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WHEN I OPENED the door to my room, I saw Gail sitting in the armchair. It felt natural yet odd.
Particularly since we had broken it off a few years ago.
As I looked at her and breathed her in, I realized why I’d had difficulty placing her scent. She had switched perfumes. That, combined with it having been so long since I’d last seen her had thrown me a curveball.
It was surprising to me that she was there at all, especially given the way our relationship had ended.
Her heartbeat started racing the moment I opened the door. I stared at her, the brunette beauty with cool-green eyes, her sunglasses tucked just above bangs that framed her soft face, rounded cheekbones and full lips face in a gently curving cascade down past her shoulders. She wore clothes that were uncharacteristic for her but showed off her athletic body nicely. A white, cut-off shirt revealed well-toned abs and a slender waist. Black with yellow striped short-shorts showed off tanned legs that went on forever.
She was a beautiful, incredible woman. I’d been lucky to even be seen in her presence in the past, never mind sleep with her. My own heart started racing, wishing it hadn’t ended, wishing I could pull her close right there.
But there was something in her scent I’d never detected from her before. There was a defiance like she often got when in confrontation or argument. But underlying it was a layer of something; fear.
She was afraid of me?
Her heart raced even faster as I took in all these things, and I wasn’t even all the way inside yet.
“I know the truth about you, Andrews,” she said, standing and tossing a copy of that morning’s New York Press at my feet. “I know you’re a werewolf.”
I gazed at her, then looked down at the paper, hoping I’d find my lower jaw there somewhere.
I looked back up at Gail and felt a pang in my heart. This beautiful woman whom I’d loved, this cherished beauty whom I’d laughed with, danced with, made sweet love with, suddenly knew my most intimate secret.
“Why?” she asked, getting up from the chair and pacing toward the window. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
As she moved into the shadow between the desk lamp and the light coming in the window, I reflected on this remarkable woman whose company I never thought I would be graced with again.
I had first met Gail three years ago when I was writing Tome of Terror, the novel in which Maxwell Bronte is framed for the murder of the owner of a highly controversial, rare edition of the Necronomicon. Gail was my field expert in the realm of the occult.
It had been the end of a long, exhausting day of research when I met up with her for our early evening appointment. I’d gotten her number from Anne Lee, Mack’s executive assistant and made the contact earlier in the day, and arranged to meet her for coffee at about 6:00 p.m.
I remember walking to the appointment, a quick jaunt from the Algonquin to the Starbucks nestled within the Barnes and Noble on Fifth Avenue, more excited about the thought that I’d be able to browse the new releases section of the store after our meeting than about the meeting itself.
That changed the moment I spotted her.
And I knew exactly who she was when I walked into the coffee shop. Even if she hadn’t been wearing an outfit that screamed “occult” to me – a black cotton shirt with a lacy frill from her neck to the top of her cleavage, a black collar studded with silver rivets, not unlike a dog’s, tight, black leather pants and a shiny, black leather jacket – I would have been able to guess who she was merely by the way that her heart subtly changed its beat as I walked into the room.
I didn’t attribute the heart-skip as anything other than the normal anticipatory feeling one gets when meeting a stranger.
But the moment I heard the heart-skip, I made eye contact with her, and she smiled at me with a confident recognition that I was the one she was to meet. She could have recognized me from the photo on one of my book jackets, but I had the feeling that it wasn’t that. Her manner struck me as slightly predatory in the way that she scanned the room. She was a very observant person. She wasn’t just sitting in the room, she was actively participating in the room’s flow, in its essence. You could tell that she wasn’t merely seated among the other people at the table, but she was reading each of the other people’s faces, confident of the stories each person told through the way they looked around, spoke to one another, fiddled with the props on their table, drank their beverage.
I rarely encounter people with that manner. It’s not something I’d really noticed before acquiring my special senses, but some people have a way of reading a room, of sucking in the very marrow of the location they were in, studying the people around them as if they were bullet-point character sketches. In my time, it’s usually been either other writers or certain criminal types who give off that sense. I’d yet to have met a person who read people’s fortunes for a living, but it made sense to me that she would have that sense too.
