She Was His Pack
By Avin Telfer
 
He'd do anything for her. He would waste years of his life just to make hers a little bit nicer for a minute. 
He told me the full moon was bright in the sky that night, giving more light than you would expect for such a late hour. Some say that drives us wolves crazy, but if anything, it made him feel sober. It allowed him to see the entire lake from his boat, and that wasn't good. It meant anyone along the share could see him just as well sitting there in the middle. He knew he had to move quickly. He told me when he stopped rowing, that was the first time he thought about what he was doing. It certainly wasn't his dream job. In fact, it had nothing to do with his job at all. This was the first time he had done something bad in his life. Not just bad, but really bad. But he loved her. He'd do anything for her, even if she hated him. He knew just far that pack bond went when he had to roll the body off the side of the boat. 
I don’t want you to think he was stupid or delusional; he wasn't. The two of them were about the same age when we moved here, so they ended up spending a lot of time together. In our neighborhood, we wolves stuck together. She called him a friend, but he grew to think of her as something more. By the time we’d been here a year, he knew she loved someone other than him. I know he was totally ok with that, he just wanted her to be happy. Though In his mind, he had made the bond. He was part of her pack. If he was the omega, so be it, but he would do anything for her. She was his alpha.
That doesn’t mean she told him what to do. He acted alone. He wanted to make sure everyone knew that. No one saw him at that lake, even though he said it took him a long time to find his footing on the boat to get dump the body overboard. He wanted her life to be better, even if they could never be together. More importantly, he knew by taking action he would never see her again. As long as he accepted being "just a friend" to her, he could continue to be around her, at least for a little while. That was worth it, for a time. But he could not take it anymore. He had to say or do something.
Before letting go, he said he whacked the bloody head across the side of the boat, cracking the wood. Even though the fur was long matted and dried, he thought maybe he could make the body would look at least something like he slipped while fishing or something. Why anybody would believe he decided to go fishing he didn't know. It's funny, back when he first met her, he didn't like her. She looked at him with some disgust when he stopped by the café where she worked. She'd take his order, and move on to the next customer like he was never there. He almost stopped going to that place for lunch because she scared him a little. How different would his life be if spent more time out of the neighborhood? Such is the way with our kind. We wolves stick together.
He told me how bad he felt as he watched the body float in the water. You don't kill people every day. He waited to watch the body slowly sink, thinking about her. Their friendship started when she walked right up to him and asked: “Want to go to a movie?”. She acted and spoke to him as if they were already best friends. I think that was the first thing she ever said to him. I remember that night well. He told me back then he felt like he had never seen her before that moment. They watched two movies that night, some new predator/prey buddy cop film in theaters and another old feel good kids movie starring an orphan canine at her place. 
Oh yes, the boat sank. He told me he lost track of time watching the body float away and didn’t realize the boat was taking on water. It was because of the bloody crack he made. Sorry, I just think it’s important to give you more context. You see, they would talk for hours, days, weeks. She got a better job near where he worked, and within a matter of months, they started spending all of their time together. She took him places he normally wouldn't go and did things with him he normally wouldn't do. She made him meet people outside of our family. You know he had never eaten at one of them vegetarian rabbit restaurants before she brought him to one?
He swore to me, during that time when they were inseparable friends, he didn't think of her in a romantic way. He didn't consider those times they'd go out together or stay home and watch TV late into the night as "dates." But then, he also considered himself a fool for not realizing how much he liked her until it was too late. She was the one in charge, without question. She was always the alpha of her group. If she called him and told him to come over, he would drop what he was doing and come over. She would call asking random questions with no explanation, and he would look it up the answer for her.
When he was talking to me, he still had not finalized his plan for what he was going to tell her. They had been friends for a while when he realized how much he loved her. He thought of her when she wasn't around. When she was around, he was just a happy pup. He never had those feelings for somebody before, so not only did it take him a long time to realize it, it also took him a long time to build up the courage to share those feelings with her. He practiced how he was going to tell her. He'd practiced in the car, in the shower, even as he went to sleep. Of course, things never go to plan.
They didn't do things together as often when she got a job in a different part of town. She could have made an effort, but that is what happens when romantic feelings aren't mutual. She met a fox, and he became her boyfriend. She liked him a lot. They seemed pretty happy together. No, his feelings weren’t species motivative. He was happy for them, eventually. I don’t believe she was officially dating him yet when he finally got the courage to go to her place and tell her he loved her. He will never forget her face. She told him no, she didn't feel the same way as he did, and within a minute he was out the door. That was the end of their friendship for a while. That might have been what pushed her into asking that fox to be her boyfriend officially. They complete stopped doing things together after that. Rather suddenly they weren't best friends anymore.
