The Shape of Desire

by Sharon Shinn

“Dante.” I swing a leg over him and straddle his hips, then lean in very close, my hands on his cheeks, my eyes staring into his. “Dante. You can afford to lose the key. You don’t have to go straight to the locker whenever you change. You just have to get somewhere that you can call me. I’ll come to you, wherever you are. I’ll bring everything you need.”

  He turns onto his side, trying to dislodge me, but I tumble over with him, landing so that we are still face-to-face. My leg is still wrapped around his waist, my palms are still on his face, though he has grabbed my wrists as if he wants to pull my hands away. But he doesn’t.

  “I cannot simply rely on you,” he says, speaking the words clearly and precisely, as if to make sure that this time I actually understand. We have had this conversation dozens of times before. “What if you’re sick? What if you’re out of town? What if you simply don’t want to come get me?”

  “I don’t think—”

  He raises his voice to drown me out. “What if you’re dead, though God knows I hope you live to be a hundred? What if you’ve gotten tired of me and you’ve taken up with some other guy and he doesn’t think it’s such a hot idea for you to go charging out in the middle of the night on an errand you can’t explain?”

  “You know that won’t—”

  “I trust you, Maria, with my secret, with my life, with my soul, but no human being can be everything else to another one. If you’re the only thing I can count on, the time will come when I need you and you won’t be there.” Now he puts his hands on my cheeks, and draws me in so our foreheads touch. Our wrists make X shapes on either side of our faces. “Just as there have been times you’ve needed me and I haven’t been here.”

  “I’ve never complained about that,” I whisper. “I’ve never asked you to give me more than you can.”

  He kisses me, very gently, on the mouth. “And I won’t let you try to give me more than you should,” he says quietly. “I have to be able to do some things for myself. I’ll think about the key. I’ll work it out.”

  “I love you,” I say.

  He kisses me again. “I know,” he replies. “My life would be nothing if you didn’t.”

  Saturday we run errands and eat lunch out and take a short hike through Babler State Park, which is only about twenty minutes from my house. The exercise puts Dante in a good mood, and so he’s willing to entertain an idea I had while I lay beside him the night before, unable to sleep.

  “What about a backup plan?” I ask. “You’ll still have the key with you in some fashion. But just in case I’m not dead or sick or on an airplane or married to someone else when you come back to town, what if we buy a prepaid cell phone and bury it somewhere that you can get to easily? And then if you lose your pack and your key, you can dig up the phone and call me.”

  He gives me a look filled equally with fondness and derision. “And you don’t think the battery will have worn down during the weeks I’ve been gone?”

  “We’ll buy one of those special chargers,” I say triumphantly. “You use a couple of AA batteries and a connector cord to recharge the cell phone battery. I bought one after my power went out last time.”

  He looks intrigued. “That might work.” Then he has a thought. “Of course, why couldn’t I just bury a spare key to my locker instead of the cell phone?”

  I stare at him blankly and then burst out laughing. “Well, you could, I guess,” I say. “But I think we should get the cell phone, too, just to reward me for coming up with such a clever idea!”

  It’s a plan that pleases both of us because it offers a couple different kinds of insurance; it also makes him feel independent and allows me to feel potentially useful. We spend the rest of the day shopping for the items we need and getting a copy of his key made. Then we take our new waterproof box back to Babler, a place that’s easily accessible to Dante, whether he’s human or animal, and that I can get to with a short drive.

  The question quickly becomes: Where can we bury the box so that Dante can find it again, but no one else is likely to come across it by accident? The site has to be memorable enough for him to find it again no matter what the season, so trees can’t be the only markers. And Babler is almost nothing but trees. A few two-lane roads connect the main entrance to the RV parking spaces and the picnic areas and a few other paved spots, but mostly it’s just one big forest cluttered with scrubby underbrush beneath the heavy spreading branches of the trees.

