Lion to Get Her

by Lynn Red

  Laney let out a huge “ha!” that surprised Elaine enough for the ferret to slosh a little vino onto her shirt. She just shrugged and sucked at it for a second. “No reason to let this stuff go to waste.”

  For a moment, the two sat in silence. Laney considered her next move, and realized she hadn’t any plan at all. Elaine considered getting the bottle again, because honestly it didn’t seem like Laney was interested. As she reached for it, her pointy elbow jabbed the power button on the television remote resting next to the bottle.

  “Oops,” she said as she poured. “Well, whatever. May as well see if anythi—”

  When Elaine’s mouth fell fully open, and she stopped talking entirely, Elaine, who had been fooling with her phone, knew something was wrong. She looked at her friend first, and when she verified that Elaine had not, in fact, died from a sudden aneurysm, Laney turned her head slowly to the television.

  “What the hell?” she asked.

  On the screen, the front of the library, shrouded in the darkness of ten o’clock on an early spring night, was framed in light. The press corps from before were reassembled. And although there seemed to be quite a few less of them, the feeling of busy noise and confused tension was complete. “This can’t possibly be what I think it is, right?”

  “You were hoping to see him again,” Elaine managed to say through her gaping lips. “Looks like he had the same feeling. Either that, or he’s crazy enough to want to get shot at again. Somehow I doubt that one, though.”

  Laney’s hands were shaking, though she hadn’t noticed it yet. She was breathing heavily, in through her mouth, out through her nose, and her heart had started racing to keep pace with the rest of her. “I have to get down there,” she said flatly. “I have to see him and for some reason, I think this is my last chance for... for whatever it is I’m doing.”

  She was up on her feet and almost to the door by the time Elaine noticed that her friend wasn’t sitting down anymore. Something about that ferret ability to pay rapt attention to something, but only one thing at a time, was on full display. By the time Elaine herself clambered up out of the La-Z-Boy, and began to chase her friend, the door closed and Laney was patting down the driveway.

  “Wait!” Elaine called out as she swung the door open, and jumped backward slightly to dodge it instead of just getting banged in the forehead. “Laney! We just got here!” she pled, knowing full well it wasn’t going to do a damn bit of good.

  The haunted-looking lioness froze with her hands on the steering wheel of her reasonable, late-model silver Civic. She squinted at her house and then waved her friend toward the car before mouthing at her to hurry. Elaine got the message, and scurried over to the Civic as fast as her little legs would go. She huffed as she sat, at once relieved that something was going to finally happen, and terrified that it wouldn’t be what her friend wanted.

  “What if this doesn’t work out?” Laney asked, chewing on her bottom lip in a mixture of frustration, anticipation, and utter confusion. “I’m not exactly the chance-taking type you know. I mean, what if I get out there, and it’s just some political rally and I’m totally out of place and—”

  “That is exactly why you have to do this,” Elaine said. She grabbed Laney’s shoulder and squeezed tightly. “I know you’re scared and I’m gonna be real honest here, I am too, but probably not for the same reason you are.”

  About halfway down the roughly graveled street leading from her house to the main thoroughfare, Laney remembered to turn on the headlights. They were for everyone else to see her coming, of course, lion eyes hardly need dim little car lamps to see where they’re going. She was still chewing her lip, though she’d gotten a lot more serious about it in the intervening seconds. “What if it’s all bullshit?” she asked. “What if everything I’m paranoid about really is true?”

  “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you,” Elaine said with a giggle.

  “Nirvana lyrics aside, what if I’m making a huge mistake?”

  Elaine squeezed Laney’s shoulder harder—hard enough to hurt a little. “Stop the car,” she said. “I want to look you in the face when I say what I’ve gotta say and I’m gonna be real honest with you, the way you’re taking these turns makes me just about want to hurl. I’d rather not hurl on you right before we go to see this guy who I’m pretty sure is making his second grand romantic gesture of the day.”

