Werewolf Wedding (13 page)

“I have to
be there
in fifteen,” he said, pulling on his clothes. He paused as he buttoned the last of his shirt buttons. “Although that should still be plenty.”

“Oh shut up!” I couldn’t help but laugh as he bent over to kiss me.

After two quick ones, and a third that made my heart pound just a little, he pulled away and whispered in my ear, “Well I meant that’d be plenty for you. Keep the bed warm, I’ll be home for dinner, honey.”

I cocked my head. “Excuse me, Prince Jackass?”

“Oh never mind,” he said with another grin. “I’ve just always wanted to say that. I’ll call you when I can. Stay safe.”

And then, with a swishing turn and a click of my front door, he was gone. But those words,
stay safe
, stuck in my throat like a lump of Tylenol.

*

A
n hour later, I pushed the door to my studio open with my foot, not because I was being cool, but because my arms were full of crap. I had a statue to fix before my subject... er, fiancé, came to
finally
model for it, and I wasn’t going to be the one to screw everything up.

Then again, I wasn’t entirely sure
how
to fix a statue broken in such a way and have it look convincing, but I’m also not the type to give up without a fight.

Obviously. It takes a certain kind of stubbornness to try and not only corral a werewolf, but also convince him that maybe jetting out of town at the first sign of trouble isn’t the best course of action. And why had he told me to stay safe? Isn’t that the sort of thing the guys on
Band of Brothers
said to each other right before someone got blown up?

“You’re sweating,” Jeannie said in her trademark deadpan. “Did you have more sex? I only ask because you’re sweating but you aren’t acting all fretful, which means—”

“Yes,” I said, as flat as I could manage. “All the way, every place, tongues all over the body.”

She helped me with my double armload of stuff and as soon as the epoxy jug, the paste, the color matching caulk and the silicone tube were safely on the floor, she put her hands on her hips and frowned. “You’re lying.”

“That’s true. Sort of. There
were
tongues all over the place, but not all the way.” I felt a little abashed as I was talking, but it was something I had to get out. “This might sound really stupid, but I think he’s trying to make it special. Also we’re getting married.”

“Huh,” Jeannie grunted. “I’ll take this stuff to the back.”

I stood there, waiting and listening, well aware of what was about to happen. Jeannie’s never at her best early in the morning. She always jokes that her meds haven’t kicked in yet, which I know isn’t true because she takes them before she leaves the house. My guess is she’s just naturally a night owl, and has forced herself to assimilate to normal, polite society via sleeping at night and waking in the day.

The other thing about her is that underneath the slightly gruff exterior, and the small frame, she’s strong as a goddamn aurochs. As soon as she was in the studio, I started counting backwards from thirty. If she lasted that long, it’d be a new obliviousness record. To her credit, and to my surprise, I only had to count down to eighteen before I heard the sharp inhalation from the other room, a lot like the sound an excited teenager makes when he’s huffing nitrous.

“
YOU WHAT?”

Something hit the ground and broke, but it didn’t sound expensive. The only thing I hoped was that it wasn’t one of the novelty coffee mugs that I liked. When she re-emerged from behind the sliding door to the studio, she was covered in flour.

Except there is no flour in a sculpture studio, so she’d somehow gotten herself covered from head to toe in Plaster of Paris dust.

“Don’t turn on the sprinklers,” I said, “or you’ll freeze like that.”

She was unfazed. “What the hell did you say?”

“Don’t turn on the—”

“You are getting
married
?” Jeannie’s voice was halfway between excited and a vulture shrieking. “To that billionaire? Holy shit, Dilly I think I’m going to faint. And I haven’t even had an over-the-panties handy from the guy.”

I shrugged, trying to act as casual as I could. Reality was, it had only just hit me what I was doing, and somehow hearing Jeannie say it put a lump in my stomach that felt like I’d eaten a bucket of spackle.

Without my having started talking, I guess she felt the need to keep on, out of fear that otherwise she’d either explode from tension build up, or maybe the world would disappear. Even as nervous as I was getting as reality set in, the fact that she was standing there, covered in plaster, and hooting at me was just a little too much.

