Her
I couldn't concentrate with her scent in my nose. The smell slinked past and stood at the lights in a low-cut red dress. Every time I attempted to drag my attention back to the computer screen before me like a wayward teenager, her scent would beckon and flash some cleavage, and I was lost again. It was perfume, strong and alluring like the best that Paris could make. It was a promise and an offer, giving me hints and glimpses of what could be mine. It was maddening, and before the battle for my sanity was even properly begun, it was already lost.
With a long-suffering sigh, I removed my glasses and set them on the desk near my elbow. Grinding knuckles into my temples didn't make the scent go away, but at least the pain gave me something else to focus on. Think, concentrate, ignore that exotic strip-tease that wafted in on the hot early-autumn breeze. It wasn't meant for you, I told myself. Stick to your own world and leave her to hers.
The Henderson's numbers swam before me. Ten-forties and one-oh-ones and tax rebate forms and deductible inheritances swam in an incomprehensible slag of accountancy. I could do this. I was good at this. Great, actually, good enough to have saved them an uncomfortable audit when the IRS tax adjusters came sniffing last year. This was my world, numbers and paperwork and quick little hand-held calculators and a proper shirt with a tie to make myself look presentable. This was where I belonged, and no little scamp from the alleyway out back was going to ruin my reputation. Not even when her smell made me feel like being elected mayor of kick-ass town just after I'd won the lottery and-
And a knock on my office door made me jump hard enough that I smacked my crotch on the underside of the desk. Little white dots swam across my vision. "God da-" Professional. Professional, the Hendersons counted on me to be smart and business savvy at all times. Keep it calm, even when your balls feel like they've just been kicked by a mule. "Yes, come in."
"Mr Stuart?" The door creaked open and admitted a disembodied head. Brunette, pretty as a stripper on the pole. I'm sure the rest of her body was attached somewhere, but I couldn't see any of it behind the door frame. I'd hired her because of exceptional secretarial skills. The body that came with them was just a bonus.
Calm and professional. "Yes, Lucy? Can I help you?" Keep it busy, time is money. "I'm on the Henderson accounts right now, so unless it's urgent..."
She paused uncertainly. More of the scent drifted in through the open door. God, that bitch must have been everywhere around here, the aroma was floating into every open window on the main floor. It was intoxicating. Just the smell alone was making me light-headed, and even my bruised ego was starting to remember what that scent was making me feel. It was intense enough that the smell started to blur the professional lines, and I suddenly had an image of Lucy that was profoundly inappropriate. I stifled the thought.
"Sorry, Mr. Stuart. I'm feeling really rough. I haven't used any sick days this year, and I was wondering if..."
"Yes, go ahead." On autopilot while my nose dragged my mind along for the ride, the response was bland and professional. "Give me a call to let me know if you'll be in tomorrow." And please don't be. Maybe I'll take the day off too, anything to get out of this hotbox of an office, where all I can think about is that offer floating past my nostrils.
Lucy closed the door behind her, but she'd let enough of the scent in that I was beyond rational. I couldn't concentrate like this, stewing inside while that enticing aroma was drawing me out...
No, not in the office. I left my glasses on the desk as I stood up jerkily. Control yourself. You control the beast, the beast does not control you. I sang the mantra over and over in my mind. A breath of fresh air, a quick break, that's all I needed to get my mind back on the Henderson's accounts. Don't let it out in the offices. That would be the end of my accounting career, and that career was my hopes and dreams.
I was on the fourth floor, and Health and Safety had all of the fire escapes and balcony windows locked. There wasn't any release from this perfume-soaked box of an office without a bit of a hike. I tapped my foot in agitation in the hallway waiting for the elevator to come up, then I tapped my foot in agitation in the elevator waiting for it to go down. I counted fifteen different ways I could exit the building faster than this as I watched the floor indicator slowly tick down. A heavy chair through a window and a quick exit to the McGowan building's roof. Throw that bastard Steven into the stairwell and ride his body like a surfboard down to ground level. Gather up all the cleaning chemicals, aerosol cans, hair sprays, and anything else flammable in the office, even the fucking white-out, and blast a hole through the floor so I could-
The elevator "dinged" as it reached the ground floor, and I tore out of it towards the sedately spinning revolving doors. Out in front of the office, downtown Miami went about their early September morning. I grabbed the lighter from my trouser pocket, but remembered how much of a stink building security had thrown last time they caught me smoking right in front of the building. 'Don't stick out, don't make waves.' That's the teaching. So I went around the side of the building to light up.
