Chapter 33: The Moment You Have Been Waiting For

Chapter 33: The Moment You Have Been Waiting For

Andy found Veronica on the eastern trail, sitting on a boulder with her book open on her knees and her eyes not on the page.

She was looking toward the clearing, eyes unfocused, posture too casual, the kind of not-waiting that was obviously waiting. Her hair was down. She never wore it down.

Andy stopped at the edge of the trail, twenty meters from the boulder, and looked at her.

He was looking at her with human eyes in a human face for the first time. She had the same features, the same freckles but this was different framing. He was seeing her from the height and angle of a person standing upright. They were the same kind of thing now. Human-shaped.

She had not seen him yet. He was standing behind a tree (not hiding; observing; Working up the nerve. Okay, definitely hiding) with his glamoured shirt catching the filtered sunlight and his golden horn catching more of it and his brand new hands doing the thing hands did when their owner was nervous: fidgeting.

“Hi,” he said, at a volume that was technically audible but not going to work at twenty meters.

She did not hear him. She continued looking at the forest. She turned a page of her book that she was not reading.

Andy took a breath. He stepped out from behind the tree. He walked toward the boulder, the bipedal gait still imprecise, steps slightly longer than they needed to be, the horn on his forehead catching the light with each step. Definitely not subtle, nor graceful.

She saw the light first. Her head turned. Golden glow between the trees resolved as she looked: The look began at the glow and followed down the horn to the head. A human head with a forehead connected to a face. And that face was attached to a person walking (Well, stumbling really) toward her on two legs in a white shirt, black slacks, golden eyes and a horn she recognized.

She recognized the horn before she recognized the man.

Andy watched it happen. Horn: known, known absolutely. Attached to a face: unknown, human, same gold eyes in a different configuration. Mounted on a body: unknown, vertical, two-legged, walking toward her with legs that were obviously new.

Three seconds. Her eyes went from the horn to the eyes. Same-ness was the bridge. Understanding arrived all at once.

“…Andy?” she said.

His name. Spoken, for the first time, to a face.

“Hi,” Andy said. His voice cracked. Gallop efficiency rating of about twelve percent: mechanism functional, coordination absent. “I have hands now. I’ve, uh. I’ve been thinking about what I’d do when I had hands. For a while.”

She stood up. The book fell off her knees. She did not catch it. She stood slowly, disbelieving. She needed to be upright for this. The being she loved was standing in front of her as a man with the same horn and the same eyes and new hands that he was fidgeting with.

Just ten centimeters of height difference.She was right there.She was RIGHT THERE.

The freckles. Twelve of them. From this distance, this angle, this height, with these eyes. Twelve freckles across the bridge of her nose, at the correct height to be touched, within the operational range of hands.

She reached out. Her left hand, the hand he had healed, the one that had touched his horn and made it sing. The same motion she had made a hundred times toward his equine face, except this time the reach was toward a cheek. The cheek was new. Her fingers touched his face.

Andy stopped breathing. Her fingertips on his cheekbone, pressing against skin that had existed for moments. Every nerve ending fresh and singing. Her fingers felt warm. The callouses are real and textured against his face. His horn, fifteen centimeters above her hand, responded to her touch the way it always responded: singing loudly without any input from Andy’s dignity.

“You’re real,” she said, her fingers pressing harder against his cheek. Confirming. This was happening.

“I’ve always been real,” Andy said. “But now I can…” He trailed off.

He raised his right hand. It was visibly shaking. He raised it anyway and touched her face. His fingertips found her cheekbone. Her face, memorized through equine eyes, translated now into the medium of touch. Fingers on skin. Contact made. Circuit closed.

His fingers were shaking. Her fingers in contrast, on his face, were steady.

“Hi,” he said again. The word had become sacred through repetition. The container for everything he could not say.

She laughed. The same laugh he had felt through his horn a hundred times, except now the vibration traveled through his fingertips instead. Hands were higher-bandwidth than hooves. The bandwidth was making everything louder. His horn was glowing so brightly it was casting a visible shadow behind her. Subtle as always.

He kissed her. It was not planned. It was the thing that happened when two faces were ten centimeters apart and the ten centimeters contained an untold amount of time waiting and all of that waiting finally collapsed under its own weight.

