A Wolf Apart

by Maria Vale

  “Of course I do,” I snap, all the Pack’s skepticism and my own self-doubt suddenly brought to a head by this woman who doesn’t know me from Adam. Then I remember what she is. A woman. A human. “I am a partner in one of the most powerful law firms in the country.”

  “You’re not just a lawyer, any more than I am just an ECO.”

  “So what else would you say you are?”

  “All sorts of things. I’m a woman who doesn’t listen to music in the background, because that’s not actually listening. Who is a vegetarian gun owner. Who makes her living helping people but likes to be alone. Whose ancestors were on this landmass when the people who yell at her to ‘go home’ were sleeping with pigs in Europe. Who likes caffeine and Cheetos. Who was in a sorority for four months. Who is the daughter of dead parents and the sister of a dead brother.”

  She lifts her tea to her lips and blows across the surface.

  “What happened to your family?”

  “You’re changing the subject. I’m saying that I’ve never met anyone who was just one thing. Who was just ‘a lawyer.’ So, Elijah Sorensson, Esquire, what else are you?”

  What else am I? I’m an exile. A disappointment. An Alpha without a Pack. A leader no one wants to follow. A flashy vessel hiding something unspeakably sacred and undeniably fragile. I am a monster: neither one thing nor the other, belonging nowhere.

  “Lost,” I say, staring at the fire until my single working eye begins to dry out. “Just. Fucking. Lost.”

  My throat feels achy and full, and I turn back to the page, pretending to read, because I feel her ironwood eyes on me, and I know what she sees: an angry, defensive, broken, defeated man in a human’s castoffs and with a wolf-ravaged, bruised-gourd face.

  And then I feel something else. I feel Thea’s hand hanging loose between us. She has returned to her book, but the wordless invitation is there. The cabin being what it is, when I let my hand drape to the side of the bed, I’m close enough to touch her.

  In the snow-muffled peace of no expectations, I stare sightless at the pages, every nerve focused on the shared heartbeat between our fingers.

  When I finally look up from the blurred pages, the mottled fire is reflected in the warmth and welcome of her eyes. I can’t stop myself. I collapse to my knees, my head at her lap, my arm wrapped around her knees, silently asking if this woman who makes a living finding people can find me too.

  She slides the ribbon back into her book and tucks it into its place between the cushions and smooths my hair back from my face, careful of my swollen eye. With each pass of her hand, she erases one jot of despair. Then another and another, and it adds up until I feel…still.

  I catch her hand and settle it against my mouth. She smells like soap and steel. There are callouses on her hand.

  For the first time in years, in decades, my jaded body longs to touch and be touched. I want the most intimate touch. I want to be inside Thea. I try to tell myself that she is different. But what if she’s not different enough? What if, in the event, her face is filled with the familiar calculus of seduction? Just one more Offland transaction?

  If I don’t look, I won’t see. So when she curls around me, laying a soft kiss on my blind grapefruit swelling, I close my one functioning eye and raise my head to the soft brush of her lips, painfully gentle and undeniable. I weave my hands through her hair and turn my head so my lips are firmer against hers, testing how deep this restraint of hers goes.

  Her mouth softens under my tongue flicking at her top lip and then her bottom, and she opens to me, unbearably receptive. Her hair falls around us like a damp curtain, and she takes me in, tasting my mouth with her lemon-and-tea tongue. She is slow and deliberate, one hand reaching around the top of my shoulders, the other to the small of my back. Her finger takes up that almost unnoticeable pulse, the one she played against the upholstered back of my big chair the first day I met her. It’s so slight, but it builds with each light touch until I am holding my breath, waiting for the downbeat. Her hip bone finds the heavy ridge of my erection and settles against it with a sigh halfway between contentment and ache.

  That’s it.

  Wrapping one arm around her, I push up from the chaise and lay her out, pulling off her leggings while she struggles with the Henley. I still can’t look at her eyes, looking instead at her body. It’s not like the dozens of young women I’ve had before. Her breasts spill a little to the side. There is a soft bulge under her navel and a scar on the left side of her abdomen. A burn on her forearm. A small constellation of freckles at her cleavage. A sprinkling of tiny lightning bolts at her hips.

