Grounded

by Narrelle M. Harris

  ‘She’s an idiot,’ crackled out from between her teeth like sleeting ice.

  ‘She’s not so bad. A good cop. Not the softest breeze in the treetops, obviously, but it’s fine. I’m not likely to be getting many offers these days.’

  The storm broke out, the cold now bursting hot out of her. ‘Now you’re being an idiot. The damage to your wing isn’t important. People don’t need to treat you like they’re being nice to you by asking you out. If anything, they’re the ones who should feel lucky.

  Benedick’s expression had frozen into a mask. ‘My mangled wing’s not important?’

  ‘That’s not what I mean!’ she protested, half mortified, half furious. ‘It’s not significant in the way you think. I don’t have wings at all but I’m still a person. Your wings are not who you are. Who you are is smart, kind, thoughtful, courageous, funny. You’re excellent company. Your life isn’t what it was, but it’s still your life, you’re still a person and you’re still worth a damned sight more than a sun-blighted pity date.’

  Clementine caught her breath to realise Benedick was looking at her with peculiar intensity. She felt stricken and confused. What the hell have I done? ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say what happened to you wasn’t important.’

  ‘You didn’t say that. You said that I was more important, as a whole person, than the one big awful thing that happened to me.’

  ‘You are. But I shouldn’t have …’

  ‘You forgot to mention my beautiful eyes,’ he said quietly. ‘And my legs. You like my legs.’

  Clementine didn’t know what to say.

  ‘You have lovely eyes,’ said Benedick.

  ‘Oh,’ she breathed.

  ‘And you’re very fetching covered in red chalk.’

  ‘Benedick. I …’

  ‘You seem scared,’ he said, the intensity of his gaze deepening.

  Clementine wondered what Benedick had been like as a policeman. Was this how he used to look at people he’d taken in for questioning? As though he already knew what was going on in their heads, and read the answers in their eyes and the pulse in their throats and the twitches of their fingers before any words were ever spoken.

  She found a voice for defiance. ‘I’m not scared of anything.’

  ‘You’re scared of being more than friends with me.’

  ‘I’m not,’ she said, although she was. ‘I just know how it goes.’

  ‘No you don’t.’

  That made her bristle. ‘How dare—’

  ‘You know how it’s gone,’ he clarified. ‘You know what other people have been like. You don’t know me.’

  He hadn’t moved—he still sat opposite her, with fingers on the handle of a barely drunk cup of coffee, his dark eyes fixed on hers: and yet it felt like he had moved closer to her. She felt pinned down by his gaze. She felt like confessing.

  ‘Nobody stays,’ she said. ‘I’m hard work to be with, or so I’m routinely informed.’

  ‘I find you very easy to be with,’ Benedick countered, and he smiled. ‘Brilliant, forthright, fearless. Not to dismiss your previous experiences but seriously, you’re amazing, and anyone who doesn’t think so has fluff for brains.’

  Clementine huffed a laugh. ‘You say that now. But then we’ll start something, and I’ll make some outspoken fuss, end up on the news and make life uncomfortable.’

  ‘You’ve already made an outspoken fuss and we ended up on the news. You know I think that’s admirable, right? Listening to you reminded me why I went into policing. To bring justice to those who’ve been denied it.’

  Clementine was not convinced. ‘But then there’ll be the first time you hold me, and I won’t feel right to you. No wings.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I guess it’ll be new, yeah. But new isn’t bad. I can tell you right now that I want to kiss you. I’ve wanted to kiss you since I saw you with candy moths in your hair. Sometimes I think you look at me like you want to kiss me too.’

  ‘I …’

  He leaned towards her, but not too close. An offer, but not a trap. ‘Do you want to kiss me?’

  Constantly. ‘The thought has crossed my mind. But …’

  He rose and held out his hand to her.

  Clementine wasn’t at all sure this was a good idea. But perhaps it was best to get it over with. Face it head-on, get it done with, and then they could get on with just being friends.

  The very thought of that ‘just’ gave her a pang, and she knew even as she took his hand and rose to look into his lovely eyes that she was giving herself an excuse. Wiser to say no. Wiser to put up a wall. Wiser not to, as it was so aptly expressed, fall for him.

