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“Would you like that?”
“Yes!” she says firmly. It’s almost like she says it angrily.
I sit down across from her with a cup of coffee in hand. It’s Saturday and she’ll not have daycare today. I wonder if maybe she’s just upset about not seeing Kelly today. “Kelly, Caleb, and Carly are coming over a little later. We’re going to do a barbecue at the lake.”
Angel smiles. “I know. And you’re going to teach Carly and Caleb how to be a fish.”
I chuckle. “How to catch fish.”
“So you can tell Kelly to move into this house today, then,” she says brightly. She picks up her spoon and scoops up some cereal.
“Well, maybe I’ll talk with her about it, okay?”
“Okay,” she says absently. I imagine she got what she wanted from the conversation and now it’s secondary to eating. I watch her awhile as I sip my coffee. My life has evolved into something interesting. We live in two different places but other than when we actually sleep, we’re together as much as we might be if we lived in one.
I think back to earlier in the relationship when my mind see-sawed enough about all this I had to shift for a while. Tomorrow is our first anniversary as a couple, and my big plan to reveal I’m a shifter is irrelevant now. Strangely, there’s no see-saw in my mind right now. On the contrary, asking Kelly to move in seems like a no-brainer. I think a moment about it. Angel is on board, and that’s great, but Carly and Caleb might not be.
I decided to ask her today. That way she doesn’t feel any pressure to agree as though it’s a big anniversary thing and to refuse would be some kind of terrible thing to do. I mean, I don’t think she’d feel that way, but I don’t want to risk it at all. Kelly finishes up with her cereal and I say, “Do you want to learn how to fish, too?”
She says, “What am I, a jaguar?”
I stare at her in shock and say, “Did you learn that from calls with Grampa?”
She giggles and nods. “Video calls.”
“Well don’t you know that leopards can swim and catch fish, too?”
“Not this leopard,” she says with a giggle.
I lean forward and kiss her nose. “Well, you might think fishing is fun.”
“What am I, a jaguar?” she asks.
I laugh and refuse to be caught in an endless loop with this. I know that’s exactly what will happen if I don’t stop the conversation. I get up and say, “Well, I’m sure you’ll have plenty of fun at the lake anyway.”
Two hours later, my car is packed up. The three kids are in the back with Caleb and Carly doing all they can to be Angel’s favorite as she sits between them in her car seat. In the front, Kelly looks absolutely radiant. I actually have to concentrate to keep my eyes on the road because they keep wanting to wander to her instead.
I’m taking them to a small lake. It’s about four hundred acres with something like ten total miles of shoreline. It’s a private lake. I have a membership. It’s owned by a dragon shifter. One weekend a month it’s open only to shifters although that’s hidden. It just always shows as fully reserved for any non-shifters so shifter families can show up and be themselves openly. Today isn’t one of those weekends but it’s still my favorite lake.
I get Carly and Caleb set up with fishing poles and it doesn’t take long before Angel reminds me that leopards can swim and fish so she’s set up, too. They catch a few fish right away, which keeps them very excited. Kelly and I catch some fish as well, and Kelly looks like a little kid, as excited as she gets about it. In the midafternoon, I fire up a barbecue a bit removed from the shore.
As I set the fillets on the grill, I can’t suppress a chuckle. Something about cooking fresh-caught meat always seems funny to me when I could just shift into a leopard and eat it raw.
It’s not really funny, of course. Humans cook meat because our stomach acid isn’t strong enough to kill the dangerous bacteria that live in raw meat and a shifter in human form is subject to most of the same physical rules that apply to ordinary humans, including the obligation to cook meat before eating it.
Still, it always makes me laugh.
“Whatcha laughing at, big guy?” Kelly says.
I turn to see her walking up to the grill with a fresh load of fish fillets.
“Nothing,” I say. “Just thought of something funny. You know how to fillet fish?”
She smiles at me. “My Dad used to take us fishing almost every weekend growing up. I learned how to fillet a fish almost before I learned how to tie my shoes.”
“Well count me as the luckiest man on Earth,” I say.
“You better believe it,” she replies, standing on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek.
