Sal
Perhaps it was easier because there had been time to adjust to Acer’s decline, or perhaps I was getting better at falling in love with Merelings, for it took little time at all for me to open my arms, legs, and heart to Sal.
Sal, with his feisty, salty sense of humor, his off-color jokes, his quick laugh. Sal could bring me out of my half-heartedness and make me smile again. While once, long ago, I’d forbidden him to jest, I now welcomed it.
“You told me once,” I said to him jokingly, “it is my fault you lacked self-control.”
He, to his credit, blushed. “I was young and stupid,” he said, “and I took advantage of you. If I could go back in time to make a different choice I would.”
“You are very attractive when your face turns red,” I said. “I do believe you are changed, and I don’t hold your youthful arrogance against you. Your life is too short to live it with unforgiven crimes weighing you down.”
“My life?” He cocked his head to look at me quizzically. “What about your life?”
“My life, my dear Mereling, is one tethered to a different calendar than yours. Have you not noticed I never seem to age?”
His eyes widened, and as if it had struck him for the first time—which, indeed, was what it seemed to have done—he gasped. “I never....”
“What?”
“I never thought about it. You were always just you. Just the way I’d first known you.”
The look on his face and his stammering confusion struck me as funny. I began to laugh then suppressed it. Something dark had flitted across his countenance, and I feared it had been caused by my amusement.
“What is it?” I asked. “What is the matter?”
“I don’t like feeling stupid,” he confessed.
“You aren’t stupid,” I assured him. “No more than any. Your friends also failed to notice, did they not? Did anyone in this village ever take heed? No. My agelessness, at least relative to your life span, failed to capture the attention of anyone at all.”
He looked at me with such a tender combination of frank curiosity and wonderment, it stirred in me my own combination of affection and lust. I took his head in my hands and kissed him, first lightly then again and again, until our lips were searching each other, our tongues flitting in and out, our teeth nibbling gently but urgently on one another’s earlobes, necks, fingertips.
He clasped me to him, and I felt his rising excitement as he grew hard in such nearness. We fumbled and fussed to disrobe while not losing contact between our bodies. Soon, I sat astride him, rising and falling on his magnificent cock, lifting almost to the point of losing the connection then sliding back down again to take him into my body, deep, deep, deep.
Up and down I rode him, and when it seemed like neither of us could hold back a moment longer I paused so we could savor the sensations just a bit more until, at last, I could not restrain myself. We burst into glorious orgasm together, finally releasing the exquisite tension.
Days, or rather nights, went by, and our lovemaking alternated with storytelling, the way it had with Acer. Curious to know how the third of these friends had interpreted the adventures of his childhood, I began to coax the tale from him with flattery.
“What does it feel like,” I asked one night under the stars, “to be the richest man in this village?”
“Now?” he questioned. “Now, it hardly matters. I have realized, since Amaro and Acer have gone to the Underworld and since you, dear Luna, have allowed me to love you in spite of my transgressions, there are more important things in life than money. Why it took me such a long time to understand this, I don’t know, except I’ve always been a slow learner.” He laughed.
I pulled an oak leaf from its branch and tickled his neck. “And before?” I prompted him.
“At first, I felt a great deal of satisfaction. I could rub our wealth and power in the faces of those who taunted me when we were children.”
“Why would anyone taunt you?”
“We were not permitted in our birth village to attend school because we were never expected to do anything more or less than the bidding of the masters. Amaro and Acer had learned to read, nonetheless, secretly, of course, and Shug was too young to be aware of such things as school or to be expected to know, in this new village, anything of school.
“For me, expectations were different. By the time we arrived here, I’d already fallen two years behind. Teachers and students alike saw me as stupid and a hopeless student. The boys who did befriend me were the rough ones, so I learned our new language from the coarsest of its speakers. The teachers were not pleased, nor were the parents of the other children in school, who picked up some of my salty sayings.
“I found I could make people laugh by being rude at the right time.”
I see you signaling, Ancient One, for a pause in my narrative. I see your long ring-bedecked fingers splayed in the light, the jewels reflecting it, waving to me. Yes, please. Put your smoking pipe down, take up your metal walking pipe. You move your hands with a grace which contradicts your wrinkles and odd body proportions. I hope you don’t mind my saying it. And your tunic, which looks quite ragged by sunlight, sparkles from the gold and silver threads woven into its fabric.
Take what time you need behind the dunes and shrubs, and when you’ve returned and retraced your steps, settle again on this patch of sand near the ebbing tide, and I shall finish my tale.
My eyes have filled and spilled a few tears remembering Sal. I’ll wipe them with a wisp of passing cloud while I wait.
You are back now. Good. I must hurry to finish my story. Sal, as I was saying, learned to play the buffoon, turning his feelings of inferiority into survival strategy.
This, old man, is another thing I have learned about Merelings. We Immortals have simple emotions. This comes, I believe, from our very clear and unyielding sense of self. We do not doubt ourselves, and if Merelings disrespect us, we dispatch them or curse them and never look back.
Merelings are always looking back.
With regret, with pleasure, with anger, with bitterness, irony, bliss. Being haunted by time, they are taunted by it. I believe it is why, finally, they lost sight of those of us who gave them the gifts of civilization—fire and whatnot—and have come to prefer a narrative which promises Immortality in a better place.
Can you blame them? Until my own journey to the Underworld, I certainly thought it to be a boring place. Not, in fact, unlike what some parts of the Earth were like before my light reached to all corners.
What’s that? Why yes, I am very philosophical. Did you think just because I enjoy delights of a physical kind and have come to be quite emotional, too, I don’t think?
You see, that’s how I know I will one day die, one day my brother will die, one day even you, Ancient One, will die—and this is why it is so important I tell you my story and so important you spread it as far and wide as all the stars in all the skies.
But you are right. I am digressing again.
With Sal I came to understand the healing side of love.
The more gently I kissed him, the more he talked afterward of his wounds. Of course, his stories simply stirred my newly developing attachment and compassion, and made me want all the more to unite with him in what I once called a carnal fashion and now understood as body and soul. I found a spot just below the proof of his Mereling birth and just above his marvelous cock which drove both of us wild with desire. The soft mound of flesh there belied the crustiness of his attitude in the world. I would nibble there, and take the halo of hair at the base of his manhood into my lips, pulling gently, sensing the pumping of his desire so nearby.
He’d turn me around so we could nuzzle each other until we were so taut with passion we could not bear to be two separate beings. Then, slowly and deliberately, he would position me against the great branch in whose crook we nestled and straddle me. He would rub the tip of his cock against me till I grew wet and wild with desire then slowly push into me. The feeling of enveloping his throbbing cock inside me is one I remember and cherish still.
We were lovers for many months, and some years, till the inevitability of his temperament and physique combined with his age. One morning, shortly after we climbed down after a particularly vigorous session of love and delight, his heart burst. Mine would have, too, out of the exquisite pain and tenderness I felt for him, felt for losing him, save for the fact that, like you, old man, I do not age by the same calendar.
I did, however, feel another piece of me go with him to his grave.
Now all that remained of our unusual household were me and the youngest, Shug, now also the only and, therefore, also the oldest.