Chapter 2-2

“Oh, God.”

            In my little “dress tent,” I remained frozen for a few seconds, just thinking, before suddenly yanking the dress back over my head and tossing it on a chair. Just then, my phone began going off on the bed, and I dashed over and looked at the screen, seeing that it was Don. Just the person I wanted to talk to.

            After throwing a t-shirt on, I answered the call and told Don that I’d just been about to call him. He asked why, and I sat down on the bed, sighing deeply, before responding.

            “Because I just realized something…and I hate to tell you this, but I’m out. I can’t go through with this whole ‘wolf shifter exposé’ thing. You can try to get another reporter to do it if you want, but as for me, I’m heading home.”

 Sounding somewhere between indignant and outraged, Don demanded to know why I’d just said what I just had. “I thought you said you wanted to make a name for yourself…help save the Press…and maybe earn yourself a Pulitzer Prize in the process.”

            “Well…I did. I still do. But not like this, though.”

            “Not like what?”

            “Don, do you realize what a horrible person I am? That this thought just occurred to me? Like, not even five seconds before you called?”

            “What thought? What are you talking about?”

            For the second time in as many minutes, I heaved a sigh before responding. “These wolf shifter men…these possible wolf shifter men, I should say. Well, if they are real, they’re not wolves a hundred percent of the time, right? I mean, obviously, they’re not. They’re probably human men more often than they’re wolves, right?”

            “So, what’s your point?”

            “My point is that these wolf shifter men, if they’re real, are men with regular human emotions. I mean, it would just stand to reason, right? Why wouldn’t this be the case? Meaning, that if I were to go through with this whole thing, if I were to get one of these men to fall in love with me, maybe even marry me, just for the sake of getting this story, I could leave an innocent man deeply, deeply hurt. And, Don…I just don’t know if I can do that. If I can just willfully bring a man into a completely fake romantic relationship like that.”

            I knew all about fake romantic relationships, or at least simulated ones. Simulated relationships were the only kind of romantic relationships I’d ever had. My first one had been in college, when I’d dated my boyfriend Max for nearly four years, only to have him to tell me shortly before graduation that he didn’t “prefer romantic relationships with women,” as he’d put it, going on to say that he’d never had a relationship with a male before but he’d known since he was thirteen years old that that was what he wanted.

He’d been scared to come out of the closet and had been using me as a “cover,” he admitted. He was extremely sorry. It was just that his parents were so deeply religious. He really did consider me his best friend, for whatever that was worth, and he did really love me as a best friend. Now that he’d finally decided to come out to his parents and everyone else in his life, he hoped that I could support him like a best friend.

            Max had said all this tearlessly while I’d silently sobbed, hands over my mouth and shoulders shaking. To say I’d been “devastated” would have been putting it mildly. I truly loved Max, and I’d thought that he and I might get married. Sure, it had struck me as a bit odd that he was never very interested in s*x, never initiated it, and didn’t seem to enjoy it much when we did have s*x, but I’d just chalked this up to his extremely religious upbringing. He just can’t enjoy things while feeling so guilty, I’d thought. Things will change once we get married and our bedroom activities are “legal.” He even pretty much confirmed this when I once delicately brought up the subject of our nearly-nonexistent s*x life, asking if my suspicions about religious guilt were correct. He’d said yes, looking visibly relieved. He’d lied right to my face. He’d basically lied right to my face for four years.

            My second sham relationship had come a few years later, after a string of not-very-serious boyfriends, none of whom I’d been able to really connect with. Brandon had been different, though. Brandon had knocked me right off my feet. And after a month or two, I’d fallen deeply in love with him. After two years, I started hinting around that if he ever asked me to marry him, I’d definitely say yes. It wasn’t long after I started hinting around that Brandon revealed the truth. He was married. Married with two children and a third on the way, no less.

            For the second time, I was rendered devastated. I blamed myself for not picking up “clues” about Brandon’s marital status, but really, there hadn’t been many, if there had even been any at all. The thing was that Brandon’s job as a commercial pilot had allowed him to pull the wool over my eyes without much trouble at all. For one thing, he didn’t even live in Detroit, instead only flying into Detroit Metro once or twice a week, usually staying overnight at my apartment when he did.

Whenever I asked if I could come stay at his place in Louisville, he would always just say something about not wanting me to have to experience his “gross bachelor pad,” or he’d say something about a trip to Louisville being pointless, because as much as he worked, I’d only be able to stay for a day or two anyway. I couldn’t deny that this was true, because I often worked six-day weeks as well, and I hated to take time off.

            As far as never discovering Brandon’s secret via the internet at any point, he didn’t maintain any social media pages, so I never learned anything that way. I did, however, run his name through a search engine when we first started dating, but all that had come up had been a few mentions about his flying career and some track team award he’d won in college.

