Little Red, Riding Wood Ch. 01

Ancil was a pig. They were all sweaty, smelly, vulgar and most of all stupid men. Two of them together couldn't get through a page of a children's book. Their lives were filled with chopping, and swearing, and eating, and rutting. Every day, day after day, was the same bestial routine for them, and the worst part was that they didn't seem to notice at all. They never questioned it. They were happy with it.

There wasn't a man among them who Celia would choose to spend more than a night with. But there were a few who could offer her a comfortable log in the dark discomfort of a single, hot, humid night.

Ancil was a pig, but Marque was cute, in a boyish way. Masson wasn't very comely, to look at, but he had a marvelous physique, with rippling muscles that glistened in the sun when he worked up a sweat. The men's sweat could be so vulgar and smelly, but at times, when Celia was in a certain mood, it had a heady effect on her, like that one sip too many of gooseberry wine. It made her want and imagine impure things, in vivid detail.

Celia's finger was wet now. Without thinking, she had pulled her knees up to her chest and slipped that finger inside herself. She was so wet there. It had been dampened just by sliding that finger up and down between the delicate petals of her private, forest flower. That naughty finger could slip in so very easily, if she allowed it.

Masson was no joy to speak with, and certainly wan't too pleasant to look at, but he wasn't repulsive. To be mounted by him might feel so much better than using just one or two small, too delicate fingers.

He probably kissed like a brute. Celia had only ever kissed Joyelle herself. And Gisselle. And Floressa, and Gallia, and Harmonie. Just for practice, of course. Just to know what to expect, and how to do it right. She and Joyelle (and Gisselle and Floressa, and once Gallia and Harmonie both at the same time) had spent many pleasant hours practicing kissing, and some other things.

She remembered their kisses clearly. They each kissed so differently. She imagined that first cool, soft touch of their lips on hers. Harmonie and Floressa were shy, like her, while Gisselle was eager and unrelenting, and Joyelle giggled uncontrollably.

It felt odd, but nice, to have their full, yielding bossoms pressing against hers. Floressa's had felt the best. They were smallish, but her nipples became as hard as wood themselves, poking into Celia's own larger breasts in a most delightful way. The feel of them had surprisingly made Celia's own buds harden, as well as inspiring a dampness between her legs.

Celia's fingers were moving now. They'd penetrated deeply inside of her, as if they had a filthy man's mind of their own. They were mere twigs, compared to the thick branch that she longed to feel inside of her, but they were nimble and energetic, and they knew exactly what Celia liked. They moved when and where she needed, rubbing, touching, humping, probing and pleasing her in just the right way, at just the right speed.

She had many times rolled on the ground, giggling and groping and kissing with so many of the girls. They were stupid, too, but not as dense and droll as the men. They at least used their meager brains for something. They were much more comely, too. As they kissed her they told Celia herself how very beautiful she was, which made her feel warm and open inside.

Masson, though, she knew, would feel very different. She imagined his imposing bulk, in place of Floressa's petite, lithe body, pressing her down into the ground. She imagined his chest on hers, not soft like pillows, but hard, like the headboard of a bed that had fallen atop her and crushed her down beneath it. She imagined his powerful physique holding her in place as she struggled weakly, but only for show and not really trying. She imagined his wood pressing against her own wakening body, first pressing against her thigh, and then against her flower, and then finally forcing its way into her.

Celia whimpered at the thought. She was writhing on the ground now, no longer leaning against the tree. Her scarlet cloak was cast open, with her white skirts pulled fully up above her waist, exposing her naked lower extremities to the vacant, unheeding forest.

Her fingers reached inside, trying to find that magical spot. She felt the soft, pulpy flesh there and pressed it hard against the bone behind it. At the same time, her other hand ran frantic circles around and around the swollen nub on the other side, the outside, her other magical spot.

"Oh, Masson," she moaned, having no fear in this part of the wood of being heard by anyone. No one came here. This was the Wolf Wood. There was nothing of value to be had here. It was overflowing with rocks, boulders, gullies, ditches, streams, fallen logs, and thick tangles of growth, making it very difficult and tiresome to navigate.

