Sweet Romance10 min read
The Collar and the Wolf
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"I don't want to be caged," I said, but my voice came out like the whisper of dry grass.
"You asked me to come back," Preston said, and his fingers closed over my wrist like a promise that could hurt.
"I asked you to come back so you'd be here," I answered, "not to—"
"Not to what?" He smiled the small, private smile that made my stomach do strange flips. "Not to keep you safe? Not to keep you from being hurt?"
"I wanted to learn. I wanted to leave the mountain." I looked at him. "I didn't want… this."
He let go of my wrist. "You asked me for a life," he said. "You did not specify the shape it had to take."
The light in the room bent around him. He had always known how to look like an answer.
I grew up by the river and the falls, by an inn with a creaky wooden balcony. Benedict Atkins and Andrea Moretti found me under a tree that dropped bitter green fruit and called me their daughter. I grew accustomed to the smell of wet earth, to the clink of the silver charms on my collar, to the guests' clapping when I danced. I learned to be quiet when they spoke of future plans for me—who I might marry, who might buy me a new set of earrings. I learned that being pretty was a currency.
"You're Kaya," Benedict would say, and Andrea would hum as she sorted linens. No surname, only the tree's name became mine. I excelled in school. I loved books. But books in the inn were used only to teach me how to sit and smile properly. The world I wanted to leave was a ribbon I could see but not untie.
One spring, a photograph of me, barefoot and laughing with silver bracelets jingling, found its way into a gallery in the city. Someone named Preston Alvarado noticed the red crescent on my forearm and remembered. He said he remembered because his mother had loved colors—had held a child and we'd been separated by choices no one asked the child about.
When he came, he did not stride in like a hero. He arrived like a careful storm. He took a wheelchair into town to test how I would lean in or away. He sat in the inn and watched my dances, and he sketched after I left. He said my name aloud once and a quiet thing shifted in his face.
"Are you the one with the mark?" he asked me the day he offered me sugar.
"Yes," I said. "I'm Kaya."
"Do you want to go somewhere else?" His voice was like a cool hand.
I was eighteen and fierce with a smallness I couldn't hide. I wanted mountains to be a memory. I wanted to be more than the thing people paid to see. I listened to his soft explanations like a child waiting for a magic trick.
"Stay with me for a month," he said. "I'll show you the world in colors."
"I will," I told him, and I believed it meant canvas and books and a passport.
He told me in his careful way that I could do anything, even study if I wanted. He gave me sugar and taught me small things, like which brush was for which stroke, and which colors sang together.
"One a day," he said, tapping the sugar in my palm. "Don't eat too many."
When he left town for a few days, I counted the hours like beads on a string. When he returned, I cried like a soft animal. He knelt and trimmed my nails with a gentleness that felt like proof the world might be kind.
"You were made for the world," he told me. "You just have to claim it."
So I began to practice claiming. It was not the big kind of claiming—the kind with signatures and tickets—but a series of small, careful pushes: staying up late to practice scales, asking for extra lessons, speaking my name without shrinking. Each push met a hand that tugged me up.
He rewarded me with favors: more sugar, a place at a school in the city, a seat beside him when he sketched. "You are to fight for what you want," he would tell me, "but you must also be honest about wanting it."
I learned to purr for attention and to flinch at cold words. I learned how to make myself need him and how to be grateful for crumbs.
Then Martina Russo arrived like winter. She was polite and efficient. She carried papers and organized schedules. People called her an assistant, but she walked as if the room obeyed her just by being present. I did not know how to be anywhere besides near Preston, but she clicked like a clock in the background, and my chest tightened.
"You like him," my reflection seemed to say one night as I stared at my silver collar.
"I like him," I whispered to my collar. "I like him more than safety."
So I did what I had been taught: I chose a game I chance to win. I baked a dessert and took it to his office, to the place where Martina's presence folded the air like paper. I wanted the simple triumph of being chosen.
"I made this for you," I announced the moment I stepped inside.
Preston looked up with slow surprise. Martina's smile did not change. "That's thoughtful," she said. "But he has work."
"I brought it personally," I said, and pressed forward with a confidence that felt borrowed.
Preston blinked, then reached out and took the tin. He lifted the lid, smelled, and smiled at me as though I were a line he had finally finished sketching.
"Thank you, Kaya," he said. "This is lovely."
I stayed nearby, putting a hand on the back of his chair. Martina stepped forward with files and offered them.
"These need signing," she said to Preston. "I'll leave them on the desk."
My heart made a small, ugly noise; I wanted to pull the world around me like a blanket. So I sat on his lap, even though I had a fever that night and my skin burned. I wanted him to choose me in front of her, to send a message like a bell.
