When we first started dating, I thought that sort of concern meant that I was important to him, that he was afraid of something happening to me. It's what I told myself, even when I was assuring my supervisors at the hospital that my husband was a big practical joker after he left threatening voice mails for the head of cardiology. He spotted the two of us chatting at a colleague's retirement dinner and was convinced we were sleeping together . . . which pretty much guaranteed I would never attend another staff party, just to avoid the potential humiliation. That was, I imagine, the whole point. I lost so many friends, any sort of personal relationships with the people I worked with. I was slowly pared out of their lives, until all I had was Glenn. Just the way he wanted it.
I'd made so many mistakes, so many exceptions to protect my pride, to prevent admitting, even to myself, how bad my situation had become. My road to hell was paved with rationalizations.
"Stop it," I whispered into the dark. "Stop thinking about it."
It was the shock of the parking-lot confrontation, I told myself. The yelling and the flames and then all that adrenaline and blood. That sort of upheaval was bound to bring up unpleasant memories. Tossing under the scratchy sheet, I found myself pressed against my bedmate. The pillow between us had been nudged down on the mattress, so that his face and shoulders were visible. I curled toward him, toward the heat of his body. He smelled of the woods, earthy and wild. Wasn't that funny? Someone who spent his time in dive bars and honky-tonks smelling like fresh wind and moss? It wasn't a werewolf thing. I'd spent enough time around the species to know that they weren't all "April fresh." He just smelled right, which in itself was a little alarming and prompted me to shove the pillow between us a little higher.
Sniffing lightly, he rolled toward me, his hand sliding over my shoulder and resting near my neck. Somehow, I'd expected it to be uncomfortable, being touched like this again. But while I certainly had some lingering werewolf-gunshot-wound-related questions, it didn't feel wrong to have this man's hand on me. I felt warm, down to the tips of my toes, comfortably, blissfully warm. I leaned closer until my forehead was resting against his arm and just lived in that warmth for a moment. In my head, I was basking in the summer sun on my parents' back porch, knowing my mother would come out any minute to fuss at me about putting on sunscreen. I hadn't heard my mother's voice in such a long time. What I wouldn't give just to hear her fuss at me about wrinkles and sun spots once more. But she was gone.
My eyes fluttered open, and I pulled out of the recollection. I wouldn't think of my mother right now, not in a place like this, with a supernatural creature snoring beside me. She definitely wouldn't have approved of my getting myself into this sort of situation. This was far outside of the realm of problems that could be fixed with sunscreen. I reluctantly moved away. But I found that my head was a lot clearer. I closed my eyes and started playing the "Random Game" in my head, a little brain exercise I'd made up to help me sleep in strange places. I would think of one of my favorite things from my old life-a TV show, a book, an ice cream flavor-and then randomly connect it to something else I liked, and something else, then something else. The pleasant imagery, combined with stream-of-consciousness thinking, lulled me right to sleep. I remembered going to see this terrible movie, The Chase, with my best friend, Teri. It was one of the first movies we'd been allowed to go to the theater to see on our own. And we picked a movie starring Charlie Sheen and Kristy Swanson. Oh, the vagaries of youth.
Kristy Swanson also played a fictional version of Anna Nicole Smith on Law & Order. I remembered watching some weird clip of Anna Nicole's reality show on Talk Soup, where she was riding around in a limousine, whining and eating an obscenely large pickle. They used to serve pickles like that at basketball games at my high school. The booster clubs would serve them in little paper cups. If you ate one in front of my classmates, you could expect a lot of remarks about oral exams at school on Monday.
My brain bounced around like that for a few more minutes, from overrated Sheens to celeb-reality to giant pickles. My limbs were heavy. My eyelids fluttered closed. As I drifted off to sleep, I had no idea what tomorrow would bring. I didn't know how I was going to get out of this little town, where I would go, how I would live. For now, I was clean, and I wasn't sleeping in my car. And I'd managed to help someone who needed it. The rest I could sort out tomorrow.
