I pistoned into her and gritted my teeth, desperately trying to hold back my own orgasm. She felt so good. The ridges above my cock weren’t super sensitive but the feel of her skin pressing against them sent small ripples of pleasure throughout my body everytime I thrust into her.
Water sloshed over the sides of the bathing pool as our mating picked up in speed and it wasn’t long before I felt Julie’s cunt squeeze around me. I could hold back no longer. I cried out as my release soared through me and as she milked every last drop of seed from my body. It felt as if I had been ripped free from this plane of existence and had been pulled into the afterlife. I saw stars and ancestors and what looked like the goddess herself. She looked just like Julie, glowing for me as a bright light in the darkness.
I came back to myself when I felt my mate collapse against me, completely spent. I ran my hands up and down her arms and kissed her forehead.
“I had no idea sex could be this good,” she confessed.
“I did.” My statement caught Julie by surprise.
“Even when I had no hope of ever touching a female, I knew if I ever found my mate, our union would be perfect,and it has been. Every moment with you is perfect.”
Julie laid back down against my chest with a sigh and a smile. “You’reperfect. I’m full of worries.”
“You should not say that as if it were a bad thing. I like you just the way you are.” I held her close to my chest. “You do not need to worry about the winter though. I will make sure you are provided for. I can give you my word on that.”
Julie looked at me with tenderness in her eyes. “I am worried about a lot of things, but not about running out of food or our future. We’ve faced ungars, jagwas, and traveling along the treetops, and we survived.”
Julie grasped my hand and intertwined her fingers in mine. “You have given me the confidence to know that we will be okay as long as we’re together.”
Her statement filled my heart with a joy so overwhelming tears trailed down my cheeks. My mate carried many burdens on her shoulders and to know that our future wasn’t one of them because of her trust in me, was more than I could bear. My heart felt like it was bursting. Not even luminescence could feel this good.
Julie gently wiped away my tears. “You’re perfect Orsu, my big teddy bear, my mate.”
We finished our bath and laid down in the furs where I held my mate all night long feeling like the luckiest male alive.
Chapter 17
Julie
Watching Orsu leave for the second day in a row wasn’t any easier than the first. In fact, it was harder this time because I knew exactly how much my heart would ache for my bear shifter the entire time he was gone. It would be different if he only had to hunt once a week like the dekes did before, but knowing he would have to leave day after day felt like too much to bear.
Now that I’d given Orsu my whole heart, it felt like he carried it with him whenever he left, leaving me feeling hollow inside.
I didn’t want to sit around and wallow in my misery though. I needed a distraction. I went to the storage room and looked over all the common ingredients the dekes had. Grain, meat, berries…Surely I could use some of these things to make something that would help the food go farther.
Traditionally, the dekes used flatbread as a plate to carry their food on and to be eaten as either an open faced sandwich or a taco, but what if I could cook the meat into the bread? That would use considerably less meat. And if we paired that with some simple vegetable stews, that would make our meat last twice as long.
I got to work on my idea and made some bread dough and laid it out on my counter. I topped it with somemeat and vegetables as filler. Then I pinched the edges shut until it looked like a rustic hand pie.
By the time the bread had browned on both sides I took it away from the fire to let it cool.
“Sozu, Jax, come over here. I need you to taste something.” I called the two youngest Sirrets over. “I made this meat and vegetable filled bread. I think it’ll help our food go further this winter.”
The two young males nodded their heads with somber expressions. Everyone felt the weight of gathering enough food for the winter. I think it irritated Sozu that he couldn’t go out and hunt, but I also understood Tarak’s reasoning for him staying behind. He was young, and Sozu looked underweight compared to Jax, who was a year younger than him and already half a head taller. Jax wasn’t allowed to hunt yet either, but I had overheard Tarak speaking to his father about letting his son do his first solo hunt soon. His father, who was such a sweetheart it was easy to tell where Jax got it from, had agreed with Tarak that Jax was ready to go out on his own.
“Mmmm,” Jax let out an enthusiastic hum of approval.
“This is pretty good,” Sozu agreed. “And you think foods like this will help our stores last longer?”
“I do.” I nodded my head and glanced at the half empty grain barrel. “I think we’ll need to gather more grain, though.”
“We can go out tomorrow morning,” he said with determination.
“Tomorrow,” I repeated with a sense of relief that washed over me. Making these hand pies will essentially double the bread content that they were using, meaning we would use up bread faster instead of meat. I could makesome rudimentary noodles to add to the vegetable stew as well.
The dekes really hadn’t tapped into the full potential of the grains they have as a food source. There were other things we could use as well. We could combine animal fat, crushed dried meat and spices or berries to make pemmican bars.
I started to feel hope well up in my chest for the future. We could do this. We could survive the winter, we just needed to gather more grain.