Martina did not flinch. She gathered the paperwork, turned, and left the room with her back straight. I felt triumph like heat. Preston brushed my forehead with his hand and smiled, but his eyes were a mapping of something I had not learned yet.
"What do you want?" he asked later, when the storm outside turned the windows into silver mirrors.
"What do you mean?" I asked, playing naive.
"You asked me to come back for your birthday," he said. "You asked me to promise. You asked me to want something from me. Now tell me: what do you wish for most?"
"You." I said, because that was true and because I thought wanting was the same as winning.
He did not gather me in with planned tenderness. He studied me, and for the first time, there was a distance in his look like a line on a page.
"Adults must accept consequences," he said softly. "You said you wanted me."
"Then take me," I whispered. "Hold me. Promise me you'll not be gone so long."
"That would be a lie," he said. "I will come when I can. But now you have to accept what I am."
"What does that mean?" I asked.
He moved closer and the air changed. He smelled like rain and iron. "I am not only a man," he said. "I have blood that remembers being something else. Sometimes I will change. Sometimes I will be dangerous."
"You scare me," I said honestly. "I asked for you, but I didn't ask for the night-thing."
"And yet you came," he replied.
Days later, rain cracked the sky open and I woke from a nightmare. I stood in the dark, wrapped in a throw, and walked to his room. His door was open a sliver. I pushed it and found the bed empty. The house, which felt almost human in its grooves and tiles, seemed suddenly too big.
I saw movement outside the window. A shape large and low moved past the garden as if there were a shadow bigger than the house itself. I wanted to run. But when I reached the top of the stairs, he was there—towering, soaked, a towel wrapped around his waist.
His hands were not hands I owned. Ears, a tail—small at first then vast—reminded me that the man who taught me to claim the world belonged also to something wilder.
"I saw it," I breathed. "You were…"
"A wolf," he said. "A thing like that. Yes."
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked with the childish hurt of someone left out.
He came to me and held me like a child. "I wanted to give you time," he said. "I did not want to frighten you. But you asked me to come. You asked me to be present."
"You said I'd get everything; you said I'd be safe," I reminded him.
"I said that you could have many things," he answered. "Safety is not mine to promise. I told you the truth about some parts."
"All the parts," I insisted.
He hesitated, then leaned close. "I can be gentle," he murmured. "But I am also wild."
I laughed then, a sound that carried the shape of my fear and something else—something like surrender. "So take me," I said. "Take me if you must. But don't lie."
"Never," he replied, his breath hot and smelling of things I'd never tasted. "I won't lie."
He taught me about brushes and paper, and he showed me how to sit in silence while he painted. He let me sleep against his shoulder. He trimmed my nails. He told me at odd times, "You must fight for what you want," and at other times, "You must be willing to accept the consequences."
When Martina Russo returned to another city, he told her that she would be better off there. "A promotion," he said. "Better for you."
She left with a professional smile and bowed chin. I thought I would feel triumphant. Instead, I felt hollow. I had won the game, but some of the shape I’d wanted flitted away with her. Preston closed the door softly on Martina's goodbye and sat with me in the dusk, watching the garden.
"Are you happy?" I asked him.
"I am," he said. "In my way."
"And in mine?" I pushed.
He looked at me like one looks at a complicated painting. "Sometimes," he answered. "Most times I am afraid I will hurt you."
"Then don't." I said more sharply than I meant.
He smiled that strange smile. "You want me to promise a thing I cannot always give," he said.
The truth is, Preston was not cruel in the measured way of villains. He had a careful cruelty—an honesty about his wildness and an impatience with softness. He could be as precise as a scalpel. He would not promise safety; he promised only himself.
Weeks slipped into a rhythm. I went to school in the city, studied hard, and returned on the weekends. Preston would come and go, sometimes gone for days, sometimes returning to trim my nails or cook steak on slow nights. I learned to read his moods like weather. I learned also to let my want take forms that made sense: books, classes, a small apartment near the school he arranged.
But the mountain in me did not vanish. When rain came, I wanted to be back on the balcony of the inn. When the city hummed, I wanted to braid light into my hair. Preston noticed not only the tenderness in me but also the ways I reached for power—the-microwins, the small manipulations.
"You're learning to be cunning," he observed one winter evening as I wrapped my hands around a cup of hot tea.
"Everyone must learn," I replied. "You taught me to ask."
His hands moved to my hair and smoothed it as if brushing a painting. "I taught you to ask because I wanted to see what you would ask for," he said. "I want you to not be afraid. But you must be careful. Self-preservation is not the same as self-harm."
