Anonymous Rex (33 page)

“I’ve got an open-ended ticket,” she says, “but the gig’s supposed to be over the day after tomorrow.” I feel a hand pressing against my costumed knee. It is moving up, toward that polyfiber mix that represents my thigh. My tail is really starting to tingle now, and I don’t know if it’s only from lack of circulation. “Of course, I could be persuaded to stay.”

That’s all the invitation I need to get me flowing yet again. I am a
dynamo today! Someone should bottle my sexual energy and use it to power India.

Nearly four hours and countless lovemaking sessions after Sarah first arrived at my apartment this afternoon, I invite her to stay the night. She accepts.

“Let me go back to the hotel, grab my stuff,” she says.

“I’ll drive you,” I offer.

“I’ve got a rental.”

“You don’t know your way.”

“I’ve got a map,” she says, laughing. “Honey, I’m coming back this time, okay?” Sarah, now fully dressed, leans over the bed and plants a full kiss on my lips, her tongue searching out mine. I try to pull her back down onto the bed for another episode of playtime, but she backs away, shaking her finger. “Naughty boy,” she snickers. “You’ll just have to wait for it.”

I nod; it will indeed be best if we separate for an hour or so. It will give Sarah time to pack, and give me time to adjust my costume and to the reality of what has just occurred. Now that my brain has been freed from the constant ecstasy of orgasmic highs, it has a chance to be concerned with the ongoing loss of sensation in my tail. Adjustments are in order.

Hopping out of the bed—yep, there’s the tingle—I walk Sarah into the living room, toward the foyer. We embrace again, and I hide myself behind the front door as I let her out. I am not an exhibitionist, costume or no.

“An hour or so?” I say.

She laughs, obviously amused at my lack of pretense. I want her, she knows it, end of story. “As soon as possible, Vincent.” She blows me a kiss and heads for her car. I shut the door and ensure that the blinds are drawn.

That tingle, that itch, has intensified, spread all across my body. Something major must have quit functioning down in the nitty-gritty of my costume, and I can only hope that I caught it in time to prevent a major injury. I don’t bother removing my mask or torso guise, as it’s a pain in the rear to properly apply the epoxy in order to get that good, tight grip that will hold up under even the most intense bout of smooching, but I do remove the lower half of my outer layer. The polysuit slowly peels away from my hide, its already gummy backside
positively slimy thanks to the buildup of sweat and other natural juices expelled during the last few hours.

Standing in my living room, across from the full-length decorative mirror hung on the far wall, I inspect my supportive trusses and girdles for any breaches in their superstructure. So far, I can see no flaws. Could this sensation, so near to my groin, be a purely psychosomatic one? A result of repressed guilt over what is sure to be the most unnatural act in which I have ever engaged? I certainly hope not, because if I have any say in the matter, I plan on being this unnatural again.

Wait, wait—there it is. Right beneath my G series, the clamp that always gives me the most trouble, a fabric strap has somehow managed to double over and work its way into a tight noose atop my tail. I can’t imagine how it happened, but what with all of the interesting new postures Sarah and I got ourselves into, I’m not surprised at the result.

Grasping my tail with one still-costumed hand, I work the strap down and away, pulling it into a less offensive position; almost instantly, I can feel sensation, glorious sensation, rush back into my body like a river breaking free of its dam. It doesn’t feel as nice as making love with Sarah, but it runs a close second.

Perhaps I should remove my entire guise and make whatever readjustments are necessary to keep this from happening again. I’m hoping Sarah and I will have an encore of our earlier performance once she returns to my town house, and I don’t want any technical malfunctions to get in the way. The next time, that fabric strap could wrap around something a lot more vital than my tail.

I locate the hidden reverse buttons beneath my nipples and work them away from their confines, struggling to work my torso polysuit away from the hide below. Torsos always give me the most problems, perhaps because there are so few places to squirrel away the requisite attachments. Masks have countless hiding places—under the hair, inside the ear, the nose, etc. The lower half of the body allows for zipper and button placement in other, less socially acceptable areas, though it works out well in the end.

