When I got the save-the-date card in the mail, I remember thinking how well an autumn wedding would complement my sister- with her long auburn hair and New England Chic sensibilities- and by the ocean, no less, where she might as well be a vision of Aphrodite emerging from the sea foam. As I studied the folded stationary more closely, I realized the tricolored artwork adorning the embossed front cover wasn’t a sunset, as I had originally thought. Rather, it depicted a moonrise over the ocean, with its ghostly light fading in the ripples of the water.
A familiar chill ran down my spine, as the smile quickly faded from my face. I turned to the hi-tech clairvoyance of my iPhone before giving myself over completely to the mounting panic. It had been years since I last had to look up the lunar calendar, but I still had it bookmarked vigilantly in my browser, as a precautionary measure, just in case. I cupped a trembling hand over my mouth when I ultimately confirmed my worst fear: My sister would be married on the harvest moon!
I don’t think anyone else knew that Greg was a werewolf. Not that there weren’t obvious signs, but the very notion must have been too outlandish for any serious person to consider. I was still young enough to believe in ghosts and goblins and all sorts of nocturnal phantasms, when my sister brought him home for the first time, like a stray she had found on the side of the road.
My parents must have had their suspicions, but Greg was already so out of place in the prim and proper household where my sisters and I were raised; I don’t think they were ever able to quite put their collective finger on it. Before Greg, the only guys who wore work boots inside our house were those my dad would hire to fix a leak in the pipes or carry in a new appliance. Greg was older than my sister, smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets with white tank tops underneath. My mother and I would whisper about how he looked like a certain character from the show Sons of Anarchy (a guilty pleasure we would sometimes watch together when my dad wasn’t around). His thick and unruly hair always reminded me of animal fur, and the intensity of his striking blue eyes often made me feel like a deer caught in a pair of oncoming headlights.
More than his appearance, I was captivated by the way he treated my sister. Unlike other guys I had seen her with, Greg was firm with her, always holding her by the arm and marshaling her in and out of his old muscle car. At family dinners, he sat next to her and kept an arm around her waist, or a hand firmly clasped on the back of her neck while she ate. I could tell it made my parents uncomfortable, but it fascinated me to no end.
While this behavior was unsettling to the rest of my family, I had never seen my sister so happy. She exuded the same kind of subtle, don’t-fuck-with-me confidence that I had only ever noticed in women at the park who walk big and aggressive dogs on the end of their leash. I couldn’t help admiring her for that, envying her even, despite echoing the consensus of the rest of my family behind closed doors, about how he wasn’t a suitable boyfriend. Greg might have been arrogant, controlling and possibly dangerous, but the truth was: I was secretly smitten with him.
I, alone, knew Greg was a werewolf, only because my bedroom had been next to my sister’s, at the end of the long hallway opposite my parents’ room. Of course, she knew too. In fact, she knew him often, and I came of age listening to those animalistic sounds resounding through the shared wall of our bedrooms, every full moon. I admit; it frightened me at first, and it took more than one lunar cycle for me to realize that my wayward sister actually enjoyed the peril she faced on those late and harrowing nights.
This revelation frightened me more than anything, because it made me wonder: If my sister can enjoy such ferocious company in her bedroom, would I too someday enjoy being savaged by a man-turned-beast? Along with the many Disney princesses who chose similar fates in order to live happily ever after (think Beauty and The Beast), my sister was a role model, one who directly informed my conceptions of love, romance and now: sex.
I was a bit of a tomboy back then, brace-faced and a tad overweight. Never before having anything resembling a boyfriend, I think I would have fallen head-over-heels for any guy that gave me even a fraction of the attention as Greg did. In his subhuman gaze, I found a strange new awareness of my recently developing body. Although far from healthy, I felt he alone could appreciate or at least understand the very real metamorphosis which I was undergoing in my formative years, both physically and mentally.
At dinner, Greg would always finish what my sister and I left our own plates. He was always hungry, unsatiable to no end, and I made it my habit to offer him a bite of anything and everything I ate. I loved sharing my food and the underhanded but unavoidable intimacy that came with it. I could think of no greater thrill than tasting him on the rim of a soda can as we passed it back and forth in front of my unsuspecting sister, who couldn’t possibly have known how much saliva we were exchanging, and I wondered how much Greg’s extraordinary senses could decern about me from taste alone. Once, while I was washing dishes at the sink, Greg came up unexpectedly behind me and buried his nose in my recently washed hair. I was more than happy to stop what I was doing and let him take a long inhaul of my sent. “You used your sister’s hair conditioner.” He said, quite astutely and correct.
