“Yes!” I said with a smile. Then suddenly I put on an angry face and shook my head back and forth. “No.”
“…no…” she said tentatively, then frowned with an exaggerated grimace and shook her head like a dog snapping a chew toy back and forth.
I laughed. “Yes!”
She immediately nodded vigorously and gave me a fake smile again. “Yes!”
I laughed again – I couldn’t help myself.
This was going to be fun.
We spent the next couple of hours doing an English lesson as we ate venison. Not only did we cover more nouns, but covered the numbers one through twenty, the simple pronouns I, you, me, and us, and even started getting into verbs.
We got sit, eat, talk, laugh, cry, crawl, lie down, and a bunch of others, which I had to teach her by acting them out.
My cartoonish, over-the-top actions got a lot of laughter from her, but they also taught her a ton of vocabulary pretty quickly.
I guess I wasn’t quite as bad at charades as I’d thought.
She had perfect recall for everything I said. I only had to say a word once for her to remember it, and she quickly latched on to more abstract concepts like ‘near’ and ‘far.’
It was fascinating – she might have been dressed in furs and running from wolves, but she had a near genius-level ability for language and memorization. It was actually kind of humbling. I’d never been anything better than a C student in high school, especially in French, and here she was picking up English like it was nothing.
Things changed a little bit with the next few words, though.
“I run,” I said as I ran across the cave from one side to the other – which, admittedly, was a very short trip.
“I run,” she repeated.
“No – I run,” I said, pointing at my chest as I ran back and forth inside the cave. “Jack runs.”
“Jack runs,” she said, laughing to see me doing the equivalent of wind sprints in a very, very short gymnasium.
“You run,” I said, pointing at her.
She immediately got up and tried to run – but winced as she hobbled.
Her ankle!
I’d completely forgotten why she was here in the first place: because she was hurt!
“Sit,” I commanded, and pointed at the floor.
She immediately complied and sat down.
I gestured for her injured leg, which she compliantly stuck out towards me.
She had bindings around her knees and calves. Above them were other bindings wrapped around her thighs, which were half-covered by a fur skirt that dropped from a belt around her waist.
I fiddled with the fur bindings on her feet, figured them out, and started unwrapping them.
“Jack,” she said, wincing.
“It’s okay,” I said soothingly. “It’s okay.”
To her credit, she let me continue.
When the furs were completely unwrapped, her tiny blue calf and foot were completely exposed.
They were gorgeous. I know that might be a weird thing to say, but they were so small and delicate – just like her hands and her face – that they truly were beautiful.
And unlike human women, her legs were completely bare of hair and smooth to the touch. Well – unlike human women if they hadn’t just shaved.
The soles of her feet were thick and callused dark blue, but the rest of her skin was soft as silk – and just as warm as her hands.
Her ankle looked bigger than it should have been, though.
I immediately started unwinding the other foot to compare.
“Jack?” she asked, frowning.
“It’s okay,” I told her in a soft voice, and she let me continue.
Once her other tiny foot was revealed, I could see the difference was noticeable. Her uninjured ankle was half the size of the other – slender and shapely.
And yet she hadn’t betrayed any discomfort all evening until I’d tried to get her up on her feet and run! She must have had a high tolerance for pain.
I gently manipulated her foot, testing her range of motion. She winced a little, but I was convinced it was only a sprain and not a break.
“Jack?”
“It’s just a sprain,” I reassured her.
“It’s… just… a sprain?”
I realized she had no idea what I was saying, so I went back to basics. I touched first her injured ankle, then her uninjured one. “Ankle.”
“…ankle…”
Then I lightly brushed my palm over her entire foot.
God her skin was soft…
“Foot.”
“Foot,” she repeated.
Then I touched her big toe. “Toe.”
“Toe.”
Then I swiped my finger across all of her toes like I was sliding across piano keys. “Toes.”
“Toes…”
Then I gave an exaggerated grimace and grunted as I touched her ankle. “Sprained ankle.”
She frowned, then tapped her good foot like she was asking a question. “Sprained ankle?”
“No,” I said, and grimaced again as I touched her injury. “Owww! Sprained.”
“Ah… sprained ankle,” she said, understanding at once.
“Yes.”
“Be okay?” she asked, a little worried.
“It will be okay,” I said reassuringly.
She smiled in relief, then yawned.
“Sleepy?” I asked.
She frowned.
I rubbed my eyes like a little kid and fake-yawned. “Sleepy.”
She smiled with half-lidded eyes. “Lelia sleepy.”
I pressed my hands together and then lay my cheek against them, closed my eyes, and made snoring sounds. “Sleep.”
“Ah – Lelia and Jack sleep,” she agreed.
Well, she got that concept, so that was good.
Only problem was, I didn’t really have much of a sleeping arrangement set up. It was my first night in the cave, after all.
As I was looking around, she got up on her knees and unhooked the fur cape from around her shoulders, then laid it out on the stone floor and sat on it.
I looked over at her in surprise. For the first time I could see her bare shoulders. They were petite and slender and beautiful.
Then she undid the bindings around her thighs, exposing all of her legs for the first time.
They were long and shapely, with thin but muscular thighs.
Then she undid the furs covering the rest of her arms, which were thin and toned.
She caught me staring at her and smiled. She pointed at her arm and raised an eyebrow, our shorthand for What is this?
“Arm,”
