The Shape of Desire

by Sharon Shinn

  She is hunched over her desk, a pencil in hand as she scans a document. Maybe a piece of correspondence she is editing before typing a clean copy; our boss is a notoriously bad speller.

  “Kathleen,” I say.

  She looks up. Her face is somber, her expression is closed, but at least she meets my eyes. “What,” she says, no invitation in her inflection.

  I step a little closer. I’ve gotten over my aversion to apologizing. “Look—I’m not sure what to say. I’m sorry. I wish—I’m just so sorry.”

  She nods. “I’m sorry, too.”

  That’s more than I expected. “I wouldn’t blame Ritchie for telling you that you should never speak to me again, but I hope you won’t be mad at me for what happened,” I say. I think Ritchie’s an asshole, but I think she’s more likely to talk to me if I take a different approach. “I know Dante overreacted. But he—”

  “Do you think so?” she interrupts, wholly surprising me. “A strange man comes into your house and starts calling you names and shoves you and looks like he might punch you—and you think your boyfriend overreacted? I think he did what any man should have done. He protected the woman he loves.”

  I file that away under statements I don’t necessarily agree with. Generally speaking, I don’t think I need to be protected, but I have to admit I was glad Dante was in the house that morning. “Still, it got out of hand. I hope—I hope Ritchie’s feeling okay today.”

  She shakes her head. “I took him to the doctor. Had a cast put on his arm. He won’t be able to work for a couple of weeks, so he’s mad about that.”

  Now I examine her face a little fearfully. As Ellen said, there are no new bruises—visible ones, anyway. “I hope he didn’t take his frustration out on you.”

  She shakes her head again. “He didn’t feel well enough. He’s still got a terrible headache and he’s kind of dizzy. Doctor said it was a mild concussion. So he’s been pretty sweet to me, actually. Letting me take care of him.”

  I’m not sure if the appropriate response is That’s nice or Run while you can. So I answer indirectly. “Listen, I know it’s awkward, but I hope you and I can still be friends. It wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t your fault—”

  She lifts her eyes and gives me a long sad look. There is so much heartache in her expression that for a moment I just stare. Who could carry such grief and devastation around inside, all the time, and not be ground down to dust and ashes? “I don’t know, Maria,” she says in her soft voice. “I’m not sure I’m meant to have friends.”

  “Kathleen! Don’t say that! Everyone is meant to have friends. You’re—I get the impression Ritchie is kind of possessive”—there’s an understatement—“but it’s not good for anyone to be too isolated, too dependent on one other human being. You have to have friends. People to help you through the rough times.” I take a deep breath. “And I think recently there have been a lot of rough times.”

  She shrugs and glances down at her document again. “Yeah. Well, who doesn’t have it hard?” she says. “I have to finish this before I go, Maria. See you tomorrow.”

  Slowly, reluctantly, I walk away, glancing back twice before I’m around the corner and she’s out of sight. The conversation has unsettled me, even though it went better than I had expected. Maybe because I was braced for anger—hoped for anger—because anger showed a flash of fighting spirit, a certain will. I had not prepared myself for the blank despair of someone who feels completely and utterly trapped.

  I remember something my mother said years ago when one of our neighbors woke up one morning and found her husband dead in his car, a suicide note beside him on the seat. It turned out he’d been embezzling from his company and he knew he was about to be exposed, and he didn’t know how to fix his mistake or how to face the consequences. People always find a way out, when there’s no way out, my mother had said. They run away. They kill somebody. They kill themselves. People always find a way to leave an untenable situation.

  The implication, of course, was that those desperate measures are always drastic. Effective, but disastrous. Even those who come out alive are horribly scarred.

  I know Kathleen is in an untenable situation. How will she get out?

  I’m so depressed by my conversation with Kathleen that I can’t bring myself to whip through traffic to speed home before Dante leaves. Sunday was haunted by the air of good-bye that usually hangs over us the day before he vanishes, and I know chances are good that the house will be empty when I get home. That knowledge adds to my general sense of misery, but my limbs are too leaden, my mind too numb, to allow me to careen down the roads with my usual missing-Dante mania.

