Bear, Elizabeth - Black is the Color by Bear Elizabeth

Author:Bear, Elizabeth [Bear, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-10-30T15:43:52+00:00

They cantered past brick condominiums, startling a red-clad woman who had been fishing in her bag, and came to the place where the riverwalk curved back to rejoin the road. Here there was construction on the north side of the street and–between the road and the river–trees and grass and ratty flowers amidst the litter on the south. They moved with the sparse early traffic but faster, threading around cars he didn’t dare jump for fear of losing the girl.

They passed between a white hotel and a round restaurant, under the shadow of an enormous crane and past the auditorium called the Armadillo for architecture like a sectioned shell. And then they were on the bank of the river again, and running now, the girl laughing in his ear as the bridge came into sight, with its center suspension spire and its walkways covered with arches like a seagull’s wings.

The bridge was named for a whisky sponsorship, and the stallion thought it a fine irony. “Duck,” he said, and lowered his own head so the girl could lean forward along his neck.

And so they passed across the bridge, and she stayed with him, while supports stippled her face with moving light and the arch blurred by above. His hooves a hollow thunder on the span. The river gave back a moving echo.

They burst out under the streaky sky again. The clouds were torn and moving; there would by rain by dusk.

She laughed, and kept on laughing. She’d found the rhythm–a gallop is not so hard to ride–and their wind and his mane stung tears from her eyes.

On the off side lay the shining silver arcs of the science center, like half-moons reflecting the rising sun.

The stallion veered away, across sand and then grass and soft earth where his hooves pressed crescents as if in answer.

And then the road, the hard jar up his forelegs, the girl shivering and urging him on. A trail they did not follow: instead, he took them among the winding band of trees.

There, he threw her, head down and rump high, and turned his body and turned his form at once and caught her as she was falling. His intervention knocked the scream right out of her, and she clung, breathless, against his chest. The scent of blood wreathed her, the scent of blood and the scent of woman.

His stomach rumbled.

She pressed closer into his arms, her eyelashes fluttering against the hollow over his collarbone. With blunt-nailed hands, he tipped her chin up and inspected her face, her mouth, the watery green of her eyes under hair tangled by their wild ride.

She winced. And when he touched the top button on her cardigan, she flinched.

“Run from me,” he said. “Go on; I don’t mind. I’ll catch you.”

Her lashes were dusted with gold. “There’s no point in running. You never get away, and where’s there to run to?” She laid her pale hands over his, the bitten nails and the torn, inflamed cuticles. She helped him unbutton her collar.

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