by Joyner, GP
She dreamed of love, of finding the one human being in this life who could lift her up out of this constant misery, the mythical better half, whom she thought for certain must be able to understand and to help her- but at the same time, she didn't ever really believe she would find such an impossible soul. Hell, she couldn't even go to a restaurant on her own without getting nervous and shaky whenever the waiter or waitress asked to take her order, so how the hell was she supposed to even dip her toes into the socially complex and confusing maze of dating, whose rules were brutal and served as much to tear you down as they did build you up?
And then from the next room, she could hear the fighting erupt once more between her parents, the two of them yelling unreasonably loud at one another with regards to God only knew what now, and then, her brother saying something loud and sarcastic from yet the next room- she didn't know what exactly, but of course it didn't matter. Now he was dragged into it as well, and the three of them were a barbershop trio of yelling and cursing and pointing fingers at one another with regards to who did what to whom and what the appropriate penalty should be.
And Jessica simply broke down sobbing, hugging her knees in her hands and leaning her head down onto them, her chest heaving silently as the tears flowed in torrents down her cheeks.
God. Damn. Them. All.
The moonlight pierced through her eyelids as she sobbed, and as her heartbeat throbbed in her ears, her head beginning to burst with a tension headache as her family's roars persisted through the walls of the cabin.
She couldn't do this. She just couldn't do this.
How the hell was this her life? How the hell was this any semblance of a life whatsoever?
She had to get out of here, to be alone for a while as quickly as she possibly could muster it, or else this God awful weekend in the middle of nowhere was going to drive her absolutely insane.
She waited, and waited, and waited, for what felt like hours, her tears more or less emptied out, simply biding her time now until the raging of her family died down. From there, she gave it a few more minutes, a half hour perhaps, to ensure that they were all asleep. Then, she snuck out from beneath the sweaty, balled up mess of her covers, and slipped into her hiking shoes.
She crept silently through the back door of the cabin with no distinct destination in mind, simply aiming for as far the hell away from here as possible for a few hours, unknowingly stepping toward destiny, and into the path of someone else's story.
2
The ground beneath the feet of our second story's hero crackled and snapped and shifted with the four-legged bounding of his footsteps, twigs breaking, dry leaves being tread upon and smashed into a thousand little chips of organic compost. His heart pounded in his pointed ears, vigorously, a terrible, frantic pulse of the utmost ferocity. He narrowly avoided collision with the trees as he sliced through their ranks like a knife, ducking around trunks, the black shadows bleeding across his skin as he bobbed in and out of them, and the patches not coated with darkness bleached out and overblown, like something out of a surrealist painting almost.
He felt he knew this forest like the back of his own hand, its hills and valleys, its creeks and streams and secret caves, all of it a rolling expanse for his territorial meandering, his playground, a place to run and bound and work off all the demons that plagued him so regularly during these nights of the month.
The night was a frigid one, his labored breath curling back and stinging him in the eyes in a thick white cloud of steam as he gulped and heaved for oxygen. His bones ached and the padding of his paws felt as though it could bust out bleeding any second from being so thoroughly worn down, but he simply could not, would not, must not stop running. When he stopped running, the things he was fleeing so desperately inevitably caught up to him, and it was perhaps the greatest weakness he faced in his wild and otherwise uninhibited life.
The power and the glory of the full moon pumped through his body, making his blood coarser, hotter, like molten lava being injected into his veins, making him burn, causing him to transform into this... This... This creature... It had been hell the first few times it had happened. Those days following his camping trip as a teenager, when he would black out for nights at a time and go on frenzies such as this one, with no recollection of where he'd been or what he'd done or what the hell the damn full moon had done to him. But gradually, as the incidences became recurring, he'd grown accustomed to them, at least to the extent it's possible for a human being to become accustomed to such a thing.
Which is, most certainly, not to say that his transformations were an easy thing for to face each and every full moon. This was as far of a cry from the truth as was possible to conjure up.
These nights never failed to tear him apart inside. To drive him insane. To make him question the very definition of his own humanity, what it means to be a man, and how easily the animal within us all can take us over, turn us into something we tell ourselves that we're not, because it's sure as hell not what we want to believe that we are.
But he'd since come to believe that it lived in all of us, and that it was merely a question of pushing and prodding and manipulating just the proper buttons of the human psyche for the beast to be unleashed.
He should have been ample evidence of that himself, shouldn't he have been?
A few moonbeams shining down upon him, and his peaceful, fleshy demeanor was torn to its foundation, Mister Hyde devouring Doctor Jekyll and burying his body somewhere deep, where no one would ever find it.
No, even now, after years to accustom himself to these God awful monstrosities that so regularly overtook him, there was still no getting used to the utter corruption of his civility. No adaptation to animosity. No reconciling the self that he wanted to be with the self he truly was.
What had changed, thank God, is that he had learned with time what precious few things he could do to suppress the very worst of his impulses, and to minimize the fallout from his inevitable decay into the subhuman.
