Werewolf Wedding(33)

Jeannie ran over to me, and held me tight.

I let her for a second, sobbing helplessly into the crook of her neck and then I remembered her situation. “Cloth,” I managed to choke out. “Wet cloth from...”

Speaking coherently was beyond me just then, so I went the ‘point like a caveman’ route and indicated one of my workbenches that had an old, brass faucet in it. The plaster on my face had already started to set, but luckily Jeannie took the hint quickly. I managed to get my eyes cleared out before I needed a trip to the emergency room, which... well, in the scheme of things, was a pretty fantastic turn of events.

Jeannie scratched at the place on her neck that my tears turned the plaster into a stiffening slurry. “I’m going to the shower, and you’re going to come talk to me while I’m in there,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Part of the work I do is getting messy. Really, really, horrifically messy. I routinely get covered in all kinds of noxious chemicals and dust and other awful shit, so I have a sort of make-shift shower stall in the back of the studio in case I need to go somewhere right after I finish working.

Of course, the number of times I’ve needed to desperately go somewhere after work could be counted on, I think, three fingers.

Jeannie stripped down, turned on the shower, and unleashed a torrent of swears and curses and words that I’m not sure how to categorize.

“It takes a while to warm up,” I said, noting that my own voice sounded listless. “Solar powered water tank.”

She answered with a sputter, and something that sounded like an insult aimed at the shower’s mother. Jeannie’s so nonplussed and hard to rouse that I usually forget how wonderful it is when she does get excited. I’m so used to her calm, almost defiantly even temperament and ability to completely avoid surprise... but damn is she a girl who hates cold water. She took a deep breath and let out a long, comically pleasured sigh.

“Thank God that’s over,” she announced. “I felt like a cat in a frozen lake. You should get a real hot water tank back here.”

“You gonna pay for it?”

“No, you are. Anyway, now that we’ve decided where your next four months of profit are going, you need to open those pretty lips of yours and start yapping. What the hell are you talking about, getting married to a guy you met two weeks ago? You’re not knocked up and trying to act like we’re living in 1947 and you can’t go around being a sullied dove, are you?”

“No, I’m—”

“Because that’s stupid as all shit, and women these days are perfectly capable of carrying on a good—no a great life—and to be fantastic parents without some idiot alpha male wandering around and wolf-whistling, and swatting them on the ass and showing off their chest hair with big, open-collared shirts.”

She made an affirmative-sounding grunt, as though she were pleased with the point she’d wanted to make.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m just saying... the President of the damn country came from a single mother! The President! I’ll babysit, and you can just bring the little rug rat to work. It’ll be fine!”

There was a long pause. “You’re not pregnant, are you?” Jeannie asked.

“Not so far as I know,” I said. “Although he wouldn’t screw me to the wall this morning. I was basically begging him to, but he said he was too fertile, and that I was ovulating.”

That elicited a loud boom of laughter. “Is he charting your period? How the hell would he know? And why couldn’t you just roll on a jimmy hat, and get on with it?”

And... this is the part that I was almost sure was going to convince my best friend in the world, Jeannie Wilders, my friend since I was six, that I had gone completely nuts. My next admission, I was sure, was going to make her realize that I had long since slipped into loony tune land, and that she may as well call the guys in the white lab coats to take me away.

“Oh right,” she said before I could speak, almost as an afterthought. “Werewolf sperm is supposed to be like the reproductive equivalent of a Viking berserker hopped up on whatever those plants were they chewed up before they went into battle. I read something about how werewolves have to use special rubbers or their little men just punch right through and before you know it, you’re carrying around a belly full of puppies. Or... er, whatever they call their babies.”

My jaw might have actually disconnected from my head. “You... what?”

Jeannie looked at me with a look of slight disbelief on her face. She remembered to pull her pants up just about then. And then she remembered her pants were covered in plaster, and instead grabbed a pair of the green scrubs I keep in the back of the studio for when I’d prefer not to ruin my real clothes.

“I told you, I’ve read lots of books,” she said with a look of genuine confusion. “Werewolves are always like that.”

If accepting a marriage proposal to a guy I hardly knew, and then watching him turn into a wolf and beat the shit out of his brother – who, by the way, drove a motorcycle through the window of a mansion and then lit the dining table on fire – was becoming hard to swallow, the fact that my friend had apparently never not believed in werewolves was like chewing on an anvil.

“Have I somehow missed a memo that werewolves and vampires and zombies are all real?” I asked, a little more sharply than I had intended to be.