29

clementine

I WISH IT was easy after that.

No, that's not true. I don't wish it was easy. I wouldn't trade any of the complicated or difficult things we went through for something easy. I'd rather have the mess of it, the tangles, the fear, the anger, the challenges, all of those things. Because those things were the things that brought us closer together. Those things taught us to be vulnerable with each other, to trust each other, and to become the unit that we would become. Without all of those things, we would never have been as strong together as we were.

I wish I knew the point in time to say things were finished, though, that things turned the corner and everything changed.

But the more I think about it, the more I think it was that moment in bed together, when Paladin said we were on our way to good. If there was any moment that would divide what came before and what came after, that was it.

So, I guess that's the end. That's the point in which it became an inevitability that the three of us would live happily ever after. Even though, in real life, no one lives happily ever after. Even though that's just a pretend idea for fairy tales.

I guess, though, I did have a wicked stepmother.

Maybe I was Cinderella in the end, but if I was, I wondered where my castle and my riches and my army of servants was.

Funny thing about Angela, she and my dad actually got divorced, and it might have been my fault, in a way. She and my dad came out to the farmhouse, after I had my first baby, ostensibly to help out, but I didn't think she'd be much help. And, uh, spoiler alert, she was not.

She spent all her time wistfully walking around the place, touching things, staring at my mates, looking like someone had punched her in the face.

After that, she and my dad separated about three months later. She ended up with a werewolf out west, I think, in one of the collectives, places where older wolves who didn't want to mate a young tithe were converging, and where aging tithes would sometimes go.

I didn't keep in touch with her. I don't know if Angela ended up happy, but I have spent far too much time thinking about what sort of person she was, how attention-starved and insecure she was, and how no matter how much my father gave her, it was never enough.

It bothers me, I guess, because I don't like the implications. Does it mean that all tithes are needy little brats who can't be satisfied unless they're living in some heightened relationship with a hairy beastman (or three) who is entirely subservient to their whims?

Paladin would say no. He would say that I wasn't even a little bit bratty, and that I didn't have whims, but needs. "People, all people, need to be loved and appreciated," he would say. "We need connection. We need meaningful things to do. And the most meaningful things tend to be the things we do for others, and especially for the people we love."

I agreed with him.

Further, I thought that a person couldn't really do a selfless act unless she didn't need anything back from the other person, or else it was a transaction. Which meant, to truly give to others, the first thing that you needed was for your needs to be met. Which… wow, that was a tangle of co nfusion. You needed people, and they needed you, but you couldn't truly give until you got from them and vice versa. Did you start with giving or did you start with receiving? Maybe it didn't matter.

But all of that didn't happen until after the walls came down.

I like to think we had something to do with that.

I never got my law degree. I didn't have time. I became the leader of what was essentially a small government, and it consumed me. This didn't feel like a sacrifice at the time, either. It felt like, before, living that life in the cities and wanting to go to school, that it had been some other existence, life in black and white. I remembered that girl, and I remembered the things she wanted, but I was a different person now, and I wanted different things. Now, I wanted life in color.

Color was love and my mates and my connections to others. Color was meaning.

I took to leadership pretty easily, which sort of surprised me. I'd never been someone who went after those sorts of roles, but I wondered if it was because I'd spent my whole life fighting for shreds of attention, and I'd somehow gotten the message that I wasn't important and that I should try to make myself small, since the world wanted me to be small.

Life in our small region changed drastically in some ways and it remained mostly the same in others. The biggest change was in the subdivision which had once been the hub of Griff's crew. That place was no longer the central part of leadership, instead, it was concentrated on our farmhouse. In the subdivision, we left things as Paladin had decided, with the women owning houses and being able to decide who lived there with them. Most of these women eventually mated to one or more wolves, and then these houses became a lot like houses in any part of the world, each housing a family with parents and children. The mating process was more versatile than we seemed to have thought. It didn't have to happen on a full moon. It didn't have to happen during the first six months after a tithe began to transform .

It turned out that tithes were on cycles. They'd go into what we started to term "heat" for lack of a better way to describe it, which would occur on consecutive full moons. After this six-to-eight-month process, if a tithe hadn't mated, she'd go into a remission period.

The whole world had assumed the remission period was permanent, but it turned out that it wasn't, that a tithe could go into another cycle again. If she didn't mate that time, she could keep cycling until she did. We weren't sure why tithes in the cities didn't, or why unmated tithes on this side of the wall didn't always either. It may have been because of anxiety or depression, something interfering with the body's natural tendencies.