  Holding her hips down with one hand, I push her chest down with the other while I kiss and suckle every baroque decoration time has stitched onto the canvas of her body, moving down until I reach her furrow.

  I don’t want her to touch me, because if she does, it will be all over, and this needs to be slow. I want her to burn. I want to burn. I want this to leave a scar in my memory that can’t be forgotten. I need to slow down.

  I need to slow down. Ineedtoslowdown.

  Then she says my name, substituting a clipped sigh for the last syllable—Eliiizhah—and I lose control. There’s no slow or fast, just all that pent-up need breaking past my lower spine, through my pelvis, and out. Like a teenage boy, I hold her tight and come undone in vast desperate bursts.

  I groan twice: once for the coming and once for the humiliation.

  “Elijah, turn over,” she says, pulling the pillow away from my face when she comes back from the bathroom. When I don’t, she pulls me harder. “On your back.”

  I cover my eyes with my forearm because I know what she’s going to do. She’s going to lick her lips, suggestively, naughtily, making sure I understand the awesome gift of her mouth. As if there wasn’t something so hopelessly banal about lips on a cock. As if I hadn’t had a whole sodality of sucking. I wait for the mattress to bend under her knees, but it doesn’t, and when I lower my arm, she is standing over me holding that wicked hunting knife and a handful of disposable restraints.

  I take it back. I have no idea what she’s doing.

  “What are you doing?”

  She holds up a single restraint. “Probably exactly what you think.”

  “Is this… Do you do this often?”

  “Never.” She looks at the restraints, trying to remember something. “I only used these once. Two years ago, on a crazy drunk hunter.”

  “But…why me?” I mean, really, why me? You didn’t do this to Doug, but you’re going to do it to Elijah Sorensson, who is an Alpha of the human hierarchy and, if it hadn’t been for that sudden attack of doubt, would have been the Alpha of the last truly great wolf pack as well?

  “I’ve never met someone who needs control as much as you do. Over other people, but mostly over yourself. Like there’s some part of you that you’re afraid to let out. It makes me wonder: What happens if you don’t have it? Control, I mean. What happens if you give control to someone else? And just let go? Would it unleash you?

  “Free you?”

  My wild cocks an ear. I finger one of the restraints, feeling its strength.

  “Is there a safe word?”

  “No, there’s no safe word. I told you, this is not what I do. All you have to do is say ‘stop’ or ‘no’ or ‘I’ve changed my mind’ and”—she twists her knife in the air—“you’re free.”

  Slowly, she moves my left foot to the outside of her bed and threads the double cuff around my ankle and her bedpost. “Trust me?” she asks.

  I don’t say yes, but I don’t say no either.

  She slides along my body to my left wrist. She doesn’t make the cuffs too tight; when I pull on them, they don’t loosen, but they don’t tighten like a noose.

  I don’t say yes, but I don’t say no either.

  With a warm breath, she plants a kiss on my palm, an
d a bolt travels up my body. My cock jumps slightly. She kisses my nipple and drags the rough side of the two remaining restraints across my chest.

  Then my right ankle is secured, and because my ankles must be on the outside of her bed frame, my legs are stretched wide. There is no place for me to hide.

  I don’t say yes, but I don’t say no either.

  At my right wrist, before she puts on the last restraint, she turns my chin toward her, making sure I’m watching her. She smiles at me.

  I don’t say yes, but I don’t say no either.

  She circles plastic gently around my free wrist. The loose ends feather against my skin, then I am immobile.

  The heat from the cast-iron stove slavers up my legs.

  She lays her body next to mine, lets her hands run gently down the slope of my shoulder and to the hard curve of my chest. My skin has gotten way too tight. She leans over me, her hair falling onto my chest before sliding down to the sheets. I feel every strand. “Breathe, Elijah,” she whispers against my mouth. “Let me love your body.”

