Page 15

Chapter 15

Erik

Y ou do not need more supplies.

My chest heaves with breath as I swing down my axe, splitting log after log to store for the long winter ahead.

I always need more firewood.

We winter in the lake.

“I do not want to winter with you in the water any longer!” My voice rings out into the forest of birch and pine, causing the squirrels and birds to scatter. Silence follows, and Phorkys’s chiding tone is the only thing I can hear, grating the inside of my mind.

You could be rid of me forever if you would only–

Stop! Stop it! Why can you not accept that I will not mate her! The axe clatters to the ground as it slips from my hands. I reach up to my temples, fingers grasping at my hair as if I could physically remove him from my head if I only tugged hard enough. Let me go! I beg of you! Find another body to molest, I cannot bear it any longer!

Eight hundred seventy four years since I lost my family in the shipwreck, over ten thousand lunar cycles of this madness. And now, even in my island solitude I cannot escape from him.

Because I cannot escape from her. Lillian.

In my heart, I know that is the difference. The final weight upon the scale of my conscience that topples me over the edge. Alone, I could withstand the torture. But knowing that my fate is shared by one as delightful and lovely as Lillian, knowing what I must do to her to escape it, I…

I cannot.

But you want to.

I whip the axe back into my grip from the sandy ground and perch a log atop the chopping stump. Whack! I will not listen to him. Whack! I will not admit to those unnatural urges. Whack! No matter how much I yearn for her– whack– soft, swaying breasts to– whack– jiggle as I– whack– hover over her and– whack– fill her with my–

Thunk!

The axe wedges deep into the stump, fractionated bits of wood scattering across the beach as I abandon the task.

“No, no, no!” I scream in fury, running now, as if the faster I carry myself away from the beach, the further I could get from my own lust.

It is not merely my own desires that I imagine. I am not ashamed of wanting to pleasure a beautiful woman with my cock. To suck upon her swollen nipples, or lick her lower lips and bury my face into her sweet musk.

No, it is the inhuman images that make me shudder: twining my tentacles around her legs, burying my hectocotylus inside of her and fertilizing my lover’s eggs until Lillian’s stomach bulges with my seed…

The familiar strain in my loins, spurned on by those unholy thoughts, infuriates me. Why? “ WHY?”

You will never be free of these desires. Not until you realize them.

Have you not tormented me enough?

I am on my knees now, kneeling in the soft bed of pine needles deep in the quiet forest. The hot sun is hidden by the forest canopy, and the rivulets of sweat cool rapidly on the back of my neck and my arms, making the fine hairs covering my body stand on end.

I dig my fingers into the soft, dark earth for any comfort it might offer. But in the end, it is only rocks and grubs and fungus. It cannot cure my agony.

The monster does not answer, mocking me now with its silence instead of its miserable words and mind-pictures. But even without his urging, my mind circles back to Lillian. Lying in her nest of furs. Availing herself of my library, my little tote of treasures.

I remember the look on her face as she read the title of the first book: my favorite, with the European sailor who captures a sassy pirate lass and her crew at sea, only for her to win him over in the end, earning her people’s freedom with her love. While it is difficult for me to parse through all of the texts I gave her—many of the words I skip over because I cannot discern their sound or meaning—I often find myself filling in the story myself from the context of the scraps of text I am able to absorb and the salacious artwork on the cover.

The way the smile lit across her lips when she saw it! The way her toes wiggled in unrestrained glee—even the ones on her injured foot, albeit less energetically—filled me with an emotion that I haven’t felt for centuries.

Joy.

All I want is to return to the lakeside shelter with my arms full of firewood, build a blaze to last the night, and curl up beside her soft curves while she reads to me. Listen, until the sound of her voice hitches when she reaches the scene in chapter nine where the heroine seduces the stoic captain, stripping herself of her wet clothes after a storm. Watch the heat rise in the apples of her cheeks as she stumbles over the part where he grabs the maiden by the waist and carries her to the captain’s quarters, throws her onto the bunk, takes the peaks of her breasts into his hot mouth and–

“Ah–!”

A wet and sticky mess plasters the rough fabric of my modern short trousers. I had been palming myself through my clothing without realizing, allowing my daydream to become a… wet dream.

I shake my head. Pathetic.