Or it could have been only that the first cycle was the only involuntary cycle, and that, to get the cycle to start again, you had to want it. It seemed, however, that if tithes tried to find mates, they did.

We weren't clear on the biology of it, either. It seemed unlikely that we all had destined mates, that there was only one person (or three) in the entire world that we could mate to, but it was also clear we couldn't mate to just anybody. There was some important concoction of pheromones or emotional draw or sexual attraction… no one knew. Maybe it was just like normal love and mating in the end, only with an extra element of intensity.

But our little region started mating tithes left and right.

And when the tithes got here, they had places to go. We started working on a project to both rehabilitate old, abandoned houses and to work on building new ones, so that once a tithe mated, she had a house. The rule was that the tithe was the head of household, just as default. Whether that really meant that the tithes were in charge… well, that was really up to the tithe and her mate or mates. They could organize themselves in whatever way felt good to them.

I'm not saying this went well all the time. There were a lot of heated debates, with wolves angrily going on about sexism and how it wasn't equal and that no one should be given status just because of their gender. Some of the tithes, too, to be fair. They'd talk about how this was just misogyny in reverse. I got called misandrist more times than I can count, and I think they only learned that word from Paladin, because he was the one who trotted it out defensively at some point.

But I always pointed out that there was already an inequality between us, put there by nature, that none of us could erase. There was no reasoning with a shifted wolf. Every time I submitted to my mates on a full moon, I was putting my life in their hands (paws?). Sure, my body was resilient and I healed and it was tough to damage me permanently, but the fact was, we were all two swipes away from an accident where someone caught a tithe's femoral artery with his teeth and she bled out before she could heal. It had happened. It did happen. Tithes died.

Not on my watch, I'd like to say, but I can't really take credit for it, even if sometimes I'd like to. Tragedy is like that. It wouldn't be tragedy if it were entirely preventable. It'd just be stupidity.

I would say, "You want someone to submit to you sexually and trust you with their life, every single full moon, and you have to accept something has to balance that or there can never be equality." I would say, "If you don't like what your mate thinks or says, how likely is it that she can physically beat you into submission? How likely is it that you're terrified of disagreeing with her?"

Anyway, we didn't dictate that anyone ruled over anyone, only that the tithes were the representatives of the houses, and that all negotiation of conflicts between houses would be conducted between tithes. There were reasons for this, too, and they were also mostly biological.

Whatever had happened to the wolves, they were territorial and prone to violence amongst each other. It had always been likely, in all of the other permutations of leadership out on this side of the wall, that a conflict would revert to a physical fight. This had the effect of meaning that the person who won conflicts was the strongest or the most vicious, not the one who was the most reasoned or the most correct.

It wasn't that the tithes couldn't be downright vicious with each other when they got angry, but they didn't tend to descend into fistfights nearly as often.

But eventually, none of this mattered, because the walls came down, and then we were all back under the rule of the human government and everything changed again .

We lived, for those years, in that interim time, in a kind of survival interval that had to happen because tithes needed to be given agency again. We gave them power. We gave them a voice.

And to be fair, we weren't the only group of wolves doing something similar.

It was a movement, loosely connected via message boards on the internet, of wolves copying each other, rumors spreading here and there. "There's some wolf collective in the southeast where they're making rules that tithes choose their wolves during the gatherings," we'd hear, and then we'd all get together and talk about whether we wanted to try that. Was it meaning more matings, better matings, how was that going for them?

The thing that was true, no matter how a group of wolves went about it, was that more mates meant an immediate decrease in violence and conflict. Lonely people felt hopeless and angry. They lashed out. People who felt love and responsibility made better choices. They had something to value, something to preserve. They had someone to go home to, and they didn't risk themselves in the same ways.

But I can't say that always went smoothly either.

Noah left.

He wasn't the only tithe to mate and then change their mind and go back over the wall.

I think, in Noah's case, it was incredibly complicated and fraught. He had a set of challenges that many of us didn't have, being a trans man. None of that made it easier for him, of course, not when so many people are threatened by the very idea of being transgender.

I know things happened. I know Red fought more than one guy off on more than one occasion. One of them, Red snapped his neck, and no one faulted him for it.

But their relationship was fraught for other reasons. Sometimes, Noah and I would have wine together and talk or go out on walks in the woods. He'd tell me that Red was still just… toxic. That Red was in denial about his own homosexuality, that he was not always respectful to Noah's identity, that they'd have arguments and Red would taunt Noah in various ways. "I can't really love you because you're not a man," he'd say sometimes. Or sometimes, he'd say the complete opposite. "I'm meant to love a woman, and you're not a woman."

