6. Gulfstream
(part 1)
The back balcony overlooked the yard; smallish, wedge-shaped, shadowed by big trees. Surrounded on three sides by fences and on the fourth by our house, a gate on each side. It was kind of a long way down.
"Shit," Mari said, handed me her boots and clutch, said "hold these", pulled off her calf-length hose, grabbed me by the waist and fucking threw me over her shoulder, jumped up with me to the edge of our roof, hind claws scrabbling on the composite shingles, and jumped over the fence into our new neighbors' back yard, cradling me like an oversized baby as we descended to keep me cushioned when we landed, her wrap flapping behind like a cape, or wings, me flooding with pleasure from her compulsions as soon as she grabbed my waist. I saw two people on our back deck look up at us, mouths in prominent "0"s.
We ran to the far corner of our neighbor's yard, behind all the nice new ornamentals, then Mari *carried* me over their back fence as she jumped it easily, barefoot in her bombshell leather catsuit and long leather wrap, claws retracted, me holding her ... boots. She put me down. We were now on the back lawn of a professional center, buncha office types behind thick windows getting quite a show if any had been watching. I know one guy taking a smoke break at a rubberized picnic table sure did.
Mari reached for her clutch, pulled out a phone as we walked, punched in some numbers, said into it "Come get me. The office park behind where you dropped me off."
We walked around the buildings as she continued lacing up her overflowing bodice, then sat at a bench just inside the sidewalk. She took her stockings and boots from me and pulled them on. A yellow-gold Lamborghini drove up. The passenger door opened.
"Find a bus," Mari said through it. "Go home and take a nap for a few hours. The car will turn up." The driver, some brogrammer not born within five thousand miles, got out and moved to the sidewalk, looking mournful, befuddled, bereft. Mari climbed into the driver's seat. The car was a lot lower to the ground than the ancient Alfa coupΓ© in my garage and growled a heckuva lot louder. We roared off. I heard a siren in the distance.
"What was your plan?" I asked.
"I have a Gulfstream at the airport," she said.
I nodded. "That'll do for now, though we'll need to lose this car first. Too visible. I bet you could get us a ride from some coffeeshop." It would've been 25 minutes to the airport, but it took a few minutes more to park in some up-and-coming neighborhood just beyond the airport runway. Mari exchanged looks with a cafΓ© patron coming out the door for about six seconds, then he drove us. Our halting conversation, which had started on the way, tottered on.
"Bob," she'd begun, "I don't know what's happening to me. You weren't supposed to be able to break control. And I don't know why I seem to be liking you so much, or why I'm not just taking what I want, which is all I've ever known how to do."
"I don't think the spell you got was exactly the one you might've thought," I said. "That witch you visited may have planted something to guarantee that something would go wrong. How well do you get along with her or him?"
Mari grimaced. "Maybe not so well. I might've been a little ... forceful, even before I moved into this new form. I can be like that."
I gave her a few seconds, trying not to nod. "Mari, this new form of yours is incredibly powerful. I know you already have some sense of that, but I don't know if you understand what a beacon it is, what a temptation for someone with the power to take it from you, to use it to master you, and there are people out there with that kind of power, like your witch friend and probably a lot stronger."
She looked at me, suspicious, maybe a little threatened, in a way that suggested I'd better not ...
"Not me," I said. "I don't need or want that kind of life, and I also don't ... well, I don't want to see you get hurt." That's about the time we parked at the cafΓ©. Her gaze was searching, evaluating, wondering, swirling spirals and all, her eyes as enthralling as ever.
Riding together in someone's back seat barely a minute later, she held my hand, her thumb in my palm, fingers curled against the back of it. Not so much companionably or lovingly as 'I'm going to extend my claws through your helpless pinioned hand if you so much as hint at wanting to do anything I don't like.'
"Right now you feel kinda like an unattended nuke," I said, trying to keep steady, "available for use or misuse by the first bad actor to happen by. And in an airplane your visibility to such an actor will be much greater. It may be just dumb luck or raw speed that you didn't get taken on your way here, but now I think antennæ will be up and waiting for your return. You need to change back before you take off."
"And there's something else ... it's not just that this amazing new form of yours is vulnerable to the right kind of power, it could also be vulnerable to affection in ways you're not used to. And frankly, um ... it might go both ways. I'm a happily married man and don't want anything about my life to change, but I ... ... your witch friend might have built in these vulnerabilities as a kind of booby-trap."
"Heh heh, he said boobies,"
came a disembodied voice from unconscious past.