VIII
"Aren't they adorable, Eugene?" said Rapunzel, her fingers squeezing my arm as she clung to it, bouncing a little on the balls of her feet.
"Yeah," I said, my voice peculiarly hoarse. "Adorable."
But that wasn't really the word that came to mind as Blondie and I stood in the lamp lit barn in the grey predawn of the eighth day after Christmas.
"Just look at those sweet faces!" she went on. "Those big brown eyes…Gorgeous creatures."
They had brown eyes? I hadn't noticed. My gaze was trained on the girls' hands. And what they were doing. And the word for that was obscene. Yes-it was almost obscene the way the pale, nimble fingers curled around the supple pink flesh, taking it firmly in hand, and tugged in a well practiced, confident motion.
Sure, the hands were probably callused by their lifetime of drudgery, but you had to admire a girl-all eight of them, in fact-who didn't flinch at her work-and who, I had to admit as my gaze unwillingly raked upward, did look rather pretty doing it. In the warm, flickering light, the girls'-who I could only assume were sisters, so strikingly alike they all looked-cheeks were rosy from their exertion, and their glossy nut brown hair was bound up in braids that left their shoulders bared by their blouses, along with the full tops of breasts as creamy as the liquid that so rhythmically squirted against the sides of the pails like rain on a tin roof.
"Uh, Babe?" I said as we watched the girls work. "I know milk does a body good-I mean, just look what it's done for me. But milkmaids? Eight of them?" My eyes darted sidelong to Rapunzel's rapt face. "And their cows?"
If it weren't for the five gold rings, I'd be starting to think she was giving me subtle hint that she wanted me to leave the palace and take up a life of farming, complete with a lifetime supply of peasant girls to make the work a little more appealing. Or, as the case seemed to be, to do the work for me while I stood drooling like an idiot.
"Gah! They're so adorable I just can't stand it!" cried Rapunzel, breaking away from me so she could rub her hands over one of the cows' velvety muzzles. It blinked at her with its so-brown eyes and gave a soft moo of approval.
Smiling, I leaned against a stall door and watched the only girl in the room who mattered to me-the only girl in the world who ever would matter to me-whose cheeks were rosy from her enthusiastic and apparently not one-sided conversation with the cow. Whose cropped hair bared a neck and shoulders as pale as fresh milk and sweeter to taste. I bet she could milk a cow as expertly as the eight maids, too. I mean, I had yet to see a thing Rapunzel's fingers didn't take to like, well, a milkmaid's to an udder.
"Yeah," I said, swallowing hard. "Adorable."