She did everything she could to avoid the Wolves. It was easy to avoid Tooth. Daisy thought he must not care, because she hadn’t seen him since That Night. But avoiding Dorian was damn-near impossible because they worked at the same place and her desk was situated right across from his, as though even the supposed-to-be-impartial Seating Plan was against her. She questioned herself, constantly, about her reaction. Her mind had split into two partisan groups, the pro-Wolf group and the anti-Wolf group, and Daisy did not know which one to listen to.
She read more than usual, cramming every spare hour she had with constant reading, trying to distract her overactive mind from the Wolves and redirect her attention to the lines and lines of escapist bliss. But every so often she would look up from the book to her empty apartment and imagine the Wolves sitting there – right there – on the couch, in her apartment, and they’d done so many things.
She masturbated over it a lot, too, which made things even worse. Then when she looked in the reflection she wasn’t just seeing a whore, but a whore who had enjoyed the whole thing. And why shouldn’t she have? What was wrong with a little sexual enjoyment? But, no, that reasoning was dangerous. If a woman gets to thinking she can enjoy sex just for itself, then what about all those women – women and men – who have never been allowed to express carnal joy? Wouldn’t she surely feel the great weight of their anger at that injustice? It was almost too much even to think about. No, the best course of action was to pretend that she had hated the whole thing. It was a hard thing to do, when the intense pleasure – pleasure like she’d never felt before – was so vivid to her.
After a week of this routine, Dorian approached her in work. He leaned over her desk during lunchtime and whispered: “What’s the matter? We didn’t do anything to offend you, did we?” It had none of the wheedling, desperate quality that that sentence could have had. He was merely curious, like a naturalist asking why a snail went this way instead of that way. “It is hard, with someone you have Scented, to maintain control always. Of course we can’t physically hurt you – that is impossible – but did we insult you in some way? I know what you’ll say, if we did: if you have to ask, you’ll never know, or something like that. But honestly, it would be easier if you told me.”
“I don’t know,” Daisy mumbled, unwilling even to look up from her desk and meet his gaze.
He shook his head and wondered back to his desk. One week until the full moon, a part of her whispered. And why shouldn’t she care about the full moon? The full moon was important, all things considered. She found herself wondering what they would look like – what they would feel like – in their Wolf forms. Would they be even more animalistic? Would their Scenting of her make them dangerous? But dangerous in a good way?
At the end of the work day, Dorian approached her desk again. He smiled at her. Angela stopped at the desk and asked if she was okay and Daisy mumbled that she was and then the office was empty apart from Dorian and Daisy. “What is it?” he said, stiffly. “Just tell me.”
“I—” I don’t know how to explain it to a man. “I don’t how to explain it.”
“Try.”
Daisy sighed and rubbed her eyes with her thumbs, and then sighed again. Where would she even start? How could a man understand all the loathing that came over a woman her age – a woman who had been born too early for sixties free love and too late for young-people carnality – and understand it enough that he forgave or condoned her behavior? She sighed once more and then sat up straighter at her desk.
Then a thought occurred to her. “When you’re in Wolf form, have you ever hurt anybody?”
He flinched, as though slapped. “Why are you asking me that?”
“It’s just a question.”
“It’s, err, private.”
“Private? Ha-ha, between us? I think we’ve passed the threshold of private way into good old Sharing Territory. I don’t think there can be anything private between people who have shared genitals.”
Dorian scratched his face and then ran a hand through his short brown hair. He clenched his square jaw and then nodded, looking off into the distance, as though the paraphernalia of the office had transformed into a memory before his eyes. “When I was first Made, something happened. It was out West, a long time ago, when I was in my late teens. Luckily – and I thank God or Whoever every day for this – the man was a child-murderer. The other Wolves joked about it: about how lucky I was only to have to live with the guilt of killing a killer. But it still gets to me sometimes.”
