by Amy Star
No! he cried in his mind. Not here! Not again! Why? Why do I keep coming back here? Why do I have to keep coming back here? I didn’t mean for it to happen! Why?
He broke into a run, deeper into the darkness. Any direction was as good as any other. There was nothing but him and the darkness, and it did not matter if he ran forward or turned and ran to any side. The darkness was impenetrable. But somewhere out there, somewhere, there had to be a light. That was all he needed to find, just one flicker of light to give him a place to run. He had to find it and escape the dark before they came. And he knew they were coming. They would be upon him if he did not move, did not run. They would be there with their tails flailing, their jaws snapping, their claws slashing. Any second they would be there, he knew.
And Jaxon was right. He’d been running for less than a minute when he heard their wing beats above him, the terrible sounds of their huge, flapping, leathery wings. It never took them long to find him. They were coming down now, right on top of him.
“Get away!” Jaxon shouted into the dark! “Get away! Let me be! I’m sorry! Why can’t you see I’m sorry? I didn’t mean it! I didn’t want it to happen! Why don’t you leave me alone? Just leave me alone!”
He wanted to become a bear and face them, stand up to them. At least if he could become a bear, it would be fairer. In his other body, he could fight back on his own terms, swiping his bear paws at them in his defense, raking his bear claws against them. He could make them leave him alone, leave him in peace with his regrets about things he could not change. But in this place, in this darkness, he could only be a man—a man all too vulnerable to being torn to shreds when they swooped down on him from the black void. A man helpless against the punishment that they brought for what he’d done.
Ducking as he ran, trying to cover his face with his hands, Jaxon shouted into the dark, “I said I didn’t mean it! I’m sorry! What do you want from me? What do you want from me? Leave me alone!”
They did not listen. They kept coming, swooping over him, slashing their claws only inches from his head and his shoulders, threatening to rip him right open with every pass. Jaxon could only run, keep running, into the darkness.
And as he ran, his breaths burning hot in his chest, his heart pounding as if to smash his ribs, in his anguished mind repeated a name, a name he would never and could never forget. It was a name that sounded like music to him the first time he heard it and sounded like warmth and contentment for so long thereafter—until it became something else. That name became a curse that he feared would hang over him forever, no matter what he did. It would always be a part of him. And it was the reason they were coming for him.
There was a swooping sound above him and behind him, and a noise like the cry of an eagle, only louder, sharper, more piercing and grinding and raucous. It was the cry of something descending right at him, borne on wings that Jaxon knew were stretched out wide, even in the darkness where they could cast no shadows. He felt a rushing at his neck, like a sudden, stiff wind. And then came the impact, the blow, so sharp and hard that it knocked him clear off his feet, sent him careening forward like a passenger shot through the windshield of a crashing car, and left him tumbling end over end in the darkness. The thing that struck him passed on overhead, whooshing in the air as it went. And Jaxon lay in the dark, trembling, gasping, dragging himself up to his knees, needing to get running again before what hit him came back for another pass.
But it was too late.
All around him now were the sounds of something massive fluttering and beating in the air, the cruel beating of wings. The beating sounds were on three sides of him, hemming him in. And Jaxon, on his knees, despaired at the sound. They were coming for him—again. They would never let him be. He would never know peace, not from them. They were angry, as they had been then, as they would always be.
They stepped out of the darkness, three of them, coming out of the black void at three points. Jaxon crouched, panting, between the converging shapes. They were covered with scales and had necks like serpents. They had long, blunt snouts, and their heads were crowned with horns. Long tails like flattened pythons curled around from the back of them, underneath their mighty, folded wings. They stopped at points far enough from him to take a long, hard, unforgiving look at Jaxon’s entire helpless form sitting in the dark but near enough that at any moment they could lash out with tail or claw and cut him to shreds. They surrounded them and stood, as they always did, in judgement.
Jaxon gasped, “I know. I know. I’m sorry. I keep telling you I’m sorry. I never wanted any of what happened. You know I didn’t. You know I didn’t! If you can’t forgive me, I understand. If I were you, I wouldn’t forgive me either. But I’m out of your lives now. I’m gone. Can’t you just let me go? None of you will ever see me again. I’m sorry. Let me go…”
The largest of them, the one standing right in front of him, leaned his serpentine neck forward and gazed and Jaxon with eyes ablaze. He opened his fang-filled snout, and in a hissing voice, gave a name—that name—into the dark.
“Fiona…!”
Something inside Jaxon shriveled at the sound of the name. His shoulders slumped. Helplessly, he said, “I know. I know.”
The other two joined the first, hissing out the name: “Fiona…!”
Jaxon hung his head. He would never forget. They would never let him forget.
In a chorus of hate, the three of them hissed on, inundating his ears with the sound of that name. “Fiona…Fiona…Fiona…!”
