by White, Jade
Tara tightened her grip on the edge of the table. Brenton noted her knuckles clenching and turning pale. “Trust you? You’re asking me to trust something I didn’t even know existed until yesterday, something that’s against everything I’ve ever thought should be real.”
“Something that our son happens to be,” Brenton reminded her.
“Our son,” she said. Now it was more than her hands shaking. “There in your arms is our son. My baby. And I don’t even understand how that’s possible.”
“I know it’s a lot to have to take in and a lot to have to deal with. But this is reality for both of us,” Brenton said, trying to be as calming as possible and stop her from flying over the edge of sanity, let alone the edge of the table. “Tara, you know me. After the time we’ve spent together, you know me. That one week, we made each other happy. We were good together, and you know I’d never purposely do anything to scare you or hurt you or do you any kind of harm. You know that. What I’m telling you is that our son needs to be here, with his own kind. He needs me, and he needs his pride, as much as he needs his mother. We have to find a way to pull together and make things work—for him.”
“That’s what you’re really telling me, isn’t it?” Now Tara was starting to break into a sweat. “You’re telling me you want me to join your pride—to live with you, and your family, to be a part of a group of people who aren’t even…”
Now Brenton’s patience began to slip. “Not even human? Is that what you want to say, Tara? Not even human?” Daniel stopped suckling on the bottle and looked up at Brenton, pawing at his chest and mewling loudly, seeming to sense his father’s growing upset. Brenton put the bottle down on the table and paused from addressing Tara long enough to stoop and let Daniel down onto the floor.
The cub sat there, still gazing intently at his father. Brenton returned his attention to Tara. “Not even human—that’s what I am to you now, isn’t it? So what if you take Daniel home, back to your human world? How long do you think the two of you will last, with you not knowing a damn thing about how to care for him or what to do with him?
How long do you think it’ll be before other humans find out about him? And what do you expect to happen to the two of you then? I can guess what’ll happen, Tara, and it’s nothing good. See, you may not know a lot about us, but we know all about you. We know what humans are like. We know the way you are. We know how you feel about differences. You can’t even live with the differences between yourselves.
We know the fear and the superstition and the prejudice about anyone who doesn’t look the same way someone else does, or talk the same way, or believe the same stupid crap, or love who they’re told they’re supposed to love. And we know what your fear and your superstition and your hate can do—the violence, the murder, the slaughter. Would you actually expose our son to that?”
Tara snarled at him as if she were a lioness herself. “So humans are the most awful things in the world, that’s what you’re telling me? Well, you didn’t seem to mind how human I was when you had me in your bed!”
“Okay—okay, yeah, I took you to bed. And you didn’t mind when you thought I was just a man. But now you know what I really am, so I’m a monster now? Tara, to your people, our son, the beautiful little boy we made together—he’s a monster. And when they find out about him, they’ll come after him and you, and your lives will both be over. Is that what you want for Daniel? You’re his mother. Think of him. Think about him in a world full of scared humans that you can’t protect him from. I’m asking you, please don’t do that to him. Please help me protect him.”
Tara wanted to say something, say anything. She wanted to scream at Brenton, to curse him, to tell him she hated him. But nothing came, neither screams nor words. She opened her mouth, and all that came forth were sobs. Her shoulders shook and she broke into tears.
For all his anger at the way she reacted to everything, Brenton could feel nothing for Tara at this moment but pity. No, that was not completely true. There were other things he felt—not mere pity, but genuine compassion. That—and more, something that he had put away almost two years ago when he put her on a plane back to Chicago, not knowing he was sending his cub home with her.
He reached across the table and took her by the hand. “Tara,” he said, “what we did, sleeping together, we did because it was what we felt. We didn’t think; we just went with our feelings. And we both made mistakes. I never contacted you again because I thought it was just something we did, and I thought you’d moved on. And you never got in touch with me again because you thought we didn’t have any place in each other’s life.
We were both wrong. But Tara, we’ve got Daniel now, and I’m glad. I wasn’t looking to be a father, but I’m glad I am. There’s nothing I want more in the world than to be Daniel’s father, and take care of him and love him and raise him. He needs us, Tara. There’s nothing more important than that.”
It was at least encouraging to Brenton that Tara did not tear her hand away from him. It was encouraging enough that he came around the table next to her, and pulled her gently up from her seat and took her in his arms. And he held her and let her cry on his shoulder, and with the clasp of his arms he assured her that he would not let her go.
They stood there together with Brenton’s arms locked around her until they felt a rustling and a pushing at their legs, and heard sounds of purring and growling coming up from down on the floor. They pulled apart and looked down to find Daniel nudging at them with his head and rubbing the side of his jaw against them, and pawing at their trousers. The little cub looked up at them and made a mewling growl, and Tara gazed down at him and sobbed a bit more.
