Page 34 of Feral Werewolves

“Right,” he said with a nod. “I know, when I want to be alone, what I like to do is come to a place that’s crowded full of people.”

I huffed again. Fuck this dude. I rolled my eyes.

He sat down. “You’re a tithe, right?”

I drew back.

He shrugged. “I smell it.”

I gave him a horrified look.

“I think everyone can smell it, actually, it’s just that it’s so subconscious that they don’t pick up on it. For some reason, though, I do.”

“What do I smell like?”

He laughed. “Animalistic sex?”

I cringed.

“Adventure,” he said, lowering his voice. “Danger. Absolute and utter ruin.”

I snorted.

“Come home with me,” he said.

“No!” I said. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Trevor,” he said, offering me his hand.

I glared at his proffered hand for several beats too long, and then, sighing, I shook his hand. “Clementine.”

I ended up at his place.

I let him kiss me, and I let him touch me. I wanted to tryit, I thought, try having sex with a human man, not a wolfman, just to see what it was like.

But he was kind of drunk, and he kept losing his erection, and we ended up naked together in his bed, wrapped in a patchwork quilt, and I knew that it wouldn’t have been enough anyway.

“I was married to a tithe,” he said, out of the blue.

I sat up straight in the bed and looked at him. “What?”

“I think that’s why I smell it now,” he said.

I gaped at him, stunned. “What… what happened? Are you still married now? Am I having sex with a married man?”

“Well, first of all, we did not actually have sex,” he said. “And no. She’s, um, she’s gone. She’s…”

I waited, but he never finished that sentence. Did gone mean divorced? Dead? That she’d gone out across the walls as a werewolf mate? I didn’t know how to make my mouth form those questions.

He settled down on his pillow and stared up at the ceiling. “We got married too young. Neither of us were even twenty yet. We were happy, I think, as happy as anyone is. And then she started fretting about tithe symptoms, and I did the typical man thing, which was to tell her she was imagining it, and that women were all freaking out about stuff that was totally normal. Then the blood test came back, though, and then there was no denying. I, uh, did not handle it well.”

“Yeah.” I was still sitting up in the bed, staring down at him. “Um, I’m sorry.”

“I wanted to take her and run. Go overseas, that kind of thing.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “My dad, that’s what he wanted me to do.”

“But then she went over the walls, and it happened, and she came back, and she seemed fine, better than fine, really, kind of luminous in this way. Those first few months, in between the full moons, we had incredible sex, and I fell harder for her than I’d ever fallen for her. She loved it, and Iloved it for her, because I loved her, and I wanted her to have everything she wanted. But then, it stopped. It switched off. I remember the first full moon that she didn’t feel the urge for it. I remember holding her in our bed, holding onto her. She didn’t cry or anything, but she seemed broken.”

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