrained strength. With all the power he will unleash on me as soon as I guide the head of his cock between my lower lips.

It makes my head swim.

“You really think so, don’t you?” he says with that insolent eyebrow of his arched once again.

I narrow my eyes at him.

“I would have loved it, sorcerer. I would have relished every single moment of you claiming a new part of me, teaching me more about myself, training me to feel as you wanted me to.”

“You would have, Trish,” he repeats, my name on his lips making a new surge of honey drip down his cock.

“Yes. But you? You would have exulted in it. It would have given your life purpose. It would have made you feel like a god, to have my beauty between your hands, at your mercy. It would have completed you.”

He blinks in surprise, the black pupils surrounded by lighting widening under my smirk.

And he doesn’t answer.

So I lean down to whisper in his ear. To wash him with the heat leaving my body like he did to me in my dream this morning.

“I can still give that to you,” I promise.

And I drag my hips up, never leaving the touch of his member behind, until his tip sharply snaps past my mons, dragging its touch along my clitoris and making me hiss before I slowly shift back, searching for it, trying to position it between my lips, against my entrance.

I don’t notice when he twists his wrists between my grasp.

I do notice when his fingers clasp my ass, holding me steady as he brings his member finally where it should be.

I stare at him in shocked surprise as his heat pulses against mine.

As he stares softly up at me.

“You… you could have used your magic. Paralyzed me. Defeated me,” I tell him, my voice tremulous and fearful.

“No,” he says, that smile of his wider as lightning warms in his eyes. “I really couldn’t have.”

And he pushes up, against me.

Against the tight ring of flesh guarding the last thing he had to claim.

We both hiss as I let him in. As I relax around the thick head of his cock and he slides just… just a minuscule amount. Just enough to let me know what comes next.

I… I…

I look down at him. At the man who claimed he would conquer me.

At the man who just has.

And I can only hope I am conquering him right back.

His lips once more take mine, sucking my tongue in with greed I return as I push down, my whole spine arching as I mold into a better angle for him to push up with powerful muscles I am now free to trace.

But I don’t.

I, instead, caress his short hair. The black almost as lustrous as mine, the white peppering it with stark contrast I can only appreciate from this close distance as he licks along my palate and my toes curl, clawing at the soft blanket beneath us.

He pushes up, farther inside of me.

I moan inside his mouth. Along a deft tongue making something spark behind my closed eyelids. Against lips softer than they looked.

He drags me down, his fingers kneading my soft, tender, tinglingflesh as he forces me to take him in. To do what I crave to as I lower myself along the path his cock lays down for me to follow. As I have him spread me, stretchme, my copious lubrication barely enough to have him glide past my lips and deeper inside me as I whimper into his hungry kiss and grasp the short locks of his hair to hold him below me, to have him keep kissing me, to have him be mine.

And then his tip reaches as far inside of me as there is to reach, his pelvis grinds against mine, and I am his.

I could almost cry. My eyes burn with unreleased tears of… of too many things. Too many conflicting things for them to agree on being poured as the sorcerer’s hands leave my backside and trace up my spine before strong arms wrap around me, holding me close against his unyielding chest.

Holding me.

My eyes close slowly, of their own volition, as I retreat into the feeling of warmth and safety. The familiar cage of his flesh trapping me. Keeping me… by…

By…

Lawrence.

I…

What… What…

My mind swirls, awash in thoughts and memories, and I don’t recognize all of them. Just… Just ones with an infuriating, injured man I want to hold close. To heal.

To…

To love.

“Lawrence?” I ask, still unsure as I leave his kiss behind and stare down at him as his eyes open wide in panic and—

“Trish! Trish, are you all right?” he says, his hands no longer on my back but on my cheeks, holding me steady as he searches my eyes for… for something…

“I… I don’t know, I just… I… know you?” I say, worried that he is worried.

Because I don’t want him to be. I want him to be happy, and safe, and with me. Forever, without any worries about… about the things I know I worry about, even if I don’t know what they are. Just that they don’t matter half as much as seeing him smile, be it softly and tenderly or sardonically and infuriatingly. That I… That I just want him to be therewhen I wake up. That I want him to be… To be…

Whole.

“No,” I answer my own question. “I don’t know you: I love you. I love you so much it hurts. So much I can’t stand you being—”

“Doll mode: initiate. Doll mode: remove memory block. Doll mode: off.”

The words rush past me, and… And elaborate memories of lonely years on the last remnants of a dead world are swept away as Patricia Ginosko rushes back in.

As if she ever left.

“Are you all right?” the man lying beneath me, with his cock as far inside my body as it can possibly go, incongruously asks with a deep worry that makes me clench around him.

As his face contorts with the sensations I bring him, I smirk.

