The Craving Read online

  Returning to the car, Diane was barely afraid. Her heart was beating much faster than normal and she felt clammy—especially the back of her neck—but she didn’t feel dizzy or wobbly. She was proud of herself for doing so well. She realized a trip to CVS hardly constituted resuming her life, but it was a major step in the right direction. Maybe if, over the next week or so, she left her house every day to take a small trip somewhere—shopping, to the gym, maybe even see a movie—she’d get used to being around strangers again and eventually the fear—and the memories of New York—would vanish completely.

  Driving home, she looked once or twice in the rearview mirror to check whether anyone was following her, but her paranoia had subsided significantly. At this point she didn’t want to put too much pressure on herself, have unrealistic expectations. She needed to take it day by day and build on what she’d accomplished this afternoon, but it was hard not to fantasize about what a fear-free life in Michigan would be like. Maybe within a month she could move out of her parents’ house into her own apartment. She had a lot of friends in the area. She’d fallen out of touch with some of them, and most of them were married, but she’d have people to socialize with. Eventually she’d be ready to date again and she’d meet a good, solid Michigan guy. He’d come from a good family and have a good job and, most important, he’d be normal. The idea of settling down in the suburbs used to terrify Diane; nothing had seemed more terrifying than living her parents’ life. But now that was all she wanted—an easy, normal, safe life. And, really, was that too much to ask for?

  She pulled into the driveway and parked in front of the garage. As she got out of the car she was absorbed in the fantasy of her future life—marriage, kids, a big house. It wouldn’t be such an awful life. It would be a good, safe, easy life, and that was all that mattered to her now. She was through feeling that she had to be in the center of the action, that she had to be in a big city, going to the newest, hippest bars and restaurants and attending club openings and wine tastings. She didn’t even like going to wine tastings, acting so self-important, having to think of new adjectives to describe the wine to whomever she was with. She was through trying to impress, being fake. She just wanted to go back to who she was—a simple, happy, laid-back Michigan girl. It would be so relieving to not feel like she had to go somewhere or transform into someone else in order to be happy. She could be happy being who she was and where she was. She could be happy right here, right now.

  She was starting to smile, feeling better than she had in weeks, when she heard movement behind her. In the next instant there was a sharp pain in her head and she was falling forward into the darkness, and her mother was telling her to get her head out from under the pillow, it was time to get up to go to school, but she wouldn’t go to school.

  She would stay in the darkness forever.

  TWO

  In high school Simon Burns didn’t fit in with any crowd. He wasn’t a jock, a math geek, a theater person, a burnout, or a dork, and he didn’t dress in trendy clothes, or drive a sports car, or date the hottest girls. He was just a nice, average, normal guy. His friends liked him, but most people didn’t have an opinion of him one way or another. On most days, when he was walking through the hallways or having lunch in the cafeteria, he felt invisible and was convinced that if he actually disappeared most people wouldn’t have cared or even noticed.

  Now, as a thirty-nine-year-old stay-at-home dad, hanging out with his three-year-old son Jeremy on the playgrounds of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Simon had the total opposite experience. It seemed as if the moms and babysitters couldn’t stop staring at him. Even when he didn’t see them looking at him he could feel their gazes, as if their eyes were projecting lasers that were boring into his skin. Sometimes Simon enjoyed the attention—hey, what married guy in his late thirties didn’t like an ego boost every once in a while?—but most of the time the staring and smiling felt intrusive, so he’d started listening to music on his iPod and wearing dark sunglasses, trying to appear as standoffish as possible.

  On an early November afternoon on the playground near 101st Street in Riverside Park, Simon was in his usual spot, on a bench near the entrance, trying to be incognito. He was wearing his shades, and on his iPod the Decemberists were into “The Hazards of Love.” There were ten or so women in the playground—most Simon recognized from previous playground visits—and they were all checking him out.

  Jeremy started playing with a taller boy, probably a year or two older than him. Simon hadn’t seen the boy before, but Jeremy seemed to like him a lot. They were chasing each other around, playing some sort of tag game.

  At one point, Jeremy came over to Simon and gave him a big hug and said, “I love you, Daddy.”

  “I love you too, kiddo,” Simon said.

  Jeremy put his hands over his ears, and Simon realized he’d spoken louder than he’d intended because of the blasting music. They laughed together, and then Jeremy went back to playing with his friend.

  Simon’s adjustment to being a stay-at-home dad had been an adjustment, to say the least. Though he still missed his career in advertising and harbored resentment about the way things had gone down at the job from which he’d been terminated, at times like this he felt incredibly lucky. How many dads got to spend so much quality time with their children? This was something special, and he never wanted to forget how great this felt.

  Simon looked to his left and saw Jeremy’s new friend’s mother looking at him and smiling. She was an attractive woman with dark wavy hair, maybe in her midthirties, a few years younger than Simon. Though she was sitting about ten feet away from him, he could smell her strong perfume and knew she’d recently had a cup of dark-roasted coffee.