  He has such beautiful eyes. I want him to hold me. I want him.

  The edges of his eyes crinkled with a smile as he met her luminous gaze.

  ‘Hey,’ Benedick said softly, but instead of continuing with reassuring words, he bent his head to press his lips to hers.

  His mouth was firm; his lips soft; his breath sweet. He smelled of cinnamon and warmth, of the memory of pine needles.

  Clementine’s lips parted and she tilted her head so that she could capture more of his mouth with hers. He tasted of coffee and a hint of mint.

  ‘This isn’t so bad, is it?’ he murmured against her lips.

  ‘Shhh.’ She leaned closer in and claimed his mouth with hers again. Lips parted, tips of tongues brushing, then she brushed her lips over his jaw and cheek.

  His warm, strong hands rested on her waist as she slid her own up the firm muscles of his chest and shoulders. Around the base of his neck, her fingers brushing against the fine, soft hair at his nape.

  Benedick’s hands pressed against her lower back. Clementine wound her arms around his neck to hold him closer. Her hum of pleasure became a vocal sigh at the sensation of one kiss ending only for another to begin immediately, against the side of her mouth, against her cheek, against her jaw. He dotted little kisses in a trail over her face until he found her mouth again.

  His hands smoothed up the muscles of her back—the useless muscles that, with no wings to support, had to be exercised daily so their uselessness didn’t spread atrophy. His hands curved over the old surgery scars.

  They curled around her back that always felt exposed and cold and, without flinching or probing curiously or doing anything but settling warm against her body, Benedick held her close.

  Clementine held close to him too, responding to his nudging, soft, sensuous kisses by dragging his lower lip softly between her teeth; by flicking the tip of her tongue against that lip, against the tip of his tongue. By drinking in the taste and scent of him.

  Clementine’s hands caressed the strong muscles of his back, following their path up to the scapula and coracoid bones, moving to cup the connecting humerus in her palms, and circle her thumbs against the soft, downy axillar hair and feathers underneath. Benedick gave a soft gasp and his wings shivered and spread at the sensation.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ he murmured against her lips, so she stroked her fingertips against that sensitive spot, and he held her closer to his body. His own hands instinctively pressed to her bare primary shoulder blade, seeking the same erogenous zone on her body, though hers did not possess it. He rubbed his fingers along the line of muscle instead, and she melted against him with a muted sigh.

  ‘You feel good,’ Benedick whispered, ‘You’re beautiful.’ His fingertips played over the ridge of muscle.

  Clementine, dazed with having what she’d longed for, cuddled against his chest and let her hands drift around his waist to hold him, then up his body to his jaw. Holding his face in her hands, she pressed her lips to his, and to his chin and cheek, then opened her eyes … only for a breathy laugh to escape at the sight of the colour smeared haphazardly over his skin.

  ‘You have chalk dust all over you. Must be all over your nice suit.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Benedick, bumping his nose against her and smudging colour over her too. ‘I like it.’

 
‘You look like a crime scene in terracotta,’ she laughed. ‘I should paint you.’

  ‘You already have,’ he said ruefully, glancing down at his chalk smeared clothes. No matching regret was in his eyes, however. He looked positively delighted with the situation.

  Clementine wasn’t as convinced. Her brain was sending a soft but insistent warning to her. Too fast, too soon. You know how this always ends.

  It doesn’t have to end like that with Benedick, she argued with herself.

  Maybe not, her fears replied, but don’t go running towards the cliff full tilt. You’ll fall and crash. Take it slow. Take it easy.

  Clementine placed a hand on his chest and stepped back, though her fingers flexed against the man underneath them. Then she looked down at herself, her dowdy robe covered in chalk, her grubby clothes underneath that.

  ‘Blessed sun, look at me!’

  ‘Happy to,’ Benedick said, quirking an eyebrow as cheerful punctuation to the assertion.

  ‘I’m cleaning up now,’ she said sternly. ‘And so are you, and we’ll meet at Takahē for a proper coffee. I’ll draw your handsome face while you tell me about what you might study, hmm?’

