Page 31 of Bride of Choice

This was it. The end of us. It had to be or I’d just keep getting sucked in.

“We didn’t even use protection,” I quietly wailed, painfully aware we could be walked in on by some rando at any moment. “And my shit is already cold!”

All that Yeti love juice he’d been pumping into me started to leak down my leg, gathering inside my snow pants.

Looking a little wide-eyed and wild at my admission, he hugged me to him, nearly squeezing my next breath out of me. He cupped his hand over the hole in the crotch of my pants, like that would just make everything all better.

“You’re never going to accept me and we’re never going to make a baby,” I went on, snotting and weeping all over his shoulder as my arms wrapped around him and I held him to me so tight he grunted as my nails dug deep.

“Nevers with the nevers,” the idiot I was clinging to muttered into my shoulder as he bent his tall frame to cuddle me to him. “Jojo-knee smells ready make babies…” the moron that just didn’t know when to stop talking rambled on.

“I- What?!” I screeched, jerking back to shove him away from me. “What do you mean- Rek?!! What the fuck?!”

“Rek say Jojo-knee smells ready make babies,” he said slowly. I could see the moment he realized his admission was the wrong thing to say.

“And you just blew your wad, like that? No, hey, wanna make babies, baby? Nothing? Just stick it in and fill ‘er up?!!” My hand lifted and I snapped my fingers in his face. “Are you insane?! You hid all my fucking tea!”

Gaping at him, I could not believe him.

Clearing his throat, trying not to look sheepish, he offered, “Jojo-knee not say she wants make babies?”

“Not with you being an overbearing dumb ass!” I shouted at him. “My god- You- That’s- Irresponsible- I can’t- We just- ARRGGGH!” Grabbing up all of my shit, withdrawing my dust of shame, going for full coverage, I pinched off a handful, cupped it in my hand, and blew it at Rek as he scrambled to undo what he’d just done.

“Consider this our official break up. I’m dumping you!” I snarled.

Rek shouted, coughed, slapping one hand over his eyes as the other fanned at his face.

Shaking my head at him, gritting my teeth past my still sore hip and even achier ass thanks to a bit of against the tree fun, I headed straight home, gift delivery be damned.

Rek called after me and ended up with a basket of greens chucked at him for his efforts.

That sorry son of a- Did the subterfuge never end?!

“Don’t follow me!” I warned him.

“How Rek follow?! Rek not see!!” he hollered after me.

“I hope you get pink eye!”

“Rek hopes Jojo gets pink in the eyes!” he bellowed back belligerently. “Jojoknee bad- BAD female!”

Taking the back way, nervous all the while about not only bumping into someone of the village but some beastie from the forest just beyond, on my way back to my hut I came across a lone Lo denaii hand fishing in a stream. I wasn’t sure but I thought he might be the one I’d bumped into earlier. He got one look at me, blinked, jerked his head in my direction, about to gawk, when I snapped, “Take a picture, it lasts longer!” There. That’d shut him up!

Once inside my hut, I got one look at myself and smacked my hand over my face. Hell, I looked a fright. No wonder nosy newt had been staring! I was Hagatha in the flesh!

When I normally would have washed up, changed, and called it a day, hiding away in bed until I felt reasonably human again, I did in fact wash up, change, and douse myself with a good deal of the dust of shame, but then went around gathering anything and everything that reminded me of Rek.

Reaching under my bed, I felt around for my mangled suitcase, still stuck in the hole, blocking the tunnelway below, and started shoving said items into the hole Rek had punched into it, then down below it when it proved too full.

His pelt remained, the only thing I kept from him. I couldn’t part with it.

I still had two other pelts that I just couldn’t seem to part with either. Fuck and Run’s pelt and Mr. Mysterious.

Damn, I sounded as crazy as I felt.

For not the first time, and certainly not to be the last, I wondered what the hell I was doing. With myself, my life, basically in freaking general. Everything felt so upside down.

I couldn’t do this anymore— didn’t want to.

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