Gintare was not a lioness who was afraid to face facts. Sure, she would deny them on occasion, but not because she was afraid of the truth. She simply chose sometimes not to accept what others considered incontrovertible fact. There were instances when her stubbornness had actually proven her correct and the majority wrong. Unfortunately, the fact that she was pregnant was one she had been having a difficult time denying, either to others or in her own mind.For one thing, there was the matter of her increasingly gravid state. Gintare led an active life, as was necessitated by living alone with no one to provide for her or defend her. She liked it that way, actually. Having no one to depend on meant that there was no one depending on her, and Gintare preferred to avoid that sort of restrictive obligation. Tare's personal preference for solitude aside, it was impossible to deny that she had been putting on weight, and she shouldn't have been, because she was eating no more and getting no less exercise.
Additionally, Tare knew she was at a high risk for getting pregnant. She didn't believe in the contraceptive powers of herbs or talismans, like some lions did, and even if she had believed in them she didn't make it a habit to carry them with her. Given her tendency to have sex with any lion who caught her eye and responded favorably to her advances, it had really only been a matter of time before the gods saw fit to end her lucky streak and let one of her partners impregnate her. And she'd been having a lot more sex than usual, late.
At least she had been until the life growing inside her had become impossible to ignore, and then there had been markedly fewer lions interested in being with her carnally. Ironically, her sex drive had grown with her swollen stomach, which left her in a state of increasing frustration, both sexually and emotionally. Gintare had always liked sex, which was undoubtedly what had gotten her into this predicament in the first place. She knew how that worked, after all.
But as to why she'd been twitching her rump for any interested and interesting male party, which was out of character, even for her. That was something else, and she had a difficult time accepting the truth of the matter because the truth was that she had gone and gotten herself hung up on a lion she would never see again. And for what? He'd been great, known exactly how to play her and how to please her, but he'd spoken no terms of endearment or affection. He'd only called her beautiful, something she'd heard many times before.
And yet she was stuck on him, and unconsciously (or sometimes consciously) compared every male she'd been with since to him. And she'd been with so many males because she hoped to forget the way he felt moving on her and in her, and the way he growled his words and sent heat pooling in her womb. If she couldn't forget him, she at least wanted to show herself that she was building him up to be more than he was, but that had proved difficult, and so she had lain with both likely and unlikely males in her attempts to make less of her memories of her time with Arindam.
At the moment, Gintare was not in the mood for sex. In fact, Gintare probably would have eviscerated any male who brought the subject up. Such a thing was unlikely to happen, however, since very few males would be interested in discussing sex with a lioness going into labor. Except possibly to apologize for having it and causing her this sort of discomfort. Tare would very much have liked to hear an apology right now from every male she'd ever been with.
Rationality and reason went out the window when her contractions began to come within minutes of each other. She was in entirely too much pain for such petty concerns. As far as Tare was concerned, right now, all males were the enemy and they should all be castrated. She was uninterested in how much fun they could be when they were intact. It was that sort of fun which had gotten her into this predicament. It would be about as much fun, she guessed, to castrate them all with a well-placed claw swipe. Then maybe - maybe - they would have some faint idea of how damned uncomfortable it was to give birth.
Another contraction caused her muscles to spasm painfully and Gintare finally had to admit that it was time to go to her den. As much as she wanted to deny her entire pregnancy and the fact that she would soon have cubs to care for, Tare had gone to the trouble of finding a relatively safe-seeming den where she could give birth to her cubs. She knew it was just impractical to give birth in the middle of nowhere, considering how very vulnerable a lioness was as such a time, and if she had more than one cub, moving them would be a challenge.
The thought of potentially having more than one cub was not pleasant. One cub could grow into a decent traveling companion. More than that, and they would most definitely be a burden. Perhaps she would be lucky and the litter would be small. Depending on which lion had sired it, she wouldn't be at all surprised. On the other hand, some of the more robust and vigorous lions could easily have sired litters of five or six. Thinking about the pain which was to come, Tare prayed that it had not been one of those lions.
It seemed she had just barely reached her den when the true birthing contractions began. The last quarter mile or so had been hellish, but Tare knew that she'd had to cover it no matter how much she hurt, because she wouldn't be able to do it later. In the relative safety of her den, Tare crouched with achingly tense muscles, trying to push and help her body expel the first cub. Later, when her mind wasn't consumed by how much pain she was in, she would think about the relative size of cubs and the aperture from whence they emerged, and the pain would make a great deal more sense.
The first cub was dark and covered in slime. Had it not been for an instinct telling her that the slime needed to be licked away, Gintare probably would not have done it, and even as she did it she felt mildly repulsed. It was not like the insides of prey at all. That had come out of her, from a place she didn't really want to think about putting her tongue in the ordinary course of things. Fortunately, the immediacy of her situation was sufficient to keep her revulsion in a distant place in her mind. There would apparently be more than one cub.
In the end, when all was said and done, Gintare's voice was hoarse from crying out and her body completely limp. There was blood, but not as much as she had anticipated. There were also five small bodies mewling softly and nursing blindly at her teats, which had been swollen and aching for some time. The fact that her cubs' feeding brought relief did nothing to endear them to her. She remained vaguely disgusted by the whole affair, but too enervated to do anything more than allow the cubs to give suck while she lay there and hurt.
If she ever saw Arindam again, she would kill him.