Yearn (18 page)

“Who are you?” she murmured, then instantly regretted the question, fearing he would vanish and she would find herself alone, waking out of her dream state. In lieu of an answer he bit her shoulder gently, then lifted one of her pert breasts to suck greedily at her nipple. He then turned her so that she was on her hands and knees, water up to her elbows. He parted her buttocks and lubricated her anus with some soap with one hand while with the other he pulled gently at her clitoris. May watched their reflection in Mitch's old abandoned full-length mirror leaning against the wall. Her pale skin was a dramatic contrast to his shining blue-black body, his large hands pushed into the white flesh of her arse. It was hard to believe she was dreaming, and yet this was a scenario she'd often fantasized about during her lovemaking with Mitch—an affair that had always been a little predictable and lacking in imagination.

Now he was easing her wider and wider—she could feel the head of his penis nudging against her until he slipped in. At first the pain took her breath away, but then as he moved slowly and carefully backward and forward she could feel herself loosening and embracing him as intense pleasure took the place of the pain. Reaching down, she touched herself between her legs as he abandoned himself to his own pleasure, now thrusting wildly—they both came together. And in the silence that ensued there was the sound of bathwater dripping down onto the tiles.

 • • • 

May woke in her bed the next morning. She stretched and yawned, her body deliciously relaxed in a postcoital kind of way. Marveling at how good she felt, she glanced across the bedroom floor. Shadow was sitting on an abandoned bath towel, licking his paws in a smug manner. It was then that May remembered the sexual encounter of the night before.

“Jesus,” she said to herself as she climbed out of bed and pulled on her jeans and T-shirt. “If I keep fantasizing like this I'll have to see a shrink myself by the end of the week.” The sequence of events of the night before ran through her mind. May couldn't remember ever having such vivid erotic dreams before—there was absolutely no way of discerning real life from fantasy. Again she was worried she might be going mad like her brother. How well did she even know herself? Most frightening of all, perhaps there was a whole frustrated fantasist trapped inside her, jailed by all her pragmatism.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the postman outside. Grabbing her iPod and mobile, she raced out, grabbing the mail on the way. She opened the envelopes at the bus stop. One contained the gas bill, which was due in a week; the other, a notice from the electric company threatening to cut off the electricity if the overdue bill wasn't paid in full—the cut-off date was the next day and the amount was four times their usual bill. How was that possible? Again, complete panic began to build from the pit of her stomach. Who had used that amount of electricity? It hadn't been she. She cast her mind back to that first day Mitch had appeared as Erasmus. He'd had the heater on—how long had he been standing there in front of the heater at full blast? Now she seemed to remember he'd been at home during the day that week studying while she'd been at the university. Was it possible he'd had the heater on all that time? How long had this been going on? Weeks or months? Maybe he had been doing this for much longer than she thought. She glanced back at the bill—he must have had it on for over twelve hours. The amount was nearly four hundred dollars—all the money she'd “borrowed” from her sister's till. If she paid it she'd have nothing left over for the rent due the day after. It was then that she remembered the rent was due the
next
day and that the landlord had finally refused to take any more late payments—if she didn't pay on time she would be evicted. It suddenly felt as if all these events were conspiring to force her to abandon her flat. No wonder her subconscious was taking refuge in erotic fantasy—the real world was just too unsympathetic and shocking to deal with, she concluded.

She caught the bus and got off at the post office to pay the electric bill in cash. As she counted out the fifty-dollar bills—the same ones she'd taken from her sister's till—she wondered how on earth she would be able to find the money for both dinner and cat food, never mind the rent, when she suddenly noticed the rings that she'd inherited from her grandmother. She'd been wearing them for so long she'd forgotten she even had them. One was an Edwardian engagement ring with three small diamonds in a pearl setting—it had to be worth something. She decided to visit the pawnshop on the way to the university.

