Hammer & Air (8 page)

We awoke from our nap that first evening, and as Hammer used the bathroom and sponged the sweat from his trembling limbs (a thing he begged me to let him do himself) I went to the kitchen for the rest of the bread and jam.

I found—along with a baked chicken and a skin of goat’s milk—a hefty tome of fairy stories with a leather binding which was tinted a fantastic color of cobalt blue.

I pulled out the book first and fondled the gilt-edged hide pages with reverent hands. There were finely plated illustrations, with what looked to be hand-colored details, and the beauty alone of such a book made my eyes burn. But perhaps that were just the day for it, right?

“Thank you. Oh… gods of motion, gods of magic, thank you. I could not have chosen better for Hammer myself.”

He’d insisted on coming to eat at the table, and I’d insisted that I bring him a tray for the bed. We settled on him eating from a small table at the hearth, and as I watched him cozy into a big, stuffed leather chair with a throw over his lap, something inside me clicked rightly to place. The cottage might have been enchanted, but maybe part of that were Hammer.

We sat and ate (silently, because that were how we were raised at the orphanage) and then, when I’d cleared the plates, I showed him the book. His eyes glowed and a child’s eagerness crossed his usually grim mouth.

“Would you like me to read it?” I asked gently, just to watch him nod with that wonderful innocent happiness. The things I hadn’t known about him—the learning of them were as glorious as the fucking, if truth be told.

The story I chose that night were about a lass named Snowdrop who fled into a forest and met up with seven little men who gave her safety.

Hammer listened avidly, but when I were done, he snorted.

“They must have been poofty as we are,” he said, and I grinned at him.

“Why would you say that?”

“Because otherwise, they would have buggered the poor lass senseless. I think she only pretended to be dead to get away from them!”

I laughed then. “Well, not all of them were pooft; some of them must have been like you, liking both, otherwise, they wouldn’t have had to put her in the glass box when she didn’t look dead.”

He laughed back and then rolled his eyes. “Aye, and I don’t think much of her prince. What? He sees her lying there like a statue and thinks that’s a woman he must have? For all he knows, she’s dumb as a potato and has a voice like a poker against a steel plate.”

I laughed some more, but he grew thoughtful and cast me a glance from under lowered brows. “No,” he said with decision. “It’s a pretty story, but in real life you want someone you can know, good and bad, and who doesn’t make you long to jump on a sailing ship and never return.”

I returned his thoughtful look with one of my own longing. “Yes,” I said gruffly. “That’s exactly who I want.”

But he didn’t see my look. “Go ahead and read the next one, Eirn!” he begged, and my smile turned sad as I did what he asked. This one were about a pair of silly lovers, one of whom gets turned into a bird. It were a long story, and we had to mark it in the middle for the next night, because Hammer began to nod off in the middle. We made it to bed and stripped to our small clothes and crawled in. The softness of the mattress and the cleanness of the sheets were still blissful to both of us, and now that Hammer no longer threw off heat like a smith’s forge, I felt free to roll into his body as we had when we were camping in our bedrolls.

He wrapped his strong arm around my chest and rubbed his cheek against my back and then made a sound of complaint.

“You left your shirt on.”

I grunted and stripped it off, throwing it to the end of the bed, and he sighed in contentment as his cheek rubbed skin this time.

“Eirn?”

“Yeah?” Hammer would have used the old word, “Aye,” but that weren’t my word.

“You miss fucking?”

“Yeah.”

He yawned and pressed hard into my back, but he were too tired and we both knew it.

“Tomorrow,” he promised.

“When you’re better,” I told him, and I took the hand on my chest and kissed it before falling asleep myself.

It were good we’d decided to settle in for the winter, because by the time Hammer were up and about and ready to venture outside, winter arrived. Unlike the winter in real time, in the forest that near to killed us, this one didn’t announce itself in built up frost and the occasional snow flurry—no. One day, Hammer and I tramped about and found the border of magic around the cottage (if we were careful, and sensitive to the changes in the air, it could be done without the horrible sense of dislocation I’d endured before) and the ground were dry grass, brown leaves and frosted branches.

The next day, it were three feet of snow.

