Werewolf Lust
some women belong in the woods
Hi loves —
It’s been a while!
Today I bring you:
🌲 Cabin in the woods
🐺 Fated mates
💍 Leaving the wrong man
🌕 One life-changing full moon
🌶️🌶️🌶️ · CW: coercive control, drugging, blood, one very satisfying eviction.
Kettle’s on.
xx
In the apartment the kettle clicked off on its timer and Marcus, who had set the timer the night before, poured tea into two matching white mugs that had arrived as a wedding gift from his sister. He took a foil sachet from the inside pocket of his dressing gown, tore the corner along the perforation, tapped a clear powder into one of the mugs and stirred. He set the teaspoon down on the marble. He was very neat about it. Elena, who would later remember it in detail, was at this point still in the bathroom.
She came in in charcoal silk and stood at the island flicking through the morning’s post. Marcus slid her mug across to her without looking up.
— Yours, he said.
She took it without looking up either. There was a planning notice, two bills, and a heavy cream envelope at the bottom of the stack with the weight a solicitor’s letter has. She opened that one first. She read it without changing her expression. There was a way of reading bad news her mother had taught her as a teenager and that she had never, in fact, learned to undo.
— My aunt died, she said.
— Were you close.
— No.
She drank. The kettle, sensing her weight removed from its plate, reset itself.
That was on a Tuesday in March. By Friday she had told Marcus she was going.
⁂
The marble island under a single pendant lamp, the solicitor’s letter open between them, two heavy sheets. Conditions of inheritance: thirty consecutive nights in residence at the property hereinafter. Marcus read it through twice and then set the pages down and looked at her in the way that meant he was about to be reasonable.
— Thirty consecutive nights, he said. Out of the question.
— It’s the condition.
— Get a property manager. We can fight the clause.
She did not answer at once. There was a small pull at the base of her spine, very minor, that she did not have a word for. She had felt something like it once, at sixteen, in a wood she had never been permitted to revisit. She had not, she realised, thought about it in years.
— I’ll go, she said.
Marcus blinked. Just once.
— You have the Hadley project.
— I’ll work from there.
— Elena.
— I’ll work from there, she said again.
The kettle clicked. Neither of them moved to pour. It was the first refusal of three years, and the smallness of it was, given everything that came after, almost embarrassing.
⁂
The cabin was nicer than she had expected. Moss on the roof, a wind-chime turning under the eaves, the smell of rosemary and old wood through the kitchen window when she rolled it down. She stood beside the hired estate car for a moment without lifting her suitcase. The forest behind the back porch was very large and very close and breathing the way large dense things breathe.
A man stepped out of the wood-shed of the next property. Mid-thirties, beard, an axe loose in one hand. He had the kind of shoulders that looked like grief. She decided she should stop looking at him and found she couldn’t.
— You’re the niece, he said.
— Elena.
He nodded. He did not give his name. He had the slight, considered bearing of someone who had spent a decade deciding not to want things.
— Don’t walk the woods after dark.
— Is that a warning, she said, or a courtesy.
He considered her with the axe loose at his thigh. It was a longer pause than was conventional.
— Both, he said.
He turned, walked back to the wood-shed. The first cut of his axe landed behind her with a particular finality. Elena lifted her suitcase. She was, she noticed, smiling at nothing.
⁂
The café in the village had mismatched chairs, a chalkboard menu, the smell of yeast from the bakery next door. The woman behind the counter was twenty-eight, tattooed forearms, working a slow espresso machine of the sort that, in London, would have indicated either a pretentious owner or an excellent one. Elena hadn’t yet decided which kind of village she was in.
— Flat white?
— Please.
The woman pulled the shot, foamed the milk, watched her in the bar mirror without pretending not to. The two men at the back table were also watching, and so was the boy behind the bakery counter visible through the connecting door.
— You’re at Maggie’s.
— For a month.
— Then a month, the woman said, and slid the cup across the counter. Then, as Elena was paying: Watch your bins. Coyotes.
Elena looked up. There had not been coyotes in this part of the country for a hundred years. The woman, whose name she would later learn was Sylvie, watched her register the lie.
— Coyotes, Elena said.
— Mostly.
The shot was, in the event, excellent.
⁂
That night she sat on the porch in the wool dressing gown her aunt had left hanging on the back of the bedroom door. Red wine in a cracked glass. No socks. The porch light haloed by midges.
At the tree-line, very low to the ground, two yellow points caught the light and held.
Elena did not move. She was not, she found, frightened. She tried to articulate what she was instead and could not. Something in her body knew a vocabulary her mind had spent ten years declining to translate. She thought, in a remote way, of her mother, and of the week at sixteen she did not, as a rule, think about. The eyes did not move. After a long time they closed, and the dark closed over the place they had been.