And, if one was unlucky, it was dangerous.

Celia came here often, though, for the privacy. She met no one and nothing to frighten her. It was a place where she actually felt more safe than around the woodsmen, as long as she was wise and careful.

"Oh, Masson," she moaned again.

Her fingers moved frantically as she tried hopelessly to imagine the feeling of his cock moving inside of her. The idea was so tempting, yet so artificial. She'd seen cocks. The woodsmen would take them out to pee, and more than once she'd spied them off alone, pleasuring themselves during a break, when they thought no one was looking. It was both puzzling and entertaining to Celia, the way their cocks changed, growing harder and longer when they were readied for use.

But they took them out so often, in the seeming privacy of the forest, that Celia had seen more than a few. Really, men were just obsessed with their logs.

She tried to imagine how a cock would feel. It was hard. It was a pleasing size and an unexpected shape. But it was just abstract to Celia. A cock looked like a thick finger, a jointless finger that might bend anywhere, or for some of the harder men, like Marque, something that couldn't bend anywhere. It was a finger that could point accusingly at her opening, hovering there, and then reach inside of her to find and scratch the itch that her fingers could never reach.

It would be so big, so much bigger and thicker than even three fingers. Surely cocks were too thick to fit properly. It couldn't be comfortable, although all of the married girls, or the girls like Fleurette who were too eager and sluttish to wait until they were married, all said with demure smiles or evil grins that it felt better than good.

Celia took their word for it. She imagined something better than good, better than fingers moving inside of her.

Her eyes flew wide as her body awakened further. She'd had these sensations many times before. She'd been able to bring her body to this same point, a point where every nerve inside of her screamed for just a little more. If she could just find the key, a cock inside of her could do it, or something else, she would know. She could feel that there was something more, but couldn't get there.

She didn't know what would happen. She didn't know what her goal was. She only knew that her body was telling her "just a little more." Her body was screaming and begging for her to get past this magical boundary. It was already an aching, tormenting, tantalizing pleasure that she felt, but her body knew that there was something just beyond its edge that must feel even better.

She was so very close.

But as always, this was as far as she could get. Her hips raised from the ground, lifting themselves up in a frantic effort to do what her fingers alone could not, to reach more deeply inside of herself than her fingers ever had or could. She rocked and writhed under her own touch, but to no avail.

Finally, after untold frenetic, thrashing minutes, she fell to the earth and threw her blue eyes wide in unvoiced frustration. She listened to herself panting as she tried to recover. She even bellowed openly up at the branches in anger, but not so loudly that someone in the distance might hear her.

It was all so unfair, Celia thought. Here she was in this tiny little backwards town, surrounded by dozens of sensual, powerful, but doltish men, and a herd of equally beautiful, soft, and alluring but dim women. Yet for all of her needs and desires, the only man in the entire town who she felt was worthy of her attention and affection was also the only man she could never even think of having, her own dear father.

It was frustrating. She lay on her back, staring at the dancing leaves above her, alternately masking and revealing blue sky far above. She caught her breath as she slowly came to her senses, leaving her with nothing but an overwhelming sense of frustration.

She sat up, leaning again against the tree, while removing the journal and stylus from her basket, along with a small corner of a loaf for herself. She took her time, nibbling on the bread while writing in frightful detail about how Masson had taken her under this tree in the Wolf Wood, as she was heading back to her father. She wrote of how wonderful his cock had felt as he showed her the way to pleasures almost as good as those which she'd been given by her own, dear father, in their most secret, dark nights at her grandmother's empty cottage in the woods.

As she dotted the period at the end of the last sentence, she read it over once, quickly, smiling in approval at the effort, with a particularly wicked grin at the delightful if horribly impossible last detail. She'd added that last part on a quirky whim, and suddenly found it to be the most appealing piece of the work. She took great pride and a vaguely unsettling joy in it, reading those last lines several times before tucking the journal and stylus back into the basket, at the very bottom where no one would ever find it. This was her best effort yet, she thought.

