Thoroughly Kissed

by Kristine Grayson

  “They’ll force you to go on tour, parade you in front of people when you want a nap—”

  “Pet me, worship me, feed me anything I want.”

  “No,” Michael said. “That would be if you were still a house cat. But you’re a lion. People are afraid of lions. They’ll cage you, subdue you with a chair.”

  “And a whip,” Emma said a little too eagerly.

  “I thought you said there were no more circuses.” Darnell’s voice held suspicion.

  “I said there aren’t that many. But that means there are a few. Why, just an hour from here, in Baraboo, is the Barnum and Bailey Circus Museum, a tribute to the most famous circus of all.”

  “We saw that driving here last fall, Darnell, remember?” Emma said. “I pointed it out to you.”

  The cat cursed. The words were filled with invective, and had something to do with mice butts, bird beaks, and teeny tiny brains. Then he came out of the bushes.

  Lilac petals covered his large back, making him look as if he had gained purple and white spots. He padded forward on his big paws, looking very uncomfortable. The mane changed the look of his face, but the gold eyes were the same ones Michael had seen the night before.

  Darnell walked up to Michael, then sat. “I don’t like you, pal. You were going to leave me last night.”

  “Last night?” Emma asked.

  Michael sighed. The final confirmation, not that he needed it. Damn Casper. Damn Emma. Damn them all. This wasn’t his business. “Casper told me to.”

  “Casper is an idiot,” Darnell said.

  “Casper?” Emma asked.

  “Don’t ask,” Michael said.

  “Look,” Darnell said. “I can handle it from here. I got the message of the damn dream. I’ll say the words on time and in the right order—”

  “You didn’t say them in the right order?” Michael asked.

  “They don’t make a lot of sense,” the lion said. “I’m fluent in English because I have to listen to it all the time, but I draw the line at Norse or whatever the hell that is.”

  “What is?” Emma asked. “What’s going on? Why are you talking to my cat?”

  “Because he’s talking to me,” Michael said.

  “We don’t need you,” Darnell said. “She and I will be just fine.”

  “That’s not what Casper said.”

  “Casper lies,” Darnell said.

  “That’s what he says about you.”

  The lion snorted. “Then why didn’t he tell you his real name?”

  “He didn’t want to,” Michael said.

  “What is this?” Emma asked.

  “This idiot thinks he’s your hero,” Darnell said.

  “No.” The word came out of Michael’s mouth quickly, although he wasn’t sure if that was because he objected to being called a hero or being called an idiot by a lion who used to be a house cat.

  “I don’t understand,” Emma said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Michael said.

  “It does to me!” Darnell growled the words. “You left me to die.”

  “I’ve never met you before.”

  “Yes, you did. Last night.”

  “And Casper told you that wasn’t real.”

  “Casper who?” Emma asked.

  Michael ran a hand through his hair. This wasn’t going at all like he had planned. “I thought you needed help getting to Oregon.”

  Emma straightened her spine. “I have help.”

  “Darnell? He won’t fit in your car.”

  “He will in a minute.”

  “That’s what she said fifteen minutes ago,” Darnell said. “I hate being this big. I don’t fit into my bed.”

  “You have never liked that bed,” Emma said.

  “But it’s mine,” Darnell said.

  She shook her head. “I’ll fix it.”

  “That’s what you’ve been saying—”

  “Stop!” Michael raised his hands. How did one woman create so much chaos? Everything else in his life seemed orderly compared with her. “Do you have any human help?”

  “Oh, so now he’s a bigot,” Darnell said.

  Michael felt his face grow warm. Maybe he would strangle that cat… when Emma got him back to the proper size.

  “What business is it of yours?” Emma asked.

  “None,” Michael said. “Except that—”

  “Tell her,” Darnell said. “Tell her you had to be convinced by a magical dwarf to help her. Tell her—”

  She turned toward Darnell. “Merlin was here?”

  “Merlin?” Michael asked. “That was the Merlin?”

  “Yes, but he’s pretty different from the one in the Arthurian myth,” Emma said.

  “Casper is Merlin?”

  “Don’t let it twist your tail,” Darnell said. “We have other problems.”

  “If Merlin was here,” Emma said, “why didn’t he see me?”

  Darnell sighed as only a cat could. Then he laid down and put his large head on his paws. “All yours, pal.”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t believe he was here until this morning when I saw—” Michael sighed too. He didn’t know how to go on with this. “Well, what matters is that he said you had no help.”

  “I. Have. Darnell.” Emma’s eyes were flashing. Michael had no idea why she was getting so angry.

  “Human help,” he said.

  “I don’t see what business it is of yours.”

  “You made it my business,” Michael said.

  “Oh?”

  “When you asked me. Apparently that set some sort of cosmic prophecy in motion.”

  “A prophecy?”

  “He wasn’t supposed to say no,” Darnell said from the ground. “Are we ever going to work on changing me back to normal?”

  “In a minute, Darnell,” Emma said. “I want to know about this prophecy.”