“Right,” Daisy said, trying to get it right in her mind. “And I supposed the Wolf-you enjoyed it?”
Dorian nodded. “I suppose.”
“Well, imagine how I feel. I didn’t kill anyone but it is just the same, in many ways. I did something that I enjoyed but knew I shouldn’t have done. I shouldn’t have had both of you.”
Dorian met her eyes. “Why do you say so?”
Why indeed? “Because it’s just not what’s done. People think school is a horrible place, and it is. Anyone different in school is ousted, hated, ridiculed. It is impossible to function in school if you are even a little bit different. But people forget; those school kids grow up and became office workers, and many of them don’t change. They read so little and think so little and do so little that their ideas from teenage years cling to them like wet raincoats. And when they see something that doesn’t fit their school-parameter, they feel that old thrill again: that old thrill that comes with affirming your own normalcy by denigrating another’s non-normalcy.” Daisy had been talking fast, her words pouring out in a continuous stream of indignation. She began to feel the old academic cogs turning. “Or maybe it is jealously. Maybe they’ve always wished they could experience pleasure like that but don’t know how: have always been surrounded by people who would make their life miserable if they did anything approaching abnormal. All I know is I’m finding it harder to look at myself in the mirror.”
Dorian leaned forward on his forearms and nodded his head. “That makes sense,” he said. “But don’t you see, it doesn’t matter what other people say? Why should it matter what other people say? They’re other people. They’re not you.”
“Oh, but, I am one of them,” she said. “I have all the same prejudices and inherited ideals. You’re right. It doesn’t matter what other people say. It matters what I say. Or what my reflection says.”
“Okay,” Dorian said, chewing his lip, as though working out a math problem. “How about this? Me, you, and Tooth meet for some non-sexual companionship? We could go for a walk or—or go for a meal? We could all get to know each other better. Would that help?”
“And nothing would happen?”
“Nothing would happen. The full moon is a week from today. But that doesn’t matter. If you change your mind by then, fine. If not?” He shrugged. “That’ll have to be fine, too.”
Daisy thought over this new idea, turned it over in her mind, held it out so she could study it and then brought it close. Going for a meal with them? That was better, at least. She could lie to her school-minded reflection: tell her it was just three friends having dinner. “Okay,” she said. “Yes, let’s go for a meal. When?”
“How about right now?” Dorian said.
Daisy collected her things and walked out of the door with him. It was slightly absurd – even to her – that only a week after her boycotting of these men she was on her way to dinner with them. But dinner fit well within the (arbitrary) parameters, so her reflection could sit happy for now.
Outside work Dorian rang Tooth and they all met outside an Italian restaurant a dozen or so blocks from work. Tooth nodded when he saw her, nodded to Dorian, and then stood silently outside the restaurant.
Then they went into the restaurant, to get to know each other better.
*****
When they had ordered their food they sat in the restaurant with their drinks: Daisy, red wine; Tooth and Dorian, beers. The restaurant was darkened with thick curtains and lit by candles that flickered across the tables. Daisy sipped more of her wine and waited for one of the Wolves to talk.
“I really do feel like I’m on a first date,” Daisy said, when the silence became unendurable. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I know how you feel,” Tooth said, in his slow, deep voice.
“Why don’t you ask us some questions about lycanthropy?” Dorian said. “I bet you’re curious about how it all works.”
It wasn’t until Dorian said that that Daisy realized that yes, she was curious. Before she had been so consumed with her own problems about her reflection – you sound so silly when you think stuff like that – that it hadn’t even occurred to her. Now she pushed through the self-loathing in her mind and tried to think of something to ask. Eventually, something came to her.
“Is it like the movies?” she said. “If you get bitten or scratched by a werewolf, do you become one?”
