Chapter 4: vvv
The hut door crashed shut behind them, sealing out the whispering rain. Eden stood panting in the center of the room, the girl’s dead weight sagging in her arms. The firelight leapt, illuminating the scene she’d left behind.
The dark, reeking patch on the floor near the bed. The wooden tub full of cold, grey-brown water, bits of matter still floating on the surface. The bucket by the door. The entire cabin was a testament to her obscenity, a crime scene still warm.
And now she’d brought a witness into the middle of it.
“No, no, no,” she hissed, not to the girl, but to the room itself. Her mind, usually a slow, deep river, became a panicked whirlpool. Priorities clawed at each other. Hide the mess. Treat the girl. Hide the mess. She’s dying. Clean the floor. She’s breathing. Burn the whole hut down.
The girl in her arms let out a small, pained whimper. The sound, frail and human, cut through Eden’s panic like a knife. It was the sound of a creature in need. It anchored her.
“Okay,” Eden breathed. “Okay. First things.”
She couldn’t put her on the filth-smeared floor. Her own bed was a tangled nest of quilts that smelled of her sweat and tears. The table was covered in jars. With a grunt, Eden carried the girl to the relatively clear space before the hearth and laid her down as gently as she could on the rough wooden planks. The fire’s warmth could reach her there.
The girl’s clothes were soaked through, plastered to her skin with mud and rainwater. They were already ice-cold. Hypothermia would kill her before any injury.
Eden’s hands, still trembling, went to the girl’s jacket—a stylish, useless city thing, now shredded by brambles. The zipper was clogged with dirt. She yanked it, hard, and the metal teeth gave way. She peeled the jacket off, revealing a thin, wet sweater beneath. Off that came, too. Each layer revealed more pale, cold skin, pebbled with gooseflesh. The freckles across her shoulders and chest stood out like flecks of cinnamon.
Eden worked with a frantic, clinical detachment, her fingers fumbling with buttons and clasps. Jeans, heavy with water, were the hardest. She had to roll the girl onto her side, heave the denim over her hips. The girl moaned again, a sound of deep unconscious distress, as her body was moved. A slick, dark streak of mud was smeared across her hipbone.
Then came the underwear. Simple cotton panties, white turned grey with mud and water, clinging to the slight curve of her pelvis. Eden’s breath hitched. This was the border. The absolute line.
It’s just wet fabric. It’s just to keep her from getting sick. It’s not what you’re thinking.
But her mind, trained for decades on a single, foul track, made connections. The wet cotton plastered to the girl’s mound. The way it would smell of rainwater and earth and… something else. The dark, vertical stain down the center. It looked like a piss stain. A fresh, urgent piss stain. Eden’s mouth flooded with saliva, a conditioned response to the thought of warmth, of wetness, of salt.
“Stop it,” she growled at herself, her voice harsh in the quiet hut. She hooked her thumbs into the waistband of the panties and pulled them down, over the girl’s thighs, her knees, her ankles.
She was naked.
Eden forced her eyes to assess, not to linger. The girl’s body was a landscape Eden had forgotten could exist. Slender, almost boyish hips. A flat, soft stomach. Small, high breasts with pale pink nipples, tightened against the chill. A neat, fiery triangle of pubic hair at the junction of her thighs, the curls a shocking, vibrant copper against her milky skin. It was a clean body. A young body. Untouched by the kind of time and hunger that had sculpted Eden’s own.
A violent, unwanted throb of heat pulsed in Eden’s cunt. It was shameful, instantaneous. A base reaction to nakedness, to vulnerability, to sheer, forbidden proximity. She squeezed her thighs together, as if she could crush the feeling.
The girl’s injuries became the only safe thing to look at. A long, angry scrape down her left calf, oozing a thin line of blood diluted by rainwater. Her right ankle was already swelling, turning a mottled purple. And on her temple, just at the hairline, a nasty bump was rising, the skin broken but not bleeding heavily.
“Alright,” Eden said, turning to practicalities. She grabbed the cleanest blanket from her bed, shook it out, and draped it over the girl’s shivering form. Then she went to the hearth, stoking the fire fiercely, adding two more logs until the flames roared and heat began to radiate in earnest.
Water. She needed clean water. The bathwater was fouled. The water in the kettle by the fire was hot, but she’d used it to steep rags for poultices last week. It would smell of herbs and mildew.
The creek. She had to go back out.
She threw her coat back on over her own nakedness, snatched a clean pot, and plunged out into the rain again. The cold was a relief. It scoured her mind. She filled the pot at the creek’s edge, the water black and icy in the dark, and hurried back.
Inside, the contrast was brutal. The hut’s warmth enveloped her, thick with the smell of woodsmoke, wet wool from the girl’s discarded clothes, and underneath it all, the undeniable, low stink of her own earlier defilement. It hung in the air like a confession.
She set the pot of creek water near the fire to take the chill off. Then she looked at the floor near her bed. She couldn’t have the girl waking and seeing that, smelling that. But it would be wrong to prioritize this over making sure the girl was safe.