FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Neville stood aside as he welcomed me into his home. I knew from other conversations that he had inherited the modest house from his parents (who had passed some years ago), and he had apologized long in advance for how badly he had "let the place go." The way I felt, the place could have been made of cardboard and century-old thatching, and I'd barely have noticed.

No; not true. You already know that I memorize details about things that are important to me, such as Neville's email, and before that, the way we had talked and enjoyed each other over the last weekend. Yes, I noticed things, but I did so in the same strange way that I had cataloged things about the badger himself. The house was structurally sound, at least to my untrained eye, and yes, it could do with some tending. The same could be said of Neville himself, if I were being cheeky, but truth told, neither he nor the house appeared to me as anything but - for lack of a better phrase - just right. "Appropriate," perhaps. Nothing about either of them was anything but appropriate to who and what they were, and that was the most important point.

He closed the door behind us, and I turned to hug the badger tightly to me. I couldn't keep my tail from wagging furiously (I was warned never to play poker), but I held back from kissing him, knowing it wasn't quite the right moment, not yet. He held me close, his own tail moving slowly, and I sensed something like relief from him, and welcoming, and although I didn't dare name it at the time, I also felt a deep sense of need that was so desperately hoping to be fulfilled. I'm perfectly willing to imagine that such feelings were, in fact, only my own, rather than his. I'd spent well over a year discovering and learning about him, and since last weekend, I'd only been hoping more and more that he was that "true match" I'd been seeking for so long. It would be nothing short of a miracle to have found him so comparatively early in my young life, but something about Neville made me want to believe in miracles, or at the very least, to believe in him.

Pulling away from me a little, the badger reached up to pet my cheek, looking into my eyes, smiling warmly. "I'm very glad you're here, Raymond."

I took a cue from much-loved literature, reached up to cup his forepaw in mine, turning to kiss the palm gently. The shiver that I felt from him was genuine and made me want to shiver in response. "Neville," I said, tasting his name again, no less sweet from the times I'd said it before. "I have to tell you that I really don't know what to do. I've got all the clichés, in spades." I chuckled. "Another cliché for you, right there!"

He laughed softly, nodded. "Me, too. That's my fault; I've put a lot of weight on this moment, this weekend. Let's start simply. Come in, sweet 'yote; come in and sit with me."

The living room was an immensely comfortable clutter of few furnishings. A rocker-recliner sat at a comfortable angle between a small side-table and a sofa. The coffee table had been cleared off (a condition, the badger assured me, that was highly unnatural; it was usually adorned with anything from stacks of mail to small Lego constructs, of which he was rather fond), and just opposite, a modest (and far from new) video screen sat atop an equally modest "entertainment center" stand with a disc player, a goodly number of black, plastic-handled cases (each holding up to 160 discs, I was later to learn), and two speakers of reasonable size and vintage. It was no "home theater system" by any stretch, but as he said, it did the job. Besides, such an extravagant system might have taken away from the room's other furniture: A vast array of bookshelves, filled to overflowing with hard-bound, paperbound, leather-bound, and slip-cased editions of books spanning an astonishing range of titles and genres. From the few titles that I could catch before joining Neville on the couch, I could tell readily that our discussions of how our literary tastes overlapped was no exaggeration, and neither was his claim of having read well over 1800 volumes over his years.

The temptation to sit close to him, to cuddle him, was stemmed by the knowledge that we needed to talk first. We sat a little apart from each other on the couch. I was amused by the way we seemed to mirror each other, as we each pulled one leg up under ourselves in order to face each other more directly. He, too, smiled. The phrase "kindred spirits" escaped his muzzle before he could stop it, and he chuckled, seeming a little embarrassed.

I remember a great deal more than most, but I don't have a genuinely eidetic memory; I can't recreate everything he said exactly. You'll have to forgive the writer's license and just let him speak through me, so to say. I'll quote as best I can, and the rest will have to fill itself in.

"Pygmalion," he said, by way of introduction.

I nodded. "The myth, Shaw's play, and_My Fair Lady._"

He smiled softly at me, returning my nod. "Ganymede."

"The most beautiful, the most perfect young male ever imagined, to be the cup-bearer of Zeus. Hera was jealous and set him among the stars."

For a moment, I thought he would cry, his smile growing wider. "You are the only male in my life who seems to know all that I know." He raised a forestalling paw. "Not literally, of course, my lovely coyote. Just as I don't know all that you know, nor do I necessarily know more. I just feel so comfortable with you because we seem already to share so much. And now," he reached out to pat my leg tenderly, "we've overcome my first reason for resisting you. I hope we can overcome the second."