  “I don’t know much about it,” Michael said. “Except that I’m suppose to go with you. Do you still want my company?”

  His stomach twisted as he asked the question, but he wasn’t sure if that was because he wanted to go or he wanted her to say no.

  She studied him for a moment. He couldn’t read what was in her blue-gray eyes.

  “Decide this, dammit,” Darnell said. “I’m getting hungry. And this mane itches.”

  Emma put her hands on her hips. Michael had the strangest sensation that she was about to say no. What would he do then? Force her to take him with her? On the strength of a dream and a talking cat?

  “Look,” Darnell said. “If I have to be this size to talk, you aren’t going to fit me in the car.”

  “He doesn’t normally talk?” Michael asked.

  “Not in English,” Emma said.

  “Well then, change him back.”

  Her eyes flashed again. “That’s so easy for you to say. As if I can snap my fingers and change him back. As if a simple little twitch of the nose makes things all better. You watch too much TV, Michael. If I could just fix this, you’d think I would have done it already, wouldn’t you?”

  “No,” Darnell said.

  Michael looked at the lion in surprise. “She hasn’t?”

  “Of course not. She’s up there moaning that it went all wrong and she says that stupid reverse spell, which only seems to work capriciously and then—”

  “Shut up!” Emma said and clapped her hands together. The clap turned into a clap of thunder and light ricocheted off everything. And when it was over, Michael found himself staring at a pudgy black house cat, lying regally on the lawn.

  “Meeeeoow,” Darnell said, and Michael could have sworn that the cat grinned. Then he ran across the street—without looking both ways—and
up the stairs to Emma’s house.

  “It’s not usually that easy,” she said, glancing at Michael. Then she ran across the street after Darnell. She opened the door to the house and they both went inside, leaving Michael standing in the neighbor’s lawn, next to the ruined rose bushes.

  He shook his head. Had she turned him down? Or ignored him? And then he realized that he had really offered to go with her. Oh, that would make his life easier. He’d just come back from England for a new job. How would he explain this?

  And how would he live with himself if he backed out again? He’d have to be dumb not to accept all the confirmation he was receiving that magic was real.

  He sighed and started across the street after Emma and her obnoxious cat. He’d make this work. Somehow.

  ***

  Emma closed the door and leaned on it. The house already felt abandoned—and she hadn’t hardly taken anything out of it. Darnell had gone to his rug in front of the fireplace. There was no fire burning, but that didn’t seem to bother him. He began cleaning himself, picking the lilac petals off as if they were contaminating him. She could tell from the methodical way that he worked his fur that he was very distressed.

  Well, she wasn’t that happy either. She had resigned herself to traveling alone, and then Michael Found agreed to go with her. Because of Merlin.

  She crossed her arms. It would be best if he went along. He was, as Aethelstan had pointed out, the best choice. But the illogical, irrational, angry part of her wanted nothing to do with him. She had a hunch he wasn’t going because he wanted to, but because he felt obligated to.

  At that moment, he knocked on the door behind her. She could feel the strength of the knock through the wood.

  Emma sighed. She needed his help, and she couldn’t afford to be proud about it. Somehow she would have to maintain her dignity through all of this—what was left of her dignity. After all, the man had seen her at her most out of control.

  She pulled the door open.

  “What?” she asked, knowing she was being ungracious and difficult and not really caring. It had taken a visit from a friend—and something so severe that Darnell had thought he was dying—to get Michael to help her.

  “I would like to come with you to Oregon,” he said. “That is, if you’ll have me.”

  He actually looked nervous. She couldn’t tell if that was because he felt forced to go and was afraid she’d say yes or if he wanted to go and was afraid she’d say no.

  “All right,” she said. “You can come.”

  He looked surprised. His mouth opened and closed and opened again.

  Behind her, Darnell growled. She blocked the door with her body so there’d be no repeat Pizza Guy attack. The last thing she needed was for Michael to change his mind again.

  Chapter 7

  They left a lot later than Emma had planned. One whole day later.

  It turned out that the offer to accompany her was a spur-of-the-moment thing for Michael. He had to ask for an emergency leave of absence (which, he was told, was only possible because it was the end of the Spring Semester, and none of the administration wanted to spend any time in the office during the break), then he had to pack, and then they had to fight over whose car to take.

  Emma won the fight simply by refusing to remove her possessions from her car. In the end, he acquiesced—on the condition that she bring an extra set of car keys. She didn’t have any, and so she had to get some made.

  She had a hunch this trip was going to be a lot uglier than she had originally thought.

  Darnell was relegated to the already crowded backseat. He actually sat on his cat bed because he refused to be inside his cat carrier, which would be safer. Even though Darnell had lost his ability to speak English, he still had the ability to communicate. A cross-country trip in a cat carrier, his eyes and posture said, would be the equivalent of six days in hell.

