Still Life with Shape-shifter (16 page)

Ever so slight against my fingertips, I felt the motion of his nod. We were sitting face-to-face, knee to knee, in that cramped clearing right in front of the tent. Keeping my hands cupped against his cheekbones, I leaned in and pressed my mouth against his. Closing my eyes, I fell into that kiss as if falling into oblivion.

We had not made love yet, Cooper and I, but it was something that was always on my mind. I was a virgin, of course—blundering antisocial girl that I was—and I assumed that Cooper was though I had not asked. Whenever he was human, we touched with increasing frequency; we held hands as we walked, we kissed in the dark. Those last two times I had spent the night at his campgrounds, we had lain side by side in the small tent, body pressed to body, hands wandering. But we had done no more than explore. I wasn’t sure he was ready—I wasn’t sure I was—all I knew about sex was that it could leave broken hearts and pregnant girls in its disastrous wake.

But everything was changed now. I had thrown off my other ties; I had unequivocally chosen Cooper over everything else in my life. It had not been a hard choice, but it was still radical. Loving Cooper closed off so many other options—a normal life of friends and family, a suburban house, barbecues with the neighbors, Sunday drives on autumn afternoons, family vacations at Disney World. I could snatch moments of that ordinary life, I supposed, during the weeks that Cooper was human, but he would never be the traditional wage earner who worked in the factory or the office five days a week, came home to pot roasts and the evening news, and mowed his grass on Saturday mornings. He would be passionate and unreliable and struck dumb, now and then, by a wordless poetry he struggled to express.

If I was going to love him, I would have to build a life that was broad enough to include him but rich enough to survive his absences, that made room for him without depending on him. I would have to be strong enough to be solitary, open enough to be joyful, and immune to surprise.

If I was going to sleep with him, I would have to practice diligent birth control—or be prepared to end up with a child as exotic and preternatural as Cooper himself.

I was the one to pull away from the kiss, scrambling to my knees so I could peer down at his face. His expression was as sober and stricken as if I had just informed him that the world was ending. I rested my hands on his shoulders and touched my forehead to his.

“I’m not sure if you’re sure,” I whispered. I could see his eyes, so huge and unfathomable, so close to mine. “I’m always the one who makes decisions, but I don’t want to push you into this if you’re not ready.”

“I’m not afraid,” he said instantly. “Are you?”

I shook my head, slightly, just rocking my forehead against his. “No.”

“Do you want to stop?”

“No. But I don’t have—I didn’t think to bring—with everything else that happened—”

“I have condoms,” he said unexpectedly.

That made me giggle. “You do? When did you buy those?”

A smile broke through his somberness; he looked boyish and eager. “About three months ago. Just in case.”

I lifted a hand to stroke his cheek and marvel at the roughness of his whiskers. “I’ve never done this before.”

“Me either.”

“But I’ve seen movies. I mean, not
porn
, but sexy movies.”

“I’ve read books.”

“Me, too. I know how it’s
supposed
to go.”

“I’m ready,” he said. “I want to.”

“I love you,” I whispered.

For an answer, he rose to his knees before me and enfolded me in another embrace. His long arms wrapped around me and drew me close, and closer still. We kissed each other greedily, making one long deliberate feast of the banquet we had only tasted before. The more we kissed, the wilder we became, the less courteous. I tugged at his clothes and he pulled at mine and I heard my mouth make small sounds, gasps or grunts or quick furious moans of frustration. We were both fully human and yet there were moments I felt as if purely animal instincts had come over me, instinctive, incautious, insatiable.

We did not bother crawling into the tent, though as soon as we were naked, Cooper snaked out a tattered blanket to cover the hard earth, and we wriggled on top of that. He was so long and lean, a thin supple plank of a man, but his pale, smooth skin covered powerful muscles. I had never thought of myself as particularly soft, especially feminine, but I was struck by the contrast between our bodies as my full round curves eased against his taut planes. I could not press myself close enough to him, I could not stroke enough of his surfaces to satisfy my need for touch. I kissed him again and drew him down on top of me and felt his body enter mine.

