How to Run with a Naked Werewolf (8 page)

And if I told Maggie what I was going through, she would insist on “opening a werewolf-sized can of whoop-ass” on Glenn, and that would bring up a whole new set of problems for an alpha already stretched pretty damn thin by integrating two packs and a recent marriage. And I
certainly didn’t want to complicate the pack’s ability to hire a new Dr. Moder, not with so many couples from the newly merged packs expecting cubs. There were plenty of doctors out there who could take my place as Dr. Moder, doctors without my baggage. It was easier for everyone if I just removed myself from the equation.

Caleb gently jostled
me awake in the late afternoon and led me stumbling into another dingy room, this time at the Flint Creek Motor Inn. I chose not to comment on the lone queen-sized bed. I was too tired to protest the possibility of spooning with Bitey McWolfPants again. Caleb practically had to tuck me into bed like a toddler, pulling off my shoes as he explained in his gravelly voice that he needed to talk to some local contacts about Jerry. I stayed up long enough to lock the door behind him and promptly fell asleep again in the squeaky little motel bed.

It was the dream of my darling former husband that woke me up, the dream of him breaking down my motel-room door. I was screaming and screaming for help, but no sound was coming out as he dragged me away. I sat up, making a strangled whimper, clawing at the imagined hands at my throat.

I sprang out of bed into the dark, empty room. I blew out a breath and pushed my hands through my short, snaggled hair, then padded to the door to check the lock again. I shook my head and wondered whether I was going to be waking up like that for the rest of my life. But I still double-checked the bolt.

Better safe than sorry.

I crawled back into bed, pulling the covers up to my chin. How had I sunk to trusting my security to a cut-rate dead bolt? I used to be a pretty nice girl, back when I was Tina Campbell-Bishop, M
dramatic pause
D. I had everything. A nice husband. A nice home. A promising career. And I walked—well, ran—away from all of it. All the things I took for granted when I was growing up, such as feeling safe, having an indoor place to sleep and food on the table, people being polite and taking notice of me—I lost them somewhere along the way. I got harder, meaner. Rather than looking at people as human beings whom I might be able to help, I viewed them all with a calculating eye, analyzing how they might help me or hurt me before they could even introduce themselves.

Most people can’t pinpoint the exact moment when everything in their life goes to shit. I consider myself lucky to have such a definite timeline, so that if I were ever given the opportunity to travel through time, I could hop into the DeLorean, drive directly to April 10, 2004, walk into the break room at the hospital, and bitch-slap myself before I could meet the new technical-support hire, Glenn Bishop. But we seemed like such a good match! It was such a sensible solution to my dry spell, a string of bad dates that made me want to see someone safe for a while. And Glenn was so accommodating, easygoing. We liked the same kinds of movies, food, and, wouldn’t you know it, music. We enjoyed lazy weekends and trips to the lake. He was proud of my medical career and the energy I devoted to my work.
I thought I was lucky to have fallen into a relationship with someone so easily.

I thought that’s what relationships were supposed to be. My parents were married for almost forty years before they died, and in all that time, I couldn’t remember them fighting. They didn’t really argue, because they knew how to talk to each other and how to compromise. I thought that was what I’d found with Glenn. He was sweet and attentive and dependable. He was
that guy
, the guy of substance your mother told you to be on the lookout for, just in case he came along.

Being with Glenn was always the easy part. The hard part was spending time with anyone else. Glenn was slight, bookish, and shy, which I sort of liked. It was a nice switch from the alpha-male types I normally went out with, burly, athletic types with dozens of friends and interests I had to compete with for attention. It was lovely to be able to have a conversation with a man without him eyeing the waitress or spotting someone across the restaurant he wanted to speak to, leaving me to fiddle with breadsticks for ten minutes while he bro-hugged some guy from his intramural basketball league.

