Fierce

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

By the time I was eighteen, I’d fully become human. That is to say, I spoke like them, walked like them, pooped and peed like them, and dressed like them. In fact, you’d never even would’ve known that I’d been raised by wolves, apart for my predilection for steak tartare—and, you know, rabbit and deer tartare. If cat had been on the menu…well, you know.

I went to school. I made so-so grades. Math and science held little interest for me. I liked gym. I ran track. I had to slow it down, and still I won all my races. I made the papers. Press at last! Still, I had almost no friends. The other kids knew of my odd-at-best past. This was Montana, after all; news travelled fast around those parts. Not as fast as me, but close.

I did have one good friend, though: Craig. Craig lived next door. Craig was homeschooled. Craig was a friggin’ genius. Einstein was rolling in his grave, in fact. Craig was also stunningly cute, with eyes the color of freshly-mowed green grass, hair as blond as wheat, and lips as red as a Twizzler. Craig was short and scrawny, while I’d grown tall and lithe and dense with muscle, not to mention hairy. Like, way hairy. The local Supercuts had to add a line to their menu: body trimming. You could braid me from head to toe. Craig, however, was smooth as silk. He was the yin to my yang. And damn if my yang didn’t want to plow his ever-lovin’ yin.

So yeah, I was raised by wolves and I was hairy and I was gay. The census bureau hadn’t even begun to think of boxes to check for the likes of me. Still, all of the above made me decidedly different. And different, especially in Montana, was never anyone’s cup of tea—Montanans being more coffee kind of people.

Craig liked different, though. More importantly, Craig liked me.

“What’s it like, Lucas?” Lucas, that’s my human name, when I’m not being all super-like. Again, pleased to meet you.

He asked me this question as we lay outside in the sun, the middle of summer in full force. We were at the far end of my backyard on a pair of old lawn chairs, facing the mountains that had once been my home. Montana is cold and/or windy most of the year; when it’s sunny and warm, you lay stakes and take advantage.

I turned his way. He was wearing a baggy, knee-length bathing suit. I was wearing tight Speedos—purple with iridescent pink trim. He was lathed in sunblock. I was covered in hair. Kudos to the sun if it managed to break through. “What’s what like, Craig?”

He blinked. He smiled. I ached to kiss him. I ached to tell him the truth, that I was super, that I was gay. I feared I’d lose him if I admitted either or both. I’d lost so much already, my home, my family; I couldn’t lose my one and only friend as well. “Knowing you have other parents out there,” he replied.

I gazed his way. Moths, it should be noted, rarely veer from the flame. Poof, they go. It seems a spectacular way to end it all. Craig was that spectacular. In any case, I tended to avoid these kinds of conversations. Joan and Brett had asked me if they should keep looking for my real parents. I told them that they were my real parents. They seemed to like that answer. I seemed to like it, too.

“I already have parents,” I told Craig.

His smile widened. It was blinding. Crest wrote commercials like this—minus, of course, the hairy, gay, super, horny teenager. Or maybe make that super-horny. In any case, he pointed to the white-capped mountains in the distance. “I meant your wolf parents.”

My stomach clenched. As much as I loved them, my wolf family, well, it was something I never talked about, not even with Joan and Brett. I was raised by wolves. I was probably the only one in the entire universe who could say such a thing. I was different in so many ways, but none so much as that one. And so, I diverted with, “Um, Craig, I’m gay.” Oddly, my stomach unclenched at the admission and I exhaled as if a great weight had been lifted off my chest. All in all, that’s exactly what had happened.

He chuckled. It sounded like seashells tossed at the shoreline. “Um, Lucas, I know.”

I coughed. Actually, I hacked. Loudly. “Huh?”

“I know,” he repeated. “I’ve always known, since the first day we met.”

I turned my face away from him and stared ahead, at the blue sky that wasn’t quite as stunning as his eyes. My heart was racing. A bunny sipping Coke had a slower heartbeat. Silence permeated the space around us, though I could still hear his breathing, could even hear him blink. Such is the curse of the super.

Minutes ticked by like hours. The silence became deafening. “That obvious?” I eventually croaked out as I repeatedly clenched and unclenched my fist.

He reached across the small divide that separated us. He placed his hand over mine and stopped my less-than-successful stress relieving technique. I turned my palm over, his hand now in rather than atop my own. I stared down as our fingers intertwined. Yin and yang, together at last. Da Vinci never painted anything so beautiful. “Not obvious,” he replied. “It’s just…it takes one to know one.”

I gulped. Again, I turned my face his way. “Huh?” And yeah, you try finding an eloquent eighteen-year-old, super or not.

“You heard me.”

Loud and clear. Hell, I could hear a cricket farting from a mile away. “I don’t understand.”

