But it would be useful now to have Cooper take a young man’s shape and come find me where I waited.
I stepped back inside through the patio entrance, called a cab, dragged my suitcases to the front porch, closed and locked the door, and dropped the key through the mail slot. Ten minutes later, the taxi arrived. I had the driver take me to the McDonald’s closest to the highway exit for the state park where Cooper had his base.
“Somebody’s really meeting you here?” he asked doubtfully as he pulled up in the semideserted parking lot.
“Someone really is,” I assured him. “I’ll be fine.”
And I knew I would be.
* * *
I had a new job before Cooper even arrived. I asked to speak to the manager, told him how long I’d been working at the McDonald’s in town, explained that I was moving out this way and might not have a car so I was hoping to effect a transfer. He called my boss, who apparently said, “Yeah, she’s a pretty good worker, but she doesn’t pick up enough shifts,” and hired me on the spot.
“When can you start?” he asked.
“Tomorrow.”
“Be here at ten. Unless you want to put in a few hours right now. I’m short in the kitchen.”
“I would, but I’m not sure when my friends are going to get here.”
In fact, it was close to nightfall before Cooper stepped through the glass door, looking tense and worried and, as he always did in small, crowded spaces, edgy as a hawk. His face smoothed out as soon as he saw me, though, and he slid into the booth across from me.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Had a fight with my family. I’m not going back there.” I gestured at the two suitcases I’d leaned against the wall. “I took all my stuff and walked out.”
His eyes narrowed and he considered me. “I wouldn’t recommend leaving your family behind,” he said quietly. “If you have any choice about it.”
“I don’t have a choice,” I replied. “They’re moving to California at the end of the month. And I’m not leaving you behind.”
Again, he thought it over before he answered. I’d cut his hair for him a couple of weeks ago, but it still tangled into big sloppy curls that made a dark halo around his face. He said he looked like a girl; I said he looked like a poet. But then, I’d always thought so. Just now he looked like a poet struggling to find a word or work out a rhyme.
“I don’t think I should be the reason you make any decision as huge as this,” he said at last.
His hands were folded before him on the table. I covered them with my own, leaning forward to give my words more intensity. “You’re the reason I make every decision,” I said.
He shook his head slightly. “You might be sorry about that someday.”
“Well, I’m not sorry about it today.”
He nodded slightly. “So what do you plan to do? Where are you going to stay?”
“I’m going to live with you.”
His big eyes widened. “Live with me? In the park?”
“Sure, why not? It’ll be like an extended camping trip.”
He looked doubtful. “You might find it pretty miserable.”
“No I won’t. You’ve got a tent. A sleeping bag. There are public showers by the RV lots.” I jerked my head toward the front counter. “I’ve already talked to the manager. He’ll let me work here for the summer.” I grinned. “And you and I can eat lots of burgers and fries over the next few months.”
“What about school?”
“I’ll take the bus up to Champaign in August. Nothing’s changed except that I don’t live with my parents anymore.”
He was quiet a moment, still thinking it over. I felt a momentary unwelcome swirl of doubt churn through my stomach. Slowly, I released his hands and laid my own in my lap. “Unless you don’t want me to live with you,” I said.
Now his smile came—as always, so sweet that it sugared my heart. He turned his palms up, an invitation for me to return my hands to his. I did, and his fingers closed around them reassuringly.
“I’d love to have you,” he said. “I’m just not sure it will be the easy life you seem to think.”
“I don’t think it will be easy,” I allowed. “But it will be with you. So it will be just fine.”
* * *
It was a damn long hike from the restaurant to the park, wheeling two suitcases behind us, as well as Cooper’s bike, since he refused to ride on ahead of me. And, again, it was no simple chore to maneuver the suitcases down the progressively narrower tracks to the remote site where Cooper had set up his camp. I had been here twice in the past nine months, so I knew what to expect: literally nothing but a small tent, a packed-down clearing of dirt in front of it, and a small cache of goods and utensils. And then the trees spreading out in all directions. Here in early summer, they were so thick with leaves the sunlight barely filtered through. The ground below them was covered with an eternally renewed carpet of dead leaves, fallen branches, climbing vines, and low bushes that choked off any easy access through the woods.
“Home,” I panted, dropping my suitcases to the ground. It was scarcely eighty degrees, but the exertion had left me hot and sweaty. “I love it already.”
We made dinner from a couple of Extra Value Meals and the items Cooper had on hand, and we talked about our options. He said I should use his bike to get to work until he found another one—he had become very good at scavenging for items left behind in the park—and he would mark the trails from his campsite to the exit and the nearest bathrooms. We inventoried his possessions and glanced over my checkbook, trying to figure out what we needed and what we could afford to buy.
“I’ll have to call the school,” I said. “Tell them that my circumstances have changed. Maybe they’ll help me emancipate myself.”
“Maybe you can go up to Champaign over the summer and talk to a counselor or somebody,” he suggested.
“Maybe I can. But you have to come with me.”
