by V M Black
Chay’s hands tightened on her shoulders for a moment before he let her go. “I’ll do it now.” He began to tap on his smart watch screen, and after a moment, he gave a curt nod. “Your credentials will allow you to open everything. Don’t make me regret it.”
The elf’s expression didn’t change, but he nodded to Chay. “Do you think you could?”
With that, he turned and left the room.
A thousand questions clamored in Tara’s mind. Chay had told her so much when she’d been in panther form, hours and hours of the most intimate confessions that she had been far beyond understanding at the time. But now she knew every word that he’d said to her during that long, dark time. His hopes. His fears. His dreams. His regrets.
Would he hate her when he found out that she knew all those things? Surely, many of them were never meant for human ears. She was certain he’d only said them because he had believed, in his heart of hearts, that she was never coming back.
One memory swam to the fore again—Chay standing in front of the door with shorn hair, clutching a gun with his face a mask that made him look a thousand years old.
“They wanted you to kill me, didn’t they?” Tara asked softly, pulling away and folding her legs up in front of her body to face him squarely.
Chay’s eyes were shadowed in his hollow face. Her heart felt so full with looking at him that she thought it would burst. She knew all his demons and his sorrows. And now she felt them as if they were hers.
He said, “The panther was dying. It would have died unless it was allowed to run free and kill people.”
“Which you knew I’d never want, even if you were okay with it,” Tara said dryly.
Her matter-of-factness managed to drag a small smile from him. “And they thought you were gone, too, or at least trapped, which would probably be worse.”
“I was,” she said, remembering the time of not-remembering. “I was a little of both, I think. I could…almost feel. But not think. Not really. They would have been right, you know. If you hadn’t gotten Dr. Torrhanin to help, I mean. What was that all about, anyway? What he said—a bargain?”
“I offered him full access to my servers in return for the…suppressor,” he said, using the word for it that the elf had used.
Full access. When she’d arrived, Tara wouldn’t have known what that meant, but she’d now been told in great detail how Chay had made Black Mesa his own—both the parts she had seen and the hidden computer infrastructure that ran everything and gave him the power to break into almost any system in the world.
Tara didn’t have to understand the ins and outs of his system to know, in vague terms, what kind of power that meant. And from his confessions, she knew that he distrusted the elves and why.
“Are you sure that was the smart thing to do?” she asked.
His laugh sounded dry and exhausted. “No. He says that he needs it to fight against some bad elves. Either he’s lying to me, and I just destroyed civilization, or he’s telling the truth, and I’ve just saved it.”
“That’s not why you gave him what he wanted, though,” Tara said boldly. “I mean, it wasn’t because you think he’s going to save us. Or that you think there’s something to be saved from.”
His dark eyes glittered. “You’re right. It wasn’t why I gave him the access.”
She took a shaky breath. “I hope I don’t end up wishing that you’d shot me, after all. I don’t want to go down in the history books as the next Helen of Troy or anything.”
A shadow of a smile tickled his lips. “So do I.”
Tara wrinkled her nose, looking around the room. “This place stinks. You know that? Let’s get out of here.”
“Where do you want to go?” he asked.
She realized that he was asking because, for the first time since she’d shifted, she could truly go anywhere. Reflexively, she lifted her hand to brush the device behind her ear for reassurance. “This thing won’t need new batteries, will it? Stuff I can’t pick up at Target?”
He stood and reached a hand down, and she took it. It was more than a chivalrous gesture. She literally needed his help to stand, and her legs wobbled under her as if she’d forgotten how to use them. She gripped his arms for a moment, finding her balance.
“Elven technology doesn’t work that way,” he said, helping her walk from the bedroom into the living area of his quarters. “I asked Torrhanin about it once, and he said something about transdimensional power links. I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, and I don’t know if he meant it or he was just BSing me to make me go away. But the few elven objects I’ve worked with never seemed to need plugging in or recharging.”
“Yep. Magic,” she joked, remembering how the elven gurney she’d once been on had floated.
“That’s where their reputation for magic came from, at any rate.”
So the panther would never come back now, not as long as she kept wearing the device. And that meant that there was no reason for her to be kept locked up anymore. She could leave these rooms and the spook shop. She could walk around Black Mesa.
She could go back home.
“I really am free now, aren’t I?” she asked, shrugging out of Chay’s grasp as her step grew steadier. The front room didn’t show signs of being inhabited by a panther, but it was a disaster of a different type. A large trashcan stood to one side, so full of cans that it was overflowing. The big leather sofa had been dragged from its position in front of the TV to face the bedroom door, and blankets and pillows showed that he’d been using it as a bed. Dirty clothes littered the floor, and the projects on the various tables were even more scrambled than before.
Tara’s clothing was sitting in a pile in the corner, and she crossed over to it and began to dig through for a complete outfit. She turned around when she’d gathered a change of clothes, realizing that Chay hadn’t answered her.
He was standing right behind her, his eyes devouring her body with an expression of such intensity that she felt a flush rising on her skin. However foreign her body still seemed to her, Chay was looking at it as if it was the most desirable thing in the world.
