by Eden Beck
I hesitate and think about it for a moment. I think I know what he’s talking about, but I never took Tom for this type. I somehow doubt whatever he has at this bonfire will be strong enough to make me feel anything at all … but still, the thought of it sounds better than doing nothing.
It’s a small risk. But it’s a risk.
Tom picks up on my hesitation.
“Besides,” he says. “Tomorrow night will be the night before the eclipse. If nothing else, you’ll get a great glimpse of the night sky while you’re there.”
The eclipse.
I hadn’t been keeping track of the days since having thrown my calendar away.
Suddenly, his invitation sounds all the more appealing.
Not because I want to see the night sky, but because I want to do something, anything that I know Rory, Kaleb, and Marlowe wouldn’t want me to do. Something to keep my mind off them.
Hanging out with Tom and a bunch of guys at the edge of the woods right before the eclipse sounds exactly like something that would make Rory furious. The more I think about it, the louder the howling sound in my head gets until I finally just blurt out in agreement.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll be there.”
“Good,” Tom smiles. “For what it’s worth, I know what you’re going through, Sabrina.”
No, you don’t. You have utterly no idea what I’m going through.
“Maybe I can help you feel something tomorrow night.” He leans forward and kisses me on the cheek. Normally that would send me reeling backward, but I’m too focused on the thought of Rory being angered at what I’m about to do, to notice.
19
Sabrina
After all these numb weeks, walking through the woods tonight floods me with more feelings than I’m prepared for.
But none of them make me feel alive; they all make me just feel more dead inside than ever.
I haven’t been this deep in this part of the woods since the boys left. Even when I found myself wandering down unmarked paths, it always led away from here. Away from them, away from the familiar grounds we once trod.
Together.
When I think about their leaving, it makes me feel as if the ground has opened up beneath my feet and is swallowing me into a big empty pit. The worst part is that I know that empty pit isn’t under my feet at all, it’s inside of me.
If it was an actual pit, then at least I’d know how to escape. At least then I’d know which way is up.
When I get to Tom’s appointed meeting spot, I see about half a dozen guys all gathered around a blazing bonfire that’s shooting flames up into the dark sky. There aren’t any other girls here, which honestly shouldn’t surprise me.
Tom walks toward me as soon as he spots me in the flickering light.
“Hey,” he says as he smiles and comes up to try to kiss me on the cheek again. This time I have the sense to back away and duck my face out of reach just in time.
“Where are Jess and Aimee?” I ask. “I thought they would be here too.”
“Nah, I only invited you.”
Of course he did. Not for the first time tonight, I start to think that maybe I shouldn’t have come.
“Why would you only invite me?” I ask suspiciously, even though I’m pretty sure I already know the answer—even if it isn’t what he’s going to tell me. I look up and see the other boys eyeing us from across the fire.
“Because, Sabrina; you’re the one who needs to feel something. Jess and Aimee aren’t struggling like you are. This will help.”
“I’m not struggling,” I say defiantly, even though we both know he’s right.
He laughs and puts an arm around my shoulders as he walks me toward the direction of the bonfire. “Yeah you are,” he says. “But this is going to make it better. I promise.”
I promise.
The words only serve to make me feel even more uneasy. I’ve had enough of empty words from boys.
When we get up to the bonfire, the others smile but don’t bother to introduce themselves to me. They’re much too busy pulling pieces off dehydrated clumps of mushrooms and passing them around.
Tom sits down on the ground by the fire and tugs me down alongside him.
“What is that?” I ask.
“Psilocybin mushrooms,” Tom answers. He grabs a handful from a pile sitting near the bonfire and holds them in front of me.
They’re odd looking, like the kind of mushrooms Alice would find in Wonderland … and probably also the sort of thing that’ll make me think I’m in Wonderland if I eat them. The whitish stems are all curled and curved and grown together into a big clump at the bottom that looks like a big root bulb. The caps of the mushrooms look like little phallic bells.
I watch as the boys shove small pieces into their mouths and chew as tiny flecks fall out from between their lips while they laugh.
I don’t know much about shrooms, but I think I know enough to think they’re all taking way too much. It explains the unease in the air. The sense of foreboding that is steadily growing.
“What is this supposed to do?” I ask. I’ve never taken a drug in my life, though I’m not about to admit it to Tom. Or to anyone else here.
“It’s supposed to make you feel something,” Tom says. “Stop worrying so much. What do you have to lose?”
He grins as he picks a small dose and shoves it between his lips before handing the rest to me.
They feel dry and velvety between my fingers.
This is a different kind of rebellion.
And it makes me pause.
So far, sure I’ve been reckless … but only with my body. The rush I get from throwing myself off bridges, from climbing impossibly high, from lifting sodas from the gas station—that is all external.
It gives me something to mask the pain inside.
I hold the mushrooms up higher and watch the way the firelight traces their shape with a golden outline.
But this … this might change something inside. It might not just mask it.
And that’s a risk I have to take.
