by Noah Harris
There’s a fairly large garden plot in one corner of the yard, up against the low fence that divides the cruddy lawn from the sidewalk. It’s clear someone cared about it, once. Now that’s ruined too. Maybe I can trade landscaping for part of the rent? Anything to make it less dreary.
A few times on the way over I wondered about the private entrance, and whether or not I could get guys into the house for private time without disturbing anybody. It’s big enough. I can see that now. But the creepy, overgrown lawn would not be comforting for any gentlemen callers, regardless of whether they could get past the whole housing situation.
I’m starting to get a bad feeling about it, and thinking about leaving with a quick apologetic text, but there’s swishing up on the second floor. Somebody’s watching me. Presumably the somebody I’m here to meet, if not one of the kids. But it’s not such a big town that I can afford to be that rude to a stranger, so I continue up to the front door.
Through the squeaking, wonky gate, and past the junked-out lawn…is that poison oak I see? And up the steps.
It looks like a real Southern mansion up close, like a Tennessee Williams play. The kind with the porch that wraps all the way around.
It looks fairly haunted. How weird is this family going to be?
Getting closer to the door I can hear a child’s high, reedy voice singing nonsense, and it brings a smile to my face. I wait until the song is over before I knock, and soon enough footsteps approach on creaking plank floors.
This place must be falling apart. No wonder they want a lodger. I get excited thinking about all the work I’ll be able to do on the house, if they’ll let me.
It’s a passion of mine I rarely get to indulge. All through boarding school, without a home to go back to, I always went on whatever volunteer trips I could get a piece of. Sometimes the other boys would take me home with them. But mostly, I preferred the work. Carpentry, tiling, plumbing, even some electrical. I always made myself indispensable early on, so the real craftsmen and women would know I was worth teaching.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” comes a man’s deep voice through the door, and I can hear him shoving what sounds like pots and pans, or a flock of umbrellas, into the coat closet. Cursing softly but not unhappily to himself.
I’m picturing a mad professor, wondering what man could possibly deal with…
And I finally realize what’s been nagging me about the house.
It’s a different color now, and the whole porch and deck have been redone. A formerly pristine, manicured yard is a disaster now. But this is the Keller house. I already know this house. I spent as much time in this house as my own for the first half of my life.
It was so much larger then. Everything was.
Is that too weird? Is it too much? Ghosts that can hurt you are one thing, but living in the house they haunt? That seems like asking for it. That’s not penance. It’s masochism.
This is a truly bad idea. Jonesy was laughing at me after all.
I don’t even have time to think up a good excuse to run. I just plaster that charming smile on my face, ready to say something self-deprecating and sweet and get the hell out of there. Back to the drawing board.
Which is when the door of Christian’s house opens.
Standing there, jaw dropped. Eyes wide. Looking even more terrified than this morning.
“I should have seen that coming,” I say out loud.
He can’t do much but laugh, horrified, and knock one fist lightly against the doorpost, over and over, as he stares at me.
No Question
“Please, come in.”
That’s what my mouth says to the man standing at my door. My brain is screaming nonsense, but at least my mouth is polite.
Dominic wavers, almost shuddering, like he might just vanish again. But I can smell more on him. Desire. A little sadness maybe.
He’s curious, alert. His body language is almost defensive, like I’m going to attack. I have to put my head back, show him my throat, before he can relax. It’s hard to look away from that piercing gaze, but it makes submitting easier.
Stepping aside, I wave vaguely into the disaster of the living room. Over Dominic’s shoulder I can see the front lawn strewn with toys, dead patches of grassless earth. It looks like a shack from out there. It looks like sad things happen in here.
“Okay, so first of all,” I say, putting a glass of water in his hand and pulling out a chair at the dining room table, still without quite looking at him. “I do have four kids. So it’s a disaster zone. I’ve gotten used to it, but I can still see how it looks, theoretically, from the outside.”
Dominic opens his mouth to deny it all, praise my home, but I’m pleased to see that he shuts it right back up again. At least he respects me that much, even if he hates me.
“Second, anybody who lives here is going to have them in his life. It’s a big house, but it’s not that big. They are loud, and weird, and nuts.”
He smiles, nodding sadly, looking down into his water glass like it holds his secrets.
“Third, we’re both shifters. Which is kind of neat.”
He nods again, even more sadly. I know Dominic’s thinking the same thing I am. Not just how long we suffered, when we didn’t know what was happening to us, but what it led to.
“The local pack is great. I don’t know about…anything. I don’t know anything about your life.”
He meets my gaze. For a moment we’re shocked by each other. Quietly staring, drinking in every detail. Hurting and ecstatic, all at once.
“Not a lot to tell," he sighs, with a grumbling edge I remember. When he didn’t talk for a while, his voice always seemed reluctant to start up again.
“Military school, Los Angeles, finance job. Now I’m here.”
It’s fitting he isn’t just handing me the details. I don’t deserve them.
“I’m glad,” I say, not sure what I even mean.
