“Come on,” she said, and there was a note of sad urgency in her voice. “I need you. In more ways than you can ever imagine.”
“We can’t,” he groaned. He stopped clawing at the door, and stood still in her arms, leaning his sweaty forehead on the (annoyingly closed) door.
“We have to. I have to.”
“I can’t do it to you.”
“I think,” she whispered, reaching around and cupping his jeans where the zipper came together, “you can.”
“You have no idea what you’re getting into.”
“That’s okay,” she said, turning him around. He kissed her, sucked on her full lower lip, even nipped her lightly. She just wriggled closer. “Neither do you.”
Nine
“God, God . . .”
“That’s funny, that’s just what I was saying,” she teased. They were resting on the living room floor, clothes strewn everywhere, and she had slid a chubby thigh over his legs and was stroking his ribs. “Repeatedly. Loudly.”
It had been, to put it mildly, a hectic half hour. Kissing and sucking and stroking and sliding . . . and then they had really gotten down to business. She had been everything he imagined: athletic and indefatigable, with the lips of a devil and the hands of an angel. He wanted to go again. He
“What if you’re pregnant?” he asked anxiously.
“Boy, you are
“Yes, but that was a lie.”
She pressed her lips together. “And the pitiful remnants of the afterglow . . . gone. Yes, okay, it was a lie. I admit, I wanted to get you into bed. Forgot about that damn nose of yours for two seconds. But I still don’t understand what the big deal is. I wouldn’t tie you down—what year do you think this is? What town, for that matter?”
“But the baby—”
“Ah, the baby.” She said it with such admiration and longing, he was a little afraid of her.
“What if it’s—like me?”
She smiled. “What if it is?”
He got up, starting putting his clothes on. “You’re not getting this at all.”
“Obviously. So explain it to me.”
“I could never make you understand. Now get out.” He paused. “Please.”
“Okay, okay.” She slipped into her blouse, found her underpants wadded up in a corner, stepped into them. “Your postcoital grumpiness has been duly noted.”
“So has your total indifference toward the consequences of intimate relations.”
“What are you, a woman now? And nobody held a gun to your head, I might add.
“I am, though,” he said gloomily, holding the door open for her. She hopped out, half-dressed and trying to slip into her sneakers.
“Don’t call me!” she yelled as he shut the door.
“Don’t worry,” he muttered.
It was only after she left that he remembered she was supposed to take him around to other supernatural creatures, try to track down his herd.
His lifelong dream, his goal, and it had all flown out of his head right about the time he ripped off her bra. Fucking great. Reason #238 to stay the hell away.
Ten
The child—not a child anymore, a woman in her thirties—had dark hair, long strong legs, and Charlene’s owlish eyes. “Anything?” she was asking him, keeping well away from him, as was her habit. “You can’t tell me anything?”
“I’m sorry.” His voice surprised him; it was old, cracked. “I came here and met your mother and that was the end of it.”
“But what about our people?”
He shrugged, then coughed an old man’s cough. Though they were sitting on the porch of his beloved red house, the paint had long faded; now it was his beloved pink house. Many of the windows were broken, but he was too indifferent to fix them—he didn’t feel much in the way of cold, anyway.
Charlene, of course, was years dead. It was just him and the whelp, a woman who avoided him—lived in Reno, of all places—unless she needed something.
“What about my grandparents?”
“Dead.” The black mare was standing patiently on the porch next to his rocking chair and he reached out a wrinkled hand and stroked her velvety nose. “They’re all dead.”
“But these—these
“I know.”
“And I’m stronger than everybody. And faster. Everyone else seems like a clumsy—I don’t know—it’s like they’re monkeys or something. I don’t really feel like I belong with them.”
“I know.”
“I can’t marry one of
He yawned. “Then don’t.”
The mare nickered into his palm and he saw the For Sale sign was up again in his yard, facing the house instead of the road, and this time it read DEATH LIVES HERE.
“Dad, you have to help me.”
“I can’t.”
“Dad.”
“Sorry.” The sign changed while he watched: HA. HA. HA.
“But who am I?” the woman asked as she faded from sight, like a ghost.
“I don’t know,” he told her fading figure. “I never knew myself, either.”
The mare nickered again, almost like laughing. The sign now read: TOO BAD, SO SAD, LIE DOWN AND BE BAD.
“Gosh,” Rae’s voice said from behind him. “Don’t you think you should wake up now? This is a doozy of a nightmare. I mean, blech.”
He blinked and coughed his dry old man cough again. His hands were wrinkled claws. He looked at the horse, standing so patiently by his chair.
“Shoo!” Rae said. “Get lost! Go scare somebody else, you creepy nag!”
Startled, the horse clopped down the steps and galloped off.
And he woke up in the middle of a sweaty bed. His hands were normal. He was still young. It had all been a—
“Fucking night mares, they’re always causing trouble,” Rae said from nowhere, and was that a note of