The Werewolf [COMPLETE]

|17|

My eyes opened to Aaron's golden gaze staring silently back at me. Our faces were lying on the same pillow, facing one another only inches apart. The round tip of my nose was brushing his, lightly tickling and tingling it, and his warm breath was stroking my lips softly. My gaze roamed musingly over his handsome features hardened and sharpened by life, skimming over his sand blond hair lightened by hours under the sun, glancing at his tanned skin, his large jaw, his thin lips, his left dimple, before settling on his eyes. They were calm and still, showing no discomfort or uneasiness from my browsing gaze, holding it steadily instead. His eyes hadn't left mine once while I was wandering off, observing the crests and recesses of his face. After all this time, it was something I could feel, when he was looking at me and when he wasn't. I guessed it was because these eyes were the same eyes that had watched over me for twenty-one years now.

Aaron and I were the story of a life-time, or the story of two life-times to be more correct. Our friendship was two generations old, born with the fathers Petersen and Pierce, and grown up with their children. Our dads always said it was fate, that destiny had decided it to be so centuries and centuries away, when a man first bore the name Petersen and another the name Pierce, or more likely something resembling them in a distant, very distant way. And like a centenary tree, it'd had to survive through both the elements and time, it had been as stormed by the winds and flooded by the rain as it had been warmed by the sun. These names grew with each ancestor wearing them, losing a letter here, adding two there, changing a sound or the spelling of a sound, until they became the last names of two six-year old boys on an alphabetical list, seating the twenty-first student Petersen and the twenty-second student Pierce next to one another for their first year of school and the twelve next to follow. This administrative fortuity originated the relationship of our fathers, then of our parents and finally of Aaron and I, relegated twenty-third and twenty-fourth student of the classroom. Just as their friendship did, the alphabetical order of their names followed them to their adult life, for the post office, for the taxes, for the electoral lists, even in the crops, where half of the men in the Village worked, from sixteen-year old teenagers too young to vote to sixty-year old elderly too old to pay taxes, they were still neighbours in the fields.

Their private lives were just as much bound together as their public ones, they did everything together, almost everything together. Cain would always joke after bottles and bottles of beer that my dad was every time a step behind him on the 'important stuff'– marriage, children, and school, whispering the latter roguishly at giggling children. While knowing, dating and loving my mum years before Cain had even encountered Agatha, my father had taken as much time to convince my mum's parents to allow him to marry her. My grandparents were strongly against the union of the two teenage sweet birds. They lived in the Village Square, owned a flower shop, and if there were any kind of a bourgeoisie in the Village, well this was it. They were hence more than reluctant to give their only daughter's hand to yet another worker in the fields. So the Petersen married before my parents did, had their first son Caleb before my parents did, but then my parents caught up for the next child.

Aaron and I were of the same year, born only a few months apart, the Petersen boy preceding the Pierce girl– once again, a step behind. Our attachment to one another was immediate, it might've helped that I'd spend more time with him than with my own parents. I would sleep as many nights in his cradle as I would in mine, we shared everything, the same blankets, the same dummies, the same feeding bottles, and how many times did I wear a prince charming nappy instead of my pink princess ones? Luckily for me, or luckily for him in that matter, Aaron and I both grew up to be anything but princes and princesses. Either way, my dad's rusty pick-up would never have made a coach decent for royalty, or even decent for the royalty's servants. But we didn't ask for castles, coaches or servants; we didn't need it. The woods were our kingdom, puddles were our fancy perfumes and mud, mud and again mud was our lavish makeup. In our realm, Aaron and I were everything, he was explorer and I was doctor, we were adventurers, we were foes, we were friends, we were siblings and we were spouses.