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“WE CAN’T WEAR THESE,” Zeke said, picking up the shredded remnants of their clothes.

“Shit,” Micah breathed, still gasping for air in the wake of their passion.

Zeke had recovered quickly. He had to, or else he would slip and tumble into the feelings which were lapping like a rising tide at the underside of his consciousness. Detachment, that was the key. Just sex. Friends with benefits, right? Right. A timid knock on the door distracted him for a moment, to his immense relief.

“We’re naked, Brandy. We killed our clothes.”

“I’ve got spares,” she said. “I’ll cover my eyes. Are you both human?”

“As the day we were born,” Micah answered, quickly wiping himself off with the rags.

The locks sprung open, and she shoved one pale arm through with a fistful of clothes. Micah’s clothes, Zeke realized. Slacks and button-up shirts. He took the clothes with gratitude, and she closed the door again. He offered Micah first choice; not because he was feeling any particular way, he tried to convince himself. Just because Micah had to go to work from here, while Zeke had arranged to have these few days off.

“Thanks,” Micah said gratefully. “What time is it?”

“I left my phone upstairs,” Zeke said apologetically. “Didn’t want it getting broken.”

“Ditto,” Micah said, glancing worriedly at the sunlight. He pulled his clothes on in record time, finishing before Zeke had even fastened his pants. He shoved his feet into his shoes, took one last disgusted glance at the remnants of their night, then moved to walk out the door. He paused to look Zeke in the eye.

“You better go,” Zeke said, his throat tightening. “You don’t want to be late.”

Micah kissed him firmly, stealing his breath.

“Dinner tonight,” Micah said with no room for argument. “You pick the place.”

He left without giving Zeke a chance to respond, which was just as well. Zeke didn’t have the faintest idea what to say. He finished dressing and pulled his own shoes on, glancing as Micah had at the pile of...he didn’t want to name it. It just felt wrong.

“Brandy?” He called as he stepped through the door. “Do you have a broom or trash bag or something?”

“Here,” George’s voice said from behind his shoulder, startling him. “Throw the shells in here, I’ll put them in the incinerator.”

Turning, Zeke’s first impression was that George looked utterly exhausted. He wondered if he looked that bad. He took the wheeled trash can from George with thanks, as well as the wide, shallow shovel George offered. He would rather not touch...those.

“You call them shells?” Zeke asked as he rolled the can into his cell.

“Sounds better than skin suits. My first thought,” George explained at Zeke’s shocked look.

“Yeah...yeah it does. So how does this work? I still have all my freckles and scars and things.” Zeke tried not to look at what he was doing as he shoveled the mess away.

“Hell if I know,” George shrugged. “Nothing about this makes sense, why should that? I went under with a bloody thumb one night, came back with the same bloody thumb. It just copies, or something.”

Zeke shook his head and blew out a breath. George wasn’t kidding; this shit didn’t make any sense at all. His lips were dry from the effort, and he licked them, only to taste Micah’s flavor lingering there. Snatching his tongue back into his mouth as though he’d been bit, Zeke turned the can over to George.

“Glad to see you two didn’t kill each other last night,” George said, a question in his eyes.

“Yep, worked out great. Best friends and all that,” Zeke blocked the question before it could be verbalized, thanked George again, and almost fled up the stairs. He wasn’t ready for questions. He had no answers. None, that was, except that he desperately needed to be careful. More careful than he had been. There was too much riding on the line now for him to fool around and fall in love, and he hated himself for giving in to temptation. Micah deserved better. He deserved someone who could fully engage, who wasn’t haunted by the ghosts of the past.

“Or the present,” he murmured as he walked to his car.

In exchange for his brothers covering his evenings, he had volunteered his mornings so they could relax a little bit. They deserved it, after all. They had been dealing with the dissolution of the old man’s brain for a lot longer than he had, and they needed the break. Even so, Zeke took his sweet time driving the short distance between the two houses, basking in the valley’s bright, fresh dawn. He had missed living out here the way someone would miss their left foot, he suddenly realized. The air, the mountains, the dry lake...everything about it felt like home. No matter how many “homes” he bounced between, this was the only one that had ever felt right.

It wasn’t because of his parents. Dead and detached, they were incapable of creating that homey feeling. It wasn’t the school; he had only gone there for a couple years, scattered over the whole of his elementary career. It was the memories. Skating down the street with Micah and the boys, circling the dry lake to have adventures in the woods; breaking into abandoned mobile homes to cook ramen on strange stoves, for the hell of it. The abandoned cement tubes, intended for an expansion on the newest housing development, eventually recommissioned by the valley youth as a general hang out and hook up spot. Every breath of fresh air brought with it another memory, years of friendship, endless summers, bonds that felt like they would last forever.

He slowed to a stop beneath the tall, twisted pine tree which bisected the main road, forking it left and right. The first people to tame this valley hadn’t bothered to remove it, and it had become a sort of mascot. High above his head, faded hearts full of initials danced between various unreadable obscenities. The marks grew clearer farther down, with the sharpest carvings sitting four feet above the ground. “Cory wuz here” and “Ass butt” caught his eye, making his mouth quirk in amusement. Ah, childhood.