Oh, God, that joining with another soul.

I cried out, half in pain and half in discovery. This was the reason. This was what drove the days forward, kept the world whirling on its axis. This closeness with another being. This mingled breath, mingled effort, straining bodies, slippery skin, touch, heat, kiss, thrust,
shock
, and satisfaction.

I knew at that moment, though I had known it before, that I could never love anybody else, or even try.

*   *   *

Y
ou can’t spend every minute having sex, though there were days that summer that we tried, and in the weeks that followed, we had to work out all sorts of logistical and personal-space issues. But more quickly than I might have expected, we had come up with a routine of sorts. Cooper scrounged up another bike, so I rode it to my job almost every day. I worked as many hours as I could, saved every penny that we didn’t absolutely require for food and clothing and other essentials, and learned just how well I could tolerate a fairly primitive mode of camping. If it hadn’t been for the public showers and bathrooms, I don’t think I would have survived so well; I have always been able to endure most situations if I can ultimately manage to get clean.

I’d also contacted the university, made arrangements for my mail to be sent to the local post office, and marked off key dates on a calendar so I would be sure to move to Champaign in time for freshman orientation. I wasn’t ready to leave my strange but semimagical existence quite yet—I was enjoying it too much for that—but by fall I thought I would be.

Cooper worked all summer, too. He had taken employment doing janitorial work for a nighttime cleaning service, though of course he could only accept shifts two weeks out of the month. His incurious boss paid him in cash and didn’t ask questions. We assumed he thought Cooper was an illegal immigrant, or possibly a convict out on parole; it was also possible his boss’s own life didn’t bear close examination, so he liked to surround himself with other people from the fringes of society. At any rate, the arrangement worked in our favor, and Cooper brought in a reasonable amount of money during the weeks that he was human.

Of course, half of the time he was not.

I had been living with him nearly ten days when we lay together one night after making love. It was absolutely pitch-black inside the tent—even if there had been moonlight, it could not have penetrated the tree canopy, let alone the canvas.

“I won’t be here tomorrow night,” Cooper whispered.

I had been bracing myself for this announcement. I had known him long enough now to be almost as attuned to the rhythms of his body as he was. “That’s what I thought,” I whispered back.

“Will you be afraid to be here without me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

He was silent a moment. “I can stay nearby,” he offered. “I can watch over the campground. If you need me, just call out, and I’ll be here in a few seconds.”

I stroked the curls away from his face. Strange to think that, before twenty-four hours were up, the dark hair would turn to black fur, the smooth skin would disappear beneath a rough coat. “I have another idea,” I murmured. “Come back here anyway. Sleep just outside the tent—or inside, next to me. I won’t be afraid.”

“You might be,” he said. “You might find it stranger than you like.”

“I won’t. I’ve been around the wolf before.”

I had—though not often since those first two weeks, when he had come to me, injured and in need of tending. I had never been certain if he stayed away because he thought I would fear him, or because he didn’t trust himself not to hurt me, or because he didn’t want to run the risk of being shot or captured. But I wasn’t afraid, and I wasn’t worried, and the last reason could not apply when we were so deep in the forest.

“Yes, but you know me better now,” Cooper said. “You’ll be looking for more of
me
in the animal, and I’m not sure how much of
me
you’ll see.”

“Only one way to find out,” I replied.

“Well,” he said, “we’ll see.”

In the morning, I kissed him good-bye as if it were any other day, and I biked down to the highway and to the McDonald’s. And I worked my shift, and took my paycheck, and rode back to the campsite, pushing the bicycle alongside me as I walked the last yards to the tent. Cooper was nowhere in sight.

And even though I had expected his absence, even though he had told me he would be gone, I felt myself overcome with the most unendurable sense of loss. I looked frantically around the campsite, I struck off into the surrounding undergrowth, calling out his name and hoping to come across him watching me from some nearby hideaway. I was crying—hard enough and stupidly enough that, once I had tramped around for about ten minutes, I couldn’t see well enough to find my way back to the campsite. For a moment, I was really afraid. Lost and alone in an untracked mile of woodland with no sense of where even the smallest haven lay. Would anyone, even Cooper, ever be able to find me again?

