by T. Isilwath
So many memories were held there, so many hopes and dreams. Pictures and bits of their life still remained hanging on the walls, draped across the furniture, lying in forgotten piles on the floor… A spare bottle of her shampoo still sat by the tub in the bathroom waiting for her to return. Everywhere there were reminders of the life he had led, and the dreams that had died on that fateful night at the Biltmore.
He had spent the last eleven years by his vixen’s side, waiting until he could reveal himself to her. He had envisioned the moment of his truth so many times, but never had he imagined that things would go as badly as they had. It had never occurred to him that she would see his deception as a betrayal and reject everything that they had built together. Never had he imagined that he would be facing the rest of his life without Joanna as his lover and mate.
He made his way through the darkened halls until he came to the bedroom.
His vixen’s scent was strongest there and he found Long Person in a heap on the mattress. The knowledge that she had even rejected the gift of clothing he had given her cut him even more, and he slowly picked the garment up in his hands, feeling the soft material and remembering the first time he had ever seen her wear it. That fateful night on the hill above the village when he was certain that she was a goddess come down to earth.
He held Long Person to his face, breathing in. Her scent was still there, trapped in the woven fibers, and it flooded his sinuses until he choked. Bile rose to gorge his throat and the despair came back in a rush. He couldn’t do this. How had he ever fooled himself into believing he could do this?
He slumped to the bed, clutching Long Person to his chest as the tears came again, and he sobbed until oblivion came up to grab him in its black maw.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Joanna was helping Elisi in the kitchen when there was a knock at the door. She went to answer, and she was surprised to find Mark Faraday standing on the doorstep. Mark was one of the Michael’s co-workers, and he was the last person she was expecting to see, especially on a Sunday the week before Christmas.
“Mark? This is an unexpected visit,” she commented as he came inside. “If you’re looking for Michael, he isn’t here.”
He looked uncomfortable as he took off his Stetson and held it by the brim.
“I know. I came to see you, Miss Joanna,” he said, facing her.
“Me? What can I do for you?”
Mark fidgeted a little and worried the brim of the hat before he realized what he was doing and stopped himself.
“Well… Michael hasn’t been to work in two weeks. Ain’t like him not to show for work like that. We’ve been tryin’ to call him, but he’s not answerin’.
Then Bob went over to yer apartment to see if he was there. His truck’s parked in the lot, but there weren’t no answer when he knocked on the door. The buildin’ super’s off visitin’ her momma, and the maintenance man won’t let us in unless we get the police involved. We was hopin’ you’d go over there and check on him, even though we heard y’all had a fight,” Mark explained in his Southern drawl.
She swallowed and tried to remain calm. She hadn’t tried to call Michael since she’d gotten back from Fort Bragg, and he hadn’t tried to contact her. She had thought that it was for the best, but now with Mark bringing her this news, she was questioning her decision.
“No, it isn’t like him,” she admitted. “You say his truck is in the lot?”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s what Bob said.”
She frowned. She’d parked the truck there when she’d picked up her car on the night she’d returned his ring. Had he never gone back to the apartment?
“Thank you for coming to see me, Mark. I’ll go to Cullowhee and check on him. I’ll let you know what I find,” she told him.
Mark gave her a grateful smile and nodded his head. “Thank you, Miss Joanna. We was hopin’ you’d do that.”
“Give me a couple of days and I’ll give you a call. I had eye surgery on Friday, and it’ll be a day or two before I can drive again.” Mark looked surprised. “I hope everything’s okay.” She gave him a reassuring smile. “It was just laser surgery to stop the bleeding on my retinas. I’ll be fine in a few days.”
“All right, Miss Joanna. We’ll be lookin’ forward to your call.”
“Great.”
He gave her a nod, put his hat back on and left. When she closed the door, she turned to see her grandmother standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
“That was Mark Faraday. Michael’s not been to work in two weeks.” Elisi frowned. “So I have heard. Will you go?”
She put a hand to her forehead. “I said I would, but I shouldn’t drive until at least tomorrow. If my eyes are still sensitive, I may have to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday.”
“Do you still have the headache?” her grandmother asked with concern.
She sighed and nodded. “Yeah.”
“You should lie down and rest. Close your eyes.”
She shook her head. “I’m not tired. If I lie down, I’ll just stare at the ceiling and worry. I’d rather be doing something. Just keep the lights low.” Her grandmother made a small noise of defeat and turned back to the kitchen. She followed shortly thereafter.
“Maybe I should just call the police and have them check on him…” she stated as she dried the dishes Elisi had washed.
“Could you live with that decision?”
She frowned and worried at her lip. “I don’t know.”
“What if they find something that they shouldn’t?” Elisi questioned.
“If he’s lived 400 years, he’s probably learned how to protect himself,” she countered.
“Only if he is himself.”