In another universe, where I’m braver, this would be where I touch his hand, and everything becomes okay again.
“You know what?” There’s a little wonder in his voice. “Me too.”
“Your parents moved away. Well, I mean…”
“My dad died, and my mom remarried and moved to Florida. Yeah.”
“So what’s here?”
I know what I want him to say. I have no right to that either.
“History. The past. I went…astray, somewhere along the way. So I’m trying to figure out what I lost, and where. Starting at the beginning.”
I’ve had similar thoughts. Amnesia would be the sweetest blank slate. All that pain, those hurtful guilty memories. Gone in an instant.
“And here you are. In my house," I laugh trying to open the door to that conversation.
Here. In my house. Where you told me you loved me. Where two boys who didn’t know what they were yet set fire to everything they knew.
You didn’t lose it. I took it away.
“Smells almost the same," Dominic hums, looking around without seeing anything. “Smells like you.”
“You smell like you, too.”
I want to say more. I want to say how much I love it. I want to climb into his arms and pull them around me, tight, with his voice rumbling through his chest, saying, It’s alright. We’re alright.
I swear I can feel him, less than a yard away, wanting the same thing.
Wishful thinking.
“Four kids in three years!” he exclaims then, standing up to look out the bay window. The backyard is a little less destroyed, although the garden and chicken coop have seen better days.
I laugh, spreading my hands helplessly.
“I love it. I love them. It’s a lot. They’re a lot. Two, three and four. Twins in the middle.”
His eyes melt a little bit at that, and his smile gets a little less melancholy. I guess it makes them more real.
“So are you here for the room? Still? Or is this something else now?”
He shakes his head.
&nb
sp; “I don’t know, Christian. It doesn’t seem right. Me living here. With your family.”
I reach out toward him and drop my hands immediately. My body’s so used to comforting children that it’s hard to remember how to do it with words. My body’s so used to flowing into the alpha’s, curling up against him, that I feel almost chilly. This close to him without touching.
“I think it sounds right, Dominic. I think it sounds…fair.”
He chuckles at that, sniffing like he’s having allergies. Maybe he’s allergic to my house. That would solve it.
“Let’s go out into the backyard,” I say. “It’s a nice day.”
Pitcher of iced tea from the refrigerator, a platter of cookies neither of us will touch. I’d imagined this lodger so many different ways, old, young, sexy, creepy, it’s almost funny to be serving tea to Dominic now. Like the real guy’s still on his way.
“It’s the first day of spring!” Dominic says brightly and looks out at the sunlight for a long breath before we take it outside.
He stops just outside the door.
“Wait. Two, three, and four? You had twins? With a one-year-old baby?”
It makes me blush for some reason, to hear him ask it.
“I’m the most fertile omega in Salt Flats history. Yeah. Almost every heat.”
I wanted it to sound like a joke, but it’s not a joke. It’s just true. Almost every heat.
“Did your parents ever suspect?”
I laugh. It’s such a youthful conversation. Something you talk about the first year after you shift, and then forget.
“No. They did not. They didn’t much care for me marrying a man, either. But they never saw the baby bump. Just me, turning up at family functions with more and more kids. Just kind of fading away.”
Dominic nods, eyebrows knitting under a dark cloud. My parents aren’t a great topic for us. Especially here, where it all went down.
I can be brave. I can address it head on.
“I want to know where you’ve been and what’s happened, all of it. I want you to know the same about me.”
He nods, warily.
“Okay. You first," he says, with something like anxiety behind his words. I’m suddenly less excited to hear his whole story.
What did they do to you, in the hard, real world?
When we scent a new shifter on the wind and he’s not from a shifter family, we have a system. All over the world, when that happens, the pack comes together to help the kid through it. It’s a sacred tradition, and it’s my favorite thing. I don’t spend a lot of time with the pack, but I definitely show up for that.
After two years of the occasional flare-up, hair sprouting overnight, teeth grown sharp, nightmares of running and fire and blood, I could tell something was coming. The full moon was approaching, not that I noticed it, and the pack was picking up my scent. They knew my time was coming.
The funniest thing in any movie is when the characters look up whatever it is on the internet. Like you think you’re turning into a werewolf, so you go to a search engine and type in “werewolf,” and find out all about werewolves. Back in 1994, I would definitely have done that if the internet existed.
For a few days, I could feel them. Out in the trees, or my yard at night. Silent and strong, just watching. Trying to figure me out. I thought I was going mad. I thought somebody had caught on to my strange transformation and they’d sent the authorities to take me out. I had a lot of fears back then.
About two days before the full moon, I decided I’d had enough. The testosterone and adrenaline were flooding my blood in preparation, of course, but all I knew was I felt brave. I walked out into the forest, waiting for my silent companions to appear, and just started yelling at them in the dark.
“Either come and kill me, or come and fuck me, or just do whatever you’re going to do!”
I barely remember this, but it’s been highly quoted in the years since.
