by Lynn Red
She dug the toe of her boot into a crack in the dirt below herself, and leaned backward, relaxing against the small pile of stuff they had with them – mostly just her lion taming equipment and a few extra clothes she always kept in the Indiana Jones-like tote she wore. The bag was ostensibly for show, but it never hurt to be prepared in case something got torn mid-show.
Overhead, she watched the blinking stars, which seemed much clearer here, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, than they ever had before. She still couldn’t quite grasp what made her so calm about Lex’s revelation, although she supposed years of listening to whack-a-doo radio and watching alien and Bigfoot shows had her trained to accept the crazy.
Then again, the existence of shape shifters being made apparent and obvious is a little more of a step than listening to crazy people rant about Area-51.
A chill wind blew across the desert, and she realized she didn’t have the slightest clue where they were. She kept a vague mental map of roughly the distances they’d traveled and the directions they’d gone, and overhead she could track somewhat by the North Star. But this dry river bed where she now hid, the endless scrub brush and small clumps of scrubby trees and mesquites, it gave away no secrets, held no landmasses or much anything else useful for navigation.
She lay back further, reclining fully onto the ground, propping her head and neck up with her pouch as she stared, transfixed, into the sky. She remembered being a little girl, and in between bouts of studying too much and worrying about whether she’d studied enough, going out in the back yard and sneaking glances through her dad’s enormous – and as he constantly reminded her, expensive – telescope.
She felt Lex creep up beside her, and started talking as he lay down.
“I always wanted to be an astronomer,” she said. “Or I guess, I wanted to be what I thought an astronomer was. I’m not sure I’d be such a good fit for all the math and sitting around observatories and waiting to collate the eighteenth gamma ray burst of the day.”
“Okay, there you got me,” he whispered. “We might have videogames and daycare like humans, but formal education isn’t much of a thing for lions. Although I hear owls do things differently.”
“Figures,” Cass said with a smile. “Study the stars, you know?”
“Well I have seen television. I know what an astronomer is, but what I mean is – what’s the point?”
“Of what?”
“Of taking these infinite mysteries, all this beauty, and turning into a list of equations and theories? Why not just enjoy it for what it is, and not worry too much about the details?”
For a long moment, both of them were silent. Cass couldn’t quite figure out how to respond to that incredibly astute question, and Lex learned a long time ago that if you’re going to ask a question, you wait for the answer. He didn’t really get rhetoricals.
“I think it’s just another way to appreciate it,” she finally answered. She felt Lex collect the hand she’d had laying on her stomach into his hand, and once again, the heat of his skin surprised her at first, and then gave her a tremendous feeling of safety. “Does that make sense?”
He was about to open his mouth when she continued. “I mean, you can look at something like the stars, and go ‘oh, those are pretty’, and have that be it. Or, you can look at them, and think about how they move, why they’re as bright as they are, and what it is that keeps them doing what they do.”
Another long silence.
“Why do I think you’re beautiful?” he asked slowly, as softly as the wind whispering over top of their little embankment.
“That’s not fair, answering a question with a question. It’s, uh some kind of logical fallacy probably. I didn’t really do college.”
“Why do you need to understand why something has beauty, is my point. What does knowing that the reason I like the way you look boil down to the crook of your nose or the space between your eyes do for me? Nothing. The world is the world. Love it for what it is.”
“Well it’s all a moot point anyway, I never made it.”
“You seem to have made it so far,” he answered in a surprisingly flat way.
“That’s very survival-oriented of you. I mean in school, didn’t make it through, just kind of fizzled out. Went too hard, too fast. Tried to do that thing where you try to please everyone. And then I started having breakdowns. After one particularly bad one,” she gulped back the emotion in her voice. “Anyway, I ran away, ended up on the street, then in a damn circus. How does that even happen? That’s stuff for books, stuff for Lifetime movies.”
Again, Lex was silent for an extended time. The way he did that certainly had an effect: it caused Cass to slow down, to think about what she was saying. She wondered for a moment how many conversations like this she’d missed because of rattling through a bunch of questions and not actually listening to the answers.
“That star might be a hundred million years old,” she said in an awe-struck voice. “Hell, it could be dead and gone by now and the light’s just now getting here.”
“Why?” was Lex’s patently stolid one-word reply. He just let it hang, so apparently, that really was the end of what he was going to say.
“Why the stars? Or why… why what?”
“Why the circus,” he clarified.
“Oh yeah, there’s a story. I’ve already blabbered more to you than I ever did dear old Max, though I was with him for a year and a half. So you first. Why were you in that horrible dirt circus?”
He let out a soft chuckle. “Out of options,” was his cryptic reply. When Cass didn’t say anything, he finally took the cue. “I was adrift, no mate, no cubs, no place in the pride. My mother was the prima, my father the alpha, but I was in the middle of a clutch of cubs. My sister was born first, so she had all the responsibility, and by the time they got to number six – me – there wasn’t much to look forward to.”
Cass rolled over on her stomach, propping herself up on her elbows. She watched the moonlight glint in Lex’s eyes. She kissed his cheek with a short peck, and then settled back into staring at him. “That’s very monarchical. The leading family, all the cubs. So, what, you just had to hit the road?”
