Chapter 4
Chapter Four
During my brief foray into formal higher education, a year and a half of boredom and people giving my face funny looks on the city college campus nearest to my pack’s land, I’d taken a bunch of philosophy classes.
The logic class had been awesome, and if I’d had anyone to argue with these days, I’d still have kicked their asses. Ethics was kind of fun.
Metaphysics sucked, because unanswerable questions always led to depression, the eventual heat death of the universe, or increased confusion, not necessarily in that order.
It’d started snowing again by the time I’d limped to the shower that night, fat flakes covering any tracks he might’ve made as he came or went. And it kept snowing almost continuously in the days that followed.
It left me a lot of time for shitty unanswerable questions.
For example: Why had Rob stayed away for almost twenty years, when he had to have known my pack would’ve welcomed him back pretty much no matter what?
Why he’d gone in the first place had never been a mystery, although I’d never thought it a good enough reason to take off like that, let alone disappear completely.
He’d been adopted into the pack when an old friend and business associate of my grandfather’s had died, leaving his twelve-year-old nephew Rob without a guardian or a home.
If my grandpa had known what happened to Rob’s parents, he’d kept his lips zipped.
And at seventeen, Rob had decided it was time to find out for himself.
As angry as Grandpa Joe had been, and as stubborn and domineering as the old bastard could be in his roles as patriarch and pack leader, he’d never have turned him away if he came back.
Disobedience earned a punishment in our pack, but never at the expense of forgiveness.
Of course, that question paled in comparison to wondering why, if he’d meant to come back at all, he’d chosen to stalk me and then semi-anonymously tie me up, hold me down, and force himself on me until I came on his knot, as he’d predicted, so many fucking times I couldn’t even tell him how I felt about it.
Yeah. By the time I got to that part of my useless wondering, I usually had to wrap one of the straps around my wrist and use my other hand to fuck myself on that dildo until I cried.
The thought that Rob might be watching me, sliding through my magic undetected to spy on my pathetic self-indulgence and longing, only made me moan louder and fuck myself more deeply.
Maybe he’d know I wished it was him. That I’d always wished it was him.
On top of everything else, I’d had to send a sheepish email to the sex store to let them know my next delivery would be late, because these restraints were definitely used.
A third unanswerable question: Would he ever come back to use them again? Use me again? And a fourth, unless it was actually a fifth, and fuck it, I’d lost count I had so many gods-damned questions: Was he still watching me? Or had he disappeared again?
I tried going out in the woods, swathing myself in every bit of concealing and stealthy magic I could muster. Two raccoons paused in their exploration of my trash cans as I wafted past them, supposedly invisible to all mammalian senses. They stared right at me.
One of them bared his teeth and made a sound eerily akin to a laugh. The other chittered, shrugged, and casually pulled off the latch that was meant to be bear-proof.
Grinding my own teeth, I simply moved on. There was no winning here.
But other than the raccoons, the woods around my cabin didn’t have a lot of movement.
Everything had settled in to hibernate or just hide out from the cold.
A couple of birds, the shush of the wind.
No sign of any werewolves except for me.
Not a rustle, not a scent, not a flicker of magic from my wards.
A week after that night, I called my mom, chatted aimlessly for the requisite this-topic-is-totally-not-the-point ten minutes, and then asked her if anyone had ever heard anything about Rob.
“I just thought of him, you know, because I found a book he gave me when we were kids,” I said, possibly too casually. Damn it. “So I was wondering.”
“No,” she said, after a suspicious pause. “Never. Or maybe your grandpa has. I think he tried to find out where he went, and he’s probably kept his ear to the ground over the years. But it’s not like he’d tell anyone anything. Ever.”
A note of frustration there, born of a lifetime of dealing with her father’s habit of guarding every scrap of information like a state secret, and I made an agreeing noise, hoping something else would be forthcoming.
But she just sighed, said, “That boy was always troubled,” and changed the subject.
At least she hadn’t questioned me about my sudden interest, though I knew her mom instincts had to have been put on full alert. That might come back to bite me later.
Troubled. That was one way to put it. He was certainly troubling me.
How the hell had he gotten past my wards without my knowing?
Maybe they wouldn’t have stopped him if he didn’t want to hurt me, but they should’ve alerted me to his presence.
That troubled me more than anything. He didn’t have any magic of his own.
I knew that. It’d have been obvious long before he left us all those years ago.
Which meant he’d used someone else’s magic.
Spell bags bought from a shaman, probably.
But that gnawed at me, because I liked to think my magic would be more powerful than someone else’s.
Obviously not. I couldn’t deny the evidence. He’d gotten past my defenses, in more ways than one.
Christmas was only a week away. I’d be expected to go home for at least a few days, and if I didn’t stay a full week and do New Year’s with the family too, there would be Questions.
Usually I loved holiday visits with the pack, even though I loved getting home to my quiet solitude at the end of it at least as much.
Would he come back while I was away? Find me gone and never try again?
I couldn’t stand it. And I paced my cabin like a caged werewolf, or I shifted and ran through the snow on four paws, but I couldn’t outrun the panic and the confusion.
Or the phantom sensations of his hand on my mouth, his body over mine, his body in mine.
Plus all the memories I’d avoided for so long, the way I’d waited and waited for him to come back, so certain that he wouldn’t abandon me, not when he knew how much I cared about him.
How much I depended on him. My transition to high school had been easy, because while my sisters and brother mostly hung out with their own friends and treated me with the benign neglect of decent older siblings everywhere, Rob had treated me like a friend at school the same way he had at home, acting like he just assumed I’d be welcome anywhere he was.
