12. Fur-ever Young
Fur-ever Young
Fourteen Years Earlier
Mash
“Happy birthday,” Cian said to me, the moment I stepped foot into the living room of our second-year halls. It was our first week there and moving boxes still littered the communal spaces.
This year we’d agreed to stay in a small two-bed townhouse in the suburbs of Remy. It was an hour commute to uni, but they’d turfed us out of our freshers’ apartment, and we couldn’t afford to rent something closer to the centre.
Well, I couldn’t. Cian said he’d pay my half of the bills, but I would feel like I owed him too much. And I didn’t want that hanging over our friendship.
The house was a typical two-up, two-down type, with a galley kitchen and a living slash dining room separated by a big brick arch. It was tiny, yes, but already loads bigger than what we’d had last year. It smelled like onions and garlic and some kind of spices and meat. Further sniffing told me the meat was beef. My mouth watered. Cian had been cooking.
“You remembered?” I said.
“How the fuck was I gonna forget? It’s my birthday tomorrow, and you’ve been nagging me for weeks via text asking what I wanted to do.”
“What are you cooking?” I asked. I chucked my bag into the corner of the micro-porch and followed my nose to the scents. My natural canine instincts were kicking in and I fought the drool threatening to stream down my chin.
“Steak, hassleback potatoes, and creamy cabbage and leek . . . stuff. It’ll be another ten minutes. You want some wine?”
“Sure,” I said, letting Ci pour me a glass of red. He liked to drink wine with dinner—probably something he’d learned from his parents. My pack was never that fancy. We drank juice from the orchards’ fruits with our evening meals, and if you were over a certain age or the grownups weren’t looking, moonshine or cider.
Without being asked, I laid the table, then sat at the head while Cian busied around the oven, stirring pots and sipping wine and wiggling his butt as he danced to his tunes. This was how it’d been every Sunday last year. We’d fallen into a habit. Cian cooked—he loved cooking and was great at it—and I laid the table and cleared up afterwards. My birthday wasn’t on a Sunday, but the tradition still followed.
I’d already spoken to my pack earlier and had opened my presents from them—clothes and special chocolates because werewolves couldn’t eat regular chocolate. It gave us the shits. My mam had also sent me the pack’s birthday crown, made from a stretchy gold fabric and padded with whatever it was padded with to make it stand up straight. It had a sparkling C, for Cassidy, glued to the front. Everyone wore the crown on their birthday, even Alpha. Nobody questioned it.
A note from Mam said to make sure I posted it back to her by the twelfth of October for Zach’s birthday.
My head was now too big to fit the crown without resorting to tearing it, so I balanced it around my ears. Ci snapped a photo with his phone and texted it to me so I could forward to Mam.
At the beginning of the week, he’d asked me if we wanted to go out to celebrate. He’d said his parents always booked a table at this place in Remy, The Wild Phoenix, whenever they visited. It was one hundred and sixty silvers per head, wine not included, but it was six courses and the chef was Demeter starred. He’d said after dinner we could go to Abysm, the nightclub I worked at last year.
But I had told him I’d rather he cooked. It was our first week back at uni, and our first time in our new student accommodation, and I’d rather we settled ourselves in. Plus, food always tasted better when it had been made with love. And Cian loved me. Though he never told me he did, but I knew.
I told him I loved him all the time.
“Hey, dude?” I’d say.
“Yeah?” he’d say back.
“Love you, man.”
He’d roll his eyes. “I know you do.”
“I said love you, man. Don’t you love me?”
“Oh, fuck off,” he’d reply, sometimes accompanying it by waving a very particular finger.
Cian plated up my birthday steak and took the seat to my right. I dove straight in. No pretence, no pussyfooting around with mumbled small talk. We had all the time in the world for small talk.
An almost indecent moan left my throat. No one, not even my nana, cooked meat the way Ci did.
“Shit. Shit. Shiiiit . This is fucking delicious,” I whined again. “It’s so good my knots are popping.”
“I didn’t need to know that.” He grimaced, but a smirk tugged at the corners of his lips. “Oh, I made you a cake too. It’s not fancy, it’s just kiwi and—”
“Ungh, I love kiwi.”
The smile on Cian’s face grew wider.
“What shall we do for your birthday tomorrow?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t like fuss.”
This was a lie, though I chose not to comment on it. Cian secretly loved fuss. Everybody loved fuss. Just because he hadn’t had a great deal of fuss in his life, didn’t mean he had to pretend he hated it.
