8
Shawn
I’m not eavesdropping. I’m really not.
The thing is, you can’t not eavesdrop in this house. At least, none of the wolves can avoid it. It wouldn’t matter if I was up in the attic, I’d still hear every word exchanged between my mother and my ex-wife.
Despite everything that went down the other day, Elise is still going to work for my mother and cater my brother’s wedding, it seems. And despite all the growling and snapping at each other we did, when I circled back to grab my things and figure out how to get to Laura’s apartment, my mom had come downstairs and handed me a folded set of sheets and a pillow with a glance towards the living room couch. It wasn’t an olive branch, but a silent offer to keep the peace until after the wedding.
For the first hour or so of Elise’s car being parked in our driveway, I’ve done a really great job of keeping my promise that I would stay away.
Leaning in the hallway near the kitchen isn’t the most subtle of choices for not-eavesdropping, but it’s the only one where I can catch Elise’s expressions, reflected in the stainless-steel refrigerator door. She’s got her arms crossed around herself, and she shifts her weight every so often, her face dipping in and out of view.
“You can tell me what the matter is. I’d sooner put him up in a hotel then make you uncomfortable,” my mom is saying, in a tone gentler than anything I’ve ever heard from her before.
I nearly scoff out loud. Of course that would be the answer. It’s not like I’m family or anything.
Elise shifts back on her heel, putting just a few more inches between her and Deanna, her reflection coming back into view. I can see the uneasy tension in her cheek. “I don’t really want to get into it, but that’s not necessary.”
“Are you sure? He doesn’t have to be here.”
“It’s fine, really. I’m sorry I had a little freak out, but I would just really like to get back to work and pretend it didn’t happen.”
Even without seeing it, I can imagine the tightness in my mother’s jaw. The number of times I’d tried to place a boundary and watched my mother clasp her hands and nod like she was agreeing to respect it. I can’t imagine how long this is going to last.
I should have come up with a cover story with Elise. My family is all going to want to know. And they’re all just going to keep asking until one of them pries the answer out of us.
It’s strange. I never would have thought I’d see this come to pass. Elise and my mom talking like they’re close. Unthinkable.
The urge to say “I told you so” is almost overwhelming. Of course she’d like Elise.
I knew that from the moment I met her. She’s smart and organized and driven, she’s had a successful small business since college. But I have to keep that to myself, at least until the wedding is over. Elise wouldn’t take it well, and I already feel bad that I’ve disrupted her life. If only it were as easy as backing away and letting things resume as normal, but I guess she wouldn’t want to stay here now that she knows who she’s working for.
That particular wonderful moment, Elise chooses to appear, ducking out of the kitchen to glare at me for a change. It does seem like there always needs to be someone on duty for that.
Since when can’t I go anywhere without running into her? I avoided her marvelously for the last few years.
Her scent is different today. There’s less anger. When our eyes meet, I see only her annoyance, but I can taste the warmth of her casual mood on the air. Interesting.
She’s absolutely swallowed up by a huge yellow sweater, worn-in jeans outlining the shape of her thighs. I’ve had this dream before, where she’s close enough that I could just dig my hands into the softness of her thighs.
After a few seconds of just drinking the image of her in, I realize I’ve started just leaning on the doorframe for support.
“Shawn,” she snaps, her voice like a whip.
The hypnosis her legs have on me breaks. I look up and jam my hands in my pockets, and nod at her. “I was just leaving.”
Yeah, I should go, but it’s just so easy to get under her skin. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it.
She nods, and I’m working on leaving in any direction when Aiden thunders down the stairs, stopping the moment he sees us.
“Hey, E,” Aiden chirps, looking a little too obviously excited that he has front-row, standing room only tickets to this moment. “Still on wedding prep duty?”
She shrugs, and says, “Yeah, I need someone to lick the beaters when I’m done with the third cake recipe.”
“Yeah, sure, I’ll lick anything you tell me to.”
The first thought falls out of my mouth before I can really process it, but as soon as I hear it, I close my eyes and immediately wish I was anywhere else, anyone else, even.
Good god, man. Get a grip.
Aiden’s face looks somewhere between horrified that he had to hear me say that, and a little bit like I just handed him a bucket of popcorn for the show.
“I will see myself out.” I sigh, turning on my heel. I make it down the hallway to the foyer before I hear Aiden let out the snicker he was clearly holding onto.
“Wow. That was . . . wow. Yikes, dude,” he says after he fails to find the adjective he wants.
“Yikes doesn’t even cover half of it,” she sighs as I head out the front door. “Also, not telling you.”
“Come on! You too? I mean, don’t feel obligated to hold back just because he’s my brother. Feel free to bitch about him.”
“Really, I’d like to keep it private,” she says, and the moment I’m out the door, I’m digging through my backpack in search of anything else I can occupy myself with to avoid hearing them.
