“Do you think shifting is causing it?”
“I dunno, but you’ve shifted three times and you’ve got three of these.”
“D’you think this is what happened to my mom? She always said she went gray early. Do you think that’s what this is?”
“I’m not sure. This isn’t gray, Sully. It’s white. Like, really white.”
I looked in the mirror again. I was stunned and unhappy.
“Don’t worry about it. It looks kinda cool.
“I was wrong about your hair,” he said as we sat by the fire that night. “It’s not kind of cool. It’s fucking cool. When the moonlight hits it, it’s opalescent.”
“Opalescent?” There was a word I never thought I’d hear coming out of Jules’s mouth.
“Yeah, it’s not just white in this light. It shines purple and pink and blue when you move. It’s pretty rad.”
“Great,” I said, patting my hair down viciously and tucking it behind my ears. “‘Pretty rad’ will be super easy to hide when I’m around humans.”
He made a yikes face and then said, “I don’t know, maybe they won’t be able to see it. Maybe it will just look white to them. I mean, that’s possible, right?”
I sighed. I was feeling tired and overwhelmed and for the first time since we’d come to the cabin, I was feeling antsy. Grumpy. I wished there was someone other than Jules around and that they’d pick a fight with me. I wanted to fight. I wanted to yell. I wanted to scream. I wanted to rake my claws across something mushy and soft. I wanted to make something writhe and I wanted to make it scream.
I had no idea what was wrong with me, but I was starting to suspect that whatever it was, it was very serious.
We shifted and went for a short run. I thought it would settle me down, but it didn’t. It made me feel strangely dysphoric, too. I felt too human to be wild and too wild to be human. I was distracted by the scents and sounds around me, and I couldn’t tune any of them out. None of them at all, especially not the smell of Jules. The smell of him wafted through the air and found me no matter where I was. I could almost see it; a purple haze emanating off him, winding its way through the air, finding me, and sinking its claws into me.
I headed home before long, and he followed. We walked the last part of the way in human form. I was careful to walk ahead of him. I was so hard I didn’t even know how to explain it to myself.
“I’m going to go for a quick walk,” I said.
He cocked his head at me. “Isn’t that what we’ve just done?”
“No, I need to, you know . . . I just need to do a quick lap of the place.”
“I get it.” He laughed as he went into the cabin, humming the theme tune of the kids’ programPaw Patrolto himself.
I knew he was trying to make a joke, but I didn’t find it funny. I found it irritating, but at the same time, the sound of his voice was having a similar effect on me as his smell. I rushed into the woods, scraping my legs on brambles, and stumbling over tree roots until I was far away enough from the house that I was positive Jules wouldn’t be able to pick up the scent of my seed in the morning. I wrapped my hand around my cock and fisted it desperately, thrusting my hips in time with my hand until I spasmed and shot my load onto the ground.
My little excursion the night before had left me slightly more Zen, but the effect didn’t last long. I woke up in the morning and was immediately hit by Jules’s scent. It hit me like a brick wall. It was everywhere. All over the cabin, all over the sheets. We’d slept so close together, I could smell it on myself. I jumped out of bed and opened the windows and the front door. Jules eyed me suspiciously but didn’t say anything. I ate the omelet he made in silence and drank several cups of coffee in quick succession.
“‘Thanks’ would be nice,” he said when I got up from the table.
I mumbled a halfhearted apology. I knew I was in the wrong, but I was in no mood to deal with nagging.
“It’s a full moon tonight.” He said it the way my mother used to say, “You’re tired,” when I was a child.
We went down to the river and bathed after breakfast. He didn’t bother with towels or clothes, and I didn’t either. Afterward, despite the fact we were both air-drying, the mood felt clearer. Lighter. I felt like I could breathe. He must have sensed it.
“Are you done being such a douchebag?” he asked.
I smiled weakly and shrugged. I hoped I was, but I didn’t want to overcommit.
“Isaid, are you going to stop being a douche now?”
The second time he said it, he punctuated the sentence with a sportsmanlike tap on my ass. As soon as he did it, he turned and flounced off, snickering and heading for home. The slight sting of his slap, along with the heat of his skin on mine was like a red rag to a bull. The effect was instantaneous. I didn’t have time to think it through. My body moved with no conscious input from me. I swung my arm back and delivered a sizzling slap on his left cheek. He jumped and grabbed his cheek in one hand.
“Ow, fuck, Sully! You don’t know your own stren…”
