The Better to Hold You (23 page)

For a long moment we sat there, huddled.

“Abra? Doc?”

I looked up and Red was already unlocking his door and turning to pull me out. “We need to run for it.”

But I found myself unable to move. I stood there, staring at the carcass of the deer we’d hit, a stag with a great rack of antlers, his gold hide darkened with rain and blood. No, not a carcass. I brushed the water from my eyes and saw more clearly that his hooves were still faintly flailing, his nostrils dilated with fear.

“Abra.”

“We can’t leave him like this!”

Red went down on one knee and the deer, panicked, began rolling its head from side to side. With one hand on either side of its antlers, Red yanked the deer’s neck savagely to the right. Then he just sat there, chest heaving.

“Red?”

He looked up and his eyes were full of regret and something darker, wilder, more excited. He started to stand, stumbled, and caught me against him. Definitely excited. Despite the driving rain and the dead stag, maybe because of them, I felt an answering heat, a sudden stab of arousal.

Red saw it in my eyes and suddenly he was holding me too hard, his fingers painful against my upper arms, his hips grinding into mine. And I gasped and then his mouth was covering mine, one of his hands moved up to cup the back of my head, the other braced at my waist to keep me from falling over. His teeth were sharp on the inside of my lips, on my tongue. I couldn’t catch my breath and I had to cling to the solid strength of his shoulders to keep from going down. And then we were both going down, sprawled in the mud beside the stag’s corpse, and I couldn’t get enough air to tell Red to stop, please wait.

“Abra!” He drew back, his expression anguished, and before I could think I found myself pulling his head back down to mine, my hips rising to meet his thrust for thrust, thrust for thrust. I was mindless with it. I felt his hands move up under my shirt, covering my breasts, his callused palms abrading my nipples, his mouth slanting sideways, nipping at my throat. Yes. I was tugging at his jeans, trying to get at him, mindless and hungry and acting from some primitive, animal part of my brain.

“Hey now, easy, girl, slow down a minute—oh, Christ.”

I couldn’t understand why Red seemed to be fighting me, but suddenly the fighting kicked something in me into overdrive, and I was biting Red’s neck, licking my way down the delicious muscular indentations of his chest and stomach, my nails raking down the lean length of his spine, finding the surprising furriness of him there too, but I wasn’t turned off by this, not when I could hear the rapid thunder of his heartbeat, so fast I knew he’d dreamed about this.

“Abra, wait.”

But I was hungry for him, ravenous, my body sliding down his, my face at the bulge in his crotch, my mouth on him through the sodden fabric as my fingers worked at the buttons, he was a Levi’s man and there was an ungodly row of buttons to contend with, ah, there, free, the dry heat of his erection in my hand. I heard him shout, Jesus, and his hands convulsed on the back of my head, then released and held me with perfect tenderness as I inhaled the clean, male scent of him, a scent of wood smoke and salt, a drugging, intimate scent of cave and fur. I took him in my mouth.

“What are you doing to me?” His voice broke off, the last word a choked gasp.

What was I doing? This was something I had done for Hunter only a few times, done to please, not something I actually enjoyed. But here with this unlikely man I was out to please only myself, this strange self with strange appetites. Under my fingers, I felt the muscles of his back ripple in a way that seemed both strange and familiar, like something remembered from a dream.

“Stop, Abra, please, before I lose control.” He had tangled his fingers in my hair, forcing my head up.

I looked at him. His eyes were no more than shadows, but I could still read him: surprise, desire, and regret, and a steady glow of tenderness that made me smile.

“Take off your pants.” I tugged on them, wanting him completely naked, for reasons I didn’t completely understand.

“Doc, I can’t—you don’t want to …”

I unlaced his hiking boots, pulling them off. “Now the jeans. Lose them.”

“I don’t suppose I could just keep my socks on?” He sounded almost desperate.

“Very funny. No.”

“Um, the thing is, if I’m entirely naked …”

I stood up, folded my arms, and just looked at him, knowing that in the end, he would do exactly what I wanted, because for once in my sexual life, I was in control.

