Total pages in book: 194
Estimated words: 187754 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 939(@200wpm)___ 751(@250wpm)___ 626(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 187754 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 939(@200wpm)___ 751(@250wpm)___ 626(@300wpm)
“I thought you were going to teach me how to hunt.”
“I will.” He waits until I raise the bow before adding, “First, you need the fundamentals. You need to learn how to use and respect the weapon you’ll hunt with.”
“Oh, fuck me. You’re about to Karate Kid me, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am. Draw.”
Holding the bow as he showed me, I impatiently wait while Thorin takes his sweet time studying my form. A bead of sweat has already formed on my brow from the strength it takes to keep the taut bowstring fully drawn. I don’t know which is tighter—the tension in the string or the one between Thorin and me as he corrects my form. He kicks my feet apart to widen my stance, and I have to grit my teeth to concentrate. When his hands move from my arms to my shoulders to my belly and down to my waist, I give up with a gasp and relax my trembling arms.
Thorin doesn’t look the least bit surprised.
“We need to work on building the muscles in your arms, or you’ll never be able to hit anything useful. Again.”
I lift the bow to try again. “If the crossbow is more powerful and easier to shoot,” I struggle to get out as I keep the bowstring drawn, “how come you’re starting me off with this?”
“Because I earned the right to be a lazy hunter. Release.”
“Oh, thank God.” Relaxing my arm with a heavy exhale, I grumble when Thorin corrects my form again before telling me to draw.
A few hours later, I’m questioning why I asked Thorin to teach me to hunt. Was I really that bored? I did need a break from being the perfect hostage in The Cabin in the Woods, and learning how to kill shit was fun, but fuck, I’d forgotten how cold it was up here.
I stopped feeling my nipples hours ago.
“Do you really hate your mom?” I ask Thorin out of the blue when we finally take a break from aiming drills.
I’m sitting next to him on a fallen log, watching him raid his pack for our lunch. We’re sitting so close together that our thighs touch, and I tell myself it’s just for warmth as I scoot a little closer until our hips touch, too. As for my prying, I’m not sure why I want to know other than reminding myself of who I’m dealing with.
But wouldn’t that mean I already have my mind made up about who Thorin is? Is that fair when I’m asking him to bare part of his soul?
“She wasn’t really much of a mom to me, but no, wolf. I don’t hate her. She loved me when it suited her, so I guess it wasn’t all bad.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugs but avoids eye contact. “Don’t be. She isn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“The last words my mother said to me before she died was that she should have traded me for a better score when she had the chance.”
“She didn’t mean it, Thorin. She was sick. The drugs—”
“She was three years sober when she said it, wolf.”
“Oh.”
“As I said, it wasn’t all bad. For a very brief moment in time, I had a somewhat decent childhood. It lasted until she started missing the high the drugs gave her. She’d sworn to me that she was done for good and that she loved me too much to ever need them again, but I found out my mother’s love was nothing but empty promises.”
I wait for Thorin to finish pulling out a large thermos and two tin cups before I ask, “How did you know when she started again?”
As he divides the stew into the cups, he says, “She was mean for a while before she started hating her life a little less, and then she was nothing.”
“I guess we have that in common,” I whisper as I stare into the flickering flames and think about my mother, who also struggled with drug addiction.
But unlike Thorin, it didn’t ruin my childhood.
No, I was blindsided by it when my father died, and my mother seemingly went full-on junkie overnight after being clean for over a decade.
“We have many things in common, wolf. Care to share?”
He hands me one of the tin cups full of stew, and I use the excuse of taking a sip to buy myself time from answering. I’m pleasantly surprised at the temperature of the stew. It warms my blood almost immediately.
“I wasn’t enough for my mom either,” I finally say.
Thorin doesn’t remark or refute it like I tried to, and I’m grateful for it as we eat in silence. Maybe he understands me more than I want to admit.
“When did you make stew?” I ask when it dawns on me that it couldn’t have been this morning.
I’d lain awake most of the night, staring out the window the loft shares with the living room, crying inside like a winner. I’d even woken up an hour before Thorin to do more brooding and not crying.