But his clothes weren’t there.
The sky darkened into night.
Frank knew Mrs. Anderson was out, but he could try to get the elderly Reynolds couple to buzz him inside. And hope they didn’t ask why he was naked trotting up the stairs.
Or he could stay in wolf form without a tag, which meant a night outside running from animal control and/or dodging every human that would mistake him for a stray dog.
Or wait, a third option. There was an oak that almost reached the ledge of his apartment window on the second floor. He never bothered to lock the window. Frank shifted back to human and sprinted across the yard.
He leaped for the lower boughs of the tree, grunting as the bark dug into the flesh of his palms. Frank swung himself up to straddle a branch, regretting it as the rough wood scraped his thighs. He crouched in the tree, awkwardly trying to shield his more delicate parts from the smaller whiplike twigs. He skirted around the trunk, grimacing as a low branch brushed a little too close to his groin. There. He was now on the side that faced the apartment house.
Frank balanced upright, his arms pinwheeling until he caught another branch higher up to steady himself. The leaves around him shivered on their stalks, the rustling loud. Please don’t let Mrs. Reynolds look out her window.
Using the taller branch as a guide, Frank placed one bare foot in front of the other and inched away from the security of the trunk. The limb beneath his feet shook as his weight tested its strength. He slid a foot farther out on the branch. It dipped, the leaves at the tip brushing against the side of his window. Just a few feet more.
An ominous crack sounded beneath him, and Frank froze. The branch popped again. It wouldn’t hold. He could make a jump for it. Frank swallowed hard. He should make a jump for it.
Frank jumped. And missed the house, falling into the azalea bushes.
Just as his hunky new neighbor from across the hall walked out of the apartment building and down the front steps.
Frank had seen Tom in the hall that morning, carrying boxes. Trying to be neighborly, Frank had introduced himself and offered to help. Tom had turned Frank down but flashed the whitest, most even teeth at him. Frank had seen nothing whiter outside of a movie theater big screen. They’d exchanged pleasantries, commented on the weather, and then gone their separate ways. Or rather, that was what Frank wished had happened. What went down was:
“Need help?” Frank barely got the words out when his new neighbor turned in the doorway. Frank froze. God, the man was gorgeous.
“Naw, man. I got it.” Tom shifted the box in his arms to hold out his hand. “I’m Tom Davidson.”
Frank wiped a clammy hand on his jeans and shook Tom’s hand. “Hot.” And Frank knew his mouth had disclosed the exact thing his brain was thinking. Idiot. Who said that to a guy he’d just met? A guy like Tom already knew he was hot.
Tom tilted his head as if he hadn’t heard Frank right. “Yeah. The temperatures are a little warm for this time of year.”
Frank didn’t dare correct him and kept his mouth shut, afraid he’d say something worse.
“Okay, well then, see you around, Frank.” Tom chuckled and continued into his apartment.
Meanwhile Frank beat it down the stairs, unsure how he managed not to walk into traffic as his mind ran over the exchange fail again and again.
So yeah. That was the less than stellar first impression he’d given Tom this morning. And now Frank followed that up by hunkering down naked in the azalea bushes.
“Are you okay?” The gleam from the safety light caught Tom’s dark gold hair as he tilted his head to peer over the shrubs. The shadows sank into his chiseled cheekbones. He looked like a brooding movie star ready to sweep a celluloid damsel off her feet.
Too bad Frank was a naked man trying to keep from exposing himself. Frank crouched down farther, making himself as small as possible, hoping the azalea’s pink blooms would distract Tom from looking at his hairy backside.
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?” Tom leaned closer. “Are you… Do you have any clothes on?”
Frank racked his brain for some reason he’d be naked and hiding in the bushes. “Um, I, uh, just got out of the shower, and I leaned too far out my window.”
“Oh my God. Did you fall from that height?” Tom glanced up to the second floor, to Frank’s closed window and then back down. “Do you need an ambulance?”
Frank sighed. This conversation was only getting worse. Cupping his hands over his privates, Frank rose from behind the bushes.
“I’m okay. Just need to get back inside. I have a hidden key if you can get me past the front security door.”