Noah couldn't fix him.

Red had to want to fix himself.

It took Noah leaving for that to happen, I think.

After Noah left, Red straightened the fuck up. But by then, it was too late.

These days, Red doesn't have a tithe mate. He's in this throuple thing with a wolf that is mated to a woman and then Red's with that guy, but kind of with the tithe, too? I don't know. It seems to work fine for them, though. They all have three children together, and two of them seem to be biologically Red's, and he's mellowed. He's older, too. We're all older. Age takes a lot of those sharp edges off.

As for Noah, he and I are still in touch. He lives in the city, but he's mated a wolf. There are wolves back in the cities nowadays. They leave for the full moon, and they have a group of wolves that let them frolic there during their gatherings.

And yes, the mating bond can break and a new one can form. No, no one is consigned to a life with a toxic person because of some biological bond.

But about the walls coming down.

How did it happen?

Slow at first, and then all at once.

There was a podcast crew that came out to live with us right before things really started changing. They recorded everything, including when I eventually had an enormous breakdown about the fact I'd been repressing all my trauma about being raped.

There were discussions between myself and the woman doing the podcast about leaving all of that out. She said she would respect my privacy and she wasn't there to inflict more trauma on me while I was healing, but I decided it was important for people to hear about it. For one thing, I wanted other victims to see they could speak out. For another thing, I thought it was important to show how much things had changed out here, what a transformation we'd gone through as a community, and how it was possible for us—as a society—to see that people who do bad things can grow and change.

So much of what we did with the werewolves was simply to throw them away.

We decided they weren't people, that they were just a threat, and we tossed them outside the walls and lived in fear of them.

They had to inhabit that role, the role of a monster.

They were never monsters, though, just people in pain.

That wasn't to excuse the violence that happened out here, but it was to make clear that violence doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's tempting to assume that if you cut out the bad person, then you'll be safe. But the real way to make a safe world is to eliminate the elements of the world that turn people bad.

However, that was not my personal journey in terms of dealing with the fact I'd been violated.

I'd been doing too much of that, too much excusing, too much forgiving, too much, "Oh, but they couldn't help it, these poor, abused werewolves." I wasn't wrong.

But I also wasn't honoring my own pain or even acknowledging what had happened to me.

I couldn't truly forgive anyone until I owned up to what had happened to me.

It was hard.

When Kestrel said that you don't ever get over it, sexual abuse, he was right. It makes a mark indelibly on your soul for the rest of your life. You never get to be the same.

I had an experience where I felt like I connected to my dead mother, and I knew that I was her in a way, that she and I had both been fodder in this awful event, whatever it was, this tragedy that had been wrought on the world when half of the men went insane and shifted into beasts. I felt… this sounds weird and woo-woo, but I felt like we merged for a moment, across time. And I felt her love for me. And I felt like she forgave me for falling in love with werewolves, anyway. And I felt like something in me, some ragged wound, finally closed over.

After that, that was when I knew I wanted to be a mom myself.

But that didn't happen for a while, because everything started ramping up after the podcast came out.

At the same time, there was a lot of stuff going on out west with werewolf groups who were climbing over the walls to stage peaceful protests in the streets of the cities. Groups of men and women holding hands with their tiny children, carrying signs that read, Votes for Werewolves and We Are Your Brothers and Sisters in Exile .

Meanwhile, there was a place in the northeast (where there weren't a lot of wolf areas at all, mostly just cities) which had started sending buses out to the gates to take werewolf children to public schools, and this had sparked a whole bunch of debate, with some people being really freaked out and other people staunchly on the side of every child deserving an education.

Our podcast blew up.

We spent that entire year doing interviews. We got flown on a plane to film an interview on a national news debate-style show, and Paladin ran circles around the guy sputtering out his stupid, hate-filled arguments about how werewolves didn't deserve rights.

I never spearheaded a class action suit, but I did testify at the senate hearings.

They went on for three weeks.

At the end, they opened all the gates .

Just like that.

And then, in the coming weeks, private construction crews started showing up, all over the country, with bulldozers, and tearing down the walls. They didn't have to do it, but they just did . They showed up, all across the nation, and they freed us. It always amazes me how people see one token of goodwill and they mimic it. It always amazes me, because we all take for granted that hate and fear spread like a virus, but we don't always acknowledge that positivity spreads the same way.

I remember I was pregnant at the time, barely pregnant, only three months along, but I was already all full of hormones, and I stood and watched those walls crumble to dust in front of us and sobbed in Lazarus's arms.

Tears of joy, but it ached in my chest like someone had clawed open my heart.