I forced back my tears, made myself stand still enough to get reoriented, and finally discerned the shape of the tent about fifty yards away. Only once I had arrived safely back at the clearing did I allow the tears to well up again, and I flung myself to the ground, sobbing without restraint. I didn’t usually give in to self-pity, but at the moment I felt utterly abandoned. I had nothing in the world, no one, except Cooper, and Cooper was gone.

It was probably an hour or so before I pulled myself together, and even then I was limp and woeful. I wasn’t hungry, but I made a light meal before sunset arrived since I knew food preparation was difficult in the dark. And when night did fall, much more swiftly and inexorably than I’d expected, it was as if I was alone on the Earth on the very first day of creation. The woods rustled and whispered around me, never entirely silent or still, but that just added to my utter and uneasy sense of solitude. When Cooper was here, talk or laughter or lovemaking shut out the noises of the night; there was always something to say and someone to say it to. Now every minute seemed fat and slow, climbing reluctantly toward dawn on the huddled backs of all the heavy minutes that had piled up before it. It didn’t seem possible enough of them could accumulate to reach daybreak.

Our batteries were low, so I didn’t want to use a flashlight to read or a radio to listen to music. There was nothing to do at all. I lay on my back in the tent and stared up at impenetrable darkness and waited for night to crawl by.

*   *   *

I
had expected the first day without Cooper to be the worst one, but in fact, the next three were just as bad. I seriously considered striking the tent and moving it closer in to the public campgrounds, just to combat my desperate isolation with the knowledge that other human beings were nearby. I even thought about renting cheap lodgings for a couple of days—there was a Motel 6 down the road from McDonald’s, and it cost less than forty dollars a night—but we were both so used to hoarding our money that I couldn’t bring myself to be so wasteful. Maybe toward the end of the week, if things didn’t get better. If I didn’t get used to living without Cooper.

That third night, I made myself stay busy while it was still light. I took a pillowcase full of dirty clothes down to the public bathrooms and washed them out in the none-too-clean sinks, ignoring the sidelong glances of the other campers, then carried them back and hung them from the branches to dry. I swapped out the batteries in all our appliances since I’d remembered to buy some that afternoon when I was on break. I read a few chapters of
The Metamorphosis
, since an information packet from the university had let me know this would be required reading in my freshman lit course. I listened to a baseball game, the broadcast floating mysteriously through the air more than a hundred miles to emanate, spectral and unreal, from my radio speakers. And I waited for the onset of night with a mounting sense of dread.

We were deep into June now—in fact, I realized with a jolt, today was the summer solstice. There would never be a day so long for the rest of the year, never a night so brief. But instead of consoling me, the thought only added to my terror. If I could not endure this relatively short span of darkness without Cooper at my side, how would I manage for the next six months, each day progressively shorter than the last as the moon bit off the minutes one by one? Night would come sooner tomorrow, and even sooner the following day, and before long all daylight would fail before five o’clock. I told myself it wouldn’t matter then. By the equinox, I would have moved to Champaign and established myself in my dorm room, where there would be other people always within call; by the winter solstice, I would be familiar with the campus even at night, unafraid of its outlandish shadows. Things would get better, not worse, as the year progressed.

But I didn’t believe my own words.

I withdrew to the tent as night collected itself outside, coiling around the campsite like a malevolent dragon. But I didn’t feel safe. I didn’t feel settled. Panic filled my lungs so densely that there was no room left for air.

I could not sit still. Leaping to my feet, I stumbled through the flap, tripped over a discarded shoe and came to my knees on the hard ground outside the tent. He had said he would stay nearby; he had said he would watch over me. He had not responded to my tears that first night, but maybe he had been hunting at that particular moment. Maybe he only returned to the campsite once deep night had fallen.