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The girl buzzes him up to her apartment a few minutes past 10.
He wedges his foot in the sill to keep the door open as he stubs out his cigarette on the railing. The dog-end goes back into his battered pack of Lucky Strikes as he slips inside.
It’s too bright in the lobby. Cold light pouring from every fixture, ugly and harsh. No room for the privacy of a shadow. He shakes his head fast, blinking away stars, and when his vision’s recovered, he thumbs the business card out of his pocket to double-check her apartment number. It’s thick, creamy cardstock, too processed to carry any lingering smell from the tree it came from.
He looks at the wrong side first. Sebastian Howard, Account Executive is stamped in the center. Underneath is a phone number and company name he doesn’t recognize. He remembers the girl shuffling a whole stack of similar-looking cards like a magician, winking as she’d told him to stop her at any time.
“I get so many of these,” she confessed. “Reckoned I might as well repurpose ‘em.” Her voice briefly slipped out of that clipped neutral American accent, vowels dripping long and leisurely with a deep-South drawl. “Ooh, there ya go. I guess I’m Sebastian this time.”
She flipped it over and scrawled her address on the back. She’d smiled as she’d tucked it into his jacket pocket, flashing those crooked canines of hers, the ones that had caught his attention in the first place.
The rickety elevator takes him up to the 5th floor. A small old woman, smelling of stomach cancer and sour milk, gets on as he gets off. She’s wearing a whole sheep’s worth of wool as a coat and her hands are covered in oil-stained, weathered cow-skin.
She squints at him with rheumy eyes as he passes her. “You stink of dog,” she says in Hungarian.
“Wolf, not dog, nagyi,” he says pleasantly. There’s a faint satisfaction as she jumps right before the elevator doors close.
He sniffs the air as he heads to the girl’s apartment. He smells weed, cat piss, and, wafting out from a door to his left, the fatty aroma of spiced meat, savory enough to make his mouth water. The cigarettes blunt the worst of his senses, but these buildings are always ripe with humanity, hundreds of ecosystems contained in their neat squares, like one of those tasty Japanese bento boxes.
It’s loud too, for being as late as it is. Alice In Chains throbs and growls over the click-pops and crackles of the turntable it’s playing on. There’s an argument in Spanish. Another in Russian.
He finds the girl’s apartment at the very end of the hallway. There’s a sunflower welcome mat outside, and he does her the courtesy of scraping his boots before he knocks on the door.
Inside the apartment, there’s the squeak of a chair being pushed back, then the soft pitter-patter of bare feet against hardwood.
The door cracks open, the deadbolt chain still on.
“Mister Wolf?”
He grunts in the affirmative and she closes the door, unlatches the deadbolt, and opens it again. She waves him inside quickly, eyes darting around the hall, checking if there’s anyone watching.
Her apartment is green, green, green. Peeling pine green paint on the walls, fluffy olive green carpet in front of the small TV, small apple-green paper lanterns strung up on wire around the ceiling. It reminds him of the forests, even though everything else is wrong: the smell, the ambient noise of grunge music instead of crickets and rustling wind-through-leaves, the boxed-in squareness.
She laughs nervously when he’s inside, rubbing her exposed arms. She’s only wearing a white linen shift dress. “Clever. Usually nobody gets more creative than Smith or Jones.”
“Dunno. Sebastian was pretty good.” He doesn’t try to argue with her. Jamie Wolf’s what’s on his ID, but it’s not his real name. He doesn’t think he has one, but if a “real name” is the first thing he was called, then it’d likely be either Monster-that-Ate-Claude! or Huge-Thing-Chasing-Us!
She smiles shyly, not quite wide enough to show off those prominent canines he likes so much. She looks younger without the makeup she’d been wearing at the bar. There’s a dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her mouth is too big for her small face. He thinks back to the last girl he’d hunted, the one in the red hood, young and juicy as a lamb, and his stomach twists with an urgent hunger-pang.
“How old are you?” he asks curiously. He offers her a cigarette.
She accepts it hesitantly. “How old d’ya want me to be?”
