Christopher Moore - The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

“Therefore,” Gabe continued, “you’d have more animals mating and passing on the depression gene. Nature tends to evolve mechanisms to remain in balance. A predator or a disease would naturally evolve to keep the depressed population down. Interesting, I’ve been feeling especially horny lately, I wonder if I’m depressed.” Gabe’s eyes snapped open wide and he looked at Val with the full-blown terror of what he had just said. He gulped his wine, then said, “I’m sorry, I…”

Val couldn’t stand it anymore. Gabe’s faux pas opened the gate, and she stepped through it. “Gabe, we have to talk.”

“I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

She grabbed his arm to stop him. “No, I have to tell you something.”

Gabe braced himself for the worst. He’d fallen out of the lofty world of theory into the awkward, gritty world of first dates, and she was going to drop the “Don’t get the wrong idea” bomb on him.

She gripped his arm and her nails dug into his bicep hard enough to make him wince.

She said, “A little over a month ago, I took almost a third of the people in Pine Cove off antidepressants.”

“Huh?” That wasn’t at all what he’d expected. “My God, why?”

“Because of Bess Leander’s suicide. Or what I thought was her suicide. I was just going through the motions in my practice. Writing prescriptions and collecting fees.” She explained about her arrangement with Winston Krauss and how the pharmacist had refused to put everyone back on the drugs. When she finished, to wait for his judgment, there were tears welling up in her eyes.

He put his arms around her tentatively, hoping it was the right thing to do. “Why tell me this?”

She melted against his chest. “Because I trust you and because I have to tell someone and because I need to figure out what to do. I don’t want to go to jail, Gabe. Maybe all my patients didn’t need to be on antidepressants, but a lot of them did.” She sobbed on his shoulder and he began to stroke her hair, then pushed up her chin and kissed her tears.

“It’ll be okay. It will.”

She looked up into his eyes, as if looking for a hint of disdain, then not finding it, she kissed him hard and pulled him on top of her on the couch.

What horrors can a dragon dream? A creature who has, in his own way, ruled the planet for millions of years, a creature for whom the mingy man mammals have built temples, a creature who has known no predator but time—what could he possibly dream that would frighten him? Call it the knowing?

Under a stand of oak trees, sexually satisfied and with a bellyful of drug dealers, the dragon dreamed a vision of time past. The eternal now that he had always known suddenly had history. In the dream he saw himself as a larva, tucked into the protective pouch under his mother’s tongue until it was safe to venture out under her watchful eye. He saw the hunting and the mating, the forms he had learned to mimic as his mercurial DNA evolved not through generations, but through regeneration of cells. He saw the mates he had eaten, the three young he had borne as a female, the last killed by a warmblood who sang the Blues. He remembered the changing, not so long ago, from female to male, and he remembered all of it in pictures, not in mere instinctual patterns and conditioned responses.

He saw these pictures in the dream, brought on by the strange mating with the warmblood, and he wondered why. For the first time in his five thousand years, he asked, Why? And the dream answered with a picture of all the oceans and swamps, the rivers and bogs and trenches and mountains beneath the sea, and they were all empty of his kind. As sure as if he were floating through the cold black at the end of the universe, where light gives up hope and time chases its tail until it dies from exhaustion, he was alone.

Sex does that to some guys.

“Oh my God, the rat brains!” Gabe shouted.

It was a different response to lovemaking. Val wasn’t sure that she might not be hurt, feeling vulnerable as she was, with her knees in the vicinity of her ears, a biologist on top of her, and her panty hose waving off one foot like a tattered battle flag.

Gabe collapsed into her arms and she looked over his shoulder to the coffee table to check that they hadn’t kicked the wineglasses off onto the carpet.

“Are you okay?” she asked, a little breathless.

“I’m sorry, but I just realized what’s going on with this creature.”

“That’s what you were thinking about?” Yes, her feelings were definitely hurt.

“No, not during. It came to me in a flash right after. Somehow the creature can attract mammals with lower than normal serotonin levels. And you’ve got, what, a third of the population running around in antidepressant withdrawal?”

She was pissed now, not hurt. She dumped him off her onto the floor, stood up, pulled her skirt down, and stepped away. He scrambled into his pants and looked around for his shirt, which lay in shreds behind the couch.

He had a tan that ended at the neckline and just below the shoulders; the rest of him was milk white. He looked up at her from the gap between the couch and the coffee table with a pleading in his eyes, as if he were looking up from a coffin in which he was about to be buried alive.

“Sorry,” he said.

He wasn’t looking her in the eye, and Val suddenly realized that he was talking to her exposed breasts. She pulled her blouse closed, and a battery of insults rose in her mind, ready to be fired, but all of them were mean-spirited and would serve to do nothing but make them both feel ashamed. He was who he was, and he was honest and real, and she knew that he hadn’t meant to hurt her. So she cried. Thinking, Great, crying is what got me into this in the first place.

She plopped down on the couch with her face in her hands. Gabe moved to her side and put his arm around her. “I’m really sorry. I’m not very good at this sort of thing.”

“You’re fine. It’s just too much.”

“I should go.” He started to stand.

She caught his arm in a death grip. “You go and I’ll hunt you down and kill you like a rabid dog.”

“I’ll stay.”

“No go,” she said. “I understand.”

“Okay, I’ll go.”

“Don’t you dare.” She threw her arms around him and kissed him hard, pulling him back down onto the couch, and within seconds they were all over each other again.

That’s it, she thought, no more crying. It’s the crying that does it. This guy is aroused by my pain.

But soon they lay in a panting sweaty pile on the floor and the idea of crying was light-years away.

And this time Gabe said, “That was wonderful.”

Val noticed a wineglass overturned by her head, a cabernet stain bleeding over the carpet. “Is it salt or club soda?”

Gabe pulled away far enough to look into her eyes and saw that she was looking at the stained carpet. “Salt and cold water, I think. Or is that blood?” A drop of sweat dripped off his forehead onto her lips.

She looked at him. “You weren’t thinking about that creature that doesn’t exist, were you?”

“Just you.”

She smiled. “Really?”

“And a weed-whacker, for some reason.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Uh, yes, I’m kidding. I was only thinking of you.”

“So you don’t think I’m a horrible person for what I’ve done?”

“You were trying to do what you thought was right. How could that be horrible?”