Ariel (40 page)

* * *

We searched for her for five days. I slept only when I couldn't go on, ate only when forced to by the need to replenish my strength. Shaughnessy stayed with me and helped me as much as she could. For the most part I ignored her, needing the help yet wanting to do it alone. Whatever she thought of me, she kept it to herself.

On the fourth night, as I was sullenly eating the rabbit I'd snared, she began to talk. She went on about the battle and how it had all been so much easier than they'd expected it to be, that the necromancer's forces had been disorganized and unprepared—

I waved her to silence. "I don't care," was all I said. After I finished eating, I lay on the ground, facing away from her so she couldn't see me crying, and I pretended to sleep.

* * *

Next day we found somebody who said he'd seen her. He was a fat man and spoke to us eagerly, arm around a fatter woman.

"Yeah, most gorgeous thing I ever saw," he said, bobbing his round head. "Moved quieter than a cat. Leg was broken, though, poor thing."

We left him and searched the surrounding countryside. New York had become a rolling green place as we traveled north.

We found no sign of her.

* * *

That night Shaughnessy heard the sobs that wracked me as I lay on the grass, turned away from where she slept a few yards distant. I tried to keep them to myself, but they wouldn't stay contained and they flowed over the edge of my restraint. I felt tired, so very goddamned tired.

"Pete?" Her voice behind me, a whisper over the cricket sound.

My throat was too blocked to answer. She moved until she was beside me. I tried to hide my face. She touched my neck.

"Pete, we'll find her."

It opened up then; whatever control I'd had burst at the seams. I shuddered with the force of my crying and she hugged me and stroked my hair. I wanted to bury myself in her breast, feeling like a baby in a rocking chair with its mother.

"We'll find her, Pete," she repeated, cradling my head. I needed to wipe my nose, but I didn't want to move. "We'll find her, you know we will. She wouldn't leave you. She's just confused, like you're confused, and she'll come back." She talked almost as if to herself, holding me tightly with one arm, stroking my hair with the other. I pressed my head against her. Her shirt was wet where my tears had fallen.

I lay there long after my tears had subsided and her stroking became less urgent. The wind blew across the cheek that faced up. I shivered.

She pressed closer to me, huddling me into her warmth, her face next to mine. She stroked my back. I opened my eyes, expecting to see her watching me, but her own eyes were closed.

I remembered the night we had kissed on board the
Lady Woof
. It had felt right then. Impulsively I reached out and stroked her cheek. She opened her eyes as it slid softly beneath my fingertips.

I kissed her. A brief kiss, and I pulled my head back and looked at her. There was no expression in her eyes, none that I could read. She bent her head to me. We kissed again. I felt her mouth opening and, after a moment's hesitation, mine followed. I felt an uncomfortable pressure somewhere deep inside. My breathing grew harsher, and I had to pull my lips back a fraction because my nose could not take in air fast enough. She pressed me hard against her. She kissed my cheek gently, kissed me again on the lips. I tasted salt from my dried tears on her tongue. She brought one hand up and turned my head to one side. She shifted forward a bit. Warm breath rushed into my ear, amplified, tingling. Her tongue traced the outside curves, working its spiralling way inward until it darted rapidly in and out of the center of my ear. I grabbed her arm, hard. I turned my head until my tongue was sliding against hers again, and this time the taste was the faintly bitter one of ear wax. We rolled until I was on top of her. She brought both hands to my head and tugged gently back until I was looking straight ahead, and she licked my throat. I did the same for her, feeling hurried, impatient. She moved beneath me. Her hair was fanned out on the grass, framing her face. Her eyes were closed and her mouth formed a small O, face tilted away as I flicked my tongue along the smooth contours of her neck. Her nails dug into my back. I reached her ear. Her hands clenched, bunching up my shirt. She began working it up, and I pulled my head from her as she brought it over my shoulders, my head, up my arms, and onto the grass by her head. I brought my mouth back to hers, and she clutched at me. Her right hand grabbed my shoulder where the slivers of glass had bit in. I sucked in a pained breath that hissed through clenched teeth.

"Sorry," she breathed, and kissed me.

My hips ground against her, a movement I did not consciously control. She brought her hands to my chest and pushed me away gently, sliding down beneath me and bringing her mouth to my chest. I gasped as her tongue lapped at my left nipple, and my breath was ragged as I expelled it. She brought her mouth to the other nipple. A small brightness exploded in the pit of my stomach, like fear, but not fear. It spread through me.