  “Hunh?” Laney grunted. “Did you just say ‘hurl’?” She pulled the car to the shoulder, which really meant that she just pulled off the paved part of the road. Redby Township was nothing if not thrifty about infrastructure spending. Reid Bennet didn’t like roads. Then again, Reid Bennet didn’t like much of anything. It’s all relative. Then again, there was a tremendous amount of tax money spent on the local elderly shifter support network. After all, it doesn’t matter how old a bear, a tiger, or a lion is, they still need a hell of a lot of meat.

  It’s all relative.

  “Okay,” Elaine said with a sigh. She did it again to steady herself. “Look, I don’t know what’s going to happen, and neither do you. Neither does anyone except, I’m guessing, Prince Charming of the Grand Gesture. But I’m willing to bet that maybe he isn’t exactly sure either.”

  “What do you mean? Who the hell puts on a press conference, gets shot, runs away to keep the guy who shot him safe, and then has a second press conference at quarter past ten on the same day?”

  “Good point,” Elaine said. “Although here’s a counter argument: no one does that. No one. Not even the most power hungry, the greediest, the most... I’m out of adjectives, but not even they would do that kind of thing. That’s what makes me think that this guy’s got a hell of a plan, and if he’s doing it in front of the library, that tells me one damn thing.”

  “That he’s doing it to get my attention,” Laney said. She felt her heart flutter, and not in the unpleasant, slightly nauseating way it did when she used an elliptical for too long without water. “The crazy thing is that even knowing that, I still feel kinda queasy.”

  Elaine threw her head back, scratched behind her ear with a couple of quick flicks of her fingertip. Then, when the itch was satisfied, she laughed loud and hard. “Oh honey,” she said as the laughter subsided and she started to catch her breath, “that queasy thing you’re feeling? It’s kinda good, right? Kinda... tingly?”

  “Yeah. In places I’m not entirely sure I want to be tingling just now.”

  “Sure, sure, but still it’s a good kinda tingling, right?” Elaine snickered. “A good sort of queasy?”

  Laney nodded. “I guess so, why?”

  “Because the way you’re feeling right now is the same way I feel when I watch pretty much any kind of television that features a man in a suit, a uniform, a state of undress, or... hell, even cowboy boots and a hat. As long as he isn’t bull riding. If he’s bull riding, I just wait for him to get gored.”

  “Elaine?” Laney asked with a tiny curl to the left end of her lip. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure, I guess.” She let out a long, trailing sigh and smiled when she did. “Sorry, just thinking about that guy of yours. He wears suits and flannel shirts, I bet.”

  “I bet. So, I can ask you anything, right? We can talk about anything?”

  Elaine shook her head as though to clear a cobweb that was wrapped around her brain. “Yeah, shoot.”

  “When did you become such a horndog?”

  Elaine blustered out another laugh. “Horn ferret. Now shut up and drive. I ain’t gonna let you miss this for the world.”

  11

  The entire library was lit up like a porn store in the middle of a going-nowhere interstate. From stem to stern, press packed into the entrance area that was covered by an awning. In the ten minutes between leaving her house and their arrival at the library, rain had begun.

  It was a plodding, slow, fat sort of rain. The drops seemed to tumble from the air and loop over themselves on the way down before they
finally flopped on the ground, splashing and soaking the concrete in a layer of almost greasy moisture. Laney pulled her car to a halting, hitching stop and turned off the lights first, but let the engine idle. There was so much press, and other assorted humanity gathered in front of the library that the normal parking lot had overflowed, and the dynamic duo were forced to park across the street, near the alley where Laney chased old Samuel earlier in the day.

  “This is gonna suck,” Elaine said, wishing she’d bothered to bring a jacket. The alcohol’s inner warmth was beginning to flag, and a chill took her for a moment.

  “I’m not sure I agree,” Laney said.

  She shivered too, and clutched her elbows. “I don’t know why I think that, but... I do.”

