Green Fairy (Dangerous Spirits) (29 page)

“I don’t know if I’m ready now,” Sol blurted out.

Carcy raised one eyebrow. “We don’t have to do nothin’ you don’t want. I just wanna get to know you a little better. I mean, we’re gonna live together.”

Sol twisted his paws around the canvas roll. It felt warm, but it didn’t deliver any more shocks. “I’m sorry. I know we’re going to, I know we…did stuff over text…but…I’m just feeling weird now.”

Carcy stood. “Listen, Sol, this is a big deal for me, too. We’ll be having sex—that’s what it’s called—sooner or later, right? Might as well be sooner, get that first time out of the way. You know? I don’t want to get you to Millenport and have you ‘feelin’ weird’ and start cryin’ and wantin’ to go home and calling the…your parents or something. You said you loved me.”

“I do,” Sol said, automatically and desperately and no longer, he was aware, completely truthfully. He loved 290-418-3831, the entry in his phone labeled “Carcy,” with whom he’d exchanged confidences and thoughts and amorous texts, but this person in his house, half-naked in his bedroom, bore only a passing resemblance to that phone entry. “Please, can’t we wait ’til tonight?”

“Will you be more ready tonight? If you’re not ready now, I dunno. Maybe I should just head back and fuck Bucky. I know he’s ready.” Carcy reached out, as if for his shirt.

“Please,” Sol repeated. “I’m just really stressed about moving.”

Carcy didn’t pick up his shirt. He reached instead for the painting. “It’s not like I’m askin’ you to do anything we ain’t talked about.”

Sol pulled the painting away. He didn’t want to set it down, but Carcy was going to take it from him if he didn’t, so he set it against the bed. “I know we talked,” he said.

As soon as his paw was free, Carcy grabbed it and pulled the wolf closer. “Did more than talk, too, right?”

He pressed Sol’s paw to his groin. Sol closed his eyes. “I…I guess…”

“See?” Carcy rubbed Sol’s paw up and down. “Ain’t so bad, is it? You want to stop?”

Sol didn’t answer. If he just went along with it, it would be over soon, he thought. And then Carcy’s other hand cupped his own groin, started rubbing there, and Sol’s eyes flew open. It felt good, but it didn’t feel right, not here. This wasn’t the way he’d imagined things going at all, but his treacherous body did not seem to care.

Natty’s scent flickered past his nose. He made a noise in his throat, but Carcy just said, “Shh. It’s gonna be good, just trust me. You can trust me, right?”

Sol’s free paw brushed the painting. He looked down at it and then up, across the bed at the mirror on his closet. In the reflection, he saw Carcy moving both hands up and down, saw the desperation in his panicked hazel eyes. He looked trapped. And then he saw the flicker of movement, a shadow behind Carcy.

The wolf’s eyes flicked forward, but there was nothing there. He flicked back to the mirror. Definitely, a shape behind the ram, a shifting shadow with a long, flowing tail, whose ears showed in ragged silhouette against the light of the hallway through the open door.

Carcy’s eyes closed. He lifted Sol’s paw and pressed it to his bare stomach, forcing it down inside his underwear.

Behind the ram, the shadow lifted an arm. It seemed to be waiting.

Sol’s fingers brushed something, and he curled them away from it. “Please,” Sol whispered to the shadow.

“Sure, Solly,” Carcy said, and moved his fingers to Sol’s waistband. “Y’see? I—”

The shadow moved, its arm whipping across Carcy’s muzzle in the reflection. In front of Sol, the ram’s head snapped to one side.

He let go of Sol’s paw and pulled his other arm back, eyes open and blazing yellow anger. “What the fuck?”

“Sorry!” The word came out cracked in two through Sol’s bone-dry throat. “I’m sorry, I just don’t…I’m not ready…”

Carcy cracked him hard across the muzzle, catching him right on the swollen part of his lower lip. “You
hit
me? Jesus, you’ve got some fucking nerve!”

“No,” Sol whined.

“What the fuck did I drive all the way down here for? So I could haul some kid back to Millenport and
not
have sex?” Carcy shouted in Sol’s face, his broad white chest looming over the wolf.

Sol staggered back, one arm flailing.  It struck Carcy on the shoulder; the ram pushed it aside easily and elbowed him in the chest, knocking him backwards onto the bed. Pain exploded in Sol’s ribs; he curled around it, wheezing to catch his breath, and cringed as Carcy raised an arm again. “I thought you were more grown up, Solly. The whole running away from home, I get it, I been there. You know what I did after that? I took responsibility for my fucking life! I had a boyfriend, I went to his place, and we fucked! I was sixteen and he was twenty, and you know what? I was grown up enough to handle it. I know how much you hate all this baseball shit and high school crap you didn’t want to be a part of, I was taking you away from that and showing you what real life is all about. And what do I get?” He leaned over and smacked Sol on the nose hard enough to bring tears to Sol’s eyes, though not only from the physical pain. “‘I’m not ready! I’m not ready!’ And then you have the fucking gall to hit me! After I drove four hours down here and took a day off work, which by the way I can’t fucking afford.”

“I thought you loved me,” was all Sol could bring himself to say. He hated the way his voice cracked, hated the way he felt everything slipping through his fingers, hated the way Carcy was looming over him and the way he felt paralyzed.

“Bucky said I was being an idiot, falling for a cub again. He said, ‘he’s too young.’ But I told him how you went vegetarian, told him ’bout what we talked about. I thought…” The ram lifted a hand to his eyes and rubbed them. “You know what, forget it. Just forget it. When you grow up—don’t call me.”

Sol watched him walk to the doorway, where he turned around, his curved horns and small ears in silhouette, eyes glaring with reflected light. “I can’t believe you fucking hit me,” he said.

