Werewolf Wedding By Lynn Red
-1-
“Someday, all of my lumps will be in the right place. Yeah, right.”
-Delilah Coltrane
––––––––
I took a deep breath that burned in my chest. My nostrils flared as I gazed up from the field, all the way to the top of the stadium.
One more time.
Just one more hellish, awful, painful, terrible trip up the stairs and I could rest.
The walls of the Jackson Community College stadium loomed over my head like a boogeyman with hunched shoulders waiting to suck the soul out of me as soon as I closed my – wait, wait, that’s not right at all. They were just walls and I am not a ridiculous drama queen when I’m making myself run the stadium stairs.
Not at all.
One more breath, Dilly, I willed myself. Stop saying one more breath and just go.
I don’t remember taking the first step, but then I never do because I take so many of them. What I do remember is my ponytail flopping, heavy and wet, against the bare skin at the top of my back that my bunched-up shirt didn’t cover. I remember that halfway up the stadium stairs, somewhere around seating section D, my legs started to burn.
Blood pumped into the muscles, tightening them, squeezing them into wonderfully painful knots of potential, and then kinetic, energy. They were pistons, I was a V-8 engine that couldn’t be stopped.
That is, until my toe caught the loose bit of step just above seating section KK and made a loose bit into a missing bit.
Those V-8 pistons didn’t stop for a second, but physics meant that the rest of the car did. I fell into a heap, although luckily I caught myself with an outstretched hand and didn’t suffer anything worse than a skinned knee, a scraped palm, and a bruised ego.
Briefly, I had a fantasy of some big, shaggy-haired man catching my flailing ass and hauling me back to my feet before laying me down on the cold metal benches of section KK and kissing me so hard that the back of my head left a dent in the aluminum. I imagined that after he kissed me, he ripped my shirt a little on the collar, sucked at my neck and put his hands places that would usually make me reach for the pepper spray.
But the guy in my fantasy wasn’t just a guy – no, no, no – he was something different, some unchained id that couldn’t be contained. He had fierce eyes, of some indeterminate color; but the color hardly mattered because after mauling me with his hands, he had my shorts around my ankles and was pulling my hair while he— And then I remembered the stinging in my left knee.
There was no mysterious alpha male with a cocky grin and an improbably large, er, pair of hands to catch me. There was no head-forcing kiss, or libido-throbbing caress. There was just me, Delilah Coltrane, Dilly to all my friends and my single enemy, alone in a stadium with a bleeding knee and a slightly embarrassing flush on my neck and chest.
“It could be worse,” I told the fitness tracking shackle strapped to my wrist, which didn’t reply except to beep and tell me that I’d stopped moving and that I needed to go faster. “I could have broken my leg and fallen off the side of the stadium.”
It beeped again, the humorless son of a bitch. This time it beeped to tell me that I had been motionless too long. It was going to switch off, and then seconds later, it made good on the threat as I poured water onto my knee. The bleeding mostly stopped. The wound on my palm was more of an impact scrape – the kind that throbs and hurts like hell, but just kinda gives the skin an agitated gray color instead of breaking it.
Thank goodness for small miracles. The last thing in the world I needed was to feel guilty about getting blood all over a stadium step that some janitor would either have to clean up, or more likely, would choose to ignore.
By the time I’d gotten back down to the field and to my duffel bag, my knee had mostly stopped throbbing, and I wasn’t limping anymore. Any more than I normally did, at least – the souvenir of an old car wreck that hadn’t gone away in the four years since I got it, so I had sort of placidly assumed it’d be with me forever.
Of all the things that a person can carry around – guilt, regret, anxiety – a limp wasn’t the worst. Although I had pretty good helpings of those other things too, come to think of it. But somehow I kept on. Maybe it was the fact that without me, my dog would have no one to feed him, or maybe it was my constant fantasizing about being caught every time I fell by some hunk of man who would ravish me in all the right ways.
Who knows?
But I kept on going, day after day. Maybe it was just to see what was going to happen next. That sounds sort of pitiful now that I think about it, but I mean it in a more exploratory way than a woe-is-me way. For me, life is just a story that keeps telling itself the longer I go, and I love stories more than anything in the world.
The funny thing is that as much as I love them, I never seemed to have many good stories of my own. I mean, sure, I had some times in high school that would make pretty great Cameron Crowe movies, but for the most part I did my thing and interesting events never much got in the way.
Then again, as is usually the case with me, when things get interesting? They get interesting.
For a girl who never had many stories, for a girl whose main fantasy was being caught when she fell down and scraped her knee? I was about to be pulled into one hell of a story, and I’ll tell you right now – it didn’t take long at all for my fantasies to get a whole lot dirtier.