As if he’d never expected to see it again.
Which, she knew, was precisely what he’d thought. He’d never admit as much to her. Not in the hundreds of hours of words that he’d poured into the panther’s ears. But it had been an undercurrent to everything—one that the panther had been oblivious to, like everything else, but one that she now understood too well.
She cleared her throat. “I mean, I can go anywhere. Because I’m not a danger to anyone anymore,” she said to fill up the silence that was suddenly too deep between them.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “You can go anywhere.”
Tara bit her lip. This was like the story of Beauty and the Beast, except that she was both the captive and the beast. But like the beast’s captive in the old fairytale, her prison that had begun as a literal place had turned into something quite different.
“I’m glad I’m free, but I don’t want to leave, Chay.” She shook her head. “I mean, I want to get out of this suite because it seriously reeks. And I want to go outside and feel the wind and see the sky. But I don’t want to leave…you.”
Chay was frozen, so motionless that he hardly seemed to be made of living flesh. All the things he’d told her over the time that she was gone flooded into her mind, and she feared again that he might not be able to stand her now, knowing everything he’d said.
But he didn’t say anything at all. He just stood there, staring at her.
After a moment, Tara cleared her throat nervously. “I’m sorry. You’ve already done so much for me. Too much for me. If you don’t want me here—”
Chay moved so fast that Tara didn’t even have a chance to finish her sentence, charging across the space between them, his body meeting hers with a force that took her breath away. Instantly, his mouth was on hers, his hands on her body, and she realized that she’d been building out of the broken p
ieces of her life walls from the instant that she’d woken up, trying to put herself back together in some semblance of what she’d been before. Trying to be strong and sane and practical—all the things she’d always prided herself in.
All that came tumbling down under his frenzied touch, against his hard body, and she kissed him back with the insanity that came of how close she’d been to never coming back.
Their embrace was frantic, desperate. All she wanted was the reality of his body against hers, in hers—not to keep her human but because she was human and she’d nearly lost it all. His mouth was hot, his tongue insistent, demanding. He tasted like life and like himself, and in that moment, she couldn’t imagine anything she could want more.
Tara’s clothes dropped to the floor unnoticed, her hands pulling at Chay’s shirt. He broke away long enough to shrug out of it, and as he did, Tara touched his shoulder that the panther had mauled. The skin was smooth now, unbroken, with no sign of what she’d done to him.
“I hurt you,” she said, remembering the moment with the directness of the beast. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s nothing,” he said.
She shook her head. She knew that was a lie—the first lie he’d ever told her. It was a lie that she had to allow him, though, because of what he was trying to give her with it.
He took her face in both his hands, looking intently into her eyes as his fingers on one hand traced the device that the elf had given her.
“No,” he said, correcting himself. “It wasn’t nothing. But if it had to be a step between where you were then and where you are now, it was worth it.”
He kissed her again, with all the urgency of his days of pent-up turmoil channeled into pure need. Would he still want her so much if he knew how much of his most private thoughts she now knew? She didn’t know, but she wanted this to last as long as it possibly could, because she didn’t think she could stand it if he didn’t want her anymore.
Chay drove her back toward the couch even as her frantic hands peeled his pants from his body. The backs of her legs came up against the edge of the couch, and she toppled onto it at an angle, pulling Chay down on top of her.
His mouth and hands roved across her body as if he wanted to commit to memory every inch of it. He kissed her lips, her neck, her breasts, lavishing them with attention until she arched her body against his, panting. He kissed the curve of her belly and her inner thighs. She relished every touch, every caress—just the sheer physicality of it after having not had anything physical for so long was a pleasure almost past bearing.
Tara explored his body, too, all the contours and crevices that she’d thought she’d never touch again, taste again. The softness of the fine skin over his cheekbones grew rougher with the slightest stubble of his lower cheeks and jaw, the smoothness of his shoulders and chest giving way to a trail of springy curls below his navel leading down to the velvety hardness of his cock. She closed her hand around it, stroking it to the rhythm of his mouth on her body.
His fingers found her clit, moving with the rocking of her hips and hands. She took control of the speed, pushing herself mercilessly toward the edge. She called his name as she came, and the word contained a universe of feeling.
He pulled his cock free from her grasp and thrust inside her as she peaked, sending her higher still as he stroked against her deepest place, his fingers still working her clit. The orgasm rippled through her body, setting every nerve on edge so that each buzzed with preternatural sensitivity.
She stayed rooted in her body and in his, glorying in the carnality of it, of the wadded blankets pressed into her back, the sweat of his skin and the smell of his maleness and the weight of his body. She clung to every detail that she could force into her awareness from what her senses were sending her, and it mixed and tangled in the force of her climax until it became a part of it, too.
Tara clung to the peak for as long as she could, coming down slowly as she fought against its loss. She watched Chay above her, his face set in a fierce expression as they rocked together. He put his head down, nuzzling into her neck as his arms tightened around her, and Tara closed her eyes as she felt him come, welcoming it.
