It was late. I was tired.
And hungry.
I found her on IM. In the time we’ve known each other, it was always as friends of a friend. We hadn’t shared more than fifty words between us.
But I knew.
We chatted; she had just stepped out of the shower and was drying her hair. I told her not to get dressed. When I found her, I wanted her in just a towel. She gave me directions to her house and told me to come straight in. She’d be in the bedroom at the back.
She listened well. I opened the bedroom door and found her in her bed in just a towel; well, towel and some sheets. I smiled, shook my head, and told her the sheets were cheating. She kicked them away.
I sat on the edge of her bed and asked her if she was nervous. Yes, she said, she was – was I?
In the initial moments of our IM conversation, I had been almost shaking, so intense was my hunger. The promise of tasting prey tender and rare. Once committed to action, however, I felt a familiar quiet settle over me. Knowing it would feed, the wolf of my hunger lowered himself patiently to the ground, alert but content to wait for the inevitable feast.
No – I wasn’t nervous. This part comes naturally.
The sound of your footsteps coming down the hall still echo in my ears.
There is much difference to the wolf that runs in the hunt, and the wolf that stands over his prey. Indeed. A quest is uncertainty, capture is not.