Binding: Book Two of the Moon Wolf Saga (18 page)

There are a number of different ways you can react if someone impersonates your lover and friend, tries to step into the place that belonged to someone so dear to you. I’d thought of several of them, from the first time I’d scented the place where I’d seen Richard standing, and it had not been him. In the first one, of course, the imposter ends up running screaming down the avenue, back arched against the blow he can feel coming his way. I was going to personally guarantee that there would be screaming. And of course there could be other scenarios first, and the screaming and the running might come later.

I decided on the second course, because Richard looked so good to me, so fine, almost exact. And I missed him, and for all intents and purposes, there he was. No reason to chase him away just yet.

“Richard!” I said, and my voice resonated with love, and surprise, and happiness, all on its own. And my eyes widening, and almost starting to tear up, that wasn’t exactly voluntary either. “You came back!” I exclaimed, and I almost made myself believe, just for a moment, that it was true. I took a step toward him. “You said you never would, but oh, you came back!” I wouldn’t actually say something like that, but I thought I’d give the guy some encouragement. This might be fun.

Fake Richard smiled, and it was almost his smile. “I couldn’t help it,” he told me. “I had to see you again. I missed you.”

He’d said that to me a dozen times in the last few weeks, in my dreams. Of course Richard would not miss me. He was free. He was gone, he dwelt in other worlds now, as a different being. But I was still enchanted to hear what almost sounded like his voice say those words.

“I thought I’d never see you again,” my voice said, of its own accord.

“Darling,” he said, “I couldn’t stay away.”

Okay, that wasn’t Richard. The imposter recognized the false note at once, probably in my reaction, and tried again.

“I missed you so much!”

“I missed you too!” I indicated the door to my apartment. “Don’t you have your key?” I was playing with him; Richard had never had a key, but this guy wasn’t going to know that.

“I—lost it, I’m afraid. And I wasn’t sure if you would want me…” He nodded toward the apartment.

“Oh,” I said. I was trying to put off the moment when I would have to move closer to him, and the fantasy that this was really Richard would vanish. Ah, well. “Do you want to come upstairs?” I asked, and I canted my hips just a little, and I tilted my head and added just a hint of a pout. Because if you are going to play a role like this, you might as well play it to the max.

“Of course!” he said, dropping his voice. “Why else would I have come?”

I walked up to him, and he held out his arms for an embrace. I handed him the grocery bags and hurried past him up the steps. At my door I turned and looked down, giving him another one of those “come and get me” looks. He was disconcerted, shifting the grocery bags to get a good hold on them, but he smiled up at me gamely.

His scent told me he was almost twice as old as he looked in Richard's form. Richard's hair was smooth and soft, with only the aid of shampoo. This guy, this imposter, whoever he was, had some kind of hair goop on, as well as conditioner, and a strong deodorant. He’d had a fast food burger for lunch, and French fries; Richard ate that stuff, but only when he was starving. I beckoned, smiling, and the imposter hurried up the steps.

Inside, I took the bags from him. “Look what I got!” I told him, as I unpacked them on the table. “See how much I was thinking of you? Here's some of that pasta that you like, and basil and mushrooms. I was going to try and make that thing you make, but now that you’re here, I can watch you do it one more time. Oh, I’m so glad you’re here!”

This time I grabbed him and hugged him, hard. Richard was not a big guy, when he was in human form. The magician who raised him made him look as unassuming as possible, so his frame was slight, though his musculature was, well, terrific. When I grabbed and held the imposter, I squeezed hard. I could almost feel his heavy flesh, his girth, under the illusion that played on my senses. Unfortunately for him, he was only managing to blind the senses of mine that were the same as his.

“Now!” I said, letting him go, “let's see you cook!”

His uncertainty, his blush, his stammer, added to the comedy as I waited for him to figure his way out of this one. He made Richard's eyes go dark and bedroomy. “Haven’t we got better things to do, after so long?”

I remembered that look on Richard. I caught my breath. It had been a prelude to so many delightful hours. I shook my head. “The moon hasn’t set yet,” I reminded him, my eyes wide.

I watched him do a double-take on that. “Of course,” he said. “I’m forgetting. It has been too, too long.” He moved to take me in his arms. Again I hugged him hard, avoiding his move to kiss me. Let him think the moon got in the way of that, too. For now, at least.