  Benedick caught her hand up in his and kissed her fingers. ‘All right. See you soon.’ A kiss to her wrist this time, and a radiant smile that glowed in his eyes, and then he left.

  Clementine’s heart beat hard in her chest, like a frantic bird in a cage. Or perhaps like Shelley’s skylark, about to wing into the blue deep and sing.

  The last lines of the poem made shapes in her brain, like an exultation of skylarks wheeling across the sky.

  Teach me half the gladness

  That thy brain must know,

  Such harmonious madness

  From my lips would flow

  The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

  Sun-blighted romantic poets, Clementine huffed as she stripped her stained clothes and made for the shower. Storm-toss the lot of you.

  Chapter Ten

  Benedick tapped the sugar packet end-over-end on the table as he and Peri waited at the campus café. When that became monotonous after a very few seconds, he varied the rhythm of it. Tap-tap, flip, tap, flip, tap, tap-tap, flip …

  ‘Chill, Ben.’

  ‘I’m chill,’ said Ben. Tap-tap, flip, tap, flip, tap, tap-tap, flip.

  ‘Oh yeah. So chill. Like a crow in a blizzard.’

  Benedick stopped tapping the sugar packet and glared at his younger brother. His foot began tapping staccato on the ground.

  ‘You really like this woman, don’t you?’ Peri asked, hardly teasing at all.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘So what is it scares you most about this? Wanting me to like her, or wanting her to like me?’

  ‘I bitterly regret the Psych units you took during your first degree.’

  Peri patted his arm kindly. Benedick groaned and dropped his forehead to his hands clenched on the table.

  ‘I’m the big brother,’ he mumbled into his fists. ‘I’m supposed to give you advice about your love life, not the other way around.’

  ‘Advise away,’ said Peri cheerfully. ‘Heavens know I need the help. Though the library wasn’t a bad hint. I met an engineering post-graduate over a copy of I, Robot. We’re now planning how to build our own AI. I’m not sure that counts as a date, though.’

  Benedick lifted his head again, laughing.

  ‘I can’t tell when you’re kidding anymore, Peri.’

  Peri’s rueful moue was either comical or tragic. ‘Me either.’

  ‘Clementine and I haven’t really dated yet either, I guess. Coffee a few times. We went to the exhibition opening as friends.’

  ‘And today I’m the third chick in the nest, so that’s this date blown as well. Bento, how is a little brother ever to learn how this dating business works when you keep giving me such feather-plucked examples to go by? Have you even kissed the girl?’

  Benedick grinned. Then he flushed, the tips of his ears going pink as the tip of the trailing edge of his wings flexed.

  ‘Oh-ho, that looks promising.’

  Benedick shrugged and made his wings settle. ‘She’s a grown woman, not a girl, and … yes. Promising. Now shut up about it, here she comes.’

  Benedick beamed at Clementine as she crossed the forecourt towards Café Wagulan, named in the Indigenous Ngunnawal language for the local crows. Peri nudged Benedick’s ankle and Benedick kicked back while maintaining his grin.

  Peri giggled like a naughty boy instead of the adult he was meant to be, but he was behaving by the time Clementine reached the table.

  Benedick kissed her cheek hello and introduced her.

  ‘Clementine, this is my brother Peri. He’s doing his Masters in nanotechnology here at Griffin. Peri, this is Clementine Torres, the artist.’

  Peri held out his hand for her to shake. ‘Ms Torres, it’s a pleasure to formally meet you. I think we met once when I was getting Ben’s place set up.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘You were asking some of the residents about local amenities …’

  ‘And you recommended Takahē, which I have to say, has the best wattleseed latte.’

  ‘Some people might consider those terms “best” and “wattleseed latte” mutually exclusive,’ said Benedick with a roll of his eyes, while Clementine tried to tastefully grimace at the notion.

  ‘Come on, you should try it!’ Peri urged.

  ‘Some people might think I’ve suffered enough for one lifetime,’ grumbled Benedick.

  ‘I do enough suffering for my art,’ Clementine added.

