By My Side ... (A Valentine's Day Story) by Christine Blackthorn

delicate
flavours teasing her. She was hungry and even though she would have
given anything to hide the fact, her stomach's growl made it
impossible. Embarrassment warmed her cheeks. She wanted to cringe,
lean away -- away form the food, away form him, away from
weakness.
    Food was dangerous, its power
immense. With it, one person held so much control over another,
held all the dominion. She had learnt that lesson. Food could be
reward or punishment -- or it could simply be a way to impose one's
will, to torture and tease. She had trained her body years ago,
when the first attempts at bonding had begun, not to expect food at
regular intervals. Elena had skipped meals and often gone whole
days without nourishment in order to minimise the power food could
hold over her. She was good at it, or had been. Since the steady
diets of the last few days, however, her body had come to expect
more habitual nourishment and was objecting to the sudden state of
scarcity. It cramped in protest, demanding food. Worse, it growled
audibly, the sound loud in the quiet of the room.
    She hated this sign of her
weakness, especially as it revealed an area of shame too dangerous
to bare to a potential enemy. Elena knew food was her enemy. Her
slightly too large breasts, the curve of her hip, all attested to
that. She was not self-conscious of her body, not to any real
degree. You could not be when your surroundings main desire is to
dominate you, to break your self-possession and mental protections
without causing you any physical harm.
    Nudity, the resulting sensation
of vulnerability, of being at someone's mercy, and the verbal barbs
and humiliations any physical imperfections could be based on, were
the obvious choice. So she had spent a not inconsiderable part of
her adulthood naked among predators waiting for her to falter. In
an odd way, the regular nudity had desensitised her to her own body
and its physical imperfections. It lost the power to hurt her soul
very fast. One simply could not live and always be embarrassed.
    But it allowed a person to
develop some realism. No matter how little she ate as an adult, she
would never have the lithe, graceful slenderness of a true beauty.
She hated food. Shame and fear warring for predominance in her
mind. Her hand covered her stomach as if she could hush it with the
gesture, too aware of the danger of letting others know your
weaknesses. Nudity and hunger she could deal with -- the constant
betrayal of her own body would be harder to fight. Elena found
herself glaring at the offending food.
    Reschkar laughed, entirely
oblivious to her discomfort, the sound free and open, filling the
high ceilinged room with a surprising outburst of humour. He
grinned at her, his strong thighs a cage surrounding her, but a
relaxed cage. His head lay against the backrest, the white hair
contrasting against the dark wood like moonbeams on a mountain
lake. His features lazily calm, the brilliant yellow of his eyes
dimmed by sleepy lids, the line of the scar on his cheek softened
in the firelight. It gave him an even more fantastical air, a being
out of this world, strong and sensual, dangerously erotic and still
a monster. How would a normal human see him -- a threat or a
wonder? Throughout all the days of their journey, she had never
seen him this relaxed before.
    "Well then, darling, it is time
to eat."
    He smiled as he carefully chose
one of the bite sized pieces on the table. He offered it to her
lips, the memory of each time he had done so on their travels
swimming between them. Her lips parted, though not enough to take
the food. She hesitated, caught in the strangeness of the moment.
When had she come to expect her food to have the underlying tang of
his taste, to be offered to her from his hand? The days on the road
had conditioned her fundamentally, deeply enough that she expected
her most basic needs, food and shelter, to be under his control, to
be provided and met by him. She had never even considered what