“Mmm, no, not had to,” he said. “More like didn’t see the point of not going. I’ve never been one to sit around and wait for something to happen. Like I said, no mate, no cubs, no jewelry on my arms,” he said in reference to hers. “No reason to stay in pride territory. Plus, the Mississippi delta is very humid.”
“Right, so you end up in the desert.”
“It isn’t humid.”
Both of them took a second to laugh, a second to relieve the tension.
“Okay, so,” she began. “How in the world did a lion shifter end up in Lyle Bertram’s circus?”
“Just like yours, mine is quite a story.” And then he stopped speaking.
“Oh, I’m supposed to go first?”
He kissed her softly, pressing her head backwards just so, as his answer. When their lips parted, Lex’s had one of his almost cruelly sexy, half-grins on them.
“Fine,” she said, sighing heavily. Cass crawled to her feet and began pacing as she recounted waking up in a mental ward, and then running away. She told him about the months on the street, working odd jobs to get enough for a bus ticket somewhere else. She described falling in love, falling out of it, dating a guy she didn’t really love, but who has very nice, and then finally not being able to handle that anymore, either.
With every word she said, Cass wrung her hands, took a step in one direction or another, or looked nervously off into the sky. “And then when I really hit the skids, well, that’s…”
“Lyle,” Lex growled.
“Yeah. I was in a bad way. Lots of bad ways, actually. In deep with money, by which I mean I was out of it. And not the sort of broke you can pull yourself up from – the sort of broke where every buck you get goes straight into someone else’s pocket. This restaurant, the owner said I could work for food. So that
’s what I was doing.”
“Where did you sleep?” he asked.
That’s when Cass realized that her cheeks were wet, and the only reason the tears weren’t falling off her face is that the cold wind kept drying them before they did. “Oh, pretty much anywhere. Only hit the ‘under a bridge’ depths a couple of times. I did have an old Toyota I slept in for a long time, but then I had to get rid of that.”
“Ah. Enter Lyle. How did he find you?”
The way Lex said you made it seem like he was reliving his own experience, if only partially.
“It’s kinda hard to remember,” Cass said. Her voice was crackling, fragile, distant. “I said I was in a bad place, well… I mean it. The money I made over top of the food I ate – which wasn’t very much – went straight to other stuff to keep my mind off how ridiculous I was.”
She stuffed her fists into her eyes, rubbing angrily at the tears, as though she was angry about them existing. “I can’t believe what a goddamn idiot I was. I’ve stopped beating myself up over it, but every now and then I still hate old me a little for doing this to now me. It was all some stupid rebellion, you know? An idiotic attempt to… I don’t know, prove that I couldn’t be what people wanted me to be, that I wasn’t the girl they wanted.”
Cass took a deep breath and didn’t bother hiding the shudder, or the shaking shoulders as it rolled out of her. Lex sat up, but didn’t make a move to comfort her, which she actually appreciated. “Every time I cried with Max, I’d try to tell him all this stuff, and he’d kiss me or hug me, or he’d start talking and make me feel better for a second. Then he’d stroke my hair, we’d have sex and the world seemed right. Only…”
“It wasn’t.” Lex’s soft voice had taken on an edge. It was still gentle, still kind – still Lex – but there was an edge of something between anger and understanding in his tone.
Cass nodded, and then looked back up at the stars, almost feeling their warmth bathe her naked vulnerability in a shimmering shield. “Yeah, it never was. I’d try to convince myself I was just being whiny, or dumb, or whatever, but those feelings, the regret and the anger, it kept coming back.”
Lex was watching her, his golden eyes turned a stormy, darker shade. She’d seen that look in his eyes before – albeit when he was a giant magical cat – right before they’d escaped. Slowly, he shook his head from side to side.
“That’s when he found me. Like some, I dunno, hard luck Freddy Krueger. I was just a dumb kid, which I’ve accepted now, by the way, but he found me when I was at my weakest, my most broken. I went to the show when it went through this sorta middle-of-nowhere town in Nebraska, that’s where Max and I ended up after running out of money and being unable to con the Greyhound driver into letting us stay on anyway. We had a fight, Max took some of my clothes, sold them for enough to hop a bus to wherever-the-fuck, and took off. Never saw him again.”
She laughed, bitterly. “To think, I still think about him sometimes and miss him. I guess that’s how bad the circus got. Anyway, yeah, I went to the circus since it was free to get in and at least look at the midway. He saw me somehow, gave me his card, saying if I ever needed anything—”
“Help is only a phone call away,” Lex finished for her, and then smiled grimly.
“Long story slightly shorter, I got drunk, thrown in jail. Next morning, who the hell was I going to call? And then there we are. He paid all my outstanding bills, which at the time seemed great. He offered me a job, which… shit, what else was I doing? So that seemed great too.”
“How long did it take you to realize what happened?” Lex had stood by then, and took a step nearer where Cass was, but made no move to touch her, distract her, or anything except listen to her pain.