I’ve almost got that last Velcro strip unattached, reaching for it, reaching for it—

And Sarah walks in the front door.

“Vincent, I forgot to ask what street I—”

She freezes. I freeze. Only her eyes move, darting around my half-costumed body, taking in the spectacle before her. And I can project myself into Sarah’s head, see myself as I must look through her eyes: a lizard draped with disembodied human skin, a beast who crawled up from the depths of prehistory to terrify and devour young, petite human women. A monster. A freak. Lust and passion and eroticism and, yes, love, are forgotten as my instinct, my damned instinct, orders martial law in my body and takes over all functions.

“Vincent—” she says, but I cut her off with my leap across the room, slamming the door closed with one exposed claw as I bounce off the far wall and pounce atop her chest. Sarah falls roughly to the floor, landing on her back with a surprised whoosh of air. My claws grab for her throat as my roar shatters the nearby mirror, glass spilling onto the carpet.

I know my duty. I have to kill her.

“I’m sorry, Sarah,” I manage to say, even as I ready my claw for the final plunge into her beautiful, quivering neck. She’s gasping in gulps of air, trying to say something, her breath still not coming—

“Vin … Vin …”

“I’m sorry,” I repeat, and strike the death blow.

It is blocked. Her arm catches mine, holds it in place, the peaked edges of my claws inches from her throat. How is this possible? Perhaps in her fear she has gained strength. I strike out with the other hand, natural knives glinting—

Caught and captured yet again. Sarah struggles with my arms, holding her death at bay, face contorted in pain. “Vincent,” she manages to say, her voice two octaves deeper than I have ever heard it before. “Wait.”

But there’s still that inborn sense of danger, of responsibility, telling me to
push it home, finish the job, kill the human before she lets it all out!
and I contract my muscles yet again, eager to get it all over with and start what is sure to be a prolonged mourning process.

“Wait,” Sarah says again, and this time her word cuts through the din of instinct-driven insanity, halting the downward thrust of my arms. Is this foolishness on my part? Is this that human-bred habit of trying to
understand
everything rearing up again, costing me valuable
time? In the dino world we do not overanalyze. We see, we react, and we conquer. With my interspecies coupling a mere half hour behind me, I find myself disgusted at whatever bits of humanity I have incorporated into my persona over the years. I should kill her now! But I find myself waiting to hear her out.

I sit back on my haunches, muscles still quivering, ready to pounce if she should try to run, to make a dash to the outside world. I love Sarah with whatever soul I have left in this body, but I cannot take the chance of trusting her. Not with this.

I expect her to try and beg for mercy, to explain that she will never ever tell a single living being about what she has seen in my apartment today, to plead clemency as others have done before her. But she doesn’t even open her mouth, doesn’t try to speak.

Instead, Sarah simply tosses her hair over her shoulders and reaches her hands up as if to bunch those long locks into a single ponytail. I hear a click, a familiar
zzzip
, and Sarah brings those beautiful arms forward again. I shall be sad to see them gone.

A shift of her features, an impossible slide to the left. Noses don’t move like that. Chins don’t move like that. At least, not without some major reconstructive surgery. Eyebrows are falling, rosy cheeks following, and what the hell is going on—

Sarah’s mask falls off, skin drooping and sagging away from her face. A rich brown hide, a smooth sandpaper texture, peeks out from beneath. Contact lenses pop out of her eyes, green globules fluttering to the carpet. Stumbling backward, my body is no longer under my control as that false layer of flesh falls away, off her hide, onto the floor. I stare in disbelief as she stands and unfastens the rest of her guise.

Polysuit follows polysuit as Sarah Archer slowly and deliberately removes each flap of faux skin, every ounce of makeup, every inch of belt and girdle and truss from the real body beneath. I do not know how much time has passed. A minute, an hour, a day, it doesn’t matter as I witness the gradual disappearance of Sarah Archer and the equally gradual unveiling of a very familiar Coleophysis.