  My breath escapes in a low hiss like the air from a punctured tire. I pull slightly on the restraints but then let go. There is nothing for me to do here. No games to play, no scripts to follow, just the feeling of Thea’s tongue and her fingers and her hair and her skin.

  She reads my body like it has a narrative. Every touch responds to the one before and builds to the next. She starts in places that I’ve never given a second thought to—the spot just inside my knee—and builds from there. I almost climax again when she nips the skin of my pelvis, my cock sliding over her soft cheek and under the tangle of her hair.

  But then she goes places where humans aren’t allowed. My neck. She plants a line of kisses along the most vulnerable part of me. I’m just about to tell her to stop, but she makes it even gentler, until she reaches the top and opens her mouth on either side and exhales. Doesn’t even touch me, just exhales. Nothing but whispered warmth and trust.

  When I grow too ecstatic, she pulls back, leaving me in the dark, straining toward the heat of her skin and the weight of her body beside me on the mattress. Then she leaves the bed altogether.

  Please, Thea.

  Don’t leave me.

  She comes back a moment later, pulling at a little packet with her teeth. It’s funny. I’m usually so careful about condoms, but I’d forgotten completely.

  She tears it open and straddles my hips. She holds the crown of my cock tight in her fist and pulls it on. Then she uses me in long strokes along her seam before taking me in. With her free hand, she traces tight, hard circles until her expression softens, her eyes become unfocused. She arches her back into a perfect curve and comes with a broken cry. She collapses against me, the last remains of her climax sobbed against my lips. Flexing my hips, I follow the rhythm of her orgasm until, finally, I come with a howl, and every animal in the woods knows what I am and shuts the fuck up.

  I am, my wild screams, here.

  Chapter 18

  Hāmweard, ðu londadl hǽðstapa, in 26 days

  Homeward, you landsick heath-wanderer, in 26 days

  Curled up in a cocoon of sweat and seed and saliva and the thin curl of blood from my reopened wounds, I sleep like I haven’t slept since I was a pup, one indistinguishable part in a writhing warm pile of fur.

  I sleep so deeply that when I wake up, the sheets are cold and the cabin is empty.

  “Thea?” I feel for her, finding only the cut remains of the restraints.

  She stoked the fire and left the coffee on the table, but for the first time, I am the one left behind, and I can’t help the sour panic creeping up in my chest.

  It doesn’t take me long to find the note she left under the coffee mug on the plain pine table. Srry, she scribbled. Hd to run.

  That’s it? “Srry. Hd to run?”

  Srry. Hd to run?

  I don’t even warrant vowels?

  I should have known.

  Jeremy, my college roommate and mentor in the realm of human sexuality, warned me. He warned me about seeming too eager, too open.

  “You can’t jump around her like an incontinent puppy,” he’d said after I’d sat next to some girl in the dining hall. “You will lose all hand.”

  “Hand? What do you mean hand?”

  “The upper hand?” He must have seen by my expression that his explanation hadn’t really explained anything. “What planet did you say you come from?”

  “Upstate.”

  “Look, Jethro.” Never clear on the difference between the Adirondacks and Appalachia, Jeremy insisted on calling me Jethro when he felt I was being especially green. “The reason you can’t go jumping around a girl like an incontinent puppy is because they will either (a) take advantage of you or (b) dump you, because, you know, what every girl wants is a real alpha male.”

  Now, I already was a “real Alpha male.” I’d left every challenger scarred and scared, and it amused me no end to hear him say “alpha male,” his skinny, little arms crooked and his tiny fists all balled up.

  It was really very cute.

  He never did say “alpha female.”

  If I wanted to have the upper hand, he said, I must never call a girl I’d slept with or go with her to have coffee or sit next to her in the dining hall.

  With Pack, the equation is simple: receptivity = mounting. This “hand” business seemed like unnecessarily awkward confusion and led to long delays between mountings. Generally, it was easier and faster just to start over.