I wanted to burst forth with_Of course we can!_ In my heart, I felt it was true, but it was also naïve of me to let that knee-jerk reaction pop out without consideration. Whatever this second reason was, it clearly was important to him; if I simply rushed ahead, I might actually hurt him. I breathed in slowly and said, "Tell me. I'm ready to listen."

That, it seemed, was the right answer.

"You know my story," he said, and I did. We had hidden nothing from each other, at least nothing that we knew of. Some detail or two might have been missed, but the story of our lives - the essential narrative - we both knew completely. "There is one thing I've kept to myself, waiting to find out if... forgive me, I'm being melodramatic. Let me cut a long tale just a bit shorter by reminding you of my former attempts at love, asking if you ever wondered why I've been so reticent in trying to find it in these later years."

"I thought you would tell me, if you thought it necessary. And Neville, if I may say, before you continue... whatever may happen after this talk, I want to thank you for trying once more, for trusting me enough to let me come visit you."

He held my gaze for a long moment, and a tear formed in his eye, spilling over onto his black-furred cheek. His lip trembled a little, and he whispered, "I fell in love with him, Raymond. I fell in love with the Ganymede of my own creating."

Part of me must have had some idea, but I just nodded a little, hoping my expression would urge him to keep going.

"I think I dreamed him, in the old First Peoples sense of the word. The aboriginals of all continents have different words for the Dreamtime."

We'd spoken of this before, in our many talks. It didn't occur to me even then that he was merely sussing out how I felt about matters of a spiritual nature. Neither of us cared a damn for religion; we both recognized it for the bastion of power-hungry psychotics and self-righteous simpletons that it was. Spirituality was always personal, at its root, and the First Peoples knew this. Archeologists and anthropologists failed, over the centuries, to understand what it was all about, because they kept trying to make the practices and stories fit into their idea of religion and its artificial hierarchies and power-grabbing. It was all so much simpler... but "simple" doesn't count in doctoral theses, nor does it sell books to the gullible masses.

The Dreamtime is a reality as real as this one, at least when you can touch it, while you're actively joined to it. Jung related the concept to what he called the "collective unconscious," and as quantum physics grows, proving the statement that we are all made of the energy of starstuff, there is ample evidence that we truly are all connected, each to each, and all of us to something greater than the sum of its parts. And you've probably gone to sleep by now, if you're like most people, so let me keep it simple: Neville had an "idea."

"The more I wrote of him, in my diaries, the more he began to appear - sometimes in my own fiction writing, sometimes in the writing or art of others, sometimes in films, plays, almost anywhere and anywhen my senses were acute. It's part of my polyphasia, no doubt, but it kept happening so much. And you won't be surprised when I tell you that I sensed it when I was trying to make sense of my various failed relationships. I don't wish to place blame, Raymond, nor to avoid my own part in their failure. I just say that each attempt didn't turn out as either party to the collaboration had wished; we parted, and I did my best simply to move on."

I nodded, still listening. We had spoken of this also, and at length. In his earliest days, he had tried to find someone to love, someone who could love him, and the myriad attempts kept failing. He joked that his worst experience was a date that had "begun at 7:00pm sharp and ended at 8:30pm blunt"; his only satisfaction was that each of them had paid for his own meal, and after his would-be date had left, the waitress had brought him a free dessert and offered her own critique of the young fennec - a short yet delightfully scathing opinion so impressive that Neville had used several of the epithets in a short story describing the event. You might have read the tale - it was called "Not On the Menu."

"It took me a very long time to understand the common theme, Raymond, because... well, at first, it was because I thought the reason made me sound insufferably arrogant. Later, I thought that the reason couldn't possibly apply, simply because I didn't deserve to think that highly of myself. Eventually, I realized - and I'm sorry if this still sounds arrogant - I'd been letting myself settle for the merely possible instead of saving myself for the genuinely exceptional. I embraced the notion that I deserved far better than most furs even attempt to make of themselves."

He had rested his forepaws in his lap, and he looked at them for a long moment. "Some have told me," he said at last, "that I'm merely making excuses for myself. To make up for my own inadequacies, I've instead turned the tables and convinced myself that I'm just too good for everyone else. I lost friends because of it; they've quit me, because they say it's merely 'sour grapes,' and because I won't 'face reality,' that no one could ever be as perfect as my self-created Ganymede. My Valentín."

