Chương 101: Chapter 99: Camp sex

I was right about Vincent and Gigi. No sooner have we set up camp than they go into the tent for a quickie. El joins them, happy to get a chance to relieve some tension. I, on the other hand, just cast Refresh and clean myself up from the day's journey, then go about starting the fire and going hunting for our meal. I'm cleaning some rabbits, letting Ash handle the cooking, while the three of them are in the tent. I hear noises from inside the tent, but try not to pay attention.

"The whole tent is going to smell like sex," I complain.

"Nothing to be done about that," Ash says.

"Is your sense of smell really that good?" I nod.

"I can tell where you each are in your cycles," I say. Then I blush.

"Sorry, that's pretty rude of me to bring up."

"No it isn't," she says.

"It's just a natural thing. And you can't help it. Tell me something. Do we smell better when we ovulate?" I blush some more and then nod.

"That just means that your body wants to mate with us, on a primal level," she says.

"Which is okay. You don't have to have all these sex hang ups, you know. You can just let them go." I look at her. With her strong jawline, her jet black skin, her yellow eyes, and the features that plastic surgeons strive to emulate.

"I know," I say.

"And part of me wants to. Part of me wants to say the hell with travel, let's just get down and dirty for a while. Let's experiment and have all the sex we always wanted to have before. Let's get kinky. Let's do it all."

"That's the spirit," Ash says. I shake my head.

"But then I remember that we're in the wilderness. We're not safe."

"We could've stayed in Elmspire for a while. You would've had no shortage of partners there."

"I didn't want to be there as long as we were, let alone longer," I say.

"I don't like all the attention that I was getting."

"Is that the core of the problem?" she asks.

"Do you feel like you don't deserve the attention you're getting?"

"I mean, kind of?" I say.

"The way I look at it, we basically cheated the system. We found an exploit and we abused the hell out of it. And while yes, anyone else could do the same thing if they wanted to, I still feel like we don't deserve to be as strong as we are. If this were a regular game, they would've patched that out. Instead, they let us become basically demigods who were able to take on two armies by ourselves." She shakes her head at me.

"We found a way to gain more power and we took advantage of it. We're just playing the game by the rules."

"Sounds like we're counting cards at a casino," I say.

"You know they ban you for that sort of thing."

"I feel like you're changing the subject," Ash says.

"Weren't we talking about how you don't feel like you deserve the sexual attention that you're drawing?"

"I mean, that's part of it. My charisma was eight when we were human. Eight. That's really low. And I'd come to terms with that. I was never great with making friends, and I never really thought of myself as attractive. Now, I look at all of you, and it just seems unreal. I don't feel like I deserve – I don't feel like I'm in your league." Ash laughs.

"I think that's the problem with not having more mirrors around," she says.

"You have no idea how attractive you are. What is your charisma?"

"With my bracelet, 120." She laughs again.

"Mine is only 78," she says.

"And I'd be shocked if Vincent's is above 50. Ditto for El or Gigi."

"But you're all so gorgeous," I say.

"You're basically a ten looking around at a group of eights and telling them that you don't deserve them. You know that, right?" I shrug.

"Trust me, Caleb. You're a very attractive man. No one is out of your league."

"No, I get that," I say.

"I understand on a conscious level that I must be that good looking. That I must be so good looking that it's inhuman, almost indescribable. But I don't deserve to be that good looking. I don't deserve to be a ten. I deserve to be about a four or a five. And the fact that I'm not makes me feel really uncomfortable." If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"I don't think you were ever unattractive," Ash says to me.

"At least, not as long as I've known you."

"But I'm more attractive. You guys have all said so."

"Well yeah," she says.

"But we all are. We're living in a gamified world, and one of the things that isn't static is appearance. You can get better or worse looking as time goes by. But that's not the real crux of it. That's not what really matters."

"What matters?"

"The thing that matters is your personality," she says.

"You look great, and that's wonderful. But that's really only important for first impressions. What really matters is what you're like after an hour of conversation, or what you're like after traveling with you for a while. And that's where you excel. That's your personality, and that's you. It has nothing to do with your sheet or your stats or anything like that. It has to do with who you are as a person. And I for one really like the person that you are. So does El. We talk about it, you know."