He saw the two of them together fairly often, and he felt a little better knowing she was happy with him. It was a long time before they started talking again. When they did finally talk to each other again, it was just as friends. Not good friends, just friends. Friends who might talk now and then, and not friends who would spend late nights watching movies about spaceship battles. In my opinion, this was his greatest mistake. It would have hurt a lot more to remove her from his life completely, but then he wouldn't need to repress his feelings. Maybe then it wouldn't have come to this.
She loved her boyfriend. I saw her at that time as well. She was much happier when he was around. It was the same way he felt with her, only she felt it for that fox. She was hoping the boyfriend would ask her to marry him soon. If I haven't said it already, I assure you, the motivation was not jealousy as you think. She was happy, and she was friends with him again. He was happy for her. He just tried to move on and recover from the rejection of his first and only love. She had been dating her new boyfriend for almost two years when he noticed the problems. She was starting to worry about something. He pointed this out to her a couple of times before she opened up enough to him to tell him what she was on her mind.
She was hoping her boyfriend would propose to her, but they were having some problems. He wasn't talking to her as often over the phone. It started when he got promoted and had to make business trips every two months for work. It was only to their other office about 3 hours drive away, on the other side of the mountains. The trips would last about a week or so. She wasn't so worried that she couldn't make contact with him while he was on these trips, she knew he wanted to get some space from her from time to time. She thought maybe he was debating with himself if he wanted to settle down with a wolf or not. But every time he went on this trips, he would not even return her calls to say if he even made it there alright. Every time she asked, he would refuse to talk about the trips. She didn't know why.
When he found this out, he wanted to know what that fox was really up to. It turns out, his work had sent him off on business, that part was true. But it was not supposed to be anything more than an overnight stay, not a week long trip. He had gotten in the habit of taking time off every time to stay the extra week. Nobody at his work knew why, but they didn't question it as it was a very scenic area. He decided to drive to the address he gave the company and confront him. He didn't tell anybody, definitely not her. He did not want her to think of him stalking her boyfriend. As you know, this was last week.
I'm sure his plan was to talk to him. He found the address of a cabin by a lake in the mountains. There were two cars parked in front and music playing. He walked up and knocked on the door, and the boyfriend answered it. He had the other women in his arms. Her lipstick was on his collar. Both of their eyes with wide with shock as they saw each other. He couldn't control himself. He told me he yelled at him, threw things at him. The other women ran away. He couldn't believe him. She was planning to marry him, and he had been cheating with some fox he met on the internet. His rage built up, he told me the boyfriend begged him not to tell her. He tried to convince him that, it's “just natural” to sleep with as many women as he wanted, “it didn't matter” because he was going to leave her soon anyway since she was “just a wolf.”
That's what set him off. He loved her deeply, and the man that she loved was going to leave her. She thought she found the love of her life, and he thought of her as nothing more than a "wolf bitch". He told him he had many girlfriends, that she wasn't anything special. He liked “trying” as many different species as possible. He claimed he gave no thought to her feelings what-so-ever.
That’s what he told me at first when he called me on the phone. Only after he got all that out did he admit to me what he had done. He described to me how he punched him, and then punched him again, and again. He pushed him to the ground, pinned him there as he started to cry. He told me how he bashed the fox’s skull against the wooden cabin floor, all the pent up feelings he had for her coming out through violence. The man didn't deserve her love, and he was going to make sure she wouldn't be hurt. That's why he wrote that letter to her. How did I know about the letter? He told me he was going to write it and mail it to her. If I remember right, he decided he was going to tell her he murdered him out of jealousy. Something like he “couldn't bare it” after he found out he was planning to propose to her. That sound about right? I figured.
I'm telling you the truth, officer, in hopes that you understand what my son’s intentions were. Maybe then you can find it in your heart to not share this information with the poor girl. When he called me, he didn't tell me where he was. We hadn't talked very much if at all over the last year or so. I was shocked when I got the collect call. I didn't say much to him at all. He did all of the talking. He needed to tell somebody the whole story. He wanted somebody to know. He told me he was going to go into hiding, but I should have realized he was just going to kill himself that night. I should have known that when he said goodbye to me. I regret not doing something more to stop him, but a person can't think things through when their son tells them he has murdered someone.
I wish I could help you more officer, but that's all I know. But please, don't let her know the story I just told you. This way, he hoped she would love her boyfriend forever. The man she was going to marry, not a bastard that was just using her as a novelty. She could hate him forever, curse his name, but her heart would not be broken. That was his last gift to her.
My son sacrificed a life to give someone true love, and he paid the price by sacrificing his own. He knew, all too well, that it is much easier to lose someone you love than to live with the realization that they never loved you.