Page 56 of Finding Her Heart
“That is the same for me!” Anna couldn’t help laughing again as Zerzer nudged her into Doku-ni’s arms. Joy bubbled through her bloodstream. This room, these new friends, her white Orki—a sense of realizing the impossible and stepping into her dreams and adventures. There was warmth here, soft embracing waves of it. Carved and shaped of stone, without a single piece of furniture or recognizable humanity, Doku-ni’s room and family felt like home.
And she knew her parents would be happy for her.
“Anna, come,” Doku-ni led her over to the trunks along the wall, opening three of them.
“Clothing!” Women’s clothing. Fabrics of all kinds, things she recognized and things she did not. Some of it looked so foreign that it must have come from the steel cities or beyond. Everything was clean and well-kept, but having studied planet history Anna identified clothes that looked new but must, in truth, be generations old.
Unable to help herself, she picked an outfit that her great grandmother might have worn. Not skirts, but pants. The first women from the steel cities dressed for labor and work, wearing pants like their husbands, sons, and fathers. At some point in time that fashion changed, became more feminine until women considered the idea of pants as immoral. Anna had made herself a pair when she was a girl, and Benjere burned them.
The trunks held miss-matched colors, sizes, everything. Jewelry and other pretty, feminine odds and ends. She had her head buried deep, chasing colors in the bottom of one when Doku-ni tapped her exposed bottom and told her to grab something to dress into for after their bath.
A bath?
Out the hall, they had used to find his room, and down a longer one, into a room lit with torches with a large swirling pool in the center of it instead of a bowlful of warg. Lit with Orki torches, she saw, thankfully, human-sized benches for sitting and Orki sized ledges recessed in the walls. Bowls of blocky soap and baskets of cloths were in reaching distance of the gently swirling water.
There was no door, and it was not a private bath. But if she came here by herself while one of Doku-ni’s brothers washed, they would be magically invisible to each other. She knew that in theory at least. She vowed to do her best not to test the theory. As comfortable as the Orki were with their bodies, she was excited to wash and finally get to cover hers up.
Doku-ni held her hand into the warm water, and took over the job of washing her. The action felt like care as much as inspection. His fingers pressed gently over her neck, discovering what she thought must be bruises, and he found the raw spots that his dominance had caused on the front of her knees. “There is a tea huumon women can drink for pain, or you can drink the warg milk—and you will use Eid’s ointment.“
“How often am I going to need the tea or the ointment?” she asked, giving him a cheeky smirk as he stood over her shoulder.
With a splash and a lift, Doku-ni set her outside the bath. His hand felt quick and hard on the curve of her bottom in a noisy, painful spank before she could turn around to look at him. He answered her question, “Often.”
Anna gaped at him, mouth open. She’d never been spanked in her entire life. The smack was playful, but not comfortable, and his expression, one side of his brow lifted, pure challenge. Waiting for her reaction. Daring it. She felt her face turn red, stunned to again feel that girlish, giggly flutter in her middle. He made her feel young. Not knowing what to do or say, she just smiled and laughed. This was something they would have to explore and figure out together. She was not about to set boundaries on all the potential of her adventures with him.
Dressing in the old fashion clothes was a delight. She liked the sensation of the pants, the top, and the cincher she found for her full breasts. Finding a comb in one of the baskets but no mirror, she attempted to deal with the mess of her wavy brown hair. It had been a long time since she cared about her appearance or about anything but taking care of the farm and surviving the day. These clothes, their odd cut and strange materials felt fun and pretty.
Doku-ni tugged at her top, pulling it out from how she tucked it. “Huumons wear many clothes,” he said.
“These are wonderful. Thank you for letting me use them. I don't know where you got them. But I love it.”
“For Anna. For Anna long time. Wait for redress. Every Orki collects what his redress woman need.”
“And this whole time, you've been collecting these things for your redress?”
“For Anna.”
“This style is very old. I've only seen it in pictures.”
“Wait for Anna. Doku-ni did not know so many layers and bindings.” Reeling her in, his hand slipped over her belly and up to the cincher.
She laughed, “They are as easily taken off as they are to put on. Please don't rip them. Do you know where my boots are? The ones I was wearing?”
“Boots are in trunk. Old clothes not in the trunk. Did not save. Smell like man's sons.”
“Thank you for saving the boots. That pair is important to me. For lots of reasons.”
“Anna has fire in her boots.”
She could hear the amusement in his voice. “I don't have much of my father. I didn't realize how much my brothers, how much Benjere, tried to erase him.”
In her quiet moments in the middle of the night after nightmares sent by the hungries—the memories of the dead—Anna had told Doku-ni the details of all her disturbing visions.
The one with Benjere, as Benjere, left such mixed feelings. Anger, disappointment, and pain, because the memory was his. Completely selfish, yet accidental, his selfish, childish action caused their father’s death. A part of him still lived there making excuses to justify the guilt and the shame, manipulating who might discover what he’d done, hiding from himself. She saw the ways the event shaped and twisted him.
He had been more under the skin than she ever knew. He loved his family but perversely hated them for not feeling good enough. He fell short in all comparisons, leaving him eaten by vicious jealousy.
Benjere had held her when she cried more than once. He had been there in his support when nobody else was around more than once. He had left his own responsibilities to come help with hers at a moment's notice more than once. In his backhanded way, he'd always made her feel terrible about it, but he had been there. Any one of her brothers could have done the same for her—but didn't. Anna didn't think that he wanted to make her miserable, not consciously. All the other things he'd done had been an offshoot of his personality and a need to control her and keep her from telling the world about what he had done.
