I shook my head, unable to speak once again. The rush of his emotions invaded me. Not just my chest, but the ache of them, the way they weighted my arms, shook my legs, and became more than I could bear. Stinging tears misted my eyes as I worried my lip. My lack of fear and my lust along with the simple knowing of his feelings, though strange... it all tightened my gut. My arms circled around my middle as nausea rolled through me.
“Christina, you have to try to get a hold of yourself. You have to listen to me. As much as I’ve tried to protect you from my truths, I can’t any longer,” he said, and then sighed. “Can you please try to listen to me? Give me a chance even if I don’t deserve one. I’m begging you.”
Throat tight, once again barely able to catch a breath of air, I gave a curt nod and immediately regretted my decision even as my ears perked up with an eagerness to understand him.
“I am a werewolf. That means, I am both a man and a wolf. I can shift from one form to the other in an instant. All I have to do is call upon the power they bestowed upon me. I’ve been one for a very long time, much longer than a normal human life. The wolf you saw tonight, that was me. I changed right before you. You never passed out or lost consciousness. I was animal one minute and a human the next. Don’t doubt what you saw?”
“How is that possible?” I interrupted. “Werewolves are things in books. They are not real. They don’t exist. That’s why they place them in the genre of paranormal. Fiction. Get it? A man cannot just turn into an animal whenever he wants. It makes no logical sense. How do you expect me to believe it? You can’t always trust your eyes,” I murmured, leaving off when the frailty of my argument dawned on me.
“I know. I know it all seems far-fetched. It sounds impossible, but it’s not. You watched me turn from wolf to man. Let your mind remember the details. Trust your eyes this time,” he urged in a soft voice, though he still stood militantly before me.
He paused as I let my mind wonder over what I’d seen. Hair had clearly faded away into skin as I’d watched. Teeth had shrunk, as had his hands and feet. One didn’t merge into the other, though. Where one had been, the other appeared as the other image disappeared. It had looked like a trick of a camera or great editing. He’d gone from being on all fours to standing upright in an instant, the seconds in between a blur of hair fading into skin. That was it, he had faded, transformed like one photo overlaid upon another as the editor slid the fade button from zero to one hundred percent.
“Does it hurt? Where does the fur go? Is it inside you now?” I asked, my face scrunching, my nose turning up. I shook off the mental image of internal organs and fur all shoved inside him. Absurd.
“Don’t look at me as if I’m repulsive,” he said, as a clipped, deep laugh barreled from his chest.
“Sorry. You’re not. That is the last word I would use for you, but I don’t understand,” I whined, then frowned at my own pathetic noise.
“Don’t apologize. Never apologize to me. I’ve put you…put us, in a horrible situation. You should never have had to try to understand all of this. I should have never shown you both sides of me. I should have lingered in the shadows as I always have, protecting you, but you never should have seen me change into a man. In fact, the man should have never let himself get that close to you. It’s all my fault. I knew better,” he rattled on, just as though he’d caught my insanity disease.
“I can’t deal with all of that now... what you should have or shouldn’t have done, the fact that you ran out on me. That’s it, right? You ran out on me to keep this from me? Shush, don’t answer that. One thing at a time. How are you a werewolf? And how did you just change like that? There isn’t even a full moon out tonight, if all this lore can be believed,” I questioned him, adamant, my hands making short waves up and down for emphasis.
I gave the moon a glance to confirm what I’d said. A half orb with wispy gray clouds moving over it hung in the sky, sending a silver sheen over the small bushes on the other side of the parking lot, still in view from this end of the alley. My hands finally stopped and fisted beside me. I felt the bite of my nails in my palms. Consciously relaxing each finger one by one, I let them fall back to rest on the cool brick wall at my back. The extra support felt good as my body swayed a bit still from time to time.