Page 117 of Feral Werewolves
It wasn’t a question, but I agreed. “Yes, better now.”
He sighed, satisfied.
“Stay,” I said in a small, ragged voice.
“Obviously,” he said.
paladin
WE WERE LYINGon the floor of the living room, and I was dressed, and she was not, and I had one hand full of one of her breasts and the other full of her ample, perfect thigh. “So, the difference between humans and a lot of other mammals is that a human woman’s body is ready to get pregnant every month—you start building up all this blood, which is eventually menstruation. Most mammals don’t do that until after they’re already pregnant. That’s for a whole bunch of reasons that we don’t need to get into—”
“Don’t we?” She was giggling.
“No, because it’s not important,” I said. “The important thing is that it started happening, and that, for whatever reason, we made it work and didn’t, you know die out, which it seems kind of like we should have done.”
“Really?”
“I mean, think about it,” I said. “You’re an early homo sapiens and you live in this hunter-gatherer lifestyle, following the buffalo around or whatever—”
“Buffalo?”
“No, fuck, you’re right, that comes later,” I said. “We’re probably in Africa at this point, and I doubt we ate that much meat. We got the meat for you.”
“For me personally?”
“For women,” I said. “Because you needed fucking iron. You were bleeding every goddamned month, and we had to provide for you.”
She threw back her head and laughed, and it was a sound like bells at Christmas, like home and safety and everything I ever wanted. “Of course, right. We were just helplessly bleeding, and you men were out there fashioning spears.”
“I mean, basically,” I said. “Yes.”
She snuggled into my chest. “Okay.”
“I’m not saying women didn’t help,” I said, giving her breast a little squeeze. “I’m sure the women were making spears, too. But all the things we had to do to be, you know, humans, it could have come from this reason. Like, okay, women need meat, so we hunt. It’d be better if we didn’t have to disrupt the tribe constantly to follow the herds around because half of us are on their period, and so, we figured out agriculture. We built whole civilizations, whole structures of society.”
“Because of periods?” She giggled again.
“Because of women,” I said, digging my fingers into her thigh for emphasis. “Because we would do anything to keep our women happy, because, we, you know, need you.”
“This is the most chauvinistic thing—masquerading as chivalry—that I think I ever heard.” But she kissed me when she said it. She wasn’t really annoyed with me.
“This is what the male of the species does,” I said. “We sacrifice ourselves to protect the women. Like, why are male birds the bright and pretty ones? To attract predators. Because men are expendable.”
She shook her head at me. “No, you arenot.”
I shrugged.
She lay her head back down. “It’s sort of sweet, this theory of yours.”
“But you don’t believe it.”
“I’m not saying that necessarily. Maybe it’s true. It’s only that men don’t behave that way, at all, most of the time. They don’t behave sacrificially. Look at this whole place, the way Griff and the other guys hoarded the tithes like fucking cattle, and—”
“No, I hear you,” I said with a sigh. “I think men resent it, is the thing. I think we know it, deep down, that nature considers males to be expendable, and I think it hurts us somewhere, and we take it out on women.”
“That’s just… incredibly convoluted,” she said, furrowing her brow.
I laughed. It was. “Yeah, I maybe think too much sometimes.”
