Ella, by Jessica E. Kaiser, 4/9
The years passed, two or perhaps three of them. Very little changed, except that Ella grew more beautiful, and my mother became ever more a shadow of herself, and Gerthe and I grew taller and bigger but no more beautiful. In the summer of my fifteenth year when the earl took up residence in his country house. This was of no matter to me.
Then, one day, while I was walking through the fields, going to the small copse of trees where the stream welled out of the ground into a pool and it almost smelled like my long-lost forest, I came across the earl's son. As I approached the grove, I saw that there was a horse tethered there, one with the earl's crest on the saddle it wore. I warily silenced my steps.
No one had yet forbidden me to visit this place, but I did not know to whom it belonged and did not want to risk an encounter. The minor sounds of my passage were masked by the whistling I could hear coming from the center of the copse. Slipping through the trees took me only a few moments, and then I could see him.
He sprawled on the green grass, a hat drawn slightly over his eyes, whistling a perfectly pitched version of "Maiden's Fancy." The feather on his hat waved jauntily in the light breeze. He was lovely. It seems an odd term to use for a man, I know. But his hair shimmered golden in the sunlight as it curled down to his broad shoulders, his mouth was a perfectly shaped pink cupid's bow, and he had lovely green eyes.
Even now, I would like to say that it was love at first sight. But it was not.
It was lust, although at age fifteen, I did not know the difference between the two. I sat down in the leaves, careful to make no sound, and watched him. It did not occur to me to try to greet him. Thanks to Ella and the townsfolk, I knew then what I did not know as a child in my forest: I was ugly. I was ugly, and he was lovely, and speaking to him would have served no purpose. Instead, I watched.
He stopped whistling suddenly and removed his hat. I drew back a little further into the shelter of the trees, wondering whether he intended to leave. He stood up, but rather than taking the path toward his horse, he pulled his tunic over his head. In the middle of the clearing, the sun was very bright. I could see clearly the rippling muscles of his back and shoulders.
Then he took off the rest of his clothes and stepped into the pool. He faced away from me at first, but once he had waded into the water up to mid-thigh, he turned around. My breath caught in my throat. He was even more beautiful without his clothes. A proper maiden would have blushed and run off in horror.
I blushed, but not for shame. I blushed because I felt hot, a heat that centered low in my stomach and between my thighs, then spread outward to the rest of my body. I wanted him like I have never wanted anything before or since, wanted him so much that I began involuntarily moving toward him, out of the shelter of the trees. As I stepped forward, one of my feet came down on a small branch.
He did not hear the sound, involved as he was in bathing. But it drew me back to myself, and the heat faded a little bit, as I looked down at my feet. Ella called them peasants' feet, and they were. Large and so wide that shoes always pinched them painfully. With tears of inadequacy in my eyes, I retreated into my hiding place.
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