by White, Jade
Then, having won the election, he’d had to learn the ropes of local government and how to execute his new office, which took a good deal of his attention as well. He had never had a problem balancing work life and personal life, but his work life was a different thing now than it had previously been and he seemed to enjoy having a quiet personal life into which he could retreat.
And it was not as if he had actually become celibate. Brenton knew he was in no way capable of just not having sex. He’d still had females, his own kind and humans, in his bed in all the time since he announced his candidacy, and he still enjoyed sex as much as ever. But for some reason he could not name, he did not seem to be as sexually active as he was accustomed to being.
Or perhaps the reason he had grown a little less active was that he could name the reason, and she was a couple of thousand miles to the east.
Many were the times he had thought of calling Tara, or E-mailing her, or texting her. And many more were the times, lying naked in bed or standing in the shower or stretched out nude on the deck in the sunshine, when he had given himself a good and enthusiastic stroking off to the memory of the days and nights they’d spent together.
Somehow he had made a connection with Tara that was even more gloriously physical than anything he’d had with any other partner; a connection that went beyond the joining of bodies to the genuine joy of another person. He had enjoyed not just sex with Tara, but Tara herself. It wasn’t that he had not enjoyed any of his other partners; he could hardly sleep with someone he did not like. But there was something about Tara, some inexpressible quality, that set her apart from anyone else. And there were times when he missed her. After just a week with her, he missed her.
So why did he not just call her, or just get in touch? Perhaps it was the distance between Chicago and Northern California. It was not as if he objected to long-distance relationships as such; he simply found them impractical and did not like having to wait between times being with someone while planning out their schedules over a gap of not just time but miles, and he didn’t appreciate the travel time involved.
Where Tara was concerned, that was ironic in and of itself, considering what she did for a living. Or perhaps it was that the distance between the places where they lived compounded the differences in their lives. When two people did not live in the same place, life itself became an obstacle. Having roots in different places meant coming into contact with different people all the time, people who could pose a considerable distraction from a faraway partner.
Chicago was a distant place filled with thousands of other men who might catch and hold the attention of a woman like Tara: handsome men, sexy men, interesting men, exciting men; men who would not be a couple of thousand miles away, but perhaps just a few blocks. Men who could more easily and readily find their way to Tara and to Tara’s bed, or more easily bring her to theirs.
Brenton and Tara had not made any commitments to each other, after all. They had gotten together and slept together and enjoyed each other, and understood that at the end of the time they shared they would return to their respective lives and pick up where they left off, separately. It was entirely possible that Tara had found another partner or partners in the year and nine months since they last saw each other—possible and, for a woman as attractive and ambitious as she was, probable.
It was even possible that she had found herself another George with whom to make a new life. The thought of Tara possibly having a new husband filled Brenton with a melancholy like the feeling that she had described to him at the end of her year-long trip. It took him back to the day he saw her off at the airport, and the way he felt telling her goodbye, and the poignant feeling of that last kiss before she boarded her plane for home.
Sometimes in Brenton’s heart the feeling that he’d had that day but not expressed would echo like a voice in the hills: Please don’t go… He had never felt that way with a woman until that day, which may have been the reason he never voiced the feeling. It was something strange and new to him, for which he was not ready. And perhaps she would not have been any more ready for it than he was. So he kept it to himself and lived with the strange and unfamiliar ache in his heart from watching her plane fly away.
One thing that time and distance would never change was the memory of having Tara in his bed, and beside his fire, and practically everywhere else in his home and on his property. They had christened the whole place with ecstatic and euphoric sex that Brenton would never forget. Sometimes, lying in bed alone, Brenton would wonder if Tara were thinking of him, remembering him, recalling and reliving the joy that she took from his body and from having him inside her. He knew she would never forget him as he would never forget her. But there were moments by himself, naked and restless under his sheets, when he would call out in his mind, Tara, are you thinking of me?
He would probably never know. It had been so long now, and their lives had surely moved too far apart. They were in different places and on different pages; their time together was now a sweet but bygone thing. If Tara had found herself a new George, or whoever, Brenton sincerely hoped she was happy—though, as much as it was a vain and narcissistic thing to think, he knew that no other man, certainly no human man, would ever please and satisfy her in the same way as he did. He could live with the fact that he had given her a kind of ecstasy and carnal abandon that was not humanly possible.
All of this passed through Brenton’s mind as he went upstairs and stripped off everything but his briefs, and carried his phone back downstairs and out onto one side of the deck opposite the hot tub, where he had a garden enclosed by a high wooden fence. This was where he sometimes went just to sit and think, and sometimes to morph into his lion body where he was doubly sure that he would not be seen, even with the general seclusion of his house.
