Ivy

Squirrel Stew

Her squirrel stew wasn’t entirely forage; she added ingredients from her pantry to round it out into a proper stew. Corn and chickpeas from a can, Worcestershire sauce, a bottle of beer, spices, along with some foraged acorns and plants.

“If I felt like frying, I could have fried up some leeches, too,” she said. “If you’d had more on you we could have been eating good. . . .”

“One was enough,” I said. “Fried leeches?”

“They’re not for everybody. It’s an acquired taste. Good to know how, though; they’re generally easy to catch.”

“Tell me there are leech traps.”

Ivy shrugged. “If you’ve got offal, they’ll eat that. Coffee can with rocks on the bottom and meat inside for bait. If you haven’t got that, just wade around for a while and they’ll find you. The ones you pluck off yourself always taste the best.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” I glanced over at the camping stove. “How long does it take to cook?”

“You hungry now?”

“Kind of, but I can wait.”

Ivy nodded. “The longer you let it simmer, the better it is. It’ll need occasional stirring to keep it from sticking to the pot, but can mostly be left alone. Which is why now is the perfect time to use the curry brush. You might have forgotten about those burrs, but I didn’t.”

I held up my hand. “I didn’t forget, I was soaping your legs and I saw them, tried to pick one out but got distracted by, uh, your assets.”

“Now’s your chance to redeem yourself.” Ivy grinned. “See if you can get everything groomed and slicked without getting distracted. You do a good job, and you can brush my hair, too.”

What’s in it for me almost crossed my lips, but I knew what would be in it for me. Currying—whatever that was—and closeness. What more could I ask for? Was this Ivy’s soft side?

“Fuck it up, and you’re getting the dildo.”

That answered one question. Now all that was left to learn was what a curry comb was.

•••

The curry comb was a rubbery disc with a hand-loop on one side and bristles on the other. Ivy demonstrated its use on one thigh, brushing down along the grain of her fur. “Might not get all the burrs out,” she said as she slipped it off her hand and offered it to me. “I’ve got a regular comb and a brush as well, if it comes to that, you’ll really have to work them out. Curry comb ought to get whatever little tendrils get left after the seed pod’s out.”

“We doing this in the kitchen?” Not that her cabin really had a lot of other rooms to offer.

“Unless it’s really uncomfortable for you. I figured I could keep an eye on the stew while you worked.”

“Yeah, that’s fair.” I slipped the brush over my hand and studied her legs, considering the best way to work. Top to bottom was surely the best way, although that meant that I’d start with the fun part and end up with the boring parts.

Who was I kidding; no part of her was boring.

I rubbed the comb across my arm, just to get an idea of how it felt on flesh, in case I had to be careful at the juncture of fur and skin. It was surprisingly pleasant, and I wondered how it would feel on the itchy spots on my back. I would have tried, but she was watching and waiting.

Starting out, I was nervous, and my first strokes were hesitant. Her coat offered more resistance than my arm had, and I wasn’t sure how much was enough. How often an area should be gone over until it was done.

Then I started to get the hang of it, started to see the difference between groomed and ungroomed hair.

I worked around her left side, down to her crotch, then went around to the right to keep things symmetrical. Her legs would have to be tackled separately, but that was okay.

Ivy’s butt was something I hadn’t been paying as much attention to as I ought to have. Curvaceous, firm, pleasant to the touch, and dead-center, her tail, occasionally flicking and swishing as I worked the comb through her coat.

I’d already touched her just about everywhere, but the root of her tail felt special and secret, so I worked around it until both her cheeks were slick and shiny, and I could have come back to it but it was right there in front of my face, impossible to ignore.

Even though I knew she could move it, even though I’d seen her moving it, I wasn’t expecting the twitch as the brush touched, and I jerked back before moving in again, focused on my task. She flicked it, slapping me in the chest with the brushy tuft at the end, and I instinctively grabbed it to keep it still and started working the comb. Feeling her muscles move in her butt as she shifted her weight was one thing; it was more pronounced in her tail.

I didn’t let that stop me, and I was halfway down before I remembered I’d forgotten a spot, the underside where it tucked into her cheeks.

I kept on working towards the end, but my eye kept going back there, considering how I’d approach it. Should I ask her to lift her tail, or just get in there? She’d expect me to, wouldn’t she? If she didn’t, how much would it hurt to take a hoof to the face?