Work will have to do.
I move into the living room, sink into one of the armchairs and open my laptop up on my knees. Freelance audio editing, in addition to being a career path my dad would have hated, has really flexible hours, which is great when you need to travel.
Noise-canceling headphones help cut Elise and Aiden’s voices out a little, but I can only turn the sound on the audio tracks up so high before it hurts, and I can replay the same clip only so many times before it starts losing meaning, and the ADR work I’m doing feels off.
Staring at the much-smaller screen in the dark has been getting to me. Still haven’t adjusted to having one screen instead of three to spread different programs and folders out across.
Not quite sure why it’s such a manual process when it’s called Automatic Dialogue Replacement. My attention easily drifts from the lines the actress reads in every time I have to hunt for a different window to find the right file. Even when they stop talking in the kitchen, every sound Elise makes finds its way to me. The way she sighs, or her footsteps, the way she drums her fingers on the countertop when she’s thinking.
It’s so familiar it aches, carving out the spaces in me that she used to inhabit.
The end of us was . . . quick. I’d never had to mentally put her on a do not touch list. Hands to yourself, a refrain that has been ringing in my ears since I was a kid. Don’t touch the museum exhibits, don’t pick up strange cats, and now, don’t grab your ex-wife’s ass. Tempting as it is.
No, I can do this. We’ve been divorced eight years, and I haven’t even once drunk dialed her or emailed her telling her she still haunts my dreams sometimes.
Eventually, I give up on trying to get work done and close the laptop. It’s dark, and Elise’s car is gone from the driveway, but the smell of her skin lingers in the house.
I head outside without even putting shoes on. In the woods, I discard my clothes and shift into my wolf form. I run so that I don’t have to think.
For a solid half of the month, between the last quarter moon and the first, my wolf has almost no power over me. But every night after the first quarter, as the moon waxes, its influence grows until I can’t contain it, and the transformation reaches its peak.
Between drinking aconite-infused liquor and exhausting myself, I usually can calm the fervor of it some.
Shifting has felt different lately. It’s more frantic, less controlled than it used to be. Probably why I got so worried when I thought the pack had started going feral. Maybe it’s just a part of getting older and I’ve been concerned over nothing.
It’s getting to be morning by the time my mind finally clears as my wolf recedes.
The sky is a moody teal, the moon a pale orange against it. The woods and the grassy hills are a near-black outline cutting through the sky, and the house nestles into all of it almost invisibly. Only the scattered rectangles of yellow light spilling out from the windows carve its presence in the hillside, and the brewery further down the hill. I get dressed in yesterday’s clothes when I find them, only partly damp from the morning dew.
It’s ass-crack of dawn early, but Logan’s already there when I slip through the back door, his keys and coat sitting on the counter nearby.
He’s in Dad’s old office when I find him, looking less haggard by tonight’s quarter moon than I feel. Then again, he probably spent the night locked in the cellar under the brewery.
The brewery has a cellar; yes, it is creepy. I didn’t go down there often, even when I did live here. It’s the safest option, those rooms being specifically built to contain us at our worst.
Logan glances up at me, frowning instinctually the moment he sees me standing in his doorway. His long, dark hair is reminiscent of our mother’s, especially with the cold, detached air he holds himself with. If he has an issue with me running the hills instead of staying locked in all night, he doesn’t say anything about it off the bat.
We haven’t taken the time to catch up since I showed up, and by the less than enthusiastic looks he’s been giving me, I don’t really think he wants to. He’s always taken our parents’ side on the whole marrying a human thing.
I’ll keep this brief, then.
“I’m running out of aconite buds,” I tell him instead of a greeting.
“You should have stocked up before you came here,” he sighs, nonetheless pushing back from Dad’s big desk. Logan’s things are lined across the top, including a number of wedding well-wishes cards, likely from other wolf families our parents used to attend church with.
The family photos where he and I were barely more than toddlers sitting on our parents’ laps, the ones that used to sit on Dad’s desk, are up on the fireplace mantle facing across from him, alongside an urn.
Can’t say I’m too bothered by our dad not being here. I finished mourning whatever respect I had for him a long time ago. What did it matter that he was actually dead now?
I scoop up a ratty, old baseball cap sitting beside it, the one he wore whenever he went outside, alongside a thick smear of sunscreen on his nose. The hat smells more of dust than sweat and grass now. I turn it inside out and hang it on the urn’s lid, just because I know it would irritate him if his ghost is watching from heaven. I don’t think he deserved to get in, but I’m sure he could have blustered his way in there.
I turn my attention back to Logan as he pushes a framed photo of the brewery some forty years ago on its hinge to reveal one of those little wall safes. His code’s changed since I last was here, I note as he punches it in.
