Lux

Their voices rang through the frozen water of any human’s sleep. . .
- John Haines, “Wolves”


Oh god, when he fucks me it feels so good. I love the way his body hair rubs up against my skin. The hair on his chest brushing against my breasts. And the way his cock is so thick, makes me stretch. He doesn’t fit in too deeply, but he pounds me when he’s excited and it hurts, but I don’t want him to stop. I literally hobble to the bathroom when we’re done.

He closes his eyes and I figure he’s fantasizing about his ex-girlfriend. I’ve seen her, she’s one of those classic beauties. Despite his own wolven attributes her new lover is positively canine with her: constantly sniffing her, feeling her up. She makes a nice trophy for a social climber. The night I met him we sat at a table in a dark corner, drinking vanilla cognac, and I listened to him talk about her for what seemed hours.

“I was too careful with her,” he said softly. He wasn’t looking at me, just watching the smoke from his cigarette swirl around in the draft. That bar was always vaguely cold, the building riddled with the chilly cross-currents of the constant wind outside. There’s an indoor firepit in one corner, where most everyone gathers until they’ve warmed themselves with the libation of their choice, but those cliques are iron-clad closed societies. I was warned by so many, at the grocery store, the post office, the drugstore – stay away from the Half Moon, they don’t like our kind – but then I saw him in daylight, slightly blurred, all leather and dusty sheen and my longing flowered like something beautifully poisonous.


When I seated myself, alone, and the bartender turned his yellow eyes to mine, a suspicious narrowing more accusation than question, I was determined in a particularly trembling fashion. I knew of him as well, a hulking specimen named Gypsy who brooked no conflicts within the space nor any concoction which involved alcoholic trickery. I had information, pried reluctantly from the woman who ran the thrift store, nominally. Upstairs she had quite a different business, and when I saw the sign above the door I realized I had found my secret squirming grail, the crux of my dreaming desire.

“You’re lost,” he said, his voice a hair above a growl.

“No.”

“I said,” he responded, coming to within an inch of my face, nostrils flaring, “you’re lost.”

“Oh let her get a drink, Gypsy. She obviously came in here for a reason.”

It was him, seated solitary at the other end of the bar. He melted into the gloom of the darkened wood and attendant shadows. But I could see the gleam of his dark blue eyes, burning within that vulpine face, sharp-angled and smirking.

“Tourists get water,” Gypsy snapped.

“Thank you,” I said, my voice high and strange. Several had turned their heads to observe me, sniffing disdainfully. I had followed her sage advice.

”Spice yourself, girl. Otherwise they’ll treat you like what you are.”
“What is that?”
“Meat.”

A smudged glass, cloudy ingredients, an expression daring me to drink. No doubt he had spit in it. But I drank, and did taste a warm saltiness. I told myself it was only a harbinger of things to come and swallowed the entire glass. Gypsy decided that was evidence enough of my tenacity and let me be, moving away towards the center of the bar. And he had relocated to a nearby table, a curvy golden bottle and two snifters in front of him. He motioned me with a jerk of his head and I picked up a nearby ashtray as I saw him remove a bronze case from his coat pocket. When I sat beside him on the left side he shook his head imperceptibly.

“Never sit with your back to anyone in here,” he murmured.

I moved to the right and he poured me a shot of cognac, then one for himself. A gleam of metal as he lit a cigarette, placing the lighter on the table. I gave him a quizzical glance.

“Stainless steel.”

We drank for a time, watching the others around the fire drink in kind; but they also spoke, and laughed, enjoyed themselves as anyone seeking social contact might do. Occasionally I noticed a glare, or curiosity barely disguised. Eventually he chuckled, as dry as the ash smoldering in the ceramic bowl.

“You’re a cipher. We don’t like to be confused.”

“Is it bad?”

“Not especially, just confusing.” He sniffed openly for clarification. “You smell like cinnamon,” he pronounced.

“It’s cardamom, actually.”

“It doesn’t really hold anyone back, is that what she told you?”

“More or less.”

We drank more, I felt myself dissolve around the edges slightly: warm and insensate. Although he had refilled his glass three times, it appeared to have no effect on him. His kind was known for their love of vice, toys to pass the time, but nothing could ensnare their strange biology.

“Why does someone seek acceptance where they know there will be none forthcoming?”

I opened my mouth to speak, then realized as I viewed his face that the question was rhetorical. He began talking, and I felt I was eavesdropping, but unless he specifically rejected my presence I planned to remain. Perhaps even if spurned.

“I’m a rogue now, lost my sovereignty. She was my queen, precious though also prickly. Difficult. I am unable to ascertain why I lost her, except perhaps I prized her too highly. And now she is gone.”

His gaze was exacting, I could see her: alabaster skin and raven hair. Entirely a poster child for their outsider posturing. Though the sciences had lately conceded their afflictions might be more than the sum of their restless disenfranchisement. And the communities went beyond the whispering into exact coordinates, places where beings uneasily resided side-by-side, acceptance had a decided paranoid aura.

I had sought such a place for as long as I could remember.

Eventually the maudlin confessions receded, leaving a conversational shore completely barren of interest. I had been studying him the entire time, his charms in more direct focus. His hair was roughly the same color as my own, a medium shade of brown, nearly to the center of his back. As his brethren did, he was possessed of a full beard, though his was more groomed than some others. His lower lip protruded and I could glimpse a slight hint of his filed teeth. They all filed their teeth for acceptance into the strict hierarchy of pack allegiance. His hair was braided in some spots, wound at the bottom with pieces of leather and beads. The sides were pulled to the back and tied. Underneath the scent of tobacco and leather I could smell something thick and strong. The musk of unwashed skin and sweat. Something assertively male. Through the gap in his coat and shirt underneath I could see that his body hair was relatively noticeable, his neck and chest were covered, though the hair was not thick, but definitely present.


