You already knew Jeremy Artell never fit in a box, and by October you’ve stopped looking for one.

He doesn’t eat in restaurants. Suggest the new Thai place on Main or the Italian spot with the ridiculous matcha tiramisu, and he gives you a calm half-smile and says he’ll cook. He does, perfectly, every time, as if takeout containers personally offended him in a past life. Every full moon he disappears with a soft “gotta handle something, sleep well” and doesn’t resurface until morning. He owns about seventeen hoodies, oversized and soft and smelling of cedar, and when you asked why so many, he muttered, “Fur gets everywhere,” like that was a normal answer. His hearing is unfair. You can whisper from two rooms away with the TV blasting and he’ll answer as if you’d said it into his ear.

Tonight is Halloween, and the moon is full.

The cold in Michigan has found every gap in your little apartment, and the string lights are the only warm thing in the living room. You’re on the couch in his black hoodie, which hits you mid-thigh, with a half-watched horror movie going and the street outside quiet except for the occasional car crunching over leaves. Jeremy is “handling something” in the spare room, door shut, the way he is every month. You stretch, roll your eyes at the empty room, and say it mostly to hear your own voice.

“Sometimes I wish I could just bite someone.”

The hallway floorboard creaks.

You turn. He’s standing at the mouth of the hall, dark hair messy, wearing one of the grey hoodies now, hands jammed in the pockets. He’s very still. His eyes are fixed on you, and they are not amused.

“What?” His voice is low.

“I was joking.”

He doesn’t smile. He looks at you for a long second, jaw working like he’s chewing on something he can’t say, then nods once and walks back down the hall. The spare room door shuts. Then you hear the lock turn, from the inside, which he has never once done.

You sit there longer than you should, heart doing the stupid little skip it only does for him, wondering why your face is warm.

You wake at 2:07 a.m.

The apartment is dark except for the orange streetlight leaking through the curtains. Your bedroom door is open a few inches, and you don’t remember leaving it that way. There’s a shape in the gap. It’s large, too large, and low to the ground, and your whole body goes cold before your mind has a word for it. Your hand finds your phone on the nightstand and closes around it.

Then the shape tilts its head, and the light catches its eyes.

Grey.

It’s a wolf. A giant one, dark-furred, sitting in your doorway with its ears pricked forward. It hasn’t crossed the threshold. Past it, down the hall, the spare room door hangs open, the lock bent out of its frame.

Your breath comes back in pieces.

“…Jeremy?”

The ears flatten. It makes a low, uncertain sound, half whine, half apology. Then its tail drags once across the floorboards.

You stare. The tail does it again, faster, like it’s overruled whoever is in charge.

“Oh my God,” you whisper.

The wolf lowers its head but keeps its eyes on you, and the pieces slam together so hard your brain short-circuits for a second. He broke out of the room. He came straight to you. He stopped at the door. Whatever the moon wanted him to do, he sat down instead and waited, because you’d said the word bite in a joke and he’d heard every syllable.

Of course he did. Of course the man who never eats out and vanishes on full moons and owns seventeen hoodies is a fucking werewolf.

What the actual fuck.

You set the phone down and swing your legs out of bed. The floor is freezing. You cross the room slowly, the way you would with any animal you didn’t want to startle, and he doesn’t move, not even when you’re close enough to feel the heat coming off him. You rest your fingers between his ears. The fur is thick and warm and completely real. His eyes slide half closed, and a sound rumbles out of him that is nearly a sigh.