I was going to make such a fuss of him.
“I was thinking I might get another tattoo tomorrow,” he said.
“Ooh, we should get matching tattoos!”
Over the past year, Cian had been visiting this tattoo artist in Remy approximately once every other month. At first I’d figured it was a rebellion against his prim and snobbish folks, but after he returned from the summer holidays with almost a full sleeve on his left arm, I’d wondered if he was addicted. Nothing wrong with that.
We all had our vices. Mine was women. And booze. And party drugs. And eating myself into a coma. Ci’s was driving a needle rapidly into his flesh and flooding it with permanent dye. Black dye only, though. He had “a look” to maintain. Mostly an old-school sailor-type look—mermaids, ships, pin-up girls, bottles of rum, swallows. But everything was one hundred percent devoid of colour. Even the roses, which he seemed to have decorating the edges of every tattoo like frames, were black. It suited him with his rolled-up sleeves and trouser hems, his lace-up construction boots, and his teeny weeny beanie.
“Get matching tattoos?” he repeated back to me like he hadn’t heard every word clear as day.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You’re afraid of needles.”
“Am not.” I was.
“And you’re such a wimp with pain.”
“No, I’m not,” I said, indignant, but lying. I was a fucking baby when it came to any kind of pain or illness. The last time I had a cold, I made Ci cook me soup and finger comb my hair. Luckily for both of us, werewolf immune systems dealt with most illnesses pretty swiftly.
“Fine, whatever,” he relented. “Not as if you’ll go through with it anyway. What should we get?”
I punched the air in victory. My birthday crown wobbled. “Dunno. Not any of your bad-boy tattoos. I don’t wanna be in your bad-boy-tattoo club. Something more us. Something wolfy.”
He laughed, held his left arm up to look at the ink. “Bad boy,” he repeated, shaking his head a little. “They’re not bad boy, they’re traditional.” But then he realised I was messing with him and rolled his eyes. “Anyway, we can’t have bad-boy tattoos, can we?” His eyes flashed with danger, and I regretted every single word. “You’re too much of a good boy. Aren’t you, Mash Cassidy?”
“No. No, you promised.” I screwed up my face, gripped my fork like an iron vice, and poured every ounce of willpower I could muster into overriding my innate canine instincts.
“Are you a good boy, Mash?”
“No, stop it.” But as much as I concentrated, I couldn’t force my body to obey me.
“Are you . . . a very good boy?”
“Fuck you! Fuck you!” I whined, as my tail began thump, thump, thumping against the chair leg.
We were three months into our first year when Cian discovered the power behind the words “good boy.” He’d brought a guy back to our halls—George, I think his name was, but there were a couple of Georges. Ci had been frying bacon in the morning, and the smell dragged me out of my hangover-fuelled pit of self-shame.
“You’re Ci’s werewolf roommate?” George had said. George was human. “He talks about you a lot.”
I was wearing nothing but a pair of Calvin K9 boxers, and my tail poked out the slit in the back. I saw his eyes sweep over my body. “Yeah, I’m Mash. You alright?”
“Is it true that if you tell a werewolf they’re a good boy or girl, their tail will wag?”
I’d frozen in horror. Cian turned his attention from the hob to look at me.
“No!” I said. But I’d said it too quickly, and I knew with undying certainty neither of them believed me. “Fuck,” I huffed.
Cian stopped his grin from forming all the way and turned back to the breakfast pan. “I promise not to call you, Mash Cassidy, a good boy in the future.” I heard the smile still in his voice.
“Go fuck yourself, Ci,” I’d replied, as my tail flicked itself upright over my back, and started swishing left and right. I understood then why some werefolk chose to tuck their tails.
George sucked his teeth like the smug little shit he was.
Later, after George had gone, Cian sat next to me on the sofa. “Sorry about earlier. I honestly had no idea.”
I’d laid my head in his lap so he could scratch behind my ears. Felt like decent compensation for the humiliation.
“You are a good boy, though,” he’d said.
I did nothing to stop my tail slapping the leather couch cushions, and I decided that outside of my pack, Ci and only Ci could call me a good boy.
Cian had mostly kept his promise, only wielding the mighty power of “good boy” if he knew I needed cheering up. Like when I didn’t get the grade I’d been hoping for on my first major assignment. Or when we went to the Witching Flour to buy elvish doughnuts but they’d sold out. Sometimes, like now, he also busted it out when the occasion presented itself so readily.
I couldn’t blame him for jumping on it. I’d have done the same to him if our roles were reversed.
