Chapter 50
Fifty
You don’t know it, but Cyrus thinks of you.
In the spring, he descends from the sky and alights on sun-streaked water, he closes his eyes and thinks, I am coming home. But when he thinks of home, he thinks of your body—how, like the water, you would have caught him readily; how, unlike the water, you would be warm, and you would hold him.
On some summer mornings, when the potion wears off, he goes into the woods and picks fruit from the same trees that fed you as children.
He sinks his teeth into a ripe peach and thinks I will never need anything but this.
But when he thinks of need, he thinks of dark winter nights on the road with you, the wolf pelt covering your bodies and the little magic pot cooking tea.
By the time he finishes the peach, it is you he needs with his whole body, which is a body you have loved regardless of its shape.
And in the autumn night, when he relives his childhood by swallowing the stars, he thinks, I am back where I belong.
But when he thinks of belonging, what he thinks of is how you belong in this scene with him: asleep in the hovel, or waiting on the shore for his return.
Without you, the scene is not complete. You were a part of the best moments of his life and you are not here to recreate them.
Without you, this life he has chosen is the life he led after the Fair Queen took you, and it is filled with the same anxieties, the same sense of dread.
He wonders where you are. If you are well.
If you are happy. If you are hurt. If you have gone home, or if you have decided to start anew elsewhere.
You asked him to visit you, just once, and he said changing his body would not change his heart.
But his heart has changed. Even though it sits within his chest, his heart feels like it is in your hands, as if you carved it out of him and took it with you when you left.
The next morning, he swallows a fortnight’s worth of the potion, and takes to the sky. That word, belonging, comes to him again.
Yes, he will always be longing for you, until you are together again.
* * *
After the first snow, you open the front door, and there he is.
“Hi,” he says.
And you know how it goes from there: he curls his man’s body around you, kisses your mouth, wipes your tears.
“There’s no point to this life without you,” he says, kissing you harder.
“Forgive me. I didn’t know how happy I was, being neither one thing nor the other.
I didn’t know I could have both lives.” He takes your face in his hands and presses his forehead to yours.
“I was happy to be a swan again. Deliriously happy. For a long time. And then the happiness waned, because what I wanted, more than the water, was you. The sky and the water, they can’t love me back.
I was on the lake, alone, and it struck me…
My love for them goes nowhere; my love for you taught me just how many shapes a man can be.
I’m only sorry I didn’t see it sooner. You are my True Love, Hans. Only you.”
And then he says the words you’ve said a thousand times:
“I don’t want our story to end this way. Will you let me try again?”
This is not a story in which you say no to him.