Season of the Wolf

by Maria Vale

  I turn away. “You’re all right.”

  “Of course,” she says, squeezing at one side of her hair. “Wolves run for miles. Our lungs are strong.” Before she can say more, a wolf calls in the faraway forest and Evie is instantly rigid, leaning into the sound, until she hears a clipped response followed by a rah-wup.

  She squeezes out more water and shakes her head, her hair coming alive like sea foam.

  My legs start to shake and I lower myself to the base of a nearby tree so nobody needs to see. She sits at a tree opposite.

  “Do you know why this is called Home Pond?”

  “You mean when it’s really a lake?” I sit with my knees up, my arms draped between them, my eyes trained on the water, because she is so naked and I am not wolf and while I’ve gotten used to the nakedness of other wolves, I don’t think I could ever “get used” to seeing her.

  “I mean the ‘Home’ part, not the ‘Pond.’”

  “I guess I assumed it was because of the Great Hall?”

  “It was Holm Pond. With an L. A holm is a little island. This is the little island. We still call it the Holm, even though the name of the pond was changed a long time ago. That is not our home.” She points with her chin in the direction of the Great Hall, now almost entirely dark except for the moth-spangled light leaking from one window. “That is just a stage set where we learn to play our parts and say our lines.”

  She lifts her eyes to the sheltering forest and the distant mountains beyond. “Our home is there.”

  I look out toward the woods that when I first came here seemed monolithic, undifferentiated. Menacing. Viewing it now under the star-strewn obsidian sky, I know better. I’ve seen the countless tiny accommodations life makes with life under its graceful living arches, stained with moonlight and green leaf-light and echoing with a thousand prayerful sounds. Now it seems like the sanctuary of a church whose tenets and rituals I am only just beginning to understand.

  “Before, when I thought I was human, I lived on a cul-de-sac. There was a mountain that we could see from the rear window of our little house. We always kept the window covered because whenever my mother looked out to it, something snapped inside her. She would stand there, frozen, until my father led her away. Then late at night, she would tell me stories about someone who went into the forest and got lost. Not just lost their way, but lost something else. Their souls, I guess. I couldn’t tell whether she was trying to explain herself or warn me.”

  I scrape my hair back from my forehead.

  “They always started out the same way: ‘In the forest stark and grim live unspeakable things.’”

  She bends her head to the side, no longer looking across to these mountains and these forests.

  “Was your mother a wolf?”

  “She was a housewife.”

  The Alpha rubs her thumb over the arch of her eyebrow. A tiny drop of water curves around her cheekbone.

  “I ask because we have stories about the Eisenwald—the Ironwood—where Pack come from, and those stories always start the same way: ‘On ðære wald stearc and grim, alifde ðæt ðæt unasecgende sceolon.’ But ‘stearc and grim’ doesn’t mean ‘stark and grim.’ It means ‘strong and fierce.’ Protective.” She looks back to the distant trees. “And it’s not ‘live unspeakable things.’ It’s…” She hesitates, her mouth open, her jaw moving slightly while she looks for the exact translation. “‘Are lives that must be unspoken,’” she finally says. “That must always be secret.”

  She rocks to the side, finding a stone under her thigh.

  “It meant us. Wolves. Our lives are the secrets protected in the forest strong and fierce.”

  She tosses the rock far into the water. It jostles the moon’s path along the surface.

  “How can you be mated to a house?” she asks after the rings have faded back into the lake.

  “Mated to…? You mean housewife?” She nods. “She wasn’t married to the house. It only meant…” I stumble trying to come up with something that will explain Maxine Brody, recording secretary for the bake sale committee of the Rainy River Elementary PTA in terms that the Alpha of the Great North Pack will understand. “It only meant that the house was her territory.” She turns her head toward me again, her cheek resting on her arms crossed above her knees, silent, one eyebrow raised. “That’s a very small territory.”

  I manage a half smile.

  “Everyone I talked to after she…” I was going to say “passed away” but I refuse to insult the Alpha with something so hackneyed and I refuse to pretend that Maxima, who was shot and immolated, went gently.

  “After she died, everyone said that she’d been a very strong wolf. Her name was Maxima.” I don’t know why I tell her, but it seems important. “She wanted to hide us, my father and me, from August. She did such a good job of hiding everything that I assumed we were human until the day she burned the brownies and turned into a wolf.”

  I have resin on the pads of my fingers. “There’s nothing like a rumor of wolves to find out how many of your neighbors have guns.”

  Every year, my mother bought Thin Mints from Mr. Gallantin’s daughter, though she didn’t like our neighbor. She never said so, but I could tell by the hard look in her eyes whenever he came to the door. He smelled like formaldehyde and the fat of the dead animals he mounted in the workshop in his basement.

  His excitement as he ran past our window was palpable. He unzipped his rifle case and dropped it on my mother’s patio furniture as he went. My father, though, was already hunting and got her first. They got into an accident off the gully bridge near the old mill far from home.

  I explode my fingers with a whispered poom, then sit lost in thought, looking at my fingertips.

  “You know what I wished for on your eyelash?”

  “My guard hair,” she reminds me. “No, you didn’t say.”

