2

clementine

MY ROAMING PHASE hit me the summer after my sophomore year of college. It was the week of my twentieth birthday, and I felt the whole thing pretty hard, this knowledge that I was old enough to be a tithe, to be thrown to the wolves to keep them satiated so that they wouldn't attack the cities and rape the normal women, that I was old enough to do that, but not deemed old enough to drink.

I spent all my time sneaking into bars or scrubbing the Xs off my hands with a special soap I'd bought. Once inside and not marked as too young to drink, I'd order lemon drops, green tea shots, buttery nipples, chocolate cake shots, cherry bombs, and fireballs.

I'd get wasted drunk and flirt with random men.

I'd note strange things about the kinds of men who excited me the most. I liked it when they seemed so big that they could break me. I liked it when they were covered in hair, faces bearded, fingers and arms coated with it, chest hair peering out of the top of their t-shirts.

I liked it when they acted like it was a foregone conclusion that I was going to talk to them, when they pressed into me on the dance floor even without my permission. I liked it when they touched me or kissed me like they knew I was theirs.

And then I didn't go home with any of them .

I don't know what I was doing. Seeing if I could resist? Seeing how far I could go and stay in control?

Maybe I was just saving myself for the werewolves, as fucked up as that sounds.

I would sometimes call Ninnia to talk about it. She was going to a different college, one in an entirely different city. She had to fly there because there were no safe roads there, not roads that weren't in werewolf country.

"You don't want to wait for your first full moon to have sex for the first time," she would say.

"No, I know that," I would say.

"You want to have some kind of experience before that happens!" Ninnia was out there having a normal college experience, with a boyfriend and stuff, attending sex toy parties, making TikToks about body positivity and stuff like that.

"Yeah, I do," I would say. "I definitely do. Next time I'm out, I'm just going to go for it. I'm going to take someone home and get it over with."

"Well, someone you like, though," said Ninnia. "Someone nice and respectful who will ask what you like and who will worship you like the goddess you are."

"Yeah," I said. I met guys like that. All the time, actually. I'd done the apps, and I'd had dates with guys who said all the right things and who seemed super sweet, who never said anything inappropriate and who whispered, Is this all right? against my ear as their fingers roamed hesitantly down over my waist. I had something wrong inside me, though, because I'd say, coy and teasing, What if it's not all right? And they would stop, confused.

I didn't want to have sex with those guys, for whatever reason. I couldn't figure out what the reason was, admittedly, but I felt like every sexual experience I was having was being negotiated, like the guy thought of himself as a loaded gun who was just trying to be sure he was meeting the legal definition of consent. It wasn't sexy. It was awkward.

Once I said that to Ninnia and she said it was only because it was new. "Once you get close to someone, the awkwardness fades and you feel comfortable exploring things."

However, it wasn't as if I wanted to have sex with the hairy jackasses at the bar, the scam-artists who were watching YouTube videos educating them in the art of negging, so that they could manipulate me into giving them sex, because I was in possession of a commodity they wanted to own—my pussy.

I hated those guys.

They were dicks and they didn't deserve my pussy.

Why did I flirt with them, then?

Yeah, well, it was that call-of-the-void thing, maybe? I was just playing a game with danger. I just wanted to go put myself into the hands of some monstrous thing that wanted to use me for his pleasure, just because.

And then, when I got there, when it came time to let him have me, I decided I didn't want to surrender, after all. Maybe I wouldn't let anyone have me at all. Maybe I was not a thing to be had.

I began watching weird blurry phone videos of gatherings, trying to figure out what it was going to be like on the full moon. Mostly, it would be trees and howls and women with torn clothes trying to run away.

There would be a flash of fur or teeth and then…

Howls and female shrieks. It was always impossible to tell if the shrieks were pain or pleasure. According to the tithes, both.

There were no shortage of accounts of tithes's experience on the internet, but how many of them were written like Penthouse-forum letters—made-up erotica by people who'd never been tithes—was really hard to say.

Still, tithes did not mind the experience, that was the consensus. It was annoying because of their jobs or their lives or their boyfriends or husbands but they said they came out of it feeling peaceful and sated and settled. They said that during a gathering, the moon high in the sky, their bodies fully ready and eager for the experience, the sex was nothing like they'd ever experienced. They were hair-trigger orgasmic. Orgasming from penetration alone, something only twenty-five percent of women could do and even they couldn't do reliably, was common. The tithes were sturdy and capable of handling roughness—claws and even teeth caused wounds, but they healed incredibly fast. They were mounted and taken by multiple wolves, passed around and licked and nibbled and it all felt great .

Sometimes, they seemed wistful that it had ended, that one full moon, the urge hadn't been there. Sometimes, tithes who were already spent would try to go to a gathering, but it never worked. The wolves could scent it on her, and they left her alone. They wouldn't take a woman who wasn't a tithe.

I didn't understand that.

Why?

Why at the beginning, fourteen years ago, why did they do it then? Why did they rape women to death then, if they could stop themselves now?

Maybe it had just been horror and confusion at the beginning, mostly because it was new and they didn't know what was happening to them. Maybe wolves had a better handle on themselves now. Wolves weren't allowed to live in cities anymore, but sometimes some intrepid reporter would go out and interview one, and they'd say that, sure, they were aware of what was going on when they shifted, and sure, they could make decisions, and sure, they didn't turn into raging, uncontrollable beasts.

But maybe they were saying that only because they wanted back inside the walls.

Maybe they just wanted their life-sentence of exile to end.

The consensus was that we couldn't trust what they said.