I understood that fortune tellers partially rely on whatever divination tools they are using, and partially reading the subtle, unspoken reactions of the person.
So I was struck by Gail immediately. And not merely because she was the most attractive person in the room. No, I was struck with her because by the time I got to the table, I knew that we shared a special kinship, that, like me, she had a quick fix on the others we shared the coffee shop with.
By the time I reached the table, I’d stopped taking in the sights and sounds around me, and focused completely on a single person.
Sure, she was physically beautiful. But there was something else about her, an aura, if you will, that cast its spell on me. Even without my heightened senses, I knew that I’d have been completely in awe, in total rapture of her.
Our quick meeting had turned into an hour of intriguing conversation, and we ended up moving to a restaurant down the street, where, upon finishing dinner, we’d ordered dessert, and round after round of coffee refills. The waiter that had served us got a huge tip for allowing us to stay for several hours just talking.
After the restaurant closed and we walked, the air between us filled with the type of conversation you might expect to hear between two life-long friends. I was extremely thankful for the timing of the cycle of the moon. If it had been just a few days earlier, I would have had to excuse myself a few hours earlier and by that time would likely have been racing through central park on all fours.
But no, the timing couldn’t be better.
Our stroll brought us through the theatre district, walking the streets between Broadway and Fifth Avenue like a couple of trick-or-treaters not wanting to miss a single house.
Neither one of us had mentioned our deep and urgent desire not to let the evening end, and while my heart and a deeper part of me burned for her – something I knew she could tell, and which I detected was mutual – I was glad that the entire first night the only physical thing that happened between us was the occasional light touch of the hand across the table, or, while walking, the way she held onto my arm.
We didn’t even kiss when we parted ways in a grey, pre-dawn light. We just stood and looked longingly at one another, each knowing how completely infatuated the other person was, yet each holding our passion in check.
I think it must have been the fact we both knew that this could be the beginning of a phenomenal, life-long relationship, and thus there was no need to jump into anything.
And those first few weeks, the relationship did work out like that – we met for coffee and dinner again the next night, but not without a quick touch-base phone call in the middle of the afternoon. And again, we walked the entire evening, sharing intimate details of our lives. It was only when it had started to rain that we ran, hand in hand, up the street to an all-night diner where we’d spent the rest of the pre-dawn hours together.
It was on the third night that we’d made love for the first time. We’d agreed to meet at the hotel lobby at the Algonquin. When she’d walked up to the table where I was drinking a rye whisky, Noilly Pratt and pineapple juice, an Algonquin house specialty, I stood, the moment suddenly right between us to share a quick peck that turned into a heated, lengthy kiss.
We’d quickly moved from there to my room, and after the most intensely physical and wild several hours of sex I’d ever had – we lay in bed and talked more.
I’d never loved another person so much as I’d loved Gail. I’d never known so much about another person either, nor had another person known so much about me.
Except for one single fact. I was a werewolf.
It is what, ultimately, led to our downfall.
From the time we met, we’d spent as many hours together as possible, mostly in the evening, as our daily appointments and schedules permitted. And we spent virtually every single night together, either at my room in the Algonquin or at her flat in Chelsea.
But three and a half weeks into our relationship was when the cycle of the moon worked its magic and I needed to spend my evenings apart from her.
It’s a shame, too, as my skill as a lover, my endurance, my stamina, were all improved during this phase. And Gail could sense it, I know. But she didn’t know what was causing it.
When I first came up with the excuse that I had to fly out of the city on a book-related trip, a story I’d been concocting in my head for weeks, she was disappointed, but understanding.
During the cycle the following month – it becomes almost funny how I can measure my life now by the cycles of the moon – my excuse had been I was under deadline to get my novel in to the publisher.
By the time the third cycle arrived and I’d come down with a nasty “stomach flu,” I started detecting her suspicions about my regular disappearances.
It was the fifth cycle when the suspicion turned into accusation. She knew for sure that I was lying to her about what I was doing during the specific moon cycle, but she didn’t know exactly what.
