Taming the Werewolf - 15
#15 of Taming the Werewolf
Jacob undid his necktie and cufflinks, placing them on the hotel room dresser. He was slow and quiet, straining to hear the muffled noises from behind the closed bathroom door, where Amanda had hidden away. She promised she would be a minute, but it was more than five at this point. It was clear from sound of her stifled breathing and pained moans that she wouldn't be coming out anytime soon.
All things considered, the wedding and the reception afterward was uneventful, exactly as he had hoped. His sister's friend, Lina, was quite happy to see both of them and to introduce them to the groom, a somewhat young man who seemed as smart as his computer engineering background indicated. They and everyone else in the reception hall downstairs were none the wiser that he and Amanda were having difficult times in their relationship. And even if they were aware, there were certainly a million reasons they could have guessed before realizing Amanda's lycanthropy was the source of all their troubles.
She pouted all the way to the chapel, which was comparatively good behavior in the week leading up to the full moon. As the wedding day approached and the moon grew brighter, she was becoming more irritable, less content, even less lucid. The werewolf within her was being denied, and the pain of not being able to transform was bad enough without the frustration that came with the realization that she would remain human all during the wedding reception. She was visibly angry with Jacob for forcing her into dialysis, going so far as to refuse his touch when they sat together during the wedding ceremony.
Picture time with the newlywed couple was yet another opportunity for more of Amanda's passive aggressiveness. In their brief exchange with the bride and groom as the cameraman switched out memory cards, Amanda couched her complaint that she was dragged to the wedding in delightful sounding sarcasm. Lina and the groom took it as a joke, but Jacob knew better. As they all posed together, he made it a point to hold her hand as she walked up the chapel's front steps with her high heels. Her skin was hot, anticipating a change that was not to come. Another sign of the frustration that she was certainly feeling all day.
The reception had to have been worse. They sat around a table with people they hardly knew, friends of Lina's that Jacob hadn't really known - she was her sister's friend, after all. Around the time he had judged to be moonrise, Amanda visibly squirmed in her chair, stretching out in unnatural ways that made the others concerned. She blamed it on the dress, another thing that Jacob forced her to wear. Another joke that had some truth in it.
They danced together for a total of two songs, the minimum they decided was good manners without seeming to others that they were actually fighting. Both times he had to insist that she at least look like she was enjoying the music and dancing with him. She grew visibly angrier at each suggestion, but he was running low on patience of his own. They needed to keep up appearances, if not for his sake, then for hers. He figured by now he was a fingernail of losing her to the werewolf and its hungers forever, but he was astounded about how quickly her desire for self-preservation was fading. As time passed, Amanda seemed to care less and less for how she appeared to others. All she wanted to do, it appeared, was to give in to the transformation and lose herself in the woods surrounding their summer home. A werewolf she wanted to be, nothing else mattered.
At the first polite moment, Jacob made their apologies to the bride and whisked Amanda away under the pretense of some illness she was feeling. Just one more lie that wasn't really. By half past nine, he was less worried about the pretense and more fearful that Amanda would lose it completely and unleash a torrent of rage in front of a hundred guests. He didn't anticipate she would transform - dialysis was too powerful, even if it wasn't powerful enough - but he was afraid her self-restraint and humanity would disappear any moment.
Relief came to both of them the moment he closed the door behind them, and they were in their hotel room at last. Friends and family of both the bride and groom traveled from everywhere, descending onto the city's most luxurious hotel for the reception, and even though Jacob and Amanda lived nearby, they reserved a room in the hotel block just the same. He wanted to spend the night with her, and didn't want to wait through a long drive home, which would leave her squirming again, more frustrated again.
"Honey, please come out," he said through the bathroom door. Her whimpers had turned to almost audible sobs. Her red eyes, the first thing he saw when she opened the door, clearly matched the situation.
"I'm sorry," Amanda said, inhaling sharply after every syllable, "It hurts so much."
The werewolf was incredibly strong and resilient, Jacob thought. It wouldn't allow the couple one full moon's rest. It was eating away at her resolve with every transformation, destroying her more quickly each time the change was denied. It seemed to show through her tussled hair and wrinkled clothes, her flushed skin and pained voice. The werewolf wanted out. It was going to force her to transform, no matter how much the two resisted, or it would crush her in the attempt, as it was doing now.
Amanda struggled to walk over to the king-sized bed. She collapsed onto the comforter and rolled herself halfway into a ball, even as the delicate dress she had picked out strained from the twisting and pulling her body exerted. The tension of the entire day, made worse by the heat of the full moon, had finally broken her self-control. Lycanthropy was killing her every moment the change was held back.
Jacob had enough. He pressed his hand to her forehead. She was burning up, as she had all day and most of the evening. He reached over to a table cloth, folded decoratively inside a room service glass above the minibar. He carefully moistened it and placed it on her forehead.