I glance over at the tent. Inside, right now, El and Gigi an Vincent are presumably having sex.

"You do?" I ask She nods.

"I've talked about it with Gigi too. You're a good guy, Caleb. You care about consent, you're not a misogynist, and when you are sexist, it's clearly by accident. You make an effort to care about everyone and to listen to everyone's opinions. You care about the world. Even this one, that we have barely any connection to. You're a good person. And you're funny. And entertaining to be around."

"Thanks," I say.

"There's a reason that intelligence isn't one of our stats, I think. Intelligence, personality, is core to who you are. It doesn't change just because you killed a few monsters. Your words might have more weight in and of themselves because of your charisma, but your arguments come from your mind. They come from your intelligence. And that is sexy too." I realize that she's really close to me. I could lean in and kiss her right now. Part of me wants to.

Part of me wants to lean in and kiss her, to keep kissing her and to see where she wants to go with it. Part of me thinks that it would be okay to have sex with her, right now. Right here by the fire, not ten feet away from our friends. Who are also having sex. But another part of me wants to run away. That other part of me wants to run through the night and put dozens of miles between me and any of them. It wants to be alone in the wilderness, beholden to no one. It wants to not have to think about other people.

It wants to not think about sex. It wants to just focus on the now, the immediate. It wants to be a wolf. Is that really how the split happens? Is it my wolf side that doesn't want sex, and my human side that does? Is it as simple as that? It doesn't feel that simple. But it might be, I suppose. I'd think that the animal side would be more interested in sex, but maybe it does just want to go hunt down some monsters. Maybe it does just want a few days to process what's going on. Or maybe it's the other way around.

Maybe my wolf self wants to fuck, wants to break this streak, this dry spell, once and for all. Maybe it wants to breed, or to at least get closer to the pack, to feel the pleasure and to reduce the pressure. And maybe it's my human side that wants to escape. My human side that wants to think about what's going on, and about what it all means, and about what is going to happen. Maybe my human side is just trying to appeal to my wolf side by offering what it thinks the wolf side wants.

Maybe my human side is trying to trick me. Just like that, the moment, whatever it was, is gone. Ash is still close to me. She hasn't actually moved at all. But I don't feel like we're inches away from kissing again. I don't feel like she's as close as she was, even though she hasn't moved away.

"It's okay," she says.

"You don't have to do anything you don't want to do."

"I'm just not ready," I say. I put a hand on her thigh, but it's a more companionable touch than anything sexual.

"But I think I will be. Eventually. Thank you." She puts her hand on mine.

"Just know that the offer is there. From me, at least. When you're ready." She squeezes my hand, then gets up and steps away. She pulls out her mace and her shield and starts doing drills with them, making the same moves over and over again. I wonder if that will work for me. My shield isn't even half as big as hers, and I don't use it the same way she uses hers. Mine is more for deflecting a blow than for absorbing it. But I still wonder if it will help me to do the drill with her.

Wordlessly, I get up and join her. She smiles at me. Then she widens her movements so that I can get a better view of them, seeing that I want to imitate her. Still without speaking, she teaches me the movement and corrects my form, helping me practice the movements. She moves with an agonizing slowness, and I realize that moving slower forces the muscles to work more diligently, and allows me to focus on making sure that I'm doing every movement correctly. It's harder to go slow than to go fast.

With speed comes a lack of control. You don't need tight control when you're moving really fast. Blows aren't met with opposite blows, after all. I'm not constantly slamming my full weight into a deflection. At speed, the deflection is just the movement, knocking the strike off target. It doesn't necessarily reduce any of the momentum. It just redirects the trajectory of the weapon. That works just fine at speed. But when you go slowly, you can make sure every movement is perfect.

And you need every movement to be perfect so that the muscle learns how the move is supposed to go. That way, when you get up to speed, the muscle memory takes care of itself, and the deflection happens. You don't get perfect strikes and perfect deflections, but at speed you don't need them. Ash and I practice for our whole two hours of watch. By the time we're done, my stamina has started to drain as if we were in a drawn out battle. It feels good, it feels exhausting, and it will hopefully help me get to sleep.

Because I was right; the whole tent smells like sex.