Tigerlily Read online

  A Total-E-Bound Publication

  www.total-e-bound.com

  Tigerlily

  ISBN #978-0-85715-188-9

  ©Copyright Charlotte Stein 2010

  Cover Art by Natalie Winters ©Copyright July 2010

  Edited by Christine Riley

  Total-E-Bound Publishing

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Total-E-Bound Publishing.

  Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Total-E-Bound Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

  The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

  Published in 2010 by Total-E-Bound Publishing, Think Tank, Ruston Way, Lincoln, LN6 7FL, United Kingdom

  .

  Warning: This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers. This story has been rated Total-e-burning.

  Sultry Solstice

  TIGERLILY

  Charlotte Stein

  Dedication

  For the little girl who loved Return To Oz so much,

  she cried when she realised her Mum had taped over it.

  Trademarks Acknowledgement

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Terminator: Warner Brothers

  Saw: Lions Gate

  Sarah Connor: Warner Brothers

  Aliens: Twentieth Century Fox

  Candyman: Polygram

  Ford Focus: Ford Motor Company

  Chapter One

  There was a guy, running a blue streak through the trees. Mae Connelly could see him, even amidst the febrile greenery and the lowering light, arms pumping. Legs pumping. Cock swinging in the breeze.

  Which was when she decided to stand up, and get a better look.

  Purely out of simple curiosity, of course. Nothing unseemly about stepping off your porch to gawk at a man who appeared to be running through the field behind your house, buck ass nekkid.

  And it didn’t sadden her—not even a little—when he ploughed into the long grass and everything below the waist got cut off. No—not even a little bit, uh-uh. After all, she was just a concerned citizen.

  Concerned about someone who sure looked terrified. He looked more than terrified—she could see him, turning his head every five seconds as though expecting to see hellhounds behind him, chomping at his heels. He kept almost stumbling, like fear wouldn’t let him keep his footing.

  And as he veered closer to her house, she could definitely make out red, striping his upper arms. The fact that said upper arms were sinewy with muscle and very nice indeed took a shameful backseat.

  She shouted before her brain confirmed that doing so was a good idea.

  “Hey!”

  It was definitely not a good idea. He fell almost immediately, at the sound of her voice. She saw him turn, and then it was all just tits over ass and nothing but the long grass, stirring, to suggest that he had ever been there.

  All the possible reasons that someone could be running, naked and terrified, went through her head: escape from a forced nudist colony. Being hunted by a Terminator from the future. Sex game that went horribly, horribly wrong. Or right, depending on your kink.

  But none of them seemed either a) plausible or b) sane. As far as she knew, forced nudist colonies didn’t even exist. And likely Terminators and time travel machines didn’t, either. Especially not ones that sent you through time with your ass hanging out.

  It was probably a bad idea to approach him, anyway. She felt one hundred percent conscious of that fact. People didn’t run through someone’s backyard with scratched arms and terrified eyes and no clothes on because they felt like starting a new jogging trend. Once she put the insane ideas aside, nasty jockish prank gone wrong seemed the most likely.

  As did said jocks being on his tail, ready to eliminate witnesses.

  But she appeared to be walking towards his position, regardless. If she got there quick enough, maybe they wouldn’t catch either of them. Maybe they’d never have to find out what the movie Saw looked like, through the eyes of evil frat boys.

  Though as she got closer, thoughts of frat-boy-Saw grew fainter, and ideas about his ultimate and overpowering malevolence grew fat, and strong. He hadn’t appeared to have anything in which to conceal a knife. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t have something! Probably he kept it in his invisible-from-the-future-laser-pouch.

  “Hey,” she said again, from five feet away. Then felt extremely foolish—as though he would have a knife, in a laser pouch! He sounded like someone who might have been about to die, any second. Not someone who was thinking about stabbing with his magical future knife.

  “Are you okay, buddy?”

  Lord, that sounded even worse than her first attempt at speaking to him! Of course he wasn’t okay. His groans reminded her of that time she’d been in the hospital with a broken finger, and someone in the bed across the ward had suffered from something called “impulsive leg falling off”.

  Though she fully appreciated that her nine-year-old self might have embellished the lady’s disease, somewhat.

  She almost screamed, when he answered her. And not because he was able to speak, despite being a victim of Impulsive Leg Falling Off disease. Because when he did, he didn’t speak in any language she was familiar with. Though admittedly, Mae was familiar with very few. High school German, and the best she could usually come up with was ich bin acht jahre alt.

  Which she was pretty sure meant “I am eight years old”.

  “Prog lun golag,” he said. “Prog! Prog!”

  Was that Lithuanian? There was a whole new Polish community living not far from her home, but she was fairly certain “prog” wasn’t a word they often used. Or that anyone used, ever.