“I did,” I insist. “I’ve just been running through my supply faster than I thought I would.”
My little trick with them hasn’t been working so well these last couple nights. Maybe it’s the stress of all the recent drama with my family and Elise that has my wolf riled up and restless. It’s only going to get worse the closer it gets to the full moon.
The safe beeps and he pulls a liquor bottle with a minimal label out. It’s sealed with dark-red wax, the Aconite Ales brand stamped into the glass.
“Don’t drink it all at once.”
Dropping a couple petals into any wine is good for a quick fix, to calm the wolf and put it to sleep, but my dad’s side of the family has been brewing a much more potent cocktail for at least a century. While Aconite Ales brews plenty of blends of floral meads for human consumption, we’ve always had a special reserve for our extended family, and a few neighboring wolf packs.
“Y’know, I am careful about some things,” I reply, because I can’t not rise to it. “Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have to be if you didn’t schedule your nuptials for the full moon. Hell of an idea.”
“It is traditional,” he says plainly, putting the bottle in my hand and turning away.
It would be, to allow for a proper mating. Werewolf society could be positively medieval with the way arrangements were made between different families. But I suppose the way werewolf weddings end, expecting the newlywed couple to run off into the woods together to mate as wolves, tie a different knot and mark each other with a bite, isn’t too different from tying a bunch of cans to the back of the car for a human couple leaving for their honeymoon.
“You should use the shower before Aiden wastes the rest of the hot water,” he says as he gets back to his desk, and that’s as close to a heartfelt sentiment as I’ll get out of him. “Some of your old clothes are down there too.”
Aw, he does care.
A hot shower is the closest thing to a balm I can manage, short of a barrel of IcyHot.
My muscles burn from shifting back to my human form. It’s too much like the all-over body ache I get every time I think I should sign up for a 5K. It wasn’t as bad when I was younger, but now my body has a harder time going from the exertion in my wolf form. My knees fucking crack in the morning too. Supernatural abilities notwithstanding, everything gets harder with age.
Partly an effect of the aconite, my shift back is slower, achingly drawn out across my morning. When I peel off yesterday’s dirty clothes for a shower in the brewery’s basement, it’s clear the hair stays just a little too thick on my arms and chest, nails like claws, the arches of my feet lingering as the bones figure out where they’re supposed to go.
And the uh . . . wolf dick.
I hadn’t really noticed that when I got dressed in the woods before.
It’s thicker and longer than my human counterpart’s, with distinctive veining. I’m sure I had the thought in my early twenties that it’d be great if I could keep the wolf dick around while human. Younger me definitely thought no one would notice anything other than its girth and length and that it would just be abstractly better for my dating game.
I’ve never had my wolf dick get hard though, now that I think about it. The sensation is a little different, radiating the need to be touched up my veins.
The entirety of the sex talk I got from my dad was that masturbation was a sin. I still cringe remembering him saying that the point of the knot was to never waste a drop of semen. Not that I really wanted more of that conversation with him—I wasn’t about to explain how many times I wiped the history of “creampie” searches from our family computer history.
The haze of my transformation clouds whatever reason I was aroused in my wolf form. It’s not uncommon that I don’t fully remember what happens when I shift. What happens is often more instincts than conscious thought, and they’re harder to recall.
I’ve never jerked off in wolf form before. Mostly because of the claws.
There’s something extra-sensitive about my wolf cock that makes me audibly hiss and groan when I start to stroke my hard length. I’m thankful for how loud the water is in here. The kind of pleasure I’m feeling just getting started would be enough to make me come in moments normally.
I continue stroking, sure that I won’t last long. But it keeps going, like I’m not putting enough effort in.
I doubt my phone is waterproof enough to search up something to watch as I lean back against the steamy shower wall. My hands work faster with the shower water falling against my chest.
God, the way Elise’s thighs looked in her denim cut offs. So thick you could smother yourself between them.
A zing of pleasure arcs through my cock, up my stomach.
Fuck, Jesus. I can’t be thinking about my ex-wife like this. She’ll kill me, for one.
But it’s hard to keep myself from reminiscing. We were wild for each other. Before long, I’m thinking about one of our picnics where she wore a sundress and just those lacey panties underneath, tracing the design until it was wet, while she fed me grapes and tugged the neckline of her dress down. Her soft breasts under dappled sunlight, licking her nipples until they were red, the way they moved above my face as she straddled and rode me right in the grass.
Thinking about her makes my cock feel on the edge of something too big for me to handle, like I’ve never climaxed before. I haven’t. Not like this.
As precum starts to bead at the head, I go to palm my balls when I graze against a shape I’m unfamiliar with, a rounded swell near the base of my cock.
Holy fuck. This is a knot. My knot.
That would mean I’ve met my mate.