Page 18 of Finding Her Luck
How much did Searnon understand?
He talked, and his hands moved. Still in her boots and stockings, but naked everywhere else, the Orki's palms ran over her skin. She'd push them off firmly, only to have them sneak back again. A hand and arm curling around her waist to support her, fingers splayed wide, brushing across her ribs, the side of her breast. The other moving over her knee, up her thigh.
"Skin like milk," he said, adding words in his own language, that when spoken together, were a description of her skin in Orki that meant soft, fragile, pale, and human.
She stopped the ascent of his paw up her thigh. His thumb reached down and back, touched her curls there. Corrin gasped and laughed at the same time. She didn't know how to respond to this playful naughtiness. It made her forget that she did not want to be here with him.
"Taste Corrin."
"What? I don't think so. We just met," she answered, not sure what he meant but sure it wasn't something strangers did.
"Claim Corrin."
"You should speak with my oldest sister about that. It's only proper village etiquette," she told him primly.
His hand opened over her belly, fingers beneath her breasts. His knuckles beneath the weighted curve. Speaking with his mouth against the shell of her ear he said, "Corrin is Urkuri redress, no sister, man, or village take her away."
She shivered all over. It was a good shiver.
To distract him, she asked what the words for the two moons in the sky were, the stars, the clouds. There were different names for each star shape, no single name for just all of them.
Different names for each kind of cloud, what the cloud did, what it looked like, but no name for all of them.
Orki saw the world through the distinction of autonomous individuality. Very few things had a group name. When there were several of one kind of thing, like a field of flowers, there were different prefix word sounds that meant things like, "a gathering of ones," or "a group of individuals." Able to grasp the concept, the execution of the language mystified her.
She discovered that their name, Orki, was given to them by humans who labeled things together to strip away their individual identity, "So that it becomes unvalued, like refuse in a pit, only garbage has one name."
Her questions failed to divert his attention fully away from exploring her shape.
His hands went everywhere, casual, inadvertent brushes against her skin. As if by accident. His arms would touch her when he moved, teasing over nipples that were growing more and more sensitized and achy. The backs of his big paws would rub by, as he felt over her belly, all in torment. Corrin bit her lip, holding back demands that he cup her, hold her, touch her deeper, harder.
It was she, of all the seven sisters of her family, who would have the bad luck to attract the amorous attentions of a dangerous, primal Orki. Only she, from her village, had the bad luck to be kidnapped twice in one day, then dragged off into unknown territories into an unknown world.
Only she would start to like it all.
As the focus of his seduction, he confused and befuddled Corrin. Used her body against her. Changed her. Something unnatural was happening. The tissue between her legs was so swollen she could feel it when she moved, the lips of her vulva rubbing against each other, wet with her essence which turned out not to be her cycle, but a clear, glossy, viscous moisture.
Urku-ri caused it, calling the mess forth from her with purrs and growls. And now with his touch. Her breasts, unbound and uncovered for days, felt bigger, heavier, hot, and sore.
She complained that she was sick. He told her it was natural.
Stupid male. What did he know? How could he say this was natural? It was her body, and it felt like a stranger's, like it had wants and needs beyond what she could comprehend.
As a child, every winter Corrin succumbed to a fever and painful cough. Sometimes the fever would make her wobbly and delirious, as if she were pulled outside herself. This sickness felt similar, although there was no cough, no pain, and it made her want things she should not want.
She was waiting for a good man to love her enough to give her his luck. Instead, she'd been forcefully paired with a scarred up, muscle bound, persistent Orki male who made her feel all the things her Nanny had talked about with misty-eyed relish. No human man would touch her after this. Not that it mattered.
Urku-ri had it in him to wreck her. She'd become her father, a man so devastated by a love too big for him that he abandoned everything of true value in an attempt to hide from the memory of it.
He let her drink extra water for the fever, which only served to fill her up quicker and add pressure to areas that did not need more pressure. They stopped early for the women to relieve themselves. The other two adult women were also twitchy, moving from foot to foot in discomfort, speaking in low, plaintive tones to the males. Were they sick too?
Corrin's eyes sought the little girl; her Orki rider kept her separate. At least they allowed the child clothing. He towered over the little creature like a giant, holding her tiny hand in his, encouraging her to stretch her legs.
"Mind yourself," Urku-ri told her, his hand on her head, turning her towards him.
The Orki with captive village women didn't interact with the others, were also told to mind themselves and 'see' only the male they were with. Urku-ri kept his body between her and those that walked over to speak with him. The single Orki talked to each other, keeping space from the couples at all times.
She didn't like the isolation. As if they were a threat, or unworthy to talk to others, the enforcement of the action registered like an injustice to her. Would she get a chance to talk to the girl, to the other women? There was the blonde from the meeting house and one other, a light brown-haired woman, with a smooth, tanned face, closer to Corrin in age, who she'd only glimpsed. Corrin wanted to compare experiences, wanted reassurances that they were being treated well, wanted to commiserate. But Urku-ri demanded all of her attention, while giving her all of his.
