"So… we need to talk."
"Oh for god's sake," Peter huffed, flopping back onto the mattress and dropping a sweaty forearm over his eyes. "Is this an intervention, or are you breaking up with me?"
"Um neither? Both? I just…"
"Spit it out!" he snapped, sudden irritation flaring in his gut as he rolled off the bed and stalked over to the dresser, careful to keep his back to the young man tangled in his sheets. He knew what was coming and to his great surprise he found that it had settled into the pit of his belly like a block of cool, heavy lead. Scowling as he jerked on a pair of shorts, he considered the feeling for all of a second before he labeled it inconsequential and forced it away. Losing Greenburg would be a significant inconvenience, but he was hardly emotionally attached to the youth - as such any reaction beyond mild irritation felt like too much of a reaction for his taste.
"It's just… I mean, I'm moving. Back to California. I paid off my loans and you wrote me that great reference…"
"When you said you were looking for work I didn't realize you were planning to flee to the other side of the country," Peter muttered scathingly, thrusting his arms into a V-neck shirt and tugging it down over his head.
"I wasn't but…"
Finally turning around, Peter found the chubby, dark-haired young man struggling to pull his skinny jeans up his thighs - a wobbly, faux-hipster mess in a coffee-stained jacket with a crooked haircut. He looked up in time to catch the older man staring, ducked his head sheepishly as he rubbed at the back of his neck.
"My, um…" he stammered, blushing painfully. "My old coach. He uh, he messaged me on Facebook. Offered me a position…"
"Your old coach, the one you're in love with?" Peter asked waspishly, half from bitter, annoyance-born cruelty and half from a strange sort of honest hope for the pathetically lovelorn boy. It was an unsettling combination, but over the two years he'd known Greenburg he'd come to… well not care for him.
Appreciate was perhaps a better term.
"Yeah," Greenburg mumbled, kicking at Peter's hardwood floors with his scuffed trainers. "I just thought… I mean, they need somebody with a PT background, and…"
"Of course," he said gruffly, reaching for the wallet lying on top of his dresser. "Sounds like a good opportunity." Pulling out four crisp five-hundred-dollar bills, he offered them to the young man with a casual, practiced hand. "I suppose this is goodbye then."
"I didn't…" Greenburg balked, eyeing the money warily, and Peter heaved a sigh, leveling an exasperated glare in his direction.
The young man had always been awkward about accepting his payment, smelling like an odd mixture of shame and relief and reluctance. Peter had never found it charming in all their acquaintance and this time was no different - he was a man of few principles but conviction was one of them, and he found a lack of it distasteful.
"That's more than you owe me," Greenburg mumbled, taking a step towards him despite his words.
"Call it a farewell tip," Peter replied flatly, rolling his eyes.
Closing the distance between them sheepishly, he reached out and accepted the money, rolling the bills in his hand before tucking them carefully into his pocket. He followed behind Peter silently as he led the way through his apartment to the front door, a familiar ritual the same as any other time that he'd frequented the high-rise, but the mood was strangely and incredibly somber, weighing on the both of them far more than it should. These were not lovers falling apart; what they had was a business arrangement built on cash, convenience, and an airtight non-disclosure agreement.
Wrenching the door open roughly, Peter stood to the side, waiting for the other man to move past and go, but instead he paused halfway across the threshold, turning back with a look of quiet contemplation on his face, a look that fit him ill.
"If it wasn't him…" he began on a breath, but Peter shook his head.
He'd heard a lot of things about the fabled 'Coach' during all the quiet, in-between moments he and Greenburg had spent in shared company, many more than he had cared to in fact. The young man had a terrible penchant for pillow talk that Peter had never found a way to circumvent, a failure that he often felt quite keenly. It didn't take a genius to see how hung up the young man was on his old instructor, and Peter had enough first-hand information to fill a book.
Still, unfortunate affinity for food-based pet names and innumerable eccentricities aside, Peter couldn't begrudge the boy happiness with the other man. If he could secure it then he was certainly entitled to it, all age differences and obnoxious personalities aside.
Peter was hardly one to judge a relationship on that basis or any other.
He only thanked God that the two would be unable to procreate.
"Get out," he scowled without too much malice, jerking his chin towards the hallway. "Go back to California. Put that massage degree you worked so hard for to good use."
A quiet moment passed between them before Greenburg spoke.
"You made it easy Peter," he said softly. "I think I'll miss you."
Standing up on his tiptoes, he pressed a quick, light kiss to Peter's cheek, making him sneer and lean away from the contact.
"I thought I told you to get out."
Smiling like Peter had just declared his love instead of gruffly forcing him out of his life with one last bitter push, Greenburg ducked through the door and headed off down the hallway towards the elevator, tossing him a silly little wave before Peter shut the door on him, scrubbing roughly at his cheek with the back of his wrist.
Stupid kid.
Peter wouldn't miss him.
Oh, he would miss the easiness of his company after all this time, the security of their arrangement. The services that the boy provided.
Oh yes, Peter would miss those.
But the boy himself?
Neither Peter nor his wolf much cared.
Wandering into the kitchen on bare feet, he poked around the refrigerator for something red and raw. It was going on two evenings past the full moon but he still felt a little twitchy, too large for his skin, and he knew a part of it was being alone again. The rest though, the rest came from locking himself indoors when he would rather be out running, careening through the forest with the silver light pouring down slick and cool on his shoulders. But such was almost never possible and so he had to find other ways to deal. Greenburg's company got him through the worst of the deprivation, but it was always like this after, always that feeling of being hollow and hungry with a strong, near-uncontrollable urge to sink his teeth into something that would squeal and squirm beneath him as blood burst hot and coppery on his tongue.