And then, that was when things got really hard for the four of us.

We'd been distracted, was the thing, what with fixing the whole goddamned world, and it was easy to feel united when we were all fighting for the same purpose.

But then…

Done.

Walls down.

I was no longer the leader of a small government. My mates were no longer my advisers and enforcers. We were no longer trying to juggle running a small farm, running a government, and doing national-scale activism.

What we were was pregnant. And running a little farm which still only had one cow who wasn't making milk anymore and needed to be bred again. Just us.

Don't get me wrong, the sex was still amazing.

I have to say, if you ever get the chance to run under a bright summer full moon while six months pregnant and be worshiped and thoroughly filthily fucked by three werewolves who are head-over-heels in love with you and have also developed a fetish for your baby bump… do it . You will not regret it, trust me .

But I started to get the unnerving idea that we didn't actually know each other.

We'd been together for almost a decade at that point, and we'd done unspeakable things to each and every one of each other's holes and licked each other in all sorts of insane places, but we didn't know much about each other's pasts or the way each other grew up. We rarely talked much about our lives before.

And now the walls were down.

I was talking to my dad, and Lazarus's sister was reaching out to him for the first time in years. Paladin had always been sort of in touch with his parents. They were paying for the cell phone they had used out here, for instance, things like that, but he had never talked to them about the realities of what had happened to him out here.

He'd always texted his mom that it was fine and nothing too bad was happening. He never told her that two nights after he got tossed out into exile, he was dressed up in lingerie with garters and seven men raped him until he bled. He said that he didn't know how to connect with his mother, who still sort of saw him as the little fifteen-year-old kid she'd been forced to relinquish. He didn't want to hurt her by telling her the horrors he'd endured, but he couldn't accept her as a parental figure anymore, because parents are supposed to protect their children and some part of him felt like she'd betrayed him. He knew she never had a choice, but it still hurt him regardless.

Kestrel's dad had somehow gotten my phone number and was sending me pushy texts about whether or not I would submit to a DNA test so we could know whose baby I was carrying, because he was apparently horrified that his son would deign to share a woman with two men.

In some ways, I longed for the walls to go back up, as terrible as that sounds. In some ways, all I wanted was to be back here, isolated from all of that, in our own little world.

But my belly just kept swelling, because children start doing that immediately. Growing, I mean.

Our son came into the world in a bathtub in our farmhouse with Madrigal attending as a midwife, because that was what she'd settled into doing in our community. He was perfect in every way. I knew I was biased, but I didn't think I'd ever seen a baby as beautiful as ours. I fell in love with him in this way that terrified me. I was swallowed up by a choking kind of love that consumed me.

Maybe that was it, actually? That was the moment when everything changed. That was the moment that would divide everything that came before and everything after.

I don't know.

We'd been living such desperate lives for so long, that was the thing. Everything had been larger than life, some practically insurmountable hurdle, and we'd clung to each other to fight our way through our life together, which had felt like being stuck in the gales of a constant storm.

When our little boy was born, the desperation didn't go away, but it shifted.

We loved him so desperately, so completely, so intensely.

And they got me pregnant only five months later, the jackasses. I was still nursing. It was not supposed to happen if you were breastfeeding and you hadn't gotten your period back yet! But it did.

With. Fucking. Twins.

And after the twins were born, I got a two-year respite before we decided to have one more.

So, four kids, yeah.

And no, we never got DNA tests or anything like that. I would say, our little girl Jennifer looks like she has Kestrel's damned face stamped on her, but the other three mostly look like me. If I cared, I'd look harder, maybe, but I don't, and they don't either.

A desperate love. For our children. For each other. For our family.

Mornings with Kestrel carrying the littlest on his shoulders with the others chattering after him. Gathering eggs together, handing up the basket to let our youngest hold it. "Yes, Daddy, I promise not to drop it!"

Afternoons with Paladin and me walking the kids back from school while Jennifer did cartwheels ahead of us. "Papa, Mommy, look at me!"

Evenings with everyone piled onto one big sofa while Lazarus read in his deep, rumbling voice, and the twins fell asleep on his chest.

After the kids came along, maybe we got a little boring.

Sweet, beautiful boredom, in our little farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, where we fell asleep each night to the sounds of the insects chirping and the night breeze fluttering the boughs of the trees.

Beautiful, boring boredom, with nothing to stir us to any kind of chaotic action.

Well.

Except the full moon, that is.

* * *

Thanks so much for reading! What's next?

More werewolves?

Eloise and the Werewolves

More than one love interest?

The Omega Princess

And if this isn't enough for you, try my recommender page, here .

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