Horse Play

"What you mean," he replied, "is that you feel more comfortable when I'm holding them."

"That's not true," Daisy-Anne laughed.

"Really?" Pickford fixed her with a hard stare.

"Then perhaps you'd like to explain to me again why you reared up and nearly kicked poor Nichole in the face when she took hold of them the other week?"

"I told you," her face showed a mixture of irritation and hurt feelings at his questioning, "there was a wasp flying around, I thought it would sting me and I just overreacted."

"Come on, Daisy-Anne," Pickford's tone was not accusatory, but rather conspiratorial. "We both know that you've been swatting insects with your tail for some time now, why would you start using your hooves?"

She looked down at the halter in her hands with such an expression of sadness that he truly thought his heart might break from the sight.

"You know what I think?"

She looked up at him as he asked the question.

"I think that the real problem isn't the damn halter at all, I think it's me."

"What do you mean, you?"

"Daisy-Anne," he smiled as he shook his head, "you're not the first patient to become attached to their doctor, and it's a perfectly understandable reaction to what you've been through. But the halter is just a physical manifestation of that attachment and it's starting to get in the way of you making progress. Worse than that, I'm worried that the attachment will do nothing but hold you back in the long run."

"What if it's more than an attachment?"

She stepped forwards so that she was only a few inches from him.

He could see nothing but the rich brown of her eyes and hear nothing but the sound of her breathing. She was so close that he could have simply moved a finger to brush the skin of her stomach and all that he could catch a scent of on the air was the smell of her skin. He could not recall a time when he had been more tempted to turn his back on the oaths that he had taken as a doctor, but in the end he was far too enamoured of the woman standing before him to do anything that would be bad for her.

"What if it's nothing more than an attachment?"

He stepped back and broke the spell that she had created.

"What if you've been coping with all of this by creating a new world in which you can be guided and led by a hand instead of taking back control of your own life? That's what you've been doing from the moment that you asked me to call you by another name, constructing a new life in which you don't have to admit that you're both a centaur and the woman who existed before the surgery."

"No," she was struggling to disagree with him, growing surer all the time that he was right.

"I can't let you carry on like this. For god's sake, Annie," he deliberately used her real name to bring home the sincerity of his words, "how serious do I have to be to reject the advances of a girl as intelligent and pretty as you? But you know what I keep seeing in my mind's eye? I see that picture that you have on the dresser in your room, the one with you and that very happy-looking bloke together and smiling. When I think of that image, it always makes me wonder what he'll think of me when you come back to him and you're changed inside here."

He tapped the side of his head to make his point.

"They can pay me to change you on the outside," Pickford tried to cheer her up with a grin, "but they couldn't pay me enough to make me want to change you on the inside, Annie."

He kissed her gently on the forehead and started to walk back towards the clinic.

She stood still and silent for a moment before she followed, falling into a step alongside the gangling doctor.

"See," he shook his head, "I knew you were lying about needing the halter!"

Malcolm stood up for his perch on the roots of the vast tree once more as he thought he heard a sound approaching from the valley below. He had been there for hours and even the slightest noise saw him straining to see the path and hunting nervously for the sight of her approaching. His stomach was a mess of nerves and anticipation and he had run through every possible scenario as to what would actually happen when he laid eyes upon Annie.

Almost a year had passed since she had flown to England and in that time he had lost himself in his job, trying and failing to keep her out of his mind. In one of his many attempts to conjure their first post operation meeting, she emerged from the bushes like a creature from the movie Fantasia and everything was perfect. In another she snorted in his face and then lifted her tail to deposit a pile of manure on his feet as repayment for making her into a monster. The rest of his imaginings the result fell somewhere between, but he was never able to think of her without the nerves setting in.

It had been her idea to meet in the same spot they had ridden to so many times in the past and he took it as a sign that she was well disposed to seeing him again that she wanted to relive the happy times they had enjoyed in the past. Malcolm was aware at the same time that this would be a very different meeting to those pleasant rides into the country they had shared. He had not raised the subject in their brief emails to one another, but it had seemed sensible to hike into the hills and leave the horse that he was used to riding to their meeting spot behind.

Malcolm ranged from one extreme to the other in his emotions as the thought of Annie occupied his mind. There was almost no point at which he stopped and simply thought about the fact that the woman he was sure he loved had consented to become the personification of his most intimate fantasy. Instead he was eaten away by the guilt he felt at the thought that he might have ruined her life and destroyed their chances of happiness at the same time.

Convinced that he had been hearing nothing more than the noise of the small brook that ran through the bottom of the valley, he was about to return to his seat on the root of the tree when a new sound reached his ears.