“Who’s a good boy? Is it you?” Ci cooed.
My tail bypassed softly thumping the chair leg, and began a percussive—and slightly painful—rhythm against it.
I tried to stop it, but it was futile. Like trying to stop yourself from laughing when someone was tickling you. It hurt, an ungodly amount, but you couldn’t help but laugh.
“Okay, sorry, I’ll shut up now,” he said.
My tail slowed its thudding, and I straightened my crown again.
After dinner, we watched my favourite movie, Clawless, ate Cian’s kiwi and pineapple cake, and got high on our tiny three-metre-by-three-metre patio garden.
“Happy birthday, Bangers,” I whispered, walking into his room the next morning. I let Ci take the bigger bedroom at the front of the house for a number of reasons. One, I was a nice guy. Two, he spent more time at home doing coursework or whatever than I did. Three, he had more stuff than me. He had a proper desk and a chair and loads of books and artwork. I had the bed the house came with and a few bags-for-life stuffed with my clothes. That was all I needed. And four, I thought if I had the smaller room, it would be easier to keep tidy.
This had proved a shambolic lie, and it was still only the first week. We’d been in the house exactly seven days so far.
I eased the shutters open on Ci’s blind. “Wakey, wakey, birthday boy. Time to put your birthday crown on and open your birthday pressies.”
He was wearing only his pants, laying on his back, the sheets twisted around his pale legs. One partially tattooed arm stretched over his head, and his other even-more-partially tattooed arm lay over his stomach. His chest was free of ink, but I wondered how long it’d be before that got shaded in as well.
He groaned, flopped onto his stomach. “What time is it?” The words were muffled by his pillow.
“I dunno, like, ten.” I sat on his mattress. Shunted him to the left, making room for myself. “I got you presents.”
“You bought me presents?” He rolled back towards me and pushed himself into a seated position. At the same time, he bundled the sheets into his lap. He stretched as he did it, affecting casualness, but really he was hiding his morning wood and knot.
Cian had a single knot which, by the shape the silhouette made in his boxers, sat all the way round the base of his cock. It was different to my double knot, which grew either side at the bottom of my shaft—like a dog’s cheeks stretched over two tennis balls.
It was different, and that was why I was curious. No other reason.
I handed him the gifts. I’d used the same paper my presents had been wrapped in. Reduce, reuse, recycle, yada yada.
“I didn’t get you anything,” he said, peeling back the paw-print wrap on the first gift. He tore it away. “Oh.”
“Good oh, or bad oh?”
It was a book. A cookbook, actually. Borderlands Fusion: Recipes from Across the Eight and a Half Kingdoms. It was glossy and heavy and expensive. I’d chosen that one specifically because the chef slash author in the picture on the plastic flap looked just like Cian. Dark hair, pale white skin, glasses, hipster beanie, stupid little moustache—which Ci didn’t have, but no doubt he’d be getting ideas.
He flipped through the pages, sniffing them like a weirdo, and landed on the title page near the front. I had scribbled in the book.
Happy Birthday Bangers, love from Mash and Mash’s tummy.
“Good oh,” he said. “It’s actually . . . really thoughtful, thank you.”
“Here’s your other gift.” I handed him the last parcel, and he unwrapped it.
“Oh,” he said again, and I knew this time it was a bad one. I started laughing.
It was a chef’s apron. Black, with an embroidered design on the front—a white ‘I’, a red heart, and a cockerel.
“I love cock!” I clarified. “Get it? Because you’re gay.”
“Thank you. I’m certain I would not have been able to decipher that one on my own,” he deadpanned.
“I’m gonna go make you breakfast.” I jumped off his bed, left his room, and shut the door behind myself in case he wanted to rid himself of his morning wood and knot sitch.
Breakfast was croissants from the bakery by the U-Rail station and orange juice and nice coffee. I didn’t cook. I wasn’t good at it. Not like Ci.
He came downstairs forty-five minutes later after what was probably the most languid wank of the century.
“I got you a gift,” he said. He bit his bottom lip, bounced on the balls of his feet, and then slapped a piece of paper onto the kitchen table next to me.
On it, he had drawn a clawed paw print, with roses curving in a horseshoe shape around the bottom. In the centre of the paw print were the letters GBC.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That’s the design for our tattoo.”
“What’s GBC?”
He laughed. “Well, since you don’t want to be in my bad-boys club. I thought we’d start a new one of our own. GBC. It stands for Good Boys Club.”