Page 18 of Feral Werewolves
“How many of them? Did you have sex with like twenty wolves last night?”
“No, just three,” I said, thinking of each of them and my voice going even dreamier. “There was one who was gray, and he was careful with me, and one who was silver and black and he was the leader, but he ended up knotting me, and then there was a russet wolf who seemed so eager and histongue, it was… oh, wow.”
“I’m feeling weirdly jealous,” said Ninnia.
“Don’t be jealous,” I said. “It was… you know… awful and invasive. I had to be naked in front of a ton of people. It hurt a lot. Like, a lot.”
“Oh,” she said. “Did they end up… like…there?”
“Uh huh,” I said. “More than once.”
“I’ve never done anal,” she said.
“It’s nice,” I said.
“I think you and I have totally different definitions of nice,” she said.
I laughed.
She laughed.
“Well, whatever, I can handle this,” I said. “Six months to eight months of this? It doesn’t sound that bad.”
“But… you never called me and said that you’d actually gone to bed with someone, right?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Oh, hell, Clementine, tell me this was not your first time!”
I just giggled helplessly. “But I liked it, though, Ninnia. I didn’t mind. I think I’m glad I waited for this. It felt right in some weird way? It was good.”
“Go to the therapy, please!” Tithes had access to free therapy sessions to get through it.
I only laughed. “I’m fine, seriously. I’mfine.”
And I was fine.
I was back in classes the next week, and I felt good. I had a certain feeling of clarity that I couldn’t really remember having before. I felt sharp in a strange way, like I could see and hear things more clearly than I had ever been able to before. I felt as if I could easily settle into a sense of peace, too. Sometimes, I would be walking, and I’d just be pulled to look at the sky or the trees or the clouds or a flock of flying birds. They would seem to sear my soul with their beauty and perfection, the shape of them, the sound of them, like a call that hooked into me and tugged on me.
It felt good, like the way the orgasms had felt good, but they didn’t turn me on.
It just felt…
I don’t know, exactly. Usually, I never noticed my surroundings when I was walking anywhere. Usually, I was too caught up in thinking about things I was worried about or something embarrassing I had done the day before.
Now, more often than not, I felt pulled into the present, just pinned there, and it was just, well, different. More pleasant in a way, but mostly because of its reality and sharpness, not because it was easier or sweeter.
But the following weekend I began wondering if I had mated them.
It started with a dream that I had, one where I climbed over the wall and went out through the wilderness to find them, following their scent like a trail. I woke up and I knew that scent trail wasn’t going to last forever.
But I fought the idea of that, because it was terrifying and I didn’t want that. If I’d resisted being sent to another country by my father, I resisted this too.
If I went out to mate to the wolves, I would go into exile, like them. I could come back, it was true. That was what was different between going to another country. I would not lose my ability to be a citizen here. But it wasn’t as if I could easily come and go over and back between the walled-off countryside and the cities.
The gates only opened at the full moons. I could come through then, and usually women who wanted to go through would do it at the sunrise to avoid the wildness of the wolves attacking the tithes, but once I was through, I couldn’t go back over until the gate opened again, a month later.
And it was frowned on to go back to the wolves once you’d come back to the cities. If I wanted to be there, I would be there, and I would lose the connection I had with my father and my friends.
