PitW Novel 1 (First Day of Your Were Life) Ch 1 Pt 2

Chapter 1, Part 2 (for part 1 check the previous post)

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Jean Goodwin sat on the park bench and watched the sun lowering towards the treeline.

Peter was late, but she didn’t mind. She had all night, and the night hadn’t even quite arrived yet. And besides (she smirked to herself), women always appreciate a man who comes late.

She idly contemplated the possibility of giving Peter another chance to come very late indeed, later that night. The two of them had been friends-with-benefits through most of their teen years, mostly because they were horny teens and there weren’t any other weres in town within five years either way of their own age. (Well, there was one, but that one just had SO many red flags. And you didn’t need to even HAVE a dick to know not to stick it in the crazy.)

Anyway. Jean had no problem bumping uglies with Peter- none at all!- but that was where it stopped. Sure, Peter was a sweet, caring, and frankly adorable goomba, but he had also inherited every bit of his father’s stupidity. (And so far as Jean was concerned, his mother wasn’t winning any Nobel Prize either- sure, she taught elementary school, but she married Mr. Stubbe and seemed to be happy with him, so there had to be something wrong with him.) And besides, as entertaining as Peter’s nonstop stream of minor catastrophes might be to watch, she didn’t want to spend her life dealing with the fallout.

No, Jean had a plan. She was going to enjoy the three most free years of her life in college, then pick some major or other- it really didn’t matter what- spend another two years getting the sheepskin, then find a new pack somewhere else, find someone well-off and well-hung, and begin working out how to make it seem like proposing marriage was his idea. Maybe she would send Peter a dirty selfie every once in a while for old times’ sake, but that was all.

She hadn’t been surprised by Peter’s lack of reaction when she’d explained all of that to him. For one thing, he was sweet. For another, he was pretty dumb. And mostly he was a heterosexual male lycanthrope just out of high school, which meant his only thoughts about lifetime commitments centered on pro baseball scouts.

Still, they each had about a year and a half left of being horny teens, and they would both be going to the uni in town (Peter on an athletics scholarship, Jean on a Mom-owns-three-pharmacies scholarship), so she didn’t see any reason not to enjoy a good thing while it lasted. Snag a bit of barbecue, find some unoccupied bushes, get that stupid ratty old jacket off of him, and-

-and there he was now, skateboarding down the jogging path. Peter looked a bit wobbly, and Jean noticed his feet were considerably wider apart on the skateboard than he usually kept them. And... yep, those feet were bare, except for the set of emergency flip-flops that he carried in his duffel. Jean knew exactly what that meant.

“‘Lo, Jean,” he said as he let the skateboard coast the last little distance to the park bench. “Sorry I’m late.”

“Hey, Petey.” Jean didn’t even try to hide her amused smirk. “See you lost your shoes again! What’s the matter, couldn’t wait for the moon to get fuzzy?”

Yeah, here’s the thing. Werewolves don’t just change under moonlight. Technically, once we learn how to control our shifts, we can change back and forth any time we want to. But the problem is, it’s harder to stay wolf during the new moon... and much harder to stay human during the new moon. On those days your body just wants to be fuzzy, and any little lapse in concentration means it’s walking-shag-carpet time. And if you do lose control, it takes absolute calm and a lot of concentration to get back to human form.

Well, it does for me, anyway. But as everybody likes to remind me, I’m slow.

Anyway, on the night of the full moon, when the need to shift is at its strongest, most packs, including ours, have what we call the Howl, where everybody gets together and really lets their hair down. The Howl serves a lot of purposes, but the biggest one is to give weres a safe space to let our instincts free a bit, where other weres can keep us under control if things go sideways.

At least, that’s the theory. The problem is, maybe there are some members of the pack you don’t really want to get all instinctual with...

“Aw, lay off,” Peter whined, flopping onto the park bench next to Jean. “First i had to ditch Butch Cramer, and that took forever. Then there was this car backfiring, and I was already jumpy from Cramer, so I lost control, and then those goons I told you about showed up again and tried to grab me-”

“Again?”

Jean, who had been slumped lazily back on the park bench enjoying the tale of stupidity, froze rigid at that voice.

“Crazed hazmat goons with butterfly nets trying to kidnap you again, Peter?” The voice was female, deep, and had a growl under it barely smoothed by its current sneering tone. “You sure they’re not just the nice people in the white coats from the place with the cozy padded walls?”