He could still remember to this day some of the earliest days of his terrible life as an animal, just after his initial realization of his condition, and his retreat from the land of the living into the safe but isolated woods. Once he began to retain recollection of his mutations to werewolf from man, he began to develop an insatiable appetite for flesh, for blood, for the sinking of his canine incisors through the raw meat of animals' plump bodies.
He could remember murdering innocent animals, often not even for food, but simply for the perfect delight of sapping the life from another living creature, a depraved and terrible and beautiful act when his mind was away from him, controlled by the unfathomable lunar impulses brought about by the cruel and merciless full moon. He remembered, on occasion, devouring poor creatures while they were still partially alive, completely and totally against his will, and when the full moon vanished and he was left in his human and conscientious shape once more, he recalled such events with the utmost horror, immediately and intensely regretting the monstrosity of his actions, but knowing that now, once all was said and done, there was nothing at all to be done that would atone for his sins, that the moment had passed, and that all that was left was to suffer through the intense remorse he felt for the countless damages done.
It was after some time of this, this mindlessness, this uncontrolled rage, that he learned what was perhaps the only thing that allowed him to placate his destructive urges during the evenings of his transformations.
All he could do was run.
Running, the pulsing of adrenaline through his veins, the endless flurry through the trees and the flash of the shadows and the rolling of the air past his pointed face, these were the only things that could save him from his lust for flesh. He thanked God every day that he'd discovered this secret when he had, and he elected not to think about what might have happened if this miracle of a revelation had eluded him much longer, what might of occurred had he one evening encountered a human lost in the woods, or a hunter, or som
eone camping as he had been upon his original infection.
Speculation, he knew, would drive him crazy more quickly than the transformations themselves, and he knew that if there was any grace left in the world for him, it was to be found in the avoidance of dwelling on thoughts regarding things he could not change.
Every full moon he simply ran and ran and ran, working off all energy to kill in as frenetic and endless a plight imaginable, never allowing himself the chance to give in to impulse, wearing himself out so thoroughly that by morning he would be sound asleep and dead of exhaustion.
Presently, he hurdled like a bullet up a steep incline, weaving through the trees, up and up and up, to the highest peak of the highest hill in the entire forest.
When at last he burst into a clearing, he peered down at the world around and below him, all his, his territory, his reign, and then up above him, his mother moon in the sky, the finger on the button of his transformations, the satellite that made it all happen.
He reared back, and let out a vicious howl toward the great white rock, a cry as much of reverence toward the orb as it was a plea for its mercy, a desperate begging, please don't let me kill again, please don't let another life be destroyed at my hand...
And his cry was overheard.
Far away, in fact, the new participant in his story was hiking along the moonlit trail, and stopped to listen to the sound of his plea. She swallowed hard, and breathed nervously, looking around trying to discover what she should do. The safe and sane thing, of course, would be to turn tail and flee, to return to the cabin and to the relative safety of the four wooden walls. But of course, the decision to flee, in and of itself, had hardly been a rational one, and in her fright and lack of reason, the prospect of facing down whatever monsters may lurk in the forest seemed preferable to returning to that hellhole of a cabin amidst the bile of her family. She proceeded cautiously, moving deeper and deeper into the web of the werewolf's story.
The wolf smelled her.
His nostrils flared, picking up the distinct scent of a female, a human female at that, something that had long remained absent from these woods, for as many days now as he cared to remember.
Nostalgia flooded over him like a great, inundating wave.
There was no full moon anymore. No looming shadows or dark creeping forests or any possibility of death to anything.
All he saw now were visions of Lily.
Lily.
That had not been her real name, of course. She had no real name, raised by wolves as she was.
But she was always Lily.
When he'd found her, she'd been standing in a clearing, wearing nothing but a lily in her hair and looking absolutely gorgeous in her innocent nudity.
This must have been what it was like in the Garden of Eden between Adam and Eve, or among the world's earliest secular humans, whatever their names were. Though of course Ugg and Grog were slightly less romantic names for such a beautiful notion, if a more realistic coupling. But the sentiment was the same. Two human beings in their natural state, without shame, without judgment, suddenly recalling what they were without the parameters shoved upon them by society, with or without their consent.
And when she turned to look at him, God, oh God almighty.
Those eyes. The smile that spread across her face at the sight of him looking at her.
For the first time since his initial infection as a werewolf, he had felt as though there was still hope for him. That there was a life to be lived. That there was even the faintest chance that things might be okay somehow.
Their days together had seemed endless and perfect and pure, like their own little private existence, immune to the influence of the world outside, as well as utterly distinct and separate from it.
Everything about her was absolutely mesmerizing.
The last time the two of them had made love was still as fresh and as crisp in his mind as if it had happened only the day before, and the wound of its being the final time was still as open and as bloody as it had been during the same period of its occurrence.
It had been the morning after one of his transformations, his body weary and exhausted from a long night of running, and his mind no less weary, reeling as it was from the constant threat of destruction, to himself or others. He always fell into something of a haze of melancholy following the waning of the full moon, recovering slowly from the monstrosity of his transformations, trying to still his mind of the murderous thoughts that had plagued him for nights on end.