Red swallowed hard. “Oh, fuck it.” He was naked in two seconds, his compact body muscular and hairy and surprisingly tanned, as if he had spent time outdoors in the buff. I couldn’t help but notice that he was not smaller than Hunter in all respects: Who would have guessed that such a slender man would be so well-endowed?

I went up to him, fully dressed, and kissed him. Our heights were similar enough that I could feel the hard length of him pressed against the vee of my thighs, and then Red groaned and bent his knees, his hands reaching down to cup my bottom and press me more firmly against him. Then he stilled, panting hard, his fingers clenching and unclenching on my hips as he struggled with himself.

And suddenly, I knew that he was too close to losing control, and that I wanted him in my mouth before it was too late. I slid down his body, pressing kisses to his mouth, his muscular chest, his belly. Red’s hand’s caught in my hair, pulling gently.

“Ah … no, sweet girl, that’s not … a good …” His voice trailed off as I bent my head and licked the rounded tip.

“You were saying?” I glanced up and saw that Red’s head was arched back, his eyes tightly closed. So I took him in my mouth, tasting the first salty-sweet prelude to his release.

Red made a low, rumbling sound, his fingers still tangled in my hair, but no longer trying to pull me away. Now his touch was a dragging caress, and oh, God, the feel of his hands, combing mindlessly along my scalp, coiling the length of my hair around his wrists. His touch said more about what he was feeling than any words could have. I felt the bone-deep hunger in him, the hunger fed by the fact that it was me doing this. I raked my teeth delicately along his length, his desire became my desire, his ecstasy a wave gathering force. He was moving with me now, faster, his lean hips pumping, and I could taste more of that salty sweetness now, and for the first time in my life, I wanted to swallow a lover down into me with cannibal desire.

“Abra, stop!” I felt his hands trying to pull me away, but it was as if I had become him, as if it were my orgasm crashing at the gate. I could feel his pulsing between my own legs and I was clinging to him, wanting to finish it, and then he groaned, a sound of utter surrender. Suddenly I was flung backward. Shocked and stung, I watched him gasp, hunched over, his face nearly purple.

Oh, God, he couldn’t breathe. I’d killed him. “Red?”

“Aaarggh!” Red folded over at the waist, clutching his middle. Was he dying? What was it? Heart attack, asthma attack, epileptic fit? I couldn’t think.

“Are you in pain? Red, look at me. Can you look at me?”

In response, he threw back his head and howled, a sound of such primal anguish that it ripped through the storm.

“Oh, God, Red, are you—”

Like all impossible things, it happened quickly. Red collapsed onto his hands and knees, shook his head, and then looked up at me for a long moment. There was no humor in his gaze this time, no challenge, no wink. But by the time he reached the trees, he wasn’t a man anymore.

I was so shocked that it took me a moment to realize that he wasn’t running away. Another moment for me to realize he wanted me to follow him.

It was only when I saw the bulky shadow of my house that Red stopped as if at some invisible boundary, his four-legged posture alert and watchful as I stumbled down the overgrown old cow path up to my back door.

Inside the dark and empty house I found a flashlight and two candles, and then I tripped over the torn and bloody carcass of an opossum in the kitchen. Red had been right about one thing: The corpses were getting larger. I wrapped the naked-faced creature in an old kitchen towel and threw it outside the front door, and sat in the living room, waiting for Hunter to come home.

I’d cheated on my husband. I’d had oral sex with another man. With a wolf man. I’d just seen a man turn into a wolf. Or a coyote. No, I’d made a man turn into … what ever it was.

And Jackie knew.

I yearned for a hot shower. For television. For a book to read. For any distraction at all. Instead, all I got were questions. Was I going insane? Had Jackie slipped me a tab of acid in the mac and cheese? I felt my heart race and tried to stop myself from panicking. This wasn’t a drug-induced hallucination. This was my life.

Which led me to the question: Where was Hunter, car-less, on a night like to night?

I felt instinctively he was not looking for me. I felt he was off on his own adventure. At Moondoggie’s? With that waitress? I wouldn’t even have the right to object. He could be in her mouth right now, or his mouth between her legs, and I would be powerless to object, because I had been just as guilty.

Except that now I suspected that he’d never been faithful at all. It wasn’t just Magda. If he was sleeping with me and cheating with that waitress, then there was every reason to think he had never really been monogamous. And knowing this changed the shape of our past together. It made my memories of our marriage incomplete.