“Vincent,” she says softly, “I wanted to tell you.”

I should have seen it coming, should have known it from the start. I’m a trained professional, for Chrissakes. It was there all along, of
course, easy enough to detect if only I hadn’t been blinded by my own lust for forbidden treasures:

Sarah Archer is Jaycee Holden. Jaycee Holden is Sarah Archer. Put it however you like it, the two women are one and the same, and I feel the increasingly unstable buttresses that support my world collapsing beneath me as the rest of my muscles give way. Someone, it seems, is dimming the lights …

W
e sit on the couch, three feet apart, miles away from each other. Every few minutes, she attempts to speak, but I hold up my hand, refusing to listen. Immature, perhaps, but I need some time to think. It has been almost an hour since I came to, and only now am I regaining enough control of my emotions to allow for rational conversation.

“Vincent, listen …” she pleads, tears welling in those soft brown eyes. Her green contact lenses soak in a spare case carried in her purse.

“I can’t … How could …” I am not getting very far with speech, so I opt for a pained expression. It conveys the message properly.

“You don’t think I didn’t want to tell you? Right there in that Greek restaurant, I wanted to let it all out. Right in front of everyone if I had to, just let it fly, let you know that you and I … that we were the same.”

I laugh sardonically, shaking my head. “We’re not the same,” I say.

“We’re both dinos.”

“Or so you say. Maybe this is a costume, too.”

“Don’t be childish, Vincent, of course it isn’t.”

“How the hell am I supposed to know?” I explode, and some part of me is glad to see her cringe. “I mean, Christ, Sarah … or is it Jaycee?”

“It’s Jaycee.”

“You sure? I could go for just about anything now. You want me to call you Bertha, I’ll call you Bertha.”

“It’s Jaycee,” she repeats meekly.

“Fine. You got anything left to hide, Jaycee? ’cause I’m just about done playing around. You’re missing, you’re not missing, you’re a human, you’re a dino—”

“There’s a reason,” she interrupts.

“I would hope so. If you did this just for kicks I’d really be worried. So, you gonna tell me?”

“If you let me.”

“I’m letting you.”

“Good.”

“Good. Now talk.”

She begins slowly, shifting about the couch, unable to look me in the eyes. It was so damned easy before, wasn’t it? “I don’t know where to start,” she says, and I suggest the beginning. “There isn’t much of a beginning. It sort of … sprang up.”

“Like a weed?”

“Five years ago,” Jaycee continues, “I met Donovan on the streets of New York. Well, not on the streets—we were both at a deli counter down in Greenwich Village. And we were both single and we were both attractive and we were both ready for a relationship, though we didn’t know it at the time. I smelled him the second he walked in, the strongest dino odor that’s ever hit me. Do you remember his smell, Vincent? From your visit to the hospital?”

I remember the odors of barbecued meat, of roasted Raptor, and though I feel Jaycee Holden deserves some pain for what she’s put me through, I don’t think divulging this information would represent a fair retaliation. “It was a hospital,” I say. “You know how tough it is with those disinfectants.”

She senses my tactful avoidance of the subject and nods gratefully. “He could light up a room with his odor. Like a wave of roses, a sea breeze. I used to call him my little sea dragon.

“I had corned beef on white with mayo, and he made fun of it. Said I didn’t know how to eat properly. Those were the first words I ever heard him say—‘Ma’am, I hate to intrude, but you don’t know how to eat right.’ ”

How cute. “Is this nonsense going somewhere?” This is good old-fashioned jealousy talking, but I really don’t care.

“You said to start from the beginning, I’m starting from the beginning. He was a great guy, Vincent, a lot like you. Not just because he was a Raptor, either. Your sense of humor, your style, the way you carry yourself—very similar. You would have liked him, I’m sure.”