“You’re afraid to go a hundred miles by yourself?”
“No. I want you to come so you can look around. See where you can live while I’m in school.”
He watched me a long time with those big eyes. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea,” he said at last.
“What’s not?”
“Me coming to college with you.”
I tilted up my chin in a mutinous fashion. We’d had this conversation more than once already—in fact, before I even applied to school, we’d talked about where I could go that he could come along. I’d offered to stay in central or southern Illinois, closer to his familiar haunts, but he’d been distressed at the idea I would restrict my life so much to accommodate him. So then I’d started looking at schools in Minnesota and northern Wisconsin, close to the Canadian border—places where a wolf might be expected to thrive. But each of us, it turned out, felt more comfortable staying in state. The Champaign campus had seemed ideal for us both.
“If you don’t come with me, I don’t go,” I said.
“It just seems that—Janet, I don’t want to hold you back. If you’re tied to me, you won’t do all the other things you should be doing.”
“I don’t want to do those other things, whatever they are.”
“Maybe you’ll feel differently, once you’re in school. Once you’re around new people and trying new things.”
“I don’t like other people,” I said. “I never have.”
He looked sad. Or maybe it was that artist’s face; it always looked just a little haunted. “Maybe you would if I didn’t take up so much of your time.”
I leaned forward and put my hands on his cheeks. He had started shaving regularly the past few months; his stubble felt bristly as pine needles against my palms. “Until you were in my life, I didn’t want anything badly enough to fight for it,” I told him. “I didn’t care about anything enough to miss it. I didn’t love anybody, I didn’t love anything. I just existed. I just endured. You’re the first thing in my life that ever made se
nse. I think you’re the last thing that’s ever going to make sense. It’s not just that I don’t want to leave you behind. It’s that I don’t know how to arrange my life if it’s not arranged around you.”
Ever so slight against my fingertips, I felt the motion of his nod. We were sitting face-to-face, knee to knee, in that cramped clearing right in front of the tent. Keeping my hands cupped against his cheekbones, I leaned in and pressed my mouth against his. Closing my eyes, I fell into that kiss as if falling into oblivion.
We had not made love yet, Cooper and I, but it was something that was always on my mind. I was a virgin, of course—blundering antisocial girl that I was—and I assumed that Cooper was though I had not asked. Whenever he was human, we touched with increasing frequency; we held hands as we walked, we kissed in the dark. Those last two times I had spent the night at his campgrounds, we had lain side by side in the small tent, body pressed to body, hands wandering. But we had done no more than explore. I wasn’t sure he was ready—I wasn’t sure I was—all I knew about sex was that it could leave broken hearts and pregnant girls in its disastrous wake.
But everything was changed now. I had thrown off my other ties; I had unequivocally chosen Cooper over everything else in my life. It had not been a hard choice, but it was still radical. Loving Cooper closed off so many other options—a normal life of friends and family, a suburban house, barbecues with the neighbors, Sunday drives on autumn afternoons, family vacations at Disney World. I could snatch moments of that ordinary life, I supposed, during the weeks that Cooper was human, but he would never be the traditional wage earner who worked in the factory or the office five days a week, came home to pot roasts and the evening news, and mowed his grass on Saturday mornings. He would be passionate and unreliable and struck dumb, now and then, by a wordless poetry he struggled to express.
If I was going to love him, I would have to build a life that was broad enough to include him but rich enough to survive his absences, that made room for him without depending on him. I would have to be strong enough to be solitary, open enough to be joyful, and immune to surprise.
If I was going to sleep with him, I would have to practice diligent birth control—or be prepared to end up with a child as exotic and preternatural as Cooper himself.
I was the one to pull away from the kiss, scrambling to my knees so I could peer down at his face. His expression was as sober and stricken as if I had just informed him that the world was ending. I rested my hands on his shoulders and touched my forehead to his.
“I’m not sure if you’re sure,” I whispered. I could see his eyes, so huge and unfathomable, so close to mine. “I’m always the one who makes decisions, but I don’t want to push you into this if you’re not ready.”
“I’m not afraid,” he said instantly. “Are you?”
I shook my head, slightly, just rocking my forehead against his. “No.”
“Do you want to stop?”
“No. But I don’t have—I didn’t think to bring—with everything else that happened—”
“I have condoms,” he said unexpectedly.
That made me giggle. “You do? When did you buy those?”
A smile broke through his somberness; he looked boyish and eager. “About three months ago. Just in case.”
I lifted a hand to stroke his cheek and marvel at the roughness of his whiskers. “I’ve never done this before.”
“Me either.”
“But I’ve seen movies. I mean, not porn, but sexy movies.”
“I’ve read books.”
“Me, too. I know how it’s supposed to go.”
“I’m ready,” he said. “I want to.”
“I love you,” I whispered.