  The day is warm and spectacularly beautiful, and the park is beginning to put on its autumn finery. A few maples are showing red—one or two leaves waving like bloody hands from the vibrant green throng covering most of the branches. The tops of the sycamores look as if someone has sifted cinnamon over them from a low-flying plane, while the honey locusts appear to have accidentally dipped some of their northwestern branches into a bright vat of yellow paint. They are now trying to shake off the color in random, intermittent droplets of brilliance.

  We leave my car in one of the RV spaces and plunge into the woods, following a narrow path. It’s tangled with roots and vines and deep, eternal piles of rotting leaves, old gumballs, and fallen branches. Squirrels skitter around us, alert and lively. Hawks glide overhead, soundless and patient. I hear Dante take a deep breath; I think he is inhaling nature.

  “These are the days I wish I could shape-shift,” I say in a quiet voice. “To be in this world—among all this beauty—at the most basic, essential level. To be part of it, in ways a human can never be.”

  “Trust me,” he says, his voice wry, “it’s easier to appreciate it in this shape. When you’re an animal, you’re not admiring the scenery or noticing the pretty flowers. If you’re a predator, you’re trying to hear or smell your dinner. If you’re prey, you’re always looking for the next hiding place. There are only two things you think about—eating and staying alive. Maybe only one thing, since you eat to stay alive. There is no”—he pauses to figure out exactly what he wants to say—“aesthetic sensibility.”

  Maybe I should be annoyed at his pragmatic response, but instead I laugh. “Way to destroy my idealistic view of nature,” I say.

  He’s grinning. “It’s like everything else,” he says. “The better you know it, the less idyllic it seems.”

  I take his hand and squeeze it. “Not you,” I say soulfully, exaggerating the sentiment so he’ll think I’m kidding. “The better I know you, the more wonderful I think you are.”

  “And the better I know you, the more delusional I think you are,” he replies. “But it turns out I like that in a woman.”

  I let go of his hand and punch him lightly in the arm. I’ve lost his attention. He’s pointing ahead and a little to our left, where there’s a low wooden bridge over an almost invisible stream. The bridge looks sturdy enough, but neglected; if it had ever been painted, all the color has worn away, leaving a dingy gray behind.

  “How about here? Or a few paces away in one direction or another?” he asks. “This ought to be easy enough for me to find again.”

  I glance behind us, because I’m not at all certain I could find the spot again. The trail is so poorly defined that I’m not even sure I could get back to the car if I was here on my own. Fortunately, Dante never gets lost. I don’t know if it’s because his animal instincts stay with him when he’s in human form, or if it’s because he’s just one of those people who is always able to orient himself.

  “Looks good,” I say. “Let’s bury our box and get back to the car. I think it’ll be dark in about an hour.”

  He laughs, looks around, and counts out twenty paces directly north of the bridge, or what I imagine is north. Then he drops to his knees and clears away the leaves and rubble to get to the dirt below. I’ve brought a trowel, but I let him do the digging while I hold the package. “I didn’t know you were afraid of the dark,” he says.

  “Well, I’m not, when I actually know where I am,” I retort. “But I’d hate to try to find my way back to the park entrance after sunset.”

  “D
on’t worry, I know exactly where we are,” he says. “And how to get back. I’d think you’d be more concerned about running into a coyote or a bobcat.”

  I look around even more nervously. I’ve been so focused on our mission that it hasn’t even occurred to me to wonder if we’re in any danger. But, of course, coyotes and bobcats are common in Missouri. “Aren’t we too big for them to attack?”

  He lays aside the trowel and reaches for the box. “Generally speaking, yes, but if there were a pack of coyotes—or if the cat was really, really hungry—”

  “Stop it. You’re scaring me,” I say.

  He laughs again. The box fits neatly in the space he’s hollowed out, and he begins filling the hole with earth. He’s made it pretty deep to discourage wild animals from going to the trouble of digging it up. “This isn’t really the season for them to attack humans,” he says in what is supposed to be a comforting tone. “Deep winter, now, you’d be a little more at risk. They’d be hungrier by then. But this is a season of easy pickings, so you don’t look as tasty.”