They ended up both sitting on the floor with him, and Daniel put his paws on his mother’s bosom and nudged at her face with his head. In spite of everything she had felt talking to Brenton, in spite of wishing her little boy were still just a little boy, something in Tara’s heart could not help but melt at the cub asking for her attention.
“Pet him, Tara,” Brenton said. “Pet him. Hold him. He wants his mom.”
Tara petted Daniel. He purred loudly and climbed into her lap. She instinctively put her arms around him, and he squirmed, still giving loud purrs, and twitched and thrashed his tail. And even though everything that Tara had ever thought of as human had been called into question, somehow in the creature purring in her arms she sensed her little boy. The birth of a child changes everything about the mother’s world. Tara’s world was now changing in ways she never could have imagined.
_______________
Brenton called the rest of the Morgan Napa Pride, and Tara sat in the living room playing with Daniel, who had finally morphed back to human and let her put his training pants on him. As she played with her son and was grateful to bond again with his little human self, Tara listened to the phone calls between Brenton and his family, and heard through his reactions and the sounds of voices coming out of his phone how startled and excited they were, and how excited he was about their excitement.
Part of it, some of the part that she could hear, was Brenton trying to explain how it had all happened, and that he now had both the cub and the human mother at his house and had done his best to explain everything to her. And Tara could imagine the things they must be saying about her and little Daniel and the whole situation.
She had the distinct feeling that she was being judged, in a way, which stung at her heart when she remembered the things that Brenton had said only a short while ago about the way humans feared, judged and hated what was not like themselves. Well, Tara was nothing like these lion people.
Were they judging her out of fear, acting every bit as human as humans acted? What would she face when they came, as he knew they would? Their fear? Their anger? Their wish to take her little boy away from her?
A part of Tara now felt as protective as a mother lioness. She felt as if she could face down or fight a whole pride of lions if they tried to take her little boy. She would fight Brenton h
imself if it came to that.
Tara held the human Daniel in her lap on the living room sofa and tousled his human hair. The prospect of meeting Daniel’s father’s family had clarified one thing for her, at least. This was her little boy, and nothing would ever come between her and her child. Not even the creature that he was inside.
Soon, the house was full of them, a dozen people in all, a couple of senior men and ten women of a variety of ages. They all had thick hair of the same color as Brenton’s, and they all had those same sparkling blue-green eyes. And they had a quality about them that made Tara think the word “pride” was exactly the right name for them. They carried themselves with a dignity that seemed noble, almost regal in a way.
Brenton, for all his dazzling manly beauty, seemed to be the one most like a “regular, average” person in the family. They all looked amazing. Even with the lot of them in their human form, Tara sensed she was in the presence of something more than mere humanity. She felt almost humbled at the sight of them.
The most impressive of them all was Brenton’s mother, the matriarch of the pride. Brenton’s father, Tara learned, had died some years earlier, but Sylvia Morgan had kept a firm hand on the leadership of the family, and Tara could sense how they all deferred to her even when she was not directly asserting her authority. The rest of them let Sylvia be the first one to approach Daniel. Tara stood by and watched as her son, sitting innocently on the floor, came face to face with his grandmother for the first time.
Sylvia, clad in an off-white, bare-shouldered gown that flowed all the way down to her ankles, crouched down with a motion as smooth and elegant as a ballerina and sat on the floor in front of her grandson. Tara watched, fascinated, as Sylvia touched Daniel under the chin and purred at him, and the boy calmly looked into Sylvia’s eyes as if he had known her from the moment he came into the world.
“Hello, my darling,” said Sylvia. “You’re even handsomer than your father was when he was a cub. You are the most beautiful little boy in the world.”
At this, Tara looked over at Brenton and found him wearing the biggest, warmest smile she had ever seen on him, the smile of a proud father basking in his mother’s approval of his son. Tara could not help but be touched.
Tara returned to watching Sylvia and Daniel, and saw Sylvia morph her head, shoulders, and arms into those of a strong, noble lioness. This was the third werelion that Tara had seen morphing, and it chilled her to see it. She wondered if she would ever grow accustomed to this. Sylvia purred again at Daniel and rubbed her lioness paw against his chin. The most astounding thing happened next. The little boy morphed, not to a full lion, but to the shape of a humanoid infant with lion’s fur and head and paws, and his tail split the back of his training pants and came curling out. He sat, rubbing his head and the side of his jaw against his grandmother’s paw, purring loudly.
Tara put a hand to her chest, feeling the quickened beating of her heart. She sensed that Sylvia was reaching Daniel in a way that only one of his own kind could reach him, and she could not help but feel envious, jealous of this budding relationship between her child and his grandmother, this instinctive bond that Tara might never be able to share.
If there were any hostility towards her from Sylvia or the other women of the pride, Tara could not sense it. If anything, they seemed terribly curious about her. They asked her to tell them in her own words how she had felt about discovering what Daniel was, and by extension what Brenton was, and they did not give any sign that they were offended when Tara answered them honestly.