  Other times over the past few weeks, when women smiled at him, Simon smiled back politely. Usually this had been a mistake, because the women often assumed this meant he was interested and started hitting on him. So, not wanting to encourage her at all, Simon remained blank-faced, not acknowledging her in any way, and continued to listen to the Decemberists and watch Jeremy play.

  “Excuse me.”

  Well, that had backfired. The woman was standing next to him.

  Without taking out the earbuds, Simon said, “Yes.”

  “Sorry, I don’t want to disturb you,” she said. “I just wanted to say hello.”

  Simon probably shouldn’t have been able to hear her so clearly over the music.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Our children, they play so well together,” the woman said.

  She had an accent—something Eastern European, maybe Russian. Her perfume was Marc Jacobs or Lancôme, definitely Lancôme, and he was pretty sure the coffee was from Dunkin’ Donuts, not Starbucks.

  “Yeah, they do,” Simon said.

  “Can I join you?” she asked

  Simon realized there was a limit to how rude he could be without coming off as being a total jerk, so he said, “Um, okay.”

  She sat next to him, smiling widely, and said, “I’m Milika.”

  “Simon,” he said hesitantly.

  “It’s very nice to meet you,” she said, looking right at his eyes. Hers were blue and open very wide.

  Simon nodded in acknowledgment but didn’t say anything.

  He was looking straight ahead again when Milika said, “You have a beautiful boy.”

  Until recently Simon had no idea what beautiful women went through every day, but now he understood exactly how it felt to have his personal space invaded; he just hadn’t learned how to deal with it.

  “Thank you,” he said, without looking at her at all.

  Still, he knew she was staring at him. He could feel her gaze.

  Then he heard, “Can you turn off your music, please?”

  “Sorry,” Simon said, “is it bothering you?”

  “No,” she said. “I just want to talk to you, that’s all.”

  She still had a toothy smile and was giving him that look. He’d seen the look lately from other wo
men around the city. It was the longing, desperate, come-hither look that rock stars get from their groupies.

  Simon didn’t know what else to do, so he turned down the volume.

  “You know, you’re a very attractive man,” Milika said.

  “Thank you.” Simon was a little taken aback. Women had been checking him out lately, but few had actually started conversations.

  “I’m from Serbia,” she said. “I’m divorced.”

  “I’m from America,” Simon said. “I’m married.”

  Just to emphasize that he was very married and very unavailable, Simon placed his left hand on his lap, in an obvious way, so the woman could see his thick gold wedding band.

  This apparently had no effect on Milika either. “You know, you have very beautiful, deep voice,” she said.

  It was true Simon’s voice had gotten deeper. His voice had always been deepish, but the other day he’d realized he could do a practically dead-on James Earl Jones impression.

  She added, “You should be in movies. You know the voice of the man who speaks about movies, in commercials, you know?”

  “Oh, voiceovers,” Simon said. “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea. I mean, since I’m unemployed.”

  So now he’d told this woman he was married, and he was unemployed. What else could he possibly do to turn her off? Tell her he had syphilis?

  “That’s good you’re unemployed,” she said. “It means you have a lot of time to, you know, do things with your son, and maybe with other people too.”

  The way she was looking at Simon, she might as well have been screaming, I want your sexy body right now!

  “Look, I’m trying my hardest to be polite,” Simon said. “But there seems to be a very big misunder—”

  She shifted closer to him on the bench and said, “I love your eyes. So many people, their eyes say nothing, but your eyes, they tell a story. A story of a very handsome man who meets a pretty woman one day in park. They talk a little bit, get to know each other, and then one day they—”

  Simon stood and said, “It was very nice meeting you.”

  He wished he hadn’t said that; it would only encourage her.

  He went over to Jeremy, who was trying to crawl up the slide, and said, “We have to go now.”

  “I don’t want to,” he said.

  “We’re going,” Simon said, trying to avoid raising his voice or losing his temper, as he knew how dangerous that could be.

  Thankfully Jeremy got the point that Simon was serious and didn’t put up much of a fuss. He finished crawling up to the top of the slide and slid down on his stomach, and then Simon grabbed his hand and led him toward the stroller near the bench.

  Milika’s son had run over to her and—although this conversation was taking place about twenty feet away—Simon could hear him saying to her, “Why did he have to leave?” and Milika said to him, “I don’t know, sweetie.”

  Like a snotty, aloof supermodel, Simon purposely didn’t make any eye contact with Milika, pretending she wasn’t there. But he heard her, walking toward him, her heels click-clacking, and her perfume was so strong, it was nearly overwhelming.

  Then he heard, “Maybe you want to give me your number, no? We make a play date for the children.”

  “I’m sorry, we don’t live in the area,” Simon said.

  “Yes, we do,” Jeremy said.

