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My dad and I had a plan, and my mother washed her hands entirely of it. I think she was really just out of her depth when it came to the wolf stuff.

I went to my dad, he made me shift, and then I ran for hours. I killed three rabbits and two squirrels. The chase was like life, like following a bright red thread to its conclusion, like an orgasm in a way? A brutal sort of orgasm that ended with snapping the neck of a small animal. But, well, don’t they call an orgasm the little death?

And then, eventually, exhausted, I shifted back.

It was late, and everyone was asleep in the cabin except my dad. He was up waiting for me, though, yawning. When he saw that I’d come home, he sent me off to bed and went to bed himself.

I did not go to sleep. I got dressed and walked for twenty minutes all the way down to Damian and Vincent’s shed. I knocked on the door, and Damian answered it.

“I scented you,” he said, smiling at me. He was fifteen and wearing only a pair of plaid pajama pants, the kind with a thick elastic waist at the top. It encircled him just below his hip bones. His chest was bare. There was a little trail of hair below his belly button. I’d seen it before, because we swam all the time together. We spent half our life in bathing suits. It shouldn’t have meant anything that he was so bare, but I was pulsing all over, pulsing with the remnants of the heat, which had just ended.

I felt bold and confident. “How do I scent?”

“Like everything I ever wanted,” he said, reaching out and hooking a finger into the belt loop of my jeans. He pulled me into the shed.

“No Vincent?”

“He’s with a girl. Surprise,” said Damian, shutting the door to the shed. Inside, it was just a small room. The floor was vinyl, the walls were decorated with movie posters—The Dark Knight, The Lord of the Rings, Iron Man. There were two beds. They heated the thing with space heaters in the winter, but in the summer—and it was summer—they just had fans in the windows. Damian grinned down at me. “We’re all alone.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s good.”

“Yeah.” His light green eyes held mine. His voice had gotten deeper.

“I’m here because I think we should.”

“Should what?” he said. His voice got even deeper.

I caught a change in his scent, and then he suddenly backed away from me and sat down on his bed, hunching in a certain way, as if he was trying to hide his crotch from me. I knew it, then, in that moment, that I’d given him an erection, and I felt that wash through me like the flow of the river. It surged and churned, and I sighed.

“Leo,” he gasped. “Your scent, it’s… wow.”

“Yeah?” I said, coming closer to him. I had this urge to part his thighs and stand in between his legs and cup his face and bend down and kiss him.

But this would be our first kiss. That was why I was there. Because I thought we should. I didn’t want to wait until I was sixteen. I could not wait that long.

Maybe our first kiss, though, maybe he should be standing up, maybe I should be looking up at him.

“I think you might need to go,” he said, shutting his eyes, shuddering.

“Okay,” I said. “But kiss me first.”

He opened his eyes. “That’s what you meant.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do want…” I looked meaningfully at his lap. “Obviously, I do.”

He shot to his feet, very serious. “Leo, don’t ask me for it. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I need to prepare and get advice and figure things out. I want it to be perfect for you, and if you ask me now, I’ll do… I’d do anything you asked me right now.”

“Then kiss me,” I said. “But just that. Nothing more. Not yet.”

“You wanted to wait,” he said.

“Not anymore,” I said, stepping even closer to him. Now, we were practically touching.

His light green eyes went half-lidded and a little grin slid over his lips. “I want to. I really want to.”

I put my hands on his shoulders. I tilted forward an inch, and our torsos made contact.

We both let out a hiss.