Natural Instincts (7 page)

Hal just waved and got into a dark green pickup he’d left on the edge of the road. Jon stared sourly after him for a moment, then turned to me.

“I love him deeply,” Jon said, seeing what must have been a shocked expression on my face. “And he knows it. But that doesn’t mean I have to like him being right.”

He opened the bag. I watched him pull on a pair of briefs and then jeans and a soft black shirt that fitted loosely, flowing with his muscles.

Darkness closed in gently. Through the trees, I could see the glow of a few campfires and heard someone laughing. I caught myself listening for the loon. But it was far better hearing his voice when he put his arms around me. For a long time, I let my head rest on his chest.

Hal’s words were bothering me a little. What had he meant by “celebrate what we can”? I needed to know what danger Jon faced. And I needed to know what the reality of our relationship was going to look like.

But Jon needed to eat. I pulled away from him and sat at the table, facing the water. He sat across from me, straddling the bench, keeping one eye on the lake and one over my shoulder at the road. I waited quietly as he opened the covered pot. It was filled with a delicious-looking beef stew. While Jon served us, I buttered some bread. I didn’t know anything about champagne, but the bottle looked old and the label was in a foreign language.

There wasn’t a corkscrew among the silverware.

Jon picked up the bottle with his left hand and passed his right hand over the top. There was a pop, and the cork flew into the air. Jon caught it as it fell, then laid it before me with a smile. The champagne inside foamed up but didn’t go over. As Jon poured into one glass and then the other, I saw he was watching me closely.

I reached out and picked up the cork. It was strangely warm. It felt good in my hands. I raised it to my face, sniffed—the champagne smelled delicious, though I was no judge—and then kissed it.

“Kyle,” Jon said, sounding a little strangled.

I pointed at his stew.

He began to eat very quickly.

I was starving too, but I ate more slowly. The stew had herbs in it I’d never tasted before, exotic and flavorful. The champagne was sweet and bubbly. It went straight to my head. I kept finding myself gazing at Jon. And he was always gazing right back at me.

“Wow, you got company fast,” a voice called from the edge of the road. “Is this why you didn’t come to the beach when the sun came out, Kyle?”

Shit.
It was Sue. I’d been so deeply asleep on the island that I hadn’t even known the sun had burned through the mist and come out.

I started to turn, afraid she would recognize Jon from her photo and unsure how to get rid of her. But before I could do anything, Jon raised his left hand and made a gesture toward her site, as though directing her to keep walking. And to my amazement, without another word, she kept going.

“I hate doing that,” Jon said quickly as I turned away from Sue’s departing figure. “But it’s probably not a good idea for me to speak to her right now, considering I was seriously thinking about murdering her when she hugged you. To say nothing about that damn photo she got of me. I don’t get caught by surprise very often. And yes, I know about the other one she’s got, but she’ll never figure it out.”

It made me warm to think that Jon had been bothered by her hugging me. I didn’t think for a minute he’d really considered killing her. But something told me he could if he wanted to. The way she’d turned and kept walking….

He searched my eyes, trying to read me. I thought about reaching for my phone to show him words for the first time, but then, I wasn’t sure how I’d frame what I wanted to know. It was hard to reduce the concept of who and what Jon was to something that would fit on a screen.

“I need to explain,” he said, rising. I got up quickly too. He’d eaten a whole bowl of stew and a piece of bread, and I trusted him to know if that would give him enough strength for whatever he had to do later.

Jon drew me away from the table until the tent blocked us from the road. Then he cupped my shoulders in his hands, my hair brushing across his fingers. “I know,” he said. “There’s a huge ton of stuff that has to get dealt with, and it’s not all going to be easy. And even putting it into a phrase like that isn’t doing it justice. I can’t just say ‘I’m a loon’ and expect you to go along with it, no problem. And my other—form—is a small part of the picture.”

I’d already gathered that.