His eyes drifted up the tree, seeking a particular sawed-off branch. The dark spots made it look like a panda face, he recalled. There, three feet above his head. His heart squeezed with an ancient grief when he saw the carving beside it, drawn in a quirky hand long since stilled. “A-Z” it said, double-wrapped in a barbed wire heart. Adam Clarey, Zeke’s first love. It wouldn’t have lasted, of course. Thirteen-year-olds don’t know how to make things last, and shouldn’t feel the need to. Still, in some dark, selfish part of his heart, Zeke wished it would have ended sooner. Or that Adam’s accident had happened later.

Instead, Zeke had been left feeling like a secret widower in the twilight between middle and high school, lost and alone all over again. A barbed wire heart. How appropriate. Instinctively, Zeke’s eye wandered to the barbed wire fence surrounding the dry lake. Even now, so many years later, he could still identify the very section which had stolen Adam’s life. The slope of the hill beside it was just too tempting for a bored kid on a quad, smooth and steep with a lip at the end like a ski-jump. Zeke shuddered at the memory and climbed back into the car. He’d needed the reminder. People he loved died, period. Micah would just have to learn to live with the reality; that Zeke would never be willing to risk him that way. 

“Decapitated?” Micah cringed.

Izzy nodded somberly, then drew a finger across his throat. Micah had met him for lunch at their group’s usual Mexican eatery to pick his brain before his dinner date with Zeke that evening. Izzy had known Zeke longer than anybody, and as a sometimes-foster kid himself, was better at interpreting Zeke’s various idiosyncrasies.

“Okay, but he said that everybody he loved died. Was there someone else?” Micah picked at his massive burrito, his appetite soured by the story.

“His mom, obviously,” Izzy said, ticking off his fingers. “Then Adam. Then his grandparents, all four of them in three years. They fostered him before he was shunted into the system. After they died, he was sort of at the mercy of the social workers. Then....” Izzy hesitated for a moment, his sharp brown eyes considering Micah.

“Then?” Micah prompted.

“Alright, this isn’t common knowledge, so keep your mouth shut,” Izzy said as he dropped his voice and leaned his crossed arms on the table. “When he was sixteen, he was in a home down in Carson. There was a kid there, same age. They hit it off. Don’t know how far it went because he doesn’t like to talk about it. About that time, Jimmy got his act together enough to bring him home. The day after Zeke left, the kid killed himself.”

“Jesus,” Micah whispered. “No wonder.”

Izzy nodded and raised his eyebrows. “With that track record, I wouldn’t be hooking up with anybody either,” he said with a shrug.

“Yeah, I can definitely understand it. Or...I guess I could, if it weren’t for the fact that all of this happened half a lifetime ago. His life was complete chaos back then, and so was everybody else’s. We’re grown now, stable, you know? Quad accidents and teenage suicides aren’t exactly on the table anymore.”

“The method doesn’t matter,” Izzy said. “All he can see is himself as the common denominator. Deep down, he knows you’re going to die. Knows it the same way you know that your burrito is going to burn your ass on the way out.”

“Everybody dies,” Micah said softly.

“On his watch, as far as he’s concerned.” Izzy sipped his drink as he gave Micah a pointed look.

“But his brothers are still around,” Micah pointed out.

“Yeah, but that’s not the same. He loves them because he’s obligated to, not because he’s internally compelled to.”

“Oh.”

Micah sighed heavily and gazed out the window. “Can a person really resist an internal compulsion?” He asked, almost rhetorically.

Izzy merely shrugged. An alarm began to screech on Micah’s phone, informing him that he had twenty minutes to get back to class. Guess lunch will just have to be dinner, he thought as he wrapped it up.

“Thanks, Izzy. Look, um...if you don’t mind, could you not...?”

“My lips are sealed,” Izzy promised with a wave of his drink. “Good luck.”

“Thanks.” I’m going to need it.

Micah’s mental gears shifted as he drove back to school, like they always did. The outside world could wait when he had students to worry about; and he was certainly worried today. A solid fifty percent of his students had been listless today, which was only mildly exceptional. Or would have been, if it weren’t for the fact that the full moon had just passed. Half of his students hadn’t even showed up to first period, his suspected werewolf among them. Second period had been a little better, except for the multitude of students who wore their sunglasses and sipped on massive coffee thermoses the whole time. Third had been a little better, but several students were still sluggish and yawning. Somehow, he couldn’t manage to convince himself that it was due to the normal interruptions the early bells inflicted on the students’ circadian rhythms.

“Just how many of us are there?” He wondered out loud as he pulled into his parking space. “And if it’s that many, how is everyone keeping it under wraps?”

Impossible, he told himself. But as he weaved his way through the crowd of students on the steps, he began to see them in a new light. Tired, grumpy students huddled together in whispering groups or sat alone, ignoring everyone around them. He noticed with interest that these students seemed to have a particular fascination with fur; hats, scarves, boots, vests, accents of fur all over. He had noticed it at the beginning of the school year and assumed it was an age-related fad, but peering through the filter of his suspicions, he saw a very clear line drawn between the furry, grumpy students and the rest.

Back at his desk, Micah pulled up every werewolf essay that had been turned in. Using his plagiarism checker, he searched for common words and phrases across the papers. By the time his students began to trickle in, Micah’s suspicions had grown into something far larger, and far more devastating. With trembling hands, he switched off his monitor and forced himself to focus on the moment at hand.