Fortune favors the bold, and when I had finished brushing out the tuft of her tail, I returned to the very root, reaching my hand up underneath slowly, giving her ample time to tell me to stop. The back of my hand was deep in the crack of her ass, and I could feel her tense as the brush ran against the grain of her hair: there was no other way to approach.

Her tail clenched and relaxed as I started the downward stroke, and the second time I moved up and started my downstroke, I pushed my middle knuckle out, dragging against her butthole as I worked through her coat.

I heard her suck a breath as the spoon slapped against the side of the stewpot, and for a second I was seized by the urge to shed the comb and stick a finger up there, like she’d done to me. But I didn’t.

•••

By the time I got to her knees, I was on autopilot, doing a job and doing it well. I’d gone from kneeling to sitting, and I was good enough that I didn’t have to move around and see what I’d gotten and what I hadn’t; I could feel the difference in her coat. Not to mention I was now intimately familiar with the contours of her legs.

The feathering around her hooves was its own challenge; the longer hair fought the curry comb and I had to change my technique, moving in shorter strokes and pulling out to get all the hair to comply.

I thought she didn’t have surprises left, but I was wrong. As I was brushing the back of her hooves, I suddenly encountered something unexpected, and at first I thought it was a burr that had lodged deep and when it couldn’t be dug out with the curry comb, I reached in with my other hand to explore.

“They’re dewclaws,” Ivy explained. “Brush the hair up if you want a better look.”

I did. They were almost like they wanted to be fingers, although they were high enough up that they wouldn’t have done any good.

I vaguely remembered that cats had something like that on their paws, something left over from evolution or else in the process of evolving, and that got me to wondering as I moved on to her other leg what sort of an ancestral tree minotaurs might have occupied, partially human and partially bovine as they were. Coincidence, or something else? I was sure that in Greek myth, minotaurs had arisen because Zeus fucked something he shouldn’t have.

Maybe it was better that I didn’t have any cellphone reception, that I couldn’t get my phone out and check. A mental reboot was as simple as looking up and focusing on her assets, considering how smooth I knew her coat was and how good it would feel to rub my cheek up against her and those pleasant thoughts lasted until I got down to her hooves, really focused on how they spread and flexed as she shifted her weight, as I traced a finger down them.

Hooves were weird.

Whether they were weirder than her tail, that I didn’t know.

•••

“You did good.” Ivy set the spoon down in the pot and ran her hand down her leg, checking my work. Smooth, sleek, burr-free. “You got what it takes to do hair?”

“What do you think?” I motioned to my hair, the best haircut money could provide . . . at Supercuts.

“Good thing I’m not vain.” She handed me the brush.

“Before I start, that thing you said earlier, about the, eh, dildo, we’re not still playing by those rules, are we?”

“You did do a good job,” she admitted. “So . . . tell you what, you do a really good job on my hair, and you can decide if it goes in me. Do a great job, and you can decide where.”

“Oh, really?” I couldn’t help myself, I ran my hand across her butt and slid a finger in her crack, almost touching her asshole.

Her answer was to push the brush into my hand. “Good luck.”

•••

The brush, at least, was a familiar implement although it turned out that using it on somebody else was a different skill than using it on myself. Still, the basics were the same even if the hand motions weren’t, and it was hard to fuck up.

Or would have been, if I hadn’t gotten distracted by both her horns and her ears, parts of her I hadn’t focused on nearly enough. The soft, velvety hair on her ears which was too short for a conventional comb to do any good, although I tried anyway before getting smart and using the curry comb again. A gentle touch, I wasn’t sure how sensitive they were, especially around the scarred notches.

Points would be docked for styling. In my head, when I first touched brush to hair, I imagined videos I’d seen with clickbaity titles like “You Won’t Believe the Transformation.” Getting tangles out and letting it do what it wanted to do on its own was a better default; if she’d wanted a stylist she’d’ve gone to Supercuts and picked up a barber.

Go with the grain, work around horns and ears. Brush back on the forehead and give her a pompadour before it flops forward again back into messy bangs which were honestly more her style.

It was still worth a second attempt, this time holding her hair back with my hand to keep it in place, just so I could get a second look.

