Page 67 of Thief of Roses
XXVII.
With only a brief interruptionof their activities to get their food, they spent the rest of the day and night together, engaged in sex and play.Although they had discussed rest and indolence the next morning, they could not help but renew their coupling with enthusiasm that day and many days after.Though Baró’s fingers were no longer suited for the pleasure of a woman due to the claws, he employed his mouth masterfully much to Rivani’s surprise and delight.She used hers quite a bit herself and before long, they both sported magnificent bruises pleasurably attained and proudly worn, marking each other in a territorial show of mating and belonging.
Although sleeping in each other’s arms had been an activity they performed long before they coupled, their exhaustion and rapturous expenditure of energy meant that their entwined limbs and soft discussions in the dark took a deeper turn and though neither of them ever used the word “love,” it had never been far from Rivani’s lips or thoughts.When their chests pressed together, their hearts beat in harmony.Would she ever sleep again when the steady reassuring drum of Baró’s heart no longer echoed in her ear as she dozed?She feared that when she left, she would never feel safe or happy again, bereft of his arms around her and the warm solidity of his body against hers.
Rivani never imagined being more content than months ago when they simply shared gentle caresses and longing looks.She was wrong.Her contentment gave way to bliss with the unexpected turn of their relationship.For all that Baró appeared intimidating and monstrous, she had never known and would never find again, such a gentle, considerate lover.Waking in his arms developed into a wondrous routine filled with smiles and kisses and disclosures of dreams.Rivani had also foregone braiding her hair and in the morning, Baró helped her pick out the mats that formed overnight, a ritual accompanied with Baró’s nibbles and kisses along her neck and shoulders and occasional massaging as he worked.She never enjoyed waking up so much.
Well into the second sennight of their newfound physical intimacy, Rivani woke from a vague dream at the sound of a horrible wail of pain.Startled and disturbed, she sought gentle nuzzles, teasing kisses, and Baró’s claws tickling her skin to forget the disturbance.The coldness of his absence roused her.
Baró sat off their nest of furs and bed linens, whimpering.
Although Baró’s use of words had been constant and consistent these many months, he struggled with them now.She had no words herself to offer.He altered again while they slept.He had clawed at the new attributes leaving open, tortured wounds and streaming blood in the wake of his evident panic.
“Baró,” Rivani said.She sat and put her hand on his shoulder, trying to recall him.“Baró!”
The sharper, louder use of his name and the command built into it snapped him from the destructive act of digging out the bones.He gazed at her vacantly, his face, neck, shoulders, chest, arms, and hands covered in his blood.She watched his eyes, their hollow depths regaining awareness and with that awareness, shame.His eyes lowered.His body slumped in defeat.He attempted to cover himself while turning from her to go.
“Baró,” this time it was much softer, almost pleading.“Dear gods, Baró, let me help you.”
She did not wait to receive a refusal before she got up and pulled her clothes from where she had discarded them, not due to shame of nakedness but because of the cold away from his body.When she went to check him, he kept his face averted.
“I will be right back.”
She sprinted to the kitchens to get supplies.She needed the space and distance too to have a moment with her anxieties and figure out what to do.
Her greatest concern came in his lack of speech.She could understand not speaking, shocked into speechlessness by waking to find himself encrusted with his own bone.Such a thing would unnerve anyone, but he had confessed to difficulties with words in the past.He had cried out like a startled creature and whined with an animal’s despair, but there had been no words.She feared his mind had changed and words were no longer part of his memory, or that his throat had altered, or that the expanding snout had transformed the shape of his mouth and tongue and jaw beyond speech.Intelligence remained in his eyes and she trusted in their shared resourcefulness to overcome such a barrier.But the blow to him would cement some inner surrender.He had been through so much already and he kept a tenuous grip on and diminished valuation of his humanity, prizing it as the last vestiges of something she might find of worth in him.
When she returned to their shared bed, Baró had restored the fire and sat by it, his back to it, putting most of him in shadow.Rivani understood his strategic maneuver.She sighed as she put her burdens down.
“I need to see you, Baró.Please.”
He vacillated but eventually obliged, turning his body towards the light rather than away from it, even if he did keep his hand covering his face and his arms over his chest.The blood had been cleaned off his arms but his shoulders and his chest continued to drip blood.She did not have to see blood on his muzzle to know that he had licked the wounds he could reach.And his face...Though he kept the one side covered with his hand, streaks remained of the blood he tried to wipe away.Fresh blood leaked down his cheek.
“Baró,” she admonished, trying not to betray her concern, “I said that I would tend to your wounds.”She set up her items around him, trying to hurry but not trying to behave in any way that might make him realize her degree of terror.
When she approached him and pried his arms away so that she could have full access to his injuries and see the new changes that had occurred, Rivani flinched.She bit down on her tongue so that she would not do or say anything daft.The blood seeped down his chest and shoulders but the flow slowed.New blood bubbled from the wound sites in his arms.Blood trickled from several torn areas around his throat and pooled in the new ring of bone that circled his neck.His face, now revealed, sported several deep cuts over his nose and on his brow, and a deep crater under his eye where he had torn out the small bony plates that he also bore on his left cheek.
“Easy to clean,” she announced, getting one of the clean strips of cloth, wetting it, and beginning to wipe at the excess blood starting with his face.
When she could see the cratered wound, she got another cloth, packed the wound, and had him apply pressure while she moved onto the rest of him.The new bony ridges that had formed did not repel her but they unsettled her.She mopped up at the pools of blood and then spent time cleaning the wounds where she staunched the bleeding.She did not think that any of them would necessitate her needle.She tended his face last, the blood having stopped flowing with such abandon.The gouges of his claws, though deep enough to cause permanent blemishes, would not require greater tending.The crater, however, needed bandaging.With that complete, she cleaned his muzzle and paws to get the dried blood from them, lest it mat the fur and cause pain.Baró sat still and silent through it all, not putting up a token fuss or showing a moment of pain, even as play.It worried her more than anything.
“I hate to say it, Baró, but I think they may scar.”
“And ryuneth my byaytie, thou menest?”
Her rush of relief almost winded her.She had been so afraid of his silence.He had lapsed into his native tongue, but it still meant that he had not been robbed of his speech and remained lucid in his faculties.She threw her arms around him, insensible to the fact that she had just bandaged deep wounds where she clung to him.
Baró grunted but endured her arms around him.He put his own arms around her and rubbed her back through her shirt.
“Dost thou grieve for my lost looks, Rivani?”
How did she tell him her true fears?He must share them.She had no desire to worry him further.
“I feared that more than visible harm had been done to you.”
She pressed her face into his neck, flinching when she met the new bony protuberances that circled it.Instead, she kissed the area behind his ear and twined her fingers in his fur, lest he interpret her initial withdrawal due to the strange bone formation.It was due to it, of course, but not in the way he might infer.