  So I am both shocked and dumbly grateful when I arrive at the house and see the door standing open, a light on through the window. Hope lends me strength and I jump out of the car and rush inside.

  “Dante?” I call.

  He sweeps around the corner from the kitchen, catching me up in a ferocious hug, kissing me till I’m breathless. “I have about an hour, I think,” he mutters into my hair. “Then I’ve got to go.”

  That’s cutting it close for him; he likes to be far outside the city limits before he feels the changes working their way through his body. But oh God, he is kissing me with a hungry desperation; his hands are fumbling at my clothes, trying to push them out of his way. There is something wild in the flavor of his mouth, different in the touch of his fingers. It is like his skin has already roughened, his blood has already heated up. He has not transformed yet, his body is all human, but some internal essence has recalibrated, some element in his body has already alchemized.

  I feel my own blood transform, my own cells react. I am as wild as he is. I kick off my shoes, rip the fabric of my blouse as I impatiently discard it. I cannot get naked soon enough, cannot wait to feel his hard, sleek body against mine. We do not make it to the bedroom or even bother dropping to the floor. We clutch and claw at each other, grunting with an animalistic pleasure as we join together and frantically couple. He is gripping my shoulders so tightly that I feel his nails break my skin; I don’t want to look, in case those nails have already lengthened into talons or claws. But I am holding him just as close, grinding against him, my open mouth gasping against his skin as if it is him I need to breathe in, and not unsatisfactory air. He cries out as he climaxes inside me, and I squeeze him more tightly between my legs, not willing to allow him to slip away from me just yet. He pumps a few more times and my own orgasm shakes me, though I muffle my reaction with my lips pressed against his chest. We are both panting, gulping for air; I can feel the trembling of my legs as my body remembers what the rest of its parts are for.

  Suddenly the air around me feels cold, and I cling to Dante for warmth. His embrace has gentled, though he is holding me just as closely. He kisses the top of my head over and over.

  “I have to go,” he says. “But I couldn’t leave yet. Without seeing you again. Without—” He kisses me again.

  Now it’s not just my legs that are shaking. I’m shivering so much that I’m practically palsied. “I know,” I say, the words chattering out of my mouth. “I’m so glad you waited—I’m so glad you were here—but go. Go. I don’t want you to be anywhere near civilization when the transformation comes.”

  “I love you, Maria,” he says, his voice more guttural than I am used to, and kisses me hard on the mouth. He breaks free and scoops up a pair of running pants that he must have left at the edge of the kitchen floor. Apparently that’s all he plans to wear; he must expect the change to occur too quickly for him to need shoes or a shirt. His pack is at the door and, of course, his key is already around his neck. “I really do. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  He kisses me and then he is out the door. I snatch up a coat and run after him, but, as if my lawn has been protected by some invisible electric fence that will incinerate me if I touch it, I stutter to a halt right before the grass gives way to asphalt. Dante is already loping down the street, bent over, as if at any moment h
e expects to drop into a crouch or go to all fours. It’s at least an hour until full dark, but shadows are already bunching up along the road, thrown by houses and garages and old-growth oaks. For a few moments I can make out the pale texture of his bare torso as he flits in and out of those dark patches, and then he disappears. I don’t know if he’s merely gone too far for my eyes to follow him, or if he has that suddenly transmogrified to another shape, another creature. I do know that, for the first time since I’ve met him, I absolutely and unquestioningly believe that he has always told me the truth about who and what he is.

  I stand there, staring at the empty roadway until night falls, until I am so cold that I can’t feel anything, not my frozen feet, not my wet cheeks, not my broken heart.

  CHAPTER TEN

  As always, it takes me a couple of days to get past my systemic shock at Dante’s absence. Ellen eyes me with a knowing look on Tuesday and says, “I suppose he’s run off again?” but she doesn’t press it further. No one else notices or, at any rate, says anything.

