“Is it really that hard to believe, considering what I am?” he asked.
Even though that did not work as an explanation, on any level at all.
“Yeah, what you arenow. But you weren’t a werewolf in high school. When you were fucking homecoming king and captain of the swim team and half the school had a crush on you. I once saw a girl try to hit you in the face with her boob. One of your fan club called me at work five years after I moved away to ask me if I would ask you to marry her. You were a god to those people.”
Okay, hot shot, get out of that one,she thought at him.
Then watched him have the nerve to actually try.
“That might be true, but I was still a dork inside.”
“What, so much of one that you didn’t bone Missy Taylor after prom?”
“I didn’t even want to take Missy Taylor to prom. Never mind bone her,” he said, and his voice went convincingly high and strained and indignant when he did.
But there was still a problem.
“Well, you know what? Even if you didn’t, and never have with anyone, this still makes no sense at all. Because doinking someone isn’t the only way to alleviate intense werewolf horniness. I mean—just jerk off, like everybody else,” she said, in as withering a tone as she could muster. She even demonstrated at the end with a lewdgesture. Like what she was saying was the most self-evident thing in the world.
Then she saw his expression.
The way his eyes slid upward, away from hers. How he flushed a brilliant red—like her mocking him had really hit him in his embarrassment bone. Even though (a) she had only done it because the very idea was obvious proof of his lies, and (b) oh dear god, it meant he wasn’t lying. It meant he wasn’t lying.
And now she had to put her hands on her knees to absorb the impact of that.
“Ohhhhhhh my god, you’re saying you can’t do that either. You’re saying that you cannot masturbate. That you have not mas turbated in eight years. Eight whole enormous years. Almost an entire decade without so much as a hand on yourself,” she said, between the calming breaths she was trying to take.
While he just made things even worse and more undeniable.
“Well, I mean, I have had a hand on myself. Just, you know. Not fully.”
“I don’t think the extent is really the issue I’m having with this, Seth.”
“So tell me what the issues are,” he asked, desperately.
But all she could come up with was: “That itshouldhelp. If being horny makes you wolf out, that is the cure.” Even though she knew it wasn’t going to fly. She knew he was going to have a terrible, terrible answer. And sure enough, he was already shaking his head.
“Oh yeah, you would think so, right?” he said, in such a falsely cheery way her heart dropped. And it dropped harder when he continued. “Ha ha, no. No, that is not how it works at all. If I get riled up, it happens. If I try to relieve being riled up by being with someone or being with myself or being with any number of appliances I might have made out of ice packs and sandpaper, it happens. There are no circumstances where it doesn’t. Except living like a member of the Jedi Order.”
Oh god, he’s a space monk, she thought. Even though she knewthe truth was somehow worse. “To be honest, I think the Jedi Order gets more than ice and sandpaper,” she admitted reluctantly. But not as reluctantly as he conceded.
“Yeah, I do too. I was just trying to make myself feel more cool.”
“You deserve to, considering you’ve almost reduced your dick to sawdust before today. I mean, good god, is that a real thing you tried? Or were you just exaggerating to make my eyes go enormous?”
He seemed to hesitate. She saw his tongue touch his upper teeth.
Before finally, “First, tell me which answer sounds understandable.”
Because he was ridiculous, oh god, he was the most ridiculous man to ever live.
“Okay, so now, see—all of this is making everything sound so understandable that I have to wonder why on earth you didn’t just tell me. Because I would have totally grasped ‘Being a werewolf means that having sexual feelings of any kind makes me turn into a beast, and so therefore I have repressed all my urges to the point where literally anything can make me deranged,’” she pointed out.
And he had the decency to look sheepish. “Yeah, but whenyousay it, it sounds reasonable.”
“Well, what way were you thinking of saying it that didn’t?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Every scenario I ran in my head just wound up with me saying terrible, friendship-ruining stuff. Like how strongly I was affected when you rubbed your hands all over my chest, and called me amazing. Even though, I swear, I didn’t intend to feel that way. I didn’t even fully know it was happening—that this was the thing causing it all—until after the fight. But then I looked back, and I realized,” he said, and now a lot of things were becoming startingly clear. In fact, one of them made her roll her eyes at herself, it was that obvious.