For an answer, he rose to his knees before me and enfolded me in another embrace. His long arms wrapped around me and drew me close, and closer still. We kissed each other greedily, making one long deliberate feast of the banquet we had only tasted before. The more we kissed, the wilder we became, the less courteous. I tugged at his clothes and he pulled at mine and I heard my mouth make small sounds, gasps or grunts or quick furious moans of frustration. We were both fully human and yet there were moments I felt as if purely animal instincts had come over me, instinctive, incautious, insatiable.
We did not bother crawling into the tent, though as soon as we were naked, Cooper snaked out a tattered blanket to cover the hard earth, and we wriggled on top of that. He was so long and lean, a thin supple plank of a man, but his pale, smooth skin covered powerful muscles. I had never thought of myself as particularly soft, especially feminine, but I was struck by the contrast between our bodies as my full round curves eased against his taut planes. I could not press myself close enough to him, I could not stroke enough of his surfaces to satisfy my need for touch. I kissed him again and drew him down on top of me and felt his body enter mine.
Oh, God, that joining with another soul.
I cried out, half in pain and half in discovery. This was the reason. This was what drove the days forward, kept the world whirling on its axis. This closeness with another being. This mingled breath, mingled effort, straining bodies, slippery skin, touch, heat, kiss, thrust, shock, and satisfaction.
I knew at that moment, though I had known it before, that I could never love anybody else, or even try.
* * *
You can’t spend every minute having sex, though there were days that summer that we tried, and in the weeks that followed, we had to work out all sorts of logistical and personal-space issues. But more quickly than I might have expected, we had come up with a routine of sorts. Cooper scrounged up another bike, so I rode it to my job almost every day. I worked as many hours as I could, saved every penny that we didn’t absolutely require for food and clothing and other essentials, and learned just how well I could tolerate a fairly primitive mode of camping. If it hadn’t been for the public showers and bathrooms, I don’t think I would have survived so well; I have always been able to endure most situations if I can ultimately manage to get clean.
I’d also contacted the university, made arrangements for my mail to be sent to the local post office, and marked off key dates on a calendar so I would be sure to move to Champaign in time for freshman orientation. I wasn’t ready to leave my strange but semimagical existence quite yet—I was enjoying it too much for that—but by fall I thought I would be.
Cooper worked all summer, too. He had taken employment doing janitorial work for a nighttime cleaning service, though of course he could only accept shifts two weeks out of the month. His incurious boss paid him in cash and didn’t ask questions. We assumed he thought Cooper was an illegal immigrant, or possibly a convict out on parole; it was also possible his boss’s own life didn’t bear close examination, so he liked to surround himself with other people from the fringes of society. At any rate, the arrangement worked in our favor, and Cooper brought in a reasonable amount of money during the weeks that he was human.
Of course, half of the time he was not.
I had been living with him nearly ten days when we lay together one night after making love. It was absolutely pitch-black inside the tent—even if there had been moonlight, it could not have penetrated the tree canopy, let alone the canvas.
“I won’t be here tomorrow night,” Cooper whispered.
I had been bracing myself for this announcement. I had known him long enough now to be almost as attuned to the rhythms of his body as he was. “That’s what I thought,” I whispered back.
“Will you be afraid to be here without me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
He was silent a moment. “I can stay nearby,” he offered. “I can watch over the campground. If you need me, just call out, and I’ll be here in a few seconds.”
I stroked the curls away from his face. Strange to think that, before twenty-four hours were up, the dark hair would turn to black fur, the smooth skin would disappear beneath a rough coat. “I have another idea,” I murmured. “Come back here anyway.
Sleep just outside the tent—or inside, next to me. I won’t be afraid.”
“You might be,” he said. “You might find it stranger than you like.”
“I won’t. I’ve been around the wolf before.”
I had—though not often since those first two weeks, when he had come to me, injured and in need of tending. I had never been certain if he stayed away because he thought I would fear him, or because he didn’t trust himself not to hurt me, or because he didn’t want to run the risk of being shot or captured. But I wasn’t afraid, and I wasn’t worried, and the last reason could not apply when we were so deep in the forest.
“Yes, but you know me better now,” Cooper said. “You’ll be looking for more of me in the animal, and I’m not sure how much of me you’ll see.”
“Only one way to find out,” I replied.
“Well,” he said, “we’ll see.”
In the morning, I kissed him good-bye as if it were any other day, and I biked down to the highway and to the McDonald’s. And I worked my shift, and took my paycheck, and rode back to the campsite, pushing the bicycle alongside me as I walked the last yards to the tent. Cooper was nowhere in sight.
And even though I had expected his absence, even though he had told me he would be gone, I felt myself overcome with the most unendurable sense of loss. I looked frantically around the campsite, I struck off into the surrounding undergrowth, calling out his name and hoping to come across him watching me from some nearby hideaway. I was crying—hard enough and stupidly enough that, once I had tramped around for about ten minutes, I couldn’t see well enough to find my way back to the campsite. For a moment, I was really afraid. Lost and alone in an untracked mile of woodland with no sense of where even the smallest haven lay. Would anyone, even Cooper, ever be able to find me again?