Raised by Wolves

by Bridget Essex

  “No, I'm being serious!” he says, brandishing his pizza. “For all you know, she might think having a werewolf as a girlfriend is sexy!”

  I think about the book she gave me and shrug a little. “Who knows. Stranger things have happened,” I tell him (not really believing it myself), but that reminds me of the reason I'd talked myself into going to the bookstore in the first place: the romance novel I bought for Rob.

  “But, hey,” I tell him with a grin, “I got you something.” I pull the novel off of the counter and toss it to him. He catches it expertly, flipping it over so he can look at the cover. “Loren recommended it,” I tell him, as his face stretches into a wide grin.

  He glances up at me with that goofy smile, genuinely thrilled. “Seriously, thanks, Becks—I haven't read this one yet, but I totally wanted it! I'll read it tonight when I get home.”

  “Like, the whole thing? You'll read the whole book in a night?” I ask him, emitting a low whistle when he nods to me.

  “Books are like candy to me,” he declares, “and I just can't stop eating. But, hey, that reminds me—I got you something, too.”

  “This isn't Christmas!” I tell him with a laugh, but he shushes me, unfolding his long body from the pile of couch cushions.

  “Just hold on. This gift is really important, and you totally need one. Hell, I think you'll use it every day. Let me just go nab it from the car.”

  He trots out to the car and lopes back in in record time, carrying a large box in his bulging-biceped arms. He plunks the box down in front of me on the carpeting, and I tear off the tape, peeling back the cardboard with a chuckle when I see what's inside it.

  “Seriously? My own punching bag?” I tell him, sinking back onto the couch cushions and laughing my butt off.

  “For family emergencies,” he tells me with a grin, “and for really bad days. I'll help you hook it up later.”

  I glance up at my apartment ceiling dubiously. “Um...I'm not quite sure that cheapo plaster's gonna hold it. Especially if I'm wailing on it like I do at your gym.”

  “We'll find a stud to attach it to. Don't worry about it,” says Rob dismissively, waving his hand.

  “That's really nice of you, Rob. Seriously,” I tell him with a fond smile.

  “Hey, we're a pack. We stick together, yeah?”

  I nod as he grins at me, shaking his head.

  “And I know how your mom can be. I know it's been kind of frustrating lately. But hang in there. It's not going to be like this forever.”

  At the mention of my mother, my good feelings evaporate like smoke, and I find myself frowning. But Rob won't let me think about that for too long. He grabs the DVD case from my cardboard box coffee table, brandishing it into the air like a weapon. “Don't worry about family problems right now. Because right now...” He pops the DVD out of the case with a flourish and slides it into the DVD player, “it's time for pizza and a terrible movie! Those two things that cure all ills!”

  “What fabulous piece of cinematic treasure did you bring with you this time?” I ask him, grabbing another slice.

  Rob turns to look at me over his shoulder, purposefully grinning widely, his teeth bared like an angry wolf. “It's a classic—Happy Howloween.”

  “Believe it or not, I haven't heard of that one,” I snort.

  He waves his hand. “Oh, you'll love it! It's about a sleepy little New England town overrun by a plague of werewolfism.” He curls his fingers into claws. “By the end, everybody's been bitten and turned into a werewolf. My kinda place.” He winks at me.

  “God,” I groan, “I really want that werewolf-bite-turning-you-into-a-werewolf trope to die a painful death. I mean, seriously, how the hell did it get started? If that were really the case, half of my one-night stands would've had furry repercussions.”

  Rob grins, his head to the side as he considers. “Yeah, now that I think of it, mine, too.”

  We're both snorting with laughter (a little like two twelve-year-old boys, actually) when the DVD menu comes up, and he presses play on the remote. “Okay,” he tells me, grabbing another slice, “shh, it's starting.”

  I cross my legs over the couch cushion and eat my pizza, watching the movie (and making a few offhand riffs) but hardly seeing it at all.

  Rob was sweet to come over with his offer of a movie and pizza—and that genuinely thoughtful gift of a punching bag. I know he's trying to take my mind off of stuff, but I can't help thinking about things, anyway, wondering how this thing with Loren is going to play out.

