“Yes! Why, how do you hunt deer?” I asked.
She frowned, not understanding.
I pointed at her, then at the remains of Frosty the Snow Deer. “How Lelia get deer?”
“Oh,” she said.
She picked up her spear, aimed the tip at what remained of poor Frosty, and stabbed the snow savagely.
CHFFF!
Well, that was pretty clear.
Speaking of weapons and hunting, we also worked on the bow and arrows. I whittled a dozen arrows and fitted them with sharp, thin bits of stone that Lelia struck from the mica-like rocks. I had no feathers for the fletching, so I had to improvise. I finally came up with small wedges of wood that I forced into slots I carved into the arrows.
I also slit the climbing rope apart and pulled apart the threads until I had a thinner but still incredibly strong bowstring. That allowed the arrows to be much more slender, since I didn’t have to create a nock at the end that would accommodate a thicker rope.
Lelia and I practiced for hours, shooting into a snowman that I made with her help. We were terrible at first – even though we were only 15 feet away, the arrows almost never hit the snowman at all. Then we occasionally got better… and better… until a majority of our arrows hit the snowman.
Then we backed up another five feet, and started the process all over again.
Lelia loved it, though. For her, it was like practicing with Harry Potter’s wand or something. I mean, I supposed I could understand it: it was technology she’d never seen before, so it was truly fascinating to her.
As the days stretched on, we got better and better, until we could reliably hit the snowman at 30 feet away. We didn’t get a chance to try it on deer, though I did practice on squirrels. Wasn’t able to hit a single one.
But Lelia was enthusiastic enough about archery that I started a second bow and set of arrows for her.
That pretty much covers ‘surviving the elements.’
The sex part… well, that happened pretty much any time we were inside the cave.
In the mornings she would roll over onto me with a sleepy smile and take advantage of my morning wood.
Every night we made love before falling asleep.
And if we came back to the cave midday, I could usually persuade her to indulge in a quickie – or just about anything else you can imagine.
Imagine finding the most beautiful woman you can picture in your mind’s eye, with the face of an angel and the body of a sex goddess. (Forget the whole ‘blue and pointy ears’ thing.)
Now imagine that she knows just the basics of sex – and most of that is about the missionary position. But she’s insanely curious, and she’s eager to try anything and everything you show her.
Also imagine that she probably never orgasmed before, or that it wasn’t that great, so you are literally the most amazing lover she’s ever had by several orders of magnitude.
Add in the fact that she doesn’t seem to know much about her own anatomy, so that when you bust out even the most basic new move – like oral sex – she acts like you’re David Copperfield and just made the Statue of Liberty disappear. Except it gave her a screaming orgasm in the process.
Also factor in that she’s incredibly grateful, and every time you do something to her, she wants to do it back to you – twice.
Now, imagine that she has a sex drive that equals or possibly even exceeds your own.
For most red-blooded heterosexual males, I’ve pretty much just described Heaven.
Jack was a happy camper.
The sex part, though, came with a bit of a darker side.
Part of me struggled with the memory of Katie. There were times after making love to Lelia where I would plunge into a mini-depression of guilt.
It’s been a year, Jack. She would want you to move on.
That feeling actually came to a head in a conversation I had with Lelia.
Over the course of the week, she had picked up far more English. Both her vocabulary and grammar were rapidly improving. We were at the point where we were having lengthy conversations about the real world, although we hadn’t exactly gotten to abstract topics yet. We hadn’t discussed things we couldn’t see in front of us.
That quickly changed.
13
We were lying in each other’s arms after a particularly fun evening romp. The fire was crackling just a few feet away, drying the sweat from our bodies.
The morning after we’d made first made love, I had hauled up a ton of fir branches and placed them over the cave entrance, using the overlapping boughs of needles to block out the frigid air. Now the majority of the cave was toasty warm, although we were still able to refrigerate the venison by placing it right at the entrance.
As I spooned Lelia from behind and kissed her shoulder, a thought occurred to me.
“Lelia, how did you get here?”
“I ran from wolves,” she said matter-of-factly, her voice drowsy with sleep.
I chuckled. “No, I mean, how did you get to this world?”
She turned around enough that she could look at me. “World?”
I gestured towards the cave entrance. “The world is everything but the sky. The mountains, the forests, the snow… that’s the world. How did you get to this world?”
“Oh. Mother made Lelia baby.”
She spread her legs, put her hands to her crotch, and gestured as though she were pulling out an invisible infant.
“Waaaah!” she said quite seriously, imitating a baby’s cry.
I laughed pretty damn hard at that one.
She frowned, not understanding what I found so funny.
“What?” she demanded.
“I didn’t expect you to act it out,” I said.
We had already covered ‘expect’ and ‘act’ earlier in the week, so she got what I meant immediately.
“Oh,” she said, and her frown turned to a giggle.
“You do a good imitation of a baby,” I teased her.
She slapped me lightly on