“What are you doing?”

I let her hair drop back. “Nothing.”

“Used to have hair down to here.” She held her hand against her back. “Too much work, and bulls would grab it sometimes. Cows, too, it’s better short. Out of the way, easier to clean, easier to brush, don’t you agree?”

“Yeah.” It was easy to brush, and while I was hardly an impartial judge, I thought I was doing a good job of it.

•••

She might have reached a verdict on grooming or she might not have. She didn’t tell me; instead she took the brush and gave me the spoon. “My turn, you stir.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Don’t let the stew burn.” Ivy cautioned, before touching the brush to my head.

I jerked back, even though I knew the touch was coming, it somehow felt weird to have her comb my hair, and I wasn’t sure why. We’d showered together, we’d shared a bed, we’d hunted together, we’d had sex, we’d checked each other for parasites and how was this more personal, how was this an invasion of space?

Was it just a human thing, that we were taught that we should groom ourselves when we were big enough, and once we were old enough we didn’t want anybody else’s help? There were barbers who also shaved faces, and I’d never once considered having a barber run a razor over my face, I could do it just fine on my own.

Ivy, of course, wasn’t willing to give up just because I’d recoiled from her first approach. She moved behind me, wrapped an arm around my waist so I couldn’t get away, and got up in my personal space, her breasts pressing against my back and her freshly-curried legs against mine.

As she moved, I could feel her fur tickling my butt, and I was still focused on that as the brush touched my hair again.

The weirdness didn’t last; it was replaced with contentment. Nobody ever touched my hair except myself, that was how it had been as long as I could remember. Maybe a lover had run her hand through my hair before, but certainly not a comb. I paused in my stew-stirring to enjoy the moment, how it was evoking feelings I didn’t realize I had.

I barely noticed as she relaxed her grip on my waist and instead used her now-free hand to play with my hair and with my ears, then my neck and chin.

“You keep that up, the stew might get an extra ingredient.”

She snorted. “Keep yourself under control, or you’ll burn your dick on the stove.”

I couldn’t help it, I imagined accidentally getting too close to the stove and singeing off my pubic hair. What was more manly than manscaping with fire? Then a more sober thought crossed my mind. “Like, sometimes when I light the barbecue grill, I burn the hair off my knuckles. You could, uh—”

“It’s always smart to be careful around fire,” she admitted. “I can comb over small bare patches, though, and in certain circles some kinds of scars are a badge of honor.” Her finger traced over the top of my ear. “Like, well, depending on what kind of ear tear it is, I don’t know how to describe it but any minotaur would know. And I never got how much value humans, especially human women, put on smooth skin. Just proof that they never worked a day in their life.”

“Or that they’re rich enough that they don’t have to.” Sudden facts I’d learned in community college coming back while I was standing over a camp stove in a rustic cabin somewhere in northern Michigan in the company of a naked minotauress while also naked were not what I’d expected. “I can’t remember exactly, there’s a near-Eastern culture where it’s considered beautiful to have light skin, as if they’ve never worked outside a day in their life, whereas here having a tan, especially in the winter, implies money for leisure time on a southern beach.”

“You’re pretty smart for a cart boy,” Ivy muttered, then stuck her tongue out.

“Smart enough to quit that job and go live in the wild as nature intended.”

“Fair point.” Ivy slid her hand down my chest and teased my belly button. “You want to live dangerously?”

“Aren’t I already?”

“Maybe.”

•••

‘Dangerously’ was currying my pubes, which was a new level of weird. Not exactly pleasant, either; the curry comb didn’t work all that well around dangling bits. Nor did it make any measurable improvement.

On the plus side, I didn’t accidentally bump into the stove and burn myself.

•••

We could have eaten standing around in the kitchen, like we had for our other meals, but it felt too confined, it felt like a wild squirrel stew with foraged plants wasn’t an inside food.

She didn’t have the back deck built yet, she didn’t have her Adirondack chairs yet, but we walked around the house just the same.

The foundation posts would have been a good place to sit, if the concrete had cured. I doubted that it had, and I didn’t want to leave a butt-print in a new post, or find out what wet cement on my balls and taint felt like.

