Chapter 7
Simon
I can’t blame Veronica for all of this. It’s a mess I made, after all. I can, however, blame her for making Lydia’s life miserable, and cancelling the search parties as soon as she did and not using her knowledge of what likely happened to me to help find me.
Before I get some petty revenge on Veronica, I still have to convince Lydia that this is all a good idea. She is not happy at all, and I suppose I do not blame her.
She frowns at me.
“Don’t you think your friends and loved ones will be relieved to know you’re not dead? Shouldn’t you reach out to your family and stuff, not go back to work?”
“They’ll find out today, don’t worry. The person who most deserves to know I am alive already does,” I say. I want to cup her face in my hands and kiss her perfect nose, but I am aware I have the stench of a failed wild thing on me. I need a bath.
“Take me to my place,” I say. “I’ll get cleaned up, and then we will go into work.”
“Won’t your parents be worried? Shouldn’t we see them?”
My parents sent me to boarding school when I was five and have checked in periodically since then, right up until they divorced and my mother married her therapist and my father took up a position in the government that leaves him working away from home a lot in ‘economic’ positions. They probably don’t know I am missing.
“I will let them know,” I say, wanting to reassure her. “But right now, I need to get cleaned up, and dressed, and…”
“You’re right,” she says. “This is your mysterious disappearance. You should get to handle it the way you want.”
There’s almost an eye roll as she says it. She manages to avoid that particular mode of disrespect, but her tone is still absolutely dripping with sarcasm.
She’s getting her attitude back, and I like it, because it means she’s feeling better.
I know I’ve put her through hell. I know I owe her a debt I can’t ever repay because this beautiful woman, who had every reason to run like hell the second I disappeared, came and waited for me.
She stayed in place while everyone else gave up.
My own family wasn’t in the parking lot. But she was.
I am going to marry Lydia. I am going to make her my wife, and we are going to raise a family because I want a life with her.
Now, how to tell her that the company essentially selected her as an experimental broodmare?
And that I was part of it, willing to sleep with her while under the effect of my experimental substances to see what might emerge from her loins?
That’s going to be a difficult conversation best had another time.
“You should rest,” she says. “Actually, you should see a doctor.”
“What doctor is going to be able to read the lab results from having recently turned into a wolf due to gene experimentation and give me useful feedback?” I pose the question in as little of a condescending way as possible, but still somehow feel I sound like a complete prick.
“True,” she frowns. “But you might need minerals or something.”
“I will look into it,” I say gently. “Can we stop at the nearest fast food place?”
“Yes,” she says. “Definitely.”
* * *
“It’s too early for burgers.” An understandably disinterested voice crackles through a speaker that has probably never worked, not even when it was first installed.
Most of these places have touch screen ordering now.
You don’t get to talk to a sleep-deprived college student who is probably still drunk from last night.
This is an experience that is disappearing from the cultural experience.
I’m going to miss it when it is entirely gone.
Suddenly all human interactions seem precious.
The fact that we can talk is amazing and beautiful and the fact that we can do it at distance makes my eyes want to well up with tears. I blink them back because wolves don’t cry in the drive-through.
“I really want a burger,” I say. “How long until you’re doing burgers?”
“9.30,” the bored voice says.
“Let’s get some egg muffins and wait,” Lydia suggests, because she is a diplomatic angel.
We do that once, then twice. Each time we go back through the same window and get served by the same guy.
I delight in the fact that the young man at the window looks exactly like I expect him to. He looks the way I looked when I was his age. He looks like he doesn’t care about anything. Lucky little bastard. I care about a great deal.
“Are you okay?” Lydia interjects the question as I muse. “You keep grinning at the kid in the window and I think he’s starting to get a little freaked out by it all.”
“Yes.” I smile at her. “I’ve never been more okay. We are lucky to be human.”
She smiles back at me, though her expression isn’t pure joy like mine. She thinks I’ve been very silly, and she’s right about that. My experimentations have been reckless and could have gotten me killed. But they didn’t, and that’s the important thing.
“Burgers!” I declare at 9:31 a.m. “I would like one of every burger you have, please.”