In the morning she opened her bedroom door from the inside. On its outer face there were four parallel furrows at the height of a man’s shoulder, fresh wood pale under splintered varnish. She stood with her hand on the door for some time. Her hand was steadier than she would have predicted. She had thought she would call Marcus. She did not call Marcus. She made tea, absent-mindedly and with great precision.
⁂
The attic had a skylight, dust motes in the column of light through it, a trunk under canvas. On a low shelf beside the trunk, a brass key in a tin marked ELENA in her aunt’s handwriting.
She unlocked the trunk. Forty leather notebooks in chronological order, 1979 to 2024, dated on the spine. She sat on the attic floor with her legs out flat in front of her — she had not sat on a floor like that for years — and opened one at random.
He came again. He brought the deer. I left bread and tea on the porch.
She opened another.
K.’s boy is grown. Quiet, like his father. Watches the road for me.
She read for an hour. Her aunt’s voice, which she had not heard since she was twelve, came up off the pages in the cadence of someone who had been writing to herself for so long that she had become an unselfconscious diarist. By the time Elena reached the most recent volume she was doing what she would later call, when she could be wry about it, catching up.
The last entry, dated four months previously in a hand already thinning, said: If the girl ever comes, leave her this. She’ll know.
She did not know yet. She knew enough. It was enough to keep reading.
⁂
The full moon caught the ridge above the cabin and held it for a long minute before climbing free of the trees.
She did not afterwards remember deciding to follow him. She watched from the kitchen window as he came down out of his side of the woods with a rucksack in one hand, the way someone goes to a thing they have done a thousand times. She put on boots and a jumper and went after him at the distance she would have used to walk behind a client touring a site. She had clocked, with a part of her mind she was still trying to put names to, that he never once looked back.
She had not breathed for thirty seconds when she crouched behind a fallen pine at the edge of a clearing she had not previously known was there.
He stopped at the centre of it. He undressed without ceremony — boots, shirt, jeans — and folded the clothes on a flat stone in a stack that Marcus would have approved of. He knelt. He bowed his head. The change took, she would later count, seven seconds.
Where Kaiden had been there was a wolf, black, grey at the muzzle, taller at the shoulder than she had thought wolves were. He shook himself out, the way dogs do after rain. He turned his head toward the fallen pine.
It was not terror that flooded her. It was older than terror, and it was the first thing in ten years she had not had to name in order to permit it.
She stepped out from behind the pine. She walked toward him through the cold pine needles. The wolf watched her come, ears flat, breath visible. She knelt in front of him. She put her hand into the fur at his throat.
He did not bite.
⁂
He was a man again on the granite slab above Pine Lake, breath ragged, eyes still half-wolf at the edges. His clothes were somewhere in the woods. Hers were, by stages and decisions, not somewhere else. The granite was warm from the day. The lake, set in a stone bowl half a mile north of the cabin, was the kind of black that water gets in places no one lives near.
— You should be running, he said.
— I know.
She stepped closer. He did not step back.
— Once it’s done, it’s done. There’s no soft version of it.
— Tell me what it is.
— Not the time.
— Then make this, she said, the time you stop deciding for me.
He looked at her. Yellow flickered at the edge of his eyes. He pulled her in.
He went carefully, in the way of a man who had spent ten years convinced he was too dangerous to touch anything he wanted to keep, and she did not let him be careful for very long. Afterwards she lay beside him on the granite, her hair against the stone, and noticed that the lake had not made a single sound the entire time. That was the first thing she registered. The second was that she had spent ten years thinking of herself as a person who did not, on the whole, want this kind of thing. She thought about it for a while without arriving anywhere. She said his name, once, not as a question. He said hers back, also not as a question. They lay like that for some time.
⁂
A black Range Rover crunched the gravel of the cabin’s drive in the morning. Marcus had let himself in. He stood at the kitchen counter holding his own travel-mug of tea, the navy overcoat that did not belong here folded over the chair beside him. Elena, in last night’s clothes, hair still damp from the lake, blinked at him from the doorway.
— Darling. Sit down.
— How did you get in.
— The solicitor. He’s worried about you. I am too.
There was a wrong note in her chest, very small, like a key turning in a lock that did not quite fit.
Footsteps on the porch. Kaiden at the screen door, hair wet, no shirt under the open jacket. He saw Marcus. He saw the travel-mug.
His eyes went yellow at the edges. His knuckles whitened on the door-frame. The wolf was close enough to the surface to be visible to a man who had never been taught to look. Marcus, it would become clear, was looking.
Kaiden turned. He went down the porch steps and into the trees at a pace that Marcus could be expected to read as flight, which it also was. Shame went with him in the line of his back as he ran.
Marcus, recovering, said:
— Was that a man.
She did not answer.
— Sweetheart. Come home.
— No.
He set the travel-mug down with great care and smiled the small smile of a man about to confess a virtue.
