6. Puppy Love
Puppy Love
Between Twenty-Four and Sixteen Years Earlier
Mash
Iwas eleven years old when Michaela Thomas told me I was cute.
All my life women and girls had called me cute. They’d pinch my cheeks or ruffle my hair, but suddenly it felt different. The word carried more weight. Meant more grownup things.
Suddenly the word “cute” made me look at myself differently.
I started growing fur where there was no fur before. I shifted into my wolf form for the first time. I got real tall, real quick. My voice went squeaky and then low. And I started noticing boobs.
I mean, I’d always noticed boobs, but overnight I was going out of my way to look at them—at school, at the shops, and at home on the pack’s desktop computer in the dining room.
Boobs were amazing. There were so many varieties. Different shapes, different sizes, different colours . . . big nipples, small nipples, brown ones, pink ones. I wanted to collect them all in my head, like trading cards. And it wasn’t only boobs. I became super interested in all aspects of girls’ bodies, and how very different they were from mine. I liked how they went in at the middle. I liked how their legs looked in skirts. I liked how soft their tummies could be.
When I discovered some girls had these dimples on their lower backs, that was game over for me.
I was twelve when I discovered masturbation. Oh my gods, the hours I’d wasted wanking. Bringing myself almost to the point of no return and then letting go . . . literally letting go of my dick until that feeling slid away, only to build myself back up again. I didn’t know it was called edging until I was much older.
Couldn’t wank in my room, though, because I shared it with my brother Zach, so I would go to the outcrop at the east end of the Howling Pines estate. The drop marked the boundary of our territory. The other side of the ravine belonged to the Rook pack, and the rocky valley in between the two perimeters was no-man’s-land.
Behind a rock, I’d hidden a magazine that Aaron Phillips had stolen from under his father’s mattress. Later, and long after the magazine had been turned to pulp by rain and other elements, I hid a bottle of lube there. Didn’t need tissues. I’d come over the edge of the outcrop into the ravine and let nature take care of the rest.
I was thirteen when Erin Anderson told me I was hot. Hot was definitely an upgrade on cute. I was already over six feet tall and towering over my classmates and most teachers. Aaron told me all the girls agreed with Erin, and I could probably fuck any of them if I wanted.
One time, Aaron’s dad was working the night shift and Aaron was home alone so I stayed over. We watched porn on the pay-per-view channels. That was the first time I ever saw anyone fuck.
“It looks fun,” he’d said. I’d agreed. My knots had popped. They were hard and heavy and uncomfortable in my boxers. That night, in Aaron’s bathroom, I learned that my knots would stay inflated for over half an hour after I’d wanked.
I was thirteen and a half when I kissed a girl for the first time. Zach threw his friend Kai a birthday party in our pack’s barn, and I snogged Erin on a dare. It was sloppy and wet, and our teeth clashed together like cymbals. I didn’t know what to do with my tongue. She had braces. Then I kissed Laura Garcia on another dare, and Jodie Holmes, and Elsie Gray, and Suzi White. I drank three beers after that and barfed in the ha-ha.
When I was fourteen, Ali Hunt took me into the polytunnels on her pack’s farm and showed me her boobs. She got me to hold my hands out in front of me and she lifted them to her chest. I came in my pants. I pretended I didn’t, but she asked to see my knots, so I let her feel them. We kissed until our faces were numb.
On my sixteenth birthday, I lost my virginity. Nancy Amos and I went to the cinema to watch the new Gryphonman movie and snuck out halfway through. I held her up in my arms and fucked her against the wall by the theatre’s dumpsters. Her skirt was bunched up around her middle, knickers shoved to one side, my shorts around my ankles. I came too quickly. She didn’t come at all. I wanted to make amends another time, but she wasn’t interested. Luckily for me, Nancy never told anyone what an inept lover I was.
Or maybe she did, but it didn’t seem to put others off. The girls in Lykos practically lined themselves up for me. And they were great, but limited in their numbers, and their adventurousness.