It was a filthy habit, I admit. I hated the sensation of smoke in my lungs, but it calmed me down. With the smoke in my mouth and nose, I couldn't taste and smell her on the thick city air. With each tug on the glowing butt, the smoke damped my stampeding libido and soothed my instincts. A breath of fresh air as seen through the filter of my Marlboro, that's exactly what I needed.
I tossed the shriveled end into a nearby dumpster. It was a filthy habit, but then again, it was a filthy city. Just five feet from the scrubbed high street where clean-shaven men strode by in immaculate suits carrying identical briefcases, I stood in a dank alley that was littered with fast food wrappers and styrofoam packing peanuts. It was a filthy city, because inside the head of every one of those professional men was a dirty animal, waiting for a chance to bare its teeth and strike at the bars of its societal cage. It all came out in the accounts, where a man could pin and savage his opponents, blood, sinew, bone, and all, and still wear his clean suit home to his model wife and two-point-three children. Money: it was one of the last remaining careers where inside every successful man was a carnal wolf.
It'd been six breaths of fetid alleyway air before the smell of Her hit my nose again like a wooden mallet soaked in perfume. It was so strong that it bent me over at the waist, and I could feel my skin crawling. It was a familiar crawling sensation. Dammit, screw the fresh air. I wasn't escaping it, not today. She'd been teasing my senses for almost a week, and I hadn't given in. I was strong, in control, master of my own mind and body. But her scent was too alluring, the siren's song that called to me from the cliffs of madness with the wrecks of every male who'd tried to resist it scattered on the reefs.
So behind the dumpster, where the businessmen on the high street never let their eyes stray lest they acknowledge the dim dwelling places of those city dwellers less fortunate than they, I disrobed. My tie, knot still tied, went on top of my jacket and shirt, folded with care. My shoes and socks went just to the side, then trousers and underpants joined them. I took great care in the accoutrements that made me Man, but they'd be of no use where I was going.
With the heavy scent in my nose, I let the instinct grab me by the glands and tug me towards her. There was a stretching and the sensation of thin pops like squeezing bubble wrap between my fingers. The change came quickly. There was no one watching to impress. In one breath, I was a man, naked and expectant with the glint of expensive hair products on my scalp and the smell of quality cigarettes on my breath. In the next breath, I was close to the ground, four feet feeling the dirty grit of the alleyway scratch unpleasantly against my pads. Calling me a wolf at any point would have been redundant; let's simply say that my body now more closely resembled my personality.
While the sharp colors fled from my sight, leaving muted browns and reds and greens where blues and purples had been, a whole new aspect to the world crawled into my nostrils and tickled at my brain. I could smell the world around me as vividly as I could see it, layering itself on top of my perception as a more thorough understanding of the alley around me. Most recently, I could smell myself, my Man self, had come here, anxious and sweaty, and lit up a smoke. Previously, there'd been a bum (smelled of cheap alcohol and cardboard.) Before that, Frank and Miller had been down here with smokes of their own, and Frank had urinated behind the dumpster. Even earlier, Jenkins had been down, and Cindy from PR had joined him - the slut. The condom was still draped around the steel grille of a sewer grate.
And I could smell... Her. Now it was so vivid and close that it clogged my nose and made my eyes water. She'd been here too, not half an hour ago. She was still around, wandering the alleyways behind the business like she owned the place. The trail was fresh, and so strong that it couldn't be ignored. Down the alley it went, left at the back of the Goldblum building and then right behind an upscale Italian joint. I followed my nose, eyes on a short leash to make sure I avoided obstacles in my dogged pursuit of that scent. Left again, and I'd lost which buildings were boxing in on either side, right again and I didn't care anymore. They were corridors of glass and concrete and aluminum, featureless and soulless and pointless. Not worth the thought, not with that aroma flooding my nose until I could taste it.