  Elaine smiled, but her lioness friend didn’t notice. Her eyes were strained as she stared into the darkness. The bright lights of camera crews and the pale, flickering white of florescent overhead bulbs gave her the beginnings of a headache, and the changing air pressure didn’t help either.

  “Where is he?” she asked a moment later. “Where’s Rip? If he’s not around then what the hell’s going on?”

  “Maybe he told them he was coming and hasn’t showed up yet?” Elaine asked, offering a tentative explanation. “I mean, he did get shot today, so a little tardiness wouldn’t be all that offensive.”

  Nodding, Laney pushed her door open with her foot, and as soon as the first plopping rain drops bashed against her shin, she switched off the ignition. Her attention rapt, she couldn’t bear to look away from the dais, though nothing was happening. She stared harder, narrowing her vision and focusing on the splintered corner of the podium. “That’s where the bullet went,” she said in a hollow voice.

  Elaine didn’t reply, she just grabbed Laney’s forearm and held tight in silent support. They took the first few steps toward the crowd. It didn’t seem real; the whole murmur of the crowd felt far away, like a dream that was fading, but still right on the fringes of reality. It wasn’t strange enough that there were all these reporters both from the human and shifter worlds, here in Redby Township. It wasn’t enough that they were, for some reason, hanging out in front of the library and about to have the second press conference of a day with a man who Laney loved and didn’t understand why.

  None of that was enough to make her feel this way. For all her anxiety and nerves, Laney was solid. She had the sort of quiet calm that, even when she panicked, no one knew except Laney herself. But even in those moments of panic and terror, she understood her emotions and why they were happening. Right then, as she stared at the splintered corner of the podium behind which Rip was standing when the bullet tore into his shoulder, she couldn’t explain, not even in the basest way, why her heart was pounding so hard she thought it might jump out of her chest.

  The crowd fell silent, which was new and at once terrifying and refreshing. Something was about to happen, Laney just knew it. From the left of the awning-covered area, there were flashbulbs popping in a way that reminded her of newspaper reporters with things like moxie and pluck taking still shots of someone who was about to do something very important.

  Except, if what she was thinking was right, none of this would be important to anyone listening except her. None of what he was about to say was going to have the slightest bit of impact on anyone on earth except the woman he was going to be directing a whole lot of words at, and who he didn’t even know was there.

  She saw a mop of black hair, hardly brushed but somehow perfect in its crookedness, and then she saw, by virtue of another flash going off, a smile with very white teeth.

  And that one crooked canine. Seeing the brilliant blasts of light reflecting off his eyes and his teeth and the sharp lines of his cheekbones, Laney made her mind up right then to do something she never thought she would. “If this goes like we both think... hope it will, take my car, yeah?”

  She didn’t wait for a response. It didn’t take a split second before she pulled away from Elaine and barreled toward the dais. “Rip!” she screamed out, and relished the way just saying his name felt on her tongue. It was like dripping honey running over her lips.

  When he turned to her and caught her gaze, his smoldering eyes, impossibly blue even in the hazy gray of nearly quarter of eleven at night. He smiled for a split second, and then started laughing as he was carried off in the surge of people trying to force him to the pedestal in the middle of the swarm.

  For a moment, Laney got the image of an ant hill freshly prodded with a stick. All the ants swirled around with a purpose that anyone looking on from above could see: they were rebuilding the walls, emptying out tunnels. But there was no way to tell from their level that there was any order to their actions, except that they somehow did know.

  “What are you doing in this nowhere town, Rip?” one of the peanuts in the gallery shouted at him as he ascended the little platform and adjusted a microphone. He waved at them to quiet down, but that was about as lucky as Laney tearing off her shirt and jumping on him. Actually, it was quite a bit less likely, as she thought about the whole scenario. “What were you doing earlier when you got shot?” Someone else asked. Laney was starting to get irritated for Rip at all the people croaking at him.

  “How are you here when you got shot? Shouldn’t you be in a hospital?” that one was a human reporter. The shifter reporters all started laughing, and the human couldn’t figure it out. After a couple of uncomfortable seconds, he asked a different question to clear the air: “Is this some kind of re-emergence for you? What message are you here to give? Are you running for President?”

