He’s still holding the club. Blood and strands of hair cling to the edge. I’m looking at him in profile and he’s like a picture from a history book. Block face hidden behind a rangy beard. Roman nose. Long, thick luxurious hair any woman would die for flowing down and spilling over his shoulders. Maybe I’m sprucing it up some, yeah, but not much.

All thoughts of using him as some pack animal vanish as I see the gentle sensitivity behind his fearsome and brutish face. He looks at me now, and I’ve never felt so lovely in all my life. I’m like a goddess to him, some divine being. And I know this because he begins shaking from head to toe as though standing in a freezing rain. I come toward him, his earthy smell fills the room like flood water, and notice the pale and shiny scars that appear latched to his arms and upper body like skin-tone leaches. His face is older than his eyes. Aged by the sun and stress of living outdoors. And I know he’s never felt the gentle caress of a woman. At least, not one like me.

I take the club from his hand and set it down. He’s taller than me by a foot, shoulders wider by half. Chest matted in wet curls of black. I place my hands on his hips and run them up the length of his slick torso, and he shudders beneath my touch. He’s watching me, but won’t meet my eyes at first, until I force him to, and then he won’t look anywhere else. A charge has formed between our two bodies, a tractor beam drawing us close. We embrace, his body carved from stone, and I whisper into his ears as I let my toga fall to a puddle at my feet, “My protector.”

“Mother,” he breathes into my hair, the only word he knows for woman. Not maternal, though. More like Mother Earth.

“Yes,” I say, guiding his hands across my body. My neck, my breasts, slick now with his sweat and mine, my stomach, the crease between my legs. Here he shudders again, and so do I. And then I pull him with me onto the couch, move his granite body between my open legs. Push his cloth trousers down with my feet and feel the throbbing hardness extending out, directing it toward my opening. I come within moments of him entering me – Oh God, I can’t believe I’m writing this – and then so does he, arching and gasping as though fighting for air. And then he collapses on top of me and I wrap him up with my arms and legs, holding him close and keeping him inside.

“Mother,” he says.

“Yes.”