Full Moon #2
He walks past me to the bathroom and runs the water, and I hear him washing the blood off his shoulder. When he comes back the shirt is dark with water, and I can see the wound, a deep gash across the meat of his shoulder, still raw, still open. He catches me looking.
"I caught a branch on the way through the trees," he says. "It's closing. It was worse an hour ago."
"Nothing closes that fast."
"In my case, it does."
I sit on the edge of the bed because my legs have stopped cooperating.
He stays standing, and I look at him, and I ask the questions I've been carrying since the parking lot, and he answers them the way he does everything: in the fewest words possible, watching my face the whole time, reading me for the moment I decide he's too much.
The wolf. The bite. Nineteen years old, camping in northern Idaho with his best friend.
The attack. The friend who didn't walk out.
The years of learning control, of schedules, of full moons spent alone in the middle of nowhere because the alternative was risking everyone around him.
Fifteen years. He says it like it's a sentence he's still serving.
"The moon," I say. "It's full tonight."
"Yes."
"On the plane. That's what was happening. You weren't scared of flying."
"I wasn't scared of flying."
"You were scared of landing."
He looks at me, and something in his face shifts, and I realize it's surprise. Surprise that I put it together, that I was paying attention, that I remember the way he watched the moon like it was a countdown.
"Yes. I booked that flight because it landed before the moon got high. I've done it a hundred times. Chicago at eight ten, safe, alone, done. And then the plane landed here, and there was no car, and I ran out of time."
"You ran out of time and turned into a wolf in an airport parking lot."
"I held it as long as I could." He looks at the window, at the moon. "I thought if I could get to the trees, if I could get away from everyone, I could ride it out. I didn't make it far enough."
"Far enough that nobody saw."
He looks at me for a long moment. "Far enough that only one person saw."
I think about the weight of that. Fifteen years of control, of careful schedules, of a life built around never letting anyone see, and one mechanical indication on a Saturday night undid all of it, and the only witness was the woman in 14B.
"I'm sorry," I say, and I mean it, and something in his face does that complicated thing again.
"It's not your job to be sorry."
"Too bad. I'm doing it anyway."
He's about to say something else when his whole body goes still. It's not a normal stillness. It's the stillness of a man who has heard something wrong, the stillness of an animal with its head up, and the hair on my arms stands up.
"Dean?"
He doesn't answer. His eyes are on the window, on the dark line of trees beyond it, and his face has changed. The openness is gone. It's the face from the plane, the white-knuckled, counting-the-minutes face, and it's worse now.
"There's another one," he says.
"Another what?"
"Wolf. On the plane. I smelled it. I told myself it was my own nerves, that I was imagining it, but it's here. It's close."
I stare at him. "That's not possible. There were sixteen of us. I saw them all, they're all—"
"Sixteen passengers," he repeats. "And one of them is a werewolf."
The room is very quiet. The radiator ticks.
The wind pushes at the window, and I sit on the bed of a man I met six hours ago, a man who turned into a wolf in front of me, a man who is telling me that somewhere in this building, behind one of these doors, someone else is wearing a face that isn't theirs.
"Can you tell who it is?"
"No. The scent is wrong, mixed with the storm and the diesel and everything else. I've been trying to place it since the terminal. I can't."
"Then we find out." I'm on my feet now, pacing, the way I pace when a venue double-books, when a keynote speaker's flight gets cancelled, when everything is going wrong and someone has to be the one who makes it right.
"Sixteen people. One of them came on that plane knowing what you are, knowing you'd be stuck here.
We make a list. Who boarded late, who sat where, who was too calm. "
"Megan." His voice stops me. "You're not doing this."
"I'm absolutely doing this. This is what I do. I organize. I make forty strangers move in one direction. A werewolf is just a different kind of—"
"Listen to me." He crosses the room, and for the first time he puts his hands on me, both of them, on my arms, and I feel the heat of him through my sweater, and I stop talking.
"If there's another wolf here, and they're here for me, then you're not safe.
You're not safe near me. You're not safe anywhere in this building.