I sat down, a little harder than I meant to sit, and then just started howling with laughter. I don’t mean the kind where you get some tears in your eyes – I mean the sort of laughing that’s as bad as a terminal case of hiccups. My sides hurt, my face burned from the exertion of being pulled up into a smile for so long. My eyes began burning from either the plaster dust wafting off of Jeannie or from how tightly I had them clamped shut.

But then the damndest thing happened.

As I sat there screaming with laughter, I felt my chest tighten up a bit, and then my eyes burned not from the dust, but from something coming
out
of them. Moisture in the corners of my eyes collected and rolled slowly down my cheeks. The volcanic laughter that had took me so quickly shifted to what I thought before was the complete opposite, but in that moment, I realized exactly how similar they were.

Despite riding a falling-in-love high for the past two weeks, exactly how stupid I’d gotten hit me square in the chest. The droplets turned to streams, and before I knew it, I was sitting there in the floor of my studio, weeping loud and proud.

Jeannie ran over to me, and held me tight.

I let her for a second, sobbing helplessly into the crook of her neck and then I remembered her situation. “Cloth,” I managed to choke out. “Wet cloth from...”

Speaking coherently was beyond me just then, so I went the ‘point like a caveman’ route and indicated one of my workbenches that had an old, brass faucet in it. The plaster on my face had already started to set, but luckily Jeannie took the hint quickly. I managed to get my eyes cleared out before I needed a trip to the emergency room, which... well, in the scheme of things, was a pretty fantastic turn of events.

Jeannie scratched at the place on her neck that my tears turned the plaster into a stiffening slurry. “I’m going to the shower, and you’re going to come talk to me while I’m in there,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Part of the work I do is getting messy. Really, really, horrifically messy. I routinely get covered in all kinds of noxious chemicals and dust and other awful shit, so I have a sort of make-shift shower stall in the back of the studio in case I need to go somewhere right after I finish working.

Of course, the number of times I’ve needed to desperately go somewhere after work could be counted on, I think, three fingers.

Jeannie stripped down, turned on the shower, and unleashed a torrent of swears and curses and words that I’m not sure how to categorize.

“It takes a while to warm up,” I said, noting that my own voice sounded listless. “Solar powered water tank.”

She answered with a sputter, and something that sounded like an insult aimed at the shower’s mother. Jeannie’s so nonplussed and hard to rouse that I usually forget how wonderful it is when she
does
get excited. I’m so used to her calm, almost defiantly even temperament and ability to completely avoid surprise... but
damn
is she a girl who hates cold water. She took a deep breath and let out a long, comically pleasured sigh.

“Thank God that’s over,” she announced. “I felt like a cat in a frozen lake. You should get a real hot water tank back here.”

“You gonna pay for it?”

“No, you are. Anyway, now that we’ve decided where your next four months of profit are going,
you
need to open those pretty lips of yours and start yapping. What the hell are you talking about, getting married to a guy you met two weeks ago? You’re not knocked up and trying to act like we’re living in 1947 and you can’t go around being a sullied dove, are you?”

“No, I’m—”

“Because that’s stupid as all shit, and women these days are perfectly capable of carrying on a good—no a great life—and to be fantastic parents without some idiot alpha male wandering around and wolf-whistling, and swatting them on the ass and showing off their chest hair with big, open-collared shirts.”

She made an affirmative-sounding grunt, as though she were pleased with the point she’d wanted to make.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m just saying... the President of the damn country came from a single mother! The President! I’ll babysit, and you can just bring the little rug rat to work. It’ll be fine!”

There was a long pause. “You’re not pregnant, are you?” Jeannie asked.

“Not so far as I know,” I said. “Although he wouldn’t screw me to the wall this morning. I was basically begging him to, but he said he was too fertile, and that I was ovulating.”

That elicited a loud boom of laughter. “Is he charting your period? How the hell would he know? And why couldn’t you just roll on a jimmy hat, and get on with it?”

