come trade out for something clean, and we'll get you tampons."
I wanted to hug him so hard, but I wasn't about to stand here bleeding like some idiot. The best I could do was give him a smile as I jigged my way into the wonderfully warm water, staring at the current to make sure there wasn't some trail of red making its way downstream.
But the problems were piling up in my mind. Tampons meant disposal. Did anything on this world get attracted by the smell of blood? What about things in the water? No, the stream was lifeless. Fish weren't really a Tyrnigg thing. More Earth and Vesdar, so I should be ok. Then there was the biggest one of all: how I was going to prevent this from happening again.
Because the reality was that even if I was bleeding, that didn't mean I was out of the woods. Stories of women who'd had periods throughout their pregnancy popped into my head. How could I have been this careless? I'd been so worried about my relationship with my demons that I hadn't stopped to think about the simple reality that I was fucking them.
"How long?" I asked.
"For what?" Sam called back. "Which part?"
"Tampons!"
He chuckled. "Five, maybe ten minutes. Probably take longer to clean your pants, sweetie. Now, wild guess here, but I'm assuming you don't want me to tell the others?"
I leaned my head back, wanting to scream, or maybe cry at the horror of this situation. It was exactly the kind of thing that every woman dreaded. Not the period part. We were all kinda used to that. More that my menstrual cycle had just become everyone's business. I could handle telling a boyfriend about it. But five of them? That was a whole different story. And yet, it wasn't really something I could hide.
"Can you just not embarrass me?" I asked.
Sam moved to the edge of the bank. "I promise," he said, completely serious. "Believe it or not, we men like to take care of our women, and this counts. Clean clothes, tampons, and a subtle word to the others. That sound ok?"
I nodded. "Thank you."
Then that mischievous smile reappeared. "So, you know that orgasms cure cramps, right?"
"Eww, no!" I said, well aware of what he was hinting at. "We are not - just no. No bloody dicks, Sam!"
"Shitty ones are fine, but bloody ones aren't?" He rolled his eyes.
I gaped at him in astonishment. Ok, partly because I didn't have a very good comeback for that. A little bit was that he had a point. I knew he did, but that didn't mean I was about to give in on this.
"No," I said, making it very clear. "No period sex! Between ruining the sheets, the horror of trying to clean up, and never mind the problems of yanking out a tampon to get it on, just no, Sam."
Then he winked. "So I'll tell the guys that it'll be a dry week. Just wanted to make sure."
I lifted my hand, middle finger extended. "This isn't funny."
"It's actually rather adorable," he assured me as he squatted down, holding my folded pants across his arm. "Sweetie, I remember a time before pads. A very long time ago, women just bled, letting it run down their legs and into the straw or rushes where they worked. As the world became more 'civilized,' men taught you to be ashamed of it. Men, Sia. They told you to lock yourselves away. To hide it so they wouldn't be inconvenienced." He lifted a brow. "Do I look like that kind of man?"
With all the pink he had going on, he really didn't, so I shook my head. "No," I admitted.
"And I'll talk to Ron about that birth control rune," he added. "I don't know what happened to it."
"Luke got thrown to Angelis, and then we had to find him, I sealed Daemin so the demons couldn't leave, kicked the angels off Vesdar, made a veil before Michael could figure out why dragons are invulnerable to aether, and kinda got a little busy." I shrugged. "Then there's the reality that I don't have my phone here, and that's where I put the alarm to make another appointment, so I kinda forgot."
"And so did we," he said gently. "Now, it just means that we get to spoil our woman."
I bit my lip and glanced away. Their woman. All of theirs. It sounded so good like that, but it seemed that I still had a few