There was a bench in the garden, surrounded by flowers and small evergreens, where he sat himself down just to contemplate things. After a while, he thought, he would let his human body go and have himself a roll in the grass; and later he would go back inside and broil himself a nice, thick steak from the freezer, the perfect dinner for a hungry and somewhat horny man-lion.
And that was when the phone rang.
Brenton’s heart quickened to see the name on his phone screen. “Hey!” he exclaimed, his face lighting up, and tapped the phone to answer. “Tara! Hey, I was just thinking about you! It’s been—hell, almost a couple of years now!”
“I know,” came her voice from the phone. “Brenton…there’s something I need to talk to you about.”
Brenton knew from the tone of her voice, which did not at all match the pleasure and enthusiasm of his own, that something was wrong. In fact, it sounded very wrong. “Tara, are you okay? Tell me what’s going on.”
And she told him.
Up from the wooden fence enclosing his garden came an eruption of shocked, horrified profanities, shouted at the top of his lungs. He leaped from the bench and paced the stone paving of the garden, clutching the phone in a vise-like grip in one hand and clenching and unclenching a fist with the other. His entire body felt like a knot of alarm that would at any minute snap open into panic. It was all he could do to hold his human shape and stop himself from morphing to lion form and shredding the briefs that were the only stitches of clothing on him.
Grasping at his rationality like a man grasping at straws, Brenton muttered as he paced: “He’s a year old. None of the doctors who looked at him so far would have found anything strange because the mutation doesn’t kick in fully ‘til the first birthday; he would have passed for a completely human kid. He just changed for the first time today. That’s good; nobody knows.” Fear put an urgent, fraught edge in his voice. “Only you saw him do it; that’s good.”
“What do you mean, ‘That’s good’!” Tara cried. Then, her voice lowered noticeably, and Brenton guessed it was because she was trying not to wake the baby. “What do you mean, ‘That’s good’? Brenton, you never told me anything about this—about thi
s part of you! I didn’t know! I didn’t have a clue this was going to happen!”
“Yeah?” Brenton shot back. “Well, you never told me a thing about you being pregnant! My God, Tara, what the hell! You left here pregnant with my cub and never said a damn word to me about it! Not a phone call, not a text, not a frickin’ thing! Tara—holy crap, Tara! You had my cub and didn’t tell me! What the hell is that?” And he went on, pouring out his shock and pain and outrage and more, in words increasingly foul and profane to suit his feelings.
“Don’t you dare talk to me that way!” Tara half-shouted back, still trying to be careful of the sleeping Daniel. “Don’t you dare act like you’re the only one with a reason to be shocked and scared! Brenton, I walked in on what I thought was just my baby in his playpen, and he was…was…!”
“Showing you who he really is! Tara, damnit, that’s my cub!”
“Stop calling him that!”
“That’s what he is, Tara! He’s what I am and you never frickin’ told me!” And he returned to his torrent of angry, stricken, frightened curses.
In a tone measured carefully to stop herself from screaming into the phone, Tara demanded, “Brenton, why didn’t you tell me anything about this?”
Sitting himself back down on the bench to stop himself from kicking the wooden fence, Brenton answered, “What the hell was I supposed to say, Tara? How the hell was I supposed to tell you what I am? What would you have thought? To get you to believe me, I would have had to show you. And what do you think you would have done then? You're a human woman, Tara. You’re not even supposed to know anything like me exists. What I am is supposed to be just a myth or a fairy tale to you. What would you have done, there in my suite or here in my house, if I’d shown you what I am?”
“So you just kept quiet about it, and let me believe you were just a man, that I was sleeping with just a man.”
Feeling almost crazy, he rustled his fingers hard through what used to be his long hair. “Tara, we were just supposed to be going to bed together for a week. We didn’t make any commitments or promises, we were just hooking up and enjoying it. There was no reason to say anything, and I sure as hell wasn’t looking to get you pregnant.”
Tara almost had nothing to say to that. It was nothing she hadn’t thought herself. “Brenton, how is this even possible? How can you even be…that?”
“A werelion, Tara. That’s what I am. I’m a werelion.”
At the sound of the actual word, Tara took the phone from her ear and buried her face in her free hand, muffling her whimper at having to choke back tears of further disbelief.
“Tara, are you still there? Tara!”
His voice shouting at her through the phone made her put it back to her ear again, though her voice was still shaky. “I’m here, Brenton. I just can’t believe this. Brenton, do you have any idea how I felt when I first saw Daniel…that way? I thought someone had done something with him, and I didn’t understand what…that…was doing there.”
“Don’t call him ‘that’. He’s our son. He’s my cub.”
“I can’t even believe the words we’re using. ‘Werelion.’ ‘Cub.’ I thought I was the mother of a beautiful, normal, human little boy. Brenton, how did you get this way? How is this possible?”
