I know she doesn’t like things to be messy.

She bursts into tears again as she pulls at her leggings but stops before she gets them all the way on.

I don’t have any of the things like my mother used to give my sisters when they were bleeding, but I think I can figure something out. I quickly cut strips of antelope hide—one to tie around her waist, and two to go between her legs and catch the blood. I don’t have any wool or anything to put between them to help absorb, but I know some dry grass can be used until we find something better, and fold some in between the two straps of leather.

I start with the strap of leather around her waist and pull her up so she is standing. She pushes at me, but I grab her hand. Since she is using her other hand to hold her lower garment part way up her legs, she can’t push me anymore. I kick at her ankle until she spreads her legs and lets me maneuver the other pieces between her thighs. Then I wrap the ends around the strap around her middle. It seems to fit reasonably well once I get the whole contraption on her. Beh alternates between laughing and crying as she shifts around, adjusts the straps, and then hugs me.

My mate is weird.

She is also very tired and keeps crying off and on throughout the rest of the day. Thinking she might want to untangle her hair, I bring her a stick from one of the trees outside, and she cries again. I bring her a drink of water, and she cries again. I bring her some meat from the fire, and she cries again.

I give up and plop down a few feet away from her.

She looks over at me, her chin begins to quiver, and she starts crying again.

I move closer, and she wraps her arms around me. We stay inside the cave where I keep the fire going and feed her pieces of dried meat as she lays on the old fur and rubs her stomach. When the piece of leather strap and grass are filled with blood, Beh replaces it with another one. I go to the ravine to throw the dry grass away and wash the leather even though the water there has a foul odor and isn’t really any good for cleaning or drinking. I will have to go to the lake for that, but I don’t want to go too far away from Beh.

I place the somewhat washed leather up high in a tree with the hope that no predators will be attracted to the scent and steal it. I make her several more from an old hide, and she cries when I give them to her.

Thankfully, Beh feels better the second day, and she follows me to the lake to wash out the leather pieces in the clean water. After a few days, Beh stops bleeding and crying, and my head stops hurting.

There is nothing—nothing in my entire existence—that compares to waking up with my mate curled tightly against my chest. Though I had not realized it at the time, the loneliness had weighed heavily on me during my time of isolation, and now I’m beginning to wonder if I would have survived much longer on my own. I could hunt and protect myself, but the lack of companionship had been slowly destroying my will to live.

Before Beh, I hadn’t thought about the loneliness in such a way. Maybe I just ignored how I felt when I would lie awake and look out into the darkness of my cave, listening to nothing except the crackling of the fire and the wind outside. I only remember feeling empty inside.

Now that Beh is beside me, like she has been for the first part of the spring season, I feel warm and full.

Tensing my muscles, I pull her closer to me and nuzzle my nose against the top of her head. Beh sighs in her sleep but does not move as I hold her close, watch the burning coals, and doze off again with my mate’s body pressed close against mine.

The next day, we head out toward the lake again. I bring along the antelope fur so I can wash it and finish it for Beh. Along the way, I collect three rabbits, which means Beh will have good fur for mittens and foot coverings for winter, too. She still doesn’t seem impressed by the rabbits, I notice, and like the last time, she won’t even look at them when I try to show them to her.

Once we reach the lake, Beh goes immediately to the place where she found the clay before. I swallow hard, wondering if she is still upset with me, but she doesn’t appear to be angry. She seems excited to find the clay again. Before I start on the fur, I follow her to the little stream and find a nice, flat digging rock. I pull the clay together in a pile and then watch her form some of it into smooth balls. I make a couple of them for her, and she smiles at me with sparkling eyes as I work. When I’m done, Beh smiles and places her lips against my cheek. My heart begins to beat a little faster as I wait and hope she will bring her lips to my mouth as well.

She doesn’t, and after a moment, I frown and grunt to get her attention. Beh looks over at me with questioning eyes, and I reach out and place my fingers on her lips. After a moment, I remove them and press them over my own mouth.

