A Wolf And His Man - 4. Big Changes

Regardless of when the full moon fell during the week, there were certain things that Oli liked to do in preparation of the four, sometimes five, days he would spend on all fours. There were certain disadvantages to being a fully functioning human consciousness trapped inside the body of a wolf. On the other hand, there were advantages in being able to plan for it.

Oli spent Sunday morning looping para-cord handles on the fridge, the lower cupboards and the lever handle of the exterior hose tap; he’d woven them himself after the first time he’d ever spent full moon alone in his new house and hadn’t been able to access any of the food he’d bought specifically to eat while he was wearing fur. He’d fitted a dog door into the back door when he’d first moved in, then basically denied doing so to anyone who ever happened to ask. As far as his neighbours knew, the house had come with it, and Oli was just too lazy to have it removed or permanently blocked. He unlocked the door, thinking that now that Buddy was well and healed and apparently happy, that he might leave it open all the time. He moved two wolves worth of dog meat to the bottom shelves of the fridge where they would be easy to eat, filled his water bowl up to the brim along with the big square plastic tub outside the back door and spent the rest of the afternoon doing laundry. It was always nice to shift back after a long full moon to have a hot shower and pour himself into a clean and comfortable bed.

Buddy followed him up and down the house as he did chores, walking at his heels down the stairs to the washing machine and back each time and keeping pace with him in the kitchen as he moved their food around for the next few days. The only item he wasn’t keen on was the hoover, and Buddy stood square on all fours on the armchair and stared at the machine like it might at any moment go from simply humming and sweeping back and forth, to actually attacking one of them. He didn’t bark, but his tail stood up and bristled until the vacuum was safely back in the under-stairs cupboard.

Oli talked to the wolf as he cleaned and readied the house about what would happen that evening. Timing the arrival of the full moon was not an exact science, but Oli usually started getting an awful hay-fever like prickling behind his eyes just before his fingers started to go numb. After that, he usually had about half an hour at the outside, to get himself home, safe, and naked.

“Full moon is painful.” He explained to Buddy as he loaded the fresh, wet laundry into the tumble dryer. “But only for the first ten or fifteen minutes. I really hope you don’t attack me while I’m changing, because you’ll win and I’ll end up dead.” He glanced at the wolf, who merely cocked his head to one side with an adorable sort of expression. “Yeah, I hope it’ll be fine too, otherwise…” Oli shook his head. “So what’s gonna happen is that I’m going to change.” He ended up sitting on the floor by the machine with Buddy snuffling around him and rubbing his thick furred body against Oli’s chest and ribs. “I’ll change, and it’ll be weird. Becoming a wolf is a rather painful experience, and a bit icky. Some of my bones will shrink, others will grow: joints will un-socket themselves and become new again. The fur is fun, a million tiny pin pricks all over your skin. I think the ears and eyes are the worst. I get like ‘sea sick’ with it, I can’t keep my eyes open at all or I spend at least two days with a huge migraine. Having a migraine and being wolf shaped at the same time hurts like hell. Sensory overload.”

He would never forget the pain.

*

“I won’t!”

“Oli…”

“NO!” Oli pulled away from his mother, her soft voice and kind eyes imploring him to be sensible, to come downstairs where the lounge had been prepared, yet again, for his transformation. “I won’t!”

“Darling, it’s going to happen anyway. Please, just come back down.”

“NO! I’m not doing that again! I won’t!” He turned, made it up three steps before his father big calloused hand closed on his ankle, and he tripped and fell against the carpeted staircase with a shout of surprise and an involuntary yelp of pain as he skinned one knee. “OW!”

“Downstairs. Now.”

“You can’t just order me around like a fucking dog!” Oli snapped. He regretted the words instantly. His father did not put up with swearing in his house, and especially not from his son in front of Oli’s mother.

The slap made his palm instantly red, concentrating all his pain and self-pity on the skin which prickled with pain. Apart from the one time he had accidentally said “shit” at the dinner table when he was twelve, Oli had never been hit by his father. Then he had stared fixedly at the floor, trying not to cry, and hadn’t been able to look either of his parents in the eye until the following day. Now he glanced up at his father from his burning hand and snarled.