“I didn’t.” Sol pressed his fingers to his own eyes. “I didn’t.”

Carcy shook his head and walked out. Sol listened to him descend the stairs, and it occurred to him that his last chance to get out of here, his last chance to escape months of misery and then a college he didn’t want to go to, his last chance was walking out the door in about ten seconds. He struggled to get to his feet. “Wait!” he called.

His paw brushed the painting again as he got up. His head snapped around of its own accord to look in the mirror. There he saw the silhouette again, standing in his doorway, the ragged fox’s ears and the long fox’s tail, and more: gleaming green eyes, fixed on him.

Slowly, the figure shook its head. It made a kind of choking, keening noise. Sol’s ears flicked forward, and he realized that he was the one making the noise. He tore his gaze from the mirror and ran to the hall, then to the top of the stairs.

Carcy stood there, still shirtless, one hand on the door. “You bring my shirt?”

“No, I…” His muzzle stung; Carcy had hit him right where his lip had been bitten. He put a paw up to it. Like in his dream, like Niki’s aches that the fox had dismissed as unimportant, that he’d regarded as the price to be paid. Sol swallowed. “No.”

“Fine. Keep it. Fucking cub. Don’t call me again.” He opened the front door. Sol heard him mutter, “four
fucking
hours.” The door slammed, and he was gone.

Sol stared at the door for a long, long time. Then he turned on shaky legs and made his way back to his bedroom.

The mirror held only his reflection. He brushed the painting with a paw, but no spark touched his fingtertips, nothing magical happened, no figure appeared from it. “Why did you stop me?” he whispered. “I just needed some time. I panicked.”

The only sound was his iPod, still playing that soft rock album. Sol grabbed the remote from his bed and stabbed at the power button until the stereo shut down with a click. “Why?” he said, louder. “Now, I’m…screwed.”

His mother would be home soon. His father would be wondering why he wasn’t at the school. Meg would be wondering where he was. And he would be here, in this stone house, always, eating vegetables under the disapproving glare of his father, working in the peach cannery over the summer, taking the bus until the fall when he would go off to some small college to learn a subject that barely interested him.

He jumped when his phone rang. His first thought was that Carcy was calling him back, that the ram had gotten ten minutes down the road and realized that Sol was just scared and didn’t mean it. But it was Meg’s voice that came through when he answered. “Hey. Save the happy sex time for when you’re back at his place and get your tails over here.”

Her expectation just made the reality that much harder to bear. “We’re not—I’m not coming. It’s not…” He wiped his eyes, which seemed to be filling up again.

“Not coming?” Meg’s voice got louder. “What the fuck? Did that asshole back out?”

“No,” Sol said. “No, he was here, we just—we just fought.” He pressed the back of his paw to his eyes, feeling the tears soak into his fur.

“You fought? With your boyfriend?”

His throat tightened. “He’s not—I don’t think he ever—just forget it, we’re not going.”

“Sol?”

He hung up the phone and dropped it on the bed, and leaned against the wall near his door. His brother’s scent was still there, but not comforting now. He could only think about how disappointed Natty would be in him:
Geez, Sol, you can’t even run away right,
he’d say. So Sol staggered over to his bed, where he sat with his knees drawn up to his chest, his tail curled around them. The mirror showed only the black wolf on the bed, rocking gently back and forth, no shadowy figure with a paw on his shoulder. All around him, silence gathered and grew, broken only by the small noises he couldn’t stop himself from making.

When the door opened downstairs, Sol scrambled off the bed, running for his bedroom door to slam it shut. He pulled open his bags and threw the clothes into the dresser frantically, until he heard Meg’s voice calling, “Sol?”

Sol stopped, exhaled. He walked to his bedroom door and yanked it open. “In here,” he called, but Meg was already coming up the stairs.

“You okay?” she asked when she got to the room. “What happened?”

He found he couldn’t meet her eyes. “He got here, and…he wanted to…” He picked up Carcy’s shirt where it lay on the edge of the bed, balled it up in his paws.

“He wanted to fuck.”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“Jesus.” Meg took the shirt from Sol. “This his shirt? He just left it?”

“He was pretty mad.”

She stared at the shirt. “Def Match sucks. Fucking posers.” He watched her claws pick at the fabric, methodically, until they’d created a small hole. Then she grabbed the shirt on either side of the hole and pulled hard. The shirt ripped; the hole grew large enough to stick an arm through.

“Fuck him. You know? Let’s go get a burger or something down at Clark’s.”

“Not hungry.” Sol sat back down on the bed. He glanced again at the mirror and then back at Meg. “Let’s go to your place.”

“All my parents have is sunflower seeds and tofu.” She pulled at the hole in the shirt and stared down at it. “Oh, right. Come on, Clark’s has veggie burgers too.”

“No, I mean.” His paws curled. For a moment, he almost told her about his dreams, about the shadowy figure that had hit Carcy. If anyone would understand, Meg would. But the words caught in his throat. When he’d been on the bed, terrified, the shadow had made perfect sense. Now, feeling safe and miserable, when rescue was not as easy as a smack to the head of a ram, the shadow and his dream sounded crazy. He would almost have thought that he had imagined it, that it really had been his paw that hit Carcy except for one thing, the thing he couldn’t escape, and that was that if he had really hit Carcy hard enough to snap his head around, that thick head with the bony horns, his paw would have felt it. His paw, right now, would hurt. And it didn’t.

“What?” She squinted at him.

He took a breath. “I just want to have some more absinthe.”

“Christ, Sol.”

“Not like that, I mean—”

“You know, I’m not a ‘Just Say No’ kinda gal, but Jesus, smoke some pot. Don’t go booze, and especially don’t go boutique booze.”

“I just need it, just one more time.”