“It’s not unnatural, Tara. We’re as natural and real as you. It’s just a genetic mutation some people have. There aren’t as many of us as there are of you; we’re rare. And the way you’re acting is the reason we avoid letting you know we exist.”
“‘The way I’m acting,’ Brenton? Really? Brenton, I don’t understand what my own child is. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with him. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do when he…changes…or how I’m supposed to take care of him when he’s that way, or even when he’ll do it. I’m afraid to leave my apartment and go to work—or go anywhere—or leave him with anyone. Do you see what you’ve done to me, Brenton? Do you see what you’ve done to me?” Tara’s temper was rising. She was starting to speak through clenched teeth.
“Tara,” replied Brenton, “what I see is that my cub is two thousand miles away from me, surrounded by nothing but humans, and I’m as scared as you are. You’ve got to get him the hell out of there. You’ve got to bring him to me. Now.”
“Brenton,” Tara snapped, “I don’t know how to handle him! I don’t know what to do when he changes! Do you think I have any idea what to do with a…” she lowered her voice, again incredulous that she was actually saying it, “…lion cub?”
And at this, she actually did break into tears. Brenton could hear her voice cracking over the phone and knew she was starting to cry, and it twisted a knife in him as badly as the knowledge that she’d had his cub and kept it from him.
“Tara,” he said, “just hold him and pet him and love him. He knows you’re his mother. He won’t hurt you, I promise. He knows your voice and your touch and your scent; he won’t hurt you. He’s still your baby.”
And her voice cracked even worse: “My baby…my baby…”
“Tara, you should have told me,” he said. “Damnit, I could have helped you. I would have gone to you, I would have brought you to me. It didn’t have to be like this. I would have told you everything then and there. I would have helped you through it, let you know what to expect. Yeah, it would have still been a shock, but it wouldn’t have been like finding out the way you did. Tara…damnit, you should have told me.”
“Brenton, you had your life and I had mine. They weren’t the same thing.”
“The minute you knew you were pregnant,” he said, “it wasn’t just your life and my life. It was his life. He can’t be there, Tara. It’s not safe for him or for you to have him there. Daniel has to come to me. He needs to be here with me.”
She balked, “You expect me to take him on an airplane?”
“Not an airliner,” said Brenton. “Not with the public, no. I’m gonna call the private pilot who took us from LA to Napa. I’ll send him for you; he…knows about me and my family. We trust him and so can you. I’ll tell him what’s going on; he’ll come and get you and Daniel. Tara, you have to do this. You have to do this for Daniel. Drop everything else and bring him here.”
Tara weighed all that for the implications. She noted the pause when Brenton explained about the pilot “knowing” Brenton’s family. That probably meant the pilot was just like them. Brenton was sending a werelion to get her and Daniel and bring them to the other werelions. Or at least that was her very strong hunch.
Brenton asked, “Tara, are you listening? Do you understand?”
Wiping her tears and calming herself as best she could, Tara answered, “I understand. Mostly.” She put an edge on that last word. Brenton still had a lot of explaining to do when she saw him.
“All right,” said Brenton. “I’ll let you know when I’ve set it up with the pilot and when he’ll be at O’Hare. I’ll pay him whatever it takes to get him over there and get you and Daniel back here tonight. And then…we’ll talk.”
The edge crept back into Tara’s voice with her reply: “Oh, you'd better believe we’re going to talk.”
“Okay,” said Brenton in a measured calm. “I’ll get back to you in a little while. Just get yourself and Daniel packed and get ready.”
“I’ll be ready,” said Tara, flatly. “Just call when it’s all set.” Unable to say another word for now, she ended the call.
In his garden, with the sun going down, Brenton sat in silence. He put the phone down on the bench carefully, resisting the urge to slam it and break it after the thing he’d just learned.
For the past year, he’d had a cub living in a world where the little werelion-to-be was surrounded by unsuspecting humans. The thought of it—of all the things that humans are, and all the things that humans are capable of being, and his cub being in their world with only his equally unsuspecting mother to look after him—made his blood run cold.
At least it did, until his heart began to race once more and it heated up aga
in. How could this be happening? How could any of this have happened?
And Brenton threw back his head and shouted at the deepening blue of the sky and the awakening stars: “I got her pregnant! Goddamnit, I knocked up a human! I got a human woman pregnant!”
He cursed at himself and he cursed at the stars and his voice broke into near-sobs of fear and pain and anguish, and Brenton could no longer hold his human shape. He stood up from the bench and his body morphed and shifted to a two-legged, humanoid lion form. His sprouting tail split open the back of his briefs, and with his slashing, flailing claws he turned the rest of his briefs to shreds.
Roaring out his pain, roaring on and on, he sank to his now fur-covered knees and sat hunched over, his body and tail quivering at the dreadful thought of his cub being out there in Tara’s world, and all the things that could happen to him—and all the things that could happen to Tara because of him.