“Don’t show your teeth to me Oliver. That’s another fight you know you’ll lose. Now do as your mother asked and come to the lounge.”

Oli followed his parents with a scowl. His father said that they had another hour before full moon hit, but because Oli was still so new to the change, that his timings were not as predictable. Oli stopped in the doorway of the main living room, gripping the door frame. All the furniture had been pushed back against the walls, all breakable objects were either out of sight in a cupboard or had been moved to another room, including the television, and the floor and sofas were draped in old sheets, scarred by twenty years of dripping paint and varnish. When Oli stepped forwards, the floor under the sheets crinkled with plastic.

“NO!”

This time he was quicker, his departure more unexpected, and Oli dashed upstairs to his room, slamming the door before sinking down against it, all at once braced against an intruder trying to enter even as he wanted to curl up into a ball and cry. He just couldn’t do it; he couldn’t go through it all again.

His father said that it got easier, that the change came over just as swiftly but with less ferocity, and that you got better at adapting and become more accustomed as your body changed. In the months since Oli had been told his father’s secret, and then his own first change, Alexander had spoken a lot about ‘The Change’ for which he always managed to intone capital letters, and the wonders of being a wolf. It would get less painful, less sudden, and Oli would begin to recognise the warning signs as his change settled down. Being a wolf would be fantastic; not the least experiencing the world through five senses which interacted in incredibly different ways. His father said that he was born for it, that he would be fine.

He had been wrong.

Oli had been petrified that first time, standing in the living room only in a pair of boxer shorts, fourteen, nearly naked in front of his parents, and waiting for his body to stop being the one he recognised. It had happened all at once, the pain; the unbearable all-encompassing pain. Oli had screamed, fallen to the floor. His body had tried to turn itself inside out, and he hadn’t been able to resist the urge to throw up. That was embarrassing enough, but at some point during the transformation his body had tried to get rid of all of the things that weren’t him, and he’d been sick again, pissed himself and defecated, all while kneeling, broken and full of pain, in the middle of the living room, with both his parents watching him. Every single bone and muscle, even ones he hadn’t previously been aware of, hurt and ached. It was like being repeatedly stabbed and beaten, from every angle, including and most unexpectedly, from within his own body. In that moment Oli knew, that his body hated him. That he’d done something awful in some imagined past life to deserve this punishment. When it had all finally been over, the first thing Oli had done in his new wolf body was pass out for several hours.

He did not want to do it all again. Changing back had been only fractionally less embarrassing, though he’d still managed to lose control of his bladder, and had woken on the lounge floor with his own urine dripping down his legs. He’d cried for pretty much a whole day afterwards, and refused to go to school or leave his bedroom for the rest of that week. He’d felt so ashamed.

He did not want to go through such misery again, and he had no choice. Even as his mother began to knock on the door, her voice soft and calm, the way she spoke to frightened animals and their humans who came into the clinic, Oli realised that it was too late. All the preparations were in vain, and he could not speak to reply, his throat was closing up, there was a hot prickling behind his eyes which made it hard to focus on the here and now, and Oli could feel his grip slipping. He fought to hold on, focused all his attention on the wall where there hung a school certificate for Outstanding Achievement in Art, and resisted the pull of the moon.

But the moon was stronger than the young werewolf, and Oli discovered that trying to keep your eyes open as smells became colours and sounds began to have a visual impact, gave him the most enormous headache of his life.

*

The prickling started just as the shadows in the garden were starting to get long. Oli got up, leaving Buddy to his late afternoon sunbathing, and began to complete the few final tasks before he lost the use of opposable thumbs. He locked the front door and the back, making sure that the dog flap was easy to slip through, shut all the windows, including the one in the bathroom, and made sure that none of the taps around the house had any annoying drips. He didn’t bother to close any of the internal doors in the house, because it was simply easier to shoulder through them as a wolf, and by the time his fingers were going numb he was pulling off his t-shirt, ready for the change.

Buddy padded in to watch him, and Oli raised an eyebrow as the wolf sat while Oli dropped his jeans, folding them up quickly and placed them on the easy chair near the bed. The wolf always seemed to be around while Oli was getting naked, and while he’d made sure to latch the door each time he’d gone to bed with the intent of enjoying the company of his own hand, Buddy had managed to get in eventually. Now Oli shed his boxers, hardly able to feel anything below the wrists, and threw them at the clothes hamper as the pins and needles spread up from his feet to his calves and made him weak.

