Their eyes meet from across the room. Amber is saying something, but she doesn’t hear it. She’s already left her seat and is moving across the room with her glass in hand. Amber looks angry until she shakes the glass and points back with two fingers. Now Amber is happy, pacified by her favorite treat.
She stops at the bar to order three drinks. She asks the business-type with the rat-tail if he’d be so kind as to bring her friend her drink. She watches long enough to ensure he doesn’t slip anything into it, and leans across the counter to ask the bartender to keep an eye on them. She takes the two remaining glasses.
He accepts one without a word and they drink silently. They’ve never met before. No hint of awkwardness poisons the moment. It is exactly as it should be. She sips at her drink. He smiles. Reaches across the table. Runs a finger along the inside of her wrist. She smiles.
He leaves.
They’re in the park together. The moon is full, the sky full of stars. The ground is slightly wet, but it hasn’t rained. He talks to her of dew on the grasses of his homeland. She curls into him, breathes deep. He smells of pine ashes. He smells of coppery blood. He smells of death. It lingers in her nostrils, deep in her lungs.
She clings on to every word he says, hoping to weigh them down and keep them with her longer but they float away like bubbles on a summer breeze. She’s sad to see them go, but she understands. She’s seen this before, somewhere in the past, like a memory of a memory.
Lately she’s been fatalistic in her thinking. She breathes of him again. He smells of pine ashes. Of past battles. Of victory.
There, she tells herself, that’s better.
He’s talking to her about the trees, now, not of his home but of here. She nods her head, sleepy, happy, pulls him closer to her, trying to sink inside of his skin. She needed him, more than ever.
Where does he go when he is not with her?
He always returns. She has no fear of losing him, understands that this isn’t even a possibility.
But where is it that he wanders to?
She sits alone inside their room. It is comfortable, though almost barren. There is furniture for sitting and laying, but little else. No food in the fridge, but she isn’t hungry. He always brings home something to eat, that has never been a doubt.
He is gone longer and longer, now that the days are warming again. She stands, wanders the room, traces a finger over the walls as if by knowing their dimensions, feeling them intimately, she might better understand him. She counts her steps, estimates the rough square footage. It’s all wrong. Not the numbers, but the entire premise. Somehow it is blasphemy, though she can’t articulate the reasons.
Her cell vibrates. Amber is calling again, upset that she hasn’t been returning her messages. Her finger hovers over decline.
She answers.
“Where have you been?” Amber is crying.
She replies in whispers.
“Speak up,” the crying intensifies, “A…, you have to speak up. Where are you?”
She hangs up.
A few hours later, he returns.
She bites his neck when he penetrates her. He scratches her back.
Both draw blood.
But they’re only the beginning.
The nights are getting longer, he tells her. She knows this, of course, but senses that he means something else. There is something between the lines that she isn’t getting. She doesn’t know how to ask what she wants. She doesn’t think he would know how to answer.
Soon, he tells her, I’ll take you with me.
He kisses the cuts on her back before applying a salve he made for her.
She wants to tend to his neck, but he won’t let her. Tells her he’s had worse.
“Where do you go?”
He doesn’t answer.
She nuzzles into him. He wraps her in his warmth.
The wake in the night.
He makes another salve in the morning, applies it with gentle kisses.
They’re in the woods. The moon hangs crescent in the night sky. The air is warm on her naked skin. Twigs and branches snap beneath their feet.
He’s on all fours. He’s faster then she could ever hope to be. He races around the trees ahead, thick strong trees as old as mother nature herself. How has she never seen them before? How has she walked these woods and never understood their beauty, their wisdom, their age.
She can’t keep up with him. He races back, pulls her down. She’s faster now, on all fours. The times she’s crawled across the floor in their apartment, it has been slow and lumberous. But now she felt like she could race down any prey. They yell at the moon, shouting words without meaning.
They mate on the branches. She stays on all fours like a bitch in heat. She cries and yips, he groans on top of her. The moment is perfect.
Then he takes her arms in his and holds her back to thrust deeper. His moaning gets louder. Hers stops.
He collapses as he empties. Falls out of her panting.
She’s disgusted.
“What’s wrong?”
She understands now what she mistook before.
All the smells and the measurements. They were never his. How could she ever know him? Ever understand him? Just a projection.
“What’s wrong, A….?”
She closes her eyes, watches the moon grow full in the darkness behind her lids. He’s scrambling to his feet. “Are you seeing this, A…?”
He’s too busy watching the sky to see her skin splitting, falling to the ground at her feet. She bites at the remaining flesh until her mouth is raw and bloody and all she can smell is blood and death and all she can hear are screams and the wisdom of the trees.
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