Well, at least I had one man who wanted me. Maybe Red was right—maybe he would be better for me.

Sure, because a man who was also a dog would be a perfect companion. No, wait, that was crazy. He had gotten scared and run off, and then I had seen a coyote. I was sleep-deprived and high on adrenaline, and I was having some sort of weird mental episode.

Red had gotten scared and run off, and a coyote had appeared and guided me home. That didn’t make much more sense, but at least I didn’t have to get myself committed in the morning. And wasn’t it just like a man to run off the minute you finally decide to let him in?

And then, sitting on my dark couch in the dark house, came a shower of memories. Me at nineteen, still young enough to believe in the magic of transformations; still young enough to believe the magazines when they said the new hair, a prettier you, thinner thighs, better sex, making him want you. I had met Hunter still naïve enough to believe that I was on the verge of inventing a new, happier, stronger self, that in choosing the right college, the right career path, the right man, I might shed the old skin of my old life.

But here I was, in a house that was big and old and alien, waiting for someone who didn’t really want me anymore to walk in through the door. When he did, it would be time to leave him and face the prospect of life on my own.

No wonder most people don’t leave a marriage without a lover to help them open the door. So comforting, the thought of that lover in the background. Too bad Red couldn’t have been a little more convincing in the role.

I fell asleep without knowing I had done so. I wakened partially when the first rays of daylight hit my face from the living room window, but then I closed my eyes again, too tired to move. Suddenly, there was a crashing sound behind me, and I whirled. My heart lurched into a faster rhythm a full half-second before my brain caught up with the information: Front door slamming open. Husband standing there. Naked. And bloody.

“Abra.” Hunter looked at me with the strangest expression on his face, a look of rueful embarrassment that did not really go with the deep lacerations on his shoulders and chest.

“Oh, my God.”

“I see you’re back. Well. That’s good.” He brushed his hands off on his thighs, for all the world as if he’d just come back from a day’s gardening. “I think I’ll just take a shower, then.”

“Hunter, you’re bleeding.”

He looked down at himself. “Ah. Yes. The thing of it is, I was out looking for you, and—”

“You’re bleeding and you’re naked.”

Something shifted in Hunter’s strange expression. “Abra,” he said, and it came out clogged in his throat. His eyes were dark with pain and confusion.

“What happened to you?” My voice was softer than I thought it would be. I pulled a throw off the back of the couch and carried it over to my husband. “Here.” I wrapped it around his shoulders.

“I can’t remember.” His arms came around me and he slid down my body, his face pressed against my belly, as Red’s face had been not so many hours ago. “Abra.”

“I’m here.”

“Don’t go.”

“I’m here.”

His arms convulsed around me, hugging me so tightly that I nearly lost my balance. I stroked his hair, not knowing what to say, guilty and a little repulsed by the sweaty, humid odor of blood and dirt. I couldn’t remember Hunter ever going down on his knees before me. His sudden need of me was seductive, and I tried to pull back a little. “Were you—did you drink something?”

Hunter pulled back. “You smell funny.”

“I smell funny?”

“Like …” His brow furrowed. He looked up at me. “Are you leaving me for him?”

“You have some nerve.” Now I did try to step back, but Hunter prevented me, holding me even as he stood, his arms moving up to grip my arms. “Where have you been all night? With that waitress? And how about all this past summer? Want to tell me again how it wasn’t like that with Magda?”

Hunter inhaled so deeply his nostrils flared. “He didn’t come on you,” he said harshly. “Did you come on him?”

“No! How dare you!” I yanked my wrists from his grip, my voice coming out very calm and precise and overly deliberate, like the computerized voice on the radio warning about the storm. “How dare you go on and on about Red when you—”

“But it means nothing to me!” His face was flushed with anger, and I realized I’d never seen Hunter lose control before. “Fucking some girl when I’m away from home—that’s like scratching an itch to me, Abra. You know that, deep down. That’s why you never paid attention when I—”

“I didn’t know!” I was hitting him with my fists, and he caught each blow. “I didn’t know, you bastard! I trusted you because you’d already had a thousand stupid bimbos!”