As it always happened, as it always would happen, Jaxon flung his head up, his eyes closed tightly, tears squeezing forth onto his face, and cried out in agony: “Fiona! I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Fiona! Fiona—I’m sorry!”
The sounds of the three judges hissing around him grew as loud as his desperately shouting voice, until they were all that Jaxon could hear. And he felt the three of them coming closer to him. At any second now, the talons of one would reach him, and the raking claws of the others would follow, and they would rip and tear and shred away at him until nothing remained of Jaxon but tatters and blood…
And he bolted upright in bed, convulsing with terrified breaths, covered with a cold flop-sweat like the sweat of a breaking fever.
Gulping air like a man saved from drowning, Jaxon sat up, naked and vulnerable—and alone. It was dark, but only the ordinary dark of the night, with the moonlight coming in through the shades of his bedroom window. There were no winged figures, no voices hissing in judgement and retribution. There was only Jaxon and his memories.
He managed to calm himself, slow his galloping heartbeat, and make his breathing less frantic. It was over—again. But how much longer would it go on? How many more times would it keep happening?
Into the night of his bedroom, he whispered the name— “Fiona”—that was synonymous with the grief and his remorse that had never left him and perhaps never would.
Jaxon knew they would never forgive him. But they were so far away, and he was right here, having taken only the memories with him. He could accept them hating him forever. But how long would the memory go on punishing him? And how long would he go on hating himself?
Chapter6
And so, Sherry invited Jaxon to her house for breakfast.
Her parents were out, Vic at work and Angela doing some morning errands, so they had the house to themselves. She made waffles because he had always loved them, and she gave him honey to put on them because as a bear he naturally had a taste for it. And while she had hers with maple syrup, they sat at the dining room table and Jaxon listened to what she had to say, for which she had made his favorite breakfast.
“So, here’s what it is,” said Sherry. “I’ve done a little research about annulments.”
He had just brought a forkful of honey-dripping waffle to his lips when he stopped and reacted: “Annulments?”
“Mm-hmm,” she said. “I looked up some things about it.”
Jaxon actually lowered his fork, as if the
taste of waffle and honey would distract him at this moment. Was she serious? Why would she actually have gone to the trouble of looking that up, after everything they had talked about, after that whole discussion they’d had with Humbert and everything they had so set in their minds about it? What was going on here?
Sherry began, “I already talked about this with my parents, but I wanted to look it up anyway just to see for myself. They wouldn’t have gotten this wrong or told me something that wasn’t right, but some things you just want to see for yourself. So, I went online and had a look. In this state, you have up to two years to get an annulment on the grounds that one of the spouses was coerced into getting married. Well, your grandfather is using his business relationship with my parents to…I guess leverage us into it; that’s the way they’d put it in business. They always talk about ‘leveraging’ things. They actually turned ‘leverage’ into a verb.”
He had heard that kind of talk plenty of times. “Right,” he said.
“So, anyway, that’s what we could use to get out of it—if we did it. Coercion.”
“Okay,” said Jaxon. “Coercing somebody into getting married, that’s not cool. We actually said that to Grandpa, and he didn’t care. He just wants us to act out the tradition. But the law’s on our side.”
“Exactly.”
“But, Sherry…are you saying you’re really… I mean, are you seriously thinking about…” He almost didn’t want to say it. “You wouldn’t go through with this, would you?”
“I’m thinking about my parents’ business,” she said. “My father would take a hit for this if I didn’t, and he’s willing to take the hit; he told me that. My parents don’t think this is right, any more than we do. But it would still happen, and I don’t like that they would accept this for me. I really don’t.”
“But they’d do it for you anyway. They love you, so they’d do it.”
“That’s not the point,” she insisted. “They shouldn’t have to. They’re willing to make a sacrifice, but… Jaxon, I’m grown up now. I’m still their kid, but there are limits. You don’t want to make sacrifices for your kids for the rest of your life. I worked through school and used financial aid and took two years longer to get a four-year degree because I didn’t want them paying for everything for me. They were willing to pay my whole way through school, and it would have been easier for me if they did, but I guess I wanted to be a little more independent than that. That was how I wanted to start out in life. It was harder, but that was how I wanted to do it. And now your grandfather is doing this thing, and I don’t want him making things tough for them because of me. I had a professor who talked about doing things because of the principle of it. I guess this is about the principle for me. Can you get that?”
Jaxon was truly impressed at how the girl he’d known since they were kids—known better in some ways than anyone else he’d ever known in his life—had turned out. Not only was she beautiful, but she was strong and independent and knew what she wanted and knew what she was about. She had principles. He liked that. He admired that. He’d shared what he’d always considered the most special thing in life with her. They had given a part of themselves to each other that neither of them would ever be able to give to anyone else. It was their experience, one that they had shared and would always bond them in the most special way. Jaxon truly knew now that Sherry was the right person, the best person, with whom to share that experience. All those times when they were in school were exactly the right thing to have happened.
