The Shape of Desire

by Sharon Shinn

  “Sure, but maybe it would be better for you. Once you got over it. You’d move on, you’d find a nice guy—a normal guy—you’d live a normal life—”

  “I don’t want a normal life. I want a life with you.”

  “You’ll tell me, won’t you? If you change your mind? I won’t blame you, I won’t be surprised. I just want you to be happy, Maria. I really do.”

  “Dante.” I make my voice as firm, as certain, as I can. I want him to believe me. “You’re the one who makes me happy. You’re the one who puts meaning in my days. You’re the one I can’t live without. If I ever change my mind on that, I’ll let you know, I promise. But it’s not going to happen. I promise that, too.”

  “All right,” he says, his words muffled. I can’t tell if he’s speaking against his sleeve, trying to hide the fact that he’s crying, or if his throat is roughening, if he’s feeling the transformation coming over him and trying to fight it off. “I’ll come back as soon as I can. I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I say. A second later the phone goes dead.

  My hands are shaking a little as I place the handset back into the charging dock. I snuggle back under the covers, but I can tell it will be a while before I fall back to sleep. I can feel the energetic sparkle in my veins that I usually associate with too much caffeine; my mind is darting here and there like an overzealous hummingbird.

  I’m not upset by the conversation, oh no. I’m excited. It’s so rare that Dante admits to weakness or need. From time to time, when we’re together, he remembers to tell me that he loves me, but he says it in an offhand way, as if it might not really be true. But alone on some moonless night, isolated, examining his life, he comes to the conclusion that I am the one he loves, and he says so. I recognize this fever in my blood. It’s happiness.

  What Dante doesn’t know is that I’ve already tried to fall in love with someone else. What I already know is that I can’t.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I met Matt Tanaka about eight years ago, before I had the job at the agency. I was doing external auditing for a small private company, traveling all over the state for weeks at a time. At this point, Dante was staying human for longer periods, so I didn’t feel such a desperate desire to see him during whatever rare and precious days he could offer me. At the same time, we weren’t getting along that well. He was edgy and sarcastic, I was feeling both put-upon and taken for granted. We would generally have one good day together, when he first returned, and then a few days of quarreling, and then he would go off on his own pursuits long enough for me to miss him again. At the time, he was renting a small apartment of his own, so it was fairly easy for us to spend a couple days apart if we were getting on each other’s nerves. But generally we liked each other again before our time was up, and so we had another good twenty-four or forty-eight hours together before he had to disappear.

  Still, I had started asking myself some very basic questions: Couldn’t I find a nice guy? Couldn’t I find a normal guy? Wouldn’t my life be better if Dante just walked away?

  Matt was a comptroller at a regional bank in Kansas City, an attractive, outgoing man of mixed American and Japanese heritage. As an external auditor, I was used to being ignored by everyone in the offices I visited; sometimes people wouldn’t even bother pointing out where the bathrooms and vending machines were. But that first day at the bank, I had to spend a half hour interviewing Matt, and afterward he invited me to join a group going out for lunch.

  I was in Kansas City for a week during the month of July, and Matt and I ended up having lunch every day.

  He was fun. He told stupid jokes. He described with rueful amusement his attempts to rehab an old house in Overland Park. He loved to play Guess-What-Their-Relationship-Is whenever we spotted odd groupings of people sitting together in restaurants. I was filled with laughter during every minute of our time together, and I always returned to my hotel room grinning a little about some of our conversational exchanges.

  Neither of us was sorry when it turned out I had to return to Kansas City the next week to finish the audit.

  “Why bother to go back to St. Louis at all?” he said on that Friday afternoon, when I dropped by to say Good-bye and See you Monday. “Stay for the weekend. We’ll go see the Royals. I’ve got a friend who can get us tickets, even if the game’s sold out.”

