A/N - Call it catharsis. Maybe I'm having a bad day. But there is a little wolf in every woman, and mine has been howling at the moon a lot lately. ~Tal.

WOLF

I know why, in the deepest throes of night, she lays awake and presses her open, screaming mouth into her pillow, muffling her torment. I know why, with each day that passes slow, her heart throbs inside her chest like an eagle caught in a reed cage, clawing and slashing to escape, to soar, to scream… to escape.

I know why sometimes she catches herself facing into the wind, scenting it like a wolf might, nostrils twitching to catch every nuance of the breeze from afar. Why sometimes she paces the confines of her life, paws placed so carefully along the very edges of her cages, claws clicking softly sometimes against the hard floor when they should be quiet on soil.

I know.

I do it too.

It isn't from boredom, although she gets restless sometimes when the moon is high and heavy and the lightning crackles along the horizon. It isn't from fear, although she does fear many things. Not marriage or sex, not her femininity, not her uncle or her brother. Not any of those things. She fears the voices in her head that whisper and howl and tell her she is lying to everybody including herself if she thinks for one moment that any cage will ever hold her. She fears the voices that tell her about her unhappiness. She tries to ignore them. She tries to silence them. She can't.

But these are not why she is as she is.

She longs.

For what, she does not know. Sometimes she thinks she knows what that thing is, but seldom remembers that she does.

She longs for wilderness, to indulge her wolfish side. She longs to be able to scream and cry out and spin until she flies away. She longs for escape and glory and adventure. For difference. For the Other to come and claim her from this monotony of sunrise and sunset.

She longs for nothing more than the wind in her hair and a fine mount between her thighs to carry her to whatever it is that she longs for.

I know.