When she was finally ready, still frustrated but resigned, and at least satisfied and elated by her flurry of imagination, Celia got up to return to town to see her dear, darling, worthy father. She looked forward to cooking and cleaning for him, and pampering him. She was almost like his wife, but at the end of the night she would go to her own cold bed alone and unfulfilled, not at all like a wife, with that familiar feeling of yawning emptiness expanding throughout her body.

* * *

Their little, forest village did not lie far from the river, which was not far from the wider river, which led in turn to the big city that Father spoke of with both trepidation and longing. It was a place of riches and wonder to Celia, and adventure and danger, and a place that offered a very different and so tempting sort of future.

She envied even the bored, dimwitted wagoner who came once a week merely to haul the logs from their town to the river, taking the lone wide, well-worn road, which was really nothing more than two muddy wagon tracks through the sparse Riding Wood to the east. The woodsmen, to protect their livelihoods, kept it well cleared. To the north lay the Hunting Wood, almost as thinly treed as the Riding Wood. There one found wonderful flowing streams and natural, open glades of grasses and flowers, as well as all of the game that their town would ever need to survive even during all but the longest and most brutal of winters.

To the west lay the Chopping Wood, where the woodsmen worked day by day, felling trees, cutting lumber for their own houses and buildings and fences and walls, and shipping the rest off to make a tidy profit for the town, enough to let the wagoner bring back the goods and wares they couldn't make themselves or find in the forest, goods like the marvelous books that Father bought with his own wages, for his and her pleasure.

To the south lay danger. To the south was the Wolf Wood, the densest, darkest and most forbidding part of the greater forest for hundreds of miles around. There not one but two packs of hungry wolves roamed at will. That wood belonged to them. The leader of the larger of the two packs was a huge, black wolf, more fierce in size and demeanor than any the town had seen for generations. The townsfolk firmly believed that with an evil intelligence he brooked no trespassers. Few people ever tested that superstition.

The hunters ventured into those woods, on rare occasion and only when at need, when game grew scarce in both the Hunting Wood and the Chopping Wood. When they did, they always came back with much needed meat, but also with frightening tales of being stalked and hunted themselves by one pack or both, or by just the monstrous, black wolf alone. They always came back with terrible if fantastic tales of bare escape when a whisker thin, arrow sharp close call was all that had come between them and certain death.

To everyone in the town the Wolf Wood was a place of terrible danger. It represented a near certain chance for a horrible death at the maw of the black wolf and his pack.

Celia, smiling on her own way through and out of that wood, knew better, but appreciated more than any the sense of adventure behind the sentiment.

* * *

"Why does grandmother live way out here?"

This was asked of her father, way back when she was of school age, when her grandmother was alive and she and her father journeyed once a week to visit and share supper with her.

"She likes the privacy, and she likes the deep forest."

"But isn't she afraid of the wolves?"

Her father was silent for a time.

"Yes, a little. But if you're careful and wary, they're no real danger. They know that men are dangerous, and other game is more worth their attention. You'll always be fine if you know what to do, when to do it, and always do it to keep yourself safe."

"So grandma isn't afraid of anything?"

"No, darling, she is, she very much is. It's part of the reason that she lives way out here. There are lots of wolves in the world. Lots and lots, of all different sorts. Most of them wear clothing."

Celia pictured this in her mind, wolves walking about on all fours in blouses and trousers and even waistcoats. She started to laugh. Her father smiled condescendingly down at her, reading her thoughts.

"I mean men, Celia, who behave like wolves, not wolves who behave like men."

Celia was embarrassed at her mistake, but still amused by the image. She thought on it further.

"But who would hurt grandma? She's so old and kind."

"She's old now, yes, and probably you're right, no one would hurt her now, but old habits and more than that old fears die hard. She's lived here most of her life. They did hurt her once, quite often, and very sadly. She was very beautiful once, when she was young. She was very much like you, with hair and skin like yours. She stayed that beautiful even after I was born and my father had unexpectedly died, and was no longer there to protect her. That loss crushed her. She did what she had to do, for herself and for me, but she never liked it."