“So, are you going to cook my favorite dinner?” I asked teasingly.

“I will cook,” he said playfully, “a whole new dinner, that will become your favorite henceforth, I promise you.”

“Oh, terrific!” I said. I wondered how far over the top I could take the acting before he figured it out and gave up. But he smelled confident, not fearful. He was excited, not nervous. I figured I could play him a long, long way.

He made pasta, but he didn’t use both butter and olive oil, the way Richard did, only olive oil. He cut up green onions and mushrooms, and grated a lot of cheese. He covered his not knowing where anything was by giving me the role of assistant, and calling for each implement like a doctor in an operating room. “Garlic press! Cheese grater! Colander!” It was a good guess that I even had a garlic press. Richard had bought all the gadgets in the kitchen. I let him get away with it all.

He put the yummy dinner on the table in front of me, and I grinned up at him like he’d done something amazing and clever. “Mac and cheese! I love mac and cheese!” I smiled to myself as he almost broke character.

My Richard's response to a crack like that had been a lecture on food that went on all through dinner. Fake Richard put his smile back on and said, “I’m so glad.”

It was pretty good, with all the trimmings he’d added. I ate with enthusiasm. “Umph! Oh, you are so right, this is just delicious, Richard!”

“I’m so glad you like it,” he said, his hand creeping across the table to stroke mine. “And now,” he glanced toward the bed-room—not an inspired guess, since there was only the door to the bathroom to confuse it with. “Shall we?” he asked.

Again, I made my eyes wide. “Aren’t you going to clean up?”

“Sweetheart—”

“‘Sweetheart?’” I winced. “You never called me that.”

Now his voice went all bedroomy again. “There are so many things I never got a chance to call you. Sweetheart, darling, precious girl…” He came around the table toward me. “But now at last we will have time.”

“Oh, Richard!” I gasped. “Oh, Richard!” I grasped his hands, effectively keeping him from taking me in his arms again. I pushed him toward the kitchen. “You get cleaned up in there, and I’ll…” I practically waggled my eyebrows at him. “… get cleaned up in there.” I headed for the bathroom. I looked back to blow him a kiss. He was smiling. That wasn’t Richard's smile. That was the smile of the guy who thought he was winning. I blew him another kiss. I knew just what that felt like. I almost smirked.

I detoured to my bedroom to kick off the clothes Tamara had given me. I pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of sweats of my own, and that was satisfying, to be wearing clothes that smelled like me, and had my shape built into them by use.

The imposter was making a racket as he did the dishes, whistling a show tune while he worked. I went into the bathroom and ran a well-deserved hot shower, and stood under it for a long time, laughing to myself about the guy who’d made me dinner, and was now cleaning my kitchen. I emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, dressed in my own clean sweats, armed with clean teeth and clean hair for the fight to come. You choose your weapons and your tactics according to the field of battle. That's what my dad taught me.

I didn’t give him a chance to think or react. I walked right up to him and started unbuttoning his shirt. That brought on a big smile, and that wasn’t Richard's smile either. He reached for me, but I batted his hands away with a surprised look. “Richard!”

He stopped and looked down, and that gave me pause for a moment, because that was something I’d seen Richard do a hundred times. Close up I could see that the bone structure was right, but the little scar under his eye was missing, and his lips were odd. Close up, of course, I could smell the wax in the guy's ears, and the trace of athlete's foot in his shoes. Richard looked up again, and now the scar was there, and his lips were just as I remembered them. Huh. He couldn’t be reading my mind, exactly, or he wouldn’t think he was fooling me. But he had figured out about the scar.

I finished undoing his shirt and slipped it off his shoulders. I undid his belt, and slipped it off slowly. I doubled it up in my hand and saw his eyes widen involuntarily as he wondered, just for a second, what the fuck he was in for, before I threw it behind me and reached for the button on his jeans. I could smell his growing excitement, which fed my excitement. And it was lust, in a way, brought on by his nearness, by his close resemblance to my sweet lover, and by the thrill of the game I was playing. I manipulated the button open, paused a moment, and then pulled down his zipper, my hand feeling the warmth of his arousal under his briefs. I bent and quickly tugged his pants down to his ankles, and then, while I was there, I tugged his briefs off too.

