Moth Ch. 017

Posted on literotica.com with permission of author: Nanna Marker; literotica ID ellynei.

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Valo came home just before dawn and found the place emptied of all but his mate. She had lighted, and was somberly staring at, a tiny, shielded, bright-glow. Next to it was a tiny bowl of sweets. Valo's heart twisted at the sight. This was Lei's birthnight.

"I've got us a new juice-can," he said, placing the big ceramic can on the table, defiantly treating the table as a piece of furniture, not a shrine.

"This is Lei's first winter as a full-grown woman," said his mate.

Valo swallowed, and gathered all his courage for a second act of defiance.

"You can't know that," he said. "She might be dead."

His mate shook her head.

"I have to imagine that she is alive," she calmly said.

Valo lowered his eyes to the bowl of candy. It was filled with various of his favourite kind of sweets, but his mouth didn't water. He and Lei had liked the same kinds. When Lei had been small, his mate had often joked that the girl had barely bothered to rest in her womb for impatience to come out and be his daughter.

The child had looked like him, talked like him, walked and flown like him, and liked the same things he liked. It seemed that all she had inherited from her mother was her temper. Brevila was a hard woman when the mood struck her.

"Who will teach her about being a woman? Who will teach her how to handle a man?"

Valo remained quiet.

"I kept postponing it," complained Brevila. "All she was interested in was bows. Bows and that cursed butterfly." The woman's face rearranged into angry folds at her own mention of Lei's playmate. "I couldn't very well tell her of the pleasures between man and woman while she was still hanging out with a butterfly-boy. She'd start getting all the wrong ideas if I did."

Brevila's face changed again, refolding from anger to worry. "I didn't even tell her about the changes her body would undergo."

"She probably knew already," said Valo. "Kids have a way of catching on to things." He, himself, had known everything he needed to know even before his father had sat down with him for the first lesson.

"Not Lei," said Brevila, shaking her head. "All she ever cared to catch on to was bow-making. Don't you remember? She was ten before she realised that for babies to be made a man's seed had to be shot into a woman's privates, not her mouth."

Valo remembered. He and Brevila had had quite a laugh about that after putting the children to sleep. The child had known, of course, that sex was when a man's privates entered a woman's privates. But, she had somehow caught on to that men sometimes shot their seed in women's mouth, and had somehow come to think that that was how the babies were made.

"And even then, she just said, 'oh', and then went off to work on her latest bow. Lei cared too much about bows to just happen to catch on to other things." Brevila took the candy-bowl and restlessly moved it to the other side of the bright-glow.

"Where did you get fire?" asked Valo, trying to distract his mate from her sadness.

"I borrowed an ember for the occasion," said Brevila. "Don't worry, I doused it with water after lighting the glow."

"Allright." Valo hadn't been worried.

"Lei is old enough to be having sex," continued Brevila. The interlude apparently had had no effect on her line of thought. "I dread to think how that will work out with her knowing little more than where to put his thing. It's the woman who needs to know how to make sex good. It's the woman who has to know how to get her man to..."

"If nothing else, Oli was very attentive of Lei's moods," interrupted Valo, not to have to imagine his daughter having sex. That was one part of his girl's possible life he did not want to know about, nor imagine. Not in detail anyhow. "I'm sure he would make a good enough lover, even if he shouldn't be."

"Oli," hissed Brevila. "Him I prefer to imagine dead. Preferably a very gruesome and slow death."

The bright-glow's light reflected off his mate's eyes, which seemed to burn with imagined pictures of Oli suffering one terrible demise after another. Valo didn't look away. He had had his own share of wishing misery upon the cursed butterfly that had brought the plague to Lei.

"Maybe she has found herself a strong, sensible moth-man by now," said Valo.

"That's what I'm worried about," said Brevila, her eyes again soft with motherly concern. "How will she handle the intimacy?"

"Maybe he is good at it," comforted Valo. "Not all men are mindless in the bedding."

"You can't trust a man to know what to do in the bedding," snapped Brevila. "I've seen your little father-son talks. It's all winks, and shoulder shoving, and hints at how great it will all be. Young men are clueless!" Brevila wrung her hands. "It's the woman's needs that require consideration and effort. How will she teach him if she doesn't know herself?"

"Maybe she will come home and ask your advice when it doesn't work out." Valo could have bit his own tongue.

"Do you really think so?" asked Brevila, her eyes were all sorrow and no hope.

"I like to imagine so," said Valo, and reached across the table to hold his mate's hands. "I miss her." He caressed her hard strung knuckles with his thumbs.

"I miss you too," he added.

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Copyright of Nanna Marker 2010.

Tomorrow's chapter is longer.