It wasn’t quite his first kiss. It was, however, his first kiss in this life, on these lips and for an untold amount of time. His twenty-three percent was experiencing its first direct challenge, and the challenge was: her mouth.

The kiss was terrible. He had no idea what he was doing. Wrong angle, wrong pressure, nose bumped her nose. His body was barely an hour old. His experience was next to zero. Six tiers of horn development and not a single one had prepared him for this.

She didn’t care. His horn listened and she returned: no evaluation, no judgment. It was joy. Pure, complete, the-being-I-love-is-kissing-me-and-he’s-terrible-at-it-and-I-don’t-care joy.

She kissed him back and slowly the return kiss became was instruction: her mouth teaching him the angle and the softness and the rhythm, the way the hawk coached healing. Through correction. Patient application of competence to enthusiasm. His efficiency rating on this activity: approximately twelve percent and climbing.

They pulled apart. Marginally. Two centimeters. Hands still on each other’s faces.

“That was my first kiss,” Andy said. “Well in this life. And almost any life, unless you count a goodbye kiss at the door. Which is really more of a peck.”

She blinked. Her eyes searched his face. The word “life” had a specificity that registered in her expression as a question forming.

“life?” she said, and the inflection turned the phrase into a query that was clear even in a language he was still learning.

“I’ll explain that later too,” Andy said. “There’s a lot to explain. There’s a truck and a crosswalk and a cat named Gerald and a Costco membership. None of that matters right now. What matters right now is that I have hands and I’m standing in front of you and I just kissed you, albeit, very badly and your response to the very bad kiss was to kiss me back and that is the most generous thing anyone has ever done for me and I have been saved from magical binding by the power of love, so the bar for generosity is high.”

She laughed again. Her laugh against his face at two centimeters’ distance was a sensation that his new nervous system cataloged and filed under “essential” and “permanent” and “the reason for everything.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Can we go somewhere? The clearing maybe? Or wherever you want. I have things to tell you and some of those things require at least one of us to be sitting down. Right now standing on two legs and not falling over is consuming approximately sixty percent of my available concentration and I would like to redistribute that concentration toward the conversation and also toward your face.”

She took his hand. Her fingers interlaced with his, firm and warm. The language of contact spoken fluently by a woman who had been fluent in it all along, to someone who could finally speak it back.

They walked to the clearing.

Around them, the clearing had changed. Flowers golden-white now. Oak taller, responding to his enhanced magical output with eager botanical enthusiasm.

They sat beneath the oak. Shoulder against shoulder. Same configuration as the nightly conversations, except he was human-shaped. Two people leaning together.

He told her. He told her everything. Not telepathically. Through his voice. Words traveling through the air the way words were supposed to.

He told her about the truck. About Megan. About waking up as a cell in a pond. The calcium spike, the jellyfish, the frog, the tiny horse the size of a large dog that had taken an apple from a beautiful ranger because she had freckles.

She listened. Her hand in his hand, the contact maintained through the telling like a rope held during a crossing.

He told her about the Purity Affinity, all twenty-three percent. About the specific, comprehensive, load-bearing virginity that had been leading his evolution since he was a cell. Telling her was the most humiliating thing he had ever done, and the bar was high. He told her he was a virgin. With his voice rather than his magic. Some things deserved to be said with a mouth.

“I was a virgin when I died,” he said. “I was a virgin when I was a cell. I was a virgin through every evolution. I became so obsessed with it that the virginity became a stat. The stat became part of my build. Choosing to become a unicorn was almost the only choice I could make because of it. There had been better options but I was drawn to this in an almost obsessive, instinctual way.

My entire build is almost entirely powered by the fact that I have never, in two lifetimes, been with anyone, and I classified this as ‘Purity’. And so the System made Purity a stat and that is what made the unicorn path possible, which means that I am, in a very real sense, a unicorn BECAUSE I never got laid. And I was so focused on it I couldn’t see anything else. And this is the most embarrassing sentence I have ever spoken out loud and I am choosing to speak it out loud because you deserve to hear it from me and not from my horn.”

She was quiet for a long time.