She!

Chapter 16

Sunday.

We'd gone back to Veronica's house then and got Becky changed out of her little black dress and come soaked red panties. We spent a long time just putting all her mother's things back away where they belonged and talking, reliving and rehashing Becky's experience.

Then we all changed into our nighties, exchanging the heavy, long, and unrevealing one Becky had brought with her for one of Veronica's baby dolls, and sat on Veronica's bed telling boy stories until late that night. We slept until almost noon when we made breakfast, got dressed, and went home.

Like most every Sunday afternoon, it took me about two minutes at home before I was bored silly. I really think it's part of Sunday afternoons as a human. I guess because of the start of the week coming up the next day and all.

I took a shot at my homework – mostly just busy work and things that didn't interest me in the least. That's no excuse of course. You have to do a share of busy work just to stay where you need to be to get to the interesting stuff.

I heard the doorbell but didn't really respond to it. Then mom was at the door of the dining room saying, "It's for you, honey."

Not even excited about company, I drug myself to the door and found Will there looking like I felt. Down.

"Hi. Come in," I said.

"I'm bored," he said. "How about a walk." I shrugged and went in and told Molly I was leaving for a while before going to the door and out. It was pretty nice really with the remaining, still fall day. You could feel the end of the summer coming but it was still warm enough for the shorts and tank top I was wearing.

"So how are you?" he said as we walked down the sidewalk with no destination at all. I told him I was okay and shrugged. Our mood were so closely matched that it was frightening and not really all that pleasant since we were both down.

It did feel pretty nice when he picked up my hand and as we walked hand in hand that way for a while. And as we walked, I started seeing things I hadn't seen for a while.

A flight of birds flew very high overhead, heading south.

"Their internal clocks tell them when it's time," he noted rather pointlessly. "I feel like that sometimes. Like I ought to fly on to somewhere – I don't know – more comfortable or where the bugs get bigger or something."

I knew exactly what he meant.

"Or like maybe I should finish my cocoon," he said, reaching for a little wooly worm that had just finishing tying up to begin the process I was familiar with.

"Yeah. But that's not all that fun anyway. Just the blankness of sleep and then unthinking search for a mate. You can't even enjoy the flight or the mating."

He was looking at me strangely and I sort of realized I was spouting some fairly inside information.

"I had to do a report on butterflies once," I tried to explain but it came out a little apologetic or weak. The fact that I'd lived for a year as a similar species of butterfly assured my facts, of course.

"I'd think that staying away from birds would be a lot of work," he said. I just nodded. Agreeing but not saying more. It had been half the effort. Just surviving long enough to live and even with human intelligence it had been hard.

We walked in silence for a while. I didn't think he'd noticed when, as we walked along beside a field, I surreptitiously noticed that the small red fox had her kits almost ready to go out on their own. That would wait, of course, until after their winter sleep together but that time would not really be like it had been during that first summer when she'd showed them all they needed to know and they played and practiced their living skills together.

I remembered this as a very loving time, full of the pure enjoyment of life. I'm sure that my face reflected my thoughts.

"She's very good with her kits," he said, following my gaze. I stumbled as I realized he knew what I was looking at even though I really didn't think anyone who didn't know exactly what to look for would even know they were there.

"What?"

"The red fox there. She's very good…" He stopped as if realizing he said something he shouldn't have.

"How did you…" Then I realized that I'd overstepped. If he shouldn't have known they were there, then how should I?

"I, ah, saw them earlier this year. When they were little and, ah, didn't hide so well. I've been watching them on and off all summer."

"Oh," I said.

"How did you know?" I thought hard. I didn't want to lie to him but I didn't want to tell him that I'd found them a long time ago. When I was a dog it had been easy. Actually, I'd known they were there within hours of their moving in when the little fox had been an adolescent out on her first experience at life on her own. Her mother, I knew, was in a woods not too far away. I'd found her two summers ago.

"Don't answer," he said then and my mind flashed from trying to think of an answer, any answer, to looking at him. He looked very serious and then led me over to the side of the field and sat down on a fallen log. I sat down next to him.

He grinned to himself and shook his head.

"Sue. I'm going to say something. Either you're going to think I'm crazy or you're going to lie to me because you're afraid or you're going to tell me the truth." I didn't like this at all. "I just hope you'll trust me and tell me the truth."

He looked at his hands as he leaned far over and took a handful of the wheatgrass that grew in the field.

"I think you're hiding something." I started to protest but he just held up a hand. "I think you're not really what you seem to be."

"What do you think I am?" He shook his head slowly.

"I don't have a name for it any more than you do. But you're much much more than a pretty young girl who lives with a nice family in this little podunk town."

"It's a nice town. Nicer than any place I've ever been."

"Anywhere? Even soaring through the skies?" He looked up at another wing of soaring geese overhead. I started to say something. Maybe to deny it. But he held up a hand and stopped me. I wondered why he'd said that.

"I think " he started. "I think you're a very special kind of being. A beautiful girl now." He stopped again for long enough for that statement to sink in. "But more. Much much more." This time he didn't pause but looked into my eyes.

"We're very secretive sorts, aren't we. We never tell anyone our secret. We never let anyone see. Oh, we get close to them sometimes. We love and live and die. But we don't tell our secret to anyone."