  “I’m sorry—I don’t speak…whatever it is you’re speaking. I know some German, if that helps.”

  If he desperately needed to know how old she was fifteen years ago, they’d be all set.

  “Grag, grag,” he said, shortly before the weirdest thing she’d ever heard happened. If she’d been pushed to explain it, she’d have struggled to describe what, exactly, was weird about the whole thing. But it pressed on her, all the same—the oddness of what he then did.

  He made a noise, like he was clearing his throat. Lots of other, struggling noises—as though…she felt it was very much like he needed to re-string his vocal chords. That was the sound it was closest to.

  And then, “Yer—you—English. Human English. Do you—can you understand me, now?”

  She supposed the word “human” contributed, a little, to the air of stunning weird.

  “Yes! Yep, I can totally understand you. Are you…are you even close to okay?”

  He took a moment. She could see the grass wavering around him, busily.

  “I…I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “I’m going to come closer, okay? Don’t attack me. I have a—gun.”

  Some fervent rustling followed, then the grass began to part in an arrowing line, away from her.

  “No! No! Don’t hurt me with your weapon—don’t!”

  She put her hands out in the universal sign for “I�
�m harmless, take it easy”, but it just made her feel even more foolish than all the simple questions and the primary school German had. He couldn’t see her, after all. He was busy running away on all fours, through grass.

  “Take it easy, take it easy—I’m not going to hurt you! I just don’t want you to hurt me, okay?”

  From further away, she could just make out his trembling voice.

  “Why would I hurt you?”

  He sounded genuinely incredulous. So much so that her heart twinged, just once.

  “Listen—whoever you are. Why don’t we just get you inside, and put some clothes on you, and ascertain if we need to call an ambulance. Or the police.”

  “The…police?”

  “Yeah. I’m guessing someone or maybe a group of someones have been chasing you. And you look pretty beat up, so I suspect they weren’t after a handshake and a backslap.”

  His breathing reminded her of something…something difficult to place. It sighed in and out of him, like…like the wind, falling soft on a turning-to-summer night.

  “No,” he said. “No.”

  “Then come with me, okay? Hey—I’m taking a big risk, offering this. You could be a maniac, for all I know.”

  “A—a what?”

  “A maniac. A loony. Someone who just escaped from the boobyhatch.”

  His voice croaked out of him—he was probably dying, while she stood there, joking around.

  “I didn’t escape from a boobyhatch. It was…I escaped from…”

  The tailing off sounded ominous, to her. Though not in any way she had expected—it didn’t seem to make him a secret maniac, or like he was hiding something awful. It made him seem like someone who couldn’t remember.

  She stepped forward, parting the grass before her as she went. When she finally got to him, he wasn’t hunched in an attack position. He hadn’t turned into a robot from the future. He was simply sat, with his knees drawn up tight to his chest.

  Lucky thing, really. His cock would have been clearly visible, in almost any other position.

  * * * *

  The weird thing was, he didn’t seem eager to get clothes back on himself. Not in the slightest—in fact, when he got back out of the chair she had put him in, he just let the blanket she had given him fall right off his shoulders. Like it was merely a distraction, rather than a device to preserve his modesty.

  “Uh—you might want to—”

  She gestured, but he clearly wasn’t getting the picture. And the not-wanting-to-stay- sat-in-the-living-room thing seemed odd, too. Why had he followed her into the kitchen? He was clearly injured—wouldn’t staying still be a better idea? Conserve his insane energies, and all that? Stop her worrying that he was about to leap on her, like a ravenous wildebeest?

  Did wildebeest leap?

  “If you just wait in there, I’ll bring, you know, some plasters. Okay?”

  But it seemed he had more pressing matters on his mind.

  “Where is this?”

  And she had to agree. Not knowing where you were was definitely a very pressing matter indeed.

  “You’re in Raven’s Wood. Near Ripon. Is any of this making any sense to you at all?”

  His eyes flicked back and forth, as though searching his brain for answers that definitely weren’t going to be there.

  “Yes. I can understand your speaking voice.”

  Definitely a boobyhatch escapee. Though she had to admit, he looked extremely good for a man who’d been ravaged by mental illness for most of his life—the scratches and bruises aside.

  “Okay. Okay—let’s just…why don’t you start with your name. You sit down on this kitchen chair, and I’ll cover your shame with a tea-towel, and then you can tell me your name.”

  And it was to his credit, she felt, that he did exactly as she said. He even let her toss a scrap of material over something he had nothing to be ashamed about at all. But then he said, “I no longer know it.”

  And that seemed very bad indeed.

  “You don’t know your name?”

  “I think…I think it was taken from me.”

  Oh, that seemed even worse.

  “Really? Well. That seems…insane. But anyway—let’s try your age! Yep—your age. How old are you?”