He was off brooding on his own, wishing he had something to occupy his mind or to ease the pain, when as if on cue his medicine came stepping into the clearing. Lily, compassion in her warm eyes as always, her dark skin seeming to radiate into him from even the considerable distance at which they were separated, an expression of concern reading clearly on her face.
“Are you alright?” she asked, knowing the answer without having needed to ask the question. She, of course, went through the precise same transformations as he did, but having been afflicted with shifterdom since birth it didn't trouble her in nearly the same way as it did him.
“I- yeah, I'll be fine. I just, um... I always get a bit tired out after the full moon, is all...” He turned away from her, not wanting to maintain eye contact, and wishing desperately that he had a cigarette in his hand right now, simply as a means of occupying himself, and despite the fact that he had never before smoked one in his life.
Lily, intuitive as ever, saw straight through his self defenses at this. Sometimes it troubled him how damn easily she could do so, as though all the barriers he spent such great care in erecting could keep out anyone but her, giving her the most acute power over him, but overall he knew it was a gift. The one consolation that he'd ever been presented with for his misery as a shifter, the love of this wonderful woman, and her ability, without exception, to make everything better, always.
He looked up, and suddenly she was standing mere inches away from him, staring intently into his eyes, his reflection staring back at him in those great, dark pools of irises, her breath light, flowing toward him in a soft, sweet mist, her heart beating audibly in her chest, the sound of it like a symphony in his ears. Still, he had to maintain the appearance of strength, to shrug off any semblance of weakness, for her, he told himself, though he knew it was mere pride.
“I'm fine,” he said, but he didn't turn to look away, and he thought that his heart might wither and die if one day she actually believed him when he told her this, turning away, and leaving him with the stupid, stupid pride of refusing her beautiful, perfect love, the one thing in the world that could revive him from the monthly death of his transformations.
“Fine is fine,” she said simply enough. “But I want to help you feel better than fine...”
And true to her word, she proceeded to do precisely that.
Before he could even think to object, her lips were on his, and as always, Lily was breathing away all of his worries, all of his pain for him, her taste a substance that was as powerful an inebriating substance as the most potent alcoholic substance. His lie was now truth- he really was fine now, and everything in the world was fine, and there was a certain impossibility to the idea that things had ever not been fine.
Desperately he seized onto Lily's warm body, pressing her into him, her hear melting away the gloom as he felt her naked body dissolving into him, perfect and pure and unlike anything else he could care to imagine. She put her hands on his chest, running her fingers across the broad expanse of his pectoral muscles as they kissed, tracing out shapes, her touch nearly more powerful than the application of her lips on his own.
He pulled her deeper and deeper into himself, as though in desperate need to consume her, this sweetest of medications, in order to expel as thoroughly as possible the gloom and the darkness. Their loins burned together, aflame with arousal, his masculinity growing strong and firm at her tenderness, yet the prospect of defiling the perfect innocence of her body was nearly too much fo
r him to endure, far too tragic, like the desecration of everything good in the world, yet he felt certain that he would be unable to resist the sweet, sweet temptation.
They pulled apart after some time, wheezing, gasping for breath after inhaling one another for so long, her perfect breasts heaving wildly, sweat coating their trembling bodies. But still he held his arms wrapped around her, still he held him so close to himself that there was a reasonable danger of suffocation, for fear that if he let go, if he loosened his grip, she would be gone forever, and the one thing that could save him would be forever plied from his hands.
Accordingly, he pulled her back into him, their lips once again meeting, sliding across one another, tongues entwining, licking, lapping, swirling and sucking, as down below their hands explored one another furiously, feeling out the soft and firm terrain of one another's body's, the heat and the slickness of perspiration over the rippling contours of muscle and curves. As though for support, he reached up and cupped her breasts in the palms of his hands, squeezing tightly on them, letting his fingers work through the soft, luscious flesh, pressing on the nipples with the tips of his fingers, causing them to grow hard and erect with arousal, and a series of soft, pleasurable whimpers to seep from her sweet, soft lips into him.
Their heads grew light with the passion of their kisses, and he could feel the weight of his troubles diminishing, disappearing, like an intense burden being lifted from his shoulders, replaced with a powerful internal swelling of sorts, an inner expansion, all-encompassing and all-consuming, and oh so, so sweet.
Almost as beautiful as the warmth of his body as he touched and groped and caressed, was the feeling in return of her own fingers trickling down along his skin like raindrops, mapping out the muscular terrain of his body, dancing across every surface, every nook and cranny, sweeping and pressing and feeling. And that was precisely it- feeling. The fact that someone could love this body of his, could somehow derive pleasure from touching it, holding it, feeling it, was perhaps the primary source of this indescribable feeling, growing inside as well as he was outside, his internal evolution from something barely human to something light as air and overpowered with the beauty of life.