Wolf Boy

Transcript

Alright, so I meant to record this for Feral Friday, but I was having a bad day, so you get it now. I don't think you're going to complain, are you? This is a poem that I wrote, inspired by a dream, enjoy.

She had just become a woman when she first dreamed of him, but was it a dream? Wild boy, lanky, gloriously undamed hair, eyes shining intensely from behind the wolfen mask, watching her as she watched him. Two figures standing at the edges of the meadow, one with a solid house at her back, one silhouetted against the trees.

There was no need to touch, those eyes alone were enough. She awoke to liquid heat between her thighs, a call she could not resist. After she died that first time, arched and sweaty and radiant, she slipped back into dreams of beautiful wolf boys and haunting songs.

As a young woman she returned, already weary of the world beyond the forest, aching for something she could not name. It was only to be a brief respite, she mourned leaving as she arrived. By this time, dreams of the wolf boy had faded, an ancient mural covered over with so many peeling layers of paint, not quite visible but still present.

Something wild and alive and hungry stirred deep in her belly when she lay down to sleep. She awoke from feverish dreams, fire, sunlight, lightning, the heat of bodies entwined, to scratches at the screen door overlooking the meadow. There stood her wolf boy, no longer lanky but all alive, long-limbed, wiry muscle and long, sharp-toothed grin under the wolf face mask, wordlessly calling her to come out.

Her hands shook, sparking sparkling energy in her nerves as she slid the door open and set a bare foot in the dew-damned grass and slipped her hand in his. They dashed toward the meadow, but her steps slowed as the trees loomed and the house grew small. He pulled at her, then stopped, tilting his head, and oh, the sharp, vibrant song in her heart, and how the moonlight shimmered in the waves of his unruly, untameful hair, before turning back towards the meadow, leaving her between the house and the trees.

She knew it was her choice, longed for him to take it from her, turn back and take her, let her pretend she did not know what she wanted. She did not turn back. She had to choose.

She had to choose. She felt something in her slowly rip apart, the sweetest pain she had ever known, as she turned her back to the house and bounded into the meadow. They chased each other through the tall grass, treating places as hunter and hunted, until finally they collapsed in a tangle of arms and legs and biting, desperate, needy kisses, until they had to part, panting and gasping for air.

They traced the moonlight on each other's faces, drowned in the mirrored lakes of their eyes, rejoining in tender, unhurried, gentle exploration, holding each other in the softly trampled grass of a deer bed, flowers beneath their skin, and stars born in the collision of their bodies. In the morning she awoke, refreshed but aching from the most beautiful dream. In the shower she watched dried dandelion florets and soil spiral down the drain, and combed long grafts from her hair.

She admired the scratches along her hips, and the tattoos of sharp kisses on her breasts, sorrowful at the thought of covering them. Wishing they were scars, she did not want to forget, to believe it had been only a dream. She returned again, still young, but not that young.

Her friends no longer joked that she would be a spinster, and her mother cooed pointedly over the chubby, soft pink babies of her cousins. She had grown quiet and still, unsettled and unsettling in the world of men. Her eyes seemed so far away, her ears trained on the sounds of the forest where she dwelled alone, listening for the plaintive call of wolf-voices in the dark outside her window.

She did not, could not, wait for sleep this time. She did not, want to, need to, wait for him to come. In the bloody fire of the setting sun, she strode slowly, calmly, into the meadow, without looking back.

He was waiting for her at the edge of the trees, where golden light gave way to sylvan shadows. He was not the boy she had known. He stood tall, moved with a grace that nearly moved her to tears, with how fiercely she craved his body against hers.

His deep, gold eyes, captivating, a slant, lined in black. The strong lines of his chest and back and arms and legs finally furred in the softest velvet. He did not wear a mask, after all.

She fell upon him with the inevitable gravity of a wave crashing on the beach, hungry, so, so hungry for him. She answered the sharp-toothed grin with her own bite, pleading, demanding, needing. He pulled her down to the earth with him, held her firm and sure, as she broke her fast, filled her hands and mouth and carned within, feasting like a starved animal, unaware, uncaring of her guttural whimpers and howls, the only way she knew to tell him what was in her wild heart.

She claimed him, knees and hands pressed into the yielding, damp, cool moss and dirt, wrote him urgently, desperately, her body searching, stalking, marking him. Her nails raised rivers of blood, fresh and bright and triumphant, across his chest as she crested, peeked, broke around him. When the tide ebbed at last and the sickle of the waning moon shone for them, she dozed in his arms, laughed at the wounds she had left, nuzzled into him and slept.

They danced through that night, determined that this time there would be no question of dreams. He sang for her, her song, the one that echoed in her heartbeat and in each breath as they took their fill, drifting in the rhythm of the waves, sweet, ferocious, delicate, savage, weaving in to the flow of desire, delight and pain and pleasure and wholeness. The first glimmers of dawn broke the spell.

She whimpered as he pulled away, not wanting to go, but there was still work to be done in the other world, the one that felt like a dream. She left knowing he had marked her with more than teeth this time, had given her a gift to carry with her back to that other world, so that her untamed, uncaged soul would not be alone, would never again be alone. She returned one last time, a woman in her own right, her wolf in spirit, no longer suitable for the world of cities and cars and noise and dirty air and poisoned water.

As she ran across the meadow, her own wild-eyed, sharp-toothed child pressed to her chest. She saw him waiting for her, magnificent, wild, free. All of her ached at the sight.

She slipped off her shoes, that she might race just a bit faster. Behind him in the shadows waited other willowy figures, pressing forward eagerly to greet her. She was pulled into his arms, the familiar warmth and musk settling into her skin like a soothing bath at the end of a long journey that had chilled her to the bone.

His embrace held space for the barren, as if they had always been three. The others, her pack, enveloped them, wrapping around like the tightly packed petals of an almost blooming wildflower. She lost herself, found herself, adrift in a sea of soft hands, nuzzling cheeks, yips of delight and welcome.

She was home, and she would never again leave.