Beh’s lips press together as she holds back a grin. I lean forward a little, still hopeful, and she narrows the distance between us until her mouth is on mine. I close my eyes and revel in the warmth of the sun, her lips, and her presence. Her fingers creep up around my neck and dig into the back of my head, holding me closer as her mouth opens to mine and our tongues touch.

If I weren’t already on my knees, I would have fallen to them.

I reach my arms around her shoulders and bring her body closer to me. There’s a rock digging into my knee, and I don’t care. I can feel myself getting hard, and I don’t care about that either. Just this—just her lips against mine—that is a wondrous thing to me.

Beh pulls away from me, breathing hard and leaning her forehead against mine. I lock eyes with her, silently pleading for more when Beh makes that sound again—the one that sounds like a snake.

“Kiss.”

I tilt my head looking first to her mouth and then back to her eyes.

“Kiss, Ehd.”

“Beh…” My fingers stroke up her arm and down again as my eyes focus on her mouth.

She moves forward and presses her lips firmly against mine, then backs off again.

“Kiss.”

I wish she would stop making noises and just keep our mouths together, but she keeps doing the same thing over and over again. She touches my mouth with hers, makes that snake sound, then does it again. I don’t understand what she is doing, and it is frustrating.

I growl low and dig my fingers into her hips. I tug her closer to me and place my lips tightly on her mouth to silence her. I reach into her mouth with my tongue, and she moans against me. All other thoughts inside my head depart until nothing is left but her scent and her taste.

When we finally stop, Beh’s cheeks flame red, and she looks down to the muddy handprints I have left on her clothing. Her eyes dart back to mine, and she raises an eyebrow at me. I watch her carefully, wondering if the mess has made her angry and what she might do if it has. She doesn’t seem vexed though and uses her own clay-covered hand to brush some of it away. This makes it worse, and she snickers and shakes her head from side to side.

I decide she must not care very much if the strange clothing gets dirty. She must know I am preparing the new fur for her to replace the odd things wrapped around her body now.

They look so uncomfortable.

Toward the end of the day, Beh has a stack of clay dishes sitting in the sun on the rocks, and she is in the lake washing off. I’ve found a small group of wild onions, which I’ve pulled out of the soft ground near the edge of the pine forest and washed off in the lake. I wonder if Beh knows how to cook them. I’ve eaten them often because they are one of the few plants I know I can eat without becoming sick to my stomach, but when I try to cook them, they burn in the fire. I know my mother used to cook them, but I can’t remember how.

When Beh comes out of the water, I hide my eyes. She dresses quickly and comes over to me, making sounds with her mouth through her smile. I watch her approach, and I am thrilled when she leans over and covers my mouth with her lips again. She drops down beside me, and I hold up the onions.

Beh takes a bunch of them in her hand and turns them around and around. She brushes a bit of dirt I have missed off of one bulb and makes more noise. I’m about to reach out and cover her mouth when she jumps up and cries out. I am immediately at her side, wrapping my arm around her and holding her against me, looking all around for whatever alerted her.

My mate giggles and covers her mouth with her hand until she has contained herself. I narrow my eyes, and she brushes her fingers over the edge of my jaw before darting away toward the edge of the lake again. Near the water are several tall plants with long, brown tops—cattails—which I recognize. Beh continues with her noises as she reaches down to the bottom of the plant and pulls one up—root and all.

As soon as she pulls it out, I recognize it. This is a root my mother would cook for us, but I had no idea it came from the bottom of a cattail. I only remember using the long stalks to entertain my brothers. They liked to pull them apart and send the seeds flying in the wind.

We work together to dig up more of the roots, and soon we have too much to carry back in one trip. Beh prattles on the entire time, and I’m starting to feel another ache in my head from it. Leaving her clay bowls and plates behind, we gather up the onions, cattail roots, and rabbits in my fur before heading back to the cave. Beh wants to use the new fur I’ve made to wrap up the food, but I pull it away from her hands and wrap it around her shoulders instead. I don’t want it to get dirty because it’s for her.