Hammer and I cleared the snow out from around the cottage—mostly for something physical to do—and then spent the day inside. The cabinet gave us cocoa, cream, and honey (which neither of us had asked for) and I made us mugs of chocolate, which we drank standing up in the kitchen. Hammer said he could live on that drink if we had to, and when I looked at him to reply, I saw that he still had cream on his lip.

I grinned then, and caught his hands to hold him still, and then playfully went to lick the cream off his mouth. He watched me move closer with his lips slightly parted and wide sober eyes, and as my tongue touched his skin, the moment went from playful to serious just that quick.

Our lips met, slow and then savage, and we barely remembered to set our mugs down before we kissed our way to the bedroom, shedding our clothes as we went.

We were naked, and I were lying on the bed, stretched out below Hammer as he pinned my hands above my head to keep me still so he could own my mouth completely, before it occurred to either of us that we were fucking in the daylight, on a bed.

It were our first time on a bed.

We both looked at each other and gasped, and he let go of my hands and pushed himself up on his elbows and lowered himself at the hips, and he were suddenly there, on top of me, looking at me quietly while our aching cocks throbbed against each other in time.

There were something in his eyes then, something like the eagerness he’d had when I read him fairy tales, or that look I’d seen, way back in summer, when he’d thrust his hand down my pants and I’d said, “Not her, idiot! You!”

It were happiness, not just to be in bed, but to be skin-to-skin with me.

I looked at him with nothing less than my soul in my eyes, and he took it. His next kiss weren’t hard or savage. It were firm and tender, and his hands framed my face and soothed down my neck and my shoulders.

He would have moved his mouth then, to follow those hard, scarred hands, but I didn’t want the kiss to end, and when I protested, he came back to kiss me some more. And some more. And some more.

Our bodies were quaking with urgency, with the need to fuck and come, but our mouths, our souls, didn’t seem to want to break off contact for that other thing. Our hips ground savagely, and harder, and I kept flexing my arse, craving him inside of me, craving that sweet burn, the shudder of my body as he nailed that thing inside me that made me see stars, craving the fullness of him, crammed into me, making my chest swell with the force of his cock buried inside me to the root of him.

He grunted and shoved two fingers into my mouth, and I sucked on them,
hard.
He pulled them out, covered in spit, and slipped them under me. The first one burned, the second one scorched, and then he spread them, and I gasped.

As I breathed in air, he filled me with his cock, and that were as good. The pleasure… it were excruciating, and it were necessary, and I screamed with it, and shoved myself further on him, before he took over and fucked me hard into the softness at my back.

And our eyes never left the other, and our lips met skin desperately, yearning for contact, begging for connection, howling for the closeness that didn’t come by fucking alone, but that we had no words for.

His end were coming; he’d been sick, his arm still gave him some pain, and he couldn’t last long.  He went up on his knees, slung my thighs up against his shoulders and supported my arse and my hips with his big, broad hands. “Yank on it,” he growled, and I didn’t even think about disobeying as I found my prick and began to pull.

My head tilted back at my rough strokes, and my eyes started to close, until he snarled, “Look at me, dammit!” And I snapped to and did.

He weren’t treating me like I would break. He were fucking me like an equal—damn me, if he weren’t—and it were hard, so hard to keep to his eyes as he drove us both to shivering, painful, swollen heights of wanting with every thrust into my arse.

In the end, he were the one who closed his eyes, who threw his head back and grunted and howled. In the end, there were something so tender in him, so vulnerable, that he had to hide it, and as my own cock spurted and spat come onto my belly, he collapsed forward, not minding the mess, and buried his face into my neck and sobbed breath into the hollow of my ear.

I wrapped my arms awkwardly around his shoulders and thought to soothe him, but he were trembling so hard that my embrace tightened, and I started to shake in return. We just held there, clenched together, still joined, quivering with the power of the fucking, and of all the things that we didn’t know to say.

Eventually he muttered, “Stay there,” and rolled away, leaving my body open and weeping with his spend, and covered in my own. I heard sounds from the washroom. He came back with a cloth, and he cleaned me up with hands that shook, and set the cloth aside and climbed back into the bed with me, although it were still daylight. He pulled the fluffy white cover up around us while I looked at him with wide eyes, and then he lay back and patted his good shoulder. I put my head on it and wrapped my arms around his middle and clung, and he dropped kisses in my hair in the silence.

That night, we heard a sound at the door.