Jon’s hands moved up to my neck, gently massaging, as though his touch would keep me calm. It worked, until his next words. They made my heart clench. “Hal and I are very old, Kyle. We’re part of the land here, part of the balance of the way things were before any humans walked this ground. We answer to old, long-forgotten powers, and sometimes certain sacrifices are demanded of us.”

I thought of him on the table, his arms raised to the sky.

His right thumb brushed my jaw; his other hand slid through my hair to cup the back of my head. I felt the strange sensation that he controlled my breathing again, as he had when he’d kissed me. If he forbade me to draw breath, I would not do it until he said I might. And knowing that brought not fear, but a deeper sense of connection than I’d ever felt to anyone before.

He pressed closer to me. I was glad my tent blocked us. He was arousing me deeply again.

“I still feel bad that I didn’t ask if you wanted to become part of this.”

The way his fingers were touching my face, it would have been impossible to shake my head had I wanted to.

“When you saw me the first night, I was just coming out of a ritual I need to complete every night.” He paused. “It has to do with maintaining the balance of the old gods, who were here long before humans.”

His dark eyes seemed bottomless as I gazed into them. I knew he was being cautious about how I would take this. So he made offerings to old gods? Was that what he was saying?

“No, Kyle. I’m not one who worships them.”

I felt my heart begin to pound. What was I about to hear?

He hesitated a moment, as though searching for words. “It’s a bit like how the CEOs of your human corporations go through the ritual of sitting down with fellow executives.”

That lost me for a second. Then the connection hit me. What the hell? Was Jon saying that he
was
a god?

“Yeah,” he said quietly and gazed into my eyes.

I gazed back and felt a tingling chill sweep my body. As I struggled to understand, a deep part of me wondered if he wanted me to worship him. And a deeper part knew that I already did.

“I need to keep the balance,” he went on. “If I don’t….”

He will be punished?
I wondered.

“I will cease to exist,” he said.

My heart almost stopped. I felt my very soul opening, his for the taking if it would give him strength.

“And terrible things will happen to the earth,” he went on. “Hal and I chose to come here to do this long ago. Those who remained behind do their part to keep us alive. The ebb and flow of power benefits us all, and the land. And it hurts us all when things go wrong.”

I swallowed. A god was holding me against him, and we were both very, very hard.

“Do you begin to see?” he asked.

I thought so.

“Of late—well, a long time ago to you—humans have begun to tip the balance away from the old gods to favor themselves. Their violence, their wastefulness, their cruelty all conspire to hasten the end of all they know, and yet they continue to race toward their own destruction. It becomes harder and harder for me to keep their might in check. When I fail come the floods, the storms, the earthquakes—nature striking back.”

I thought of how, in the last few years alone, the planet had turned deadly very often. It was blamed on climate change. But Jon was saying there was far more to it.

He nodded, seeing that I understood.

“Hal calls himself my brother, and that’s not a bad description of our relationship, but he is here to support me. I am the one on whom the burden lies. And I don’t mind. For the most part, what I do brings me great pleasure. This part of the world speaks to me in ways I feel very comfortable with. I don’t regret my decision to come here, as some of my kind do. Yes, there are others like me, spread all across the world.”

My brain felt like it was getting full, but I knew there was more to come.

Jon seemed to follow my thoughts with no trouble. One of his hands drifted down my back. The other stayed in my hair, making me remember how he had stroked his head through it as a loon. The hand on my back urged me even more firmly against him. As an undercurrent to all he was saying, his jeans were pressing hard against the thinner fabric of my trunks, through which I was straining.

“You’ve read Greek mythology, haven’t you?” Both his hands were now working down my back, one to ease under my shirt to find my skin, the other slipping inside my trunks.

I spread my legs a little to give the fullness of his jeans room to press closer into me. He had to clear his throat a little before he went on, the fingers of his right hand moving ever closer to the place that was aching to be filled by him again. “You know how in Greek mythology, the gods often had their way with humans?”

I raised my chin so I could look up at his face. He shook his head quickly. “No, no, I wasn’t one of them. I’ve always been here in New England. What they did over there got so out of hand that they were recalled, every one of them. I hope you know me well enough to know that I’d never play with humans like that.”

