Page 50 of Sky and the Grumpy Troll

My emotions were right at the surface, tears and pain and years of closing myself off in a controlled little box all rushing out of me. I was trembling, the formal structures of my mind coming apart at the joints.

“Can you come from this, little pain slut?” The paddle landed again.

“I don’t know. Oh, fuck—”

“Count, Moerrven.”

“Four… five…” The numbers were getting harder to form. My mouth was not cooperating. “Ah — oh gods. Six… seven…” The emotions hit me hard, washing over me in waves with every strike, and the last three counts came out as grunts that hardly sounded like numbers. I was sobbing, tears streaming down my cheeks, and my hips were lifting to meet each strike like I was offering him something I did not know how to offer any other way. Every impact shook loose another layer of the composure I had mortared into place over five years. Underneath it was grief and shame and wanting, all of it pouring out of me through the place where leather met skin.

He stopped. I lay there shaking, my face pressed into the pillow, my cock aching, my skin on fire. He wiped a tear from my cheek with a tenderness that made something crack inside my chest.

“Are you ready to talk now?”

“Could you do more?” My voice did not sound like mine. “Ten more. Please? I was very bad, wasn’t I?”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

Shameless, I wiggled my ass. “Break me, Sky,” I said.

He huffed a laugh as he leaned down and kissed the tender skin of my ass, a soft, warm counterpoint to everything the paddle had done, and he started again. I stopped counting. The numbers had become irrelevant. What mattered was the build, the crack, the bloom of sensation, and the slow, terrifying loosening of everything I had held shut. And pleasure built with the pain, growing so intense that I couldn’t stop myself from tipping over into orgasm, crying out as my cock spurted beneath me onto the sheets.

By the time he finished, I was covered in cum and tears, crying openly, every muscle shaking, my face wet, five years of locked-down grief spilling out of me onto the sheets of this beautiful room in Highmark. He rubbed at my sore muscles until I was floating in a foggy, comfortable space that I did not know existed until this moment.

“Are you ready to talk, sweetheart?” He moved away for a moment, and when he came back, he was naked, his skin warm against mine, gentle on my ass, soothing, massaging the heat away.

“I did not want to cross Bryndala’s bridge.” There was nothing holding words back now, no walls left inside me.

“Why not? Didn’t we cross one of her bridges by your house?”

“This was her final project.” My voice broke, but I kept going. “It is a feat of engineering, magnificent and beautiful. Or so I’ve heard.”

He gasped softly. “Greymere Gorge. It’s that bridge?”

“Yes, that bridge. There was rain high in the mountains, and the canyon is narrow, all that runoff in one place, you know.” Tears were flowing openly now, and Sky pressed close, kissing them away. “The bridge was so brilliant that it survived. Water crashed over it, washing Bryndala and her workers away, but the damn thing they were building, it survived. So it’s always there, taunting me.”

Sky’s hands glided up over my face and looped around my horns, letting me feel him. Through the trolgar, his anger had dissolved, like a wave pulling back from shore. What replaced it was fiercer than pity, fiercer than sympathy: it felt like being held, even though his hands had stopped moving.

“Would she want you to live like this?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and the words tore something. “I don’t know what she would want because she isn’t here and I cannot ask her.”

He brushed his lips against mine. “Perhaps not, but I have a feeling that she would be proud to know the bridge still stands. Wouldn’t she? It is a testament to her skill and innovation, isn’t it?”

“She was very proud of her bridges.”

His thumb pressed gently into the trolgar point, and I closed my eyes, letting the emotions flow.

“Mm, so she would want her accomplishment celebrated?”

“They have celebrated it. The whole bridge is dedicated to her, and I believe there may even be a statue. They call it Bryndala’s Bridge.”

“But you’re afraid to gaze upon the statue?”

“Yes,” I said. “Or afraid to let the statue gaze upon me. I am not the man she married, Sky. I’m not a sweet, kind daydreamer, not the author of books about adventure and romance. I’m something else, something more broken.”

“Something more real,” he said. Then his lips were against my shoulder, kissing a path up my neck. “It’s okay to mourn her. But you need to face your demons before they eat you up. You need to keep living, sweetheart.”

“The pain helps,” I said. “Is that strange?”