I were sitting, reading Hammer another fairy tale, (this one about a horrid little man who liked to kidnap children) and when Hammer looked at me shortly, I held up my hand. It didn’t sound threatening; and I didn’t like the thought of offering violence to a place that had brought us nothing but peace.

I went to the doorway, cautiously, it were true, and opened the door a wee bit to see what were there.

A bear stood there, seven feet tall, pawing softly at the door.

I gasped and slammed the door shut. Hammer stood from the front room and came into the kitchen, and as I leaned against the door and gasped like a fish on a dock, he looked at me in shock.

“What is it?”

“It’s a bear!”

“A
what
?”

“A
bear
!”

“Well, what’s it doing out there?”

I blinked and thought a minute.

“Knocking.”

And now Hammer were the one gaping like a fish on a dock.

“
WHAT?
”

I shrugged, baffled, and not as afraid as I should have been. “Well, it were standing on its hindquarters and batting at the door to get our attention. What does that sound like to you?”

Hammer’s lake-blue eyes were as large as I’d ever seen.

“It sounds like knocking,” he said, setting back with a puzzled frown. “I’m thinking we let it knock!”

I grunted, unhappy. “I’m thinking…” I muttered to myself, reasoning. “The thing is,” I said, turning to Hammer, “why would it be knocking? If it were going to attack, it would have. But this cottage… it’s a good place. It’s seeming like a creature—even a furry one with teeth—that would be knocking at a door like this one, well, it would not be an enemy. You hear me on this, Hammer?”

Hammer let out a huff of air. “Aye,” he muttered, because it were the old word, and then, as though remembering himself. “Yeah. Yeah yeah. But I’m not liking it, Eirn. When you and I are shredded bits o’ bear dinner, you make sure….”

I grinned at him. He were not accustomed to uncertainty, nor to taking my lead. On impulse I leaned in and kissed his cheek roughly. “I’ll be sure to write it in blood, that it were my thick idea. In the meantime, even if we’re food for bears…”

“At least we’ll be together,” he finished cheekily, and I grinned again, mostly to hide my fear.

Then I opened the door.

The bear gave an affronted grunt and then shook himself, all over, the snow throwing off him in chunks of ice and pebbles big and hard enough to make Hammer and I duck and fend them off with our arms.

“Bloody animal!” Hammer swore. “Big lummoxy oaf! Get your snow off in the out of doors, dammit!”

The bear made a sound that I could only classify as apology and backed up. This time he shook the snow off on the porch instead of on us. When he’d gotten as much as he could (which were nowhere near all!) he made that little growl/moan in his throat again and looked at us questioningly.

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Come on in. But stay in the kitchen until we get the worst of that off you, right?”

“Get it off with what?” Hammer wanted to know. He scowled at the creature standing in our kitchen with some resentment. (Yes, rather presumptuous, but the cottage felt like ours, and so did the kitchen. What of it?)

“Uhm…” I grimaced. “The rake. You get the rake, I’ll get the broom, and we’ll get him fit to…”

“To roam the house?” Hammer asked, still in disbelief, and I shrugged.

“Everywhere but the bedroom,” I said firmly, and he rolled his eyes, apparently mollified.

“Good. I’d hate to have to take that thing up the arse. When they said
hung like a bear
, they weren’t kidding, were they?”

I got a look at the bear’s tackle, hanging low from near its back end, and whistled lowly. “No thank you!” I muttered, and then winked at Hammer. “You’re quite enough for me, you bloody bugger. Here, let me go fetch the rake.”

The bear looked at Hammer sideways and growled.

“I’ll go get it,” Hammer said with ill temper. “It’s clear he likes you better.”

He did actually seem to like me better. Hammer and I cleaned him off with rake and broom, and the bear groaned in pleasure as we managed to scratch itches he probably didn’t know he had. I noticed that when I got a little rough he simply twitched away from me, but when Hammer were anything but gentle and genteel with his rake, the bear would growl like a menace. I told the damned thing to pipe down—if it weren’t for Hammer’s good graces, I would have left him outside to become the world’s fuzziest snow-covered hill, and then what would he do? He gave an affronted grunt and I scratched him between the eyes with the broom. That seemed to soothe him—he flopped on his bottom, and I told him he were probably clean enough to go sleep on the animal fur rug in front of the fire.