She snorted and began putting dishes away in the cupboards, but Elisi was right. Akihiro might not be himself after what she had done to him, and that might make him do something stupid.
“Maybe it’s best if I don’t go,” she said as the guilt and remorse returned.
“He’s better off without me.”
“That’s not your decision to make, Child,” Elisi chided gently.
“How can you say that after what I’ve done to him? You heard Mark. Michael hasn’t been to work in two weeks. And Dan told us last week that Michael had disappeared. I hurt him, Elisi. I hurt him badly.”
“And you both needed time apart to lick your wounds. Would you abandon all you have built together because of this one argument?”
“It was a lot more than an argument,” she countered peevishly.
Elisi was unphased. “No matter. Would you allow it to destroy what you had between you?”
“What we had was based on a lie, Elisi. We can’t ever go back to that.”
“Then maybe it is time to build a new life based on the truth.”
“The truth is I’m not worthy. He revealed himself to me and I rejected him.”
Her grandmother shook her head. “You are too harsh on yourself. You reacted in a perfectly understandable way to a terrible shock. And your worthiness is not for you to decide. He decided long ago that you were worthy enough for him to live through the centuries. That should be enough for you.”
“Elisi, you don’t understand,” she insisted.
“I understand better than you think I do. You should go to see him. You will not be able to live with yourself if something has happened to him and you did nothing.”
She sighed and nodded. “You’re right. If my eyes are better, I’ll drive down tomorrow.”
“Good. I will say no more on the subject.”
‘Good,’ she wanted to say, but held her tongue. She knew her grandmother had only her best interests at heart. She’d been miserable since she’d left Akihiro at the Biltmore, and they were both certain that Akihiro wasn’t doing much better. ‘Maybe Elisi is right. If something happened to him, and I didn’t do anything about it, I’d never forgive myself.’
She sighed and hoped her eyes would be better by Monday.
********
There was pain there; a terrible gut-wrenching pain that no one should have to endure, and he couldn’t bring himself to face it. In his tiny world made up of only himself and his vixen’s scent, he found solace and peace. He could stay there forever, drifting just on the dark side of consciousness, until his body either forced him to wake up or it stopped functioning due to neglect.
In his current state, he didn’t really care which side won. He just knew he wanted to prolong facing a world without his vixen in it. He curled up tighter, pressing his face into the softness that smelled like Her, and let himself sink deeper.
********
Her eyes were somewhat better in the morning, and her headache had downgraded from “jackhammer” to “rubber mallet” which was a significant improvement. She took some pain medication, drank a cup of herbal tea, and waited to see if the headache would go away completely. After about an hour, she felt much better and decided that she was all right to go to Cullowhee since it was less than an hour’s drive. She had special sunglasses that wrapped around her eyes to shield her peripheral vision from bright light. They made her look like a high tech G-man, but they made it possible for her to go out in sunlight.
Elisi wished her well as she left the house, and she drove off to an uncertain outcome. The drive itself was uneventful, and, in many ways, too short because she had no opportunity to mull over what she was going to say or do when she got to the apartment. She actually sat in the parking lot for almost thirty minutes, going over scenarios in her head. What if he wasn’t there? What if he was? What would she say to him? What would she do if he wasn’t happy to see her?
She finally decided that sitting in the car was getting her nowhere so she exited the vehicle and entered the building. She took the stairs up to the third floor and walked down the corridor to their apartment.
“Michael? Michael, are you there? It’s me, Joanna,” she called, knocking.
There was no answer, and she wondered how long she should wait before she tried her key.
‘What if he changed the locks?’
She knocked two more times, but there was still no response, so she fished out her key and opened the door.
The apartment was dark and appeared empty. She closed the door behind her, shutting out the light from the hall, and took off her G-man sunglasses.
“Michael?” she said, looking around. “Akihiro?”
Silence was her answer and she made her way down the hall to the bedroom. As she reached the open doorway, she saw something on the bed, but the blinds were drawn and the room was too dark for her to see clearly.
“Michael?” she asked, but there was no response.
She made her way over to the bedside table and reached for the touch lamp. Her fingers brushed along the metal frame, and the light came on to its lowest setting. She was glad because the low wattage didn’t hurt her eyes yet gave her enough light to see. When her eyes adjusted, and she saw what was on the bed, she gasped and was very glad that she had listened to her grandmother.
Akihiro was lying there, motionless and silent, and without his choker so he was in his true form. He was naked, and she could see a pile of discarded clothes on the floor. He was on his side and he had surrounded himself with her clothes, most especially Long Person which he was clutching in his hands and pressing to his face. The scene made her heart spasm and she frowned.
“Akihiro,” she said. He didn’t answer so she repeated the call as she leaned over and shook his bare shoulder. “Akihiro, wake up.” He did not respond and that confused her. Akihiro had always been a light sleeper, even as Michael. By all rights, he should have heard her come in and awakened right away, but he wasn’t even twitching, and she began to suspect that he might be more than just deeply asleep.