            As far as never meeting any of his friends or family, I did meet one of his family members, or I thought I did, anyway. Maybe a year into our relationship, a few weeks after I’d complained about never having met any of his family, a woman claiming to be Brandon’s sister met me for dinner and drinks, saying that she just happened to be in Detroit for a business trip and wanted to meet me.

We’d had a lovely time and had gotten along great, although I had thought it was strange that she’d seemed mystified at first when I’d referenced a tale Brandon and I referred to as “poor Brandon’s saddest Christmas,” when he’d gotten a long-awaited aquarium full of tropical fish at age five. By the end of the day, for whatever reason, all the fish had sadly died, and his mom flushed them down the toilet, telling Brandon that they were going to “fish Heaven.”

 A few minutes later, Brandon’s mom had found him with his feet in the toilet, weeping, trying to flush himself down to join his short-lived friends in “fish Heaven.” Brandon had told me this was quite a famous oft-retold funny family tale, which is why I thought his sister’s initial apparent mystification was strange.

However, she soon seemed to recall the tale, saying that, oddly enough, their family actually had a few different Christmas tales involving fish, so she hadn’t immediately remembered which particular one I was talking about. Which, again, struck me as just a bit odd, because I’d specifically referenced Brandon being five, and making an attempt to follow his fish friends feet-first down the toilet.

            After coming clean to me about the fact that he was married, Brandon admitted that the woman he’d tried to pass off as his sister to me was, in reality, just a stewardess he worked with. She had “owed” him, he said, because he’d once pretended to be her brother during a dinner meetup with a man she’d been cheating on her husband with for six months. Like Brandon with me, she’d been telling her boyfriend he was the only one and that she’d be delighted to have him meet her sibling.

            In hindsight, maybe there had been some huge red flags about Brandon. In my haze of love and blind trust, though, they’d all just been invisible to me.

            After Brandon, I decided to take a break from relationships and even casual dating. I just focused on my career. My mom was thrilled to hear this. Unlike most moms, sometimes it seemed like she never wanted me to get married, at least not until my career was very well-established, like maybe when I was in my mid-to-late thirties. She certainly didn’t want me to have children before then.

My career seemed to be much more important to her. And most of the time, especially in the time since I’d dumped Brandon and had told him to go back to his wife, my career was the most important thing to me, too. It actually seemed to become more and more important with each passing day, even though with each of those passing days I felt some distinct “lack” in my life that I couldn’t articulate, even to myself.

            My career-driven friends and my mom all said that this funny “lack” sort of feeling that I got sometimes was just my natural hunger for success and accomplishment, and I supposed that sounded about right. It couldn’t be for “lack” of romantic love, I figured, because even when in relationships with Max and Brandon, even before I knew about their respective inauthenticity, “the emptiness” would still wash over me sometimes, and sometimes very strongly.

            In the present, in response to what I’d said about being unable to ensnare a man in a phony romantic relationship, Don snorted and began to say something dismissive, but I cut him off.

            “I’m serious, Don. I have no idea why the morality of all this didn’t hit me earlier, but I really don’t think I can do this. I guess I was just overly excited about such a big possible story, and--”          

   “This is investigative journalism, Sable. I thought you knew that. I thought you knew that it can be a bit more morally ambiguous than simply reporting the news.”

            “Well--”           

“Look. Why do you think these shifter men are there? They’re part-animal, with animal-like urges, I’d imagine. In fact, when she saw that now-deleted post on whatever message board it was, Hilary is sure she read something about the shifter men coming to these meetups to find wives to take back home because they’re so highly libidinous.

“Now, if you want to talk about moral ambiguities, don’t you think that’s one? To come to a social meetup on the pretense of wanting relationships, marriage, and families, when really, their end goal is just to get all the unlimited s*x they can get from a wife? Let’s not pretend that these wolf shifters don’t all have ulterior motives for being at this meetup, just like you do.”

            Thinking, I didn’t respond, and Don continued.

            “So, you need to pull a little trickery on a man for a few weeks or months until you can get the story. So, what? In the meantime, I’m sure you’re fully prepared to sleep with him. Aren’t you?”

            I didn’t answer, because Don had already brought this issue up once before, and I’d answered his question in the affirmative, face flaming. I would sleep with a shifter, no matter if he was attractive or not, in order to get my story. At the time that I’d said yes to Don, I’d been feeling like I’d do absolutely anything to get my story.

            After a few moments of silence, Don continued. “So, not to be coarse about this all, but you get the scoop of a lifetime, and some wolf shifter gets a few weeks of free s*x with a beautiful woman. Everyone gets something out of this. Then, once you have all the proof and details you need for the story, you tell Mr. Shifter that you need to go back to Detroit for a few days, and then once you’re safely back, we break the story. You’ll never have to reveal the truth about your little ‘simulation’ to anyone’s face.”

            “Well…okay, but…now that I’m thinking about the ramifications of this all, if shifters are real, have we thought about what it might do to one of their communities, or their entire community at large, to be ‘outed’ in an exposé? I mean, what if the government tries to hurt them, or--”