  That got everyone roaring. The idea of Rip, the playful lion-shifter with a slightly wild view of how shifters should act, and a penchant for running around without any pants on, being the leader of the free world gave Laney a shot of amusement. She pictured him standing in the middle of a State of the Union address, shirtless, behind a podium. And then when he started getting into the speech and stepped out from behind, he would show off that just like in Texas, everything is bigger with shifters.

  She took a deep breath, and at exactly the same time, Rip lifted his hands again. “Enough!” he shouted into the mic. “If you want to ask questions, fine, but you need to wait for me to actually say what I’m here to say.”

  He cleared his throat and kept waving his hands around. It reminded Laney a whole lot of the cubs at Kiddie Time when she, or anyone else for that matter, tried to get their attention. She glanced around the crowd briefly, and then her eyes settled once again on Rip. When she did, she caught him staring at her. Straight, directly, hungrily, at her—no, into her—his eyes burned the same way Laney’s nerves did.

  For the few seconds they held one another’s gaze, there was more exchanged than there could have been in three weeks of talking. He’d known she would come, and she had. She’s known, somehow, that he wasn’t going to go anywhere without seeing her again.

  The fact that the two of them were there, and were staring at one another, meant that they could count on each other. That whole business about fate and mating and what-all else that Laney never believed? She was seeing it unfold right before her very eyes.

  “I,” Rip started as soon as the crowd fell silent, “came here three months ago. I needed to, as some of you know, get away from what I made and never meant to make. At least, not as far as it went.”

  He took a deep breath and looked over at Laney again, like he was drawing on her for the strength to do something he needed to accomplish, but that every fiber of his being fought back against with all its strength. She felt his nervous energy in the way he kept smiling between sentences. As he ran through a speech about how his life had changed in the past six years of what he called ‘advocacy’, Rip kept watching her. He was a dynamite speaker, so he was looking around like you’re supposed to do to make the audience all feel engaged. But after every sweep of the reporters in the audience, he came back to her.

  Like he’s coming home, she thought. Like everything th
at he’s talking about led him here. Like the whole universe was built just to make this happen.

  She shook her head and couldn’t help but laugh at herself as she ran through the mystical possibilities. No, what happened is that two people met under weird circumstances, and both of them happened to be looking for something they didn’t even realize they wanted. The only thing the universe has to do with anything was that it had the decency to give him gorgeous eyes, and those cheekbones that just about make me want to scream.

  Someone in the front stopped him with a stuttering question. “So does this mean you’re finished? You’re just giving up the fight?”

  Rip smiled slowly, not once taking his eyes off Laney. “No,” he said quietly. The rain beating down overhead, and streaming along Laney’s face gave her the strange sense of a cleansing shower; of a healing mist that was washing away whatever it was that haunted Rip for so long.

  “I’m finished? Giving up?” Rip laughed. “No,” he said. “I’ve just been talking to some new friends, some people I met in this town. And by the way, quit calling it the middle of nowhere. Stop acting like just because this isn’t some place full of skyscrapers and subway stations... and Subway restaurants, that this place is something less.”

  At his chiding, the reporter gaggle fell silent. Rip smiled again, in the way a mischievous kid smiles before delivering a really stellar prank, or the way a heckled comedian grins just before delivering a verbal knockout blow to whoever was stupid enough to try and heckle the guy who talks into a microphone for a living.

  “I came here because life in the cities, life on the lecture circuit and the political talk shows, and the morning shows and the book tour circuit was killing me. No, wait, that’s not true. It was fun, and I was doing good work—work that needs to continue—but I was tired. Not tired like a person gets after a long day of trimming trees, either. I was getting tired in the way a person does when their soul is slowly sucked out of them for years and years, and one day they wake up,” he paused just briefly enough for Laney to notice what he’d said, “and look into someone’s eyes that they’ve needed their whole life.”