  “I feel so reassured,” I say. “But couldn’t you defend me if a coyote showed up? Or a wolf? Couldn’t you turn into a wolf yourself and fight it off?”

  He’s kneeling on the ground, tamping down the dirt, but now he looks up at me with a troubled expression. “That’s not the way it works,” he says. “I can’t just summon the will to transform. And I can’t choose what I want to be.”

  The tone of my voice is halfway between defensive and placating. “I just thought. Some natural instincts might assert themselves if you were in danger. You know, like fight or flight. If you need to fight, maybe your body doesn’t just shoot you up with adrenaline, maybe it turns you into a creature that knows how to rumble.”

  He wipes his dirty hands on his jeans and stands up. His features are collecting into a scowl. “Always, with you, the most romantic interpretation,” he says, his voice edged with anger or sarcasm or maybe both. “‘How lovely it would be if my boyfriend would turn into a werewolf to save me from danger! I would swoon in his arms from gratitude.’ But it doesn’t work that way.”

  I am close to losing my temper. “Well, how would I know how it works? You never tell me anything. You don’t want to talk about this part of your life. Everything I’ve ever learned about your—your alternate existence I’ve had to chisel out of you by asking questions you don’t want to answer. Maybe I do romanticize it! But I want to understand it. I want to understand you. And all you want is to keep your secrets.”

  His lips are pressed firmly together, as if he is holding back angry words. He turns his head so he’s staring at the tree line instead of me, as if he’s afraid his hot gaze will burn through my skin. “When I’m with you, all I want is to be human,” he says tightly. “I don’t want to think about and talk about and analyze my animal nature. You think I’m being secretive, but I’m just trying to be.” He swings his head around to look at me, and it’s true; his glare is fiery enough to scorch. “Let it go.”

  For a moment I stare back at him, fifteen years’ worth of protests clamoring on my tongue. Let it go? I’ve done nothing but let it go! I’ve believed your impossible story without a shred of proof! I’ve designed every detail of my life so that it accommodates yours. I have loved you without conditions, trusted you without reservations. All I want is to know you better. All you want is to keep your distance.

  “Well, then,” I say. “Let’s go back to the car before the coyotes find us and dash all our hypotheses to the ground.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Both of us are in better moods Sunday as we drive out to Rolla, though what seems to keep us in charity with each other is saying as little as possible. So we don’t talk much during the drive. We spend most of the time on Highway 44, but close to our destination we exit onto a two-lane county road where the median speed seems to be seventy miles an hour. Dante is focused on getting ahead of every slow-moving family car and farm vehicle we encounter, which can be challenging as the road winds and dips around blind hills and corners and once clatters over a narrow, ancient bridge scarcely wide enough to accommodate a sedan.

  I don’t watch. I turn my head and gaze out at the gently rolling Missouri landscape, its densely bunched covering of trees making a slow-motion transformation from emerald to garnet and topaz. It is as if someone has caught a freeze-frame image of the instant a hillside has caught fire. Flames have been halted in their leap from branch to branch; gold has crystallized halfway on its journey to orange. In a couple of months, every tree will be bare, stripped to a mute, stubborn brown. It will be hard to even remember the color green.

  We pass farmland, some of it still high with crops waiting to be harvested, some mowed clean and tilled down to the soil. We pass grazing cattle and a few lazy horses. I am tempted to speak. Were you ever a cow? Have you ever been a horse? How about a pig? But I would rather keep the peace than find answers to my questions.

  I think about what might lie ahead of us at Christina’s house. Rolla is a small town with a population of somewhere around twenty thousand, probably best known for being home to the University of Missouri campus that specializes in engineering. Christina lives a good ten miles outside of the city limits, in the house that used to belong to their mother. She works as a secretary for the local school district, a job that seems to pay well, to be recession-proof, and to afford her enough flexibility that she can take a day off whenever she needs. I know she comes to St. Louis on a fairly regular basis, because she talks about events she’s attended and restaurants she’s gone to with college friends who live in the city. Not once since I’ve known her has she gotten in touch with me on those visits.