  Relations with Kathleen remain tentative and awkward, though Ellen is doing her best to mend that situation as well. She makes sure both of us are included in some group lunch outings, so we can appear to be interacting without actually having to speak to each other. I drop by Kathleen’s desk a couple of times a day with flimsy excuses, and she always responds with a polite smile; but it’s clear that the walls she maintains with everyone else are back in place when I’m around. I had been far from certain I wanted to be Kathleen’s best friend, so it’s ironic I miss her now that she’s pulled away. I chalk it up to just more proof of the contrariness of the human heart.

  But there are other people who are plenty happy to spend time with me. The day after Dante leaves, I call my cousin Beth.

  “Hey—do you still want to go to Chicago?” I ask.

  “Do I ever!” she exclaims. “Can we go now? Tonight? I’ll pick you up at seven.”

  I laugh. “Well—I wasn’t thinking quite so soon. But I could go this weekend, if you can be that spontaneous. Or next weekend. Probably not the weekend after that.” Because Dante might be back.

  “Let me check with Mom and Sydney to see if one of them can keep Clara. Can you take Friday off? Or Monday?”

  I’ve been hoarding my last remaining vacation days, but suddenly I feel reckless. I’ll call in sick later in the year if I need more time off. “Sure.”

  “Great! I’ll get back to you by tomorrow.”

  It seems all the stars have aligned, because Aunt Andrea can keep Clara, Beth’s friend with a condo on Michigan Avenue will let us stay at her place for free, and I have more vacation days than I had thought. As office manager, Ellen is the one who monitors these things, so it’s possible she’s tweaked something in my favor, but it turns out I’ve been given credit for a Saturday that I came into the office to straighten out an accounting mess.

  “So have fun on the Magnificent Mile,” she tells me.

  And we do.

  It’s cold in Chicago, of course—probably twenty degrees colder than in St. Louis, which means the temperature hovers around the freezing mark—and everyone is bundled up in winter accessories. We don’t see sunshine the entire time we’re there; the sky just frowns down at us, a face full of puffy gray cheeks surrounding the bleary white eye of the sun. Between the skyscrapers, we occasionally glimpse the dark bruise of Lake Michigan, a flat expanse of water that looks as limitless as an ocean. Twice in three days—during this last weekend in October—it snows, but it’s only a halfhearted effort. Nothing sticks to the dirty pavement or the marvelously varied architecture. This is a city that shakes off all hindrances and just plows forward.

  We fill the days shopping and eating, the evenings in the condo sipping margaritas and watching video on demand. We agree it’s been the best vacation ever.

  “Let’s call our offices and say we won’t be back for a week,” Beth suggests on Saturday night.

  She’s probably not serious, but I think about it anyway. Dante won’t be home for at least another week, and if he finds himself in human form for an hour or two in the next few days, he knows to call my cell phone. But I make a face. “Not enough vacation days.”

  Beth sighs. “And surely Clara will have driven Mom crazy by tomorrow night, let alone next Monday. I suppose we have to go back.”

  Still, we stretch out the visit as long as we can, not starting our return trip until about four in the afternoon on Sunday. We’re not even halfway home before dark gathers around us and turns Highway 55 into a long, snaking tunnel intermittently illuminated by headlights. Beth has brought her Honeymoon in Vegas soundtrack, while I’ve contributed my old New Kids on the Block CDs, and we sing all the way home. I can’t help thinking that it was a more successful weekend than the one before.

  It’s past ten before Beth drops me off, and I bang a few of my shopping bags against the door frame as I enter the house. Once I’ve checked to make sure no murderers are hiding in the closets, I turn on the computer to read e-mail and then play back the messages on the answering machine. All of them are junk calls except the one from my mother asking me to let her know when I get back.

  “Hey, Mom, sorry to call so late, but we didn’t want to leave Chicago until we absolutely had to,” I say when she answers the phone. I can tell by her sleepy voice that I’ve woken her up.

  A yawn breaks her next words. “Did you have a good time?”