He paused again and slowly turned to look into my eyes.

"Maybe that's why we never find each other." He stared into my eyes and, I know, I just sat there with my mouth open, ready to deny everything. Ready to run. "But Sue. Don't you ever wish you had someone to do the dance of the skies with?" He looked up at the blue sky and, though I'd never heard it called that, I knew what he meant. It was that wonderful, free flight of the hawk or eagle. Soaring up with the thermals and dropping toward the Earth in ecstasy. Perhaps it was my happiest memory from all my transformations.

"Come with me now, Sue," he said very softly and slowly stood up and offered his hand. I took it and followed him through a corner of the field and into the edge of the trees. I wondered if it wasn't just a close call. A seduction that happened to touch on my secret as he stripped off his tee-shirt, kicked off his sneakers, and dropped his shorts. He wasn't wearing anything else and I thought he looked magnificent naked. I didn't care now if it was just a seduction. I was ready to be seduced. And if it was something else, I'd know that in another minute.

"I know that I am most vulnerable in the few seconds afterward. But I don't care. If you want to stomp my head in to keep your secret well, maybe that's the way it was meant to be."

I was sure it was something else when, instead of coming to me, he moved a few steps away and sat down on the ground. Then, in an eyeblink, he disappeared completely. In another, a beautiful hawk, one I recognized as a male red-tailed hawk in English, lay on the ground where he'd been. It struggled on its side briefly before fluttering and finding its feet. Then it sat, its reticulating eyes looking at me with its sharp beak opened, and spread its wings wide on the ground as if to dry them.

I smiled and kicked off my sneakers, pulled the tee-shirt over my head and dropped my own shorts to the ground. I took one look around myself to see no one was watching before I disappeared into my short incarnation as a microbe. The image of the red-tailed hawk firmly in mind, I opened my eyes to the acute vision of the bird and felt the wave of disorientation overcome me for a few seconds.

I reacted in fear as the larger male flapped once and took some steps so he was beside me. I'm sure that no human would have seen or understood his look of encouragement and something else. Love? He turned and rose into the air with powerful wingbeats that took him only a few inches off the ground but a hundred yards to the fallen log we'd left from a few minutes before.

I tested my wings without leaving the spot before leaping into the sky. I repeated his flight but didn't settle to the log. Instead I twisted slightly just above his head and reached for the open sky with a cry that echoed off nearby buildings.

The freedom and power surged through me as I reached for a cloud high above me. The blood surged through me. The strength of the wings was exhilarating and went to my head like a full bottle of some kind of intoxicating liquor. A human wouldn't have seen the smile I felt in those seconds.

I found the upward drifting warm air over the small town and let it lift me further and further. I snatched a large moth from the sky that I hadn't even seen until it was right before me. It tasted wonderful in my craw.

But then he powered past me, wings beating as he soared toward the sun. High in the air, riding the thermal upward without effort, we called our exultation to each other as we circled and let the warm air carry us higher.

Far far below, I could see the fox that had attracted our attentions before and the horses in a distant field gently feeding and birds and other animals of all kinds for a five mile radius. Nothing took any notice of us but a dog in a backyard that looked up and barked a few times before getting bored and curling into a ball to sleep.

When I returned my attention to Will, he laid his wings back along his sides and dove into a stoop that drove him toward the earth. I followed, excited at just the memory of the drop. At the bottom of the stoop, he opened his wings and soared back into the air effortlessly. The speed of the drop was transferred back into kinetic energy that lifted me back up to the top of our flight with a single wingbeat. He dropped again and I followed. We screamed out enjoyment across the skies to each other as we stooped over and over again until the sun was nearing the horizon and the warm air slowed its upward movement.

I followed him as he extended one flight and opened his wings to extend his legs to a high tree limb. I came to a stop near him just as he soared down again to the ground. He'd hardly touched down before he disappeared and a small cottontail appeared in place of the hawk.

Laughing to myself, I dropped and changed. Almost right away, he was there next to me. He almost didn't wait for my comfort level to return before he was on me and his credible pink penis was inside me. My eyes blurred with pleasure as he came inside me, coming with him just from the memory of our courtship flight.

He dropped to his side and disappeared then reappeared as a Doberman bitch. My sensitive nose caught the smell of her estrus before she'd gained her senses.

She was waiting for me, front end down with her wagging tail high up, her tongue hanging out as I found my feet. She bounded around me and we ran and jumped and chased through the grass and trees before she stopped and waited for me.

I fucked her with animalistic abandon until I came deep inside her and tied up. I licked her back and bit at her neck until I was freed of her body. She loped back to the edge of the woods and disappeared before I got there.

I saw Will, the young man, laying on his side in the pine needles before I dropped to the ground and changed.

"Oh Sue! Could anything be more wonderful?" he said before he kissed me.

"Yes," I said as he slid between my legs, my thighs holding his sides. "We can do this anytime we want. And later. When we've graduated from college somewhere, we can get married and have a dozen kids."

"Two. Two kids. But we can do this all the time. Anytime we want."

My orgasm was spectacular. The rest of our lives together would be spectacular, too. Every flight and every romp in a field.

I wondered if our two children would be like us. Or would they be "normal."