9

clementine

PALADIN WAS SUBDUED when he took me back to the wall. He didn't touch me, and it felt like someone had carved out half of my heart and left it to decay on the side of the road.

He kissed me goodbye, though, and when he did, there were tears in his eyes.

That broke me, and I sobbed and clung to him for a while, for too long.

Finally, I climbed back over the wall all alone.

I had to hike a little ways back to the place where I'd parked my car, because it needed to be somewhere safe, on the shoulder. I drove back to my dorm.

And everything seemed to turn gray.

The sharp, bright feeling that I'd been feeling now and then was gone. I felt muted and dead and sad. I trudged through my classes, mostly because I wanted something to do. I thought about researching tithes and wolf mates, but it was too depressing. I didn't want to know.

Anyway, they'd rejected me.

They said it was for my own good, so maybe that was better than being rejected because they didn't care about me.

When the weekend came, I went out drinking.

Unlike during my roaming phase, when I'd pressed into men and flirted until they bought me drinks, when I'd tossed my hair and danced and beckoned and teased, I ignored everyone, men and women included.

That was when I realized that it had probably never mattered what I did. Tons of men approached me, and I rebuffed as many of them as I could, refusing free drinks, getting gradually nastier and nastier as the night went on. I found myself saying things like, "Well, things were going well until you came over," and when even this was too difficult for them to comprehend, "Go away."

It was near midnight, and I was nursing a mixed drink that was mostly melted ice when another man came over to me.

I huffed, annoyed. "Look, let me spell this out for you. I don't want any company right now."

"Right," he said with a nod. "I know, when I want to be alone, what I like to do is come to a place that's crowded full of people."

I huffed again. Fuck this dude. I rolled my eyes.

He sat down. "You're a tithe, right?"

I drew back.

He shrugged. "I smell it."

I gave him a horrified look.

"I think everyone can smell it, actually, it's just that it's so subconscious that they don't pick up on it. For some reason, though, I do."

"What do I smell like?"

He laughed. "Animalistic sex?"

I cringed.

"Adventure," he said, lowering his voice. "Danger. Absolute and utter ruin."

I snorted.

"Come home with me," he said.

"No!" I said. "I don't even know your name."

"Trevor," he said, offering me his hand.

I glared at his proffered hand for several beats too long, and then, sighing, I shook his hand. "Clementine."

I ended up at his place.

I let him kiss me, and I let him touch me. I wanted to try it, I thought, try having sex with a human man, not a wolfman, just to see what it was like.

But he was kind of drunk, and he kept losing his erection, and we ended up naked together in his bed, wrapped in a patchwork quilt, and I knew that it wouldn't have been enough anyway.

"I was married to a tithe," he said, out of the blue.

I sat up straight in the bed and looked at him. "What?"

"I think that's why I smell it now," he said.

I gaped at him, stunned. "What… what happened? Are you still married now? Am I having sex with a married man?"

"Well, first of all, we did not actually have sex," he said. "And no. She's, um, she's gone. She's…"

I waited, but he never finished that sentence. Did gone mean divorced? Dead? That she'd gone out across the walls as a werewolf mate? I didn't know how to make my mouth form those questions.

He settled down on his pillow and stared up at the ceiling. "We got married too young. Neither of us were even twenty yet. We were happy, I think, as happy as anyone is. And then she started fretting about tithe symptoms, and I did the typical man thing, which was to tell her she was imagining it, and that women were all freaking out about stuff that was totally normal. Then the blood test came back, though, and then there was no denying. I, uh, did not handle it well."

"Yeah." I was still sitting up in the bed, staring down at him. "Um, I'm sorry."

"I wanted to take her and run. Go overseas, that kind of thing."

"Yeah," I said, nodding. "My dad, that's what he wanted me to do."