They both nodded. “Yes,” Dorian said. “I was a laborer out West – dropped out of college – when this man whom everyone called Mr. Bacon moved into a town nearby. They called him that because every morning he would go to the local café and pile his plate sky-high with bacon, and then munch it all down within seconds. Plus, nobody knew his real name. He never talked to anyone, just ate the bacon and returned to his apartment. You can get away with being untalkative in cities, but in small towns it isn’t so well-received, so he became a sort of talking point for the entire town. Every time I went to town I heard about Mr. Bacon’s latest food-eating exploits. Anyway, I was out one night looking for Toby – our dog; he had ran away – when out of the dark came this…” He shuddered. “Some Wolves revel in the fear they cause.”
“Monsters,” Tooth muttered.
“Mr. Bacon had roamed from town to town using his Wolfism as a weapon, as far as I can tell. Anyway, out of the dark, and then – swipe – right across the shoulder.” He looked around and then pulled down his shirt, revealing jagged scars across the shoulder that she couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen when they’d—That Night. “Most Makers would stick around in that situation, to let the Pup know what was happening, but not Mr. Bacon. He fled town the next day, and left me wondering why I could smell what the townspeople were eating before I’d even stepped foot in the town. Then the full moon came. That’s when I killed the child-killer. Thanks the Gods it was a child-killer.”
“I was luckier,” Tooth said. “I lived in England for a time. London.”
“Like the movie?”
Tooth looked at her blankly, and then nodded. “Like the movie. I was approached by my Maker – his name was Eli – and everything was explained to me before it happened. I agreed to it.” He fingered the tooth around his neck. “A year after he Made me, in Wolf form, he was dead. Some Wolf-hunters got him. There are bands of people all over the world who know about us, and they’re not pleased with it. I kept his tooth, and from that day on I took the name Tooth. I will never say my real name again. I do not want to be associated with the people who killed Eli.”
“Okay,” Daisy said, and nodded, the men before her slowly turning from utter strangers to only half-strangers. “But how did you two meet?”
“The Council,” Dorian said. “New Wolves are contacted by the Council at some point. Tooth knew about the council straightaway, because of Eli. I was only contacted after they heard about how the child-killer had died. Random animal attack. That’s a surefire sign to any Wolf that his Brethren might be near.”
“But, hold on,” Daisy said. “I thought you said you could – sort of – control it?”
“We can, now,” Dorian said. “Even then, if I had been told what was happening, I would have been able to. It’s not like the movies where you fall unconscious and this other thing takes over. Instead, you’re filled with a sort of—” He turned to Tooth. “How can I explain it?”
Tooth smiled faintly and shook his head. “I have no idea.”
“With a sort of animal instinct, I guess you could call it. The Transformation makes you taller, stronger, hairier, more wolf-like, and then your sense of smell is even stronger, and you feel like hunting.”
Hunting! And they want me to be their prey. Why doesn’t that idea scare me as much as it should? “But now you can control it?” Daisy said.
“Oh, yes,” Dorian said. “We’ve been at it now for almost two decades.”
“And this Scenting, how exactly does that work?”
“We were one city over when this powerful urge came over us both. We had heard about Scentings but had never experienced it ourselves. Scentings – for some reason; nobody is sure why – only happen to the same Pack. Tooth and I are a Pack. We either had to come and find you or else go crazy. And I mean really, really crazy. If you ignore a Scenting it can turn your mind to mush. So here we are.”
“Yes,” Daisy said, “here we are.”
“Food’s done,” Tooth said.
Daisy looked around. She couldn’t see anyone with their food. And then, about thirty seconds later, their food was being brought to them. She smiled at him. He nodded and they began to eat. They were silent for a few minutes as they tucked into their food, and then Daisy, unable to stop herself, said: “You’re not using me, are you?”
Tooth looked up sadly, his expression so full of meaning that he might as well have said how can you ask that? Dorian shook his head. “We are not using you,” he said. “You are a Scented One. That is a high position in Wolf culture. Our need is to give you pleasure – and to receive pleasure from you – but only if you are comfortable with it, only if you enjoy it, only if you want to do it.”