— I should tell you something, he said. I haven’t been hiding it, exactly. I just thought you should know now, given all of this. There was the smallest of pauses, in which he was, she understood afterwards, expecting her to ask. She did not ask. He continued.
— Your morning tea. For two years. Just a little. To take the edge off.
She was very still.
It was not that she had not known. It was that she had not, until that moment, been permitted to know. Ten years assembled themselves at once into a single shape that she had been carrying around without seeing — the postponed wedding, the wedding she had wanted to postpone again, the headaches she had blamed on her work, the work she had begun to do badly, the fragility she had been told was hers and that she had, on balance, agreed must be hers. The shape was, she noticed with a clarity that felt almost technical, not hers. It belonged to him.
— Get out, she said.
— Elena —
— Get out of my aunt’s house.
He went. He took the travel-mug.
⁂
In the morning she walked into the village square in the same clothes — she was, she had decided, past changing for him — and Marcus was waiting at the fountain. He had been talking for some time. The square watched without pretending not to. Sylvie at the café door, drying a cup. Two old men on a bench. The church sexton leaning on his broom. A boy of perhaps nine on a bicycle who had stopped pedalling without dismounting.
— You’re not well. I am taking you home.
— No.
— Elena.
— Marcus, she said, very evenly. Get in your car. Drive to the motorway. Do not turn around.
For the first time in his life, Marcus raised his voice. The words, in his mouth, sounded borrowed. Sylvie, behind him, set the cup down on the doorframe and folded the cloth without taking her eyes off them.
— I doubt it, Elena said.
She turned and walked across the cobbles toward the café and away. After a long moment she heard the Range Rover door slam and the engine start, and the car pulled away. The square went back to its weather. Sylvie picked up the cup again and went on drying it.
Inside the café Elena put a hand on the door-frame and stood there until her breath came back.
— Coffee, said Sylvie, not as a question.
— Please, Elena said, and was, she noticed, already laughing slightly.
⁂
She found him at the foot of an old pine half a mile into the Hollow that afternoon. The trail of blood through the moss was not subtle. She had, she realised on the way, never tracked anything in her life and had no trouble doing it now.
He was human. Pale. Breathing too shallow. Below the cut of his thigh the moss was black.
It was not panic that came, but the opposite — the calm of someone who had decided. She knelt. She tore the silk scarf at her throat, pale grey, the one she had been wearing the day Marcus proposed, and bound the wound tight above the round.
— Silver, he said.
— I gathered.
— You should leave.
— I’m bored, she said, of being told what I should do.
She got her shoulder under his arm and lifted. Together they began the long walk back through the trees, slow and badly coordinated, his weight bigger than she had imagined and softer in her arms than she had imagined, neither of which she had time to articulate to herself just then.
Halfway home he said, Margaret saved my father. His voice barely carried. She kept him walking.
He told her the rest of it that night, in the kitchen, by lamplight, while she boiled water and tore a clean sheet into bandages. He told her what mating with him would mean. He spared her nothing. He did not, this time, decide for her.
She listened. She thought about her flat in London with the engineered oak floors. She thought about the Hadley project, which she would, she now knew, finish remotely and then not take another like it. She thought about being ill for the last three years and not having been ill at all. She thought about her mother, briefly, and about the wood at sixteen, and about her aunt, who had been writing this very conversation into existence in a notebook for forty years.
— Yes, she said.
He did not ask which question she was answering. He already knew.
⁂
Dawn came pale to the cabin porch. Mist rising off the long grass, the kettle inside just clicked off. Elena came out barefoot, hair down, in a man’s flannel shirt that was his, with a chipped mug she had filled herself. There was nothing especially significant about the mug. It happened to be the one to hand.
A sound at the tree-line. Paws on pine needles. She did not flinch.
From the trees, in single file, came six wolves. Then, in human form among them, Sylvie — flannel shirt, boots, an unhurried smile of the sort Elena had not received from a sister in any branch of her family. Then Kaiden, healed, half a pace ahead of the rest, with that same considered bearing he had had at the wood-shed. The bearing of someone who had spent a decade declining to want things and had recently, against his better judgement, begun.
He stopped at the edge of the long grass and waited for her.
Recognition, settled now. Not new. Hers.
She set the mug on the porch rail. She stepped off the porch. The grass was cold under her bare feet, a fact she registered in the way one registers small physical facts at moments one will be expected to remember.
Sylvie nodded once. Kaiden watched her come.
She reached them. She took Kaiden’s hand. The pack closed around them — six wolves, one woman, one man whose hand had stopped trembling for the first time in ten years — and they turned together and walked into Blackwood Hollow.
The cabin behind them, its door still open, its kettle resetting itself on the counter, would still be there when she came back.
It was only afterwards, walking, that she realised she was no longer thinking in sentences her mother would have approved of.
end