  During one of the more eye-rolling parts of the movie, my gaze alights on the werewolf book on my kitchen counter. I decide, right then and there, to start reading it tonight. Maybe I won't finish it in one sitting like a certain Mr. Bookworm, but still, I can get a start on it and try to figure out why Loren loves it so much. Hell, who knows? Maybe she is into werewolves.

  But I know, better than most, that reading about a werewolf on the page is a whole different animal from inviting a werewolf into your bed...

  Or your life.

  ---

  Sunday morning dawns bright and finds me with a stomach full of butterflies, an entire horde of them flapping their wings like crazy. And this horde of butterflies (flock? Herd?) sticks with me all day at work. Which makes me annoyed—who likes a nervous stomach?—and anxious.

  But, even with all those damned butterflies, I still can't help feeling excited about seeing Loren again.

  After Rob left last night with his terrible, terrible movie (which was good, because it was so bad), I scooped up the werewolf book from the counter and brought it to bed with me. And I read it.

  Me, the woman who doesn't read anymore, not since I was a kid. I read the whole thing.

  Admittedly, several parts were a little silly. Clearly, the author has never met an actual werewolf, because she subscribed to all of the old myths, like the silver bullet being able to kill us (I'd like to bring up the fact that a bullet could kill anybody, silver or otherwise) and the involuntary transformations beneath the full moon... But the love story itself was incredibly sweet—and encouraging. The main character in the novel had to come out to her human girlfriend as a werewolf, and the girlfriend hardly batted an eye at the startling revelation. In fact, she asked the werewolf to change her into a werewolf, too. Which, scientifically speaking, isn't possible. In real life, werewolfism is all genetic: you're either born a werewolf, or you're born a human, but you certainly can't pass on your werewolfism to anyone else, just like a human can't pass on being human to a werewolf.

  But it was still nice to read a happy ending about someone like, well, me.

  Overall, the book was aggressively pro-werewolf, which might—might—mean that Loren is pro-werewolf, too. At least, from a mythical/pop-culture point of view. It's almost impossible that Loren would have any concept of werewolves actually existing. But I'm hoping that, if ever confronted with the revelation, Loren might handle it at least half as well as the human woman in the novel did—and not react like my uncle's wife.

  Or Minnie.

  I close my eyes, and I can still see the look of revulsion on her face. After all these years.

  At the end of my work shift, I change out of my uniform in the employee restroom. I had absolutely no idea what to wear to a poetry reading, but when in doubt, wear all black.

  I turn and look at myself in the mirror, giving my reflection a once-over. I'm sporting a black button-down shirt with black pinstriped skinny pants, black leather shoes and my hair slicked back into a pretty sexy 'do (using about a gallon of gel). I toss my work uniform into my gym bag, sling the bag over my shoulder, and then I'm out of the bathroom, aiming for the front entrance of the store. But my co-worker Dan is by the entrance, and when he catches a glimpse of me, he wolf whistles. I laugh, and he winks at me.

  “Hot date?” he asks.

  I bite my lip, raise a brow, and then I'm grinning like an idiot at him. “Yeah, actually.”

  “Well, she's a lucky girl,”
Dan says with a chuckle.

  Dan looks like Mr. Universe, with his enormous, bulging muscles—that he always shows off under his tank top (he argued that the tank top is the colors of the work uniform, and the owner could hardly refuse, what with all those muscles informing customers that you can get this ripped if you buy equipment from Sports Mountain). He looks more than a little intimidating—if you're intimidated by sheer muscle, that is. But he's honestly one of the kindest people I know. When he's not at Sports Mountain, recommending whey proteins and supplements and barbells, he spends most of his free time volunteering at the local pit bull rescue. I found out on my very first day working with him that he's engaged to a guy named Peter, which then led to my own coming out to him—about the lesbian thing, not the werewolf thing, of course. We've been friends ever since.

  “Don't sweat it, kid. You'll knock her socks off,” Dan tells me, then regards me thoughtfully, his head to the side. “And possibly other articles of clothing, too,” he tells me with a waggling brow. I laugh and punch his arm, and then I take a step back, saluting him.

  He salutes me, too. “Good luck!”

  “Thanks,” I tell him with another laugh.

  Then I'm through the revolving front doors of Sports Mountain, ready to start the evening, come what may.