We head back to our home after a wonderful day of work. Beh seems as confused as I am about cooking the cattail roots and the onions, and eventually we just let them sit close to the fire until they are at least warm enough to eat. Afterwards, we sit and watch the coals, and I wrap my arm around Beh’s shoulders. She leans against me, and I inhale the fresh scent of her hair.

Beh and I fall into a routine through the summer.

I can’t help but think of my tribe as Beh and I work side by side, gathering grains in the fields and plants in the forest. She knows some other plants we can eat aside from the cattails, and we store what we don’t eat in the clay pots Beh has made. She has even fashioned covers for some of the pots to keep the moisture out. As the back of the cave becomes full of such things, my worry about keeping my mate healthy through the winter diminishes.

Beh leaves most of the clay dishes to dry in the sunshine for a day before she sets them near the fire for a long time. Only when she indicates they are ready does she let either of us put anything inside of them. With one particular pot she makes, she spends even more time keeping it close to the fire. She never seems completely happy with it in the morning and lets it set again. Eventually, she takes one of the clay plates and sets it inside the coals and then places the pot on top of it.

I have no idea what she is trying to do, but like I have thought many times before, my mate is strange, and it doesn’t matter to me that she is.

When I look at her, my chest feels larger. Sometimes my heart pounds, and often my penis grows hard and thick, wanting to put a baby in her. In the night, she places her lips on mine and lets my hands touch her face, arms, back, and legs—but never her breasts or the warm spot between her legs. She will run her hands over my chest and arms but never below my waist.

It’s driving me insane with desire.

There is also a mystery around her—a very, very strange mystery. Specifically, it’s around the top half of her body. It’s another piece of clothing wrapped around her back, over her shoulders, and around her breasts. I can feel it when I put my hand on her back, though when I try to feel it in the front, Beh pushes my hand away. I have no idea what the thing is, only that it is pale pink—like the beginning of a sunset on the clouds—and that she only takes it off when she is bathing.

As I relieve myself into the ravine, the morning air is decidedly cooler than it has been in recent days. I wonder how long it will be before the leaves on the trees begin to fall and there is snow on the ground. I should try to hunt another large animal before then. We have a decent amount of dried meat and fish in Beh’s clay containers, but winters can be unpredictable. Having more would be better. It would also provide a larger piece of leather for carrying the last of the grains in the field or arrowroot plants back to the cave.

Beh’s pots are good for storage inside the cave but too heavy to carry around. Since the antelope is for Beh’s winter furs, I did not scrape the fur off to make more supple leather that could be used as a carrying pouch, and Beh’s baskets aren’t much better than they were in the beginning. Beh hasn’t made any clothing for herself out of the fur though she does wrap it around herself when she is cold.

Maybe I will go out onto the steppes and look for a nearby herd of antelope or horses. It will take a long time to dig another pit trap, but it will still be helpful. Beh can gather more of the field grains while I dig.

I return to the cave with this thought in my head, and find Beh hovering over the pot she has been warming in the fire for many days. She has filled it with water and placed it close to the fire. She sticks her finger in the water every few minutes, and I wonder if the water is getting hot in the clay pot. Eventually she seems satisfied and adds some of the arrowroot and wild onions to it, as well as a little of the pheasant meat from the bird I caught and roasted yesterday.

A sudden, long forgotten memory comes into my head. It is the image of my mother hovering over pots of tightly woven leaves. She would place rocks in the fire until they were hot and then place them in the woven basket to heat the water inside. Beh’s way seems to take less time.

I watch in silence, and when Beh is done, the stew she has made is pretty tasty. It is undoubtedly the best thing I have eaten in a very, very long time. As I tip up a clay bowl and pour the contents into my mouth, I groan with appreciation and then pull Beh into my lap to hug her to my chest.

She giggles and wraps her arms around my neck. When she tilts her head up, I capture her lips with mine. I’m too happy to wait for her to instigate the action like I usually do. Beh hums against my lips, and I hold her tightly to my chest.