WHAT IS THIS STORY ABOUT?
It's quite simple - it is a
story about forbidden love.
Irma is a
young Lithuanian woman with a sparkling personality.
She is about to go to study in the USA. Oliver is a
sensible American man who is her adoptive father.
He's married to a foreigner and runs his own business abroad.
On the surface Oliver is a father figure to Irma, while Irma acts like a caring and friendly daughter towards Oliver. However, there are strong hidden currents underneath. One day their suppressed feelings burst into the surface. These are powerful conflicting feelings of love, hate, desire for brutality and gentleness, primal desire to submit to male authority and the instinct to protect the woman you love.
Irma and Oliver
express their feelings through intricate love and sex games.
These games take them to ballet, to imaginary encounters between a brute rapist and a noblewoman, to roleplaying wild animals and substituting for Irma's teenage friends.
This story is also a portrait of a woman, who learns how to deal with her burgeoning sexuality. It is not an image portrait, it is a character portrait.
If you'd like
to experience the character
of a beautiful woman like Irma, dressed or naked or making love, that's way more difficult. You might get there if you read this story. It will take you about one hour.
********
THE HOWL OF THE NORTHERN WOLF
I. The Ice Age Woman.
"Don't move. Don't even think of running away." The man's voice sounded calm and almost threatening. It was as cold as the snow that covered the forest clearing and the frost that covered the branches of the old spruce.
I knew that voice very well. It was the voice of my adoptive father, Oliver, when he felt danger.
"She will not attack us if not provoked. Pull back slowly, without turning your back."
"HRRRHRRH!!!"
Ten paces away, on the other side of the clearing, a wolf growled, teeth bared. Her litter of three wolf cubs was hiding closely behind her back. The she-wolf's fur was matted - gray with darker streaks. Her eyes were light brown - almost yellow - and her gaping jaws were full of pointed teeth, as if deliberately sharpened.
Dad and I slowly began to back away, sinking into the snow.
The she-wolf followed us at a very close range, sinking into the snow as well. Her cubs quickly disappeared into the bushes, kicking up frost.
"Don't turn your back, Irma," my father told me loudly, waving his hands in front of him. "And don't start running. We must have come close to her den. Wolves usually avoid people. You can scream and shout, but don't run away."
The wolf followed us for another hundred paces. Only then she lazily turned around, licked her paw, and disappeared among the fir trees.
That winter day we'd been lost in the forest. We'd trudged through the snow, frozen and cold, unable to find the clearing and the forest road where we had left the car. Several times we'd found our own footprints. Oliver's shoes were bigger and mine were smaller. It had seemed that we had been bewitched by the evil spirits of the forest, cursed to keep going in circles.
It was getting dark. I could see my father, who is usually very calm, getting nervous. His anxiety was spreading to me. I felt cold and my hands were shaking.
Finally, Oliver breathed a sigh of relief. He exclaimed in English, "Thank God! There's the road!"
When we got to the road, we still had to walk a few kilometers. We had wandered completely off the path when we'd been lost in the forest. By the time we reached our car, it was already completely dark.
"Listen," Oliver said, stopping suddenly.
I heard the sound too.
"Hhoooaaaaaouuuu!!!" a howl came through the forest.
After a few seconds of silence, it was repeated:
"Ooouhhoooowww!!!"
The howl made the hair on my arms stand on end. I had never heard wolves howl, but you don't have to know it to immediately recognize it for what it is. It's in our genes.
If there had been some ice age woman who'd wandered through that forest twenty thousand years ago, wearing fur and not having washed for six months, I'm sure she would have felt exactly the same way I did.
She, too, would have had her hair standing on end, and she, too, would have clung to her man's hand.
"This is how they show that this is their forest," my father said. "This is their territory. The others - let them stay away."
***
Oliver often took me on his expeditions into the woods. On the week-days he had to manage over one hundred employees in his IT consultancy business, so during the week-ends he followed the policy that he would turn off his phone and get away. The further away from people and from the city he would get, the better.
A few years ago, he'd decided to build himself a small log cabin in the Labanor forest. Once he'd been done with the construction, he'd invited both me and my mom to see it.
My mom said that she wasn't a forest person, but that, as an exceptional favor, she would go. Naturally, she'd expect to be generously rewarded for that extraordinary favor later on.
Frankly, I didn't feel like going there either. No eighteen-year-old likes spending time with her parents. It would be even worse than that. It would be spending time with parents in a forest with no cellular coverage.
I think that was the last day that we looked like a happy family. We spent half a day fishing, and then we cooked a very smelly fish stew with lots of wild garlic and thyme.
Even though my mother enjoyed it, too, she would never admit it, because, per her worldview, that would weaken her negotiating position.
That day I pouted my lips, rolled my eyes and complained about mosquito stings. That's what teenagers do. However, when Oliver asked me if I'd like to go there again, I'd said, "Yeah. Sure. Whatever."
My mother had had other things to do, so since that day it had just been Oliver and me.
The forest has grown on me. Those spring, summer, autumn, and winter days in the woods had felt vivid and real. We would hike, we would fish, and we would cook simple meals on an open fire. Often we would climb into a tree and spend time birdwatching.
Almost every time, we also managed to spot forest animals: foxes, roe deer, wild boar, elk. However, we had never encountered a wolf before. The she-wolf we met on that snowy day was our first.
It took us two hours to drive home that night, and all the way long we talked about the power of the forest and the primal instincts hiding in us. What would we be like if we were ice age people? What would it feel like to hear at night the roar of saber-tooth tigers and the trumpeting of mammoths?
"Would you like to live in the ice age?" I asked my dad.
"Yeah, I would love it. There would be no government, no countries, no tax authorities, and no keeping up with the Kardashians. The whole world would be ours. I would build us a nice cabin by the lake. You could go fishing in a log canoe. I think you would be good at spearfishing."
"I think so too! Yep - that would be great!"
"What would you be if you were a forest animal?"
"If I were an animal... hmmm," I mused, "if I were a forest animal I would be a wolf. I would be like that she-wolf protecting her cubs. All the ice age people would see me and they'd know right away that it's better not to mess with me."
"Would you howl like a wolf?" My father sounded very amused.
"Yes I would!"
"Show me."
" Whooohoooaaaaaouuuu!!! I howled in the car. "Ooouwhhoooowww!!!"
"Not bad, not bad at all!" he said with a sparkle in his eyes.
A strong gust of wind suddenly blew snow against the windscreen. The blizzard was getting worse.
Oliver focused on the road and drove in silence.
"It was a good howl, Irma," he said after a while.
"Really?"
"Yeah. It gave me goosebumps."
II. The Modern Young Woman
I'm texting with my best friends on my smartphone. Whenever they get a chance, they bug me about my secret love life.
GINA:
So... Irm, when will you finally tell us about this bear guy that you are dating?
--
LAIMA:
I've told you - she isn't dating anyone. She's just pretending that she does
--
GINA:
She's visiting a teddy bear in the woods 🌲🌲🌲
--
ME:
ha ha ha, very funny... it is not!
--
LAIMA:
her slender trunk is tickled by hedgehogs... on New Year's Day she's SEX SEX SEX SEX with the squirrels
--
GINA:
lol
--
ME:
Not funny! Again!
