Wildling: Midnight Sun 2

3. Flynn

3

Flynn

I caught sight of myself in the still blue of the pool above the waterfall. My bruises had healed in the weeks I’d been in the wilderness, but the pain he’d inflicted inside didn’t fade as easily as the outside.

All because I’d fallen back to sleep after he’d gotten me up for the day.

Not like I did it often, but I felt my birthday allowed for a bit of laziness, something I didn’t truly understand the meaning of. Growing up off grid from day one out of Ma’s womb, I knew the meaning of hard work. Having to take care of the house and Pa when she’d passed, I also knew how to keep one’s head above water living off the land.

Pa didn’t notice. Didn’t fuckin’ care how hard his son worked, strived, to earn his appreciation and respect.

Finally eighteen, taller and wider in shoulders than Pa, and he still knocked me around. And I stuck around because I’d promised Ma I would. Ten years old, and I’d sworn an oath as she lay there dying that I would look after the bastard who’d hurt her more than loved her.

I’d cursed myself to the equator and back since making that promise, but couldn’t bring myself to break it.

Pa was a bastard of the worst sort. Always poking fun, tearing me down, and calling me a p***y if he felt I didn’t man-up like I ought to.

Eighteen.

“Time to get the hell out of there,” I told my reflection while smoothing down my beard that had begun to fill in. Wasn’t the first time I’d said it—wouldn’t be the last.

But I had no money. No means of making it on my own. Everything I called mine belonged to Pa, even though I’d helped with the trapping and panning for gold since I could walk alongside him. I knew what those critters felt like ensnared in wire or metal claws—fuckin’ trapped. Unable to escape. Freedom a long-gone wish. The chance to live ripped from their center like still-warm guts dropping to the snowy ground.

Jaw clenched, I pushed up from sucking down the icy mountain water, swiping my forearm across my mouth.

Eighteen.

Bearded like a man. Seasoned like a man. Officially in the eyes of the law—a man. But I’d never gone to a school. Never drove a vehicle. Never had myself a woman. Never owned a goddamn thing, not even the clothes on my back.

Yes, I wanted to get the hell off Pa’s homestead, but where the f**k would I go even if I hadn’t promised Ma to stick around? What the f**k could I do? Sure as hell couldn’t afford the plane ride into Fairbanks.

Tired of game cooked over an open fire, I trudged down the mountain, feeling as though I had no other choice, my footsteps slow while I forced myself to focus on bathing with real soap in the river. Changing into clean clothes since the ones on my body had crusted over days ago.

Fuckin’ filthy animal.

Wildling, Ma had called me when I’d been a kid and she’d been around to show me the meaning of kindness. Always running around half-n***d in the summer, my hair long and knotted, scratches and scrapes on my arms and legs. Half-feral, Pa had always grumbled before cursing at me. Made for the wilderness, at one with the woods, wildlife, and Mother Nature.

I’d known nothing but the wilds of Alaska, and I had no wish to know anything beyond. I didn’t need to remind myself while standing on a bluff overlooking the greening land stretching alongside the river below.

No smoke rose from the cabin’s chimney that I could see from my height. No one moved, either.

He’d be around somewhere, though. Always was—even when I felt sure he didn’t watch, catching me doing s**t I shouldn’t; like skipping rocks across the river rather than tending my fishing pole. Tossing sticks to my dog rather than splitting wood like he’d instructed me to do.

My dog…

The old beagle Pa had brought home from Fairbanks when I’d been eight or so. A dog to hunt with him, man’s best friend. Turned out Dog liked Pa about as much as I did, and he’d taken to my side like a summer shadow, tight against my side—ignoring Pa altogether.

He’d tried to protect me against Pa on my birthday, but Pa’s fist clobbered him alongside the head, leaving him dazed as me whenever fist or palm met flesh.

But no more.

I straightened and filled my lungs with the mountain’s clean air, sucking it in deep until my lungs thought to burst.

“I’m a man,” I told Dog, leaning down to scratch beneath his chin. He closed his eyes, his tongue lolling like he was smiling. “Not gonna let Pa hurt either one of us ever again. I’m gonna stand up to him. Won’t hurt him because of my promise to Ma, but I’m not going to let him use me like dough Ma used to beat down before making bread.”

I stood, my mind set, my feet ready to take me home to begin a new kind of life.

Dog sniffed the air and took off down the path but didn’t make so much as a hint of noise from his flapping jaw. Pa had throat-punched him hard enough after his first week of braying pretty much non-stop, that the poor animal couldn’t make a sound.

Useless animal in Pa’s eyes. A necessity in mine.

Man’s best friend—man, I reminded myself. I’d tended to Dog ever since. Provided his food, and he kept me warm at night.

Dog continued down the path, flitting glances back at me now and then, making sure I followed his lead, that I would stay true to the promise I’d just made to myself about standing up like the man I’d become.

No sign of Pa around the yard. The cabin sat shut up and quiet, cool, with no evidence of a morning fire—or any recent fire, for that matter.

Hands on hips, I surveyed the two-room cabin, hoping for evidence he’d disappeared in the middle of the day and hadn’t been able to return. Dead. Fuckin’ gone, leaving me the man of the house.

His neatly made bed sat in view through the opened door into the one bedroom, and the lack of dirty dishes he rarely bothered with, fireplace cleaned out…

He’d gone to town, which meant he’d be back.

“Fuck.”

Every part of me wished he wouldn’t. If it weren’t for Jessie and her bush plane being my lifeline to the outside world, I’d hope his flight nose-dived. Jessie had been lucky enough to survive a plane crash a couple years earlier—and I wouldn’t wish it on her again no matter how much my bastard of a father deserved to rot in a shallow grave, feeding worms and bugs in the circle of life.

Jessie had heard Pa give me s**t more than once. Seemingly a smart woman, I expected she knew his character. Her kind eyes never failed to catch my gaze, offering me friendship even if we didn’t share words privately.

Pa never left us alone.

Maybe he tried to protect Jessie from his wild son, the man who’d never felt the softness of a woman grasping at his d**k.

I remembered hearing Pa and Ma in their bed. Kinda hard to not hear as a kid when your parents lay beyond a doorway without a door, rutting away like all animals did. With Ma gone, it’d fallen to Pa to tell me once I’d hit puberty what they’d been doing. He told me all I’d be missing as a teenager and a young man out in the wilds of Alaska.

Teased the s**t out of me. Fuckin’ relentless in his vivid descriptions of a warm, wet p***y, created just for man’s pleasure. What soft breasts felt like in a man’s hands. What it felt like to have a woman’s a*s in your face, slick and ready to suck your d**k into her body. Sick bastard wouldn’t stop. Laughing after me whenever I walked away to escape the teasing that made me hard as wood.

My focus caught on a pencil drawing that hung forgotten beside his bedroom doorway, pulling my focus off him. I’d fashioned a frame for the image Ma had drawn of me sitting down by the river, fishing pole in my hands, Dog seated next to me. Both of us peered out over the water. The details of our faces made plain what we’d been thinking about…freedom.

At the time, I hadn’t realized what I’d longed for. With the wilderness stretching around me, I had more freedom than most. The trap ensnaring me lay in circumstances, and the knowledge no escape was possible kept me down more often than not.

Dog’s wet nose touched my hand, and I scratched under his chin again. “You’re a good boy,” I told him, my throat tightening over the fact I hadn’t heard similar words for too damn long.

And I didn’t expect to hear them anytime in the near future. Pa would return, and life would go back to s**t, until he took another trip into town.