And... this is the part that I was almost sure was going to convince my best friend in the world, Jeannie Wilders, my friend since I was six, that I had gone completely nuts. My next admission, I was sure, was going to make her realize that I had long since slipped into loony tune land, and that she may as well call the guys in the white lab coats to take me away.

“Oh right,” she said before I could speak, almost as an afterthought. “Werewolf sperm
is
supposed to be like the reproductive equivalent of a Viking berserker hopped up on whatever those plants were they chewed up before they went into battle. I read something about how werewolves have to use special rubbers or their little men just punch right through and before you know it, you’re carrying around a belly full of puppies. Or... er, whatever they call their babies.”

My jaw might have actually disconnected from my head. “You... what?”

Jeannie looked at me with a look of slight disbelief on her face. She remembered to pull her pants up just about then. And then she remembered her pants were covered in plaster, and instead grabbed a pair of the green scrubs I keep in the back of the studio for when I’d prefer not to ruin my real clothes.

“I told you, I’ve read lots of books,” she said with a look of genuine confusion. “Werewolves are always like that.”

If accepting a marriage proposal to a guy I hardly knew, and then watching him turn into a wolf and beat the shit out of his brother – who, by the way, drove a motorcycle through the window of a mansion and then lit the dining table on fire – was becoming hard to swallow, the fact that my friend had apparently never
not
believed in werewolves was like chewing on an anvil.

“Have I somehow missed a memo that werewolves and vampires and zombies are all real?” I asked, a little more sharply than I had intended to be.

“No, zombies aren’t. That’s dumb. They’re just shambling corpses. Who the hell wants one of
those
up in their business?”

“I... have no idea how to respond to that.”

My head was swimming. Maybe it was all the Malbec I’d had over the past couple of weeks, but on the other hand, maybe it was the fact that my best friend was completely unexcited about werewolves and was vastly more interested in me getting married.

“Jeannie?” I asked. “I have to... why are you more surprised by me getting married to a guy I barely know than you are about the werewolf business? Because I’m gonna be real honest with you, it’s kind of disconcerting.”

She shrugged. “I just never figured you’d be the type to get all worked up over someone and fall on them, that’s all. The werewolf thing seems more likely to be real.”

“I’m... not sure whether or not that’s a burn. Is that a burn?”

Jeannie shook out her shaggy mane and brushed it back out of her face before snatching a ponytail holder off my desk and helping herself. “Look, I’m not trying to insult you or anything. I don’t mean you’re a whackjob or you’re stupid or anything like that. It just doesn’t seem like you. You’re the careful one, you know? Anyway, he seems like a nice guy. Who cares if he turns into a dog?”

Before I could respond, she was weaving her way back to the front of the studio, humming what I think might have been a Billy Idol tune. I heard her say ‘white wedding’ in a sort of snarling, growly voice and I could have hit her in the back of the head with a spit wad, assuming I was in middle school and had ever managed to master shooting spit wads. And assuming she wasn’t at the other end of the studio.

I shook my head, wandered back over to my bench to start in on at least trying to get the damn statue back together.

Stay safe
.

Jake’s words echoed in my mind. I still had no idea what he’d meant by them, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was some kind of weird prescience in what he said. I had no reason to believe he was anything other than what he’d said – your average, everyday werewolf. But psychic? Come on. That’s about as stupid as zombies.

I snuffed a laugh and opened my epoxy. The pungent, acrid aroma hit my nose with a force I hadn’t expected. “Pff! A nose full of that will clear just about anything out of your head. Except I guess huffing epoxy.” My head was already getting a little floaty from the glue. It had been so long since I screwed anything up in such a royal fashion that I’d completely forgotten the whole ‘don’t use this indoors without ventilation’ thing, and went over to pop the windows all around my studio open.

One by one I walked from window to window, turning the cranks that eventually filled the room with fresh air, the happy chirps of morning birds, and also some angry squawking from jays that I think had a brawl with some of the robins. A pair of squirrels was going back and forth on the power line that stretched between the back of my studio, and the rest of the warehouse buildings in the district, and then all the way across the bottom end of the Lesser James River. Joke was it was so small that it was “less” a river and more a stream.