  I would have done it, but Dante was human back in St. Louis, possibly enjoying my absence but also very likely to notice if I didn’t come back. “Oh—I can’t,” I said regretfully. I’d already learned how to lie so automatically that I didn’t even have to fumble for an excuse. “It’s my mom’s birthday and I’m the one hosting the tea party on Sunday. Kind of hard to break that date. And I don’t have any clean clothes with me.”

  “We-elll,” he drawled. “Stay next weekend. Pack enough stuff. Cancel all the birthday parties and the movie dates with your girlfriends.”

  I hesitated. “I don’t have enough work to do here to justify staying a whole ’nother week.”

  “Come up Wednesday,” he suggested. “Or, you know, take a couple of vacation days. I assume vacation days are part of your benefits package?”

  “You know, I think they are. And I have about twenty of them stockpiled, since I’ve been too busy to take any time off.”

  “See? It all works out. You’ll stay? I can get tickets?”

  We were standing in the doorway to his office, which was little more than a glassed-in cubicle visible from every point in the bank. About twenty people were close enough to hear if they had been trying hard enough to eavesdrop. Even so, it was all I could do to refrain from leaning forward and planting an impulsive kiss on his mouth. His wheedling had made my blood fizz; it was so delicious to have someone flirting with me, someone paying attention to me who so obviously liked me. In those days, there were times when it felt like Dante barely tolerated me. He certainly didn’t seem to want to spend more time with me than our lives afforded.

  “You can get tickets,” I said.

  “Yessss!” Matt exclaimed, slapping a hand against the wall. “Friday night or Saturday night? Or Sunday afternoon? Or all three?”

  I was laughing. “Umm, I don’t think I like baseball quite as much as you do.”

  “I don’t care about baseball. Let the bastards trip over their bats and their running shoes, I don’t care. I just want you to feel obligated to spend all that time with me.”

  “How about a Saturday night game, and the rest of the time we can wing it?”

  “Sounds good. Sounds great. See you next week. Drive carefully!”

  I was a little giddy during the whole drive home, a little more than four hours straight across I-70 past cornfields, wheat fields, small towns, and the clump of heavy traffic that marked Columbia at roughly the halfway point of the journey. The house seemed empty when I first got home, so I assumed Dante was at his apartment, but then I found him sleeping in the second bedroom.

  “What’s wrong? Why are you in here?” I asked, bending down to touch his forehead.

  His skin was hot. “I think I have a stomach virus,” he said in a miserable voice. “I was throwing up all afternoon.”

  “Oh—you poor baby,” I said. “You want me to get you some Tamiflu? Alka-Seltzer? Tea? Saltines? Gatorade?”

  “Yeah, keep talking about stuff I’d have to swallow,” he said faintly. “That won’t make me want to vomit some more.”

  I strangled a laugh. “Okay—well—you just tell me if there’s anything I can do for you.”

  “I just want to go to sleep.”

  “All right. I’ll come back and check on you in an hour or so.”

  He was sick all weekend, and bad-tempered about it, which certainly erased any chance he had of seeming so attractive that Matt paled in comparison. I was never seriously worried about his health, which made it easier to be annoyed with him, though I tried very hard to be a sympathetic nurse. And I never suggested he go back to his own place to convalesce, though the though
t certainly did cross my mind more than once.

  And I did walk out of the room Saturday evening when he threw a packet of crackers to the floor and growled, “I hate this crap!” I walked out of the house, in fact, and drove myself to the mall, where I stayed until it shut down at nine. I seriously considered not returning home at all—I could have gone to Beth’s, could have told her there had been a water main break in my neighborhood and asked her if I could spend the night—but I decided that was too petty. Dante would surely apologize as soon as I got home.

  He didn’t. He was sound asleep, his hair very black against the white of the pillowcase, his eyes creased against a nightmare or some ongoing pain. I stood there for about ten minutes, just watching him in the faint light from the hallway. He didn’t look particularly exotic or beautiful or precious or beloved. He didn’t, at that moment, even look familiar. I turned away and let him sleep.