The problem was that Glenn’s shyness became my issue. He had no trouble spending hours online gaming or chatting with total strangers, but he didn’t want to go to my work functions or casual drinks with my coworkers. He spent too much time around my colleagues anyway, he said, and my colleagues got enough of my precious time. Before I realized what was happening, Glenn slowly but surely made it more difficult for me to maintain friendships. He pouted when
I wanted to go out with the girls, saying he never got to spend time with me. He even hid my car keys a few times so I couldn’t leave, all the while claiming it was just a “joke” he was forced to play because he loved me so much.

Of course, I couldn’t tell my friends, “Glenn doesn’t want me to spend time with you,” because that made it sound so unseemly and controlling. So when I retreated from those relationships, my friends thought it was my choice. I was one of those women who can’t maintain friendships after they get into a relationship. I was a
Cosmo
cautionary tale, in more ways than one.

As time went on, a lot of Glenn’s problems became my problems. We’d committed to each other, moved in together. It seemed petty and shortsighted to leave my fiancé because he was a little needy. His demands grew so incrementally that I didn’t see how unreasonable they were becoming. If I loved him, I’d dress a bit more feminine, keep my hair long, cook the things he liked, enjoy staying home on the weekends the way he did. If I loved him, I would keep my personal cell phone on me at all times, even though it was against hospital policy. I would ignore the “accidents” I seemed to have whenever Glenn was angry with me, like tripping over his feet after an argument about rent and smacking my head against the coffee table. I would pass up the big white wedding debacle and get married on a beach in the Caribbean, which is what we did, one not-so-special weekend when I came home to find Glenn holding the plane tickets. I was the proverbial frog in the pot of slowly boiling water, dying by degrees.

And then, there were the family “issues.” I was an only child, a late-in-life miracle for my lovely, rational parents. We’d shared a close, slightly unorthodox relationship, as my parents tended to treat me more like a small adult colleague than a child. I’d been disappointed that Glenn wasn’t interested in spending time with them. My parents didn’t like him, he claimed. My father made him feel as if he was being interrogated for the entire visit, and my mother was too clingy with me. He caused huge fights right before we were supposed to go to family events, so that either we would skip them, or I would end up fighting off tears for most of the night, sparking tension and uncomfortable questions from my parents. It ended up being easier to tell my mother that we had other plans or that I was working. While he was mollified by my efforts to “focus on us,” he grumbled that he didn’t understand why I wanted to go see my parents so often anyway.

I tried to tell myself it would take time for Glenn to warm to my parents. But then Mom was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer about two years after our wedding and passed away within six months. Dad never quite recovered from the shock, passing in his sleep a year later. I would always regret missing those last Christmases and birthdays with them. And while I couldn’t blame Glenn for my failure to protect my time with my parents, I could blame him for expecting me to bounce back from their deaths as if they were just an inconvenience.

At first, I stayed because I was afraid to admit, even to myself, that my marriage was such a mistake. I didn’t
love Glenn. He’d strangled any love I’d felt for him with his insecurities and his manipulations. But I was a successful doctor, on my way up the ladder at a major Nashville medical center. Marriages that lasted less than one presidential term were not supposed to happen to women like me. I was ashamed and embarrassed and every other word that expressed world-shaking regret. When Glenn started talking about having children of our own, instead of going all warm and tender at the idea of starting a family, I panicked. I knew I couldn’t be tied to him in that way for the rest of my life. So I made a clean break.

With my parents gone and my friendships damaged, nothing prevented me from moving across the country. I didn’t have enough evidence for a restraining order, so I elected just to disappear. I used computers at the public library to find a new job at a hospital in Tampa and used what was left of my inheritance to set up an apartment there. I filed divorce papers and moved out before Glenn could make it home from a late-night department meeting. I used my own name to start my new life but thought I was being smart by listing a post-office box on bills and accounts. I hoped Glenn would just move on, get bored, find someone else.

As usual, I’d underestimated him. He hacked into my e-mail accounts, no matter how many times I changed the address or password. I had to change my credit-card information and post-office box three times after he managed to buy some nice Jet Skis, a flat-screen TV, and a bass boat on my dime. When I complained to police in our hometown, he told them it was
simply a predivorce credit spat and that we were working through it in family court. With me in another state, they were all too happy to let me fend for myself.

