Hairshirt (Werewolf story #2)

Once, when I was young, Morelli and I spent an evening combing each other.

This is a love story.

In the full moon, his hair shone gold like the rays of a thousand suns. He was fierce, and smelled of blood and sex. I was old enough to know both scents, just barely, and I loved his car.

The first time he picked me up at school he honked from the back of the parking lot and all the other girls looked in unison as I slung my bag over my back and walked to the open door. It was a boat of a car, streaked with blue and glimmering silver. It reminded me of the night reflected in the lake, a cool cosmic fire. His thick hands rested on the wheel, his thumbs pulsing to the rhythm of some old, old song. That was the night he bit me.

I knew what he was, and I wanted him. Each time he came for me we walked through the woods, and he took me to the place where he spent his time. The grass and the sticks were matted down in an oval, an egg-shaped depression that held him, shivering in the moonlight, as his body grew hair and his saliva drooled out of his senseless mouth. I watched, each time, conscious of my own naked body. Then that one afternoon, with everyone watching me, I knew things would be different.

“I want it,” I said.

“I thought that was the plan,” he said grinning.

“No, it. You know. I want to be one too. I’m bored. Nothing’s right any more.”

He looked at me, sized me up. I touched his leg.

“When?”

“Now.”

“Tonight?”

I slid closer to him and brushed the soft belly of my wrist over his lips. “Do you smell me?”
He groaned. The sun started to go down and I knew it would happen.

When we were done, I nearly fainted at the sight of all the blood coming out of me. Your mother doesn’t tell you about this. How could she know? He pressed his hand against my arm to hold the blood in, the blood that began to boil inside me. My skin tingled, each hair straining upward like a hungry plant. My arms began to hurt and I screamed, and suddenly I couldn’t see because his hair grew down over my face, and we writhed together as the change took us both over.

There was tenderness, too, then. So much hair to stroke, grass to be picked off of one, dirt caught between our naked toes. I started bringing my comb, told him I’d make him handsome. He laughed hard at that. We took turns, so careful of each other, especially the matted hair. “I’ll bring leave-in conditioner,” I told him. “Now it can be tested on animals.”

I loved running through the woods, growling and lumbering over fallen branches. We would see others occasionally, and we would all howl, our hairs vibrating with that one shared, keening note. We stayed away from roads, until that one moon, just before Thanksgiving.

The boy was biking. I don’t know why he was out so late. He shouldn’t have been. Didn’t his mom care? He was on a little kid bike, one of those ones where all you have to do to stop is pedal backwards. He stopped. “Come on Morelli,” I said, laughing. “You gotta chase the boy on the bike.”

“No.”

“Dare you.” I panted. I hadn’t tasted anyone else yet, just Morelli. The boy’s cheeks were soft and white, and he stood still as a deer trying to figure out what it was he heard in the woods.
I nipped at Morelli’s heels. “Go!” I licked him, nudged him toward the road, then took off myself in a quiet lope towards the boy.

He must have heard something, or finally had the sense to get scared. He put one foot on the pedal, waiting for his weight to push the bike forward. Too slow. My teeth dug into his ankle. I cut my lip on the pedal and let go, but by then Morelli had come up on the other side and pushed the boy over onto me. He smelled like pee now and I ripped at him with my claws. He fell, a cry caught in his throat. I looked back at Morelli, but Morelli wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the boy. I gnawed at the boy’s throat until he stopped thrashing, then licked up the sweet blood. “Come have some,” I said. “It’s good.”

We ate till there was nothing left.

This did not bother me. I was young, and knew that I would make mistakes.

I had assumed that Morelli was used to this, that I wasn’t the only one he had taken. He was so handsome, so assured. Whatever he wanted he got, wherever we went. But how do you ask your boyfriend if he’s eaten anyone before? It just doesn’t come up in conversation. I had other stuff to talk about. Algebra, band, mean kids in the smoking section. He talked about his job hauling logs out of the woods, said after he changed he couldn’t bear sitting at a desk anymore. I think he was just scared of being around people.

We didn’t last too long after the thing that happened with the boy. “Everyone makes mistakes,” I said. “You’ve got to get back on the horse, and you know, try not to eat anyone again.”

He looked at me like I was a monster. “We killed a boy. You can still see the blood by the side of the road.”

“We were wolves,” I said. “We were hungry; he gave himself to us.” I had felt the hunger, and had felt it go away. I knew what was in me couldn’t be denied, that once we heard the sound of his tires that everything had been decided.

But Morelli wasn’t convinced. “I buried his clothes. What was left of them. It makes me feel sick.” He turned away from me and nothing was the same after that.

So what could I do? He was lost to grief and guilt. He was never hungry any more and only ate to live, barely. He was always cold, those big hands that had clawed my neck now clasped around his own sad body. The fool. Maybe he was too much wolf; the human mind knows well how to forget its own disasters. You clean up and move on. But he drove himself crazy, refused to run with the pack. The last time we were together I brushed him, one last time, and added the hair to the pile I’d been keeping without him knowing. Toward the end, so many clumps of hair came out, there wasn’t anything to do but save them.

I played with them when I was alone in my room, and teased them out into soft locks. I spun them each night, little by little, until I had a strong yarn. The yarn I plied and knit top down until I had a seamless sweater, another skin. I knew I was losing him. I wanted to protect him, to wrap him in his own nature and make the wolf show on the outside at least a little.

Someday, I hoped, he could walk in the world with me, that we could run together again. I missed his breath and the place at the back of his neck where I used to kiss him. In the meantime, I had a life to live. I had many lovers, some wolf, some man, some both when the taste was right. I opened a yarn store, and sat in the back room spinning when I wasn’t chatting with old ladies. Word must have gotten out. The others must have seen him.

Now they all come to me, in the back door of the shop after hours. My old hands don’t move as fast as they used to, but I turn their bags of hair into gloriously warm sweaters. They’re always cold you see, the ones who need me, and sometimes they sit by the fire and watch me spin.

I wonder if Morelli is still wearing his.