Celia stayed quiet, trying to read between the lines, but not really knowing what she needed to know to fill in those gaps.

"Eventually, when she couldn't take it anymore, when I was still a boy, we moved out here, into the forest. I hated it, at first, but she sent me regularly in to town to work to pay for supplies — she wouldn't ever go herself, and never did again — and she taught me how to read and do my numbers, and many other things, almost as much as I've taught you."

He paused a while to think, and Celia realized that he would finish the story in his own good time. She walked beside him, as impatient as a child often is, but holding her tongue from asking the woodpecker's barrage of questions that clacked in her head.

It really wasn't long before he continued, although by then she felt she was ready to burst.

"The path then was even harder to find than it is today, because I was the only one that used it, and under her strict instructions I took care to never use the same route too often. Only a handful of hunters that she trusted knew where the cottage lay, and dropped by from time to time to check on us, and bring us food. I never understood why, but men are queer creatures and do queer things for queer reasons. They always struck me as sad, in a way, though they went to great lengths to hide it."

He paused a moment in thought, actually stopping on the path. When he looked around into the depths of the forest, Celia looked, too, although she knew that he was seeing things that she couldn't see, as if they were in two different places, or rather, the same place at two different times. Again, with a patience that is uncommon in children, Celia waited for him to begin again, both walking and talking, which he did after not very long.

"I myself snuck in and out, always careful that no one could learn where we lived, and in that way she stayed safe until I'd grown to be a man, and at her urging I eventually struck out for a time to try my fortunes in the big city and to get a true education. It was very hard to leave her, especially since she depended on me so. But at the same time, the idea of the adventure ahead of me was glorious, and she said that she could never hold me back from the call of my own life. And the city was glorious, more wonderful than words can describe in very many ways."

"So why did you come back, Papa?"

Her father fell silent, then, with a look that she'd seen before. Celia knew she'd get no more out of him, which was all the more the bother because she felt like the didn't understand any of it. There was a whole, wonderful story in there to be heard, and Papa wasn't telling. He simply took her hand and led her through the thick, labyrinthian forest to her grandmother's house, for roast turkey with special gravy, and fresh, clear water, and always, always extra helpings of grandma's amazing bread pudding.

* * *

There had been a time, not today, when Celia was and should have been afraid. As she wandered out of the Wolf Wood now she glanced around hopefully, as she always did, looking to relive the excitement of that day. It was the day the wolf had come to hunt her, or so she liked to think.

It was only two summers ago. She had wandered all the way out to grandma's empty cabin, to be alone and to write and to think, as well as to experiment with her own awakening body.

As she had returned she spied the wolves, frighteningly many of them, walking parallel to her off through the trees, to both the left and right. They were low, gray, agile forms, gliding smoothly through the twists and turns and obstacles of the forest like fallen leaves floating down a stream, unlike her own halting, stuttering, inconsistent progress,. As soon as she'd seen them her heart had begun to race in growing, serious fear. She was tempted to run, but bravely kept her composure, following Papa's advice by keeping her pace and her course steady, but with a constant wary eye on the wolves.

She approached a spot where the trees thinned for a stretch, like a spot that had wanted to be a glade, but had been firmly told by the rest of the forest that no glades were allowed here. There, at the far end of the more open patch, stood the black wolf itself, staring at her with devilish blue eyes that mirrored her own. It stared at her with a penetrating intelligence of a sort that mocked and sneered at the dim minds of the woodsmen. She stopped in her tracks.

They stared at each other for a good while, neither moving, other than a quick glance around by Celia to see that the flanking wolves, too, had halted but were not moving any closer to seal her in to their trap.

The great black wolf stared at her, and she stared back, although with not nearly so much courage as she pretended to remember. It was far larger, in her eyes, than even the hunters had described. Its black was like a dark, forbidding cave where light could never penetrate. She could see its taut, bunched muscles broadcasting the rending power of it's limbs. Its mouth, when it opened to carelessly expose a pink, lolling tongue, was lined with teeth that looked like full sized daggers to Celia.