"But then she went over the walls, and it happened, and she came back, and she seemed fine, better than fine, really, kind of luminous in this way. Those first few months, in between the full moons, we had incredible sex, and I fell harder for her than I'd ever fallen for her. She loved it, and I loved it for her, because I loved her, and I wanted her to have everything she wanted. But then, it stopped. It switched off. I remember the first full moon that she didn't feel the urge for it. I remember holding her in our bed, holding onto her. She didn't cry or anything, but she seemed broken."

"What do you mean?" I said in a tiny voice.

"There was a light in her, and it turned off. We tried after that, but it didn't work. It was like she was a different person, I think. She wasn't the woman I'd fallen in love with—not the teenage girl I married, and not the moon-tinged sex goddess I fell in love with either. She was someone entirely else. I think I could have fallen in love with her a third time. I really do. But I was still just me , and she had fallen out of love with me a long time ago. I think probably right after her first gathering. I was never going to be enough for her, not after all of that. She left. We have a very amicable divorce, and she moved close to where both of our parents live, so sometimes I see her when I go home for family gatherings. We always chat, and it's nice. But that spark, whatever it was that was there, it's gone."

I didn't know what to say to that.

He flung an arm over his face. "Now, I do this . Bring tithes home and fail to fuck them."

"Really?" I said. "I'm just a typical Saturday for you?"

"You offended?" he said. "I'm sorry."

"You have difficulty maintaining an erection a lot?"

"Ooh," he said. "Now, you're really offended." He laughed again.

"No, just… why?"

"I don't know," he said. "I could say it's because I want her back, and tithes remind me of her, and there's probably something to that."

"But?"

He was quiet.

"Is she remarried?" I said.

"No," he said. "When we got divorced, she said something to me about how she didn't think regular men were enough for her anymore. I figured she was just saying that. A version of, ‘It's not you, it's me,' or whatever. She said that it wasn't fair to keep me in a relationship when I could be with someone who could genuinely love me and want me, like it was this altruistic thing, and I didn't believe her. But when I do see her, there's some weird hollow, longing in her face now. I don't know."

I eyed him. "You should try to get her back."

He snorted, moving his arm away from his face. "What?"

"Well, it's too late for her," I said. "She should have mated, and that would have satisfied her, but she didn't. She missed her chance, missed the window. All she can have is second best, now, and that's better than nothing. You don't seem to be moving on. You want her second-best. Just stop trying to give yourselves some beautiful, impossible love story and be happy for what you can have."

He laughed again. "You don't understand anything. How old are you, anyway? Twenty-three?"

"Twenty," I said.

"What the fuck?" he said. "You were in a bar."

"I have ways of getting served," I said, defensive.

"Oh, my God," he muttered. "I'm that guy, trying to fuck children."

"I'm twenty ." I looked him over. "How old are you?"

"Older than you," he said, chagrined.

After that, I left.

I spent the next week in a state of grim determination. I knew what had to happen now. It didn't matter how I felt about it, or what plans I'd had. Things had changed. I didn't exactly like the fact that they'd changed, but I knew that I didn't want to end up like that man's ex-wife.

I could see that it would happen, though.

I'd go through the rest of my full moons, fucked sideways by different wolves, and come home at sunrise, until it all ended.

And then, maybe I'd have a life where I could go to school and be a lawyer. Maybe I'd meet a man and we'd get married, and I'd have children. Maybe I'd do all of those things. But I could see now that it wouldn't be enough.

It wasn't that we didn't have choices in life.

We did.

But not everything was a choice.

Sometimes, you woke up and it was raining on the day you intended to plant flowers.

Sometimes, you were in a car accident and ended up paralyzed from the waist down.

Sometimes, you got some windfall inheritance from a dead relative you never knew existed.

These things happened. Things that were out of our control.

One moment, the world was one way, and the next, everything had shifted entirely.

When I got that sharp feeling, pinned to the present moment, staring up at the brightness of the sky, I knew that if I was too rigid, if I didn't let myself move with the rhythm of what was out of my control, I'd only end up snapping in two.

I'd had plans, sure, but now, I had to change my plans.