And still, I didn’t realize how bad things could get. I’d made the mistake of staying in contact with old friends. They’d been so convinced by my “perfectly happy wife” act that most of them were shocked by the sudden shift. One well-meaning (read: ill-informed and utterly without boundaries) college friend gave Glenn my address, thinking I’d given up on the marriage too quickly and should give him another chance. Having followed me through the lobby of my building and through my front door, he walked right into my new apartment and broke my jaw.

I didn’t know that it was possible to hurt that badly. I could barely crawl to a sitting position as Glenn ranted and raved over me.

After Glenn
let me know how much I had hurt him
, he told me to wait in the bedroom while he went to fix himself a drink. He was so convinced that I would do it, he just walked out of the room, leaving me right next to a phone, and never even considered that I would use it to call for help. That chapped my butt much later, when I was in my
analyze every moment so I can better blame myself
phase. He was so sure of his “shock and awe” campaign. He was so sure I would just cower on the carpet. It never occurred to him to take the phone with him.

It wasn’t the first “accident” I’d had around Glenn, but it was the first that I couldn’t treat myself afterward. I called 911, and Glenn—to my shock—stuck around.
The paramedics—to Glenn’s shock—didn’t accept his assertion that a fully dressed woman with dry hair fell getting out of the shower, so he was arrested on assault charges. I was a patient in my own hospital for two days, treated to pitying looks from my coworkers as I recovered from a broken jaw, several broken fingers, and internal injuries.

I knew what would happen when he was released. I’d had him arrested. To Glenn, that was unforgivable. When I went to file a restraining order, I found that he had called some online-gaming friend and given him some sob story to convince him to post bail. Glenn skipped town, without regard for his friend’s bail collateral. And when I tried to file the restraining order, I found out that Glenn had been fired from the hospital months before and moved out of our apartment. Other than his birthdate, I had no information with which to file the order, which would make it difficult to serve and enforce. If I wanted to keep this new life I’d started and continue the divorce proceedings, I would have to stay put. Although I couldn’t find a trace of where Glenn might have disappeared to, he would know exactly where I was. And he could come back anytime he wanted. And even if I moved somewhere new and started over, if I wanted to practice medicine, it would be impossible to hide. Hospitals and private practices expected their doctors to post profiles on their Web sites, appear in ads, and have some public presence. Trying to make myself invisible would mean the end of my medical career. Walking away from the divorce proceedings would stall them, giving credence to Glenn’s
claims of my mental instability and “cruelty.” But it had to be done.

I’d learned my lesson. I checked myself out of the hospital against doctors’ orders and ran. I sold everything I had, which wasn’t much after Glenn’s playing Russian roulette with my credit rating. I bought fake IDs and a junker car and drove in jagged lines across the country, until anyone Glenn used to find me would be so confused they wouldn’t know where I was heading. I figured Alaska was as far as I could go without having to switch citizenships.

Most people try to use abandonment as a reason to dissolve a marriage. Glenn had used it as a reason to stall the divorce decree, stating that I should be present for the decision. He used the fact that I couldn’t return home to keep me tied to him.

And now, all these years later, Glenn was looking for me again. And I was running. Again.

How long was I going to live this strange, untethered half life? Would I be an eighty-year-old woman working under an assumed name in a bowling alley in Saskatoon, dreading that day my geriatric ex wobbled up to my door on his walker? Would I ever have a home again? Would I ever have a family? I was lucky to have escaped my marriage without a child. At this point in my life, a child, particularly Glenn’s child, would be a liability, a beautiful burden I couldn’t protect or move without worry. But the idea of never having one of my own put a cold, insistent pressure on my heart. I’d delivered so many children to the valley werewolves. Then again, having a baby would mean trusting someone enough to
let him see me naked, perhaps even telling him my real name. If I had to wait until I was eighty to do that, it was going to be disappointing on several levels.