- Caroline -

How did I ever live without this in my life?

I curl up on top of Xark’on, burying my face in his chest and drawing deep from his male scent. I’ve had boyfriends before. Of varying quality. But I’ve never had this. This is more than just a boyfriend. A manfriend, maybe? It sounds weird, but it’s the truth. Xark’on is a man, an actual, real one. I don’t think I’ve come across that before. I had to cross light years and go to an alien planet to find that. And now I don’t want to be without him.

His slow breathing lifts and lowers me, and I could just stay here forever.

I yawn. I’m getting a lot of fresh air lately, and I sleep so deep here in the safety of the tree house. His safety.

“I love you,” I state into his striped chest. Because if this isn’t it, then I’ll never know what it is.

When I wake up, of course he’s painting again. Using the tiny stick, making one little dot at a time. I can’t even tell if he’s made any progress since last night.

I get up and embrace him without a word.

He hugs me back with the arm that’s not holding the painting stick. “Up early again?”

“Not as early as you. I’ll make you a paintbrush today. It’s what the artists on Earth use. It’s faster and better for certain things.”

“I like my stick,” he says. “But it is slow.”

“And it’s probably hard to use it for painting the sky. It should be more fluid, somehow, not just dots. Although I’m sure you could make it look spectacular.”

“The sky is always difficult to get right. Especially when I lack blue paint. But not every day has a blue sky. I’ll find a way.”

I squeeze his massive upper arm, using more force than I would with a normal man. But his muscles are huge, and he can take anything I can give him. I love that.

He puts his stick down, and we eat breakfast and walk to the trap site.

Xark’on starts digging, and I dig the pot out from the ground. Today, the liquid from the leaves looks even better. I think it’s the right thickness. I mix in a little bit of the white clay powder and stir with a stick until it’s the perfect consistency. Next time, I’ll add some oil. Animal fat probably isn’t perfect, but if I have to use it, I will. We’ve never seen such a thing as olives or similar stuff here, but I suppose if we searched long enough we’d find a plant that would give oil. There’s no rush.

I look towards the cave where the girls are. I can’t help being glad that I’m stuck on this side of Troga’s trench and not on the other. If I’d gone there a day earlier, for instance, and then tried to return here yesterday, I’d have had no way of coming back here other than to follow the trench and find its end, probably getting totally lost in the process. Lost in a jungle full of monsters. I shudder. Gods, I’d be devastated if I couldn’t get back here.

Is there any other way for me to signal them that I’m okay? I know they can’t see the tree house from the cave or anywhere near it. I’d never seen it until I was here. The tree is the tallest around here, but from a distance it probably melts into the background of jungle. Even so, when Heidi or Ar’ox are flying on their dactyl, they should be able to see a light if I pointed it in the right direction. Except they don’t like to fly on that thing at night. There’s no reason to. They can’t see much, and it’s not like a dactyl comes equipped with searchlights.

Still, it’s worth a shot. A torch will still be seen during twilight. Unless it’s between the cave and the sun. Which it probably is. Well, I can try. Are there other ways? Maybe a banner saying ‘I’m fine! Being fucked so well by an awesome caveman and going to trap a dragon! Don’t wait up. Signed, Caroline’. We’d have to flay a pretty huge dinosaur to get that so much skin that the banner would be seen from far away. And it would take too much time.

No, the torch idea is the only way. I’ll try it tonight.

I get busy making a paintbrush for Xark’on. I should have thought about it yesterday when I hunted that not-sheep. I didn’t bother take much care of the fur since it wasn’t all that nice, and I cut it up too much while gutting the thing. I find the spot where I buried the parts of the not-sheep I didn’t use, which is always to good idea in order to not attract carrion eaters, which are usually huge insects. I dig the bloody mess up again, and while it absolutely makes me go ewwwww, I’m able to save a patch of grayish fur.

I cut a suitable twig off a sapling and fashion it into a thin handle, but still thick enough for a caveman to hold comfortably. Attaching each hair from the fur is another issue altogether, and I struggle with it for several hours. I finally hit upon the idea of splitting the end just a little, filling the crack with sticky sap from an old tree and pushing the thick ends of the hairs into the sap. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best I can do right now. If Xark’on uses a light touch, enough of them should stay on for the brush to be usable. Heck, he might not even like painting with it. It’s just, I really want to encourage the creative artist part of him. I get the feeling nobody has ever supported his interest before.

Those rustling noises in the bushes are back today, about the same time as yesterday. Well, animals have their routines too. And it’s the things that don’t make any noise you have to worry about.

The day passes quickly, and today I’d like to get back to the tree house before dark. I pack all my stuff and walk over to Xark’on’s hole. “Hey, digger man.”

“Hey, fucker girl.”

He grins happily up at me, and I can’t help but laugh. If he knew how that would sound in my language ...

“I think your hole is deep enough now,” I say. And I mean it. That’s easily twenty feet deep, more than enough to give that dragon a serious drop. “Let’s go home. There’s another hole that needs your attention.”

He wipes the sweat off his brow. “I see. So many holes to deal with. Stand back.”

I walk a safe distance away so he can toss his shovel up from the hole. Then, he climbs up and kisses me, and we walk to the pond to clean up. Xark’on swims around the pond once and we have a splashing war that he lets me win. Then, he tosses me into the air again, but not as high as yesterday, so I squeal more because I love it than because it scares me.

He makes me practice with the throwing stars for ten minutes until he can’t stand my whining anymore.

Then we’re back at the tree house, we eat dinner, and then I give Xark’on the paintbrush.

“So you dip the brush into your color like this,” I demonstrate. And you apply it onto the skin like so. You drag it lightly across.” I paint a little piece of dino skin that he uses as a rag. “See?”