The man behind the counter gave her 150 dollars for the ring—fifty dollars short of what she needed to make the rent and about sixty dollars short after she'd bought dinner for herself later. Depressed, May pocketed the money and began to wind her way down to the university gates. She was interrupted by a chorus of wolf whistles from a group of road workers. Unused to such admiration, she looked over her shoulder, imagining they must be whistling at someone behind her. When she realized they were whistling at her she panicked, thinking some part of her body must be exposed. She was entirely covered up, yet the men were grinning appreciatively at her. Were they picking up on something new about her? Had her fantasy left some invisible mark or scent about her person?

The day at the university went a lot more slowly than usual. Although it was the day of all her favorite tutorials, May found herself increasingly excited as the hours ticked by. All she could think about was whether or not she would be visited that night. It was as if this incubus, this fantasy creature, had released some primal force within her, tapping into a raw sensuality she hadn't even known she'd had until then. And others had begun to notice as well. One of her friends—a very handsome womanizer with whom she'd only ever been platonic mates—suddenly started flirting with her, which appeared to surprise him as much as her. It was as if he'd only just noticed that she was female. She seemed to engender male attention everywhere she went: the bus driver had let her off her bus fare when she hadn't had the right change, and one of her male tutors had given her an extra week to complete an essay without her even having to argue the point. Although pleasant-looking, May knew her male counterparts considered her interesting but never sexy. It had always been force of personality and a strong sense of self-deprecating humor that had attracted men to her. For the first time she felt like a femme fatale, a sexual magnet. It was a seductively empowering sensation: heads were actually turning in her direction.

Just then her mobile phone rang and she almost walked into a lamppost. Collecting herself, she answered it. It was one of her girlfriends wanting to know whether she was going to their usual trivia night at the local pub. May had forgotten all about it.

“Come on, it'll take your mind off Mitch,” the girlfriend insisted.

“The warlock, you mean?” May corrected her.

The girlfriend broke into stifled giggles, then pulled herself together.

“I'm sorry, it must be really terrible. I mean, living with the guy all that time, then finding out you don't really know him at all.”

“It has been difficult. . . .”

“Yeah, but you don't sound devastated. And don't take this the wrong way, but I saw you today on the other side of the quadrangle and I've never seen you look so good. Like hot. May? Is there something you're not telling me? Like who's the new bloke?”

“Do I look that good?”

“Babe, I didn't recognize you. I swear your aura was lit up like a Christmas tree. Whoever he is he must be good.”

“The best . . .” May murmured dreamily into the phone before realizing she'd actually spoken aloud.

“I knew it!” the girlfriend, whose main currency was gossip, squealed, causing May's ears to ring. She held the phone at a distance.

“Trin, there is no one, I promise.”

“Sure, and I'm guessing you're about to cancel tonight to be with this no one, right?”

“Afraid so.” Relieved that she'd been offered an excuse not to go, knowing she wouldn't have the money to buy her friends drinks, May resigned herself to an evening alone at home. Normally this would have depressed her, and yet she actually found herself cheerfully swinging her arms as she walked toward the apartment in the evening sun. Impending financial crisis be damned, she concluded, it can all wait until tomorrow.

On the way home she dropped by the fishmongers to ask for free fish scraps. She was given two salmon tails, one of which had quite a lot of meat on it. She could feed both the cat and herself, and somehow she felt Shadow had earned it.

The cat was waiting on the garden wall outside. As May turned the corner and caught sight of him she was amazed (and slightly ashamed) at the depth of emotion that swept through her. She felt as if she were greeting a new lover. Again, it seemed both irrational and a little hysterical to her, and May did not like feeling out of control. Had she begun to transfer the affection she would have given Mitch to a dumb animal? It was an uncomfortable supposition.

Determined to repress this new, ridiculously placed affection, she barely acknowledged the cat as she opened the garden gate. Rebuffed, the cat ignored her in turn and stared arrogantly out into space as she passed. It was only after May had slipped the front door key into the lock that he jumped down from the wall to follow her silently into the flat.