Peter and Jean looked up and behind them. There stood a tall, voluptuous blonde (close-cropped in back, but long bangs in front that obscured half her face) in an outfit that looked like someone had taken a wrap-around military tunic and modified it to be a one-piece swimsuit. She smirked down on them, hands on her hips, smirking down at them.

That was Rebecca Cramer, who had picked up the unfortunate nickname of “Butch” in the three years she’d attended high school with them before getting her GED and dropping out. She was also, in their estimation, the second craziest member of the Peterstown pack, second only to her father.

For most of their childhood, Butch Cramer had been a vague, briefly-glimpsed face at Howls, and then a slightly more frequent sight in the halls of Dante High School. For most of that time she’d had as little to do with them as possible, which had been just fine with both Peter and Jean.

That had changed a few months back, for the much, much worse.

“Best not let those mean, nasty people lock you up,” Cramer said in a mocking tone. Then, in a tone clearly lifted off some movie villain somewhere, she added, “You belong to me.”

“Butt out, Cramer!” Jean snapped. “Peter ain’t your property!” She felt her own inner wolf stirring, but it was still sunlight, and this wasn’t the part of the park reserved by her father for the Private Family-and-Friends Event. There didn’t seem to be any humans around, but...

Cramer let loose a snort at that. “Everything belongs to the strongest.” She reached a hand down to caress Peter’s check. Then she stretched her hand, grabbing his jaw and squeezing... as she shifted.

One moment an outside observer would have seen a blonde human holding a black-haired human’s jaw in her hand. The next moment the hand was twice as large, with sharp claws extending from each digit and light yellow fur running up an arm bulging with muscle. The outfit stretched, as it had been designed to do, around a body that had put on more than a foot of height. The buttons down the front left had to stretch to cover the expanded torso, gaps between showing the inner curves of breasts that refused to be compressed any tighter.

And the face above it all had a smile that, thought it rode on a wolf muzzle and bared sharp wolf teeth, was still the smile of a human being deliberately threatening.

“That is the way of the true lycanthrope,” Cramer finished, giving Peter’s chin a rough waggle back and forth in her hand before releasing it. Flexing her other arm and curling her paw into a fist, she added, “And I’m strong enough to take what I want.”

As Peter scrambled off the bench and away from Cramer, Jean stood and put herself between them. “Back off, Becca,” she said, keeping the growl out of her own voice with considerable effort. “Or else I’ll make sure you miss the Howl tonight.”

“Temper, temper, Jeannie,” Cramer replied. She brushed past Jean as if she weren’t there, leaning down to lightly touch a claw to Peter’s lips. He stared crosseyed down at it as she said, “I’ll claim what’s mine at the Howl. Be ready.” Then instantly Peter’s cheeks were crushed between Cramer’s thumb and forefinger again as she whispered, “Don’t even think about refusing me.”

Then she leapt onto the bench, bounced off the back of it, and was off, bounding on all fours to the trees. In five seconds she was lost to sight.

Peter and Jean both let out a long sigh of relief. “Peter,” Jean asked, “why don’t you EVER stick up for yourself? Even just once?”

“Hey, it took everything I had just to stay human during that!” Peter said sulkily.

“Lame excuse, Petey.”

“Hey, it’s important!” Peter said. “I already lost my shoes and socks. I don’t wanna mess up anything else when I’m going out with Sarah tonight!”

“Tonight??” Jean’s slow process of relaxing out of fight-or-flight mode reversed. “With Sarah? TONIGHT?? I’ve covered for you two before, but I am NOT making excuses for you blowing off a Howl to hang out with a human! Do you even care how much trouble you’ll be in?”

For some reason (maybe the fact he was stupid), Peter grinned at this. “Well, I’m kind of obliged to be there,” he said, “seein’ that last time we got together we finally DID IT!” He grabbed Jean by the arms and pulled her to him, not quite hugging her.

Jean’s brain didn’t want to accept what it had just heard. “You- what- come again?”

“You bet I HOPE to!” Peter continued, almost giggling. “Two weeks ago were were all out on her couch, I’d dosed up on wolfsbane, ‘cause her parents had taken her little sisters to grandma’s in Bloomington, and they weren’t gonna be back until the next day-”

“What??”

“And then SHE was all, like, pulling off her panties, and then we-”

“YOU DID WHAT??”

Two seconds later Jean, holding on to her human form by sheer willpower, was hauling Peter down the sidewalk, out of the park, at full gallop, paying no attention to his whining about the duffel, the skateboard, and the sandals they’d left behind.

They could go back and get them later, assuming the two of them were still alive then.