The wolf feels a little stupid. He’s walked among men long enough to guess how she must have interpreted that kind of question.
He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
She holds out her cigarette for a light. She draws in a few quick puffs, careful to blow the smoke out the corner of her mouth. She was different at the bar. Blew smoke right into his face with a grin.
He sparks up the remaining half of his cigarette from earlier, and they go to the living room to sit at a small card table covered in a blue gingham tablecloth.
He listens attentively as she goes over the rules.
“No anal. No hitting me.” She pauses thoughtfully, takes a drag from her cigarette, then amends, “Light spanking is fine.” She waits a second, looking at him expectantly, if a bit warily, and when he nods to show he’s still listening she continues. “If your cock’s goin’ in me, it’s gonna have a condom on it. Even blowjobs. No choking, don’t even put your hand there. No pulling my hair.”
She stops, blinks, and then runs a hand over her buzzed scalp with a self-deprecating laugh. “Never mind that one.”
“Never mind that one,” he echoes, to show he’s been paying attention.
She fidgets and taps ash from her cigarette. “So, we good?”
“Sure.”
Men think of this as a hunt. They’re on-the-prowl, they're chasing tail, they’re baiting and snaring their prey. The chase and then the kill – bar to bedroom. It never made sense to him; hunts don’t have rules, but he’s doing this to understand, and there’s still time.
They finish their cigarettes. He gives her the cash. She counts it, grins at the tip he included, and then scampers away to her bedroom. There’s the sound of a lock spinning, the click of metal-on-metal. There’s a long pause, shuffling, and then the whisk of fabric over skin.
When she comes back out, she’s in a black satin slip trimmed with lace. She drapes herself against the door, letting him get a good look, and sways her hips as she returns to the table.
He guesses it’s supposed to be enticing, but lingerie’s never made much sense to him, conceptually. It’s a bit like keeping a chicken sandwich in its wrapper.
She leans across the table and flutters her lashes. “So. Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for tonight, handsome?”
Her inflection’s gone artificially crisp and sophisticated, imitating someone older, more confidently seductive. He doesn’t think he likes it.
“Not looking for anything complicated,” he says, with a one-shouldered, rueful shrug. “Never done this before. Wanted to see what it’s all about.”
She laughs like she finds that charming. “Aw! Always flattered to pop someone’s cherry.” She winks, teasing. “Don’t tell me I’m your first girl at all.”
“Not my first girl,” he agrees, before he realizes she’s talking about sex.
She comes around the table. She pushes off his jacket playfully, then fists a handful of his flannel and tugs him up and towards her bedroom. The lights inside are comfortably dimmed. The bed is covered in a thick comforter and looks soft and inviting. There’s a variety pack of condoms nestled between two blood-red throw pillows. The air is thick with lavender-scented smoke from a candle burning on the bedside table.
“Make yourself comfortable.” She gestures at her room expansively, a lady inviting a man into her estates. It always gives him a pleasant jolt, how gamely most humans trust him, how easy it is to pass as one of them undetected.
“Thank you,” he replies respectfully, enjoying the performance of man.
He gets comfortable. He strips all the way down, pinches out the candle, and moves the box of condoms out of the way so he can spread out wide on the bed. The mattress is the coziest thing he’s ever laid on, and he forgets himself for a second, wriggling happily, belly-up, almost kicking his legs in the air.
The girl barks out a surprised laugh. “You really get comfortable, huh?”
He rumbles in contented agreement, and she settles into a sitting position beside him, folding her legs underneath herself. She runs a finger down his cheek all the way to the corner of his mouth. He instinctively snaps his teeth and she flicks his nose reproachfully.
“Bad boy.”
“Is it against the rules?” he asks, so serious that it makes her giggle.
“I guess not.”
She lowers herself onto her elbows. A pink flush spreads over her cheeks, and she places a timid hand on his bicep. She bites her lip and steals a look up at him, like she’s checking for permission.
For what, he isn’t sure. He waits to be asked a question, but she doesn’t say anything. Her flush deepens and she gently trails her hand up to his shoulder, then across to his chest.