3
Plastic Handcuffs: Fun for the Whole Family
I was warm. I was safe. There was a pleasantly heavy weight against my stomach, and someone was rubbing his thumb along my cheek. My hands skimmed over the shape on top of me and threaded through thick, silky hair.
Wait.
My eyes snapped open. The werewolf was on top of me. I bit back a scream when the warm, rough hand clasped the back of my neck. Whiskers scratched my neck, leaving a burning path in their wake. I tapped at his shoulders, unable to push his heavy weight off of me.
"Um, hey, I think you've got the wrong ide-mmph." His mouth closed over mine. It was soft, wet, and hot. My bedmate broke the warm, wet kiss, running the tip of his nose along my throat and making sweet, soft rumbling noises. My hands went from batting at his shoulders to lightly tracing the line of his neck.
It wasn't entirely unpleasant to have someone this close, to have the heat from someone else's skin seeping into mine. I wasn't so startled when he kissed me again, teasing my tongue with his own as I opened to him. His hand cupped the weight of my breast in his palm before lightly pinching the nipple through his Suds Bucket T-shirt. I arched off the bed, and he used the opportunity to slide a hand under my butt, grinding his hips against me.
Blood flowed into my cheeks, and a pulsating coil of tension started building between my legs. My eyes fluttered open. His were shut, and not just in a "busy kissing" way. They were half-shut in that dazed, heavy-lidded expression of someone who's only just woken up and is on the verge of passing out again. But his movements, while languid, had a purpose, and that purpose seemed to be stripping me out of my clothes.
I pulled away slightly, my eyebrows furrowed. Was he asleep, or was he faking this?
I'd heard of sleepwalking, but sleep-snuggling?
Was this a werewolf thing? Should I wake him up? I'd heard that was dangerous. Of course, letting a stranger have unprotected sleep sex with you couldn't be terribly safe. Frankly, his touching me didn't feel wrong or bad. I traced my fingers along the contours of his face, thumbing the arch of his cheekbones. He leaned into the caress and made that happy purring noise. I smiled into the darkness of the room. I'd gone far too long without any sort of connection to another human being. I missed something as simple as choosing to be touched.
Leaning closer, I let the tip of my nose run along his cheek, inhaling the warm, woodsy fragrance of his skin. I sighed, tangled my fingers into his mass of dark hair, and kissed him greedily. He moaned, a deep, rumbling sound that vibrated from his chest to mine. I expected him to reach for his belt. I was prepared for it. But he just pulled me back to his chest and wrapped his arms around me, holding me close. His lips worried my throat in tight little circles, his teeth nipping lightly at the skin until he reached the spot where my neck met my shoulder. I was relaxing into him, enjoying the alternately soft and sharp sensations, when I felt him scrape his teeth along the line of my throat. He paused, pressing his canines into the soft web of flesh where my shoulder and neck joined, hard enough that he was millimeters from breaking through the skin. I gasped, tensing my back so quickly that the crown of my head caught his chin. He yelped, then licked at the spot he'd injured, nuzzling it, cuddling against me as if trying to apologize. This was so far outside the etiquette of how to thank someone who has treated your gunshot wound it wasn't even funny.
I tried to wriggle out of his arms, but I might as well have been wrapped in an iron cage. He was immovable. But instead of trying to bite me again, he simply tucked his face into the crook of my neck and commenced snoring.
Now suddenly wide-awake, I stared into the darkness of the motel room and rubbed at my neck. And she was never heard from again.
I lay there at dawn, blinking into the dark, until the sun rose. After climbing out of bed, I got my bag together and put on my last clean shirt. The mark he'd made on my neck just looked like a bad hickey, the impression of his teeth barely visible. In the light of day, I could not explain what the hell he'd done. Had he meant to hurt me? Was it some weird flashback to an old girlfriend?
I didn't know what it meant. It was probably significant in some way, but I didn't know how. That was what bothered me. Werewolves were born, not turned, so I didn't have to worry about going all furry the next time I got pissed off at the post office. Side note: The fullness of the moon wasn't a factor for werewolves. After their initial postpuberty transition, they could phase whenever they felt like it. Or when they got angry. Or happy. Or bored. Or when they were asleep and had a particularly wolfy dream.