‘Okay. What’s he done here?’
She took a closer look, noting that his body was different from the one she had known back in Feudal Japan. He’d filled out. Gone was the lanky, half-starved form of an adolescent. Now he was lean, but well muscled, and he had the body of a dancer: strong and lithe. His face had matured, losing the boyish look and taking on the features of a healthy adult. He was still a bishounen, but obviously a man.
His hair was longer, and it was darker by a shade or two as well, and the fine hair that blanketed the lower half of his abdomen had gotten a bit thicker if what she was seeing was accurate. The biggest difference was the two tails. She had thought she’d seen two peeking out from under the towel at the Biltmore, but she hadn’t been certain. Now it was obvious that there were two separate fox tails tucked behind him.
In all the time she had taken to examine (and admire) him, he hadn’t moved and he was barely breathing, adding to her notion that this was no ordinary sleep. She suspected that he had gone into some form of catatonia, probably triggered and sustained by her scent. If that was true, then no amount of shaking or calling would bring him out of it.
Operating on a theory, she carefully pried Long Person from his grasp and pulled it away from his face. Then she got into bed beside him, positioned his head so that his nose was at the base of her neck, and waited. While she lay there in the bed, she stared at the ceiling, thinking about all the memories she and Michael had made in the room, and she wondered how their life must have seemed to him from his point of view.
What had it been like for him to be with her in human form? What had he been thinking as they lay in the dark? Were there times when he wanted to take off the choker? In hindsight, she thought there may have been times when he did. Was he afraid of what she would do if she discovered his secret?
‘He must have been so conflicted.’
She turned her head enough to see one of his ears, limp against his skull and half buried by his hair. She smiled and reached up to touch it, but frowned when he didn’t flick it away. His hair was as soft as she remembered.
“What did you think when I came home and told you about the Gate testing? What were you feeling when you watched me go into it, knowing that it was going to malfunction?” she whispered aloud. “Were you scared? Did you fear that the past wouldn’t repeat itself? Did you worry that I might not come back? What were you going through in that head of yours?” She let her finger trace the side of his cheek, running her nail along his jaw. His face was still beloved, and she was surprised to find that the love was still there under all the pain and sense of betrayal. Perhaps that was what had made everything so terrible, because underneath it all she still loved him.
“How are we ever going to come back from this, my fox? How am I ever going to forgive you? How are you ever going to forgive me?” Akihiro didn’t answer, but she knew that he was still deep inside of himself. She sighed and moved closer, hoping that her scent, and the heat from her body, would call him back. The shadows on the wall changed with the movement of the sun, the thin lines of winter light coming through the closed blinds tracking across the neutral, off-white paint as the day passed. She closed her eyes and let herself drift.
Something woke her. Akihiro’s breathing had changed and she thought she could see movement behind his closed eyelids. She shifted a little so she could look him in the face and waited to see what he would do. He twitched, his body going through a series of involuntary shudders that reminded her of a dreaming dog, and he made little whimpering sounds as his breathing picked up. She watched, waiting, until he drew a deep breath and let it out with a moan just before he opened his eyes.
Amber brown. Maybe a little more flecked with green and gold, but they were the eyes she remembered. They were the ones that had follo
wed her every move and gazed at her adoringly. Now they were dilated and looked confused.
“Joanna?” he whispered faintly, as if half afraid she was a dream.
“It’s me,” she confirmed in a soft voice.
He moved, struggling to rise as limbs slow from disuse made him clumsy and sluggish. He finally managed to sit up on the bed, his body trembling and his fingers jerking spasmodically, then he shook his head and rubbed his face before cracking his neck and rolling his shoulders to work out the kinks.
She sat up as well and waited for him to speak. It took a few moments, but he finally cleared his throat and opened his mouth.
“What day is it?” he asked quietly, his voice rough and gravelly.
“It’s Monday, December 17th,” she replied, keeping her tone neutral.
“Monday,” he repeated, licking his dry lips and casting her a brief look before he dropped his gaze. “When did you get here?” She glanced at the clock before answering. “About two hours ago.” He nodded then suddenly whipped his head around, his eyes wide. “You cut your hair,” he said with a gasp.
“You expected me not to?” she countered, an edge of challenge in her voice.
He started to say something, then stopped as his face contorted with pain and he placed an arm across his stomach, groaning.
“Are you all right?” she asked, worried. She had no idea what the effects of catatonia would have on his body, but she remembered clearly how she had felt after she had awakened from her diabetic coma.
“Yeah. My body’s still coming back. It’s protesting,” he replied, then he looked at her, his face a portrait of hope and agony. One hand reached out, but paused in mid-air, and he let it drop to the mattress. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
She gave him a small smile and looked away, unsure of what to say or do now that he was awake and they had to face each other. He moaned again and curled his spine forward, hunching over. She frowned.