“You got a nice body, mister.”
He preens, pleased that she likes it. “Don’t I?”
It was expensive. A lissome witch-boy, honey-haired and sharp-eyed, made it for him in exchange for two strigoi hearts, a clove of raskovnik, a pretty diamond necklace, and five live chickens, which the wolf had carried very carefully in his jaws, one at a time.
On the day of the summer solstice, the witch-boy took the wolf to the long green grass behind his cabin and set down a bowl of blood and ground herbs in front of him. The wolf lapped up the mixture, and it had made him very drowsy. He’d laid out, belly-up, on the sun-warmed grass, and the witch-boy rolled up his sleeves, took out his enchanted Bowie knife, and skinned the wolf alive.
The wolf stayed very still as the witch-boy fashioned him into a new shape; stretching his sinew like taffy, wrenching and twisting his bones, prodding his muscles into exciting new forms.
The witch-boy wrapped him in skin, which came with built-in hair and only two nipples, and then he washed his hands, wiped sweat off his brow, and chucked a pair of jeans and a flannel onto the wolf’s new bare legs.
“I have given you flesh, I have given you a face, I have made you a man. I have even given you nice abs, on the house.” The witch-boy made a face the wolf did not recognize. “Good fuckin’ luck out there, dipshit.” He slung the wolf’s pelt over his shoulders like a cloak, which the wolf admitted looked very becoming. “I’ll hang onto this until you need it, yeah?”
The wolf doesn’t mention any of this to the girl, because she looks preoccupied with his chest. She squeezes the meat on his breast for a little and then, bolder now, skates her hand down to his belly, to the faded silvery scar that not even the witch-boy could scrub away.
“What happened here, sugar?”
“I was cut open and stuffed with stones.”
She laughs brightly, showing off those prominent canines he likes so much, and he laughs with her. Her eyes, framed by long black lashes, are the color of amber.
“Take it off,” he urges, fingering her lingerie. “You won’t need it. I wanna see you.”
She unhooks the bra strap shyly, not meeting his gaze as she peels off the garment. She even crosses her arms in front of her chest for a moment, covering her small breasts. Goosebumps break out over her skin. Her nipples are hard dark nubs.
“Are you cold?” the wolf asks. “Here, lay back down, I’ll keep you warm.”
“My, what a gentleman,” she says.
She lowers to her side, facing him. She takes one of the small red throw pillows and places it between their crotches before she eases in closer.
She tangles a hand in his hair, closes her eyes, and kisses him. She isn’t the wolf’s first kiss. She’s– hm. He counts fast.
In order: two delectably plump girls at a bus stop in Sarasota. It’d been dusk, and the bus was late, and they let him bum a cigarette from them as they waited. (His first cigarette!) They’d asked him how he liked it, and they’d pressed in close from either side, their hands on his thighs, his arms. They’d kissed his neck, and then his mouth, laughing when he didn’t know what to do with his tongue. (He recalls he’d also misplaced his wallet that night. Unfortunate.)
A black-haired girl at a humid nightclub In Tallahassee. She’d smelled so strongly of menstrual blood he’d started to salivate. She’d caught him staring and crooked her finger, beckoning him onto the dance floor, and they’d swayed together and kissed for a few songs. It’d been nice, but when the wolf politely asked if she’d be amenable to sneaking off to the bathroom to let him lick her cunt clean she’d slapped him hard across the face and darted away. He’d been so surprised he hadn’t given chase.
A boy at a house party in Savannah, delicate and blue-eyed like his witch. Two men had offered the wolf $40 and a small bag of cocaine to kiss the boy and put the boy’s dick in his mouth. He would’ve done it for free, but the cocaine and the extra money were nice, and afterwards the boy bent down to whisper in the wolf’s ear that he was sweet. (Out of all of them, the wolf wanted to eat him the most. He still thinks of him fondly.)
A stooped old woman at a deli in Baltimore. She’d tapped his arm and asked him a question he didn’t understand, and when he leaned in to hear her better, she’d lunged forward and pressed a kiss smack-dab on his mouth.