The first time I saw his wolf-form fully awake, it was because I had pushed too hard. I had demanded that he not leave for a longer trip, had sent an urgent, small plea that read like a child begging for cookies. And I had not realized that the scent of me, pulled tight by longing, could cause him more pain than a blade.
That night he returned to the house on the hill, and the moon caught the silver collar at my throat. He stepped through the doorway and everything slowed to breath.
"You smell of me," he said in a low voice. "You always have."
"Did you come just because I shouted your name?" I asked.
"No." He went quiet, and then the change happened: lines pulled at his face; his shoulders shifted. When he looked at me, the top of his head seemed too narrow for the shape of what was trying to live inside.
"Are you going to hurt me?" I asked, though the question had no real answer.
"Not unless you tell me to leave," he said. "But the answer is not only mine."
I wanted to be brave, so I reached out and touched his chest. His heart beat like a drum under the fabric.
"Will you promise me one thing?" I whispered.
"What?"
"If you must change, don't go in the house where people will see you. Don't bring the night to others." My voice was small.
He closed his eyes. "I will not risk you," he said. "I will keep some things in the dark so they cannot hurt you."
When he walked away into the night, his shoulders low, I understood a small part of him. I learned to sleep with both hands on my collar.
"Why do you keep that?" he once asked, softly brushing the silver. "Is it for sound? For memory?"
"It is mine," I answered. "It sings when I dance."
He nodded as if that answered something. "Then dance for me," he said. "Not for the guests, not for coins. Dance because you can."
So I danced. For the first time in my life, I danced for myself and for the man who could be both shelter and storm.
The days that followed were a mixture of tenderness and wildness. He would carry me like a child when I feinted from fever. He would sit and watch me study. He would sometimes disappear into the deep woods for days, and then return with collages of leaves and feathers, new colors in his hair like a foolish king collecting trophies.
Once, at a small dinner with friends, someone snapped a photo—an ordinary moment. Later, when I saw the picture, I saw us both softened by the light. I thought we had steadied. I thought we had become the plan I had drawn in secret.
"Do you regret?" I asked him one night when the lights in the city were low.
"Regret what?" he asked, looking at the space between us.
"Everything that made you not with me," I answered. "Do you regret the choices that kept us apart before? Your mother—"
He flinched. "I regret what I could not change," he said. "But not that I found you."
There was a time when I wanted to be entirely his—body, mind, and the quiet peace that came from being chosen. But wanting someone means seeing them whole, with claws and with gentleness, with history and with hunger.
I sometimes thought of the night he had told me that adults must accept consequences. I thought of my own small consequences: the fever I brought on when I tried to win him, the guilt that came when I saw Martina's quiet departure. I tried to be kinder to myself.
We were building a life that was neither mine nor his wholly, but a shared space with its own rules. He would teach me to paint a face, and I would teach him the names of the flowers my mother liked. He would tell me when I was being foolish. I would tell him when he was cold.
"You are not like them," he said once, with a kind of wonder, touching the red crescent at my forearm.
"Who?" I asked.
"There are people who take and do not return. People who would bind you and call it care. You are not that. You are your own," he said.
"Will you always be mine?" I asked then, small and needy.
"Yes," he said. "In the way I can be."
He meant it. His promises were honest within his limits. That was a kind of safety, too.
Years later, when I tell people about the time I left the mountain and became someone else's pupil and someone else's lover, I talk about the silver collar and the red crescent, because those are the things that marked the beginning and the brand. I tell them about being shown the world in color and about learning that some people are soft hands and some are wolves and that the two can live in one person.
"Are you afraid?" he once asked me in the darkness, his voice a warm thing.
"Of you?" I laughed with a small supply of tears. "Of losing you? Of losing myself?"
He took my hand. "Then stay," he said. "But stay as the woman you are."
"Do you want me to be tame?" I asked, a little bitter.
"No," he said. "I want you to be unafraid."
That is how the world shaped itself for me: a man who sometimes changed, a life that was not clean, choices that were both tender and hard. I kept my silver collar. He kept his secret nights. And we learned, slowly, to accept the truth of both.
"You asked me to come back," he reminded me once, with a smile like a page-turn.
"I did," I said. "And I'm still asking."
"And I am still here," he answered.
At the end of the day, when paints dry and silver charms catch the light, I put my hand over the red crescent on my forearm and remember the tree where Benedict and Andrea found me. I remember shining things and how far a life can go if someone sees the mark on you and remembers to be kind enough to come back.
The End
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