But Peter was no longer a pup wet behind the ears, driven to ecstatic madness by the beauty of swollen moon. Instead he was a beta in his prime; strong, powerful, his control iron-clad, and he had found his own ways with which to leash his more animalistic instincts.
Though that wasn't to say that he preferred them.
Withdrawing from the refrigerator, Peter sliced through the cellophane packaging of a nicely marbled steak with a single claw, taking down a plate and cutlery from a cabinet. He might be eating the thing while it still bled but that was hardly any reason to be uncivil about the process. It was a display of control more than anything, cutting delicate slices of meat expensive enough to melt on his tongue when he would much rather grow his fangs and tear at it, but such tended the bent of his life in all things.
Control.
Concealment.
As necessary as it was exhausting.
He'd learned the hard way that exposing a preference to or character trait for anything that could be considered weakness made one vulnerable to all sorts of… inconveniences.
But Peter was one to learn from his mistakes, and to go after what he wanted with a voracity that matched the wolf's, regardless, or perhaps in spite of any limitations standing in his way.
Savoring the last salty bite of his steak, sucking the juice from his thumb, Peter dropped his dishes into the sink and headed deeper into the apartment, searching around until he found his running shoes stuffed under the edge of a table. Lacing the sneakers tightly, he pocketed his keys and plugged his iPod into his ears, selecting a dark, visceral playlist with a hard, pounding beat. His metabolism had already gone to work on his meal and a quick jog around the lightly wooded park nearby would help him to shake the last vestiges of discomfort clinging to his limbs from the pain of a confined moon.
XXX
A full two hours later Peter dragged his feet back into his apartment, sweaty and exhausted after pushing himself to the furthest limits of what a human male in his physical prime could achieve. It would have been a pleasure to go beyond that, to tap into his animalistic side and move with the speed of his werewolf blood, but in the publicity of the park that hadn't been possible. Indeed, such was a pleasure he rarely allowed himself, only on those few occasions when he flew back to Colorado to visit his sister's pack or when he made the drive out to the head of the Appalachians for a long weekend. Far more often he found himself trapped in the city - a city he loved, don't get him wrong, a city that he had made his kingdom - but on those few days, those few nights every month, he did feel trapped, caught between the glass and concrete of the skyscrapers and brick and steel of the back alleys.
Still, if he went long enough he could tire himself out.
Looking at his couch with longing, Peter toed off his sneakers and forced himself into the shower, scrubbing down quickly under cool water. Leaving his hair damp, he pulled on a pair of boxer briefs and moved into the kitchen to turn up the air conditioning. It was mid-July, well into the sweat of summer, and the leftover heat of the full moon made him want for an ice-water bath. Settling for a glass of the stuff instead, he carried it into the living room and settled into a lazy sprawl at last, sunk low in the cushions with his feet propped up on the ottoman, taking a moment just to breathe in the quiet silence.
It was always pleasant having his apartment to himself again.
He enjoyed Greenburg's company for what it was, needed it even, but getting rid of him as the moon began to wane was a joy in itself. He would take tomorrow off, one last day to get himself together before he returned to the office, and then things would be back to normal.
At least until next month.
Frowning, Peter reached for the remote, tuned his flatscreen in to his Netflix account and put a cowboy flick on in the background while his laptop booted up. Losing Greenburg, his long-term go-to, meant that he only had until the next full moon to find a replacement, and Peter's wolf didn't take well to change. The sooner he found a new boy the better - that way he'd have time to get to know him, acclimate to him before the real test, the three to four days of spine-tingling, logic-numbing wolf-out that came with being a loner, bound to his apartment and packless.
He'd found Greenburg through a local escort service that was well-reviewed and had a sparkling reputation, not a whiff of scandal, and being a lawyer himself as well as a less-than-scrupulous exploiter of the law, Peter had done a thorough search of their history and current clientele. Their website was neat and easily navigated, straightforward which he appreciated, and he was pleased to see that it hadn't changed in the two years since he'd signed his long-standing agreement with the ridiculous young massage student who'd so rudely resigned without so much as two weeks' notice.
Though this was hardly the type of business arrangement engaged in by Hale & Dorr; he could hardly expect to see the same etiquette from the young man as that which he demanded of his regular employees.
Tapping his fingers on his thighs in contemplation, he sighed with a vague sort of irritation before going back to the keyboard and starting his search through the available escorts, both male and female alike. There were far more important things to consider in this than plumbing, but unfortunately for him, those things weren't often part of a posted profile.
The way someone smelled, the way they moved, the way they felt.
It mattered, to him and his wolf.
The way they shifted when he did, when and how they met his gaze or avoided it.
It was difficult finding a human who fit that description - they were highly unlikely to be aware of the supernatural world around them and Peter wasn't inclined to divulge what he was on a whim. As such it took a particular sort of personality to satisfy the urges he was looking to quell, or indulge in as the case might be.
Hardly something easily done through an electronic interface.
Rumbling with annoyance, Peter scrubbed his hands over his face before slapping his laptop shut and reaching for his phone, dialing from memory and leaving a brief message on the owner of Urbane Escorts' personal extension. Paying as well and as regularly as he did led to certain perks, including having access to the CEO on a secure line. The man knew what Peter was - people in his sort of position often did - and with any luck he would be able to make a few recommendations that would leave to an interview or three.
Stretching out full-length on the couch, Peter dialed for take-away and went back to the shoot-out on screen.