A Night by My Fire

His eyes had not once looked from the female. “Three hundred fifty-three.”

“How many can you do?”

Stephen answered, nonchalant, “As there is no weight on my back, at least one thousand.”

River cocked her head. “Weight? Like a person?”

“At my strength level, resistance is necessary for expedited improvement.”

“So if I sit on you, this will end quicker and I can reclaim my living room?”

“Yes.”

River walked up, waited for him to hold plank, and sat right across his shoulder blades. When he immediately started right where he left off, she started to laugh. “I didn’t really believe you.”

She was about to hop off, to leave him to continue, but he barked, “Remain where you are.”

It’s not like she had anything better to do. “Are you going to bench press me next?”

In a grunt, he answered, “You are too light to offer sufficient resistance.”

Having to brace to keep in place, her hands felt what made him bigger than a grizzly bear beneath his shirt. He was a rock, inhuman, everything bulging under her palm. “Just watching you do this is making me extra sore.”

Freezing mere inches from the ground, Stephen turned his head to cut a glance at the woman from the corner of his eye. “Due to the storm, there has been little need for you to perform physical labor. You have no call to be sore.”

“Pffft,” River cocked her chin at the couch. “You’ve been sleeping on my bed for six nights now. The chair is not nearly so comfortable.”

He started to stand, River toppling unexpectedly, only to yip when he moved with inhuman quickness, twisting her arms over her breasts. He spun her around, and yanked her back up against his chest. One good jolt and the bones in her spine popped, the startled woman squealing.

She just hung like a wet noodle, as if unsure her legs would work.

“Is that not better?”

She managed to squeak, “Umm...Yeah.” When her feet found the floor, and over-huge python arms let her go, she added, “A little warning would have been nice.”

Stephen frowned, watching River plop belly down on the couch. “You would have tensed, making the adjustment less effective.”

“It was effective. I feel like everything went cockeyed.”

Beefy fingers flipped up the hem of her sweater before River realized what he was doing. When she cursed and tried to shuffle off, a flat palm pressed her into the cushions. Thumb and forefinger pinched down her bared spine. “Everything is in alignment. It feels unnatural because you are unaccustomed to proper spinal positioning.”

“Stop poking at me, jerk!”

He ignored her complaint and did as he pleased. “Hold still.”

The pad of a thumb dug in from the base of her neck and drew down the left side of her spine. A jump of muscle, another yelp, and the tension was forced off. He even managed to draw out an agitated sigh. The process was repeated on the other side.

Kneading the way that best alleviated discomfort, he found her squirming less and settling more. A shoulder was cupped, drawn up so the blade projected and he could reach the smaller muscle groups beneath it. She held still and allowed it, going so far as to stifle a groan when he forced a knot to release.

The more he touched, the less clinical it became, there was too much to learn from such a grand amount of exposed flesh. He was correct about her athleticism, though he assumed her physique came from hiking and the necessary labor of survival in the wilds, not organized exercise. But it wasn’t her musculature that had his eye. The entirety of her exposed back was painted, a tattoo alive with the movement of gentle muscle under vivid skin. He traced it with his fingers, the design complicated, created by a master of both flow and color, absorbing the hours upon hours she’d submitted to a needle, to pain, for a thing of such beauty.

A rising phoenix and the flowering branches of a tree embedded in the totality of the design. It extended beyond where faded jeans covered hips and buttocks, above the bunched up fabric of her ugly sweater.

The portrait was breathtaking, the subject unique.

It wrapped her side, asymmetrical, and he needed to know what remained hidden. But when he tried to turn her to see it, she pulled down her sweater and began to sit up.

Stephen wanted her back as she was. “I am not finished.”