after Beauty and the Beast (1946)

The Beauty could not believe her eyes. She did not want to believe them. When she first saw him emerge from the rose bushes all those weeks ago, she bit her cheek so she wouldn’t scream. But now, the curse was broken, his matted fur replaced with glossy, chestnut curls. His wide nose and heavy brow traded for aristocratic sharpness. She felt nausea bubble in her throat.

He held her hand in his. His skin was paper thin and smooth. The Beauty wanted to pull away. She let herself go limp under his caresses. She heard his voice—his measured poetry filling her ears. But those hands— ascetic, made for counting coins or turning the pages of the Aeneid. Made for powders and pleasantries. Made for boudoir seductions. Those hands were not, could not be his.

She had spent so long learning his face and his body, his heavy tread on the marble floors. She had learned to love the sound.

Now, taut curls skirted his pale ears, rimmed with pink from the cold. The classical cut of his jaw was shaved and boyish. His shoulders were narrow. His new body screamed of health. It was the body of a man who learned archery for sport, not survival. It was the body of a man who would never need to carry his own bathwater. He will come to love his beauty too well, she thought. A trait admirable in a woman, but not in a man.

He embraced her. His hands ran across the river of hair at her back. She took in his scent. All trace of the forest was gone. He smelled milky sweet, like a newborn puppy. She burrowed her face into his shoulder, knowing this moment should be a happy one. He was, after all, transformed.

She remembered a morning walk. She had held her skirts up to keep the hem clear of dirt. She had taken her gloves off to let her palms press against trees as she passed. She had learned to love this garden she knew first as a prison. At the beginning, the too bright and beaming flora frightened her, but slowly everything had become delightful. She had stopped on her walk to dip her face into the rosebushes. She nuzzled the head of a rose with her cheek, feeling the velvety fineness. She heard splashing in the distance. What could it be? A deer, maybe, or a flock of birds? Towards the stream she went.

Her slippered feet made no noise. The splashing grew closer. She parted the bushes. There he was on the ground. His hands clutching the bank. He drank like a dog—mouth to the rushing waters and claws gripped tight to the grass. He slurped and slurped. Her rustling caught his ear. He sat up and turned.

Their eyes met.

“Are you frightened?” he said, coming towards her.

She took her time answering. Ran her hand along a branch at her side.

“I don’t mind being frightened with you.”

In truth, the sight of the Beast bent to the water made her heart full to bursting. So moved she could have wept on the spot. She could no more explain it than she could the magic that kept this place hidden. If I were that stream…, she mused, but she dared not finish the thought.

The Beauty went to the stream. Her tiara flashed in a beam of errant sunlight. She bent down and made her hands a cup to welcome the flow of water. Gently, she lifted her hands and brought them to the Beast. She gave her cupped hands up to him. He bent down, cradling her hands in his. She felt the water ripple from the touch of his lips. His tongue tickled her palm. He lapped it up, water trickling between her fingers and onto her dress. His nose nuzzled into her skin. He drank to the last drop.

When he finished, he wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his velvet jacket. He could not meet her eyes. He looked at the shadow gathered between them on the ground.

“It doesn’t repulse you to let me drink from your hands?”

She wiped her palms on her skirts and felt a soft drop of pressure down her spine.

“I like it,” she said. She liked it a lot.

That night, alone in her quarters, she had taken a bath. She let her long hair fall outside the tub, the round of her breasts rising from the lavender-scented water. She leaned her head back. She thought of his guilty looks. His dark eyes with beads of yellow splintered in them. She cupped the bathwater in her hands as she had done for him. She let the water go. She poured more down her neck. The memory of his tongue made her restless. She touched herself under the water, slow at first, then fast and greedy. Her desire was rabid. A heat like anger. She wished she could fight it or herself or him. Her father and brothers had always called her gentle. The townsfolk too had loved her for her sweetness. The Beauty carried secrets and shame.

The face of the man before her now was gentle and sweet. Gone were the pointed teeth and black gums. The Beauty felt the lace of her gloves thin at her fingertips. They wound up her arms and over her elbows like a straight jacket. She loved the Beast. She wanted him. God, she had wanted him. This man was not him. Yet she held him. Opened her eyes and turned her gaze up to look at his face—searching for any trace of the creature he had been.

“Now I am on the outside as I have always been within,” he whispered, pulling her close once again. The purr of his voice told her she should be grateful for this miracle.

No, no, she thought. This isn’t him. She felt larger in his arms than she should. She imagined how it would have been—her delicate frame cocooned in him like a bird in a nest. The panic grew. She could break this creature trying to hold her up. His skin unblemished. There was that rabid heat again—something between pain and desire. She opened her mouth. She closed hard on his skin.

He yelped in pain and pushed back on her shoulders, sending them apart.

She tasted something strange and delicious. Put her hand to her mouth. When she pulled it away, there was blood. The man that was not the Beast clutched his arm.

“My beauty,” he said, a question in his voice.

She searched and found no pity for what she had done. She took a step back.

“Beauty,” he said again, this time imploring.

How—she thought to herself—am I supposed to love a new creature, just like that? How am I meant to trade my Beast for this?

Her skin felt aflame. He called to her once more, asking to go back to the castle together, to begin their life.

She took another look at the man who was no longer her Beast. He was a shiny and pitiful thing, like a new toy unwanted. She held her skirts up and ran.

“Catch me,” she yelled to him—not to that man, but to her Beast that no longer was. Catch me like the animal you are. Catch me, like the animal I am. Catch me, or I will never stop running.

Behind her, the new man stretched his hand out too late to stop her. As she turned through the bushes, her dress caught a rosebush. A few red petals were knocked to the ground. Beneath the beautiful bushes, he noticed for the first time, were so many dead and dying roses.