Tom’s eyes widened when Frank stood. Frank winced, sure he looked like one long scrape covered in leaves. He blew at the hair in his eyes. A twig dangled, caught in an auburn strand, but Frank was unwilling to expose himself to yank it out.
“Sure. Sure.” Tom fumbled for his key and opened the door. Frank half hopped over the acorns and chestnut burrs to slide past Tom. Tom wrinkled his nose as Frank passed. Good old wet dog smell. It always clung to him after a run in the woods.
Frank took the stairs two at a time to escape.
After a shower and shave—why did going furry always lead to needing a shave? The rest of his hair receded. Why didn’t his beard?—Frank spent thirty minutes in front of his bathroom mirror, trying to psych himself up to knock on Tom’s door and invite him over the next day for coffee or to watch football. He scratched behind an ear, feeling the healing scab from a graze he’d gotten when he’d fallen into the azalea bushes. Staring at his reflection, he tried to look earnest and approachable. He could do this. He had game.
“Hey, I know you don’t know many people in town, and I’m a loser, but would you like to spend time with me?” Frank made a face at himself. Probably shouldn’t label yourself as a loser.
“Yo, you want to watch football? No, how about basketball? Baseball? No? What about Mexican wrestlers?” Oh God, what if Tom doesn’t like sports?
“I ordered two large pizzas by mistake tonight, and I could use some help, or I’ll be gorging on pepperoni for a week.”
Lame. Frank’s own gaunt features stared back at him from the mirror. Who was he kidding? He’d always be the guy who lost the genetic lottery and ended up with the family curse.
Galen’s syndrome was rare, only affecting about one in 2,000, but well-known enough that most people had at least heard of it. The Greek surgeon Galen had coined the word lycanthropy to explain the shape-shifting curse that traveled down through a family tree. Like most recessive gene disorders, it only manifested when two genes were passed down to a child, leading early scholars to think the afflicted had been re-cursed or spared for a generation due to divine providence. It was only with modern medicine that curses were found to be attached to DNA, breaking and molding chromosomes like magical radiation. But despite better understanding of the disorder, the stigma remained, not helped by the occasional local television feature linking the disorder to werewolf mythology.
All Frank knew was the recessive curse gene made him even more different from his family. He’d already been pushing it when he came out as gay. Turning into a wolf at sixteen had been…well, more than his father and stepmother could handle. She wanted to protect the kids, she told him. He loved his half siblings, didn’t he? It wasn’t safe to have a wild animal around children.
It had gutted him. They turned him out of his own home. He’d been angry. He’d done something stupid, lashing out, snapping at his sister Robbie. It still hurt, remembering the tears on his baby sister’s face, her eyes wide and scared. Of him. It was then he knew his stepmother had been right. Dangerous animals didn’t belong in a family. So he’d left, traveling all the way across the state until he landed in Waycroft Falls. It had been hard that first year. There were a lot of adult things he still hadn’t figured out.
Like how to ask out a guy who he hadn’t known his whole life. Moving from one small town to another had been a bad
idea. Frank bonked his head against the mirror, gazing down into the white porcelain sink. He rubbed at a stray hair that clung to the side.
But on the plus side, small towns meant he rarely needed a car. And he could shift and run if he needed. He should take his clothes with him next time.
Chapter Three
After an evening spent with his carpenter brother-in-law, John, going over options and pricing for the stage area and seating for the new performance venue, Tom closed up the bookstore’s top floor and walked back down the sidewalk toward his tiny apartment building.
When he neared the front door, he glanced around, checking for naked men in the bushes again. Seeing none, he unlocked the security entrance. As he trotted up the stairs to the second floor landing, he remembered the bizarre encounter with his neighbor earlier that night.
Had the guy been shitting him about falling out of the window? Frank had to have been. Nobody could have escaped without at least a broken bone or a sprain after tumbling from that height.
The apartment house was small, only four units, two up and two down. Tom and his neighbor—was it Frank?—were both on the second floor. An elderly couple took up the space under Frank, and Mrs. Anderson, who owned the building, lived under Tom.
