The buzzing chaos that filled the air crackled away as Elisa slid the creature back into her tub. He had stopped trembling, no longer afraid she would reprimand him like an irritated schoolteacher for running away. Elisa had wiped the blood off of his chin and his chest when she'd bandaged Giles' wounds. Poor Pandora. She'd never been terribly attached to Giles' cats, seeing them more as background objects whereas their master was always her main focus, but even then she didn't wish for any of them to be devoured by a startled amphibian man.
Now, though she knew Giles had to carry a bloody pillow case out to the dumpster and say a tearful goodbye, all is well. The amphibian man sits upright, finned muscles rippling, stretching as the panic in his veins dies down. The paths of his eyes and Elisa's intersect, then blend, and he looks at her, content. In planes, the soft geometry of his face presents itself to her. His head has such an alien, exotic shape to it; layers of gills and scales and soft hidden membranes, like feathers. Elisa absorbs herself in the moment, and in him. Gazes melt together between them, heated by the glow of the wizened sun through the window. It's like she sees this time unfold through a kaleidoscope, or a haze. It's perfect, but muted. Soft. Slow, undemanding. It mozies and takes its time.
Elisa remembers watching the creature in a similar motion, trotting over to Giles like an ape. Pads on his fingers, like a frog's, connect with Giles' scalp and the old man's hand is pressed firmly to the amphibian man's finned cranium. Blue light dots up his body, popping into existence like stars under an inky, green sky. She'd stood in the hallway then, not wanting to ruin the bonding time between her two friends. The rest of the interaction was hidden from her, but the sound of Giles' shrill, reverent "Oh!" had made her giggle silently into her hand.
Before she can stop herself, Elisa reaches out and runs one slender finger over a spot she'd seen him illuminate; on his right pectoral, near his armpit. Under the slow caress, the light returns. The creature trills in a high key, like a marshy, wet flute. The glow under his scales is less stripe-like than she remembers. Instead of bands, undulating up and down his body, they are more isolated and still. They're dots in his flesh, lights piercing from his shell and out into the world. Or, instead of something coming from those imagined holes and pouring out, perhaps they are a window to, and look in. What does she see when she looks through them? Does she gaze upon his soul? Elisa shakes her head as she watches the little azure torches come to life and then burn out. Someone less enamored with life's poetry, someone like Zelda or Dr. Hoffstetler, would look at the light and see nothing but the work of nature. Camouflage for defense, or a disguise to aid in hunting.
And maybe they were right. But Elisa sees the spirit within him even when his lights are dim.
His eyes follow her face's small, imperceptible changes as she moves to the other side of him, trails of dotted light trailing her fingertips down his creature's head gently flares a little more. His full lips, as angelic as Apollo's, are slightly open; perhaps he forgets to close them, all his focus on the twirling fingertips touching him? Now Elisa is looking at him again. Though she's had him stare at her in wonder a hundred times before, the molten oceans of his eyes are roiling now, burning into her. Something is different. An innocent, darker intellect dawns there. Elisa swallows, a little awkwardly, and tries to push it out of her mind.
As she studies his face, her hands rove into view seemingly of their own accord. Along the teal tiger-stripes under his eyes and forehead her fingernails run. In waves the tiny, ocean-colored fires rekindle below his skin. The light diffuses like silent lightning all the way down his gilled neck and chest, and he shivers visibly. The creature croaks again, deeper this time, more characteristically. The heated, freeing panic in Elisa's throat vanishes. Everything is fine. This is the creature she knows.
Until he reaches out to her, a fingertip of claw and pad massaging the cords in her neck.
Her eyes dart to his arm, extended her direction. Suddenly the sunlight through the window is not muted, or soft; it's crawling up Elisa's chest, flushing her cheeks and turning her thoughts to mush. Suddenly the moment is tense, in slow-motion, but leaving her no time to object (would she even want to?) or consider how she and the creature had found such a fate. Suddenly everything is too warm, too abrupt, too close, her clothes are too small and sweaty and her blouse is so tight on her nipples and she has to get it off, ocean waves crash and conflude into each other in her ears-
The creature gets one button of her collar open before she buries that pearl of yearning back in her heart and stands up. Closing the door and doing her best to ignore the perplexed chirps of the creature in the tub, Elisa sighs and gets ready for bed. Dubiousness slows her fingers as she sets her alarm clock, now wearing a teal nightdress. How will she ever sleep knowing that he will remain awake, flaming with guilt that he may have offended her? Elisa felt unfair faulting him for crossing such a line. The creature was wild, and obviously social norms she'd known all her life were odd to him, laughable even! Maybe wherever he was from, out in his humid Amazon jungle, his people were flagrant and flaunting with their desires, making love in the sun, in the open.
Even so, she hopes he's gotten the message. They were from different worlds, incompatible. They did not belong together.
Elisa had just slid her eyemask over her face when a thought occurs to her.
People said the same thing about white and colored people in love, and she certainly didn't have a problem with that.
They said the same of men and men or women and women getting together; of people who loved like Giles. Elisa wasn't bothered by that either.
Her mind wants to scream at her look at him! He's not even human! But, the more she thinks on it, the more she associates her own denial with the arguments of racists and homophobes. Was the creature any more different from her than a black man would be? His body was different from hers, certainly alien . . . but the creature had the mind and soul and eyes of a man. Eyes for her.
A second idea breaches from the sea of self-doubt and second guessing in her head; a memory, something she'd signed to Giles what felt like years ago.
'When he looks at me- the way he looks at me,' She'd told her friend, tears in her small but soulful eyes. 'He doesn't know what I lack, or how I am incomplete. He sees me for what I am, as I am. He's happy to see me, every time. Every day.'
And that still rang true. She knew what it meant.
Did the same bell chime in her heart?
When her eyes lock on the bathroom door, and she rises, walking to it and swinging it open, finding herself so ferociously in love . . . she knows the answer is yes.