Out of the woods stepped Goodboy Miller, G.I. Joe in human form, ageless and silent, with the kindest eyes I’d ever seen and standing behind him…
Growing up I was always the cynical one, the sarcastic one. I had to be. Irony was the only way I could possibly survive or keep lying to myself about so much. But I definitely had that streak in me. Hated “romance,” public displays. The whole thing.
So when I say I knew from the second our eyes met that Ernest Greendale was the person I was meant to spend my life with. That’s no small thing.
I went into the woods thinking I was straight and possibly being hunted by the government. I came out of there a gay shifter in love.
He was only a couple of years older, but his hair was already thinning, which I thought was cute. Big eyes, deep brown, which the kids inherited. A goofy smile, and broad shoulders. He walked like a wolf, deliberate, graceful. Almost as calm as Goodboy, almost as silent.
Like a lot of the pack who preferred to live out on Goodboy’s farm, Ernest had the deep wildness shifters can get if we spend a lot of time in our wolf forms. I don’t know how else to describe him but pure. He seemed pure. Untouched by the world. I wanted that so, so badly.
I think that’s what lit the spark. I’d spent so much time hating myself, feeling afraid and alone, tainted, dirty, so confused by what my body was doing and wanting, that all I wanted was to be clean and pure. Not like a child, not innocent. Just healed. Greeting the world with a smile as open and fair as his. It seemed like salvation.
Which, honestly, it was. All the confusing, twisted parts of me were suddenly aligned in the moonlight, because I finally had the information I needed to make sense of myself.
I don’t know how easy it would have been to accept if somebody else had come out of the woods that night. But the rightness of Ernest was the most solid thing I’d ever felt.
Much later, he admitted with a blush that he’d been volunteering for every surveillance shift he could get his hands on. He wanted to be close to me, too. So it was a little fate and a little luck. A whole lot of finally being angry enough to be brave. And then, there were two of us.
I was sixteen, he was a few months from turning eighteen, and my parents were more worried about me than ever, so it was tough. But we were able to see each other and come to love each other. We ran together every moon. The day I turned eighteen, we moved into an apartment together and started our little life. As far as I can tell, it’s possible we got pregnant that very night, the first time he mated me. I like to think so.
Of course, my parents lost their minds. Choosing marriage over college, choosing to go live in an apartment with this teenager. I can understand how they felt. But they couldn’t possibly understand how I felt. How right it was, how quickly I’d come to accept and love myself through him. How healed I was by him and continued to be, as we grew.
After I’ve sketched out the basics, light on the destiny talk, skipping over anything about sex, Dominic nods, as if it’s about what he expected.
He clears his throat of the undercurrent of silence.
“I didn’t really come home, after they sent me away. I barely talked to them unless I needed money. I felt like that was a fair trade.”
I nod, unsure how much of this I’m supposed to know. I kept tabs on him as best I could, until graduation. After that, I was just too busy. Hurting myself with the guilt didn’t have such great appeal.
“Second year in military school, the older boys kidnapped me on a full moon and took me out into the training woods. I really, honestly thought they were going to kill me. They’d been such bullies. My parents hadn’t really done a lot of research, so they wouldn’t have known I was the poorest kid at the academy by a long shot.”
I can feel my face heat up with second-hand pain.
Two years of bullying, with no idea what you are or what’s happening to you. Or how wonderful life might one day be.
“Anyway. They weren’t taking me out to murder me. They told me what I was, and said I was part of their gang now. A secret shifter
society at that school, which goes back hundreds of years. Which meant in the daytime they protected me, too. I was their…”
Dominic looks down, away from my eyes, with a downturned mouth. Guilty? Ashamed? I hope not.
“People thought I was their pet. The older boys would sometimes…anyway. Everybody knew I liked guys. So, when they started taking me with them on trips, or getting me treats the others didn’t have…I can understand how that looked.”
As strange as it sounds, I’m glad he had a pack at least. I’ve imagined his situation so many different ways over the years. This sounds like one of the best-case scenarios I could have hoped for. There’s a little gleam in his eye, now.
“Well I mean. It was true. I was hooking up left and right! But not because I was their pet. It was because we were all shifters, very horny, healthy young men trying to figure out what our bodies could do. Trying to practice as much as possible, so we’d be great at sex down the line. But yeah. Definitely got me a reputation. A few of the instructors seemed to think it gave them the…well. It was so much easier after that, and I didn’t mind the drawbacks. It meant I never had to go home again.”
He nods, staring into the middle distance. Remembering with a slight smile.
“I’d love to hear more, one of these days.”
I try to sound innocent, but somehow my voice sounds flirty to my ears. Which is perverted. I can tell he’s a little thrown by it.
“Ah, yeah. Sure. So, when we graduated, my friend Felix and I moved out to L.A. and got an apartment, got jobs at a brokerage through some of his family connections. Then we were mainly just very rich for a while.”
Felix. He doesn’t say the name with any particular heat or emphasis. It’s most likely they were just friends, as he says. But there’s a fifteen-year-old buried deep in my heart who hates this, ‘Felix’, so bad it almost feels like disgust. My replacement.