With nothing more to go on, and given that it was usually the evening and the wee hours of the night in which she couldn’t track me down, she’d assumed I’d taken another lover. And that had been how most of her relationships had ended. She’d always chosen some hot stud of a guy, taking physical appearance and a strong sexual nature over a decency.
She’d mentioned it multiple times. How, though she found me just as sexually attractive as the models and actors she’d been with, that I had something none of them did. I had personality, I had a depth, and I had substance.
But I could feel how my deceiving her about my werewolf nature was leading to the breakdown in the intense communication we had established so quickly. And that she was feeling like, despite me having fooled her into thinking I was more than those other mindless hunks before, I kept secrets, was lying to her, and was unfaithful.
We’d broken up by the time I went into the next cycle.
I’d lost a part of my heart then – something special within me had died. And yes, even though I saw it coming, weeks before it happened, it still caused incredible shock and pain.
But I imagine it was foolish of me to think that I could maintain a solid and truth-filled relationship with anyone while keeping that big a secret from them. While living with the half man, half animal that I was.
Foolish, stupid, idiotic.
Why didn’t I just tell her?
I thought that I’d blown it, that I’d never see Gail again, but here she was, in my hotel room.
She was standing at the window, looking out, not facing me. “Well?” she said, and her heartbeat revealed another jolt of fear – likely the fear at having her back to me.
That hurt.
I stared at her back, finding it difficult to break the hypnotic thoughts of how we met and our time together. My mind tossed between that, the pain I’d lived through when she left me, and that she was actually afraid of me now.
“I deserve an answer,” she said, looking over her shoulder at me. “When I accused you of sleeping around, you didn’t deny it. You just stood there like an idiot. Why didn’t you just tell me the truth?”
“Gail,” I started, my eyes watering with the sudden rush of emotions. “I don’t know what to say. I mean, how could I begin to tell you something like that? How is it possible that you would ever believe me?”
She turned to face me, arms crossed. “I’m the first person who would have believed you. And you of all people should know it.” She looked down at the floor. “For Christ’s sake, Michael, I run an occult shop. I teach divination. I’m a consultant for shows about the supernatural. I’m the only person who would have believed you.”
It was true, of course. Why didn’t I think of that a couple of years ago? Why hadn’t I just taken the chance and told her about my true nature?
“I . . .” I began, not sure what I wanted to say. “I was never unfaithful to you, Gail.”
I had to struggle against the overwhelming desire to fall to my knees and wrap my arms around her legs. My eyes welled up as I fought against the emotions that quickly bubbled back to the surface. I hadn’t been physically nor emotionally close to anyone since Gail left me. While I see Buddy every six months or so when he blows through town, it’s not much. And while I meet on a semi-regular basis with Mack, and though he has a way of getting to the point and digging to the heart of the matter, we never get into the types of discussions you can expect to have with a dear friend. Gail was the only person I’d truly ever opened my heart up to.
The overpowering thought coursing through my being was, now that she knew exactly what I was, now that she was here to confront me about it, maybe this meant that we could pick up the pieces. Maybe we could try again.
I stopped fighting against the tears, and just let them flow. As they blurred my vision, I again settled back on the other sensory input that I had been ignoring as the emotion began to sweep me away.
The fear in Gail’s heartbeat that I had detected moments ago went away. It was replaced with an emotion I hadn’t yet felt from her, at least in my direction.
It was pity.
Pity?
She felt sorry for me.
What the hell?
I heard her moving across the room, could smell her scent getting stronger as she approached.
My heart started to warm as she reached me and I felt the gentle touch of her hands on my shoulders.
“Gail,” I cried. “Please forgive me.” I turned my head, let my lips caress her knuckle and place a light kiss there.
I opened my eyes, saw her hand, and my sudden hope shot all to hell.
I looked up at her and the sympathy, the pity in her eyes was virtually gushing down at me. She didn’t say anything, just pursed her lips and slowly shook her head back and forth, uttering, “Oh, Michael,” under her breath.
On her third finger was a solid gold ban that housed a massive, soul-crushing engagement diamond. Not sure how I’d missed that giant rock.