Because I can’t go on living like this forever—holding onto a kite that’s long since flown away, leaving me dangling behind on an empty string.
So, considering I have nothing more to lose at this point, I go with it and swallow a small cluster of the mushrooms. They taste earthy and weird. The spongy texture makes my tongue feel like it’s simultaneously both wet and dry.
I chew a couple times before I swallow and wait for something to happen … which it does.
Not right away. It takes some time for the effects to settle in.
And when it does, what happens isn’t what I expect.
I guess the anti-drug programs in school had prepped me for hallucinations in the form of dragons and monsters or some sort of out-of-body experience where I’d float up above the treetops and look down on my own lifeless corpse.
Part of me was hoping for that. For the fear of creatures in the night to make my ears fill with howling, or at the very least … that maybe if I left my body, I’d leave the pain behind with it.
The effect I get is more subtle, but at the same time, more powerful than any of that.
Instead, Tom is more right than he could have imagined, and I feel more than just something. I feel everything at once.
I feel a longing so intense that it threatens to crush me.
I can’t breathe. I feel like my ribcage is being held together with burning matches.
I look around me at the faces of the boys sitting by the bonfire and I can’t see them anymore. Instead, I see Marlowe and Kaleb and the flames in their eyes are burning more wildly than the bonfire is. I can feel everything inside their bodies, and all of it is calling to me.
I blink, forcing my eyes to close and then open again, expecting my shifters to have vanished—replaced by these strangers sitting in the dim light of the fire.
But when I open them again, the illusion is still there. It’s still them.
And
even though I know it isn’t actually them, that it can’t possibly be them, I let myself get lost in it for a moment.
Because suddenly I understand what Lydia had described when she talked about the boys being bonded to me. I can feel it; the relentless pull that made it painful not to be together. It’s more than just desire, or lust, and passion … it’s need.
I’ve felt it tugging at the corners of my heart and mind ever since I arrived here in North Port, but I’ve never felt it as strongly as this.
I stare into Marlowe’s eyes across from the fire, and I can feel the rushing blood pushing against his veins and the racing heart inside his chest. I can feel that chest heaving, labored with every breath, and the swelling rise between his legs.
When I look at Kaleb, I can feel the rumbling growl inside his throat and the shaking energy that wants to pounce and put his body inside mine. I can also feel his emotions; the love and devotion that seem more important than anything else in the world, and the pain and fear that usurp my entire mind with the thought of not being able to be together.
If this was how the boys felt when they were around me, then I don’t know how they were ever able to live with it. It is the most consuming feeling I’ve ever felt; and I both want it to end and last forever, like a cruel, utopian torture.
I turn to see Tom sitting beside me, but I choke on my breath when I see it is Rory there instead.
The fire in his eyes burns the brightest. So bright, I feel like I am drowning in his gaze. I can hear his thoughts in my head and feel the desire in his eyes. His yearning is the most painful, the most urgent for some reason, and I can’t resist needing to give in to it.
He leans forward to kiss me and when he does, desire floods through me like a dam unleashed. I feel the heat from his body coming from inside mine as well and I feel like the two of us together are even hotter than the fire. I pull him over me and am overcome by the sensation that we are somehow tied together both physically and more.
It’s only now that I hear the howling I craved.
But this time, it’s different.
I open my eyes and for a moment I see Tom on top of me instead of Rory—and I let out a strangled choke.
I struggle against my mind and the influence of the mushrooms and try to decipher what is real and what isn’t.
The longing is real. The extremely deep connection is real. I can feel them, all three of them here with me. But my mind and eyes are playing with me because the face that I am kissing keeps flickering back between that of Rory and Tom.
Part of me wants to be sick, but the other part, the part that desperately craves the boys who were supposed to be here with me, forever, is the stronger part.
I close my eyes and will the face I see when I open them to be Rory.
And like magic, it is.
I keep my eyes on the face in front of me, that beautiful, sharp line of his jaw. The dark hair falling into his eyes. The passion hidden behind his stoic expression. I don’t let myself blink, don’t let myself close my eyes for fear of losing him again.
Rory.
I don’t know if I think it, or if I say it. But it doesn’t matter. I’m not the only one lost in the heat of the moment.
Hands fumble with the button of my jeans, and I don’t stop them.
It’s Rory. It’s Rory. And I won’t stop him this time.
I fumble with my fingers to undo Rory’s pants as well, and he leans in to kiss me with such fervor and passion that I have to close my eyes. Hands fumble in the dark, cold air rushes to meet my exposed flesh, but I keep my eyes closed and wait for the moment that I can feel him. Every inch of him.
But in the split second before that happens, the howling pierces my head so loudly that it jars my eyes to open and …
And it isn’t Rory.
It’s Tom on top of me. My thighs are open to him and in a single moment, he will claim the innocence that I’ve saved for someone else. For Rory. For Marlowe. For Kaleb.