  “I want to say…six hundred and nine. Could that be right, do you think?”

  She thought, quite blankly, it could be right that you’re a mental case, who’s about to rape my face with a tea-towel.

  “I think it’s unlikely, at best.”

  He looked honestly crestfallen. It was hard, she figured, to realise you’re a crazy person who wants to have sex with someone’s tea-towel. Or face. Or whichever one seemed most fitting, in the land of being raped by tea-towels. She leant back against the kitchen counter and clenched her fist around the sharp knife—the one she’d left on the draining board, when salad had no longer seemed like a good idea.

  But he didn’t seem to register it, at all.

  “How old do you think I look?”

  “About thirty?”

  He glanced up, suddenly sharp. Eyes big and disbelieving.

  “I look that small? Really?”

  He blew out a breath and glanced away at nothing.

  “Maybe I’m just new.”

  There were several things wrong with the things he was saying, she felt. More than several, most likely. But there also happened to be something beyond his words, that was approaching an even weirder patch of wrong. Something that made her chest want to stop rising and falling. Something that made all the saliva in her mouth evaporate, and rematerialise on her palms.

  The red—on his arms. The cuts she’d clearly seen, when walking him into the house.

  They weren’t there anymore.

  “What do you mean by new, exactly?”

  He glanced back as though sure, before surety slid away as easily as melting pudding. She wanted to say that his eyes suddenly became vacant, but that wasn’t really the case at all. There was nothing vacant about his burning bright eyes—like great dark moons, in his narrow face.

  “I’m sorry—I have absolutely no idea. How odd.”

  “You have a better idea of where your scratches have gone?”

  She raised an eyebrow at him, and watched, as he examined himself as though the whole thing was as curious to him as it was to her.

  “You know, if you’re a robot from the future—my name isn’t Sarah Connor. And I haven’t had sex in years, which makes it unlikely that I’m going to birth any kind of resistance leader with floppy hair. So you know—God speed. Go forth and kill that chick from Aliens and the guy from Candyman. And Lance Henricksen.” She paused, breathless and unable to take her eyes off the cuts his liquid alloy body had probably closed up over. “I don’t know why I’m babbling about people from the Terminator movies.”

  “I don’t think I know a Lance Henricksen,” he said. “Though it could be that I’m a robot from the future. I don’t know. What do they look like?”

  “Like a little skinny guy with jug ears, or a big Austrian guy, with a granite jaw.”

  He put his hands up, then. To feel the sides of his face.

  “Well—that’s a relief. My ears don’t feel anything like jugs.”

  He traced two fingers over the admittedly lovely shape of his jaw—firm, but not too square. Tucking into a neat little chin in a way that she shouldn’t be thinking about in such fascinated terms.

  “My jaw feels soft. Not like granite at all.”

  “Phew! Well, that’s a relief! Likely it was just Terminators chasing you. Any second they’ll burst in and kill us all. Now I can sleep at night!”

  He glanced back, towards the living room and front door. As though that was actually a possibility. Her heart had pretty much broken world speed records since finding him, but at that expression on his face, it got into the top ten.

  She wasn’t sure how to drag it back down, once he found it in him to tell her a whole bunch of stuff that really only made it wor
se.

  “No. No—they won’t follow me here. They were trying to stop me, I think.”

  She could feel her voice, on a knife’s edge. Not wanting to come out but sure it had to.

  “Stop you from doing what?”

  “From coming to this place.” He frowned, as though the memory was low down and slow coming. “We’re not supposed to come here.”

  “And where did you come from?”

  He shook his head, though it wasn’t a sure sort of motion. And there seemed to be a lot of false starts, before he finally spoke.

  “I don’t know. Far away, and from a place that seems…softer than this. More full of heat, and light. It hurt to come through, but I had to. I had to, even if I can’t remember why, now.”

  She needed to sit down. Badly, very badly. But if she sat down, then he’d know that his weird delusions and strange talk were having an effect on her. They’d cart her off to the loony bin with him, for believing the stuff he wasn’t even sure about, and for seeing the cuts on his arms that no longer existed.

  Better to make it clear to him.

  “I think I’ve gone insane.”

  “Why?” he said.

  A naked man with a magical healing body who had in all likelihood been birthed by the land from beyond was asking her why she felt she might have cracked a nut or two. That was what seemed to be happening, right now.

  Nothing could be clearer. Grief had driven her mad.

  “Well—because! Because! I mean—just look at your arms! Did your cuts heal themselves, or did you use your magical powers?”

  If she fainted standing up, would he notice? To think—half an hour ago she had been considering an evening of staring blankly at the television while not wanting to eat.

  “They’re not supposed to just go away, are they?” he asked, and sounded quite sad while doing so.

  It was bad, having to disappoint him.