Okay, that wasn’t Richard either. Richard hadn’t been anywhere near that—showy. And it wasn’t a big reach to guess that Mr. Imposter wasn’t nearly that well-endowed either. I wondered briefly whether, if I grabbed it, I would know its true size and shape. And I realized in the same moment that I really didn’t care.

His pants and briefs down at his ankles, I looked deeply into his eyes, doing the bedroomy thing myself, and I took his hand. “Come,” I said, making my voice husky. “Come, Richard. It's time.”

I turned away and led him firmly to the bedroom, and was satisfied first to hear the startled exclamation, and then the hard tug on my arm as he stumbled and went down heavily with a thump and a cry. “Oh, Richard!” I cried, turning back to him. He was on his hands and knees, scraping at his pants with his shod feet. “Oh, no! I’m so sorry! Here, let me help you, please!”

“No, no, I’m all right, really.”

I got down on the floor with him, and went to his feet and grabbed them, lifting them high. I smiled to myself when he registered how unexpectedly strong I was, how he couldn’t shake my grip on his ankles as I pulled off each of his shoes and then his socks. I stood up, holding on to his pant legs, and pulled off his pants and his briefs while he still lay on the floor. I tossed them behind me and walked into the bedroom, leaving him to follow or not, just as he pleased. I was still smiling.

I pulled off my sweatpants, my sweatshirt, my t-shirt, and lay down on the bed as I heard him come in. I pointed. “Over there.”

“Oh my god!”

I looked up. That hadn’t been Richard's voice.

“What happened to you?” He was staring at my really impressive bruise, only just starting to fade on my hip.

“Oh,” I said. “I got shot.”

“My god!” Then he remembered, and the voice was like Richard's again. “My darling, are you all right?” He came toward me, but hesitated to touch me.

“I’m fine. Richard, over there.”

“What?”

“The oil. In the dresser. You know.”

And the fact was, Richard had bought the massage oil. He’d bought four kinds. He liked the strawberry, as he said there were some things in England he liked to remember. I liked the sandalwood. But that was a memory that belonged to the real Richard, and me. “The almond oil.” After all, if I was going to play this scene to the end, I might as well get some good out of it.

Fake Richard sat down on the bed and opened the bottle. Again I turned to him in surprise. “Feet first, right? Watch out for my ankle. It still hurts.”

Obediently, fake Richard moved down to my feet. “Ow,” he said in sympathy. “What happened here?”

“I got in a fight,” I said. There were constructs by which this statement was true. Besides. There's no point in telling the truth to a liar. He probably wouldn’t even hear it.

“Oh, poor baby!” Richard's voice had never sounded so sappy.

“I’m all right,” I said. “Especially now that you’re back. It doesn’t hurt at all.” I’d never played sappy before, but it sure wasn’t hard.

He began at my feet, and over the next half hour worked all the way up my body, had me turn over, and worked all the way down again, going very gently on my bruises. It was pleasant. It wasn’t Richard, but it wasn’t bad. I have had experiences, before the experience of Richard put them all behind me. Richard had made an art of love hundreds of years before I was born. He brought all that skill and understanding to my bed, in his efforts to bind me to him, to keep himself in my service while he needed my protection. So I’d learned from him that it could be fun. It could be a joy. And now that Richard was gone, I was wondering, will it be anywhere as good with anyone else? So, I thought, why not? By the time he had massaged me up one side and down the other, by the time I was slathered in almond oil, relaxed and at peace, that and his borrowed form might earn him my willing cooperation in what he seemed to have come here to do. So, when he got on the bed, I turned to him, and opened my arms.

He began to kiss me, lightly, following in the path his hands had already gentled and smoothed. I took the oil from him, dripped some on my hands, and worked his shoulders while he continued his way down my body. “Ah!” he said, and “Oh!”

His muscles were not Richard's muscles. I knew Richard's body very well. With my hands on the imposter's, I could feel his larger mass. His scent was not unpleasant. But then, not many smells are.

He pressed me to him, and kissed my ear. I squirmed and moaned a little, to give him encouragement. “Say it,” he breathed. “Say my name! My true name! I want to hear you say it!”