He squeezed his hand in mine. “You’re gay. I’m gay. You just admitted it. I just admitted it. It’s not rocket science, Lucas.” He grinned. “Though, as an FYI, if you want to discuss rocket science, I’m game. I tried with my mom and dad. We got as far as the origin of avionics before they broke out the Parcheesi.”

I shook my head. “No, I’m good with the whole rocket science thing.” Again, I stared down at our hands. Was this really happening? It seemed more like a dream. I know because I’d been dreaming of just such a scene for the past couple of years. Only, we were more or less naked in those dreams, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. “Um, Craig?”

“Yes, Lucas?”

“Do you mind that I’m so hairy?” It was a sore subject with me. I assumed men would be repulsed by it all. I assumed he was, too. Still, when you assume, you make an ass out, well, mostly me. FYI, my ass was hairy, too.

He released his hand from mine and jumped up. The sun haloed him from behind. It made him glow. He looked like an adorably scrawny angel as he stared my way. His grin widened. “I think you’re beautiful.”

“Really?”

He nodded. My d**k did the same. I wondered how my Speedos kept it all in there. Such a modern marvel. The Speedos I mean. Though my d**k was also nothing to sneeze at. “Really,” he replied. “Special.” He pointed at me, his finger aiming from top to bottom. “Hairy. Gay. Super, I’d go so far as to say.”

My eyes went wide. That was a word I only used inside my head. “Huh?” And yes, that word tended to follow me like a shadow. Get used to it.

He laughed. “Super, Lucas. I think you’re super.”

It was now my turn to nod. “Super? You think I’m super?”

He shrugged. “Given that you can run faster than anyone else, can hear better, smell better, can see so much farther than anyone else, well then, I’d say that super seems the appropriate word.” A faint blush crept up his neck. “Plus, you know, you’re…um…beautiful.”

The smile on my face actually hurt as it stretched tautly across my face. “You think I’m beautiful?” And then all the words he said prior to that last intoxicating one wormed their way through my brain. The smile on my face all at once faltered, crashing down like a house of cards in a gust of wind. “Wait, what? You knew I was gay and that I have…super powers?” I whispered that last part. No good tempting fate, not when it had been so kind to me thus far. “But how could you have known all of that? Do you have powers, too?”

He shook his head. “Nope, just the power of observation,” he said. “I mean, the gay thing, that was simply a hunch. I feel for you in a way that I don’t feel for other people. Reason would lend itself to the fact that I feel that way because you feel the same. As to the rest of it all: I watch you run, but I don’t see you perspire or get out of breath. Therefore, you could run even faster if you wanted to, and you already run faster than anyone I’ve ever seen; you hear the phone ringing in your house, even when we’re out here. I certainly don’t hear that; as for seeing and smelling, I’ve tested you.”

Again, my eyes grew wide. Saucers could have popped out of them if they were so inclined. “You have?”

He nodded. “I’ve asked you to read street signs two blocks away, to read license plates down the street, to smell for items clear across the house. You found it so easy to do those things that you never thought the requests to be odd.”

I pushed myself up onto my elbows. The lawn chair groaned beneath me. “And all that doesn’t scare the hell out of you?”

He moved in closer. He said I was beautiful. He took the word right out of my head. After all, it’s what I thought about him as well. “On the contrary,” he replied. “I’m special because of my intellect. You’re special because of who and what you are. Special is a great thing to be, Lucas. One in a million people are special. Statistically, I’d say you’re more like one in seven and a half billion.” My blush returned as he sat by my side. Tentatively, he ran his hand through my chest fur. In all the many years we’d known each other, he’d never touched me, at least not like this. “Is this okay?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper as his fingers traversed my peaks and valleys.

If at all possible, my pulse picked up speed. Okay was putting it mildly. “Um, fine,” I managed to squeak out as my Speedos started to tighten around the middle.

He smiled. “It’s soft. Like down. I always wondered what it felt like.” His eyes locked with mine. It felt like drowning. It felt like heaven. “You ever think of why you have these powers of yours?”

I lifted my hand and placed it on his thigh. It was like touching silk, the skin soft, hairless. If opposites truly did attract, good luck ever prying us apart. “Good genetics, I suppose.”

At last, he blinked as he slightly shook his head. “Doubtful,” he said. “There’s too much going on here, too many powers to spontaneously arise at one time, at least in a single generation, not unless your real parents had the same powers, probably even their parents before them. That would be a hard thing to keep a secret over several generations, especially in this day and age.”

My hand moved further up his leg. I’d become brazen in my five minutes out of the closet. His hand stopped as mine kept going. He watched my fingers disappear up his shorts. I could hear him as he stopped breathing. His heart pounded in sync with my own. In my ears, it sounded like two bass drums. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

“So, where did my powers come from then?” I asked as my hand came to a stop just below his crotch. “I mean, if I didn’t inherit them and I didn’t come by them spontaneously, then how do I have them?”

