“But you haven’t fully changed yet, have you? Not yet?”
“No, not yet,” she said. “Only the small changes so far,” she said. She looked off without moving her head. “I can hear the forest,” she said with a faint smile. “I can hear the rain in ways I never heard it before. I know things. I knew when you were approaching. I look at the flowers, and I swear I can see them grow, see them blossoming, see them dying.”
He didn’t speak. It was beautiful what she was saying and yet it was frightening him. Even the soft secretive look on her face frightened him. She was staring off. “There’s a Norse god, isn’t there, Reuben, who can hear the grass grow?”
“Heimdall,” he said. “The keeper of the gate. He can hear the grass grow and see for a hundred leagues in the day or in the night.”
She laughed. “Yes. I see the stars themselves through the fog, through the cloud cover; I see the sky no one else can see from this magical forest.”
He should have said, Just wait, just wait until the full change comes on you, but his voice had died in him.
“I hear the deer in the forest,” she said. “I can hear them now. I can almost … pick up the scent. It’s faint. I don’t want to imagine things.”
“They’re there. Two, out there, just beyond the clearing,” he said.
She was watching him again, watching him in that impassive fashion, and he couldn’t bear to look her in the eyes. He thought about the deer, such tender, exquisite creatures, but if he didn’t stop thinking about them, he would want to kill both of them and devour them. How would she feel when that happened to her, when all she could think of was sinking her fangs into the neck of the deer and tearing out its heart while the heart was still beating?
He was aware that she was moving, coming around the table towards him. The soft clean scent of her skin caught him by surprise as the forest in his mind receded, dimmed. She settled in the empty chair to his right and then she reached out and put her hand on the side of his face.
Slowly he looked into her eyes.
“You’re afraid,” she said.
He nodded. “I am.”
“You’re being truthful about it.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“I love you so much,” she said. “So much. It’s better that than saying all the correct things, that you realize now we’ll be together in this, that you will never lose me now as you might have, that I’ll soon be invulnerable to the same things that can’t hurt you.”
“That’s what I should say, what I should think.”
“Perhaps. But you don’t tell lies, Reuben, except when you have to, and you don’t like secrets, and they cause you pain.”
“They do. And we are both a secret now, Laura, a very big secret. We are a dangerous secret.”
“Look at me.”
“I’m trying to do that.”
“Just tell me all of it, let it flow.”
“You know what it’s about,” he said. “When I came here, that first night, when I was wandering out there in the grass, the Man Wolf, and I saw you, you were like some tender, innocent being, something purely human and feminine and marvelously vulnerable, standing there on the porch and you were so …”
“Unafraid.”
“Yes, but fragile, intensely fragile, and even as I fell in love with you, I was so afraid for you, that you’d open your door like that, to something like me. You didn’t know what I was, not really. You had no idea. You thought I was a simple Man of the Wild, you know you did, something out of the heart of the forest that didn’t belong in the cities of men, remember that? You made a myth of me. I wanted to enfold you, protect you, save you from yourself, save you from myself!—from your recklessness, I mean your inviting me in as you did.”
She seemed to be weighing something. She started to speak but didn’t.
“I wanted to just take away all your pain,” he said. “And the more I learned of your pain the more I wanted to annihilate it. But of course I couldn’t do that. I could only compromise you, bring you halfway into this secret with me.”
“I wanted to come,” she said. “I wanted you. I wanted the secret, didn’t I?”
“But I was no primal beast of the woods,” he said, “I was no innocent hairy man of myth, I was Reuben Golding, the hunter, the killer, the Man Wolf.”
“I know,” she said. “And I loved you every step of the way to the knowledge of what you are, didn’t I?”
“Yes.” He sighed. “So what am I afraid of?”
“That you won’t love the Morphenkind that I become,” she said simply. “So you won’t love me when I’m as powerful as you are.”
He couldn’t reply.
He sucked in his breath. “And Felix, and Thibault, do they know how to control when the full change happens?”
“No. They said it would be soon.” She waited, and when he said nothing, she went on. “You’re scared you won’t love me anymore, that I won’t be that tender, vulnerable pink thing that you found in this house.”
He hated himself for not answering.
“You can’t be happy for me, you can’t be happy that I will share this with you, can you?”
“I’m trying,” he said. “I really am, I’m trying.”
“From the very first moment you loved me you were miserable that you couldn’t share it with me, you know you were,” she said. “We talked about it, and it was there when we didn’t talk about it—the fact that I could die, and you couldn’t give this gift to me for fear of killing me, the fact that I might never share it with you. We talked of that. We did.”
“I know that, Laura. You’ve every right to be furious with me. To be disappointed. God knows, I disappoint people.”
“No, you don’t,” she said. “Don’t say those things. If you’re talking about your mother and that dreadful Celeste, well, good, you disappoint them for being far more sensitive than they can guess, for not buying into their ruthless world with its greedy ambition and nauseating self-sacrifice. So what! Disappoint them.”
“Hmmm,” he whispered. “I’ve never heard you talk like that before.”
“Well, I’m not Little Red Riding Hood anymore, now, am I?” She laughed. “Seriously. They don’t know who you are. But I do and your father does, and so does Felix, and you’re not disappointing me. You love me. You love who I was and you’re afraid of losing that person. That’s not disappointing.”