  “Okay, time to get into the stroller now, kiddo.”

  Leaving the playground, heading toward Riverside Drive, Jeremy asked, “How come we couldn’t stay? I wanted to stay, Daddy.”

  “We stayed for as long as we could,” Simon said.

  “No, we didn’t. You always make me go home too soon.”

  It was true; Simon had left other playgrounds lately when random women had started hitting on him.

  “How about some ice cream?” Simon asked.

  “Yay, ice cream,” Jeremy said.

  Score another point for the ice cream distraction strategy. Simon felt bad for evading Jeremy’s questioning, but what choice did he have? He didn’t want to lie to his son, but the truth was out of the question. After all, how was he supposed to explain to a three-year-old boy that his daddy was a werewolf?

  If someone had told Simon just last month that he would be hiding his werewolfness, or werewolfosity, or whatever it was called, from his family and the rest of the world, he never would have believed it. The thought of werewolves actually existing had seemed insane, and even now there were times when the reality that he had actually become one seemed impossible to comprehend. He’d wake up in the middle of the night, thinking everything was fine, that he was just a normal Manhattan husband and dad, and then he’d remind himself, You’re a werewolf now, and he’d shudder as he relived the horror of everything that had happened to him over the past several weeks, the way his body and perceptions had changed, how it had felt to actually transform, physically and mentally, into a half-man, half-wolf creature, and, most horrific of all, how it had felt to kill with his bare hands. Or, well, bare claws.

  Simon took Jeremy to the Tasti D-Lite on Broadway and Eighty-sixth. Jeremy had a cone of Nutella and Simon had a double cone of Cookies ‘n’ Cream. Though Simon could have engulfed the ice cream and cone in a couple of bites, he forced himself to eat at a normal pace. Lately it took a lot of discipline not to scarf down his food. Sometimes he slacked off, letting his mind wander, and suddenly his food was gone. Still, he finished the ice cream well before Jeremy finished his. Unfortunately, the carbs didn’t do much for Simon’s appetite. He was dying to get home and cook up some burgers or, better yet, steaks.

  When they got back to their apartment on Columbus and Eighty-ninth, Simon parked Jeremy in front of the electronic babysitter to watch The Wiggles. Although Jeremy had probably seen the episode dozens of times—even Simon knew most of it verbatim—he was as happy as only a three-year-old could be. Meanwhile, Simon satisfied his craving by cooking up four hamburgers. Though he preferred his burgers well-done, the smell of the cooking meat was so enticing that he couldn’t resist snatching one from the grill when it was rare, and he polished the others off when they were about medium rare—medium, at best.

  Simon was content—for the moment. Lately it had been nearly impossible to satisfy his appetite completely, and even when he was going about his normal daily routine—taking care of Jeremy, doing chores, running in the park—thoughts of his next high-protein meal always seemed prominent.

  “Hello.”

  Simon was in the kitchen, cleaning the grill, and Alison had startled him.

  “Hey,” Simon said, immediately recognizing his wife’s particularly pungent end-of-the-day natural scent, mingling with her perfume and deodorant. She was in a navy work suit, heels, and a nice pearl necklace. She worked as a sales rep for a large pharmaceutical company called Primus, currently working on selling a new oral contraceptive, and she always had to look her best for her meetings with physicians. Meanwhile Simon was in his usual daddy outfit—jeans and an old gray hoodie.

  “What a day,” Alison said. “I think I’ve been running around nonstop since seven A.M.”

  Since Simon had lost his job, Alison had been the financial provider for the family. She worked nine to five, though some days she left earlier and came home later, especially on days she entertained doctor clients—taking them out to fine restaurants, sporting events, and Broadway shows.

  Unable to block out the wonderful aroma of her body after a long workday, Simon said, “I know, I can tell.” He imagined grabbing her, putting her on the countertop, then pulling up her dress and ravishing her. If fantasies of steak and sausage were the main behavioral symptom of Simon’s being a werewolf, thoughts of sex, particularly with Alison, were a close second. If it were up to him, he would be all over her all the time, making love to her multiple times every night. Sounded like the perfect marital situation except for one small problem—the last time he’d tried to seduce her, he’d nearly transformed into a werewolf and mauled her to
death, so—at least until he figured out how to control his transformations—actual sex was out of the question.

  “What can you tell?” Alison asked.

  Simon was lost, distracted.

  “How can I tell what?”

  “You said you can tell.”

  “I did?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” Simon realized he was actually panting. “I guess I, um, didn’t hear you come in, that’s all.”

  It was a lame excuse but the best he could come up with. He tried to strike the sexual thoughts from his consciousness, but it was nearly impossible. They say that men think about sex at least once every two minutes—well, for Simon it was probably every thirty seconds. Complicating things, he just couldn’t seem to control his brain the way he used to. Sometimes he felt like a puppet, as if someone had taken control of his behavior and actions and he was just a defenseless observer.