Lydia looks on with an amused sort of slow horror as the rural chain restaurant creaks out five different kinds of burger, each one more fatty, salty, and delicious than the last. The processed cheese, the tangy pickles, the onions that aren’t cooked well enough, the bun half-toasted in some places and basically plain bread in others. It’s all amazing to me.
I give her the plain small cheeseburger, and I eat the rest of them. I am stuffed by the time I am done, but in a satisfied way that leaves me feeling sleepy.
Lydia drives me home without complaining about the fact I’ve filled her cute little car with wrappers. She seems very calm about all of this, relieved perhaps that I am safe. I didn’t think she’d care so much about me, I really didn’t.
“What did I do to deserve your loyalty?”
I murmur the question while half-asleep.
I don’t hear her response, if there is one.
I wake up as we get to my place.
“Are you sure you don’t want to call someone?”
“No. Calling people would let them know,” I say, leaping from the car barefoot and in my scratchy lab coat.
It takes all my self-control not to rip it off and run through the lobby naked, but humanity and shame are starting to assert themselves a little more and I realize that if I do that there will be gossip.
So I walk through the place with as much dignity as I can muster. The man at the door nods to me on my way in. He knows my face, but apparently not the fact that I am missing. Interesting.
Lydia comes with me, of course.
We go inside my place; I get cleaned up and dressed. The suits I’ve always worn really feel almost like real suits now, heavy and battle ready. I did like not having to wear clothes. Everything else was incredibly difficult, though.
Being stuck in the form was a… mistake. I will have to do some work on that and try to understand why it happened.
“You look almost normal,” she says when I appear back in the living room, dressed all the way to socks and shoes. The shoes are particularly odd. I still have the memory of feeling grit and stone beneath my feet. Socks, then rubber. We do things very oddly.
“Thank you, a very high compliment,” I say while fighting the sensory issues that threaten to overwhelm me.
She, I notice now, looks tired and rumpled. She was wearing athletic wear to look for me: legging, sneakers, and a hoodie. It’s pink. It’s cute. She’s cute. I like her hair in a ponytail. I like her. A lot.
“Would you like to go to your place before we go to work? Or I can drop you there and you can get some well-earned rest.”
She scrunches her face up. “I want to see what’s going to happen.”
“Of course you do,” I laugh. “Let’s go.”
“Okay, but I am driving my car. You can drive yours. Then I’ll leave mine ay my place, and you can drive me to work because I’m tired.”
I debate sending her to bed, but I know she won’t go, and though I could make her, perhaps even spank her cute little ass for refusing, I am in the mood to indulge her.
So we go to her place, and she gets to have a shower and put some clean clothes on. The process of becoming human all over again feels strange, but necessary.
When she emerges, pink and fresh, wearing the librarian-like attire she likes to work in, I feel the separation between us again. In the woods, there was an equality. I was a man. She was a woman. But the power of the human hierarchy is reasserting itself now.
The suit makes me a different kind of animal. And the cardigan hides what she is. It tames her and makes the burning, ferocious loyalty seem indistinguishable from bland compliance.
“You look very pretty,” I tell her. That simple statement covers so much deeper admiration, but now isn’t the time for grand declarations. I have to go and tell everybody I’m not dead.
She smiles at me, and her face lights up with such sweetness I feel another surge of guilt. She deserves so much better. She has always deserved so much better.
“Shall we go announce my lack of death?”
“Yes,” she says. “But I think the police and…”
“Everyone who knows is going to know, sweetheart. Don’t worry.”
“Last time you told me not to worry, you ended up stuck as a wolf in a forest,” she says.
My palm tingles with the urge to spank her again. Asserting a little bit of dominance would do us both a bit of good, I think. She likely lost a little bit of respect for me when I ended up stuck, as she put it. This suit is probably a very good thing.
“Lydia,” I say, lowering my tone slightly. “I can’t have you speaking to me that way.”
She blushes immediately, knowing she has stepped over the line.
“Sorry,” she says. “It’s just…”
I step forward and put my hand under her chin to tilt her face up toward me.
“It’s just what?”
I see her eyes flicker for a moment as she tries to decide whether to say what she so desperately wants to say.
“It’s just you did end up stuck… as a wolf… so…”
I smirk a little. “Do you want to test me right now, Lydia?”
I see her lips quirk up a little.