“Have we seen this one before?” asked Swift, hoping for past history from which to derive some preliminary hypothesis. Where had she originated? What land-locked currents had brought her to their sea?
Dancer ran a quick search of the Collective, checking for any past sighting, the woman as a child perhaps, standing cautiously with the waves breaking around her waist and her tiny hand clenched in an adult’s, or as a teenager, frolicking with giggling girlfriends and vociferous boys. The Collective was a compendium of these sightings, passed from generation to generation, from one cetacean species to another, constantly updated as pods encountered each other on the migratory routes. Dancer’s search came up with nothing. Either the dead woman had never set foot in the ocean, or on a beach or pier—or no cetacean had ever seen her do so. “I think,” she told Swift, gently nudging aside his attempts to mate with her, “that we’ll have to make a new entry for her.”
“Maybe we should try pushing her back?” But Swift knew it was too late for that. From the look of it, she’d quit breathing some time ago. Her lungs were full of seawater, and he had but the most rudimentary grasp of how that fluid might be removed and replaced with air. He leaped out into the cool morning air to get a look at the beach. Even if they were successful at moving her back into her own environment, there were none of her kind around to help.
They probed her with sonar clicks, high-frequency whistles and directed pulses mapping her body as surely as any CAT scan. She was fat, but she had been fatter. In the gas-bloated tautness of her skin, they found the scar-like trails of stretch marks concentrated around hips and thighs, breasts and stomach, lighter bands against the already pale hue of her flesh. There were small scars which seemed to indicate that some of her bulk had at one time been taken by predators or parasites. Such was their logic that they couldn’t formulate such a concept as willingly sacrificing a part of one’s self. Human vanity was a mystery to them, one far more complicated than the task of mapping the currents and tides which tossed up these corpses more and more frequently.
Their probing revealed no anomalous growths, no deformities or past traumas of any significance. There were minor, negligible scars of the type acquired through everyday living. There were the usual accumulations of heavy metals and toxins, things the humans might know as mercury, lead, organa halogens, and PCBs, but the dolphins only recognized as unnatural intruders to the body. These were elements the dolphins had become accustomed to finding within themselves, as well as every other dweller of the sea.
She’d never borne children, perhaps never even mated (but that was a difficult call to make), and had never marked her body with any of the colorful designs so common among the younger members of her species. Her hair was long and blond (Swift loved the feel of it against his belly), softer than any kelp or sea grass. She was naked. She was cold. She was dead.
Swift mourned her loss, same as he did that of any intelligent species, and wished for the thousandth time that he could either understand why these things happened or be given a different assignment by the Council of Elders. Still, the sight of her did not hit him as hard as the infant they’d found the week before. He had pushed that one back on the land, struggling forward until his own body lay half exposed on the beach, bottle-shaped nose repeatedly pushing at the tiny body as if all he had to do was awaken the child. But the child had been, like this woman, dead. And when Swift had finally struggled back into the sea, it was with the knowledge that man killed not only cetaceans, but his own kind as well.
“There’s no sign of injury,” Dancer said when she’d finished entering the sonar data into the Collective.
“She drowned herself,” Swift acknowledged, thinking it obvious.
“Perhaps she was shunned by the others,” Dancer suggested.
“Why would they do something like that?” He rolled through her hair again, its silken length whispering down his side, across his claspers, and over his flukes.
“Why do they do any of the things that they do?” she countered.
He agreed that it was incomprehensible. The mystery of this woman’s death, the loss of the sheer potential that she embodied as a sentient being, was beyond him. And if she had intentionally stranded herself here, how could the others have allowed it—or, worse, driven her to it?
They made their entries, logged their observations in the hopes that another survey team might later be able to draw some conclusions, and then they made their way up the beach, frolicking in the surf, making love in the whitecaps. Dancer put the dead woman out of her mind. But Swift could not. He remembered her hair, so long and lustrous as it billowed in the waves. He tried to imagine the warmth and softness of her. Wondered what it would be like to feel her next to him, to be stroked by those cleverly constructed hands. He would never know.
No one ever would.
The Baited Night
* * *
The barmaid brought George another Budweiser. Odd, seeing as how he hadn’t ordered one. He hadn’t, in fact, even finished his first—wasn’t so sure he was going to. The pain was less than usual tonight, half a beer and it was just a remote, minor annoyance, like the buzzing of a distant insect. And he really didn’t want to be here. The hotel’s bar, with its mariner motif, rock and roll noise, smoke, and boisterous people (all of whom were having the time of their lives while successfully ignoring him), was making him sick. He didn’t know why he’d come here in the first place.
“Thanks,” he said, blinking at her through cigarette smoke, “but I think you’ve made a mistake.”
“No mistake, love.” She shifted a wad of gum to one cheek and pointed across the bar room to where a tall redhead sat beneath a weathered harpoon at a corner table. “Compliments of the lady in the blue dress.”
George tried not to look dumbfounded. “Uh... did she say anything?”
The barmaid leaned over the table so she wouldn’t have to shout over the music. “A drink from someone in a bar usually means they’re interested,” she said in the same tone his college professors had used when he’d failed to grasp some basic, intuitive engineering principle.