  But I find that, even with all of my usual confidence, my stomach is roiling on the bus ride to the Lyceum.

  Because the cold, hard truth of it is that in all my adult life, I've never gone on a second date.

  That sounds terrible, even to me.

  But it's true. God knows I do one-night stands. I'm the queen of them. But second dates, other dates, actual long-term relationships? Yeah, no dice. And this means that, right now, I'm not quite sure how to behave on this, our Second Date. My fists itch to have a go at my new punching bag to work off all of this nervous energy, or I'd like to run eight or nine billion miles to blow off some steam. But there's no time for any of that, no time to head home and pummel the bag into submission, no time to go to the gym and pump weights until all of my muscles are sore, and I'm spent.

  The poetry reading starts in ten minutes. So I have no time for anything but getting there.

  The bus drops me off at the theater entrance, nicely enough, since the bus stop is right out front. The doors of the theater are crowded with men and women in dark clothing, conversing animatedly, laughter rising above the people like sparks. I look through all of the assembled poetry-reading-goers, but it's easy to spot Loren even in the crowd.

  Okay, so cheesily enough, I think I could spot her in any crowd. My eyes are drawn to her like, I don't know, she's a hunk of sexy metal, and my eyeballs are, for some unknown reason, magnetized.

  Weird metaphor, but it works.

  And she's also easy to spot because, in that entire crowd of black-clad men and women, Loren is wearing a knee-length cream-colored sheath that sparkles with strands of gold beneath the lights of the marquee board. Her blonde hair is swept up in a high knot, with tendrils of gold hair falling along her creamy neck, revealing its graceful lines. My mouth goes dry at the sight of her, and I can't help but smile like a dope.

  She doesn't see me yet, and I slip through the crowd up the steps unnoticed until I'm about a foot away. That's when Loren glances back, her beautiful neck bending as she turns on the step to spot me. I'm standing one step down from her, and I tilt my chin up to take in her beauty; she's glowing like the illuminated marquee overhead. Brighter, even.

  And she's smiling at me; her eyes dazzle. She's as glorious as the sun.

  I take her hand, brush my lips against the back of it, feeling her skin against my lips, the warmth of it, inhaling her intoxicating scent, and then I'm rising out of the bend, taking that one step up so that I'm on the level with Loren. I lean forward, and I'm kissing the side of Loren's mouth, whispering, “Hello, beautiful.”

  She bends her shining face to me, smiling brightly as she wraps her soft arms around my neck, drawing me even closer to her as she breathes out with a sigh, glancing up at me through her lashes. “How was your day?” she asks, her voice purposefully low, throaty. A purr of desire runs through every syllable.

  I raise a brow, wrap my arms around her, too. I can feel the warmth of the fabric of her dress, the warmth of her body against my skin. Her scent is all around me, and it's distracting me, the sweetness of all that is her. “Oh, business as usual,” I joke, feeling warmth surge through me. “Stocking shelves. Helping the excessively testosteroned track down their preferred varieties of balls.”

  She laughs so hard that she snorts a little, and I'm fairly certain I've never heard anything more adorable in my entire life.

  “How about your day?” I ask her, my head to the side. It's a normal small-talk question, but I'm genuinely curious. I want to know what she's been up to today, how she's feeling, what she thought about as the hours passed. I'm interested, and again (and this is terrible to say), interest isn't something I've felt for many people.

  But I feel it for her.

  Loren grins at me, but now she looks a little sheepish as she glances away. “It was such a packed day, I don't know how I'm standing here on two feet,” she says with a little wink. “Today was busy, busy, busy!”

  “Oh, really?” I chuckle.

  “Yup. Little Red and I watched a hundred episodes of House Hunters and ate way too much macaroni and cheese.” She says it all with a straight face until the very end, when she starts cracking up.

  I stare at her, unblinking. “Say what? Your cat eats macaroni and cheese?”

  Loren sighs. “ Begrudgingly. She's a snob. Penne in clam sauce is her favorite.”

  “I'd...believe that,” I tell her. I'm about to say something else when the rest of the people on the steps start moving into the theater itself. I glance down at Loren, at her head inclined toward the entrance, and then I offer her my arm, and she takes it with a bright smile. “Shall we go in?” I ask her.