So we sat leaned up against the side of the house, overlooking not only our morning’s work, but also the forest. I could see a squirrel dart across a branch and then pause, studying us, no idea what we were eating for dinner. If he’d been out a few hours ago, he might have been in the stew, too.

Did squirrels eat carrion? If I left some of my stew where he could get it, would he?

Ivy had had beef stew, what did that mean?

Realistically, was that different than eating a monkey?

And why was I thinking about it? I took a spoonful of stew, blew on it, and popped it in my mouth. It was good, and the meat was more tender and less gamey than I’d expected. I’d never eaten much in the way of wild game, a venison burger back when Arby’s offered them, and one of my former co-workers had gifted me some meat-strips from a deer that were decent enough fried up.

I hadn’t understood hunting, but as I supped and watched the wind ruffle the leaves, as I listened to the constant birdsong and hum of insects, as I remembered her sweeping the rifle off her shoulder and bringing down her prey, I thought I understood it better than I had before. It certainly wasn’t necessary for survival, but maybe it was important for survival.

“Do you ever go up to the cabin with nothing but the clothes on your back, and rely on what you catch for food?”

Ivy nodded. “Keeps me sharp.”

“Have you ever caught nothing?”

“There’s always something, if you’re willing . . . mosses, bugs, and I can eat more plants than humans. It’s tougher in the winter, especially if there’s a lot of snow, you have to know where you might find things you can eat. I usually spend one week a year really roughing it, the only thing I bring is water because I don’t want to mess around with that. Depending on what it is, you don’t get sick right away, then a couple weeks later you’re back at the job with raging diarrhea and everybody else is making fun of you.”

•••

We went back inside to clean up the dishes, then back outside. Ivy dragged out the beanbag, and we vied for position. She wanted me to sit on it because I was the guest; I wanted her to sit on it because it was hers and it was her cabin and she ought to be comfortable. Both of us didn’t fit side-by-side, it was deceptive enough to let us think it would work before someone shifted and then I or she would unceremoniously slide off.

Leaning against it and letting her lean against me had worked last night, and it worked again. Old tricks were the best tricks.

Morning felt like it had been forever ago; the day had unfolded into a century in my mind, and it was hard to imagine that sometime tomorrow, we’d have to leave. I didn’t have a job any more, but she did.

“Is this all paid for?”

“Not yet,” she admitted. “Are you thinking what I think you are?”

“That you could live here year-round.”

“Yeah, that’s going to be the day that I tell my boss where to shove it. Sometimes I do think about that, and I have thought about how long I could hide at a state park, evading the park rangers and the tourists. . . .”

“There’d be a few blurry photos that everyone would say was a sasquatch.”

“And they’d have to blur out the nipples.” She held her hands to her chest. “You think that Sasquatch is a guy or a girl? Figure if he’s a guy, he’d have at least balls swinging around, maybe a dick too, which ought to show up in pictures. Hell, even a sheath ought to show on a blurry photo. Suppose those are okay since your money has a buffalo sheath on it.”

“Wait, really?”

Ivy nodded. “I know all about those.”

“Buffalo sheaths? Dicks?”

“Not all that different than a minotaur bull, really.” She shifted around, then leaned her head up against my chin. “I did tell you that you could decide where it went.”

“Yeah.” I ran my hand through her hair, then along a horn. “Now’s not the time.”

•••

As quiet as we’d been in the woods, we’d still been moving, and that had been something that many animals had noticed. Here, we were sitting almost as still as statues, and we’d both fallen silent, contemplating in our own way. Animals, some of whom were used to the minotaur-smells from her cabin, went about their business in the woods. A curious grey and white bird landed on one of the new-poured foundations, unbothered by the wet concrete.

He regarded us with his dark eyes before hopping down and picking at the ground, coming within a few yards of us before something startled him and he flew off, chirping out a warning.

“If we get lucky, we might see another deer,” Ivy whispered. “Sometimes they come up right to the edge of the woods.”

It was the first words that either of us had spoken in I don’t know how long. It felt longer than when we’d been hunting, although it probably wasn’t. It felt loud in the natural noise of the woods.

I didn’t answer her with words, I just nodded, knowing she’d feel the motion and know what it meant.

As the sun descended, the nature of the forest changed. When it was near the distant horizon, everything took on a new light. The golden hour, as photographers called it. Everything seemed to have a new vitality as the colors changed.