  I woke late the next morning, alone in my bed, hearing rustling and clinking noises from the kitchen. Wrapping myself in a robe, I stumbled down the hall to find Dante standing at the stove, stirring oatmeal with one hand and eating an apple with the other one.

  “Feeling better?” I asked in a neutral voice.

  He glanced at me over his shoulder. “A hundred percent. I’m starving.”

  “Good. Need any help or can I go take a shower?”

  He put down the apple, hastily swallowing a bite, and laid aside the spoon. Crossing the room, he took me in a warm hug, wrapped his arms tightly around my waist, and rested his cheek on my head. “I probably need you to kick me in the butt,” he said. “Christina always said I was a lousy patient, but I didn’t mean to be such an asshole the past few days.”

  “Asshole? Really? I scarcely noticed,” I said brightly.

  He kissed the top of my head and released me. “Yeah, I think you did.”

  I smiled. “Yeah, I kind of did. But I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  “I’m still a little shaky,” he said, “but maybe tomorrow we can go do something fun.”

  “I have to go back to Kansas City in the morning.”

  He looked affronted. “What? You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Sorry. I thought I did. I never finished the bank audit.”

  His face showed growing dissatisfaction. “I’ve hardly seen you at all this time.”

  “Sorry,” I said again. “Maybe when I get back—”

  “I’ll be gone by then,” he said brusquely, and returned his attention to the stove.

  He was contrite again by the time I came fresh-scrubbed out of the shower, and I had managed to soap away some of my irritation. The day was astonishingly cool for July in St. Louis, maybe eighty degrees, so we sat outside on the porch glider, sipped lemonade, and listened to a baseball game. We had our arms wrapped loosely around each other and our heads tilted so that our skulls touched, and that sweet, casual contact filled me again with deep affection. He was like a drug, some powerful opiate that I could absorb through my flesh; just the sensation of his skin against mine was enough to get me high. I sighed with contentment and had a hard time remembering what there was in Kansas City that could justify the drive.

  When the game ended, he sighed, unwound himself, stretched, and sighed. “God, I am so bored,” he said.

  I went straight inside and began packing.

  The rest of the audit could be stretched legitimately through Thursday morning, so I kept myself busy for most of the week, not hanging out in Matt’s glass cubicle for more than a few minutes a day. But Thursday afternoon we had lunch together and then returned to his office so he could finish a story about a bad trip to Mexico.

  “I won’t drink tequila to this day,” he said as a pretty blond secretary came in to drop a pile of papers on his desk.

  “Too bad,” I returned. “It’s my favorite kind of rotgut liquor.”

  The secretary turned to give me an unsmiling glance. “You know he just broke up with his girlfriend. He always breaks up with his girlfriends,” she said and walked out.

  There was a small, charged moment while Matt and I stared at each other, trying to figure out what to say. His face was full of both chagrin and eagerness, like he couldn’t wait to explain everything once he had figured out how to phrase it.

  “You just dumped somebody?” I said.

  “I did. But I tried to be really nice about it.”

  “There’s no nice way to dump somebody.”

  “I know but I—See, here’s the thing. We’d been dating for almost a year. She was so sweet. Really. Too sweet. I was always hurting her feelings when I didn’t mean to, just by being myself, you know? I was always tap dancing when I was around her. Trying to be careful about what I said, and then apologizing because I always said something wrong.”

  Keeping my face impassive, I merely nodded.

  “And she’s, okay, she’s thirty-two, it’s clear she’s thinking it’s time to get married and have kids, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the right one for her to marry. So if I wanted to be a nice guy, I had to break up with her so she could be available for the right man, you know? But she didn’t really hear it that way when I tried to explain.”

  I nodded again. “And you break up with all your girlfriends?” I asked, repeating the secretary’s accusation. “Do they all want to get married and have kids?”

  He made a helpless gesture with his hands. “Sometimes that’s the reason and sometimes it’s not,” he said. “It’s just so complicated.”