His father had always said that he would get used to it, that the change would come easily, naturally; that one day he would barely noticed the movements that changed his body and that he would learn to love it. Fourteen years of changing, one hundred and seventy-odd shifts later, he was still being proved wrong. Somewhere deep in his heart, Oli knew that he was a shite werewolf.

The change, a monthly event Oli never bothered to capitalise, hurt just as much now as when he’d been a skinny fourteen year old. Age had brought with it a growth in height, better and more muscle tone, broader shoulders, and the experience to, if not cope with the torture, then at least know when to expect it. Oli got naked before the full moon because he hated wrecking his clothes, but now he leant forwards and placed his palms flat on the floor, fighting the urge to claw at his own furiously pounding heart, because he knew that’s where they needed to be when fingers turned into toes and hands into paws.

Buddy whined, head cocked to one side, ears pricked forwards, and Oli managed to flash him a smile right before his vision started to blur. He clamped his eyelids shut, attempted not to grit his teeth, because that would hurt when his fangs came through, and convulsed as his body began to change in earnest. When he was fifteen, he’d managed to keep control of his bladder and bowels when he changed, but he’d never rid himself of the urge to throw up. Now Oli kept his house clear of vomit by not eating anything at all in the twenty four hours before the change. It made him ravenous once he’d shifted, but it worked.

Buddy had stopped whimpering, but Oli knew the wolf was still there, his room awash with scents that were now becoming fully defined textured colours in his inner vision. The wolf was more ochre than red, the feeling somehow soft and solid, like wet sand on a beach, yielding but firm. Oli let the scent draw him away from the pain of his changing body as he lost all control, allowed Buddy’s presence to infiltrate his mind and by the time his body had finished breaking, bending, shaking and twisting, Oli knew the other wolf’s scent as well as he knew his own. He wanted to paint the inside of his house with those colours and textures, just as his mind had been.

Slowly, the large reddish brown wolf opened his eyes, staring at the thick carpet of his bedroom floor. He swivelled his ears, his nose twitching, picking up of bursts of colour where Buddy’s paws had been, patches of scent where the wolf had lain and watched him dress in the mornings and undress in the evenings. The room was overlaid with a reddish pattern of lust. Oli raised his head and stared at the place where the grey and black wolf should have been standing.

Feet. Human feet. Oli blinked, but there were ten pinkish toes standing on his carpet, smelling ochre brown. Oli looked up.

There was a man. A large, naked, rather un-groomed man standing in Oli’s bedroom smelling exactly like the large grey wolf Oli had been sharing his house with for the past week. He smiled down at Oli with an honest and open expression, and Oli had just enough time to appreciate how handsome he was despite being slightly too-skinny for his large frame, how bright his amber eyes were under dark grey brows. And then his body did something rather predictable in response to the shock. Oli fainted.

*

The scent was subtle, but it wound up inside his sinuses, plugged into his brain and made it very hard to think of anything else at all. The one thing his father had been right about so far, three awful, horrible, and truly painful changes into Oli’s inescapable future as a werewolf, was that now he’d learnt to ‘see’ with his nose, he would never truly lose that talent. Scents did not have the amazing textured vibrancy that they did as a wolf, but aromas were coloured and strong, much stronger than Oli had ever experienced before.

This scent woke something up in his mind that Oli hadn’t ever known about before.

“Hey bud.” His best friend Taylor swung into the seat in front of him and spun on his chair with a grin. “Dude, you OK? Still asleep?” Taylor ruffled Oli’s perpetually messy reddish-brown curls before he turned away. “Hey Dinah! Callum…”

Oli had tuned out. The scent was subtle, true, but rich, complex, a web of colours that he couldn’t describe using anything close to human language. It was a shock to realise that the red lust that had begun to carpet the room was spreading from himself, overladen with strong tones of desire. It was a greater surprise to find that the scent driving into his brain and turning him on most shamefully under his clothes was the scent of his best friend.