He pronounced the name in the Spanish way: bah-lahn-TEEN. It was from the Latin Valentinus, where we get Saint Valentine. The name actually means "strong," although it's come to be thought of as "heart" in the romantic sense, thanks to the greeting card people.

"I fell in love with someone who doesn't exist."

"He must exist," I said softly.

"Not in this world."

I nodded a little. "Perhaps. That doesn't mean that he doesn't exist. Would you tell me about him?"

Neville looked up at me then, perhaps to see if I was laughing at him, which I most certainly was not. "You've probably already seen in him, in one or more of his guises." He chuckled softly. "I made him into an Arcanine once, and he almost didn't let me hear the end of it."

"Not a fan of the game, is he?" I smiled.

"He does play_go._ And chess, of course. I'm far less clever about games of strategy than he, but he doesn't begrudge me that. He teases me that my success at gin rummy and cribbage is more because of luck than skill, but I still manage to best him, most of the time. I do wonder if he doesn't occasionally let me win, but he still has to admit that I can race around a cribbage track faster than most."

"He sounds very bright."

"Oh, he's quite the reader, which is how we found each other, you see." Neville warmed to the description. "A random chat room where I would sometimes while away some bit of time, and I dropped a quick literary reference. I'd gone in under the name of 'Mr. Darcy.' His name was 'Ferdinand,' which should have told me everything. He asked if I was seeking 'Elizabeth.' Everyone was confused, because this was a gay chat room, and what male would be looking for a female? And I replied that it was a truth universally acknowledged that I was in want of a husband."

I laughed, recognizing easily how he had revised the opening line of_Pride and Prejudice_ to suit his purpose in a brilliant stroke. "That must have set him apart from the crowd."

"Instantaneously! We began our talks from there, you see." He sighed with a memory that he had both created and lived. "We finally met, and we talked, and... oh, Raymond, I'm not a madman, at least not one who can't distinguish between what we call 'reality' and what we call 'fantasy.' I created him, or I Dreamed him, take your choice, but I know that he's not part of this world. That wasn't the point. I realized that he was everything that I had wanted, and through that, I realized why my previous suitors had no... well, for lack of a term, 'staying power.' I had set my sights, and I just wouldn't be happy with anything less." He looked down at his paws again.

"Describe him to me."

The badger seemed to blush a little. "He's a bull. Stands a little over two meters tall, his chest so broad that I could almost sleep on him. He's very strong, as you'd guess; he'll sometimes pick me up and carry me on his shoulders, holding my calves to help keep me steady. I joked with him once that I'd use his horns for handlebars, and he started running straight toward a tree until I tugged a little on one of his horns to turn him." Neville chuckled, and I couldn't help joining in. "He jogged with me on his shoulders, me turning him like riding a bicycle, and he just kept going for the longest time. He finally tired enough that I guided him back to the tree, so that we could sit underneath it, resting in the shade of a perfect early autumn afternoon, and I sat there in his lap as he got his breath back. He leaned against the tree, and I leaned on him, and we talked softly together, and I..." He glanced at me, looking embarrassed. "I'm being foolish."

"No, please." I leaned forward to place a forepaw to his leg, my eyes feeling much too wide. "Tell me; tell me everything."

"I leaned up against his smooth black hide." The badger's voice was almost a whisper, his tone reverent. "I could feel the sweat on him, like the lather on an equine, and I... his scent came to me, almost like steam rising from his body. I craned my muzzle up to his neck, and I licked the sweat from him." His voice cracked a little, and another tear fell down his cheek. "That was the first time we made love."

I squeezed his leg gently, shaking my head. "You don't have to tell me. I already know that it must have been magical."

"But I do have to tell you." I felt his paw on mine, so gently, and he looked me in the eyes. "Not the graphic details; that's not what you want to hear anyway. I know that you will grant my privacy, even with dreams. What you need to hear, Raymond, is what Valentín told me. This is what makes me so afraid..." He swallowed. "There's only one great love of a lifetime, my sweet coyote. He told me that. But what is important is that he told me that he is not my great love of_this_ lifetime."

The pause became so great that I finally had to break it myself. "I don't understand. Neville, are you trying to say that you can't love anyone else?"

"No, my lovely pup." The smile on his muzzle was as soft as his voice. "What I'm trying to tell you is that Valentín and I can't spend this lifetime together. We'll be spending the_next_ life together. And I've been spending my lifetime - the last many years, at least - waiting like a groom who has no idea when his wedding day will be. I can't set the day for myself. I won't, in part because I feel that I have so much left to do in whatever life I have left... but mostly because Valentín would not wish that choice upon me. He is my creation, he is my Dream, but he has told me that I must not give up this world before it is my time."

