Full Moon Fiancé

By a Stranger

Diana found herself back in her bedroom before she knew it. After Joshua’s shocking confession that he might be asked to murder her, she had felt unable to absorb any more information. The Westerlys had murmured around her, offering platitudes, offering assurances that it wouldn’t come to that. But she had felt frozen. Eventually, Joshua had stood and gently escorted her back to her room.

Even as he had kept a hand on the small of her back and guided her up the stairs, Diana had felt the distance he kept so carefully between them. It only made the ringing sensation in her ears louder. They’d once been so close it was as if they’d been one, and now she felt she was being touched by a stranger. Her head was heavy and her ears were both ringing and felt as though they were filled with cotton, simultaneously, somehow. Nothing felt real. When Joshua deposited her onto the bed in her room, she sat like a statue, willing herself to move, but unable to do it. Her body no longer seemed to respond to her.

That had been at least an hour ago, and Joshua had left her in her room, murmuring that he would be back to check on her the way one might coo softly at a scared pet. She’d barely noticed.

She was surprised by a knock at the door. Even more surprising, it opened before she could call out. Joshua was there, holding a cup of tea. It made her nearly laugh. She might have even felt the tiniest smile twist its way across her face. A loving gesture from a man she could hardly even bring herself to associate with someone she had once loved.

“How are you?” he asked, crossing the room and setting down the cup next to her. He looked genuinely concerned. Her own face, she knew, was as blank as a mask. It was an unwritten story. There was no story, in her head, not anymore. Just the fuzzy cotton feeling of her ears as she struggled to process what he was saying, struggled to formulate a response, struggled to force her mouth to open and the muscles to work to speak.

“I can’t help but feel like… like you must not be telling me everything.” She finally managed to get words out. They were clumsy and not exactly what she wanted to say, but they were something, and she was slightly shocked that she managed to say anything at all.

“I’m not telling you everything,” Joshua said. “We hardly have enough time for everything. I mean, there’s a years’ worth of… everything.” The last word he said quietly, so quietly that Diana could barely hear him, even though he stood right next to her. After a moment, he sat down on the bed beside her. His face was almost glum. For the first time, she wondered if perhaps their separation had been hard on him the way it had been hard on her.

But it had been his choice.

Did that make it easier, or harder? She wondered. Diana had believed Joshua was dead. Every day, no matter how hard, that was true. And it was final. Nothing she said or did would ever change it. Joshua had to wake up every day and live with the fact that he had left her. Know that if he only picked up the phone, he could have had her back.

Did he ever nearly do that?

“Diana, I won’t let anything happen to you,” he said, shaking her from her thoughts. “I know… I realize this is all a lot to take in. It was a lot to take in for me, and I knew about lycanthropy my whole life.”

“Is that the word?”

“What do you mean?”

“Lycanthropy? Werewolves? I mean, what do I even call…” she gestured vaguely to one side with her hand, “all of this? I don’t even know what this is. Moon… fur… cult? I mean, there has to be terminology.”

“Oh.” Joshua seemed bemused. “I guess you can call it any of those. Uh, well, not ‘moon fur cult’ though. I don’t think that is an official term. And it might be a little insulting. We just call ourselves wolves. I can see how that would be confusing for humans though.”

“For humans,” Diana snorted with the kind of hollow laughter that had been so prevalent to her lately. “Right.”

“Diana–”

“Look, you just have to acknowledge that this is objectively weird for me,” she interrupted him. “You, my fiancé, or, ex-fiancé, or whatever you are. You’re sitting here talking about humans like you aren’t one–” Joshua opened his mouth to speak, but Diana held up a hand and continued, “and maybe you aren’t, fine, but that’s an absolutely crazy thing for me to process. And then, on top of it, apparently, some wise wolf judge might come and ask you to kill me. Now, that’s another crazy thing for me to reckon with, okay? But you want to know what the part that is freaking me out the most is? I lived with you. I’ve spent years with you, your parents, James, living in this town. And I didn’t know? I didn’t notice? I mean… how? Explain that to me, Joshua, because that’s what is making me feel like I’ve truly lost it, or this is some weird dream. You and your parents seem to just expect me to believe that this whole universe has existed right next to me this whole time… and now I know about it, and I just have to trust you to guide me through it… you, the man who faked his own death to escape me!”

She was shouting slightly by the time she finished.

“It wasn’t to escape–”

“Fine!” Diana cut him off, “to escape the life he had built, which centered largely around me, his fiancé. Better? Does that wording make you feel better?”

“No,” he said softly.

“Good,” she said with a hint of venom. “Because the other wording doesn’t make me feel better either.”

“Diana, we are asking for a lot of trust from you, but don’t you? Trust me, I mean?”

“No,” she said. “I can’t say I do, and that truly breaks my heart. I want to, Joshua, but I can’t. Not anymore. Not like this.”

“I guess that’s fair.”

“I can’t shake the feeling that you wouldn’t be telling me any of this, your parents wouldn’t be telling me any of this, if I wasn’t already dead.”

“What, you mean, like, you’re dead and I’m talking to your ghost?” Joshua snickered a little.

“No, I mean like, my fate has been decided. It’s fine if you tell me all of this because, whatever, I’m going to be killed anyway. Why not lock her up for days on end? She’ll be dead in a week! Why not tell her about the crazy alternate reality werewolf life you’re leading? She can’t tell anyone from the grave! Dead, but the only person who doesn’t know it yet is me,” Diana explained.

“Diana,” he said. “Maybe consider that it’s the opposite?”

“What do you mean?” Diana asked, feeling as though the cotton had been shaken out of her ears. Curiosity percolated in her brain once again. It almost felt like hope.

“I mean, maybe, just maybe, my parents are telling you this because they believe you won’t betray us. Won’t go out into the world and write an article about us for your newspaper the second you get the chance.” He breathed in, and when Diana looked into his pretty, green-brown eyes, she could see that he was sincere.

“Maybe this is faith.”