---Raala’s perspective---

  Bliss…

  This is utter euphoria!

  My heart does backflips in my chest as I fiercely press my lips into his!

  I feel his bristly black beard as it tickles my lower face.

  The front side of my nose squashes against his cheek while the right rests against his cute, short, narrow, single ridged and surprisingly stiff one that feels like it has much more cartilage in it than mine does.

  His glorious, sour tang fills my nostrils as contentment fills my stomach.

  Everything is exactly right with the world…

  Then, all at once, I realise what I’m doing… and everything is suddenly very wrong!

  My guts in freefall, I push us apart and, terrified, open my eyes to look up at him.

  He’s staring back, his tiny brown eyes bulging wide and contemptuous alarm twisting his face!

  There’s no hope of him not having noticed that I just spent a full two breaths kissing him! There’s no playing it off as anything other than what it was!

  He knows!

  He KNOWS!

  NO!!!

  This isn’t what was supposed to happen!

  I wasn’t done with my reconnaissance!

  I’m standing before a man who’s definitely about to rip my heart out of my chest and crush it in his spindly brown fingers before hurling it into the snow!

  The terror I had in coming out of the tent and seeing him just a few handlengths from a speartooth (momentarily banished by the kiss) has returned, ten thousand times worse!

  Without waiting for my mind’s say so, my legs are pounding through the snow, sprinting me away from Ksem before he can ruin my life forever!

  It takes me several steps to realise I’ve left my spear back there on the ground but I immediately decide to abandon it to him.

  “Raala! Wait!” he shouts after me but I don’t stop.

  The few dozen bounding strides it takes me to make it most of the way back to the tent give me time to realise there’s not really any getting away from him, is there…?

  I can run faster but I’ll run out of energy in no time at this pace and he’ll easily be able to follow my tracks through the snow… I also don’t want to be out without a weapon in a forest I already know has at least one speartooth in it!

  I can’t escape, so I have to hide and hope he chooses to leave me alone.

  I dive into the tent, fasten the door and snatch up his towel.

  Instead of hanging it up as a privacy screen, I throw it over my head, swaddle it across my chest and curl into a ball on my side of the firepit.

  I lie here in the blanket that smells like him, choking, sobbing, panting hard and still feeling like I’m suffocating, my heart thundering in my chest and my thoughts in chaos.

  I feel like the world’s at its end!

  Just long enough passes that I think he might’ve taken the hint when I hear his footsteps crunching through the snow.

  “Raala?!” he calls through the door.

  “NO!” I answer, reflexively.

  “What?” he asks, confused.

  “It didn’t happen! Nothing happened! You imagined it!” I lie, frantically.

  “Raala, you just kissed me…”

  “NO I DIDN’T!!!” I scream, desperately!

  “Yes, you did…” he corrects, firmly “…what I want to know is why?”

  “Go away! Leave me alone!” I sob.

  I hear the wooden *clonk* of my spear being put down next to me then feel the weight of a palm being softly placed against the exact middle of my back, taunting me with the physical touch that only makes me think of what I want but will never have!

  “No, Raala… I won’t… You need to talk to me about what happened.” he states, calmly.

  “Nothing happened!” I insist “I just… I got caught up in the moment, is all! I lost control of myself! I’m sorry! It won’t happen again!”

  Patting me a few times through the towel on my back, he deliberates before pointedly asking “Is it… a normal thing for your people to randomly kiss others when they lose control of themselves(?) Because I knew Old Red for more than eighteen years… We shared many moments of high stress and subsequent relief together and, somehow, I managed never to get pulled into a kiss with him(!) The only people I ever saw him kiss were his woman and his son… ‘Lost control’ sounds to me like you’re normally having to control yourself in order not to kiss me… Is that accurate?”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  “No!” I lie.

  “Yuh-huh…(?)” he says, not even slightly convinced.

  “FINE! YES! I WANT YOU! I WANT YOU SO BAD I FEEL LIKE I’LL DIE BUT YOU DON’T FEEL THE SAME SO LET’S JUST FORGET IT, ALRIGHT!?”

  Silence answers.

  “Can we just pretend it never happened and… when we get back to the Plateau, can we try our best to never see eachother again… Please!” I beg, whimpering as tears spill down my cheeks under the towel filled with his scent.

  “Raala… Sit up and look at me.” he instructs, simply.

  I hesitate about letting him see my tearstained face but then realise… it’s not as if I have any dignity to lose… It’s not as if I could get any more pathetic in his eyes…

  I raise myself from lying to a kneeling position and turn my face to him, dropping the towel behind me.

  His eyes are kind as he extends a slender finger to my left cheek to wipe away the tears there.

  The bastard! Why did he have to be kind about this!? This would be so much easier to stomach if he was being cruel to me right now!

  After a few more moments of him looking down on me with his unbearable, pitying kindness, he speaks “What… gave you the idea, Raala… that I don’t feel the same?”

  “Don’t!” I groan, immediately.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t… do that! Don’t give me false hope! I won’t be able to bear it if you make me think I have a chance!”