And the last thing I'm going to do is let you walk into a room full of suspects with a notebook. "
"Then what do you suggest? We hide?"
"I suggest you stay with me. In this room. Where I can make sure nothing gets to you."
"That's the first romantic thing you've said to me all night."
It comes out before I can stop it, my mouth doing what my mouth always does, and for a second I think I've ruined everything. Then the corner of his mouth does that thing again, and I realize it's the same almost-smile, the one I've been collecting since the plane.
"Noted," he says.
The snow keeps falling. Ruth comes down the hallway knocking on doors, and her voice carries through the thin walls: the highway is closed, no one is going anywhere until the plows get through, the power might flicker, nobody panic, the ice machine is still broken.
The lights dim once, twice, and settle into a low buzz.
And somewhere in this building, behind one of these doors, someone is listening to the same announcement, and smiling.
Dean gives me the bed. That's the first thing he does when it's clear neither of us is leaving.
He pulls the quilt off the mattress and drops it on the floor beside the radiator, and I watch him start to settle there, barefoot, still wearing the too-small flannel with the blood on the shoulder, and I can't let him do it.
"Get in the bed, Dean."
"I'm fine on the floor."
"You walked twelve miles barefoot and you're bleeding and you're going to sleep on the floor of your own room?"
"I've slept in worse."
"I don't care. Get in the bed."
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he picks up the quilt, puts it back on the mattress, and sits on the edge of the bed, and I sit on the other edge, and the width of the mattress between us might as well be a canyon.
"This is stupid," I say after a while.
"What is?"
"This. The bed. The floor. You trying to protect me from a man who isn't even in the room.
" I pull my knees up and wrap my arms around them.
"We've known each other six hours. You turned into a wolf in front of me.
And I'm sitting here arguing with you about who gets the floor like we're old friends. "
"We're not old friends."
"I know."
He looks at me, and I can see him considering something, turning it over. "You're the first person who's talked to me like this."
"Like what?"
"Like I'm a person. Not a risk. Not a schedule. Not something to be managed."
"What's it like?" I ask. "Being alone all the time?"
"I'm not alone all the time. I have work. I have..." He stops. "I have a life."
"That's not what I asked."
He looks at me for a long moment. "It's quiet," he says. "That's what it's like. It's very quiet."
I don't know what to say to that. I don't think there's anything to say.
So I sit there with my knees pulled up, and he sits on the edge of the bed, and the quiet stretches between us, and for the first time in hours I'm not thinking about the wolf or the snow or the man in the parking lot.
I'm thinking about the way he said quiet, like it was a room he'd learned to live in.
"Why do you do that?"
His voice comes out of the dark, low, and I look up. "Do what?"
"Joke. When you're scared."
"I'm not scared."
"You've been scared since the parking lot. You've been scared since the plane. And every time it gets close, you make a joke."
I open my mouth to deflect, to make another joke, the way I always do, and I find that I can't. He's watching me, and he's not letting me go, and I realize no one has ever asked me that before. No one has ever noticed.
"It's how I survive," I say. "My parents split up when I was seventeen.
Badly. The kind of badly that takes years to recover from, except nobody in my family ever recovered, we just got better at pretending.
" I stop, and the words keep coming anyway, too fast to stop.
"I learned that if you make people laugh, they don't ask what's wrong.
And if they don't ask, you don't have to say it out loud.
And if you never say it out loud, it can't hurt you. "
"Does it work?"
I laugh, and it comes out ragged. "No. But I've been doing it for twelve years and it's the only thing I know how to do."
He's quiet for a long moment. Then he says, "You don't have to do it with me."
I look at him. The moon is in the window, and there's light on his face, and he's looking at me like I'm something he's trying to understand, like I'm a structure he's trying to figure out how to hold up.
"That's a big promise," I say. "You've known me six hours."
"I know you asked if I eat people and then stayed."
I don't have a joke for that. I don't have anything for that. So I do the only thing I can think of. I lean across the canyon of the mattress and I kiss him.