Not wanting to return to the water, where Phorkys’s influence is bound to flood my consciousness with even more shame, I strip myself of the cumbersome shorts and wipe off the remaining evidence of my prepubescent fantasy.

While I’d love nothing more than to cozy up to Lillian for the entirety of the cold months, filling our days and nights with reading and lovemaking, that is entirely unrealistic. Irresponsible. Cruel.

She has a life in the modern world. A life she could, perhaps, return to—if I can only keep my lust at bay for long enough to nurse her to health and see her back to the mainland, before Keto’s influence becomes too great.

She isn’t yet hearing Her voice, after all.

And as long as that’s true, then mayhaps she stands a chance.

It is my favorite time of day when at last I return to her, dragging a convenient thick-wheeled wagon behind me stacked with reserves of dried meat and firewood. At my waist, a belt of freshly skinned squirrels obscure a fresh pair of shorts.

“It’s about time you got here!” Lillian whines. “I was about to die of boredom!”

Her tone is sharp, but her eyes sparkle with humor. The expression takes me off guard, particularly the devilish smirk tilting her full, pink lips, and my heart quickens in my chest.

“I wanted to make sure I gathered enough supplies.”

“We have more than enough supplies,” she says, the echo of Phorkys’s earlier scolding ringing in my brain. I hold back a wince. She peers behind me at the wagon. “Although, if that’s jerky you’re packing, then I’ll hand it to you–that was a good call. If there’s one thing we’re low on, it’s handy snacks. I refilled the water skin, though!”

She holds up the skin, beaming with self-satisfaction. I can’t help but mirror her joy.

“I am impressed! It could not have been easy to walk on the sand with your ankle.” She nods in agreement, raising her eyebrows and pushing her lips up in such an adorable, self-satisfied expression that I have to stifle a laugh.

What a woman!

“How is it?”

“The ankle? Meh.” She shrugs. “I mean, yeah, it hurts, and yeah, I’m not going to be entering any 5k’s anytime soon, but I’ll live.” I frown at that, not fully understanding her answer apart from the fact that it is still causing her pain. She tilts her head at me as I remove my belt to begin preparing our dinner. “Are those new shorts?”

My face heats as I clear my throat. “Uh–yes, I dirtied the other ones while preparing fuel for the fire.”

No need to tell her the details of how, exactly, I soiled them.

“Better take good care of those, then. I can’t imagine you have too many extra pairs lying around. Although, if you have to run around naked again you won’t hear me complaining.”

The nonchalant tone she uses is once again in conflict with her salacious words. I almost drop the squirrel carcass I am holding as I attempt to spear it onto its spit. “I am sorry you had to see me at my most…natural earlier.” I mutter. “I hope I did not scandalize you.”

“Uh, are you forgetting you left me with a pile of Harlequin romances? Pretty sure that would scandalize me way more than seeing your morning wood.”

I glance back to the wood pile. “It is dusk, not morning.”

She shakes her head. “Nevermind. Can I help with dinner?”

She favors her left side as she scoots closer to me, securing two squirrels onto a waiting spit. While she handles the food, I stoke the embers in the fireplace back to life.

It is comforting, setting about these domestic tasks with another human. Visions of my distant past come back with a bittersweet ache, as I remember my former wife and children. Lillian hums while she works, songs that are at once familiar and strange to the scene: a mix of modern and timeless.

“Erik,” she begins, and I lift my face to hers. “I’ve been thinking.”

“What about?”

“About this whole…” she waves, gesturing about the shelter. “Situation.”

My hands still in their task, and anxiety builds in my throat as I wait for her to continue.

“Obviously, this is weird. Right? God-monsters in Lake Superior, immortality, gills… it’s a lot for me to process. And seeing as I’ve been sitting around all day with a bum ankle, I’ve had plenty of time to think. And I’m doing my best to take it all in, but like I said, it’s a lot.”

She pauses, as if expecting me to cut in, but I do not speak. I have little to add to her analysis. Her words, though simple, are wise.

It is, as she says, “a lot.”

I merely nod in response, hoping she will continue.

“When you went to the cabin to get my clothes, did you notice—I mean, was anyone else there?”

“No.”

A wrinkle forms between her eyebrows. I long to reach over the fire and smooth it away. “Was there a sign of anyone? A car, or other clothes or anything?”