  ‘I am surrounded by culinary cretins,’ laughed Peri.

  Benedick basked in how relaxed Clementine was with Peri, and vice versa. The answer to Peri’s question had been ‘both’. He wanted Clementine and Peri to like each other. So far, he thought, so good.

  ‘So. The campus. Would you like coffee first, or to take a look around?’

  ‘I’ve been at the easel all morning,’ Clementine said. ‘A walk would be perfect. Let’s check out the faculty buildings, see how they’re set up.’

  Benedick offered her his elbow, which she took with an amused sparkle in her eye. She bumped her arm against his though, which he took as affectionate acceptance of his chivalry.

  Benedick very determinedly ignored the ebullient glee that radiated off Peri as he walked behind them towards the School of Medicine and Physiotherapy.

  ***

  Clementine spent an excellent half day with Benedick and his charmingly ridiculous brother Peregrine at Griffin University. She was especially pleased to not spend any time either reading about or discussing the incidents at the gallery.

  She hadn’t been to Griffin University for several years, but it had maintained its well-deserved reputation for inclusiveness. It wasn’t perfect—some of the labs for Aerial Medicine were hard to access and one of the three campus refectories was poorly laid out for anyone who had difficulty folding their wings away, which they’d discovered when Benedick’s drooping primaries brushed a stack of cups from the water station to the floor. Luckily the plastic cups bounced. Benedick had started to apologise, then he and Peri had watched while Clementine had patiently but firmly explained that the university’s access policy meant that the tables should be a further ten centimetres apart.

  ‘If wings can’t get through the space, how can a wheelchair get through?’ she’d said to the Dean afterwards, when they’d bumped into her in the quadrangle. The Dean had promised to get onto it.

  The Dean had recognised Benedick too, and invited all three of them to afternoon tea in her office, eager to discuss how Griffin might suit the heroic Captain Sasaki’s needs.

  While Benedick and Peri discussed study options and what of Benedick’s previous studies and experience might count as study credits, Clementine took a call from Octavia Sasaki.

  ‘Clementine, hi! I wanted to let you know I’ve prepared a contact sheet of my photographs at the opening. I thou
ght you might like to see them some time to pick any you’d like.’

  ‘That would be fantastic. You, ah … don’t have any of me and Benedick together, do you?’

  Octavia’s moment of silence before she spoke was eloquent, and Clementine was grateful that Benedick’s cousin didn’t fill it with speculation.

  ‘I do have some nice ones of you both. And you with Dell, too. Some good crowd shots as well. I’m still going through those. That’s the blessing and curse of digital cameras. You can take two hundred pictures before you know it.’

  ‘Two hundred?’

  ‘I took a hundred and eighty-four photos to be exact,’ Octavia confessed sheepishly, ‘I got carried away. You won’t have to look at all of them. I’m weeding the duplicates and dodgy ones out this week.’

  ‘I can’t imagine there are many of those. You have a great eye. I’ve been checking out your work online.’

  ‘You have?’ Octavia almost squeaked, then cleared her throat and said, dead serious, ‘Oh. That’s great. I have a few pieces in small galleries around town.’

  The conversation between the Dean and the Sasaki brothers appeared to be winding up.

  ‘I’d best be off, Octavia.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah, of course. Sorry. You must be busy.’

  ‘I’m just at Griffin Uni with Benedick, having a look around at the facilities.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, he said he was thinking he might go back to study.’

  ‘But I’ll be in touch about a time to look at those contacts. Perhaps we can look at them over lunch in a day or so.’

  ‘That’d be great. Thanks!’

  ‘No, thank you,’ Clementine insisted. They rang off with promises to text later.

  Clementine really was impressed with the examples of Octavia’s work she’d looked up on EchoLocater. She had to get to know Octavia Sasaki better first, but Clementine was already inclined to the possibility of a joint exhibition. Their work had some thematic similarities, even when their subject matter was different. Octavia’s portraits highlighted small particulars in the everyday, though on faces rather than in ground-level nature. It would be a marvellous way to share a little wingspan and give Octavia’s work some lift, too.