  She nods, and arm in arm, we ascend the rest of the entrance steps and stop in front of the little ticket counter under the alcove. Loren takes a step forward, waving her slim little purse at me and pulling out her wallet. “My treat,” she tells me with a grin over her shoulder, and she's leaning down to speak into the little hole in the glass. “Two, please,” she tells the attendant. She scoops up the tickets and turns, just in time to see me checking out her legs.

  She's beaming now as she shakes her head, shaking a finger at me. “You're bad,” she says, but I'm wrapping an arm around her, and she wraps an arm around me, and together we walk side by side into the theater itself.

  We take our seats near the back of the audience in the already-darkening space; the show is just about to start. I am highly aware of the heat of Loren's leg pressing against mine, how the warmth of her bare skin feels against my pant leg. I am so aware of her particular scent, that soft rise of floral, and of her every breath, every heartbeat, the soft thump-thump a rhythm that my body matches without even thinking about it.

  Sometimes I wish I could turn my heightened werewolf senses off, because I'm far too conscious of the rise in Loren's temperature as she leans against me, of the increase in her heart rate when I reach out and place one hand on the creamy, bare skin of her thigh—and that makes my own heart pound and my cheeks flush, heat coursing through me, mixing with my desire until it's a potent, powerful thing.

  Yeah, I've got a feeling that sitting through this poetry reading is going to be kind of rough...

  I'm fairly certain that most people, whose only brush with poetry was in school when we were forced to read it, whether we liked it or not, just don't enjoy poetry. It's not that I disliked what I read in school. It was passionate and pretty and moved me sometimes. It just rankled me that we were forced to do anything. What can I say? Werewolves often have problems with authority when it comes from outside the pack. Besides, not every poet that the teacher had us read was one I enjoyed.

  So I'm going into this experience thinking I'll probab
ly hate it. That it'll fly over my head with crazy metaphors that only make sense to the poet (or, at the very least, just don't make sense to me). But when the red curtain pulls back from the stage, the atmosphere in the room changes. I can sense it, can sense the rising temperature, the weighted hush in the air, the hope and excitement that surges through the audience around me.

  And I end up being more than pleasantly surprised by the performance.

  The poet—a woman in her late twenties—sits on a stool on the stage, dressed simply in a red dress, her feet bare, and she recites storylike poems in a hushed tone, her voice low and pleasing to the ear.

  She begins with talk of a wolf.

  “Little Red ran into the wood,” the poet murmurs, her red lips turning up into a coy smile. “And what do you think she found there?”

  A quartet of masked dancers moves out of the shadows of the curtain on either side of the shade, creeping in the darkness as they move closer to the spotlit poet. When they get closer, I take a deep breath, my heart beating quicker inside of me.

  The masked dancers all wear exaggerated wolf masks, big heads with long snouts and enormous, glowing eyes, their bodies dark and fading into the shadows with their black bodysuits. The dancers begin to move around the poet onstage, moving quickly and lyrically to the rhythm of her words.

  The poet stands up from the stool and begins to talk about wolves in the woods. Once I get over the initial shock of her subject matter, I begin to really enjoy it. After all, the tale of Little Red Riding Hood has pervaded every aspect of our culture, from the cartoons and the stories you first experience when you're a kid to the bottles of beer in the liquor stores that feature a scantily clad Little Red character on the labels. It makes sense that a poet would want to talk about it. Isn't it the age-old story? Don't stray off the path. Don't want what you can't have. And, for heaven's sake, don't trust the big, bad wolf.

  I'm intrigued by the poetry, but I'm not relaxed in my seat. For one, I can tell that Loren's body is hotter now, either because the woman on the stage is beginning to talk about the wolf in the woods with a few choice, sexual words, or because my palm is still resting on her thigh. Her mouth is open a little, her shimmering lips parted, and though what's going on the stage is pretty interesting, I can't help but steal glances at Loren, at the tendrils of gold that dance over the cream-colored skin of her neck, at the warmth that flushes her cheeks, at how she licks her lips, wetting them, her lashes long and resting against as she closes her eyes while the poet talks faster, faster, drawing the words out into the air like an incantation. Like a spell.