Page 23 of Feral Keep

The shock of it isn’t temperature. It’s the shock of clean. My skin has been layered in weeks of sweat, dirt, dried blood, the residue of the canopy—a stale, sour smell I’d stopped noticing on myself because I never got far enough from it to smell anything else. The water touches that and the clean cuts through it like a blade through cloth. A line of wet on my calf. Clean skin underneath. The contrast is so sharp it’s almost pain.

He lowers me into the water. His cock shifts inside me as my body changes angle—the prehensile tip adjusting, the girth pressing against different nerves. A pulse of warmth through my pelvis. My hips jerk. His arm tightens.

The water rises to my waist. My chest. It meets the heat of his body behind me, his crimson skin against my back, the water and his heat combining into a single temperature that erases the boundary between inside and outside.

I’m clean.

The thought is simple. The feeling is not. My body starts to shake—not cold, not fear, not the vibration from his knot. A tremor that starts in my hands and moves through my arms into my shoulders. The shaking of a body that has been holding for a very long time, encountering a gentleness it has no defense against.

It isn’t only my hands. My jaw shakes too, and behind my ribs something loosens that I didn’t know was clenched, an old fist finally opening its fingers one knuckle at a time. There’s no word ready for what’s under the fist. It might be grief. It might be relief. In this water they feel like the same thing wearing two different faces.

His hands in my hair.

The matted, broken braids. Gretchen’s braids.

She put them in two days before the escape. Sat behind me on the barracks floor with her fingers in my hair and her mouth shut and the quiet between us doing the talking neither of us had energy for. She sectioned my 4c curls into parts. Worked through the tangles without pulling—she was the only one who never pulled—and braided them tight and close to my scalp. Tight braids lasted longer between washes. We only got water for hair once a week.

Two days later I was through the fence. The braids went with me. Through weeks of running, of rain, of fever, of the canopy pressing against me on all sides. The braids matted. Broke down. Became something that was no longer braids but was still, under the matting, the shape of Gretchen’s hands on my head.

His crimson fingers touch the first braid.

He doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t know another woman’s hands put it there. He doesn’t know that the pattern of the weaving is a pattern Gretchen learned from her mother, in a world that doesn’t exist anymore.

He sees matted hair. He sees a thing on his mate that needs tending.

Don’t you dare. Gretchen’s voice in my head, not mine—the particular firmness of a woman who spent ten minutes on every braid. Those are mine. I put those there.

“Don’t,” I say. Out loud this time. My hand rises from the water and catches his wrist.

His wrist is wider than my grip. My fingers don’t close around it. He looks down at my hand on his arm. At my face. At the tears that haven’t started yet but are building behind my eyes like weather.

His fingers work into the first braid. Slow. The claws retracted, the pads of his fingers pressing through the matted sections with a patience that makes no sense for what he is. He doesn’t rip. Doesn’t pull. The braid loosens under his hands a section at a time—and the hair comes with it. Dark strands sliding free of my scalp and drifting into the water around us. Months of starvation, of no protein, of my body eating itself from the inside. Hair is a luxury. My body stopped paying for it a long time ago.

I cry.

Tears run down my face and into the water without a sound. They mix with the dirt, the undone braids, the everything else. Silent tears—the only kind the camp allowed. You could cry in the barracks at night as long as you didn’t make noise. The women who cried quietly learned to cry without the sound. The sound brought attention. Attention brought hands.

He moves to the second braid. More hair comes loose. It floats on the surface of the water—dark tangles, thin and dead, the water carrying it away from me. By the third braid the loss is impossible to miss. By the fourth I stop looking. He can probably smell the salt of the tears on my skin. His nose twitches. But he doesn’t stop. His hands in what’s left of my hair. Each one releasing more of Gretchen’s pattern and more of my hair with it, until the water around us is full of the dark strands and my scalp feels bare in places.

My hand wants to check, fingers hovering half an inch from my scalp before I make them stop. The old, animal instinct in me is already grieving hair I haven’t even looked at yet, mourning it fast and quiet the way you learn to mourn anything the camps get around to taking eventually.

Before Gretchen, there was my mother.

The memory comes up from the water like the strands of hair—slow, surfacing. My mother behind me on the ground outside our shelter in the settlement, her fingers in my hair, oil she’d traded for from another group. The smell of it. The pull-that-wasn’t-a-pull, firm enough to section, gentle enough to not hurt. She hummed while she worked. I can’t remember the song. I can’t remember her voice at all anymore, just the hum of it still moving through her chest into my back where I sat between her knees.

She was the first person who touched my hair like it mattered. Then Gretchen. Now this.

A nine-foot crimson male undoing Gretchen’s braids in a stone pool in the canopy while knotted inside me, and most of my hair is floating in the water instead of on my head, and the gentleness of his hands is the cruelest thing he’s done.

Not because it hurts.

Because it doesn’t.

Because the gentleness is worse than the camp ever was. The camp I could endure. I had a script for the camp. Go quiet. Go still. Wait for it to pass.

There is no script for a monster washing your hair like it matters to him. There is no script for hands in your curls that don’t pull, don’t use the hair as a handle to move you where you don’t want to go.

The tears run and I let them because stopping them would cost energy and I’m spending all my energy on the confusion of being tended by the thing that took me.