Emma feels the lock move under her hand, and then the hotel room door opens silently in front of her. She peers in, spooked. “Dance?”
“Bathroom,” Drin says, from the bed.
Emma turns her head. The bathroom door is open right next to her, and she doesn’t see anything. She knocks the main door shut absently with her hip, and puts the bags of groceries down on the side table. She puts down the thrift-shop purse with the bags. She’s beginning to think that purse is okay for the trip, it’s better than her old one would have been. She tucks the car keys away in a clatter. “Dance, I got you some pretty good cinnamon, and some bread and butter to put it on. So you’re moving okay?”
His voice is soft, echoing a little in the bathroom. “It’s sore, and my lower back is killing me, but I’m up and walking okay.”
She frowns, and steps into the empty room. She turns her head. “Dance?”
“Do you know,” Dance’s voice says in the room, almost in her ear, “how rarely people look up?”
She stands perfectly still, and then she takes a deep breath, and she closes her eyes. She really doesn’t want to see him hanging up there in the blind corners just above the bathroom door frame, parts of him not visible at all, locked in place and half-asleep, like a climber frozen nicely in a chimneying position up there. He probably tucked himself up in a position just right to take the strain off his lower back, and the relief was enough to put him to sleep for awhile. She’s not even sure how she knows that’s what he would do. She’s finding herself annoyed at just…knowing things like that about him.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” Dance says. He sounds unhappy.
Emma lifts one hand, still with her eyes shut. His hand touches hers, the fingers intertwine with hers, and she lifts his hand to her mouth and kisses the back of his hand. “Okay, you’re forgiven. Are you going to come down off the ceiling?”
“Ergghhh, well, that’s the fun part,” he says. There’s a rustling noise, and a little grunt, as of a man climbing out of bed, complaining about his back. Then there’s a brief scrabble, and he says in a pained tone, “Ouch,” and she hears a hairbrush go clattering.
She opens her eyes in time to see the brush levitate up off the floor and fumble around clumsily at the counter, and finally drop. He says, “Well, I guess that’ll need more work too.”
She looks at the brush. Some people would have an odd reaction to touching it again, she thinks, but she just pushes it back out of the way. She fills a glass with water, and holds it out.
Dance moves something, almost like parting a curtain, and suddenly he’s right there in the mirror, standing just behind her. He takes the glass and gulps down the water, and she takes it back and refills it, and watches as he drinks that too.
Then he leans forward, rests his chin on her shoulder, and hums some tune in her ear, some tango she doesn’t remember.
She puts her hand back and strokes his hair, cups his face.
He murmurs sleepily.
There’s a streak of dust on his forehead, and she wets a washcloth, turns to him, and wipes it off. Then she puts both hands on his hips, slides her fingers around to his lower back.
He grunts and leans into her, and rests his head on her shoulder again. The muscles along his spine are trembling as if they’re exhausted.
The odd part is that she’s sure that weariness is just from the effort of climbing down, of standing here, holding that weight off the floor. She can see that it hurt him to leave the position above the door. It just hurts to hold it away from touching anything.
“Do you need Drin’s help and mine, carrying the weight to go to bed?” she says.
He blinks. “Yeah, if you don’t mind,” he says. “Why it’s fine sometimes and not others, I don’t know. It’s like not knowing if you’re going to be able to get up out of a wheelchair or something.”
“There’s people who live with that, too,” she says.
“I know,” he says, opening his eyes. “Do you–” and he looks around, turns his head toward Drin at the doorway. He looks up at Drin and says quietly, “Are you thinking I am losing my legs?”
“You mean, losing function in your legs?” Drin holds out both hands, palms up. He grunts a little under a sudden weight, although to all appearances his hands are straining in midair, holding nothing. He pauses just long enough for Emma to grab another invisible armful of Dance’s body, and Drin starts walking backward ahead of them.
Emma’s arms strain outward, holding something flopped like loops of garden hose across her forearms. Or fire hose, more like. She thinks she’s carrying about forty or fifty pounds, which is a lot when you can’t adjust your grip or stop it from sliding around helplessly. She just keeps her hands open and lets Dance’s body lean on her support, not grabbing. They’ve seen him curl up in agony from that.
“Talk,” Dance pleads, face tight, as if he’s hurting a lot.