The badger paused once more, still gazing into my eyes, his lip trembling softly. "I'd stopped looking for love in this world, because I'm waiting for it in the next. But this..." He gripped my forepaws in his own. "This is what has changed. I stopped looking, because nothing could be like the love that Valentín and I share now, what we will share throughout time. But he saw me still craving, still feeling lonely for this." He squeezed my paws again. "And when you and I met, when we wrote to each other and then began talking - really talking - I knew that I had to talk to him about you."

Some small part of me was unquestionably disturbed; after all, despite all else that had happened to me in my short life, I had been a reasonably sensible sort of coyote. I'd read enough popular psychology books, mixed with a few more scholarly works, to realize that what was being described to me was, by the definitions of the doctors, scientists, and "rational people," something schizophrenic. "Broken mind" or "split mind" was the literal translation of the word. This wasn't in that ultra-rare category of multiple personalities, and nothing in his manner or his speech indicated any sort of fugue state or lost time. The "hearing voices" thing was what the shrinks would call it. And they'd be wrong. It was a true extension of Eliot's observations. This was the place where the creator who suffers meets with the mind that creates and turns that suffering into a means to help heal itself. Neville wasn't talking to "himself"; neither was he talking to "someone who wasn't there." Through the intermediary of his Dreamtime lover, he was asking his heart what it wanted, what he himself wanted. He was asking his Dream for guidance, and no seer or saint in the history of sentience could ask any differently.

I shook his paws so very gently, returning his gaze without flinching. "What did he tell you?"

"He told me to find out from you three things. The first is who you really are - and you have given me nothing but the truth from the beginning, so that was no issue at all. The second was to meet you in person, both to prove the first thing and to see if you would return." Here, he smiled again. "I have a confession, sweet 'yote: I knew you would return almost from our first conversations last weekend. By the time we said good night this past Saturday, I knew. It was all I could do to part from you on Sunday morning. I think you figured that out by how quickly I wrote the email to you."

I nodded, smiling. "And this... this is the third thing? Telling me? Seeing how I'll react?"

The look on the badger's face sobered somewhat, and he sniffed back another tear. "Partly. Raymond, I don't know how long I have left to live. My health is good, for my age; I've no serious illnesses, no looming prognoses. I may have five years, twenty-five years... no idea. But for the rest of my life, I'm going to have the greatest love ever, the male who completes me, waiting for me in the Dreamtime. And my fear, sweet 'yote, is what I may or may not have left to share while I'm waiting. I'm not waiting to die, mind you. I am, however, wondering how I may live." He squeezed my paws again. "I want him, Raymond. But he told me not to wait. I'm not mad; I know he is a creation of mine, and even if he is some definition of 'real' that we don't really understand yet, he is still me, at least enough to know all that I know. So he has read all our words to one another, and he was with us last weekend. He watched, he listened, and in my heart, he warmed me so very much for you.

"Raymond... he told me that he was the love of the_next_lifetime. What he hopes is that, even after knowing all this, hearing my admittedly crazy-sounding talk of a Dreamtime lover... he hopes so very much that you might, finally, after all my waiting and failures, be my love of_this_ lifetime."

My heart caught in my throat. I stared open-mawed, barely able to believe what I'd just heard.

"Have I shocked you, my young coyote?" he asked me tenderly. "Have I hurt you?"

I disengaged my forepaws from his, not taking my eyes from his, and I reached up to cup his face in my paws. "Neville," I whispered. One paw reached up to pet his headfur tenderly, while the other stroked his cheek. I felt the tears in my eyes leak down to my cheeks. "I'll need words, when I can find them, but now..."

So very slowly, trusting the moment, trusting my heart, I leaned forward to this most precious badger and touched my lips to his. We held there for a very long time, despite my own breath quickening to match his own, despite a tremendous urge to move forward, to give ourselves over to what we both wanted. It wasn't just me; I was completely sure of that. I trembled, and I felt him tremble as well. I thought perhaps I caught a scent, something like desire and fear mixed together, a scent that might best be called "anticipation," and I wasn't entirely sure if it was from myself, from him, from both. What I was certain of, however, what I could feel without the slightest doubt, was the presence of a great black bull, looking upon us with the most loving eyes I could ever have imagined... or perhaps Dreamed.