  “Ah… I see… What if it wasn’t false, though? Might that be a kind of hope you’d have any interest in?”

  A shuddering breath is the only answer I give as I desperately fight against the impulse to tell him it would be!

  He inhales deeply and repeats his question “Why are you so sure I won’t reciprocate, Raala? I feel like I’ve made my feelings about you fairly plain in the time we’ve known eachother, haven’t I?”

  “You’ve flirted… but you flirt with everyone…” I observe, miserably.

  “I see… so we’re back to your perception of me as a playboy then… Let me be clear, I’m friendly with everyone, I may even be charming with everyone… I only want you.”

  “But I’m not…” I start before trailing off.

  “Not what?” he prompts, calmly.

  “I’m… not… mhoodinufferhu…” I mumble, my cheeks burning!

  “I’m sorry?” he says, cocking an eyebrow.

  “I said I’m not GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU!” I shout at him, furiously.

  “I disagree.” he states, simply “What makes you think so?”

  “Oh, I don’t know(!) Maybe because you’re a gorgeous adventurer whose travelled the world and I’m an ugly homebody who’s never even left the Plateau before?! Maybe because I’ve been nothing but horrible to you since the day we met?! Maybe because you’re so attractive and charismatic that you’ve needed to beat girls off with a stick all your life where me and Morlu were a case of pairing the spares!? Maybe because you’re calm, kind, clever, cheerful and selfless and I’m the opposite of all those things!? Maybe because I eavesdropped on Lurla’s confession to you and never told you!? Maybe because I watched you reject a woman who’s taller than me, fatter than me, prettier than me, kinder than me, happier than me and, in every other way, just better than me!?!?!?” I spill out, bitterly, only realising the truth of half of what I say as I say it.

  His eyebrows raise up his flat forehead.

  “You… followed us?” he asks, confused.

  “No. I was already there, on top of the cliff. But I saw you coming and I didn’t shout out to you, even though I knew what she was going to say because she asked me if I was willing to let her and I said yes, so it’s just as bad!”

  “Why did you say yes if you had feelings for me?” he frowns, curiously.

  “I only realised I did afterward.” I sulk.

  “I see… and that explains the attitude shift over the last Moon!” he smirks “Allow me to set you straight, Raala; you and I do not share our taste in women. Lurla only looks better than you through your eyes, not through mine. To me, you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met in all my travels and, even when you’re ‘horrible’ to me, I enjoy your company more than just about any other experience I’ve ever had!… I would rather you hadn’t eavesdropped on us but, given the circumstances, I don’t think that’s unforgivable. I think you’re beautiful, I know you’re extremely clever, I know you’re truculent but I certainly don’t think you’re unkind or selfish! I like your truculence! I would far rather have you as you are than make you into a simpering sycophant who worships the ground I walk on(!) I’d rather have someone willing to tell me when she thinks I’m being stupid than someone who blindly says ‘yes’ to whatever I say! I want someone who challenges me, Raala! I want someone like you! I think you’re perfect exactly the way you are!”

  “Then why didn’t you do anything about it?!” I demand, dejectedly “If you think I’m so ‘perfect’, why haven’t you already made me your woman?!”

  He gives a humourless puff “I did do something, Raala… I determined, to the best of my ability, that you had no interest and never would!… The only way for me to ‘make’ you my woman would’ve been a way you should be able to guess my feelings on, given the sentence you watched me carry out on Qrez.” his voice turning dark at that last.

  “So… then…?”

  “We’ve both been pining for eachother out of nothing more than our own misreading of the other’s feelings and denying ourselves unnecessarily?… I’d say so, yes(!)” he quips.

  Not really able to believe it and looking around for any evidence this dream is about to turn into a nightmare, I quiver “So, I can… we can…?”

  He holds up a palm to stop me “One more question… then we can, depending on your answer.”

  “Wh-what’s the question?” I frown.

  He grimaces back for a few moments, twisting my guts into knots of anxiety.

  “You… understand that I’m… not going to be able to come and live with you in Bison, right? That, as much as I want you, I can’t shirk my duties to my people? You realise that, if you become my woman, you’ll need to travel with the Deltafolk for the rest of your life?… You understand that you’d spend all that time travelling with me and my people, going wherever we go, being outside the Plateau for years at a time, maybe even going outside the Basin again at points?… If you can accept that, I will become your man and make you my woman, right here and now…”

  The question stops me dead.

  I realise I hadn’t really thought about it before (I never thought I’d get this far) but… obviously!

  Obviously he won’t be coming to live as a Bisonman!

  I can’t become a Deltawoman but I will have to live with them, work for them, learn their language, be away from my home, my friends, my family, for years at a time!

  I’ll have to keep up with them when they migrate.

  I’d rarely get to sleep in anything other than a tent.

  Can I really do it?

  Can I do it when all I’d have is…?

  I look up into the heartbreakingly beautiful face of the man who’s all I’ve ever wanted and more.

  “Make me yours, Ksem.” I answer, resolute.

  Realisation |