“Interested?”
“You’re invited over to her table, numbnuts!”
“Oh. I see.” But he didn’t.
She gave him an exaggerated wink. “She ain’t bad lookin’. I’d get over there now if I was you, ’fore she decides to buy someone else a drink.” Then she was gone in a swirl of skirt and dancer’s thighs.
So, George thought. It actually happens just like in the movies. Drop into a bar and get picked up. Just like that. Easy.
But you’re not going to get picked up if you don’t get your ass in gear. Numbnuts. He laughed, letting a smile split his usually sour face. Across the bar, the redhead saw the smile and thought it was for her. She sent one back.
Encouraged, George got up, taking the fresh beer with him. He tried to walk nonchalantly across the smoke-filled room, but nonchalance wasn’t easy for him, not at six foot six inches tall and two hundred pounds. Gangly was the term most often used to describe him. He possessed all the grace of a rhinoceros—and most would say that comparison did the rhinoceros an injustice.
Halfway there, he noticed how short her blue dress was. And how long her legs were. Golden, tanned legs. The color of warm cinnamon in sunlight. No hose. Just legs. A woman with legs that nice didn’t need hose. The dress was one of those sexy little one-piece jobs. It was so short he could’ve seen her snatch if her legs weren’t crossed. He was excited by the way her thighs lay across one another, brown velvet over long, toned muscle. A man could die happy between thighs like those.
From there, his gaze traveled across hips excitingly smooth beneath the thin veneer of her dress. Her waist was small, her stomach flat, her breasts just perfectly so. She wasn’t wearing a bra and the dress had assumed the firm contours of her breasts. Her nipples were hard, buttons mistakenly sewn inside her dress. Her hair lay like gathered copper fibers across her shoulders. Her lips were red, eye
shadow blue to match her dress, cheeks lightly flushed—makeup or excitement, he couldn’t tell which.
“Mind if I join you?” he heard himself say. A stupid opening line when she’d more or less invited him over, but what else was he supposed to say? He braced himself for a dismissal: she’d say there’d been a mistake, the beer had been meant for another man, or in the poor light she’d thought he was someone else when she sent it over. He cursed himself for a damn fool for being here in the first place. But, God, she was a looker!
“Please do.” Her voice was soft music.
“Thanks for the Bud.” He took a quick sip to show his appreciation, set it down, and pulled out the chair across from hers.
“You don’t think it was too forward of me?” Her eyes said that she didn’t care if he did. She struck him as the type that knew what she wanted and went after it.
He sat down. “Not at all.”
“A lot of men are put off when women make the first move.”
“Not me.” He extended a hand across the table, careful not to knock over his beer or her margarita. Clumsiness was another of his less desirable traits. “George Cooper.”
She placed her dainty hand in his large one. Her hand was warm and soft. Her nails were red like her lips. A painted woman, his mother would have said. But what did Mother know? It was Mother that had kept him isolated for so many years. So much time wasted. So little remaining.
“Cheryl Morgan,” the redhead replied, her eyes like green diamonds.
He wanted to kiss her hand, but knew how foolish that would look. Romance and gallantry were dead save for the fantasies he read and the dreams he kept to himself. “Pleased to meet you, Cheryl.” Saying that made him feel foolish too.
“Likewise. What do you do for a living, George?”
“Engineer. I work for the government. I’m here for a conference.” Diarrhea of the mouth. He was spilling answers faster than she could ask the questions.
“Are you here for long?”
“Just through Friday.”
“Do they send you to many conferences?”
“A few,” he said. Then, before she could fire off another question, he blurted, “Would you like to get out of here?” He felt heat rise to his face. There was probably a proper way to build up to such a question. His limited experience gave him no idea what it was, but he was certain you weren’t supposed to jump straight to Your place or mine? not more than two minutes after introducing yourself.
To his surprise, she didn’t bat an eye at his abrupt request. Instead, she tossed off the last of her margarita. “What are we waiting for?”
He wanted to toss off his own beer. That would have been the macho thing to do—perhaps even the polite thing since she had paid for it—but his hands were shaking too bad. He didn’t trust himself not to spill it all down the front of his shirt.
She rose, uncrossing her legs to do so. White bikini underwear. The whitest, smallest, sheerest goddamn underwear he’d ever seen in his life. His heart near slammed through his chest.
“Have you got a car?” Cheryl asked.
He swallowed the lump where his heart had lodged. “Uh, yeah. Rental car. Out front in the parking lot.” As he got to his feet, she slid her arm through his. Her skin was soft silk, cool and yet electric at the same time.
It wasn’t until he was opening the door for her that he wondered why they needed a car. He was staying here in the hotel. He’d assumed she was too. Another odd thing: she didn’t appear to have a purse. He couldn’t recall ever seeing a woman out without her purse before. He wondered how she’d paid for drinks at the bar, but he wasn’t about to ask anything that could blow the magic of this evening.