Oli had always thought Taylor was cute, had done since they were put into a tutor group together as wide eyed eleven year olds, and they’d always been friends. It hadn’t taken Oli particularly long to realise that he was gay, a proclivity he had first admitted to Ruff rather than to anyone else: and at the age of twelve during a sex education class, had decided that being in love with his best straight friend was too clichéd in the extreme, and the pair had managed to maintain a healthy relationship ever since. It was a relationship in which Taylor had, of course, no idea that he could be an object of lust, but Oli had always figured that was for the best as well.

Now something was different. All day Oli couldn’t get the scent out of his head, the rich greenish-bluish hues and the tang of salt. Taylor smelt like he was carrying the Mediterranean Sea around with him. It drove Oli nuts.

He didn’t dare ask his father about it. Their relationship, that once had been very good indeed for any gay teenager and his hulking traditionalist father, had been reduced to a series of nods, grunts, and unanswered questions on his father’s part. Apart from diner times, when Alexander would wax lyrical about the benefits of being a werewolf, Oli didn’t spend a single voluntary second in his father’s presence. He wanted to despise him, hated the sense of betrayal: but Alexander smelt like family, smelt familiar, and that was apparently very important to Oli’s werewolf genes. Oli had spent most of the evening drawing distracted patterns in sea-coloured oil pastels, went to bed with pigment stained fingers, and jerked off to the thought of his best friend, nearly naked and sweaty after football practice. He’d certainly felt more embarrassed, but afterwards, never had he felt more guilty.

*

Oli regained consciousness to the warm, soft, and overwhelmingly pleasant sensation of someone stroking his fur. Oli loved being petted, which was, according to his father, not something any self-respecting werewolf would admit. But since the only human on the planet who knew that he was a werewolf and who ever really saw him in his fur was his mother, Oli didn’t get petted often. Sure, she might run her fingers through the fur on his head or ruffle his ears, but there was something faintly… inappropriate, about being stroked by his mother. Now strong fingers ran over him from shoulder to hip, and Oli couldn’t help but shift his weight onto his back slightly, opening up his legs to allow the hand to stroke his chest and belly instead. He wanted to burrow his face into the sofa, but when he wriggled his shoulders, he found the top of his skull pressed against the warmth of someone’s thigh. Oli opened his eyes, and looked up.

The man sitting stroking him was still naked. He was tall, and sort of rangy looking as though his body type was supposed to be athletically muscular but he didn’t weigh enough to make it work, his hair was a bit on the long side and a dark steely grey colour which did nothing to make him look older. And he had sparking amber-yellow eyes. The man who smelt exactly like Buddy began a soft scratching motion just under Oli’s ribs, and the wolf wagged his tail in pleasure.

“Nice to see you awake.” His voice was soft, but rough around the edges, as though he hadn’t used it in a long time. “Hello Oli.”

Oli stared up at him, puzzled, confused, ad trying desperately to think of a way the wolf he’d been looking after could now be a man.

“You’re a heavy bastard, you know that?” Buddy’s fingers were still moving in his fur. “No more passing out with shock, OK?”

Oli tilted his head as best he could, and raised an eyebrow at his unexpected houseguest.

“Oh you really do look just like that picture you drew of us.” Buddy reached down and placed the pad of a finger against Oli’s very dark eyebrow spots. It was the one wolf feature Oli had inherited from his grandfather, a man Oli could barely remember. “You really had no idea?”

Oli rolled over and shuffled himself into a proper sitting position. This was a conversation he actually needed to pay attention to. Buddy-the-human drew his hand back into his lap with a sad little sigh. The noise made Oli ache somewhere between his belly and his heart, and he pushed his muzzle under Buddy’s hand and sat closer to him, the man’s arm draped naturally over his neck and shoulders.

“So I guess you wanna know what happened?”

Oli nodded, flopping his tail from side to side.

“It’s Boris by the way; but ‘Buddy’ is nice, I can live with it.” His fingers sought Oli’s skin under his thick fur and the wolf leant into the contact: it had been too long. “I never thanked you, not really.” Boris looked at him dead on and smiled. “Thank you for saving me.”

There was a long moment of silence before Boris spoke again.

“So, you know how being a teenager sucks…”