Panic seizes me, and for a moment, I think I don’t have the strength to push him off of me. Bile rises in my throat, choking me.
I turn my head away and see the trees in the forest. Between the trees I see yellow, glowing eyes. At first there is only one pair of them … then suddenly, there are dozens. Hundreds.
And the panic is broken.
Immediately, I knee Tom in the groin and push him off of me. He hollers and curses as the other boys laugh in hysterical fits. Tom was right, this did make me feel something, and it’s that feeling that makes me yank my pants back on and take off running through the woods toward home.
For all the times I was made to feel like the outsider, here I am, the one acting like an animal.
I get lost more times that I have ever gotten lost before.
More than the night I went to see Remus.
The night I lost the boys.
The mushrooms are making my mind a mushy garble of sights and sounds and emotions. I try to clear my head, but it’s impossible because I don’t have control over my own mind. The emptiness that I’ve been feeling almost caused me to have sex with Tom, Tom of all people.
I stop once to be sick behind a tree.
I know I should be furious at myself, or him, or embarrassed even … but I just feel …
I just feel.
Those mushrooms may have caused the events of tonight, but the feelings, the longing … the bond that I have with Rory, Marlowe, and Kaleb; that part is real. I just didn’t see it before or feel it like they did. But now I do.
Emptying my stomach seems to dull the psychedelic effect of the mushrooms, at least enough for me to start recognizing where I am.
Even as I’m able to think straight enough to find my way home, that link to the boys remains. Even though they left, the interconnectedness remains.
If this bond is truly there, still, I don’t think they can get rid of it any more than I can.
And if they can, then I wonder how they ever left.
And more still, how they’ve been able to stay away.
I stumble up to the cabin just as daylight starts to break. My mother left the door unlocked and I can see her open eyes staring at me from her bed as I try clumsily to climb up to my loft. When I get onto my mattress I drop down and let my head flop against the pillow. I close my eyes, but I can still see them, the yellow, wolfish eyes glowing at me from between the trees.
I wonder if I hallucinated that part too, or if there really were wolves in the forest watching us.
As I fall asleep, the lingering effects of the mushrooms mixed with the revelation of how deeply I’m connected to the boys—wolf-shifter or not—plays havoc on my dreams.
I’m at the bonfire with Tom with no one else around except for the two of us this time.
He kisses me and I let him and before I know if we are both naked and lying beside the fire. As Tom kisses my neck, I turn my head and see the glowing yellow of hundreds of eyes from between the trees and I feel an energy in the air that seems to radiate up through the ground beneath the paws belonging to all those eyes, and into my body.
When I turn my head back around to see Tom, I see Marlowe and Kaleb standing behind him. They lift Tom up and throw him onto the bonfire as they stand there and watch him burn. I don’t watch, because I can’t take my eyes off the sight of Rory walking nakedly toward me on his two feet as a man with a swollen need between his legs.
He lays down over me and as Kaleb and Marlowe tend to the fire, Rory doesn’t stop where Tom did. The way I made him. Rory ignites every feeling of desire I could ever have.
All around us, the sound of packs of howling wolves grows louder in volume and intensifies, building until the dream comes to an abrupt end.
The last thing that I see before I wake up is the smoldering heat in Rory’s eyes on top of me, both man and beast.
Just like the Rory I still love.
Like the Rory I can now feel, along with every aching emotion in my body—awake or dreaming.
20
Sabrina
“I’ve had enough!”
It’s my mother’s voice.
Her voice grates against the edges of each of my brain cells first thing in the morning, thanks to the lovely after-effects of the mushrooms. Everything in my head and body hurts.
Thanks to the mushrooms, I’m not numb anymore.
Instead, every inch of me inside and out, seems to be in pain.
When I open my eyes, she’s leaning over me on the ladder. She has the crumbled remains of a mushroom in one hand—something that must have been left in the pocket of the pants I vaguely remember leaving in a heap at the bottom of the ladder before I crawled up here last night.
I groan and cover my face with my hands.
“Seriously what the hell is wrong with you, Sabrina?”
“I don’t know mom,” I grumble at her from between my fingers. Even with my face covered, the smell of wine is thick on her breath. Thick enough to make my temper rise.
When I look up at her again, I realize that the light isn’t bright enough to be morning. It’s dull and fading.
I’ve slept the entire day, and night will soon be upon us again.
The night of the eclipse has arrived, and the flood of new, crippling emotions makes it impossible for me to hold my tongue.
“Why don’t you go ahead and tell me since I know you’re dying to let it all out,” I snap. “But before you do, why don’t you consider who I might be copying.”
She looks down at me, aghast.
“You haven’t exactly been here for me lately. Not for months,” I say, half sitting up. I have to stop myself thanks to the throbbing behind my temples. “Not since he came back. Though from the way you’ve been drinking, you’d never guess you invited him back.”
I’m well aware of the fact that we sound like the bitter old couple, not mother and daughter.
Her breath catches.
“I don’t even know where to start.”