Welcoming him. Wishing that she could give him more for everything he’d done for her but knowing it was a debt that she’d never be able to repay.
He stilled and rolled slightly onto his side to the very edge of the wide couch, unmoving as the minutes ticked by. Tara was grateful for all of it—for Chay and for him holding her. She was even grateful for the numbness slowly spreading through the arm that was trapped under his body and the too-bright glare of the lights overhead.
And so it was several minutes before she realized she was crying, when a shuddering sob seemed to come out of nowhere, catching at her throat.
“I’m sorry,” she managed, the words tumbling over the sobs that wracked her body as Chay shifted his hold on her, gathering her against his chest and making comforting, shushing noises as if she were a small child. “I’m so sorry. It’s so stupid, because I wasn’t scared…then. I ran away. I let the panther win. Oh, God, Chay, I wasn’t even scared because there wasn’t enough of me to be scared. It was just…nothing. Or almost nothing, as close to nothing as you can be and still be. I just was. Something like that can’t be scared. There’s not enough left.…”
She broke off, realizing that she was babbling.
“It’s okay,” Chay was saying. “I told you that it would be okay, didn’t I? And I was right.”
She gave a shuddering, hiccoughing sound. “You gave away everything to Torrhanin. We’ll see whether it will be okay or not in a while.” She swallowed hard. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “It’s stupid for me to cry now, when it’s all over. But I’m so scared. I’m scared because I wasn’t scared, and that makes even less sense.”
He gave her a slight squeeze. “It makes all the sense in the world.”
She closed her eyes and turned her cheek into his chest, breathing him. The hyper-acute senses that the panther had brought stayed with her—whatever changes it had made in her were permanent, though the panther itself was suppressed.
She accepted that because she had to, just like she had to accept the terrible things she’d done to Dr. Butros and Sylvie and that poor boy.…
The tears that trickled down her cheeks gradually slowed, and later still, her hiccoughing stopped.
Finally, she drew a shaky breath. “I guess I can take this to mean that you want me to stay, too?” For now. Until he knew all that she knew, from how his grandmother used to make fried corn fritters for Sunday breakfasts to how he’d begged the universe to let him die in Laurence Olsen’s place.
“I’ll never let you go.”
His reply was so simple, so bold that it stole the breath from her lungs. She looked up into his face to see his shadowed eyes looking down at her, his cheekbones standing out almost painfully beneath his skin.
“I mean it, Tara,” he continued. “I promised you that while you were…gone.”
“I didn’t think—” She cut herself off. She’d have to let him know that she’d understood everything. But not now. Every hour that passed only made the fact that she was hiding her knowledge worse. But she couldn’t break what they had now, not when she felt so fragile still, not when it was the one thing in the world that she most wanted to hang on to. “You meant more than just saving me from the panther, then?”
He dipped his head to her hair. “So much more.”
She closed her eyes against the tears that pricked them again, and for a long moment, she just let herself revel in that thought. Finally, reluctantly, she pulled away.
“It still reeks in here,” she said. “And I’m really hungry.” She put a hand to her stomach, half-marveling in the fact that she could feel hunger again. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since I haven’t eaten in…a really long time,” she finished lamely.
Chay nodded and stood, freeing her from the couch. “We’d better get dressed, then.”
The catastrophe of his hair wasn’t the only silent witness to what he’d undergone. The lights of the front room were unforgiving, showing exactly how much weight Chay had lost. His shoulders were still the same broad shape, but his body was now gaunt, the perfectly sculpted muscles now showing up starkly, stringy and unhealthy under his skin. That wasn’t the work of days. It was the result of weeks of suffering—or longer than that. She hardly dared to wonder how long she’d been gone. The unrelenting lights of his bedroom and the panther’s poor sense of time made it impossible to tell.
“What did I do to you?” Tara wondered aloud.
“Bae girl, don’t,” he said, his dark eyes so intense that she caught her breath. “It’s worth it. You’re safe now. It was worth everything.”
His voice broke on the last word, and as if to cover it, he gave her a lopsided smile, bent to run the pad of his thumb down her cheek, and turned away.
She took a long, shuddering breath and unfolded from the couch, retrieving her dropped clothes and wriggling into the bra and panties. The fabric felt strange against her skin after so long. She froze suddenly, struck by a thought.
“I’m safe now, so that means that I can tell my parents.…” She trailed off. She didn’t know what she’d tell her parents. That she was okay? That wasn’t exactly true. How long had she been missing? What kind of excuse would she have for them, showing up uninjured after being gone?
“I’ll tell them I’m okay,” she said firmly, pulling her shirt over her head. “That there was a mix-up, maybe? I was detained because…” She laughed hollowly. “Because I had a mental breakdown. Went crazy. Couldn’t tell them who I was. They mixed me up with some other girl and thought I was dead. And I’ve just been allowed to talk to them. Or will be allowed to talk to them. I guess.” She took a deep breath. “Could you handle that? Lying to them, I mean. Forging some kind of document. If I told them the truth, they’d think I was still crazy. And…they shouldn’t have to know what’s happened, even if they could be made to believe it.”