I nodded, pressing as close as I could. The irony wasn’t lost on me that he could play with this human all he wished.

“But it is—how shall I say this?—within our rights to become partners with life on this planet. To better understand and relate to it. We can also bestow a bit of our own power on those whom we wish to reward. We do this by letting them take part in our rituals. Or even observe our rituals.” He paused a second. “You see where I’m going?”

Yeah
, I thought. I was getting it in a big way. Now I understood what the lightning and thunder that hadn’t been lightning and thunder had meant. I’d had certain—things—bestowed upon me. Instantly I began to search my mind for how I was different. Other than being passionately in love, I felt pretty normal.

It hit me that it was going to be really hard to go back to my apartment or to the bank after this, though. The pull of this place, this lake, had been growing steadily all day, though I hadn’t recognized it until now. It was all bound up in the pull of
him
.

“Yes, I can see you’re feeling it, Kyle. You’ve always had the right natural instincts. You just understand them better now.”

I nodded.

“But I still feel really bad that this happened to you with no warning, without your consent. That’s why I thought I should just leave before the bond was fully formed. While you still might have gone back. Because now—you’re mine, Kyle, as wholly as the maidens Zeus took for his own. Unless you really, really want me to let you go? I could, if I had to.”

I answered that by pressing my mouth to his. Did he think I was crazy? For the first time in my life, I felt like something really good was happening. What downtrodden waif hadn’t dreamed of being chosen by a god? Even if accidentally.

Or had it been an accident?

Our kiss was making things start happening inside his jeans that I didn’t think he was going to be able to control much longer. I knew because the same things were happening inside my trunks. I really wanted our clothing to disappear.

“Are you sure? Because you walking away isn’t really going to be an option much longer.” His breathing was coming hard. “You’re shifting all kinds of balances inside me right now that are going to mean I won’t be able to work without you soon.”

I felt a burst of joy. I would be able to help him!

In answer I pulled him in the direction of the tent behind us. For a long, final moment, Jon held out, searching my eyes. Then we broke apart just long enough to get inside and out of our clothes. I lay on my back on the top sleeping bag, and he was over me and moving between my legs in a hot, smooth rush. I thrilled to the sensation.

He groaned. “Now I know what all the fuss in Greece was about. I had no idea how incredible this feels.”

I felt myself flushing, still not sure why someone like him could see anything in me. But I didn’t care as he took hold of my wrists again, this time spreading my arms out to the sides and pinning them there. Until he saw a length of thin rope meant for tying down the fly in a high wind, which I’d just tossed inside to get out of the way.

“Oh, Kyle,” he said, looking from it to me. The burn in his eyes grew brighter.

For just an instant, I was afraid again. But I was afraid of being afraid, I realized, and that was a whole lot different from being afraid of him. I held out my wrists.

Soon I was trussed so tightly I couldn’t even breathe, and I didn’t care. Ankles, knees, my arms bound behind me, a loop around my neck, another around my forehead. He didn’t blindfold me this time, so I could watch him going through my duffle bag until he found what he was looking for.

My jackknife.

He opened the blade and returned to straddle me, so huge and hot that I couldn’t believe he’d actually fit inside me, and I couldn’t believe how badly I wanted him there again. I couldn’t stand not to touch him, and struggling against my bonds felt exquisite.

“We need to do this to make the link complete,” he said. “Normally we would each make the offering, but I think, under the circumstances, it would mean more if I did it.”

I nodded, which made the rope around my neck pull even tighter.

He brought the knife to the center of my chest in one of the few spots left bare by the rope. Then he glanced at my face. “You won’t cry out, will you? Do I need to gag you?”

That struck me as very funny. For the first time in almost as long as I could remember, I laughed aloud. I shook my head. Words to communicate with him would never be necessary. It was part of what I loved so much about him—he had not once given me any indication that it was important to him that I speak. He accepted me as who I was, just as it had never occurred to me to wish he wasn’t what he was.