"How is that?" he asked her. Already she was beginning to calm down.
"It's warm," she said, "But it feels better."
She quieted her sobs and finally stopped squirming. Her skin still radiated heat - this much he could tell from sitting this close to her on the bed. The full moon was surely outside, burning her and beckoning the werewolf. But for now, she was calm.
"I can't stand to see you like this. I wish things were different," he whispered.
"I know. I wish I wasn't a werewolf. But..." she drifted off. As her head rested against the pillow, she thought a long, hard moment before speaking again. "But a part of me? Deep down? I just want to let go. A part of me wants to change."
As much of herself as she surrendered to lycanthropy, she was still reluctant to say the words. Maybe there was hope for her yet, he thought, even when he was sure the animal had taken her from him.
"I can't lose you, Amanda. I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have you."
"And I need you, too, Jacob. But this beast inside of me, it's too much. It can't be tamed. You can't tame a werewolf."
And that was the truth, the damning reality of it all. Jacob had thought about it. Did he make his wife worse by putting her on dialysis? Would he still have her if he didn't try to tame her werewolf? Would she just be a "normal" lycanthrope if they hadn't tried to resist her curse?
Amanda sat up on the bed, wiping her brow, sweat forming through the pores again. She looked at him, full of regret, before taking the table cloth to her forehead again.
She looked at the cloth, and brought her nose to it. She smelled it, just as an animal would smell something that interested it. Then, without a second thought, she licked it. Her face indicated a sensation of pleasure, that she licked it some more.
"This isn't water."
She looked over at the nightstand, and there sat a transparent vial with a screw-on cap. The same vial that Jacob had taken out of his pocket when he reached for the table cloth. A small amount of liquid remained. Amanda reached over to touch it, obviously to feel how warm it was. He didn't have to tell her it was the waste from her recent dialysis treatments.
Amanda clutched her chest, bowling over as a sudden jolt of pain seemed to wash over her. Her jaw dropped and she looked at Jacob in surprise. She was more surprised still when she looked at the back of her hand. Small, wiry, black hairs had slowly sprouted from her skin.
"What did you do?" she said, already an animalistic tone creeping into her voice.
"The lycanthropy had to have been filtered out into the waste," he said, "I was just giving a little bit back to you."
Stunned, she pushed Jacob aside to peer into the mirror above the dresser. She pulled her cheek down, seeing a glowing yellow tint begin to develop in her eyes. Without concern for her clothes, she pulled on the v-neck of her dress, splitting it apart and revealing a tuft of hair that was certain to blossom into a patch of fur before too long. The patch grew and expanded, but stopped short enough to leave large areas of her shoulders and upper chest hairless. A half werewolf, maybe even less, she was certain to be.
"Why?" she said, excited yet fearful in equal parts.
"I knew how much you wanted to change. I knew it would hurt you if you remained human all night long."
"But I can't change here! This hotel, there's too many people!"
"Shh," he said, "Just let it happen." He lowered her down on to the bed, helping her rip apart the rest of the dress, exposing her slightly furred chest to the open air. "I'll take care of you."
As the seams of her dress further down her body split apart, her skin seemed to tighten and darken as her human features began to lose definition. The hosiery around her legs and feet stretched and ripped, especially where claws had grown where her toenails used to be. She clutched her head and bared her sharpening teeth, as the transformation was bound to be painful. But mixed in with her pained groans seemed to be bouts of pleasure every time she exhaled.
"Jacob!"
She kicked against the bed sheets as the transformation continued. Her arms, bare to begin with, had grown muscular and slightly hairy, but only in certain places, leaving much of her skin untouched by the dark fur of the werewolf. As expected, her ears moved up her head but her face remained flat, with only a darkened nose and thick eyebrows to reveal the beast's face. Much of what made the human Amanda so appealing to Jacob remained in place, accompanied by the parts of the werewolf that, by image alone, made her...
Sexier.
"AAaaaaaawwwwwooOOOOOOO!"
Amanda stretched herself out on the bed underneath Jacob, her howls echoing in the air in that soundproofed room. Or at least a room that Jacob hoped would give them both enough privacy for the rest of the full moon. It had better, because the beast was strong enough to clutch his face with her clawed hands and pull him closer to her. Who knows what else she would be capable of once the transformation finally died down.
She snarled underneath her black lips, smelling him just as she had smelled the table cloth moments before. She rose up from her tattered clothes, which lay in shreds on the bed. Her bra, which had snapped loose when her werewolf frame expanded, fell to her lap, concealing the wild bush between her legs if only for a moment. Her slightly hairy breasts, with a pair of nipples just barely peeking above the fur, brushed against his face as he was thrown backwards onto the bed. Even this partial werewolf, made less wolfish than all the times they had ever experimented with her lycanthropy, was too strong for Jacob, and he felt the weight of her entire body push down on his shoulders.
"Now you're mine."