Some of them told Tara that they had known other human females who had slept with werelion males and become pregnant, and that there was help for human women in Tara's situation. They told her that they could put her in touch with women who had been through what she was experiencing, and that there were even small groups of human mothers of werelion cubs who corresponded with each other and sometimes met in person, traveling from other cities and other parts of the country to share their experiences face to face and introduce their cubs to each other.
Tara, though she did not say it, was still having difficulty with her son being referred to as a “cub”. She accepted the kindness and concern of Brenton’s family, but she found that even now there was a part of her that could not quite commit to this new world into which she had been thrown.
The pride was generous. The whole thing became an impromptu baby shower. They brought a crib and a playpen, a carriage and a stroller, and baby blankets and toys, either new things or things that they had saved from their own cubs who were too big for them now. Tara received all the gifts with appreciation, and Brenton watched her reactions to his family’s generosity and kindness. He sensed that her gratitude was sincere enough, but that her heart—her human heart—was not one hundred percent in it.
From her face and the sound of her voice and the way she carried herself, Brenton sensed that Tara was still not completely prepared to try to integrate her human life with the future she now faced as the mother of a werelion cub. And how could she be? Only a morning ago, Tara had thought her life was one thing and that her child was one thing. Without warning, she had been thrown into the deep end of an experience for which no human could possibly be prepared.
It was a wonder that she was taking it all as well as she was doing. Brenton had an undeniable feeling that deep down, Tara could not help herself. She could not help but resist the whole idea of her life being taken over by something that her experience as a human being had taught her was a myth. They were still going to have problems. There would be no avoiding it.
Brenton’s family also brought lunch and dinner. And when the meals were done, after Tara put Daniel to bed in his new crib, they said their goodbyes for now and saw themselves out, and Tara thanked Sylvia one more time before they all left. Once they were gone, the house was quiet again, and Tara wanted nothing more than just to go to bed.
Once again, Tara and Brenton went to bed and only slept. Brenton wore only a pair of briefs to bed, and even with his shorter hair he was still the magnificent hunk of maleness whose constant ravishing of her had given Tara their son. Seeing him climb into bed that way was such a temptation. There was an undeniable part of her that would have loved to have him again.
When she had him before, it was after a year and a half of no sex. Since the last time she saw him, it had been even longer than that since she’d last known the pleasure of a man’s body, and on some level she ached to have Brenton join himself with her again.
For all the things they had said to each other since she told him about Daniel, Tara found her desire for Brenton was still there. But it was subdued now, buried under things she could not move aside to reach it. So she kept to one side of the bed and let Brenton keep to the other, and they both dropped off to sleep.
But Tara had set her phone to vibrate and wake her a few hours later, and she had set a plan for when it did. She had arranged for a taxi to meet her at a specific time at the end of the private road from the house that let out onto the main road to the highway. In the still and the dark, using the flashlight app in her phone, she crept out of bed and silently dressed herself and Daniel, taking care not to disturb him too much and letting him stay half asleep while she did so.
She packed all the clothing for the two of them and all the food and supplies that she could get into one suitcase and one carry-on bag, and put Daniel in the sling to carry him. And ever so carefully, she took the bags and the baby and crept with them out of Brenton’s house and into the night.
THE FINAL CHAPTER
Tara did not draw another easy breath until she finally reached the end of the private road. Only then did she permit herself to relax, just slightly. She had been anxious every step of the way from Brenton’s house, walking along that road in the night with forest thicket on either side of her and only the flashlight in her phone to light her way. She was a woman alone with a baby, out in a country area in the dark. There could have been dangerous things in the fo
rest around her, things against which she and Daniel would have been defenseless if they had come out onto the road. There could have been coyotes or cougars…
The rich irony of that thought suddenly hit her. She couldn’t suppress a smile and almost wanted to laugh. Cougars! Really—cougars, of all things! After the things I’ve seen in the last couple of days, cougars are nothing!
She set her bags down on the shoulder of the road and lifted the hand in which she’d carried it to the top of little Daniel’s head. The blackness of the forest blackened the road on the side where she stood and on the opposite side, stretching out along the asphalt before her and behind her. Tara knew the taxi would be along soon, but even so, it would not be soon enough. Her boy was out like a light, which was good. Now if only he would stay asleep until they were on the plane, or better yet until they reached Chicago.
She repeated that last thought in her mind: Until we get to Chicago. And what would they do then?
“Oh, Daniel, baby, what will we do then?” Tara whispered. “We’re going to have to have a plan and we’re going to have to do it fast. We can’t stay in the apartment; it’s too risky. We’ll have to move out. We’ll have to find someplace else, someplace better for you. Definitely someplace out of the city, out of the way. I don’t have as much money as Daddy, but I’ll have to get us a place at least a bit like Daddy’s house. Someplace off the main road, where there are trees and bushes around and no one can just come looking and see us.
