Page 50 of Tusk Love

Chapter Thirty

Guinevere

“How do you learn to stop being afraid of something?” Guinevere asked Oskar the next morning.

Yesterday’s mid-battle revelation weighed heavily on her heart. But she didn’t want to tell Oskar exactlywhatshe was afraid of, the reason that she couldn’t summon Teinidh when he was around; her feelings for him, all-consuming though they might be, were still too new and fragile for her to even hint at them out loud. So she settled on that nebulous, namelesssomething,and she prayed that he wouldn’t press her any further.

Oskar mulled her question over as they walked side by side through the forest, between Pudding and Vindicator. Finally, he shrugged. “Maybe ‘stop being afraid’ is the wrong term. Maybe it’s about being afraid of something and yet confronting it anyway. I’ve done it before. It’s not pleasant, but it’s always worse in your head than it turns out to be in reality.”

She cocked her head at him. “I can’t imagine thatyouwould ever be afraid of anything.”

His high cheekbones flushed a darker shade of oakmoss. “Being underground,” he muttered, in such a low and vaguely embarrassed tone that she almost thought she’d imagined it. “I can’t stand it. The endless dark, and all that earth over my head—but sometimes my mother forgot to bring her lunch with her to work. I’d wake up and I’d see it on the table, and I’d go down into the mines to give it to her.”

Guinevere’s heart gave a bittersweet wrench. Oskar had been selfless even as a boy. She wished that she could have known him then. Her hand found his beneath the autumn leaves, and their fingers laced together and didn’t let go.

“Oskar,” she ventured after a few minutes of companionable silence had passed, “where was your father in all this?”

“I never knew him. He was a military man—a captain of the Righteous Brand. Once Ma told him she was expecting, he got himself assigned somewhere else.”

I’m sorry,Guinevere nearly said, before remembering at the last second that she was supposed to stop apologizing for things that weren’t her fault. She swallowed the words, biting her lip.

“You were about to say ‘I’m sorry,’ weren’t you?” Oskar drawled.

“Well,someonehas to be!” she burst out, aggrieved on his behalf. “How dare that man abandon you and your mother!”

“It was probably for the best,” Oskar said. “He was, by all accounts, a wastrel. He would have made us miserable.”

“I suppose that I’m sorryforhim,” Guinevere sniffed. “He missed out on raising someone like you.”

The flush returned in full force to Oskar’s handsome face. “Ah, Gwen.” He squeezed her hand. “Don’t say things like that.”

And something about his tone and the look in his eyes reminded her too much of that odd little daydream she’d had by the Bonecrusher campfire, and so she didn’t ask him why.

Four days into the hikethrough the forest, Guinevere’s good cheer began to erode, along with the brisk can-do attitude that she’d determinedly adopted after her outburst in the Labenda Swamp.

Because, yes, shecoulddo this, but surely no one shouldhave to.The walking was endless, the rain constant. She couldn’t evenrememberwhat her formerly lovely boots had looked like prior to these interminable miles; they were rock-scuffed and mud-caked, the laces limp from the perpetual damp. Her hair had long passed tangled and was well on its way to matted, and every bone in her body ached.

And yet, she felt that she could still have held up admirably despite all these things, were it not for the fact that Oskar had somehow become…annoying.

It had started two days before. She’d woken up half out of her bedroll and half in his, his—protrusion—also very much awake, poking into her backside. Startled and intrigued, Guinevere had squirmed against it…and Oskar had stirred, stopping her motions with a firm hand on her hip before leaning in to give her a sleepy kiss. Then, just as the first faint embers of a familiar heat spiraled from her center, he’d rolled away and gotten up to prepare their breakfast as though nothing had happened.

Ever since then, she’d been far too aware of him. Of the way his muscles rolled beneath the clinging fabric of rain-slicked clothes. Of the veins on the backs of his large hands and his long, thick fingers stroking Vindicator’s glossy flanks. Of his lips—and the smiles that had been coming easier to them lately—a soft valley between two sharp tusks that was the perfect place for her own mouth to land.

It seemed to Guinevere that she was wet between her legs all the time now, her mind a fever of memories and fantasies. But Oskar remained blissfully unaware of all the torture that he was putting her through. They were making good time, and he was loath to let that go, he said, and so he insisted that they walk as much as they could each day, sleeping early and rising at the crack of dawn, stopping only for quick meals. She’d once tried to cajole him into an afternoon nap, as was customary in Rexxentrum, and he’d made a show of looking around for a feather bed. He’d only been teasing, and she should haveloved that he was now comfortable enough with her to tease, but her imagination ran wild with visions of her and Oskar tumbling into all manner of beds—orright there,on the forest floor—and at that moment she’d wanted nothing more than to shove him into the nearest river.

Infuriating man.

The last straw broke in the early afternoon. Guinevere and Pudding were lagging behind Oskar and Vindicator. There was a pebble in Guinevere’s right boot; she could feel it rolling around in there, and it wasalmostas annoying as Oskar was, with his broad shoulders and his powerful thighs and the firm way he was holding the stallion’s reins as they walked.

“Oskar,” Guinevere called out, “could we possibly stop for a—”

“I see a stream a ways up ahead, Gwen,” he replied without so much as glancing back at her. “Let’s eat our lunch there.”

She started to explain that she didn’t want to stop because she was hungry, she wanted to stop because there was a pebble in her boot, but he had the audacity to continue, “Come along, princess. It’s only another few minutes’ walk.”

Yes,she thought sourly, and then after that few minutes’ walk they would stop for also a few minutes to eat their bland rations and then there would bethousands upon thousands of minutesof more walking, and it would never end, all the way to the Menagerie Coast, and she would be a saint if she hadn’t killed Oskar by then, but he saw nothing wrong withinterrupting her while she was still talking—

With stern finality, Guinevere dropped Pudding’s reins and sat down on a fallen, mushroom-speckled log. The dappled mare looked from her to the rest of their party and let out a mournful neigh. Only then did Oskar turn around.

---