  I take a deep breath and launch myself into the void. “I wanted to understand how wolves flirt.”

  “Flirt?”

  “It’s the things you say and do to show that you’re interested but want to pretend you aren’t in case the other person isn’t and you don’t want to be embarrassed.”

  She scratches the tip of her nose with her thumb. “That’s why it’s one of the eight primary forms of human misrepresentation.”

  “Misrepresentation? I wouldn’t call it misrepresentation. And there aren’t eight.”

  “Yes there are,” she says and starts counting off on her fingers. “JAFFEWIP. It stands for Jokes. Advertisement. Falsehood. Flirtation. Exaggeration. White lies. Irony. Politics.” And as the last long finger rises in the air, I find myself unable to argue with a single one.

  “Flirtation is only taught in Advanced Human Behaviors so that wolves heading Offland will understand how to interpret obscure signals.”

  “What’s it like? The class.”

  “I was never going to be an Offlander, so I have no idea.”

  A squirrel runs through the branches overhead, loosing a sprinkling of duff. She picks up a branch of long, brown pine needles and twirls it between her fingers.

  “Will you tell me?” she asks quietly.

  Oh god.

  The single light in the Great Hall goes off and I try to collect my thoughts.

  “If you were human, Alpha, I would accidentally stand closer than strictly necessary with my back straight so you could see how tall I was. With my shoulders back so you could see how broad they are. I would smile at you, but not a friendly smile, more a smile verging on disdain, so that if you weren’t interested in my height or my shoulders, I would seem like I had never really cared in the first place.

  “If you were interested, you wouldn’t say that straight out. Instead, you might ask me for help that you didn’t actually need, like opening a jam jar or working an app on your phone. I would help you with the thing you didn’t n
eed with more flair and exertion than was required. Then with the jam jar opened or the app conquered, you might put your hand on my arm and say something about my strength or intelligence. I would then ask you where the nearest coffee shop is and you would say, ‘It’s easier if I just show you.’ When you’d shown me, I would insist on buying you a coffee. If you consented, we would have conducted a successful flirtation.”

  She shakes her head, a small smile playing across her lips.

  “But it’s all a lie.”

  “Not a lie, a misrepresentation. As you said yourself.”

  She waves her pine fan in front of her.

  “When I asked for your help to swim like that, swim like you, did you think I was flirting?”

  I know what she wanted. She wanted to find a place that was a little apart. Not run away, just float in the dark for the space of one breath, until some idiot thought it had gone on too long and rescued her, though she didn’t need it.

  I shake my head.

  “So how do wolves flirt?”

  “It’s not all that different. At least until the hierarchy is settled, there are lots of feats of strength. Who drags the biggest windfall from the forest. Who kills the biggest bear. Who lifts the most bales of laundry. The usual. But then…” She leans toward me and I feel the warmth of her body behind me and stop breathing. The air moves behind my jaw, and when I suck in that breath again, the tight tip of her breast scrapes across my arm.

  “That’s it,” she says quietly. “One wolf will smell another wolf to see if they are willing. That is how wolves flirt.”

  When I turn my head, my cheek lines up to hers, and I suck in a deep breath. My brain is immediately awash with the almost indecipherable complexity of the Pack—black earth, fur, the blood of prey, the fast-running sap of summer trees. But then it settles on that something else underlying it all, the granite and moss, hard stone covered with fragile life, that is Evie.

  “And am I?” I choke out.

  “Yes,” she says, pulling away, her eyes shielded, voice suddenly distant. “But then every unattached male wants to cover the Alpha.”

  A frog squawks into the night as I take her chin in my hand, kiss her between the eyebrows, and stride away fast, looking for a tree as big and thick as I am. Leaning against it, I strip off the damp boxers, then take my overfull cock with the other. It feels impossibly heavy even to the companion of lone nights in sterile hotels. I begin the stroke, so primed and tightly wound that my back arches and my eyes close before I reach the root.

  “And what kind of wolf would rather masturbate than fuck the Alpha?”

  Her arms are crossed in front of her, her expression hard. In the low light, her eyes burn like embers. There’s a rawness to the word fuck. I suppose that’s why it is the most popular expletive, but in her voice, it scrapes like a match on my combustible skin.

  “I am not a wolf. And I do not want to fuck the Alpha.”

  “It certainly seems like it.” She looks pointedly at my erection.

  “Words may not be everything, but they are something,” I show her my fingers wrapped around my cock. “I don’t want to fuck the Alpha.” I squeeze tighter. “I want to taste your mouth.” I slide down. “I want to tongue your breasts.” I reach the border between pain and pleasure. “I want to touch you until you think your skin is going to split from feeling it.” I slide my hand up again. “Then I want you to come saying my name.” I slide my hand down one last time.

  “Like I do.”

  —

  “Evie.”

  I was teetering so close that all it took was groaning her name. I lean my forehead against the rough bark and in long, throbbing bursts find my release.

  “I don’t want to fuck the Alpha.” I stare at the pale stripes against the dark wood. “I want to make love to Evie.”

  She silently repeats her name, her lower lip sliding under her front teeth at that seductive “vee.”