In our tiny werewolf high school, there were fewer than thirty students in my year group. Eleven of them were girls. I went through them pretty quickly, plus the girls in the years above me. There were no girls in Lykos who didn’t go to Lykos Academy.
I discovered early on I didn’t like the thought of being stuck with the same person. Nancy had the right idea—hit it and quit it.
Except for this one girl, Sam Dixon, who I fucked regularly. We had a sort of agreement—friends with benefits, I guessed, though we were never friends. We just met up occasionally, at her house, or mine, or the bathroom of Lykos’s only nightclub.
I learned everything I knew from and with Sam. How to make a girl come. Where the clit was. Where the g-spot was. How to give head. How to turn one of her orgasms into three or four. We were each other’s training dummies. The best part was that she never wanted anything more. Never asked me to be her boyfriend. Never asked me to meet her parents—even though I did, several times, on the landing outside her bedroom. Usually stark-bollock naked. She never asked me to take her to prom, or spoke about our “future,” or stopped me from fucking other girls. In fact, my first ever threesome was with Sam. The first two times with other girls, and the third time with another guy. I didn’t fuck him, or let him fuck me, but I watched him fuck Sam. It was much hotter than I’d expected it to be. And then he fucked her while she sucked me off.
We were young, and we were having a bloody good time. We always used condoms because Sam’s auntie was Lykos’s main GP, and it wasn’t worth the humiliation of getting an STI. No other reason.
After eighteen months of our “benefits without friends” arrangement, we began hanging out. We’d watch movies, or get drive-through burgers and fries, or smoke weed on Howling Pines grounds. I never took her to the ravine, though. That was my special place.
One time we lay in the bed of her truck and watched the sky for shooting stars.
I thought maybe, just maybe, we were becoming more than fuck buddies. But I wasn’t sure.
“Hey, Sam?” I turned to her.
Sam was beautiful. She was tall, and curvy, and had dark skin, with darker freckles sprinkled across her nose. She wore a lot of eyeliner and red lipstick and leather skirts. She’d stolen my leather jacket from when I was fifteen, and wore it almost every day. It didn’t fit me any more, so I didn’t care.
She’d turned to me, and placed a finger over my mouth to stop me speaking. “Mash, do you love me?”
I faltered. Considered her question. “I don’t think so,” I’d said, because it was the truth. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but it was important not to lie about these things. “But I feel like I could. Love you, that is.”
She sighed and rolled back towards the stars. “I was afraid of that.”
We were both quiet for a long time. I wanted to untangle all my thoughts, and at the same time, have them wiped from my brain with a chalkboard eraser.
“We’re gonna break up, aren’t we?” I asked.
“We can’t break up if we were never a couple.” She took my hand but kept her gaze trained on the stars. “I need to get out of this town. This realm. I need to meet other people besides werefolk. We have uni next year. I’m going to apply to Bordalis. I need to lose myself in a city. I need to know that if I make a mistake, it’s not going to be front page news for the rest of Lykos. Maybe you do too, Mash. I know you weren’t made to stay in this tiny town forever.”
I was, though.
The thought flitted through my head. I trapped it, like catching a fly between my fingertips, and crushed it. My birthright, my responsibilities, my burdens were a problem for future Mash.
I would follow Sam’s advice, I decided. Run to the city, though not Bordalis because even though cities were unfathomably huge, she would be there. Remy maybe. There would be plenty of other girls in Remy for me to sample. To help me recover from . . .
Wait, was this heartbreak?
Don’t be daft, Mash. Of course it’s not heartbreak.
She continued. “You’ll thank me when we’re thirty. You’ll look back at this moment and think, ‘Thank gods I’m not still with the girl I fell for at eighteen.’ ”
I knew she was right, so I said nothing. We continued to hold hands while staring into the night sky, and when I saw a shooting star, I made a wish.
Please, never let me fall in love.