I pushed her back to the grass and roughly brought my mouth to hers. I worked my way down until the fabric of her shirt collar slid against my lips.

My hands trembled as I unbuttoned her shirt.

She sat up after the last button was undone, after I had slowly pulled it from where it had been tucked into her pants to get to it, and I drew it over her shoulders and down her arms.

Her bra was frosty white in the moonlight, contrasting with the dark of her. I kissed her shoulder and lay her back down. She arched her back as it touched the cold grass. I kissed her again, feeling the rough fabric of her brassiere tickling my chest, sliding against the skin. She helped me remove it because I didn't know how.

The fear hit me then. I looked into her eyes. She didn't smile, I think because she knew I might interpret it as amusement. Instead her hand found mine, and she brought it up to her breast. She urged me with gentle pressures and stroked the top of my hand when I continued. Her nipple grew taut beneath my palm. She moaned, and the sound of it made my heart beat faster. I brought my lips down to it, not quite sure what to do. I brushed back and forth, and then sucked like an infant.

The fear hit me again, and I took my mouth from her and lay my head against her chest, feeling it rise and fall. She made a noise in her throat and turned me over until she was on top. Her hair tickled my nose and I brushed it aside. She was breathing hard and her breasts pressed into me. I shivered as she slid down until her mouth again covered my nipple. It gave way to trembling as her hands found my belt, slid it through the buckle, pulled it, unsnapped my pants, and fumbled with the tab of my zipper. I held onto her head, pushing it tightly into me, and shook all over. I could not think. There were things here that had always been here, lying half-submerged. There was a low rasp as she tugged down my zipper, and her fingers slid beneath the elastic band of my underwear. I clenched my eyes. My thigh muscles knotted up.

And then she was pulling down my pants and underwear simultaneously, making me arch my back to pull them over my buttocks, and they were sliding down my thighs, over my knees, my shins, my feet. She tossed them aside and stood up. I opened my eyes. Her breasts rose and fell as she breathed. I tried to swallow and couldn't. The night air moved, causing a prickling sensation in my scrotum as it whispered across my pubic hair. She took off her own pants and panties at the same time, impatiently, stepping out with one foot and then the other, tossing them aside, kneeling back down beside me. She passed her head back and forth. Her hair brushed against me from chest to stomach. She stopped at one end of the rhythmic swinging. Her warm breath, the wet-slick sliding of her tongue up and down the shaft of my penis, and then the soft ring of warmth, descending and ascending. She brought her mouth away and I looked at her through half-closed eyes as she straddled me. The insides of her thighs were warm against the tops of my own, a contrast to the night air moving across the rest of me. She leaned forward and kissed me, and began moving back and forth, so slowly.

"Don't be afraid," she whispered.

"Shaughnessy—"

"Shhh. "

I felt that she was wet, rubbing against me, coating the underside of my hard penis. There was a faint ringing in my ears, and through it I heard the soft, coarse sound of her pubic hair brushing against mine. She lifted a little and reached down with one hand to lift me and guide me into her.

"Shaughn—"

She pressed down. A little hiss escaped between her teeth.

And then she was pounding and it was warm and I was grabbing her hips and there was nothing but moving, wet moving, and my own hips bucked uncontrollably, and she arched her back and turned her face up toward the moon, biting her bottom lip, and the expression she wore was pain but not pain and it was happening so frighteningly fast and then something began creeping stealthily into my mind on nightbird wings, and then it was there and it was light and light pulsing, spreading, and I could feel the hot gushing into her, and it rose, and rose, and then slowed into rocking movement that gradually stopped.

She fell against me, and she was crying, and our tears mingled.

Twenty-Four

"I was looking for my people," the unicorn said. "Have you seen them, magician? They are wild and sea-white, like me." Schmendrick shook his head gravely. "I have never seen anyone like you, not while I was awake. There were supposed to be a few unicorns left when I was a boy, but I knew only one man who had ever seen one. They are surely gone, lady, all but you. When you walk, you make an echo where they used to be."

—Peter S. Beagle
, The Last Unicorn

I awoke at the sound of something crashing through the brush. It was midmorning. Shaughnessy's naked form was curled beside me. Something was coming toward us, something big, from the sound. Conscious of my nakedness, I picked up Fred and waited as the trampling neared.