“Interesting,” he says, clumsily gripping it in his fist as if it’s a sword. “I’ll have to practice.”

“Yeah,” I agree, butterflies dancing in my stomach. “And you can practice with this.”

I hand him the pot with the carefully prepared liquid from the leaves.

He looks at the black liquid. “Ah. I see.” But he clearly doesn’t.

“It doesn’t look like much now,” I explain. “But put a little on the painting. Say, where the sky goes.”

Xark’on takes the new brush and dips it into the pot and then gently brushes it across the middle of his picture of Bune, right above the mountain itself.

Then, he freezes and just stares. “Holy Ancestors!” he finally exclaims. “That’s... that’s unbelievable!”

My eyes are burning a little at the edges. This was a total success. “I just think you need it.”

He dips the brush again and makes a bolder stroke, leaving a long arc of deep blue, the color of a new pair of jeans. “It’s magnificent!”

“You can make it lighter by mixing it with this.” I show him the white clay. “And then you have to add water to keep it runny. Or oil. I think oil would be better. But I haven’t found any yet. It has to be clear oil.”

He places the pot and the brush carefully on the floor.

Then, he embraces me so hard I have to struggle to breathe. A bearhug is like a pitiful, cold embrace compared to this. But that’s fine.

“I never had blue before,” he growls into my ear with a voice that’s less clear than usual. “And you made it for me.” I think there’s a little sniffle too.

I’ve got some fluid on my face myself. “Every artist needs blue. I remembered something I saw once about how they make blue on Earth. For coloring fabric. It’s called ‘indigo’. And I thought, maybe there’s a plant like that here on Xren too. And there was.”

“You spent days on this.”

“Hey, I had to do something while you were digging your trap.”

He squeezes me once more, then puts me down, wipes his eyes, and stares at the picture with the two blue streaks across it. “I can’t believe it. I’ve never seen it before.”

“Some of the other tribes have blue fabrics. Now yours can too. The bush this comes from is very common. I’ll show you how to make it.”

He grabs the brush again and attacks his dinosaur skin canvas with vigor, painting the sky over Bune.

I kiss his shoulder and quietly make my way around the tree trunk to the other side of the house, the side from where I think I’m looking straight at the cave. This time of the evening should be perfect. I imagine Heidi just coming home on her dactyl after spending the day looking for me, and then she will look around the horizon one last time before the sun sets, and then she sees a light in an unexpected place. I’m pretty sure Xark’on never lit a torch in this part of the house. After dark, he was always busy painting on the other side.

I take a torch from Xark’on’s supply, hammer it into the join between two boards so it stands steadily on the sill and light it. Then I take a cured not-sheep skin and hold it in front of the torch so it can’t be seen from the outside. I lift the skin again, revealing the light.

To anyone looking from a distance, it will look like a light blinking. As far as I know, there’s nothing natural here on Xren that does that. If Heidi sees that tiny little point of light flashing steadily on and off, I’m sure she’ll strongly suspect it’s me. And then she might fly here tomorrow morning. If she sees it. And that’s a big ‘if’.

The not-sheep skin is light, but holding it on straight arms and lifting and lowering it once a second takes its toll on my arms. After ten minutes, they are tired. After twenty, they are exhausted, and I’m bored as fuck. After thirty minutes, I start muttering to myself, and after forty I’m angrily singing the worst swear words I know to the tune of Mamma Mia. It’s too dark now. Heidi must have landed. But what if she’s on the way here to investigate right now, and then the light disappears?

My rendition of Abba’s song gets steadily more aggressive and seething, and the lyrics get so filthy I surprise myself. And then I realize that I don’t have to keep the light flashing—if she’s on the way, she can navigate just as well by a steady light as by a blinking one. The flashing is just to catch her attention.

I put the skin down and swear once more for good measure. My arms are burning, and I think this was a total waste of time and effort. But it was worth a try.

I let the torch burn and just look out into the darkness. The jungle at night sounds differently than in the daytime. But from up here, I like it. I’m above it all. With the best man in the universe.

And now I want to be close to him again. I extinguish the torch and saunter back to his painting studio.

He reaches out to me and pulls me close without even looking at me. “What do you think?”

He’s almost finished the blue sky.

I nod. “Very nice. The brush is faster, right?”

“Faster and better. I wonder if it would be possible to make more? Perhaps some smaller, some larger?”

I caress his hard abdomen. “It would. You can make a knife too. With a straight edge. To kind of scrape the paint out and spread it.” I’ve watched a lot of Bob Ross, so I feel pretty knowledgeable about this.

“Hmm. There are so many possibilities.”

I squeeze his hard butt, and then I sit down on the floor with my back to the jungle. Xark’on gets me a fur to sit on, and I lean back against the railing and feel peace descend.

When I wake up it must be hours later. My back is sore, and Xark’on has put another fur over me.

He’s still painting with his back to me. I squint in the light from the torch. Now he seems to have gone a little wild with the blue color.

“Should,” I say and clear my voice of sleepy gruff, “should Bune be blue like that?”

He gives me a strange look. “Bune isn’t blue.”

“But you’ve painted it blue.”

“No. Just the sky.”

I get to my feet without using my hands to support myself, because after the signalling last night they’re so sore I don’t trust them.

I point to the area right beneath Bune on his painting. It’s as blue as the sky above it. “Then what’s this?”

“The sky.”

“Sky under Bune?”

“There was blue sky between Bune and the ground.”

I try to wipe the sleep from my eyes. I’m still groggy. “Why?”

He leans close to the painting and carefully touches up a line. “Bune was flying.”