“Yeah, I think I can get that,” he answered.
“I’m glad you understand,” she said.
“I do get it,” said Jaxon. “So…two years, though. That’s kind of a long time to do something like this, even if it’s for a principle, you know? Two years is kind of a bite out of your life. You wouldn’t really want to go into this for two whole years, would you? I mean, you had plans—or ideas, at least, right? There’s your whole career you’d be putting on hold; I don’t think that’s a good thing. What are the recruiters and the headhunters and the hiring people supposed to think about that?”
“It wouldn’t be for two years,” Sherry agreed. “It would be long enough to satisfy Humbert, I guess. Which kind of brings up…I don’t know, a bit of a morbid point that I hate to mention about how long he really has…”
“Yeah, there’s that,” Jaxon said, nodding.
“I feel like a bit of a ghoul, putting it out here like this.”
“But it’s a point. He hasn’t got that much longer, and we’d be going through with it—if we went through with it—to satisfy him. At this point, it might be for just a few months.”
“A few months,” Sherry sighed. “The whole thing of getting married and being married just to satisfy some dusty, creaky old tradition that no one believes in anymore, just for a few months out of our lives.”
“Yeah,” was all he could say.
“Of course, then again…,” she began.
His curiosity was stoked. “‘Then again’ what…?”
“Then again…,” and she looked right into his eyes to gauge the reaction when she said it, “it could almost be like going back in time, in a way, couldn’t it? We weren’t married then; we were kids. And we’re older now, and we’ve both been through things, and we don’t really know how each other has changed from me being away at school and you being out of the country in the Air Force. We might have to find out about each other all over again. But it might be like going back, just a little. Going back a little older to the way it was when we were younger.”
“But you said it yourself: we’re older, and it wouldn’t be the same. It’s not high school now. We’d be living in the same place, and we wouldn’t be kids in school. It’d be different.”
“It would be different,” she said. “Most of it, anyway. One thing, I know, would still be the same as it was.”
They were quiet at that: a very deep, very knowing quiet. They just smiled, not even having to say aloud what Sherry meant. One thing about Jaxon was constant and unchanging, and they smiled to know it.
Finally, she did put it out there. “We’d be consummating that marriage.”
Jaxon chortled at the word. “No kidding. We’d be ‘consummating’ the hell out of it. I’d be ‘consummating’ you at least three times a night, more on weekends.”
Sherry grinned more broadly at that. She snickered a bit through her teeth at the thought of it. “That much is for sure.”
They were quiet again. There did not seem to be much more to say about that part of it at the moment. But they felt a need to touch now, just to make the thought that much more of a reality. Jaxon reached for her hand, and she let him take it gently in hers and give it just a little squeeze. And they looked warmly at each other. Without a question, some part of the relationship they had created as kids was still there. It had never gone away. They had carried it with them from then to now.
“Jaxon?” she began again.
“Yeah?”
“I know neither one of us has been celibate all these years. But was there ever anyone else for you that you were…serious about? Serious the way you were with me?”
Jaxon let go of her hand and looked off, seemingly into nothing but really into another time and another place. Sherry saw a complete change in his mood. He leaned back in his chair, and something, some dark veil, seemed to fall over his face. Where was he now? He was not here with her in the dining room, not completely. He was somewhere else. Where had her question sent him? Should she have brought it up?
Hesitantly, she spoke. “Jaxon…?”
Not looking at her but still facing out into some place that he saw through a dark veil, he said in a hushed voice, “Yeah. Yes, there was somebody else. I mean, there were others. I won’t lie; I’m a bear, and I fucked around some. But there was one…one…that I wasn’t just fucking.”
Leaning back in her own chair, Sherry saw a faraway pain come over him. “Jaxon, I’m sorry if I made you…”
He cut her off, looking at her again now but still seeing her through that strange veil. “No, you should know this. We’re up front about everything else; you should know this. It was in England. We got serious. And…I got her pregnant. I was gonna do right by her, whatever it took. I was gonna step up. But I never got the chance. The baby didn’t make it. And it didn’t end in a good place. It went really bad. And it was over.”
Now Sherry actually felt like crying. She was truly sorry she’d brought it up now. The pain on Jaxon’s face looked keener—the pain and the regret and the remorse. Her heart shattered for him. “Oh, Jaxon, I’m sorry. I should never have gone there. I’m so sorry.”
He reached out for her again, and the veil parted, his expression returning to full focus, his hand finding hers once more. “No, don’t be. It happened. I own it. I can’t wipe it out; it happened. I accept what I did. I can’t change it.”
“We wouldn’t have any accidents, Jaxon,” Sherry said. “We’d be careful, like we were back then. I’ve got a prescription, and I use it—all the time. We wouldn’t be ‘going fishing.’”