Page 102 of To Trap a Soul

Lindi shuddered at the mental image, especially as it’d been inside her not even moments before.

“I thought doing it this way would be best, which is why I have never attempted another way,” Weldir stated. His black eyes, completely lacking the white sclera, peered into her very being. They were shiny in comparison to the matte appearance of his chalky, misty body.

Lindi tilted her head. “Why do you think that?”

Like usual, Weldir barely moved, his expression light and fleeting, as if it was forced. He always floated in his emptiness, his body lean and long, stretched and motionless other than his coalescing form.

It made reading him difficult. Like now, when additional body movements may have helped her decipher how he felt.

Had he ever thought about having sex with her, or was it just Lindi who wanted something a little more? Then again, she was so touch-starved she may have turned to a cactus for pleasure if it would offer it.

“I didn’t think you would like being close with me. I assumed you didn’t want that.”

“Oh,” she rasped, lifting her hands so she could interlock her fingers to play and fidget with them coyly. She lowered her gaze to look at him through her lashes while hiding her face. “Does that mean you want to?”

She could almost feel her heart coming up her throat in nervousness. They were married, and this should be normal, yet it was anything but normal between them.

Lindi no longer knew what normal felt like.

“It’s never truly crossed my mind,” he answered dully. “Whichever way this act results in what I want is all I care about.”

In the back of her mind, Lindi played out a scene. One in which she grabbed an invisible dagger and shunted it into her heart and played dead because... his words were so detached and callous he may as well have felled her. She even heard her imagined cry of pain as the blade dug deep.

Instead, she bolstered herself with courage, and a touch of her outrage. How dare he deny her pleasure under his lack of care? A woman had needs, and so should a man! Even if he was a freaky shadow being.

She lifted her hands in annoyance, almost like a shrug, but also like she could reach out and wring his non-existent neck. “Don’t you want pleasure? Human men seek it constantly, even going to places to find it.”

Even doing it themselves,her mind grumbled.

After inserting herself into different societies, Lindi was learning that the belief system she’d grown up in wasn’t a shared one. Men still preferred pretty virgin maidens, but not all societies made it a requirement, and not all shared that same sentiment. She’d blushed at her first brothel, and the first set oftits she’d seen paraded in public with no one batting an eye like it was strange.

A lot of what she learned was that customs could be contextual, and they differed between people and backgrounds.

Then again, she may have also been sheltered by her parents and their isolated farming lifestyle.

Learning all this made her mind fill with different fantasies, and her body thrum with need. Over time, it was worsening. She’d been alive for almost seventy years... and her lust was building. Her need for affection was stifling, and if she had to be subjugated to another wormy tendril, she’d claw at the ether and murder his undying ass somehow.

But he’s a man, of sorts. Hopefully he’ll...

“Coitus seems like a pointless activity, since I’d find no pleasure in it. This way is faster.”

Lindi promptly shut her fallen jaw, and her features tightened in dismay. She fisted the bottom of her blue tunic, unsure if she wanted to weep or scream at him. Instead, frustration bubbled in her chest and Lindi didn’t know how she wanted to release it.

She bit the sides of her tongue as she gritted her teeth and lowered her eyes to look at anything but him. She found his toes and mentally cursed him to stub the pinkie ones at every chance the universe permitted it.

Her anxious heart changed and swirled with rage instead. Undenied, lusty, needy rage.

“Have I upset you?” he asked, as if he was uncertain. “Is this something you want?”

“Obviously, if I’m bringing it up,” she muttered as low as possible, her face twisting up further. She tried to smile to show it was fine, but she knew it was more like a horrible cringe as it pulled tightly across her face. “But don’t mind it. Forget I asked.”

“Lindiwe,” he warned, just as she reached out to grab one of her boots.

“I’m rather embarrassed now,” she admitted, shoving her foot into it before grasping the other. “And I’d like to leave.”

Weldir waved his hand towards her raven cloak floating beside him – intangible to her currently in her physical form – as he secured it with a tendril to it to keep it solid for him.

“I have yet to fix this. I thought we agreed that you would stay here until I have completed that task.”

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