So, okay, his sixth. He thinks he’s getting better at it. He finds a rhythm with her mouth and mimics the thing the boy in Savannah had done with his tongue. He can taste the cheeseburger she ate earlier, which makes him hungry, but also the harsh bite of the mouthwash she must’ve used before he came, which he doesn’t care for.
When he starts to get bored, he flexes up onto all fours and considers her.
“Go to your back,” he says. Then, wheedling, “Please?”
She does so, but hesitantly, and makes an abortive gesture for the pillow when he takes it and sets it to the side.
“Don’t worry, I remember the rules,” he says sincerely.
She snort-laughs and her shoulders loosen. “S’your hour, sugar.” She shifts and blinks at him, long and slow like she’s trying to be flirtatious. “How d’ya want me?”
He shrugs.
She stiffens as he climbs on top of her, straddling her hips. “My, you are warm,” she says breathlessly.
He spares a nod and then crouches in, burying his face in her neck and sniffing deeply, grateful that there’s no hair in the way. She giggles when he presses the tip of his tongue against her jugular. Experimentally, he pinches a nipple like he saw in a porno. Her pulse jumps under his tongue, and for the first time something quickens low in his stomach, between his legs.
He licks down her neck, mouths at her tits, enjoying the saltiness of her skin and the faint tang of her sweat. He scoots lower. There’s a sparkly yellow jewel dangling from her bellybutton, and he takes it between his teeth and pulls lightly. She makes a funny noise.
Her scent is strongest where it’s concentrated between her legs, so he goes there next, pillowing his head on a slim thigh as he noses at her cunt. He’s never seen one so close before. Underneath the coarse, springy dark hairs the flesh is engorged and a deep pink that reminds him of the inside of a mouth. She moans when he runs a finger down its length. It’s wet in a sticky way that he thinks he likes. At the top is her clit, which looks like a very, very small version of his cock.
The girl squirms and makes an impatient noise. “If you keep starin’, my feelings are gonna get hurt.”
He raises his head and grins toothily. “Sorry.”
He’s starting to get excited now, and he eagerly returns his attention to her cunt. He’d prefer to keep staring for a while longer, because it’s very interesting to look at, but he decides to be good, and he obediently licks a long strip from her hole to her clit.
She makes a happy noise and pulls on his hair, tugging him closer. He licks her again, hungrier, burying his tongue between her folds and inside her hole. She tastes so good it makes him rumble with pleasure.
He flicks his tongue over her clit which gets him high-pitched yelps and whines. She’s cute, like a puppy, and he sucks her clit into his mouth like he’d done with the boy from Savannah. She huffs out a guttural noise and arches against him, grinding her crotch into his face.
His cock is hard, and it feels good where it’s trapped between his belly and the bed. He could probably be satisfied just doing this, but he’d paid for sex, and he isn’t sure this counts. Still, he keeps it up a while longer, until her thighs quiver, tense, and then finally relax.
She flops back, boneless, as he pushes up and grabs for the box of condoms. He messes up the first one, frowns, and looks to her imploringly. With an exhausted laugh, she helps him get the second one on properly.
“Stay here, stay like this,” he says pleadingly when she starts to roll to her stomach. He wants to smell her breath, lick her jugular, press his palm against her left breast to feel the pump of her heart under his hand.
“Romantic, huh?” she says, dryly.
It doesn’t sound like a real question, so he doesn’t reply. She opens her legs and he arranges himself between them. It takes a moment to find her hole from this angle, but once he does she’s so slick that he slips in easily. He gasps at the hot, tight clench of her body around him, flexing like a live muscle.
He thrusts into her, getting a feel for it. He never did this as a wolf either; that wasn’t the sort of story he was. When he tore into little girls it was with his claws, when he entered their bodies he used his fangs.
He watches her reactions curiously. She digs her heels into his back and her breathing gets ragged when he makes his thrusts short and fast, so he does that more.