  Emma was beginning to think she had volunteered for six days in hell too. Michael had wanted to drive. He had asked her how many years of driving experience she had—and she hadn’t told him the truth. That would have made him insist on driving. Instead, he had compared their driving experience and had deemed himself the most competent.

  She had to haul out the old, tired, and perfectly unreasonable argument to keep her position in the driver’s seat. It was her car. She had the right to drive it anywhere she wanted.

  And she really wanted to drive it nowhere.

  They pulled out of Madison at seven a.m. The ghastly early hour had been Michael’s idea, to make up for the time he had cost her the day before. He had stayed up late, pouring over maps, trying to find the shortest route from Wisconsin to Oregon, and he had finally decided on what he called “the Northern route,” taking I-90 through Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana on the way to Oregon.

  She had wanted to take I-80, which was flatter and easier, except for crossing the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming. She had never been to Utah or Nebraska, and she wanted to see both places.

  Michael had told her that neither were worth her time.

  That had angered her even more—who was he to determine what was worth her time?—and then he confessed that he had an irrational fear of deserts.

  She looked at the map and said there were no deserts between Oregon and Wisconsin, and he’d said she only thought that because she hadn’t driven the I-80 route. The last part, whether she went through Idaho or through Nevada, included desert.

  She couldn’t argue with an irrational fear of deserts any more than he could argue that she could drive because it was her car. She decided they had reached a stalemate, which was about as good as she could hope for at the beginning of the trip.

  What she really hoped was that the stalemate would last through the rest of the trip.

  Michael slept through the first two hours of the trip. He tilted his head back on the leather seat, closed his eyes, and almost snored. Darnell fell asleep rather quickly too, and there was no almost to his snoring. The cat was a regular brass band, complete with tuba, when it came to the noises he made.

  So Emma leaned back in her seat, turned on WORT softly, and listened to the alternate music voice of her home for the last time in a while. The early morning sunlight made the interior of her car look white and she wished that the tension in her shoulders would fade so that she could just enjoy the drive.

  The rolling hills and farmland, the developers’ signs, the trucks and cars all around her, seemed very distant from her. She was trying to memorize them.

  At least this time when she had to leave her chosen home, she knew it. The first time, she’d fallen into a coma and awakened so far away from her home that she could never, ever go back.

  Except for a flash a few days ago.

  She glanced over her shoulder at the sleeping Michael. He looked younger in his sleep than he did when he was awake. The worry lines left his face, smoothing his skin and making him seem as young as the students he taught. He was a very, very handsome man, more handsome than she had realized.

  And he was sacrificing a lot to come with her.

  She hadn’t asked him what Merlin had said, but it must have been convincing. Not even Darnell complained a lot that Michael was coming along. And Darnell, by rights, should have been hissing, biting, scratching, and yowling—especially after accusing Michael of having no regard for his—Darnell’s—welfare.

  She lost the radio station as she turned toward LaCrosse, and had to pick up Wisconsin Public Radio. The music she’d been listening to had become Morning Edition—lots of news and chat that really didn’t concern her. But at that moment, the driving got hairy—apparently Michael’s wonderful plan to leave early meant that they would hit LaCrosse at the end of morning rush hour, so Emma had to swerve and use the brake and stop and start a lot more than she had planned—so she couldn’t fid
dle with the radio.

  All that driving made Michael snort, but didn’t wake him up. Darnell on the other hand was awake and sitting up. Emma could see him in the rearview mirror.

  “Not a word from you,” she said, and was a bit surprised when Darnell laid back down and sighed. She had toyed with trying to spell him again for speech, just as a backup, but Darnell had run from her when she mentioned it.

  She had taken that as a resounding no.

  Michael made her write all the instructions down and he had taken the piece of paper home with him the night before. She hadn’t seen it at all this morning.

  Big green signs told her she was approaching the Mississippi River. There was a view wayside ahead and, after the rush-hour traffic, she was ready for a break.

  She had learned on her first cross-country drive that the best thing to do was take the drive in short bursts.

  She pulled off the road under the shade of several trees. There were some Winnebagos on the truck and trailer side of the wayside, but no other cars. As she stopped the car, Michael sat up.

  “Where’re we?” he asked blearily.

  “The Mississippi.” She unbuckled her seat belt and opened the car door. A rush of cool morning air came inside. It smelled of river water and flowers.

  He rubbed a fist over his eyes like a little boy. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yep.” She got out, and then opened Darnell’s door, snapping his leash on his collar with a movement so coordinated she even surprised herself. Darnell looked up at her with complete fury at the indignity, but he clearly remembered the routine from the last trip. All of them would rather have him use the great outdoors than the catbox she’d managed to squeeze onto the floor in the backseat.

  “Why don’t you get some water and the morning buns on top of the cooler?” she asked Michael. Morning buns were her weakness. They were the specialty of a restaurant on the near westside named the Ovens of Brittany. At least once a week, she’d stopped there and picked up morning buns for her breakfast at home.

  She’d miss that too.

  “I still don’t get why we stopped,” he muttered as he fumbled with the seat belt.