  I wonder if I would think she was odd even if I didn’t know her secret; I suspect I would. She’s got Dante’s same dramatic coloring, but she’s more delicate. You think you could probably snap the bones in her arm just by applying a minimum amount of pressure. She’s almost always smiling in a way that strikes me as artificial, which makes me wonder what she’s really thinking, and her laugh is high and tinkling. She flutters like an indecisive butterfly. I think the people in the school district must find her exhausting to be around all week. Then again, maybe she is more relaxed and natural around them. Perhaps I only see her at her worst, around her brothers. Perhaps she tries too hard to charm them—or to charm Dante, at any rate.

  She seems to have a closer relationship with William, despite the fact that he is human so rarely. From what I understand, her house is the place he returns whenever he wants to reenter the world of men; it’s where he keeps his clothes and his few possessions. She is his storage locker, his emergency cell phone, his key. If William has made any other long-term connections over the years, I have never heard about them.

  I remember the first time Dante told me about his siblings, granting details like much-begrudged diamonds. “William and Christina and Dante Romano,” I had said, because I still liked to roll the Italian surname off my tongue. “Why do you have the weird first name?”

  That had actually made him laugh. “My mother had a thing for the Rossettis.”

  I had laughed, too, though the name had meant nothing to me at the time. But I committed it to memory and tracked down a reference room staff member the next time I was at the library. This was in the days before easy Internet search engines, and finding arcane information often required determination and assistance.

  “I need to know about the Rossettis,” I’d said, not sure if that was a place, a family name, or some other category. “Specifically, any of them who might be related to Dante, Christina, and William.”

  As it happened, the reference room staff member was a specialist in twentieth-century literature, so she had to do a little research. But the first world biographical resource she pulled out listed “Dante Gabriel Rossetti” and described him as a painter and a poet. From there it was pretty easy to amass a history of the flamboyant, charismatic, and deeply flawed artist who was my lover’s namesake, and le
arn stories about his brother and sister as well. I found myself drawn to the painter’s vividly hewed, richly detailed canvases, at least from the early part of his career; I found the endless late-stage portraits of his mistress much less appealing. And none of his poetry ever spoke to me, though I struggled through as many volumes as I could.

  Christina Rossetti was harder to like. She had led a bleak and restricted spinster’s life after experiencing a couple of severe disappointments in love. Most of her poems were morbid and resigned meditations on death. She seemed to spend her whole life preparing herself for the grave.

  Except…

  One poem is full of anticipation and delight; one poem is nothing but metaphors of elation. I’ve read it over and over again, memorizing it without even intending to. Today her heart is a singing bird, she says in convoluted Victorian language. Today she wants to dress up in peacock feathers and fur. And why?

  Because the birthday of my life

  Is come, my love is come to me.

  Somehow she had known, this woman who had renounced love for religion, who had died a virgin, who had lived long enough to see almost everyone she cared for pass away. Somehow she had gotten it right…

  I still feel that way, every time Dante walks in my door. The birthday of my life / Is come, my love is come to me. It took a depressed British lady poet to put my emotions into words.

  William Rossetti survived his brother and his sister, and led the most ordinary life of the three. Given what I know about my own Dante and his siblings, it seems to me this is the ultimate joke. Or it would be, if any of this was funny.

  Christina lives in a well-maintained one-story white clapboard house heavily decorated with gingerbread accents. The wraparound porch makes me think of lemonade and iced tea and warm summer nights with children chasing fireflies on the lawn. She owns about five acres of land, much of it given over to old-growth trees, and this property serves as a fairly effective buffer between her house and the encroachments of urban development. That level of privacy is essential for a family of shape-shifters. My own bungalow is on a plot of land that backs up to a semi-wooded area; I hunted a long time for a house where my neighbors would have to put some effort into keeping track of my comings and goings. But Christina’s house is even more isolated.