He likes this, he thinks. It’s not a hunt, but it’s flesh and movement and panting and sweat. She tilts her head back, groaning. Her throat strains, showing off all her pretty tendons and muscles. He almost drools at the sight.
He can’t resist biting the join of her neck and shoulder. It’s a gentle bite, but it makes her moan, and he clamps down, excited. He releases her when she cries out, but a few seconds later he’s dipping down to bite her again, harder. It doesn’t break skin but she twists her fingers in his hair like she’s trying to yank his head away.
He considers releasing her, but he likes it, likes the taste of her skin and the appetizing whimpers coming from her throat. It’s not against any of the existing rules, and she hasn’t given him any new rules, either.
He fucks into her faster, bites a new spot further up her neck. She makes a hurting noise, loud and urgent.
He can’t imagine wanting those noises to stop. In Tallahassee, he’d listened as two men commiserated with each other about how loud their wives were, squealing like stuck pigs. He didn’t understand then (he adores pigs), and he doesn’t understand now. He loves the sounds she’s making the same way he loved the noisy gurgles of slaughtered sheep, the terrified snorts of deer, the screams of the girl in the red hood when she’d seen his teeth.
Those memories stir a new sort of excitement in him. He bites her again, sharp and quick. She lets out a raw, punched-out sound and he huffs delightedly against her jaw.
He kisses along her jaw, so fond of her, as ravenously hungry for her as he’s been for all the things he’s eaten. This is a sort of hunt, he thinks. He’s inside her like teeth in a wound.
“You’re so beautiful,” he pants, overcome with emotion. He pulls back just enough to admire the bite marks he left along her neck. “The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”
Her amber eyes blink wide. Her fingers spasm in his hair. Her mouth parts, and she fixes him with a muzzy look of confusion. Maybe she’s come to expect something different. He’s starting to gather that men hold their prey in contempt. Maybe the witch-boy was wrong – maybe he’s not a man at all, not fully, because he doesn’t feel any contempt for her.
He never felt contempt for the goats or the chickens either. Why would he feel contempt for something he wants so badly?
He digs his teeth into a spot he’s bitten before and speeds up his thrusts. She wails in pleasure-pain, or maybe just pain, bucking underneath him like an animal in its death throes.
One of her hands flies to his stomach. Her short nails dig into the old axe-scars, and he rumbles with pleasure. He wonders if she’d be able to slice him open too. She’s small, but she has lean, corded arms, a boyishly muscled body. If her form was good, she probably could bury an axe in his belly, open him wide. He likes the idea of her inside of him too, although now that he thinks about it a strap-on (like he’s seen girls wear in the lesbian zines he’s thumbed through at the cramped little bookstore near his apartment) might be easier and more practical.
He adores her so much! His dick feels amazing, sososo good. She smells fantastic. Her eyes look like jewels. He would love to pluck them out and keep them forever. He’d love to eat her up, too. There’s no rules against that.
He whines through his orgasm, snapping his hips as his dick pulses. He presses light, affectionate kisses to each of the bite marks he left as he pulls out. A couple are starting to bruise, dark blood spotting under the skin.
“We should do this again,” he says as he carefully peels off the condom.
She looks reluctant. She rubs her throat, but doesn’t move away from him. “You hurt me,” she says, without accusation.
“I won’t do it again, if you tell me not to,” the wolf says, a little regretfully. He’ll miss it, the feeling of his teeth in her skin. “And next time you can fuck me instead, if you like.”
She considers it. “Okay,” she says.
Immensely pleased, he folds himself around her, his chest flush to her back, his arms wrapped around her slim waist. She inhales a startled noise.
“I don’t know if I can do round two–”
“Oh, no,” the wolf says. “I just wanted to touch you. But I can go, if you like.”
“No,” she says. She sounds very young. “This is fine.”
She settles against him, relaxing slowly. After a while her breathing goes long and deep.
She’s prey he can return to over and over again, he thinks. That’s something he’d never considered, but he realizes he likes it very much. Maybe next time she can be the predator, and he can be prey. Maybe he’ll even give her a knife, see what she does with it.