“You are losing your touch, lover,” I say as I twist my hips around him, my sex so tightly clenched that I feel every single pulsing vein of his cock sliding inside of me.

“Answer me,” he demands, his hands clutching my face. Holding me with warmth and an anxiety that melts what should be my heart and is, instead, a set of turbines and a percussive device.

They still race.

“You shouldn’t have built an entire life for me if you were going to act like this,” I tell him, some warmth seeping back through the sarcastic reply midway through it.

“I… I just wanted you to…” he says, sheepish and lost like he rarely is.

Because I just scared him.

No, because he was scared at the thought of having hurt me. Lost me.

And the thought shouldn’t be this… this…

I lean down to kiss his forehead, the thin lines that come with age and he has yet to bother hiding with any of the treatments I can pay for him, and I go lower, to his eyelids that I close with light kisses until they soften as if asleep.

Then to his lips. To the lips that just captured and defeated Trish, the other Trish, even if she was never anyone but me.

And then I lean back and wait for him to look back at me with the wonder and tenderness that always makes me melt.

“I know,” I tell him. “I know you didn’t want to do this anymore. That you only did it because you thought it’s what I would want.”

He, slowly and apprehensively, nods.

“But…” I ponder how to follow. How to explain what I know to be certain. “But you kept my feelings for you like you always do. You kept them so I wouldn’t feel threatened during our play. So I would still want everything that was about to happen, that you were going to do to me.”

He brushes back a strand of black hair dangling down toward him, and I close my eyes to nuzzle against his touch in a way that is entirely too feline, yet I can’t help at all.

“Yes. As always,” he says, as if all the other times he messed around with my head at my behest involved a backstory about the last priestess of a goddess sworn to revive the world. As if he has routinely crafted entire lives for me to enjoy his taking of my body, my heart, and my soul—whatever that last one may be.

“No, Lawrence. Because… Because the last time you did this… You said you loved me. You told me. And I… I changed. You changed me,” I tell him, those tears from before rushing wetly back to my lower lids as I force myself to look straight at him when I explain to him what went wrong this time around.

Or, rather, what went right.

What went… perfectly.

“Trish… What else could I ever feel for you?” he says with a smile that quirks at the left corner of his lips with something that tries to be lighthearted without managing to.

“Many things,” I tell him, my voice quivering. “Many… Anything other than this. This thing that is just so all-encompassing that I can’t… I love you. I love you so much that… That you would have to block that if you ever want me to go under without me waking up. Without me looking for that missing piece of me that only you will ever hold.”

I stare at him. At the blue eyes that the other Trish thought to be lightning yet are so much more.

At blue eyes that are Lawrence’s.

His thumbs brush below my lids, taking away traces of moisture I was too affected to realize I could stop with a single thought. That I could hide this so very human part of me from him if I had wanted to.

I don’t.

I want him to know me. To know all there is to know about me like he claimed earlier. I want him to see all of me and still feel like he does.

I want him to love the… Me.

Just me.

So I lean back down to kiss him, to languidly trace his lips with my tongue before prodding forward, asking him to let me in as I slide my hands below his body, tracing the muscles on his back and the scarred lines another Trish longed to soothe.

I once offered to remove them. To regrow his skin and have him be unmarred, whole.

He told he wasn’t. Whole. That he didn’t want to look like something he wasn’t.

And I… I no longer think he’s right. I think he healed, at least in part. That what he did for Magda mended that wound and that he’s no longer as injured by his past as he claims to be.

I think he made his scars his own.

But I will still caress them. Still soothe phantom pains as his kisses take my breath away and his cock warms me up from the inside.

I pull back and look at ice, lightning, and Lawrence.

“You said you would conquer me. Make me yours,” I whisper as I pull up until he barely remains inside of me, and he clenches his teeth as I tighten right around the underside of his glans.

“I will—”

“You did,” I tell him. Louder. Smiling. Almost crying. “You really, really did.”

And then I drop down.

We both gasp at the intense sensation of him filling me right back up. At his hardness surrounded by my softness.

At my… At Lawrence and I making love.

But then his arms once more wrap around me and pull me down until my breasts flatten against his chest, and powerful legs move between my thighs, thrusting once, twice, thrice until my eyes roll back and I gasp my pleasure before he pushes and we roll to my right, his body above me, pushing me against the cotton blanket and the crushed foliage beneath it.

The cold of the jungle’s humidity seeps through, the warmth above me making me feel it more keenly on my undulating back as he slides his hips back, slowly dragging his cock out of me despite my silent begging for him to stay.

To never leave me alone. To never let me be the Patricia I was before I met him, and Magda, and Sam.

To stay with me.

And be my world.

When he thrusts back, I scream with joy.