It was snowing outside, the flakes were wet and it seemed more a light slush falling from the sky. He turned up his collar and I suppressed an urge to brush the snow from his hair.

The parking lot was lit by a solitary lamp, casting a large circular shadow on the ground, bluish halogen light competing with the moon.

“What is it you want?” he asked. His inquiry was calm and measured rather than annoyed, which I took to be a good sign.

“A pet is small comfort for an outcast, but I’ll be whatever you’d like, do anything you want.”

To prove my point I dropped to my knees, immediately soaking my jeans, and carefully unlatched the fly of his pants, sending the warmth of my breath onto his genitals. My tongue tasted salt and sourness but I breathed again and gently inhaled him as he had the smoke, with hands to guide against the cloth.

“It’s freezing out here,” he said softly. Not a rebuke.

I breathed again and he closed his eyes.


The room was perennially dark, the windows covered with black fabric, stapled into place.

“I thought light didn’t bother you?”

“It doesn’t. But I’m as nocturnal as any other fringe creature.” His tone was dryly sardonic and I liked the crispness of his voice when he said such things.

He lit a few candles, but they did little to illuminate actual details. I hung back as he pushed an apparent pile of clothing off the bed, and that smell of sweat and semen returned. He shed his clothes seemingly as afterthought, shrugging them off at a leisurely pace. His body was lean, scarred, though he had a bit of paunch and the beginning of love handles. His left arm bore a tattoo that identified him as a member of a particular clan, while a larger piece on his back below the left shoulder showed a jaggedly-rendered howling wolf: all spikes of fur, teeth, and glowing vengeful eyes.

But the feature which held my interest was his pelt, that covering of brown hair which went from his throat all the way down to his crotch, his skin visible beneath but no doubt that he was wolf, whatever the actual physical explanation. A line of hair rose up from his coccyx, but stopped just short of his back. His legs were also thoroughly covered along with the tops of his feet. He sat down on the mattress, his back against the wall, his posture indolent as he waited for me to do something. The outcome was obvious so I took off my clothes, shivering slightly. Climbing onto the bed I bent to offer fellatio again, but he easily put me onto my back, firmly possessive, and proceeded to sniff at me, starting with my hair and moving his nose all the way down my body, each breath as he exhaled then inhaled stirring my nerve endings, giving me goosebumps not already brought forth from the ambient temperature of the room.


They snarl when they fuck. After my first time I wasn’t sure what to believe, so many stories of the wolves and what they do to their sexual partners move through every facet of informational exchange, ending up vague and apocryphal. So only experience could truly provide me with what I required: the recreation of that very first time when I feared for my life, mixed with a perverse delight in the way in which I was seemingly coveted: sniffed and nipped and scratched and broken. The meaning of intimate reality, fractured beyond repair.

“What’s your name, girl?” A question, calling attention to my status as something less glorious than he. I answered him, and asked in kind. I expected a snarl, or a growl for my troubles, as that was the type of response I had been given before, as I chased a rumor, a dream, among those I found at tribal gatherings always attended by our kind, watching on the fringe as the freaks enact their rituals of bonding, of belonging.

“They call me Lux,” he said. Then he smiled, wry commentary on his existence, I imagined.

But his kiss, teeth scraping against my lower lip and the sides of my mouth, against my tongue and my neck as it wanders seeking heat and a proximity to blood, is warm as I know light to be.


I am surprised that we fuck in every position, not merely the one always mockingly referred to as doggy style, which brings to mind stolen glimpses of couplings in fields, around fires and in the star-ridden darkness, watching and wishing for the same consideration. Sanctioned savagery: long taloned hands wrapped around throats, tangled in hair, and always the battering ram thrusting: meant to bruise and remind the vessel of the master’s ultimate dominion. That I craved to be fucked so very hard, sought the attention from human males, only eventually to be shunned as a lycanthrophile. Not uncommon, but decidedly unnatural.

I cannot tell you why I seek this, though I imagine there is some psychological explanation, to relive an unexpected turn, a near-miss of adventuring risk. I am aware I could never be loved, not as people expect to love, and return the sentiment in kind. But I crave the collision of strangers, the shadow outside the paradigm of my own reckoning; and he rewards my curiosity with thrust after relentless thrust, with pain and lust, uncaring of my comfort or of my pleasure. But he laughs when I cry out, my eyes watering. He understands that despite the peril I have chosen this path, and views me afterwards with a glint of respect coloring his gaze, barely seen in the dim smoky murk. I move towards my clothing on the floor, silent but covetous of his skin, I imagine this is my last glance and I want to absorb as much detail as possible. But his eyebrows, framing his piercing eyes perfectly, rise in query. He pats the mattress beside him, then speaks.

“If you’re going to stay, come back to bed before you turn to ice.”

I recall that his kind do not require warmth, perhaps they only mime the memory of the chill.

I extinguish the candles and slide into his arms. He thoughtfully covers me with blankets and his body and we sleep in true creature comfort, curved around one another. In faint daylight I am thoroughly trapped; his arms and legs completely wound around me, his face nearly buried against the back of my neck. I have no desire to do anything to disturb this trap, even as I am aware that he smells a great deal more pungent after sex, in the midst of sleep, and snores as well.

Qualities I could have never endured in a man.