She swung her shapely legs into the car and he closed the door after her. He ran around the front of the Plymouth Reliant and got in behind the wheel. The Reliant started easily. “Where to?” he asked, shifting into drive.
“How about going up the coast a ways? Maybe find a nice quiet stretch of beach?”
Oh God. “Great idea.” He hoped his voice didn’t sound as nervous to her as it did to him.
“Full moon tonight. You ever swim naked beneath a full moon, George?”
He couldn’t get his mouth to work on an answer to that one.
• • •
The sand was an opalescent blue beneath the pale moon as George followed Cheryl’s swaying hips across the beach and down to the surf.
It’d been a quiet drive, she asking most of the questions, he trying his best to answer them without sounding like a dork. She’d asked where he was from, what type of things he liked to do whenever he wasn’t engineering (her words), and whether or not he liked Virginia Beach. She didn’t ask if he was married, but he’d managed to work the fact that he wasn’t into one of his answers anyway. Somehow they’d briefly touched on the subject of his parents. George had explained about his father’s death in a freak railroad accident. That had happened when George was eight, leaving him very few memories of his father, a salesman who’d been gone most of the time anyway. George had carefully maneuvered the conversation away from his mother. Cheryl had asked about his job; he’d told her what he could about the Army’s Advanced Weapons Lab and what he did there, steering clear of the classified research projects. They’d gone only a few miles up the coast when she’d directed him down a side road where, after a few hundred feet over sand and gravel, they’d come to a secluded beach.
Cheryl had left her high heels in the car, and as he followed her across the barren beach, George found himself mesmerized by the little spurts of sand her feet kicked up. Rather than stopping at the waters edge, Cheryl walked right in.
“Take your shoes off, George.”
Easy enough. He sat on the sand and pulled them off. The waves were washing around Cheryl’s knees by the time he’d tucked his socks into his shoes, rolled up his pant legs, and joined her.
“It’s cold,” he said and instantly felt like a wimp.
“No, it’s wonderful,” she replied, but her nipples were like small marbles.
A wave rolled in, and she hiked her dress up over her waist to keep it dry. For a second, he stared wide-eyed at her flat brown stomach, hips, navel, and the V of her crotch. The wave washed around her; then a moment later, receded, leaving her panties soaked. In the moonlight, the dark triangle of her pubic hair stood out in stark relief beneath her underpants.
“Wish we had a board.”
“Board?” he stammered.
“A surfboard, silly.”
“Oh.” He was having trouble thinking beyond the tight fit of her wet underwear.
Something surfaced and splashed in the darkness to their right.
“What was that?”
“Dolphin,” she answered. “They’re out here all the time.”
“What if its a shark?” George asked nervously.
“Sharks don’t splash around like that. They just cruise along under the surface and look for something to eat.” Cheryl snuggled against him, still holding her dress up above her waist. “See anything you’d like to eat, George?”
There it was again, just out of sight in the darkness, something big breaking the surface of the water. George thought he heard the slap of a tail before it was gone. She was probably right. Just a dolphin. Nothing dangerous. He’d even seen a few of them earlier from the balcony of his hotel room. It was certainly nothing worth distracting him from her.
Another wave rolled in, prying them apart. As it slapped George just above the small of his back, he realized he’d unwittingly been moving out into deeper water. Cheryl was clutching her dress in a knot just below her breasts. When the next wave hit, she squealed and gave a little jump. As she jumped, tender white flesh bobbed out from under the dress, the lower half of one sweet, untanned breast, so captivating that he almost didn’t notice when something brushed against the back of his right thigh.
“Hey!” Startled, George jumped, lost his footing in the shifting sand, and fell forward into the water. H
e came up sputtering and already starting for the shore.
“George? What’s wrong?”
He hesitated. This wasn’t right. He couldn’t leave her out here alone. “Let’s go back to the beach. Something brushed against my leg a second ago.”
“Don’t be silly, George. It was probably just a fish.”
“It was bigger than just a fish.”
“A dolphin then.”
“Maybe.” But he wasn’t buying it. “I think we should go in anyway.”
She pouted, her full red lips moist with salt spray. “I wanted to go for a swim.” The moon played spotlight as she pulled the dress off over her head. Her breasts shone in the pale light like two smaller moons, each orbited by a small dark satellite. He stared, open-mouthed, as they bounced with the swell and fall of the surf.
There’ll never be another night like this, George thought. Like she said, its only a goddamn dolphin. He moved toward her, his shaking hand reaching out to cup one of her soft white breasts. Against his palm, her nipple was rigid. He kissed her once on the mouth, lightly, timidly. She smiled reassurance, her tongue a furtive animal that darted once across his trembling lips. His free hand swept down her back, over the firm contour of her ass, beneath her wet underpants. The muscles of her stomach quivered as he bent and put his mouth over her other nipple.
Something struck George’s leg hard enough to take it out from under him. He sprawled in the sea, his mouth popping off Cheryl’s teat with a sound like a pacifier yanked from an infant’s mouth. He came up fast, choking on salt water, feeling a sudden numbness in his leg. Shock. He’d read somewhere that it takes several minutes before you actually feel it when a shark takes a limb.
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