Page 17 of Cruel As A Tree (Chaos God Sugar and Spice Companion Shorts #4)

Chapter

Fourteen

LILLIAN

I stared at the beautiful surface of the wall, living wood that had replaced the ugly hole that my mother had hidden behind.

It wasn't just the hole, though; the entire wall had changed, the straight lines softening and deepening, changing to the smooth ruby brown color of living wood, like we had stepped inside the hollow of a living tree.

The floor was now warm under my bare feet, and I looked down to see a surface that was now a living braid of moss-veined wood that gave way slightly under my feet, spongy but pleasant to stand on, like it would take an impact and soften it for the joints.

The ceiling now arched above me. Gone were the dim hallway lights, and the roof, and now there was a vaulted ceiling with branches that spanned overhead.

It wasn't open to the sky; instead, there were huge leaves, translucent and hard, almost as if they had been fossilized or someone had made their idea of leaves out of blown glass.

The frames on the wall had small flowers sprouting around all of them, and the scent of jasmine filled the air.

"What have you done?" my mom gasped. "What is this?"

"If there is anything you wish changed, I will change it," Lorthion said.

I looked back and forth between them. He was in the form he usually wore at my house, exceptionally humanoid, with practical clothing.

He still had his long ears and a small crown of antlers, but his body was fully clothed in a basic linen shirt and pants.

They were tight enough to show off the smooth curves of his strong body.

When I saw him lying on the ground in the kitchen, his upper body in the sink cabinet, his shirt pulled up just enough to expose the lower lines of his abdomen, it had awoken another part of me I didn't know about.

Now I wanted an entire scenario where he pretended to fix a sink, and I just got out of the shower, and oh no, who is this hot plumber in my kitchen?

It was one of the many, many scenarios that had run through my head.

At this point, after enough dinners and hangouts with my family, I was certain I wanted him, all of him, and that he was worth whatever I would change into, because if being with him meant I changed into a creature that was more like him, I was so down.

He was a wonderful man.

I glanced back at my mom, seeing the stress on her face as she stared down the hallway to her newly altered bedroom door.

I put my hand out and placed it on her shoulder, immediately understanding. "Mom, he had hot running water in the treehouse he made me. Don't worry. Your bathroom is going to be even better than before."

I shot Lorthion a look, hoping that I was speaking the truth, and he gave me a broad smile and a strong nod.

My mom bolted down the hallway, darting into her bedroom. "Mary in a manger!" she shouted from the other room.

I felt the tension melt from my shoulder. That was a happy shout.

She came out of the bedroom, her bible clutched against her chest and tears in her eyes. "There are roses around it."

I knew what she was talking about. She had a small personal altar in her bedroom where she liked to do her nightly study and where she kept her bible.

She had helped me set up one for myself when I was younger, but after I read through the whole book, I didn't feel connected to the whole thing, and she never pushed me.

She always had a bible available if I wanted it, and was happy whenever I went to service with her, but it was never something she pushed on me when I pulled away from it.

She was the kind of person who focused on the teachings of love and ignored the stories of hate.

She always told me the stories of hate were the ones that were written by men who wanted to control others rather than write down the real messages.

She walked up to Lorthion and threw her arms around him, hugging him tightly. "I love it."

I went over to look into Anne's room.

All of her toys were still in there; it was just the structure of the room and the furniture that changed.

The room was three times the size it was before, with a high vaulted ceiling, and her small twin-sized bed had morphed into a jungle gym.

Her bed was up high at the top, a vaulted nest that was protected by a rail of intricately woven branches.

There was a ladder, a wall with knobs that stuck out to make it look like a climbing wall, a bunch of vines that traversed the ceiling like a net that could be crawled across.

There were flowers all over the room, and her bookshelf now had carvings of small creatures.

It was everything I wanted to give her.

The reason I was so excited to go to the Order Academy, other than the chance to learn magic, was that I thought it was going to allow me to provide a better life for my family.

My mother worked so hard to support me. She had help from my father's health insurance money, but that paid for the house.

It didn't help us buy the tools we needed to repair the wall or build the kind of bedroom any child would be delighted to have.

That didn't diminish the amount of work it took to support a teenager through a pregnancy and raise the baby for her.

I wanted to learn something valuable, a skill that would help me go out and give my daughter the same deep level of focused support that my mother had given me so that she could live whatever kind of life she wanted.

I walked back over to Lorthion and my mom released him, wiping the corners of her eyes with a shaking hand.

"Mom," I said as I slipped my hand into Lorthion's. "We're going to head over to his place for a bit."

"Good, I need a minute to myself," my mom said.

"Love you," I told her as I pulled Lorthion towards the backdoor.

"Love you too," she said.

Then we were out the door.

"You didn't have to do that," I said as I dragged him to the tree that served as the portal back to his forest. "You didn't have to make everything better."

We stepped through the portal and out into the forest, and as always, it was the sound that struck me.

Growing up, the sounds of the neighborhood were predominantly taken over by leaf blowers or trash trucks.

It was a constant cacophony of industrialism, of machines clanking away as their stink and sound imposed on the quiet peace of the morning.

Here in the forest was the sound of birds singing, of leaves crunching underfoot, of a stream running off in the distance.

Waking up here was waking up to a silence that was filled with the song of life.

"I will always make everything better," Lorthion replied, his voice low and earnest. "Anything that is within my power to change, I will change it for the better."

I stopped and turned towards him, looking up at him to see him gazing back at me with a warmth that hurt, like the heat of a hot bath against skin chilled to the bone. "I know you will."

He searched my eyes, and something in them caused him to lean down as if he was going to kiss me. But he didn't. He stopped there, inches from my lips as he watched my face.

I closed the distance, throwing my arms up around his neck, pressing my lips against his like he was fresh rain after a drought, bringing new life to the parts of me that I thought had been charred for good.

His lips parted, his breath exhaling into my lungs as his arms snaked around my lower back.

He kissed me slowly, tasting me, nibbling on my lower lip, touching the edges of my tongue, his fingers massaging my lower back.

He kissed me like I was someone to be savored, to be focused on with the entirety of his attention, to be explored until there was no part of me he couldn't see.

I kissed him back with fragile wonder, with a fluttering excitement in my heart that had let go of the last vestiges of fear and embraced the fall with an open heart.

It was a certainty rooted in a feeling that had grown with every moment spent with him, with every moment I observed him with my family, with every detail I learned about him and his relationships with those around him.

It was a feeling I couldn't deny anymore, one that I thought I had felt before for another, but that was now proven to be a pale imitation now that I experienced the full depth of it.

I pulled back from the kiss and he let me go. I didn't let him go. I held on to his shirt, clutching it in my fists as if it could give me strength to say the words I needed to say.

"I'm in love with you," I told him.

He brushed back a strand of hair from my face, tucking it behind my ear as his eyes crinkled with the weight of his smile.

"I love you too," he said. "I love the way that flowers distract you, their colors pulling your attention like a bird looking for the perfect piece of fluff for the nest. I love your attention to others, the way you keep checking in on your familiar, even though she growls at you to go away.

I love the way you try to take care of your matriarch even as she does the same to you.

I love the way you treat your young, with a care and kindness that goes beyond your own desires for yourself.

I love you because I see the woman that you are, full of the rich essence of life. "

"Oh," I said, a sigh of a word carried straight from my heart and for the first time I fully understood that to be known was to be loved.

"I intend to spend every day of our existence showing you how I love you with my actions, with my attention to your needs, and supporting you and your family in any way that you need. I will protect you, care for you, and support the beauty you want to create in the world," he continued.