  “It was great. We have to do that more often. How was your weekend?”

  We chat for about ten minutes, catching up. While she talks, I scroll through the last three weeks’ worth of data on the Caller ID, mostly deleting numbers. But just as we hang up, I get to one that catches my attention. It’s a 636 area code, just like mine, which means the call was made from somewhere in the St. Louis area, outside the boundary of Highway 270. The number’s unfamiliar, which it would be since in place of the name of the caller, the unit just spells out the word PAY PHONE.

  Who would be calling me from a pay phone in the western suburbs?

  I check the date then calculate when the call came in. Two and a half weeks ago…at 1:47 in the morning.

  Oh. That was when Dante phoned during the one hour he was human.

  At first I smile, remembering the conversation, but then my brows draw together. I had asked him—I think I remember asking him—where he was calling from, and he’d said, “Sedalia, I think.” I drop onto my desk chair, flick the computer to life, and do a quick Google search on Sedalia’s area code. It turns out to be 660.

  He had not called from Sedalia, after all.

  I sit there for a few more minutes, still frowning, still turning the matter over in my head. It doesn’t mean much, of course. He has always told me—he said it again during this most recent visit, in fact—that it is difficult to keep track of geography and distances when he is in another shape. Sometimes I think I’ve traveled for miles, and I’m just a county away. Other times I don’t think I’ve gone too far, but when I turn human and find a highway sign, it turns out I’m in Colorado. He could honestly have thought he was in Sedalia—he might even have been in Sedalia earlier in the week—he might simply have been confused.

  Or he might have been lying. If he’d been calling from a 636 number, he’d have been nearby, close enough to come to my door. He might have thought that’s what I would have begged for, if he’d told the truth. He didn’t want to argue.

  Maria, it would take me an hour to get there and by then I’d be ready to transform again. It wouldn’t be worth it.

  But it would be worth it to me! Tell me where you are! I’ll come get you!

  He knew he only had time for the call, not the physical connection. The lie was to spare us both.

  Still, it makes me unhappy. It brings some of the old bitterness to the surface, the worry that he does not love me as much as I love him, does not so breathlessly treasure our hours together.

  It also makes me suspicious. If he lied about this, wha
t else does he lie about? What else have I believed because I have been unable to disprove it? How stupid have I been?

  I am exhausted Monday morning, since I wasn’t able to sleep Sunday night. I was both too keyed up from the trip to be able to relax and too fixated on the question of Dante’s phone call from not-Sedalia.

  Ellen takes one look at me and says, “Boy-howdy, somebody had too much fun over the weekend.”

  I am grateful that she instantly ascribes my peaked condition to overindulgence instead of romantic moping. “Remind me never to travel with my cousin again,” I mumble.

  “Nah, it’s good for you to be hungover a few times once you’re past thirty,” she says. “Reminds you not to mourn your lost youth.”

  I get more sleep as the week goes on, but I don’t feel much more cheerful, and the fact that the weather has gotten sharply colder doesn’t help my mood. I keep thinking about Dante and then trying to think about something else. It’s almost a relief to be at work all day because at least I’m forced to focus my mind on something productive.

  Through some misunderstanding about times and dates, I end up having lunch alone with Grant Vance on Wednesday. I can tell he’s not thrilled by the arrangement. “I could see if Turtle wants to come with us,” he offers.

  “Turtle?”

  He grins. “New guy. His name is Tuttle, but he’s bald and he always wears turtleneck shirts that he hunches into like he’s trying to make his head disappear.” Grant demonstrates by scrunching up his shoulders, shortening his neck, and then peering around with big, blinking eyes. He does not look remotely like a turtle—more like an Ewok—but I get the general idea.

  “Sure, if you want to.”

  But Turtle can’t join us, and I’m too apathetic to care if Grant is uncomfortable dining alone with me, so off we go to Pizzeria Plus. He’s willing to split a large veggie pizza, extra olives, and the gesture makes me put a little more effort into being companionable.