Okay, readers... Just a heads-up... we're heading into some pretty sappy "romance" territory (in the first part of this chapter—before we get to the juicy-stuff!), because it's where the characters have taken me... But, still, the sex is still gonna' be rather torrid, and explicit... so, at least there's that...
;)
So, "If you be my Dixie chicken; I'll be your Tennessee lamb..." LOL!
CHAPTER-2:
The Picnic
After breakfast—and another vigorous session of more, incredible, sex—Merry, quite unexpectedly, handed Tom a list scrawled in pencil, and asked, "If you would pick these items up from the mercantile, today?.. Your food-stocks are shameful—pathetic, actually—and I don't know how to cook all those colorful boxes of iced-foods you have in the ice-box. But they don't seem very wholesome and healthy to me, anyway... 'Bachelors,'" she said to herself, ruefully, shaking her head in playful admonition, "you'd eat worms and crickets, if you thought you wouldn't have to cook them!"
"Of course, Your Highness," Tom replied, as he laughed at her (quite accurate) description of the bachelor's culinary expertise, "Every request of my wife is the same as a command from the Almighty, and I'm
her
most-humble servant," he finished, with his best imitation of a flourished courtly-bow, worthy of The Globe Theatre.
The little half-goblin laughed back at his overly-dramatic words and display, and whacked him on his bowed head for good measure, saying, "And hurry up with it!.. We're going for a picnic with Ziffy this afternoon in the forest. There's a nice pond, and we might go swimming, too! It'll be fun! You'll see!"
***
It was almost noon when Tom pulled his truck onto the single-lane-road leading to Cascadia Home. He had woke up late that morning, at six. After all, he had had quite a workout, between Ziffy and Merry, the day before. He had left at nine, an hour into Philomath, an hour of shopping, and an hour back. And, truly, he worried about little Merry being discovered in his cottage, but the thought was quickly push aside. After all, she had gone for more than a century of remaining undetected by the mundane world that surrounded her.
His concern for her surprised him. He had just met the girl, and he already was beginning to feel a deep connection to her. And while her more innocent definition of "wife" wasn't nearly the same as his own, still... Do I actually love her, already, he asked himself, so quickly?
He cared for her, he knew. That much was plain. Yet with all of his failed attempts at finding "the one," had he found "her" in this mottled pink-and-green creature of folklore?
This was all just happening too fast. His world had changed, over night! He felt the panic, the anxiety, coming on, and quickly squelched... Just calm down, Tom, he told himself. It seems that there is life after retirement, he mused. It was just, now, he had a new purpose, and new responsibilities. And, that thought was actually quite comforting. And although he half expected to get home, and find an empty cottage, with no secret door, no goblin-bride, no magical forest out back, and all of this had been just some
really
vivid, erotic dream... He, somehow, was also certain that Merry would be there waiting for him.
***
"C'mon, slow-poke," Merry chided him, as they neared the exit of her tunnel into the forest, "Keep-up, keep-up..."
Earlier, he was worried over getting her out to the forest unseen. Tom thought he might have to wrap her in a blanket, and carry her like a sack of potatoes—along with all the other picnic supplies—until they were out-of-sight of the manor. But, once again, he didn't take into account that she had survived here, undetected, for well over a hundred-years. He should've figured that all of his worrying was for not.
While he was in town, he had picked up a few other items not on the list Merry had provided him. Namely, and most importantly, the very revealing bikini. It was a hot-pink, halter-top/g-string number made from iridescent lycra. And when he presented it to her, she pulled a confused expression, and asked him, "What's this? Some kind of undergarment?"