And everyone accepted it. No one made fun of my face—at least not more than once.
And then he was gone. I had to walk into the first day of my sophomore year all by myself, with a big Rob-shaped emptiness hovering invisibly by my side.
His influence lingered, though, which made it even harder to forget him.
No one really bothered me throughout high school…
although being a werewolf with budding signs of shamanic magic probably helped.
Even the school’s supernatural teenagers had the sense to be wary of magic someone could consciously use to fuck with them.
At home, everything reminded me of him. His room in the big sprawling pack house, which had slowly been turned into a dumping ground for random furniture no one used, but where I’d still go and hide out, hoping to catch a whiff of his lingering scent.
The orchard, where we’d hung out for hours, either alone or with my siblings and a couple of cousins: play fighting in both our human and wolf forms, munching apples, sprawled in the grass reading, talking about nothing.
Holidays, when he’d used to sit next to me at the long, crowded table, bumping elbows and stealing my pie even though he had plenty of his own, blue eyes bright over his crooked, mischievous smile.
On the holidays our family didn’t celebrate with formal parties, like the solstices and equinoxes, all of us younger ones had usually gone out and run and howled at the moon, just for the hell of it.
It’d be the winter solstice in a couple of days, but I didn’t think I’d have the heart to run or howl or do much of anything.
Having Rob appear in my life like a stalkerish fever dream had thrown me into a state of frantic, useless misery, reliving the past and bewildered by the present and wondering what the fuck the future could possibly bring me, when I stayed here alone in my cabin…
but the thought of going somewhere else scared the shit out of me.
We’d occasionally had gifts on the solstice, too.
Mostly we did Christmas, but sometimes Grandpa Joe had given everyone something weird on December twenty-first, like one year he’d gotten each person in the pack one of those kind-of-fake certificates that made you the Lord of the Dance or whatever in some ten-square-foot area of Scotland.
I’d tacked mine up over the washing machine when I moved into the cabin.
If Rob lived here, he could put his over the dryer.
My chest hurt.
The moon, almost full, hung over the trees outside my living room window and cast a blue glare on the snow. The clouds had cleared off enough to see it, but they’d be back.
Unlike fucking Rob.
He probably wouldn’t want me again even if I gift-wrapped myself.
I’d been in the act of sulking into the kitchen to make another cup of tea that could go cold while I brooded, and I froze with one foot off the floor, halfway through a step.
If I gift-wrapped myself.
Maybe he hadn’t come back because he thought I’d be ready for him this time, prepared with magic that could neutralize whatever stupid cut-rate spell bags he’d bought for the occasion.
He hadn’t wanted me to be able to see his face or to acknowledge his identity.
(A tiny, gnawing, nagging part of me still doubted if it had been him at all, but I couldn’t give those thoughts room to grow, or I’d go mad. Madder.)
So what if I made sure his conditions would be met?
On my own terms, of course. I would be ready for him this time, but he wouldn’t know about that.
I’d let him know I’d be waiting. I’d get myself ready. And then maybe…
Well, maybe he’d get what he wanted. And maybe so would I.
I spent December twentieth preparing everything for the following night, a complicated process made more so by the need to look, from whatever his hypothetical vantage point might be, like I wasn’t doing anything unusual.
He’d somehow acquired magic that allowed him to get through my wards.
Fine, that rankled, but stopping him from doing so again would be counterproductive, so I didn’t need to worry about it. Much.
More relevantly, he’d resisted my attempts to use my magic on him directly when he’d first come into my bedroom. There had to be a way around that. Even more relevantly, he’d kept me completely pinned and immobile and at his mercy, bound by the restraints I myself had made and enchanted, and…
I had to take a little break from setting up my spellwork. If he was watching, he got a good show. Fucker.
By the time dusk settled over my cabin and the woods around it on the twenty-first, I’d gotten everything ready—subtly enough, I thought, that Rob wouldn’t know about my little surprise until it was too late.
Then came the really embarrassing part. Dry-mouthed and unable to make eye contact with anywhere in the woods where he might be lurking, which left me flicking my gaze awkwardly around the treetops, I stood on the front porch and cleared my throat.
“I’m going to tie myself to my bed,” I announced to the driveway, the trees, and presumably a group of grinning, derisive raccoons.
Their possible mockery honestly bothered me more than Rob’s.
Clearly, I’d spent a little too long out here alone.
“I’ll blindfold and gag myself too. I’ll be ready in an hour, okay? ”
Ringing silence followed the fading of that last, shaky word. Gods, I was such a fucking idiot. Asking him if it was okay for me to tie myself up for him? Could I be any lamer?
But I’d set my plan in motion, and now I had to follow through, lame or not.
Five minutes before the time I’d set, I’d gotten myself situated: on my back on my bed, spread-eagled and bound, my restraints wrapping themselves from ankle to wrist and back and catching on to the bed frame.
Since blindfolds and gags weren’t my usual fare as a craftsman, I’d had to improvise.
Luckily, having a plethora of distant cousins who never knew what to get as a Christmas gift for a disfigured, solitary shaman who made magical sex toys for a living had left me with a wide selection of scarves.
And then I waited, the chilly air prickling on all my exposed skin, the gag starting to get wet and press on my tongue, the sensation of being blind and bound and silent far more disturbing than I’d expected. After all, this was my show.
It didn’t matter to the part of my brain that logic couldn’t control.
As I’d been doing all the time for the last twenty years, if I’d been honest… I waited.