  After an endless moment, she takes a deep breath.

  “Constantine?” she says, exhaling the whole unwieldy length of it.

  Pack are constantly stripping but when Evie stands here, arms outstretched, she is bare beyond naked. For this moment, she has put aside not only her clothes, which mean nothing, but also her responsibilities, duties, customs as Alpha, and that means everything.

  Straightening myself, I brush my forehead in case there are still any little bits of bark left there. I want to touch her, but I move slowly, giving her time with every step to move away. To change her mind. To remember that she is Alpha and I am an old enemy and not worth the risk.

  She doesn’t move and her eyes never waver from mine except for a brief sweep downward. When she smiles, I close the last few feet, not touching but stopping close enough so that when I put out my hand, I can feel the heat from hers. Then I slowly close the space between our palms until there is no separation anymore. Her breath recoils sharply like she’s touched something hotter than she was expecting.

  “The question is what do you want. What does Evie want.” I exhale her name and listen until the last syllable has turned into mist, then I kiss the touching points of our fingers and feel the tremor of my hand.

  We are well matched so when Evie leans her head against mine, her shoulders are parallel to mine. I begin to rock her loose in my arms, just a tiny swinging from side to side, to coddle her for a moment and buy myself some time.

  “I am not supposed to want. I am the Alpha of the Great North Pack. There shouldn’t even be an Evie.”

  She tilts her pelvis, brings her hip bone closer to my growing erection. I curve in to her, touching her, feeling the pressure of her body as it draws the weight of need back into my cock and her face broadens in a smile against my face. I pull back to look at her, at that half-tweaked corner of her mouth, that slight softening of her cheek.

  “But there still is an Evie and she, no, I want this.”

  I bend my head to the side. She follows my lead, her nose touching mine like wolves do when they acknowledge one another. Bop. She frowns and tilts her head back until our chins touch.

  “Have you never kissed before?”

  “No. I’ve seen it in movies,” she says. “But getting everything lined up is more complicated than I expected.”

  This, at least, I can do and I slide my fingers through the cool, damp denseness of her hair, curving my hand at the base of her skull, holding her in place so that this time when I angle my head, my mouth finds hers. There is a slight flutter of the intimate skin of her lips against mine. I slide my lower lip, imagining burrowing into the silk solace, and bang my teeth against hers. I feel like the inexperienced teenager I never really was, because while I had too much experience in things no child should know, I had none whatsoever of first love. None of the feeling of the awkward touching of lips, of inhaling her breath only to feel it turn to drops of mercury in my blood by the alchemy of a kiss.

  I pull her lips back to mine and try them gently, then harder, opening her mouth with teeth and tongue. I drink from her. Her shallow breaths, her lips, her tongue. We taste, touch, and try awkward things as though we were awkward, vulnerable people, though neither of us has ever been allowed to be.

  Without moving away, she slides her hand between us.

  “I’ve never touched one before,” she murmurs, her little finger pressing against the damp crown of my cock.

  “But I don’t understand. Aren’t Nils and Nyala your—”

  She waves her hand dismissively. “Of course we fuck, but this”—she spreads her fingers wide across my torso—“is not something wolves do. Touching. I want to know what it feels like. What you feel like.”

  I lean my forehead against hers and pull my hips back to give her hand space to roam. She is alternately soft and firm, her hand sketching my collarbone to the notch, then following it down my sternum, her little finger brushing
my nipple.

  “Does that hurt?” she asks when I jump.

  I brush my thumb under the curve of her breast up to the hard, dark tip and make her shiver.

  “Does that?” I whisper and feel her smile under my lips as she continues tracing the deep line dividing my chest down to the path of curls at my pelvis, skirting my erection. I have never craved anything as much as I crave the skin at the back of her hand. When I say her name, it is with the voice of a man who is only just not breaking.

  I think she likes it, having this power that doesn’t come with all the terrifying responsibilities of being Alpha. Simply the intimate power that Evie has to make me ache. To slake me.

  I don’t tell her that I want her to wrap her fingers around my erection. I don’t tell her that I need her to scrape her nails along the seam between cock and balls. Because everything she does to my body channels through the levees I have built around me and I feel her rushing in, an ocean of power and beauty filling me in wave after wave.

  “Careful, Evie.”

  She laughs and I can feel the tremor of it race down her arm to her hand reaching around my sac. “I’ve never touched them, but I’ve bitten enough to know how vulnerable they are.”

  Which coming from her is strangely comforting.

  Finally, finally, finally, just when I don’t think I can take anymore, she traces her hand along the length of my cock, feeling the give at the crown, the flared ridge, the hardness of the shaft. She pulls down the skin.

  “It’s soft,” she whispers. “Like velvet on antlers.” Now she wraps her fingers around me as though she’s feeling for the bone underneath until I manage to choke out.

  “Stop.”

  She loosens her hand, taking a step back. I can tell by the expression on her face that she thinks I don’t like it.

  “Evie.” I take her hand tight in mine. “It’s not about you. No, that’s wrong: it’s all about you. I want your touch more than anything, but not like this. I want you needing me.”