I was sure of it then, I'm sure of it now, and I've been sure of it all this time. Some would call it the power of suggestion, some a dreamer's fantasy, some a romantic notion that was nothing more than "quaint." If I cared, I'd say, Damn them all for lacking the desire to believe in something larger than their puny mortal minds can be bothered with. There may or may not be a god, depending on your definition, but there is no shortage of the divine, if only your heart is large enough to recognize it, and more than that, to become it.

There is no accurate measure to say how long it took for us to break the kiss. We were both breathless, both gazing into each other's eyes, and in a way, both paralyzed by the same thing: What does this mean? Again, I can't say how long it took, but I broke the quiet first. Still looking him in the eyes, not blinking, not wavering, I said softly, "Valentín... I swear on my life that, whatever may happen, I will never hurt him."

That's a quote that I can say is complete. I took that vow from that moment, and I knew that I would never break it. It wasn't a proposal of marriage; that would take longer, for both of us. What we knew, in that moment, was that we both wanted the same thing, and the we would start the business that is the making of love. For a relationship to be strong, powerful, lasting, it has to be built, grown, maintained, tended, a project of mutual dedication and devotion that the partners must work on for all the time that they spend together. Love has to be made, and making love has many facets.

Just as I had no need to hear any details of Neville's sexuality with Valentín, neither do I expect you to be so prurient as to ask for, much less expect, any details of our first joining, nor of any other. You would probably expect that scene to have led directly to the bedroom, wouldn't you? I hope you didn't put any money on that bet, because despite - or perhaps because of - all that we were feeling, our next act was to fall into each other's arms there on the couch. After a short rearranging, I lay on my back, up against the armrest, and my sweet badger lay atop me and seemed almost to purr there in my arms. I held him, pet his hair, matched his joyous tears drop for drop. We knew that we had a lot of talking left to do, but just as he was sure on that prior Saturday night that I'd return, so did I know in that moment that we would work out all of those details, whatever they were, and I found myself wanting to spend every possible moment with this magnificent male, for as long as we both shall live.

Now, here, as I tell you this, I can tell you that we changed that line as we wrote our vows together. That didn't happen that weekend. We knew that we still had to work out the madness that the rest of the world would try to impose upon us - my job, my apartment lease, all my "stuff," our income, the daily routines that require us all to make concessions to one another as we share space, time, lives. For most of that weekend, we spent our time writing promises to one another in our every word, action, touch. I didn't try to be Valentín incarnate; I wasn't he, I was me. I displayed plenty of imperfections, then and later, and so did he. We laughed about them, realizing that the most perfect romance was the one that included lots of laughter, the one that embraced our foibles rather than pretend we didn't have them. A sense of humor is the best thing to bring to bed, or anywhere else you might decide to take your romance. And we laughed so much that weekend, oh holy gods...

Parting that Sunday was both more and less painful than the week before. More, because we both felt as if we could never have our fill of each other's presence; less, because we'd laid a lot of groundwork for what we would do next, and every step of the "next" would lead us, ultimately, to never having to part like this again. Even as I drove home, even when pausing to text at my halfway-point rest stop, I was working on all the things that I'd need to accomplish in order to prepare for what we were planning.

How fast? I'd have done it all that week, if I could have. Even so, we were living together, in his home - our home - in time for us to survive some of the most arduous annual tests of any couple: Hallowe'en night (to candy or not to candy?), cooking Thanksgiving dinner, and decorating for Christmas. If any couple can survive "the holidays" without coming completely unglued, they've got a good shot. Other trials include the "We need a new bed sheet set; what color, texture, etc.?" and the infamous "What do you mean, we're out of coffee?" And don't think we weren't afraid of actually bugging each other about what fur wash to use, where to hang our towels, or who's supposed to make sure we're not out of toilet paper at crucial moments. It's part of being in this world instead of the Dreamtime. I have every reason to believe that Valentín never once complained about anything, nor would he need to. In this world, we still have... well, toilet paper.

But we worked it out. We got irritated with each other, too, and each time that happened, we'd eventually remember that loving each other was more important than worrying about losing that love over toilet paper. That, in fact, became the running joke (pardon the expression). If one of us got upset with the other, and it seemed trivial, one of us would ask, "Toilet paper?" and we'd snort a laugh and deal with it. We never wanted each other less, not for a moment; we always wanted more touch, more time, more expressions of love. We celebrated with much more than a kiss on our first New Year's Eve together, and we decided - both of us, stone cold sober - that we would marry that August, planning our wedding around our honeymoon. It, like so much of our lives, is a story that needs to be told and shared with love.

And that's what's brought us to today.

...to be continued