Malcolm had enough experience of riding to be able to identify the sound of hooves clattering over rocks and through water and in that instant he knew that something was crossing the brook and coming in his direction up the side of the valley.

In that moment he was no longer a grown man worried about the consequences of what he had urged his partner to become, he was ageless and totally overtaken by the need to see who or what was making the journey up the winding path towards where he sat.

He was half way up the trunk of the tree by the time he was able to see through the branches and leaves, down onto the path in the direction from which the sound had come. For a few seconds he was forced to glance around as he tried to see what he both longed and feared to see, but then he was rewarded with a view that could have been taken from a Hollywood storyboard.

It was Annie, she was coming up the path towards him and she was beautiful.

She moved with a strange confidence and grace that at first seemed strange to the eye as she shifted her human torso and almost wove herself through the trees. But he soon realised that her movements made perfect sense when the motions of her equine portion were taken into account. It was clear that she had mastered the challenge of adapting to her new body, and better she was smiling as she went, clearly enjoying the experience of galloping through the wooded valley.

Everything about Annie's centaur form looked to be in proportion and flowed together in a way that had to be seen to be understood. There was no way that she could have been taken for a thing sewn together from disparate parts, instead she presented a complete entity that made a crazy kind of sense. The way in which her subtly muscled torso melted into the grey coat of her equine body seemed to be perfectly natural, the shape of her legs more akin to a graceful blending of human and animal than a compromise between the two.

Annie wore her hair in the same braids that she had before the transformation, though now they stretched down her back in the manner of a mane. She had braided her tail in the same way and it flicked and moved over her well-muscled haunches as she made her way up the path. She wore a simple shirt that covered her breasts, but left her arms and stomach exposed to the breeze and nothing at all on her lower half save for a pair of practical leather pouches strapped around her middle.

She came to a halt a few feet from the tree and fixed him with a playful grin.

"Now that's just not fair," she planted her hands on her sides, "shinning up a tree where you know I can't follow!" She raised her forelegs one after the other and stamped them down on the dirt path to make the point.

"I'm sorry," Malcolm climbed down from the tree with his eyes fixed on Annie's.

"Don't be stupid," she laughed, "I was only joking."

"No," he shook his head, "I'm sorry that I can't join in the joke...I'm kind of in awe right now."

"You were the one who wanted a centaur," she shook her head in a good natured way as he climbed down and walked over to where she stood. "Well, what do you think?" She turned herself around slowly so that he could take it all in.

"It's incredible...better than I could have pictured it," he paused for a moment. "But are you still..."

"Yes," Annie nodded as she stepped close to him so that they were only a fraction of an inch apart. "I'm still me despite the fact that I'm a centaur, and I still love you."

He kissed her gently on the lips and then could not help starting to laugh as he stood back to take another gaze at this woman who had become a centaur because of her love for him, marvelling that she still felt the same after so much had changed for her.

"All that time," Malcolm let out a breath and felt himself relax as they walked further down the path, "and no contact until so recently. I was starting to worry that things had gone very badly for us...and you."

"I know," Annie replied, "I'm sorry if it hurt you, but the rehabilitation was hard after the operation. I was being taught to stand, walk and everything else you can think of pretty much from scratch. There was just no way that I could have coped with any more issues than I had at the time."

He nodded, allowing her to speak as she needed to.

"Sometimes I really came close to thinking that I couldn't do this and that I'd made a mistake, but I kept looking at the picture that you gave me and imagining the look on your face when you saw me again."

"This is going to be something that'll take some adjusting to," Malcolm tried to broach a subject that had been on his mind a great deal in her absence in a way that would not provoke a swift kick in return. "I'm just going to ask," he came out with it, "you are still interested in two-legged males?"

Annie laughed out loud and slapped him gently on the shoulder.

"I don't know about the Booth woman, but I still think that horses are beautiful in the plutonic sense of the word." She smiled at the look of relief that was suddenly all over his face. "The doctors were pretty frank about all that stuff, so much for your famous English prudishness by the way. They showed me some images of stallions and human guys that even made me blush while I was hooked up to some kind of computer and they said the responses were pretty much what you'd expect from an ordinary straight female. Apparently it has to do with the fact that my body was created using my own genetic material. I might look like a horse from the waist down, but in real terms I'm still technically a human being in all the ways that matter."

"What about in the sense that you no doubt think I'm thinking of right now?"

"Let's just say that while I didn't go off and play with another stud while I was away," Annie winked at him, "I had some time to myself and things may have moved around a bit, but the important things are still all present and correct."

"As I said before," Malcolm slipped his arm around Annie's waist and stroked the point where her coat began, "this is going to take some adjusting to."

"Just wait until it's my turn to go on top," Annie replied, leaving him lost for words.