He tweaked one of my n*****s, then the other. It was an indescribable feeling, like a switch had been flicked on, like a thousand volts of electricity were suddenly coursing between the nubs before ricocheting out to all four limbs, to the fifth one dead center. I moaned as my eyelids fluttered. He smiled at my reaction. He had physical power over me now. I sensed he enjoyed the novelty of that. Which made two of us. Three, if you included my d**k. And yes, I always included my d**k, mainly because the little head was generally in control of the big one. FYI, it wasn’t so little anymore.

“The wolves,” he said, his hand now tracing my abs, one muscle at a time, causing me to wriggle in ticklish glee.

“What about them?” I rasped, my hand creeping up higher until I could tickle his balls, which hung low from the heat. Like the rest of him, they were smooth. Like the rest of him, they were perfect. My mind raced at the idea that I was tickling another guy’s nuts—and in my own backyard, no less. In broad friggin’ daylight!

“Gene therapy,” he said. “Or something like it.”

“Huh?”

He laughed. He cupped my crotch. I jumped. I moaned. Our eyes locked yet again. “You have to stop saying that, Lucas.”

“Seems to do the trick, though.”

He bent down. I craned up. There was a pause just before our lips brushed, as those thousand volts from a minute earlier suddenly tripled. That kiss was life itself, flicking on even more switches. My world suddenly went Technicolor on me, like Dorothy landing in some gayer version of Oz. And Oz was pretty gay to begin with, if you ask me.

Our tongues coiled and snaked around one another. With my free hand, I cupped the back of his neck and pulled him in tight. If I could’ve devoured him whole, I would have. Still, we eventually came up for air many minutes later, however reluctantly.

“Wow,” he said.

“Ditto.” I huffed and puffed, very three-little-pigs wolf-like. He hopped up. I started to object, but then he fell on top of me, the kiss repeated, then repeated again. Time seemed to stand still. The world around us faded into oblivion. I think a cloud might’ve slipped beneath us, but that could’ve simply been my overactive imagination.

His prior words, however, the one before that understatement of wow, bubbled their way up inside my head. Curiosity took a stranglehold on my cat. “The wolves,” I exhaled into his mouth.

He nodded as he bit my lip. I tasted a drop of blood. It brought me back, the memories flooding in, until even Noah’s ark would’ve had a hard time sailing on through. I saw my family, the wolves. My heart ached. My c**k ached. It was intense pain mixed with even more intense pleasure. It was almost too much to bear.

He pulled an inch away. I stared into his eyes, which had melded into a single Cycloptic emerald. “You were a baby when the wolves found you, right?”

“Probably,” I replied. “Least that’s what we figure, based on how wild I was by the time I was found.”

“And how do wolves carry their young?”

I knew the answer because I knew how my mother wolf carried her young, my brothers and sisters. “By the napes of their neck.”

He grinned. He kissed me. Stars twinkled behind my eyes. “You have powers like a wolf’s, Lucas,” he said. “You had to have gotten them from the wolf who raised you, who bit into your baby neck, who must’ve transferred something of herself into you. Gene therapy, Lucas. She altered your genetic makeup. You were young, after all, your body still forming, eyes, ears, nose not yet fully developed. If I had to take a guess, that’s how I’d say it happened.”

It made sense, given that I did indeed have those powers, the same ones my wolf mom had. I thought to question him further, to kiss him again, to grab his d**k, his ass, to push and grind my body into his until it would’ve been impossible to tell where he ended and I began, except…

“Boys, lunchtime!”

It was my mom. Talk about bad timing. Talk about the cloud being pulled right on out from underneath you.

“For all intents and purposes, you’re a wolf, Lucas,” Craig said. “Genetically speaking, I mean.” He laughed as he hopped up, his bathing trunks tenting all three-ring-circus-like. As for my Speedos, I was amazed that they hadn’t ripped at the seams.

I stared up at him in wonder and awe and lust—yeah, mostly that last thing. I thought of the moth just before it went ZAP! I growled like my wolf mom had taught me to, fangs exposed. “Woof!” I barked his way in complement.

He grabbed his stiffy. “Look at you, all fierce.” I could see the light bulb shimmering above his head. Edison would’ve yipped in delight. “Fierce,” he repeated with a snap of his fingers.

I jumped up and nearly fell over. All the blood in my body had seemingly travelled to my equatorial region. “Not to sound repetitive, Craig, but, huh?”

“Fierce!” he shouted. “That could be your superhero name!”

I shrugged. I nodded. I grabbed his trunk-encased boner. And no, not necessarily in that order. “Fierce.” I smiled broadly. “That could work.”

And there you have it.