I do not know what she is talking about when she says “car.” It’s a word I’ve heard before but have little context for, aside from the fact that it is something modern. Regardless, the cabin appeared abandoned when I went there to gather her things.

“I am sorry, Lillian. There was no one.”

“Damn. So she’s really gone.”

Lillian looks down at her hands and fusses about with the stakes for the roasting spits. The first batch of meat is cooking over the hot embers before she speaks again.

“I didn’t come to the lake alone, Erik. Every year, my best friend—well, former best friend, Tiffany—and I, we come up to the cabin for a girls’ trip. This year was supposed to be our last one.”

“If you come every year, why would this be your last?” I ask, confused.

“Because she’s having a baby with her fiancé, Dean.”

“She is engaged to be married?”

She lets out a breath, heavy with sorrow. “Yeah. Yeah, she is.”

I toss another log on the flames and dust off my hands before crawling nearer to her. “This makes you sad. Are marriages and babies not happy things? In the books you like–”

“I’m happy for them!” She says, loudly and quite un happily. Again, her tone and words are in conflict, and it makes my nose scrunch. She glances at my expression and sighs, spinning the spit as she continues. “I mean, I’m happy for her, that she’s found someone she loves. She deserves that. But ever since she and Dean started dating, we’ve been growing apart. It’s like… the things we used to connect on, the stuff we always used to do together, it just isn’t clicking anymore, you know? She hardly ever makes time for me anymore, she barely texts me back. Like, this vacation, right? It was supposed to be our last one, but she wouldn’t even go swimming with me! And Dean came along. He was staying in a tent right down the beach from us!”

I nod slowly, still confused, but beginning to see why she sounds unhappy when she speaks of her best friend. “Even when you were with her, she was not wholly with you. You were lonely.”

“Yes!” She nods emphatically, her deep blue eyes sparkling with recognition. “It was like when we were hanging out she was there, physically, but not with me mentally, you know?”

“Hanging out?”

“Like, spending time together,” she explains.

“Ah.”

There are so many phrases she uses that are new to me. I want to ask her to slow down, but before I can she’s talking at a rapid pace.

“And like, I get it, right? She’s got other stuff on her mind with the baby coming and the wedding and her in-laws sounds like a whole lot and I know I should be supportive, but I really just wanted this last vacation to be about us , and our friendship, and a chance for everything to be like it used to be, you know?”

I nod, trying to keep up.

“But she couldn’t let any of that go. Dean had to come with us, and she wouldn’t go swimming, and everything kept coming back to the baby this, and the baby that, and she wouldn’t want to hurt the baby, what if something happened to the baby? When she should know how much saying those things might hurt and be triggering for me…”

She looks up at me, and my eyes must be wide with confusion, because she allows the words to fade on her tongue. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t understand the situation, and I’m totally ranting now, but I do have a point.”

“I believe you.”

She smiles then, a small curve of her lips, the joy of which does not reach her eyes. Not knowing what to do, I reach out my hand to place it over hers.

Her fingers twitch beneath mine, before she shifts her weight so she can grasp my palm.

“What I’m trying to say is, we grew apart. We were probably always going to, you know? It happens. Our paths diverged, and that’s just fate. It’s sad, yeah, but with her wanting kids and me being—well, me —it was bound to, eventually.”

I empathize. As she speaks of the cruelty of fate, I squeeze her hand. But there is something in her words that does not make sense to me, beyond just her modern euphemisms.

“When you say that you were bound to grow apart because you are you,” I ask, speaking slowly to make sure I do not mince my words. “What do you mean?”

Her throat bobs, and moisture gathers in her eyes. My chest aches to see so much emotion building inside her. I do not understand. She is Lillian; she is beautiful and funny and lovely. What about her could cause such a rift in her friendships?

“I lost a baby. Years ago,” she says. A single tear spills from the surplus clinging to her eyelashes, and once it falls, more follow. “And the doctors said–well, they told me that there’s something wrong with me. I get these polyps, I guess, and it makes it really hard for pregnancies to be viable. So.”

She shrugs and lifts her sad eyes to the sky, as if to punctuate her sentence.

“So… what?”

She sniffs. More tears fall from her eyes, and I squeeze her hand harder. She pulls it away to wipe at her face, and I instantly regret my attempt to comfort her. But before I can back away from her and give her space, she grabs my hand again and sighs.

“I can’t have kids, Erik.”