 • • • 

That night May laid two places at the table: one for her and one for Shadow. The salmon tails were then ceremoniously decorated with a few sprigs of rosemary (stolen from next door's bush) after being lightly marinated in lemon juice (the lemon having also been stolen, from next door's lemon tree) and baked for ten minutes in the oven. Shadow watched the preparations with a reverence May had always associated with religion-worshipping humans and certainly not cats, but she liked the sensation of his approval.

She also found herself liking the way he sat watching from Mitch's old chair, his tail occasionally twitching in barely contained excitement. His feline gaze upon her was almost an erotic one, something May found hard to admit to herself. Humming happily, she put on a CD and sat opposite the cat, who again didn't start eating until May had lifted her fork.

The salmon tails were delicious, although meager, and though the potato and piece of broccoli were barely enough to stop May from waking up hungry in the middle of the night, she felt triumphant. She was surviving without Mitch, without a man to oversee all the economic realities she'd avoided these past two years. And even though the nagging fear that she might not make the rent loomed, she felt surprisingly self-contained and content.

May glanced over at Shadow, whose ears seemed to twitch to the music. She smiled at the comedic sight, amazed at how the animal appeared to keep perfect time, his frayed left ear butterfly-like as it fluttered in time with the right. His bitten left ear. His bitten left ear! May stared down at her plate. The image of a black human ear with a section missing out of the lobe suddenly seemed to float over her plate. How was it possible? Could it be coincidence, or some kind of projection of hers onto the innocent creature? And why had Mitch given her the cat? Did he know something about the animal that she didn't, that it had some extraordinary power?

Nina Simone's song “I Put a Spell on You” floated out of the speakers and drifted across the kitchen like a dangerous perfume. Suddenly she felt that the presence across the table had changed. May froze, terrified, still staring down at her plate, too afraid to look up and across at the cat. In this position she heard the chair scrape the floor as it was pushed away from the table; she heard the heavy footsteps as he walked toward her. She felt his breath on the back of her bare neck, his large hands slip around, finding her breasts, finding her nipples, until finally she managed to whisper, “Who are you?”

She was answered by a loud meow. The sound made her look up to see the cat sitting just as it had been a minute before, on the chair at the end of the table opposite her, its yellow-green eyes wide in innocent surprise.

 • • • 

Later that night May made Shadow a nest of an old pillow and a blanket in one corner of the living room. While she packed them into an old straw basket she'd found, the cat wound itself around her legs, meowing plaintively.

“You can't sleep with me, you just can't. I need to know, Shadow, do you understand? I need to know before I go mad,” she told him, pausing to caress him behind the ears. She was interrupted by a cough outside. Gary, her neighbor, had paused outside the open window on his way to his own back door. He grinned sheepishly at May, who, mortified, picked up the cat.

“Oh hi, Gary. . . .”

“Hi.” He stared warily at the cat. “The landlord doesn't allow pets, May, you know that.”

“It's my sister's; I'm looking after him while she's on holiday. He'll be gone by tomorrow afternoon,” she lied, trying to smile at him. Gary hunched his shoulders defensively.

“Glad to hear it. Can't stand the animals meself. But you should know, they don't usually speak. At least not human,” he added, guffawing at his own joke before disappearing down the garden path and out of view. May collapsed, hugging her knees. In response Shadow rubbed himself affectionately against her legs.

“What does he know, eh, puss? Nothing, but then again maybe I really am going mad, like Mitch. Maybe he really was a warlock and now he's cursed me and you. . . .” In response the cat sat on its haunches and, lifting a paw, touched her face. May's resolve wavered for a moment. Would no cat mean no lover? Either way, she had to find out.

May slipped between the sheets and listened out into the silence. There was nothing. Earlier Shadow had settled into his basket without a protest, his whole body infused with sad resignation. Indeed, there was such finality to his movements that May feared he might slip away into the night, and she didn't want to lose him. She realized, with some surprise, that she'd developed a dependence on the animal. She thought of him now, curled up on his pillow, his long tail wound around his face and whiskers, no doubt twitching slightly in his sleep. Would her man come with the cat firmly banished, or were the two inexplicably linked?