Good thing Mrs. Anderson’s standing hair appointment was Wednesday afternoons. She’d have keeled over for sure at the sight of Frank in all his glory, plummeting into her azaleas.
Tom thought back to the yards of tanned skin he’d seen when Frank had stood up from behind the bushes, right under the safety light. He’d had pectoral muscles that should have graced a sculpture of a Greek god in the Met. Molded abdominals and heavy thighs bracketing, oh God, curling pubes just a little more auburn than brown, trailing down from his belly button and into a thick thatch. Frank’s long fingers had clutched around his package, but it had been a tight fit. Tom’d had to swallow twice just to get spit back in his mouth.
Tom shook his head as he pushed open his apartment door. No way was the guy gay. Tom couldn’t be that lucky. But it wouldn’t hurt to put out feelers among the town’s family. He could use a diversion, and even if Frank wasn’t up for scratching his itch, Tom might find someone to hook up with while he spent his summer here. Someone who wouldn’t mind when he left for NYC again.
The thought made Tom pause. He’d gone from high school hookups to the fast-paced incestuous love ‘em and leave ‘em backstage theater culture of New York without a blink. He’d expected to go on to bigger and better things once he left high school. But he’d also been up front with all his partners, from the closeted jocks to the awkward nerds. The ones who didn’t like it, he dropped. He had a destiny. And no one, no long-distance relationship would keep him tethered to Waycroft Falls. New York, the big city, awaited him. He’d expected to arrive like a visiting prince and be swept into a hit Broadway play within a week of setting foot in town. Casting directors would see him and fall at his feet, begging him to grace their stage.
But when he arrived in New York, his teenage dreams still trailing him like clouds, he found the world harsher, colder, more calculating. No longer was he the golden boy, the one sought after as a prize. He rushed from audition to audition and then got by on the scraps of walk-on roles and no speaking parts. In one play he’d been a statue for the entire run, stock still onstage during his scenes, not interacting with the other players, listening to the actors say their lines and feeling like a fraud at the curtain call when he’d taken his undeserved bow.
In NYC, no one batted an eye if the lead chose him, one of the anonymous ensemble players, to sleep with one night and the prop master the next. Shows were fleeting. And show relationships even more so. Lust in real life could fuel a love scene onstage, but like a play, the actors purged it once the run finished to begin rehearsals for the next opening. That was Tom’s new reality. Lasting love had no place in a world where the cast created fantasies six nights a week and twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays. He needed to remember that, stick to that, and not fall for the first pretty face that would call after him when he got back on that plane to New York.
Tom swung his apartment door closed, taking a last look across the hall at Frank’s door. He heard snuffling and the click of nails, a soft canine whine. Was Frank flouting the no-pets policy with a dog? Mrs. Anderson would have a cow.
Tom chuckled at the thought of a big rangy dog scrabbling to escape Frank’s apartment. How had the guy kept it a secret from their landlady? And then Tom remembered Frank’s soulful eyes and thought Mrs. Anderson might have surrendered in the face of them. Those golden-brown eyes looked like they had seen pain and heartache aplenty. Did Frank wear his heart on his sleeve for everyone?
A wistful longing perched for a moment inside Tom’s chest. Frank’s openness attracted him. The guy had even been stripped naked in front of Tom, bare to him physically and emotionally this afternoon. Caught up in the New York theater scene, Tom was used to naked bodies. Bodies were commodities to be sold for the price of a ticket. But emotions were practiced, honed. Frank’s eyes held none of the trained art of acting. They brimmed over with Frank’s truth and honesty. Tom ached to have that kind of solid, genuine feeling directed at him, focused on him. He’d grown tired of the feigned attention his lovers drowned him with in New York, only to drop him without a care for the next pretty face. Somedays it seemed like the only real people he knew were back in Waycroft Falls.
Tom shut the door with a snap. Enough of that. He was only here for the summer. He’d be back on a plane to NYC in a few months. Leaving his life of repainting peeling apartment walls, unclogging stopped up toilets, and directing community theater behind him.