The bushes parted and Ariel emerged.

She stopped when she saw me. Her head came up as though she were sniffing the air. She stepped toward me and stopped suddenly after a few paces. Her head was cocked questioningly, the way it had when she'd been blind.

There was a rust-colored smear on her neck where I'd hugged her in the Empire State Building. The dried blood on her horn had begun to flake off. Her hair was matted and tangled. Gone were the glossy rainbow ripples that used to spread across her in the sunlight as she moved. For the first time in her life, her coat was dirty. She looked like a wild thing, a thing that had never before seen a human being.

The first time I had ever seen her I had waded cautiously from a lake. I hadn't been ashamed of my nakedness then.

She blinked. She'd begun to put weight on her right front leg as she walked, and that was good. It would heal now. The pain was gone, New York but a memory. A bad memory, one with scars, but one that would also heal, with time and love.

She looked thin.

A stirring beside me as Shaughnessy moved in her sleep. I looked at her nude body and remembered.

"Ariel," I whispered. She couldn't have heard.

I stepped toward her. She didn't move. Stepped again, until I stood before her. I reached out and she backed away. I was close enough to see the outline of my naked form in her dark eyes.

Not this. Please, not this.

But as I stepped toward her again with both hands outstretched, she snorted and turned her head aside. A pool formed at the bottom of each dark eye, and a single tear flowed down her muzzle, crystalline.

"Ariel," I said again.

We looked at each other. I have walked the road with you, my beloved creature of purity. We've laughed and cried and traveled and fought, and now it's come to this. I felt cold inside.

"I can't," I said. "I can't, I can't." A spasm took me, a wave that made me twitch once and then was gone. The side of her muzzle glistened from her tears. I stepped closer to her. "Please—"

And she stepped back.

My sword had fallen from my hand, unnoticed until now. I looked at it and lowered myself to my knees before her. I looked up at her, then at the sword. She stepped forward and placed her horn between my hand and the blade. Gently, she nudged the sword away. I looked into her eyes and the pride was still there, now a part of the wildness. I tried once more to touch her, and she gave the barest shake of her head.

Tears brimmed and I shut my eyes. I brought my clenched fists to them and rubbed hard, as if it would scour me clean somehow, and when I opened them again she was gone.

I stared at the space where she had been for a long time and something broke inside me.

* * *

It feels as though a lot of time has passed since then, though only a year has gone by. We like to think our lives stop at these climactic spots, that all else will be superfluous, but of course that isn't so. The cliché holds true: life goes on.

Shaughnessy and I set ourselves up in a house in North Carolina. The place was in pretty good shape but required some repairs, and for a few months I lost myself in work. When that didn't satisfy me I hunted alone for days.

Even when I surfaced from my fugues I was cold to Shaughnessy, treating her more as a roommate than as the friend she wanted to be, or even the lover she was. Sometimes at night, when she lay breathing deeply beside me, I would lie awake in bed and, if I strained hard enough, just at the threshold of hearing, I felt I could hear the sound of wind chimes tinkling, the sound of silver hooves. I didn't, of course—life goes on, yes, and our capacity for self-deception accompanies it. It must have been hard for Shaughnessy to live in a shadow.

We went on like this, living our separate lives together, until the middle of winter when I was tracking a deer and thought I saw a unicorn. I couldn't be sure; it may have just been a trick of the snow. Somehow the incident pried me open and made me see what I had kept inside for half a year.

I spent that night crying in Shaughnessy's arms. I had been numb too long. The house, the work, our relationship. The façade.

But no more charades. We talked, Shaughnessy and I, and it surfaced that there was something between us, something I had too long denied, something we both thought worth saving. But the foundation of our relationship couldn't lie in the past, and I could no longer be content with the stagnancy of the present. Rolling stones and moss, I guess.

Before I could reconcile moving on, however, I felt the need to cauterize old wounds, and so this account was written. I will leave it behind when we go. It was intended as a cathartic, but if you wish I suppose you may read it as a sort of subjective history of the first years of these odd times.

Shaughnessy and I are taking only what we need to get by as we wander the land. It is less safe than domestic tranquility, perhaps, but I would rather live the life of a dolphin than that of a clam.

Besides—the world is a different place now, and I haven't even begun to scratch its surface.