  “Boy is it ever,” I said.

  “But I really don’t want you to think I’m a jerk.”

  “I have a boyfriend,” I replied.

  He was already poised to say something else, and this stopped him so completely that for a moment his mouth hung open. “Are you about to break up with him?”

  “No,” I said, and laughed.

  He laughed back. “I didn’t want you to think I was on the rebound,” he says. “So I wasn’t going to tell you about my ex-girlfriend.”

  “I wasn’t going to tell you about my boyfriend, either.”

  We both laughed even harder. I wondered if we were being watched by the blond secretary (who probably had a secret crush on him). I wondered if she found it impossible to believe that I was amused by her revelation instead of unsettled. I wondered if she had any idea how tricky it was to navigate any relationship and what a relief it could be when laughter was one of the first options.

  Over dinner that night, I told Matt more about Dante than I had told almost anyone up to that point. It was odd; it wasn’t as if I knew Matt so well that I felt I could trust him with the one thing I had hidden from everyone else. It was more like he was a seatmate on a transatlantic flight, someone I knew I would never see again, and the very randomness of our connection made it safe to confide in him.

  Even so, I wasn’t entirely truthful. “I’ve been dating Dante for six or seven years now,” I told him. “And yet there are all these things I don’t know about him. Like, he travels for his job. He’s gone about half the time. But he’s evasive about where he goes. I’ve never met his boss or his coworkers. He tells me he’s in sales—he sells valve and gear parts for big machinery—but I can’t really get a sense of the job.”

  Matt’s eyes were huge; he was suitably intrigued. “Do you think he works for the CIA?”

  “I don’t know! It’s crossed my mind.”

  “Maybe he’s a hit man.”

  “Something else I’ve considered.”

  “Does he carry a gun?”

  “Not that I’ve ever found.”

  “Have you looked? Like, have you gone through his clothes when he’s sleeping?”

  To anyone else I would have been ashamed to answer honestly, but with Matt I simply nodded. “I have. And I’ve looked through his closets when we’re at his place.”

  “So he does let you come to his house.”

  “His apartment. He rents a studio. Yes.”

  “Well, that’s good, because my n
ext thought would be—”

  “That he might be married.”

  Matt nodded. “That was what I was thinking.”

  “I’ve wondered about that, too. Hell, he could have several wives all over the Midwest, the amount of traveling he does.”

  “Have you considered hiring a private detective?”

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t think—well, if he’s an assassin, I surely wouldn’t want to put a private detective in danger! And if he’s married—maybe I don’t want to know.”

  “I’d want to know,” Matt said.

  I scoffed. “You’d be relieved. Less pressure on you.”

  He grinned. “You’re right. I think it sounds like a good arrangement.”

  “Anyway, I don’t ask too many questions.”

  A look of unwonted seriousness pulled down the corners of his dark almond eyes. “But you want to be careful, Maria. I mean, if you really think he’s leading some kind of double life—and if you think it could be dangerous—”

  He’s a shape-shifter. Half the time, he roams the world as a wolf, a dog, a bear. His life is dangerous to him, but probably not to me. Unless he is lying about all of it. “How nice of you to be concerned,” I said playfully, changing the tone and changing the subject. “And here I thought you were such a carefree guy.”

  He grinned again. “It’s easy to be carefree with a girl like you.”

  He took off that Friday, and I, of course, was already on vacation. We spent the day wandering through the Plaza, Kansas City’s high-end collection of shops and restaurants and apartments. We found a sports bar for dinner—since it turned out Matt was far more than a casual baseball fan—and cheered on the Royals over beers and burgers. When he drove me back to my hotel, we found a shadowy corner of the garage and sat in the front seat, kissing.

  “Isn’t this the point when you’re supposed to invite me up to your room?” he asked finally in a breathless voice. He drove a small European sports car, and it wasn’t entirely satisfactory—or comfortable—to lean over the gearshift to make out.