She took a deep breath, her lips trembling as she let it out. “Year, probably,” she finally said. “When he gave me that slip of paper showing how much I owed him against how much I’d made. In one year, I made dent the size of five hundred bucks in a ten thousand dollar bill.”
Lex let out a dangerous hiss.
“I was sold,” he said in that flat tone of his. “Sold like a pet. Or more accurately, a trophy.”
Cass’s eyes went wide. “You let that happen? I mean… I’ve seen you do some thrashing before, you’re not exactly easy to convince if there’s something you’re not wanting to do.”
“Our stories aren’t all that different,” he said. “Mine’s a lot shorter, but… not that different. We need a fire,” he announced, and stood abruptly. Cass grabbed his arm as he stalked away, forcing him to face her.
“I told you everything,” she said. “Laid it all out there, every embarrassing thought and feeling laid bare for you to see. And you’re just going to say something vague like how our stories are similar, and then pack it in? That’s it?”
Lex stared at her, but not coldly. He was searching her face and, she thought, his own feelings. It couldn’t be easy for him, but then again, “it wasn’t easy for me either,” she whispered. “You make me feel safe – you always did, even when I thought you were a lion with whom I shared a very small living space. If you don’t feel the same way with me, what the hell are we doing here?”
“We got away,” he said. That time his voice was a little cold, but it was hard to tell if it was actual coldness, or self-defense. “That’s all that matters, isn’t it? We’re free.”
“Are we? Are we really?”
His eyes went from her eyes to her lips, then to her chin, and finally he stared at the ground near her feet. “I need time,” he said. “These aren’t words I was ready to say.”
Lex took her hand in his and slid her clasped fingers off his wrist. “And we do need a fire. Just… give me some time. I’ve been having this fight with myself since the first time I laid eyes on you, Cassiopeia. The very first time. When I saw you, I wanted to show you what I was, what I really was. But I couldn’t. And right now, I’m not sure if I was protecting you from the truth, or me.”
Her hand fell limply to her side, and she watched as he turned again, and crouched. The firm muscles lining Lex’s back, his legs, his arms, all grew leaner and tighter. His hair, turned into a mane, and the tiny hairs all over his body slid out of his pores, becoming the golden fur she’d known for so many years. She took three steps forward and laid her hand on his back.
“If that’s what it is, time? I can… I can give you time.”
He turned, his golden eyes flickering in the moonlight. He nodded, and then was off like a shot.
-7-
“If I’ve got you, what else do I need?”
-Cass
When Lex returned, Cass was laying on her side, pretending not to notice.
When he struck the fire, and made it near enough to her to keep her warm, but not so close for danger, she kept pretending not to notice – in fact she took it one step further and started snoring.
If he knew, which she thought he almost certainly did, Lex made no sign of it, or of trying to disturb her, or anything else.
With those careful inactions, he did more than Max ever had, more than either of her parents, or Lyle, or anyone else.
He let her be the way she wanted, no matter how badly he wanted something different.
The entire sum of attention he gave her, outwardly anyhow, was that when he curled up by her feet to sleep with one eye open, he made sure that her meager covers – not much more than her spare clothes, were wrapped around her, that her head was resting on her canvas bag, and that the fire was warming her back.
She opened one eye just enough to look in his direction and see what he was doing. She knew he saw her, but as soon as he did, he turned away, again giving her the peace she was asking for.
In truth, she’d been trying to sleep the whole time, and between the fire and the pouch under her head, was at least as comfortable as she’d been a hundred other times in her life. But until he settled down by her feet, and she felt the slow, even, rise and fall of the side of him that was against her calf, sleep would
n’t come.
Once he was there though? No matter how irritated she was at him being a little too much like John Wayne with his feelings, she couldn’t keep from feeling the comfort he emanated, and shrugging her shoulders against the ground, moving her body a little more against Lex’s.
With her legs crooked around his curled up form, she felt him purr softly, the way he always did when he, too, felt secure and comfortable. Maybe I’m not crazy, she thought. Maybe I do just need to give him a chance to get used to this new skin, this new… reality. It can’t be easy, it can’t be…
She drifted off as the moon was at its apex, but still low in the sky. The last thing she remembered before drifting off to dream was Lex moving his head, and draping it over the top of her thighs, the way he’d done so many times before, back in the days before she knew.
Somehow, with that one gesture, that one simple motion, Cass knew that he was trying to let himself trust her. That he was fighting against his fear, even if it wasn’t exactly what she wanted, was good enough for right then.
*
“Up!” he urged, with that strange twist in his speech that Lex had when he was in his lion form. “Cass, up, now!”
In a half-startled, fully confused tangle of clothes, messenger pouch, and her natural grace, Cass flopped over onto her side, grunted when she hit a rock with her elbow, and shook her head wildly from side to side.
“Up!” he said again. “Quick!”
Lex was nuzzling her with his head, pushing against her neck to try and urge her off the ground. “Jeez, if you were that hard up,” she said, blowing a tendril of hair out of her face, “all you had to do was ask. Even after last night I wouldn’t be saying no.”
He paused, furrowed his heavy, lion eyebrows and let out a soft growl. “Reassuring,” he whispered, “but no, that’s not it.”