Drin says, “Your feet tested normal, last time I ran my hands over your toes. Any tingling or numbness in the soles as you’re walking now? no? Okay. Well, I’d expect issues with your legs and back, getting overtired from the load here as it grows out.”
None of them have said it, yet. The word hangs in the air anyway.
Tail.
“There,” Dance gestures at a spot on the bed, and Drin leans down carefully, releasing the load onto the wrinkled sheets without moving his hands around in handling it. Dance is bent over with his fists knotted on his knees. His face tightens up involuntarily, showing his front teeth in a grimace, but he nods at Emma like a man in a hurry.
Emma lowers something that glints just a little in her hands, like an aurora borealis crystal necklace seen through layers of gauze. The bed groans under the weight, and new wrinkles appear around nothingness.
For some time, Dance justs stands there bent over like an old man, eyes squinched shut, breathing in deep hard drafts, while both of them hover near him, ready to grab him. Now he’s just enduring the pain, waiting it out. His belly is tight, clenched, fighting it. He’s naked. Everything shows.
Being able to move around, to climb like that, is a kind of freedom that they weren’t sure he’d ever have again, just six hours ago. Emma is proud of him suddenly, feeling fierce on his behalf. He’s come a long way since the night before.
The first time he tried to get up, he couldn’t even make it as far as the bathroom before he was lying on the floor, curled up in agony at the overload of sensory burn from the thing none of them can see. He had to lay where he fell for an hour, forced to use the trashcan to relieve himself, and humiliated by having to ask for help.
Emma hadn’t been bothered at all about using moist babywipes to clean perfectly normal parts of him that she’d been intimate with for months now.
What had bothered her was the cry of pain that her touch caused when she washed the tender new skin along the same sort of croup where a horse’s tail would be, and the thick cabling of tendons tied into the base of his pelvis. The new tissues were tied into the same bones where the powerful cords of his thighs strained under his pubic hair. It didn’t matter how quick or careful she was, when she touched the new skin, it hurt him. She found it was faster to just use her hands, feeling her way down things that weren’t built at all like what her eyes see.
Right now, as she looks at him, she just saw a nice tight little tan butt, same as ever. It’s very convincing, at whatever angle she views it. It just doesn’t match the telltale deep loops crumpled into the bedsheets next to him. The thick end, close to him, is nearly as wide as his thighs are.
How on earth did he manage to have intercourse with both of them for two months and hide that? Emma thinks, puzzled all over again. They’d both been all over him, and not always careful about it, either. How come it was only clumsy and active and hurting him now?
She opens her mouth, and Drin touches her hand lightly. It draw her attention to herself, as he means it to. Emma glances down at her own forearms. The tender skin on the inside of her wrists shows regular rows of red dents, as if she’s been carrying a basket that’s very heavy. Or an expensive leather suitcase. An alligator leather suitcase.
Drin holds out his wrist, showing similar marks, and traces out a row dotted along his forearm. “You can see the keels are starting to grow out on the scales now.”
“Yeah,” Emma says, holding out her forearms to him.
Drin traces out rows on her wrists with a finger, touching her gently. “There, you can see the keeling gets deeper and farther apart,” he murmurs, peering at the marks.
Emma looks up at him. “No wonder you couldn’t stand watching that zoo guy. The one you said meant well, but he was such an amateur.”
Drin blinks at her. “Oh, the Aussie guy,” he says, and looks past her at Dance. “Yeah, he was trying really hard to get that conservation message out there, though, I got to give him points for that.”
Dance makes a tight little snorting laugh in his nose. His face is starting to ease a little. He shifts his weight, sighs, bends his knee onto the bed.
And then right there Emma can see, between his posture and the wrinkles on the bed, exactly how the new thing is draped in a loose swag between Dance’s pelvis and the sheets. She knows its shape and its length and she can see how it is sprawled tiredly across the bed. She can see how it’s going to pain him to move it out of their way so they can crawl into bed next to him. And looking at his face, she sees that he does want them to lay next to him and hold him close, and warm, and maybe they can all forget for awhile that there’s a monster in the bed with them.
===
Challenge: Cornered
Title: Look Up
Writer’s Notes: A followup on events in my first “cornered” piece of fic