That wasn’t the only change; the birds disappeared and their calls faded until they were gone. Meanwhile crickets and frogs and who knew what else started to take up their chorus—the woods were never really silent.

Already, I could feel a chill in the air. So much of me was covered by Ivy, it wasn’t too bothersome: her back and her fur kept me warm.

As the night arose, we didn’t see a deer. Was that bad luck, or Mother Nature’s capricious nature?

The sky turned from reds and oranges to a deep violet, and I watched the first stars of the night appear, or maybe they were planets. I didn’t know and I didn’t want to ask, I didn’t want to break the silence. There was a value in it that I hadn’t properly appreciated before.

I saw bats start to swoop around, in search of tasty insects, and I saw fireflies—they kept close to the ground, and blinked out their message under the spread of stars. In the darkness, it felt like my other senses were heightened—Ivy’s weight pressing against me, the strange feel of fur as she moved her legs, the scent of her hair. The scent of her, not quite covered by the body wash and shampoo.

In the forest, there were other noises besides the crickets and frogs; the trees creaked and sighed as the temperature dropped, and I could hear creatures moving about as well.

This wasn’t a place to sleep, and yet it was lulling. I’d never meditated before, and I wondered if this was what it felt like? I didn’t have any great unanswered questions, at least not any that were currently on my mind, and yet I felt content, at peace with the world, with everything.

I was half-asleep, satisfied with the feel of her pressing against me, from her hair brushing against my chin to my arm wrapped around her stomach, rising and falling with each slow breath she took.

I was sore everywhere—cart wrangling and shelf stocking hadn’t prepared me for hard labor at the deck foundations or a hunting expedition through the woods; nor had I been prepared for the whiplash experiences of sex in the shower or the mutual pest removal that had bookended the day. And I still hadn’t decided which was more intimate.

For the moment, I was the king of the world. I had never been more comfortable in my life than I was right now, and I wanted to make it last for as long as it could. It was the little things in life that really mattered. Sex was fun and then it was over, but this—this could stretch on as long as we wanted it to, as long as we needed it to. There was no urgency, no goal, just the two of us together for the here and now.

Tomorrow it would end, tomorrow we would go back to our real lives. Tomorrow I would start on a job hunt but I didn’t think I would have any trouble finding one; Lowe’s had a ‘Now Hiring’ sign on their building and I was experienced in the world of hardware and home improvement.

And it wasn’t something to think about, not now. The future would take care of itself.

Was she asleep? Or was she lost in her own thoughts?

Did it matter?

•••

Nothing could last forever; no perfect moment could stretch out into hours or days or weeks or months. They were moments, and then they were gone. She shifted around and stretched, and my hand slipped down to her thigh, resting lightly in the fur there.

Ivy’s voice was low, quiet, almost a whisper. “You still awake enough to make it to the loft?”

I squeezed her thigh then ran my hand down to her knee. “You’ll have to carry me.” My voice was husky, almost as if I’d forgotten how to speak.

“Maybe I’ll just throw you a blanket.”

“Is it a hero’s death if I fall off the ladder and impale myself on your horns?”

“No.”

“Pity.” I ruffled her hair, which still felt almost freshly-brushed. Not an unbiased observation, but still . . . I’d done a good job, I thought. “You ever sleep out here?”

“I have, yeah.” She leaned into me. “Before I got the cabin built, and sometimes after. It’s not like you might be thinking, it takes a special kind of . . . stubbornness. You won’t wake up refreshed. Some of it’s physical and some of it’s psychological. You don’t think I hoisted a mattress all the way up into the loft just because it was fun.”

“I figured you considered it a challenge.”

She pulled away from me, just enough to turn around and face me. I didn’t think that my night vision was good enough to pick up on a facial expression, but maybe hers was.

“Surprised you didn’t stock the bags of concrete up there, too.”

“I was going to build a throne this weekend,” she said. “But then you arrived and I had to use them.”

Without her body against mine, the night air was far less comfortable, and I pressed my palm into the ground, wondering if I’d still be able to stand gracefully or if my legs had gone to sleep.

Ivy must have wondered the same, or else she was feeling benevolent; she reached out a hand and I took hold, let her pull me to my feet.

•••

This time, sharing a toothbrush wasn’t even weird.