And Frank fell out of his own window, for Pete’s sake. Who did that? Was the guy that awkward at everything? If he tried to have sex with Frank, Tom’d end up in traction with a broken leg. Still, Tom could hear the scrabbling of Frank’s dog in the hall. Frank was a rule breaker too. Those muscles and touchable skin aside, Frank was a walking, talking disaster waiting to happen. Best that Tom just focus on his sister’s play and helping her restore her historic bookshop.
He didn’t have time for romance on this trip. He needed to do a little detective work, find out that Frank was straight with a girlfriend, and then all his woulda-coulda could go take a leap. And Tom could direct Annie’s play and return back where he belonged.
Chapter Four
Frank hefted the box of trade-ins to restock the science fiction section. Heinlein, Farmer, LeGuin, Asimov. Somebody had read their way through the classics. Annie had left Frank in the store alone while she went to meet her brother—the famous New York actor—for lunch. She’d crowed about cajoling him into returning home to direct a play on the empty top floor.
Frank was looking forward to it. She hadn’t divulged what play they were putting on, just that she hoped to use the space for more performances. It might be a real moneymaker if she could rent out the space. It would mean keeping the store open later on performance nights, but it could bring in a lot more foot traffic than usual.
The bell over the shop door tinkled, and Frank popped his head around the sci-fi shelves to see who it was. Annie walked in, talking to someone behind her.
“Sure. You know you have the run of the place. I gave you a key to the front door and the third floor, so you can come and go anytime you want.”
A deep masculine—familiar—voice answered her. “I need to measure the space again. I’ll just be a moment.”
Frank scooted back out of sight and then tiptoed to the opposite edge of the shelves. As he heard the first soft footfall on the stairs, Frank peered around to see his new neighbor climbing the steps.
Frank wanted to fall through the floor. Or maybe just his stomach did.
Annie’s brother, the famous actor, was Tom? Tom of the beautiful smile and golden hair.
This was a disaster. Frank had given up on asking Tom over and was childishly avoiding him in the hallways. The night before last, Frank had even pricked up h
is ears and let his wolf senses reconnoiter for him. Which had resulted in a fit of sneezing when he’d gotten a good whiff of Mr. Reynolds’s muscle rub the other day.
It was humiliating enough that Tom had seen Frank naked, but he was also afraid he’d blurt out one of the lame pickup lines he’d practiced. To give his mind something else to focus on, Frank was brainstorming ways to redeem his shifter fail. Maybe dressing in a suit, if he had a suit, would give Tom a better impression of him. Frank could position himself on the stairs, reading philosophy or something, to look smarter. Or maybe if he was desperate enough, he could slide a nudist colony flyer under Tom’s door to make him think everyone in Waycroft Falls ran around naked. Frank thumped himself on the head to banish that ridiculous thought. Tom was from Waycroft Falls. Lame, lame, lame.
There would be no way to avoid meeting Tom here at the bookstore. If he was putting on a play in the empty third floor of the shop, Tom would see Frank sooner or later. Please be later.
Frank had assumed Annie’s Broadway actor brother would stay at Annie’s house or maybe at the one and only nice hotel in town, the Twickham. They had a first-class suite that the hotel swore had housed President Grover Cleveland on an unexpected stopover during his 1887 Goodwill Tour. The only other options were the motel near the highway and the B&B near the waterfall tourist attraction ten miles away on the other side of town.
What Frank hadn’t expected was for Tom to move into Mrs. Anderson’s tiny apartments.
“Frank, I want to invite you to dinner at my house tomorrow.”
Frank spun around so fast his head swam. Annie stood right behind him, a calculating look on her face. How did she sneak up on me? His inner wolf whined an apology.
“Um.” Frank manned the counter on Saturday nights until six. She didn’t want to close the store early, did she? Or leave Molly, who couldn’t see in the dark well enough to drive at her age, or Jessica, the teenage part-timer, to close up shop.
“I know this is short notice, but I’m hoping you’re free.” Annie’s pleading eyes tore at him. “John and I need to make plans concerning the store. My brother, Tom, will be there, and I want to include you too. I value your input.”
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