“Because of the–” I try to remember the word she said. “Pollies?”

“Polyps, yeah,” she corrects. “Or something like that. I mean, I’ve had PCOS my whole life and my periods are awful, so like, I’ve always known I’m probably not especially fertile or anything, but like, I wanted the option, you know? And when I found out I was pregnant, there was a part of me that was really excited. Even with my boyfriend leaving me and my job being boring and all the other crap in my life, there was something there , you know? Something that made it worth it. It felt like something I could do. Something I would be good at, raising a child. I–I wanted to meet them. Him or her. Be a better person for them.

“But clearly, it wasn’t meant to be. I’m not supposed to be a mother, I guess. It’s not in the cards.”

The meaning of her words strike me, and I believe I know what she is attempting to communicate. “A cruel whim of fate.”

She nods, wiping at her eyes again. I grasp her hand again, and reach my other to her face, wiping away the errant tears for her with my thumb.

She gives me a watery smile. One that I return.

“Lillian, I am sorry that fate has been so cruel to you. You are so beautiful, so lovely, so…” I clear my throat. “So perfect. It is an excruciating injustice to see what fate has done to you.”

She abandons twirling the meat over the fire and leans her face into my hand, holding it with hers. Her words are just above a whisper when she replies, “You, too, Erik. You’ve also been fucked in the ass by fate, and it’s stupid and dumb and it just fucking sucks.”

I startle at her language, and a wave of heat rushes to my cheeks. I clear my throat and pull away from her.

“Your words are very–ah– graphic. I do not…I have been alone many years, and while I have been curious to explore certain pleasures in my loneliness, I do not believe–”

Her responding laugh is loud and raucous and honking, and it breaks the sad, weighted air of the shelter. I feel it shatter the tension between us as she wipes her face again, new tears bursting forth as she gasps for air.

“No, it’s an expression!” She continues to laugh, and I tilt my head. “When something fucks you in the ass, it’s like saying it’s screwing you over. Beating you down, ruining your life.”

“Oh!” I heave a sigh of relief, my chest also shaking with laughter. She has so many strange sayings! “I do not agree with that expression!”

“What?” She’s wheezing now, water pouring from her eyes faster than she can smooth it away. “What do you mean?”

“Fucking in the ass,” I clarify. “Your meaning for it is silly. Why should that mean ruining one’s life?”

“I mean…” There’s a pause as Lillian thinks about my question. “You know what? You have a point! It’s a pretty prudish expression, isn’t it?”

“Prudish?”

“Like sheltered, or insecure. A prude is someone who thinks sex is bad.”

I chew on her explanation for a moment. The heavy mood from earlier has lifted. Lillian’s face is ruddy from her tears, but far less sad. Her expression grows thoughtful as she watches me.

“Erik, what are your feelings about sex?”

The question takes me by surprise. For the past few days, my priority has been to hide all of my sexual feelings and urges from her. Knowing that if I were to give in, I would be putting her in danger. Placing her in the path of my monster’s destruction. Potentially ruin her life.

Fuck her in the ass, as it were.

The phrase seems infinitely more appropriate in the context of my curse.

I resume cooking duties, stoking the cooking fire to a healthy blaze and tossing on another log. I take over the rotation of the spit while Lillian looks on, expectantly.

“Perhaps I am a prude,” I say at last. “I do not believe that sex is bad. But the monster within me… he has desires I cannot abide. And I believe that, for me, sex can only lead to damnation.”

For several minutes, the only sound in the small space is the crackling of the fire and the swish, swish, swish of spit on stake. I let my vision go hazy, the light of the fire blurring into a pulsing pastiche of orange and brown.

A soft pressure rubs my shoulder, and I blink to see Lillian kneeling behind me, her hand brushing my back. “That’s awful, Erik.”

A lump forms in my throat. I swallow, the sensation of her touch feeling at once wonderful and uncomfortable, and nudge her away. “It is the only way.”

She bends at the waist, pushing her head into my field of vision, just above my shoulder. “Is it?”

The heat of the blaze is stifling. My palms are hot and clammy with sweat. I remove myself from the shrinking space between the woman and the fire, scrambling out of the lean-to and grabbing the water skin as I go.

“I am going to get more water.”

“Erik, I just filled it up–”

“I will return soon,” I shout over my shoulder, running towards the shore as soon as my feet hit the ground.