I wanted to feed all of his appetites and began changing more than just the hair products I used. Over the next few months, I changed the way I dressed, even the way I spoke and acted. I experimented with makeup and different hairstyles, imitating my sister’s signature teenage fatalism: choker-necklaces and halter tops, low-rise jeans with skimpy black thongs showing in the back. Anything to make his eyes linger a few seconds longer. Although I got straight A’s in school, I would make myself dumb and dollish whenever he was around. On Saturday mornings, my mother would scold me for walking around the kitchen still wearing what I had slept in: just my underwear and an oversized t-shirt like a makeshift nightgown. My sister always championed my cause and reminded my mother: “Greg isn’t company. He practically lives here!”
As I got older, my sister and I became more like friends than family members. Especially when she realized that, by including me in her plans, she could more easily navigate the impeding maze of questions and concerns which my parents imposed every time she left the house. Because I wasn’t as outwardly boy-crazy, I think they wanted to believe that I would be a responsible chaperone, a snitch or that my presence alone might keep her out of trouble. Boy were they wrong! In restaurant parking lots and the back rows of cinemas, they were constantly making out and pawing at each other over their clothes. Once they realized I wasn’t bothered by it, they started taking me everywhere, and I was more than happy to be their third wheel.
Once night, on the way home from the movies, Greg kept taking my sister’s hand and putting it insistently in his lap. “Not while my sister’s in the car.” She said but ultimately gave in to him like she always did. When she craned her head to check on me in the backseat, I pretended to be preoccupied with something else, far away, outside my window.
When I did inevitably look forward, between the two front seats, I could only glimpse at what they were doing in the intermittent headlights of passing cars. I had never seen a guy’s cock before, at least not any outside of health class textbooks or those scratched cartoonishly on the lockers at school. Cloaked only in shadow, Greg’s towered halfway up the steering wheel, taller than I would have expected and slouching slightly towards Bethlehem. Sleek and strong and crowned with a heretically mitred bishop’s hat, it was nothing like those flimsy anatomical diagrams, and I found myself apostatizing under my breath and abandoning the chaste playground doctrine which insubstantially claimed that girls rule and only boys drool.
Amanda eventually leaned over the center console and obstructed my view. Then I could only see the back of her head and hear the wet sounds of her mouth as she moved up and down on him, the way it sounds when you eat a sour candy or drink an especially thick milkshake. My heart was racing well before Greg veered accidently across the double yellow lines and swerved back in time to avoid the oncoming traffic. Even when another car honked its horn, I was still more concerned with what was going on in the front seat of ours.
As we turned off the main road and onto our own street, I could hear my sister laboring harder and more distinctly as the engine wound down. When we pulled into our driveway, she started to lift her head up. “I’m almost there.” Greg promised and urged her back down into his lap with a heavy hand on the back of her head. I opened my door to leave, but the interior lights came on and illuminated the surreptitious scene inside. I gasped at my mistake and quickly slammed the door shut again. But it didn’t matter: the inside of the car remained lit-up like a Broadway stage in the middle of our otherwise sleepy suburban neighborhood. Greg looked up to find me now perfectly visible in the rearview mirror, like an escaping convict exposed by the spotlight of a police helicopter. His blue eyes, more arresting than ever, turned me to stone. I couldn’t move; I couldn’t breathe. All I could do was stare back, my mouth agape in utter disbelief.
“Keep going.” He said to Amanda, but her never took his eyes off me.
Between his parted lips, I could see the extraordinary prominence of his canine teeth which seemed to grow disproportionately in his mouth the longer I looked. In the rearview mirror, he watched me bite down on my own lip in a vain attempt to wake myself from what I thought must be a fever dream. “Keep going.” He said to my sister but watched intently as I brought a hand up to cover my palpitating chest.
I was beside myself. Part of me wanted to run inside the house and lock the front door, surround myself in protective circles of salt and sage. Another part of me wanted to lean forward and take my sister’s outstretched hand, kiss it and beg to switch places with her. I felt I had to do something, anything, to ease my sister’s burden, but Greg’s unblinking eyes pinned me to the back of my seat more than any internal strife. Nervous and shaking with reservations, I lifted my shirt and turned-out my pushup bra in order to lend Greg an unprecedented view of my ample but still unsung breasts. Like a sacrificial offering, I hoped it might entice him long enough for Amanda to finish drawing out whatever poison had induced this untimely hysteria, more than a week before the next full moon.
It seemed to work, and Greg came to a guttural climax- snarling and licking his chops- while my poor sister drowned sweetly in his lap. But my shameless gambit, however successful in its effect, worked like a double-edge sword. In that I felt myself slowly succumbing to those same wild and unnatural urges acting on the two of them, and I found myself unexpectedly reluctant to cover up again, when the time came.
I hardly managed to get myself back in order, by the time my sister sat up all starry eyed and proud. She wiped her mouth and turned around to regard me like an accomplice to her crime: “You’re not going to tell mum and Dad about this, right?”
I offered her my pinky finger in full sincerity.
Coming soon…Part II: Sun Dogs
Source: reddit.com/r/Erotica/comments/yj773x/lycanthropy_a_love_song