  But I don’t want to start over.

  I want Thea.

  Removing my clothes from Thea’s “dryer,” I slip them on, stiff and bone dry and warm on my skin. I untie the rope, pull the dryer back up to the ceiling, and secure it again around the cleat. I fold the borrowed clothes.

  Chewing on a crunchy end of bread, I bend over a new piece of scrap paper, trying to think of just the thing that straddles that line between cool disinterest and pathetic availability. That will say Alpha male, not incontinent puppy.

  I feel like I did that day in the Year of First Shoes, when some adult Pack member helped me wrap the unfamiliar fleshy fingers of my human form around a pencil.

  I put the pencil back down.

  • • •

  Back in New York, I’m no better. I sit on my bed with my laptop balanced on my crossed legs, Thea’s email address typed in and my cursor at the subject line.

  Cool disinterest and pathetic availability.

  I end up typing FJFJFJFJFJFJFJFJ until I run out of space.

  My doorbell rings. Unaccountably, my heart leaps, and bouncing off the bed, I run to the door like an incontinent puppy. Through the brass frame of the peephole is Alana, the only person it could ever be.

  I’ve got to sell this place.

  “What happened to you?” she shrieks. “Was it an accident?”

  “Something like that.” I start to pull back into my apartment. “Alana, I really have a lot of work—”

  “Luca is out of town again?” She scrapes her nails across my chest, her eyes studiously avoiding my battered face. “San Francisco?”

  Well, of course, nothing says cool disinterest like fucking your neighbor. But I discover that all the upper hand in the world is worth nothing if the lower parts refuse to cooperate.

  Alana is already down to nothing but a shelf bra of burgundy lace and matching panties, and the only thing I’ve got in my pants is a parboiled squid.

  Trying to wake up the squid, I pretend to scratch at my thigh. Leave me alone, says the squid.

  “Is he going to stay here?” I nod toward Tarzan, who is watching me, his head cocked to the side.

  “He was here before?” she says after a quick look. “You didn’t mind then?”

  “He wasn’t watching before.”

  “Ooo, waz de madduh?�
� Her voice floats up the register. “Is de big man afwaid of the liddow doggy?”

  Oh sweet fuck. Get me out of here.

  She drapes herself around me, her chin on my shoulder, her breast against my shoulder blade, her fingers toying with my waistband. I pull her hand away.

  “You seem kind of off your game, Elijah? Did you…like…hurt it in the accident?”

  “It? What acc…?” Then I remember the “accident.” The one in which an enormous wolf tried to eat my eye. “No, but the accident… Maybe it’s just that coming so close to death so unexpectedly has made me more aware of the transience of life.”

  That should do it. Nothing unnerves humans like talk of death. They simply can’t wrap their minds around the idea that their own spark—divine, they call it, to distinguish it from every other creature’s unsanctified ember—might sputter like a waterlogged Roman candle.

  “Well, that’s kind of a bummer?” Alana says and swings her leg around the other side of the bed. She toddles toward the en suite and pulls her robe around her. “Maybe we should wait until you stop thinking, you know? About ‘transience’?”

  My squid and I share an overwhelming sense of relief. There will be no tomorrow. No amount of upper hand is worth this. When I start to pull my shirt back on, Tarzan stares straight at me.

  I know what you’re thinking, you minuscule mutant.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  One of these days, Tarzan.

  One of these days, I am going to eat you.

  • • •

  Unable to concentrate on anything, I push stuff around. Socks into the hamper, batteries into the smoke detector, new ice cubes into the ice bucket, clean towels on the towel bar.

  I’m just pushing the toothpaste tube up when my pocket buzzes with a pleasant, pulsating buzz, the one I’d set for Thea. In my rush to get it, the corner of my phone catches on the inside of my pocket. I fumble and scuffle, and it flies toward the toilet. Diving, I grab the phone, but not before it stops ringing.

  In the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, I catch sight of myself on my knees in front of the toilet, cupping the phone to my chest. Like a frigging incontinent puppy.