Then there was a glimpse. A flash of tawny fur, the flag of a tail, and the scent that ensured that I saw nothing else. She disappeared down a side-alley, just one more dead-end in the labyrinthine warren of back streets behind the city's business. Like a moth to a neon bulb, I flitted towards the alley, dodging left and right to make sure I'd seen it right. There she was, the tease that'd been making every moment cooped in the stifling office a torture. I turned into the alley, and there she stood. She could smell me, I was sure. You can't miss a wolf like me, mature and in my prime, virile, dominant... Her scent made me puff my chest and pull my lips back to show sharp teeth. I was already panting, the miasma of her presence stripping all thought of anything else.
Her ears perked, and she stopped mid-stride. She was a yellowish tan, shaggy as a golden retriever, but with a piercing, level gaze that defied domesticity. She was alert and healthy, her pelt had the dull sheen of prosperity that was so rare in the alleyways. I couldn't help but admire her features. If she was a dog, then she wasn't the friendly family dog. She was a rough, feral beauty, with predatory features that were so lupine in nature that she and civilization seemed to inhabit two alien and distant worlds. No collar graced her regal neck; it would have been as out of place as a leash on a lion. She measured me just as weightily as I measured her, and her gaze gave nothing away. Then with a dismissive toss of her angular head, she ran.
By the time her first leap had landed, I was already airborne. Off to the left she dashed, past the restaurants and into a low-slung collection of flats. She was fast, so fast it was all I could do to keep up, just a glimpse of her tail disappearing behind dumpsters and discarded crates and cardboard boxes that doubled as homes for the alley's human inhabitants. She dodged and weaved, and I followed suit.
She was crafty, too. It took her two seconds to wriggle through a cat flap that barely admitted her head. I just barely caught a nip of her tail as the flap swung closed on my muzzle. By the time I'd squeezed inside, she'd already escaped by a half-open kitchen window. Back out in the alleys, I'd lost all sight of her, and had to follow the trail by nose. The scent was strong though; I could have closed my eyes and followed it without fail, not counting the potholes and discarded soda bottles and dilapidated wooden palates that would have tripped my feet.
By the end of the chase she led, it'd been long frantic minutes since I'd seen a part of the city I recognized. I was panting hard when I arrived in the alley where she'd stopped, finally stymied by two brick walls and one featureless concrete barrier. I was winded and anxious, and her smell was now so pervasive that my vision had tunneled. Finally she was there in front of me, and she'd stopped running. She whined softly, submissively. The chase was over, I'd caught her. Wolf instinct pulled my nose and tugged my feet. The same instincts must have been tweaking her senses and guiding her movement, because she responded. In the dog world, that was a yes.
Then she was under me, and I could feel her tail smack the barrel of my chest. She was feisty, and wonderful, and my nose was swimming in that smell, and everything was just right, oh so right-
But the feel of something changing put me off. It was subtle at first, a shifting and struggling beneath me. I let her go and backed up, a whine of frustration and anticipation tearing itself from my muzzle. As I gazed on her again, though, the whine stopped. She was changing. Her pelt ran like water, and those gorgeously strong limbs tugged straight and long, while pale skin crept over where tawny fur had been. I backed up in shock, hopping on my forelegs and snarling. Her ankles bent and twisted, and her neck pulled up to the head, where her majestic muzzle drooped down into an all too familiar face, framed in brunette.
The shock knocked me out of my wolfish mood, shattered the concentration that held my form. The startled bark that escaped my lips sounded strangely like English.
"Lucy?!"
"Uh, Mr. Stuart? Is that you?" She pulled her hair down to cover her tits, and her hands down to cover everything else. I was far too surprised to care.
"Holy shit, I didn't know that..." I stuttered, with all-too-human nightmares of pink slips and sexual harassment suits cavorting through my head.
She glared wide-eyed at me. "I'm so sorry, I didn't know that you could... You would..." She stuttered off into silence.
Time passed as the two of us regarded each other. For the first minute, it was two humans, naked, startled, and afraid. We watched each other, watching for any hint that there was trouble, that there was injury, that because of the other, we were, in essence, fucked.
Then sometime in the next few minutes, those two humans stopped gawking at each other, and it became two wolves gazing out through their human eyes. We sat silent, measuring each other for ability, looking for an opening, a weakness, that one opportunity. She was a pretty brunette, though maybe not as pretty as that tawny bitch.
"So, dinner? I know this nice Italian place." I felt my mouth say for me. I drank in the scent of her.
"Takeout?" She replied. "My place, or yours?"