My legs wrap around his waist, my fingers once more threading through his short hair as my ankles hook behind him, and I angle myself to better receive him.

He kisses my right cheek, lightly and barely there, yet leaving a trace of fire behind as he kisses down to my ear, then my neck.

He bites down on me. On the crook of my shoulder. And I pull him harder against me, holding his head closer so that he doesn’t let go. So that he doesn’t ever let go.

And, almost painfully, I let go of his hair and slide a tremulous hand down his spine, circling each and every one of the burned chrome ports dotting it.

Silently promising.

He thrusts back harder, rocking my whole body beneath his, making the blanket slide over the jungle floor as it bunches where I writhe atop it. As it is stained by our juices sliding down from my sex every time he pulls out to leave a yearning, aching void behind that he rushes to fill hard enough that it echoes through the last grove of rubber trees in the world.

To my right, behind Lawrence’s moving shoulder, I can still see a bleeding, injured tree.

I feel briefly guilty about it. Then Lawrence thrusts once more and makes me forget.

Everything.

Everything but him and his body. His scent, surrounding me, strong enough to erase the jungle itself. His breathing, rough and uneven as mine is, both with exertion and pleasure. His heat, intense enough that I don’t care about the damp coolness under me. His taste, still lingering on my lips and tongue, even if it’s just one of the many things I can savor in him as I’m brought by temptation to lick dewed sweat on the edge of his hairline just to taste more of him.

And his touch.

The touch of his skin on mine, infinitely rougher and more imperfect. But that is the wrong word, because each blemish is a sign that he is alive. That this wonderfully frustrating man is not an illusion but… but somebody who was born. Who lived.

Who was free to choose. Unlike me.

And that he choose me.

So I laugh. Freely and unrestrained, in this last forest just for the two of us, I laugh with overwhelming happiness and only stop when he growls against my skin, hurrying in his movements in and out of me, dragging me along to his pleasure.

I let him.

I clench my thighs around him, encouraging him, demanding he give me his all, and when he does, I allow the moans of sheer pleasure to tear through me. I quiver under him, my entire body devoted to taking in everything that he gives me, that he offers me, even if he doesn’t know it.

I become… A receptacle. Something for Lawrence to fill with all his desire, yearning, and pleasure.

And love.

Until I overflow.

“I love you. I love you, love you, love you. I want you to fill me, to be with me, to never leave me. I want you to own me and never throw me away. I want you to be as mine as I am yours. I want you to… To say that you love me. To tell me every day of our lives,” I say, almost tearful, even as his cock keeps going in and out of me and driving me higher and higher, as high as I thought a sorcerer’s traps and spells could bring me.

But he doesn’t need any magic to do it. He just has to—

“I love you,” he says as soon as his teeth leave the crook of my neck. “I love you and always will.”

And I come.

I wail, out of my mind, my arms and legs clenched around him, only held back by inbuilt safeties, my head thrown back and thrashing on the blanket, over the black hair spread under me.

He grunts, grinding against my clitoris, his hips forcefully pushing me down even as I arch my back and press the side of my face against his cheek, uncaring of how poorly he’s shaven, even craving for the rough caress of the stubble because it’s his, because it’s something else from him.

And then, as I contract and pulse around him, my entire being devoted just to asking for more, for him to give everything he has… he does.

Liquid heat rushes inside me, and my climax redoubles as he fills me, as jet after jet of his seed comes inside of me and makes me feel so wanted, so…

So his.

My world goes white with the thought, with the last thought I can hold onto, and I slump, lifeless, beneath him.

His tender kiss on my brow is the last thing I know.

***

“I didn’t know that was possible,” he says with a not-quite mocking grin as I come to my senses under shimmering stars and beside a low campfire that he tends to with a long stick as he sits in profile to the warm, orange flames coloring his silhouette.

I look at him in sheer, unmitigated confusion, and then I remember—

Oh.

Oh.

“It… The memory block… Surely I…” I offer, as collected as ever, and—damn it!

He’s never going to let this one go, is he?

“Hey,” he whispers.

And, as I turn to him, to see what kind of new torment he’s going to visit on my poor, abused psyche now that he can hold over me that he made a gynoid come unconscious, he…

He lets go of the stick, crawls on top of the blanket, over me, and softly kisses my lips until I forget to breathe.

“I love you,” he says when he pulls back, interrupting anything I cared to tell him.

Anything other than…

“I love you.”

Yes.

Other than that.

Then, under a canopy of rubber trees that are, thankfully, not in season for their seeds to explode open, under a lattice of crystals dispersing accumulated purple and orange light that prolongs the growth cycle of the plants it shields all through the night, even if only slightly…

Under a sea of stars…

My lover holds me, I close my eyes, and I am happy.