Ship To Ship

	When I was a young girl, my father told me I’d be lucky someday to find a man – any man – who would have me.  I was too thin, too masculine in the shoulders, my fur was too coarse.  And that was to say nothing of my personality, far too much pride, too dreamy, always looking up instead of looking ahead.  I wanted too much, I spoke too much, I had no patience.  I was just too wild.  Too difficult.
	Well, my father never thought I’d be more than a village wife in our little valley.  If he’d known that nearly a decade later I’d be halfway across the world, fresh from war and avenging the slaughter of my tribe, a warrior in my own right and now a Privateer aboard an infamous vessel . . . well . . . .
	If I’d learned anything over the last few years, it was that life’s a winding path that branches more than the mightiest oak, and every choice you make can take you places you may never have even conceived of when you imagined your future long ago.  Or listened to someone else imagine it for you, as was my case.
	I think the reason I’ve adapted as well as I have is because I never really knew what I wanted, then or now.  There were always moments I found happiness, and pain when things didn’t work out the way I’d hoped they might, but some people have a grand plan for their lives, and when it falls apart, they have trouble finding the good in the new places they’ve been taken.  I flatter myself a bit here, I suppose, but I think I’ve proven to be more resilient than that.  I’ve lost everything, many times over now, people and places that made up my entire world, but I’ve come to find that for every piece of my life I’ve lost, new pieces fall into place.  And that’s where I am now.  Putting the new pieces together into something that seems to fit.
	I had a point.  Right.  The wolf snoring beside me is very distracting.  I think what I was saying was . . . the man who was meant to dictate my romantic future, my father, once seemed to feel he’d have to sell me to the lowest bidder to find any man willing to deal with me.  And now, it seems, I have a surplus of would-be suitors.  And they’ve certainly surpassed me in being ‘difficult’ partners.  
	My father was wrong about everything.  Not only am I apparently not as hideous to the opposite gender as he seemed to think, I am also quite capable of drawing on endless reserves of patience.  Or I never would have gotten through this week.
	I’ve been digging my elbow into Grayson for about half an hour now, and slowly pushing.  The end goal is to wedge the far heavier wolf onto his half of the bed, as per our long-standing agreement.  I’d come to believe he only agreed to the rules I’d set forth because he fully intended to spend most of the time in our cabin = his really, but part of the agreement was that I could stay here so long as he got to tell his crew we were doing more than strictly sleeping next to one another – knowing that he’d spend most of his time with me unconscious and thus not accountable for his actions.  And he was a snuggler in his sleep.  Gods, was he a snuggler.
	He was all limbs and dark, matted fur, dreadlocks and a big snuffling nose burying itself against my neck while his grubby paws snuck their way under the covers to fumble at me in the night.  More frustrating still, a swift kick or an elbow to his midsection always seemed to wake him enough that he’d grumble and flop away from me, but I’d never actually hurt him enough that he’d remember it in the morning.  Likely, that had to do with amount of rum he polished off each night before bed.  I wasn’t really one to call men on their vices, especially not someone like Grayson whose life could end on any given day thanks to an unfortunate condition, but at this point I was seriously beginning to doubt the wolf could ever fall asleep without his alcoholic crutch.  I felt like maybe, perhaps, I should try somehow to help him with that?  But I’d not come from a culture with so much access to the drink, and I knew even less about helping men with addictions.
	A few years ago, I travelled with two men who were more interested in one another than me.  At least, in the way Grayson was interested in me.  Back then, there’d been a Marshall, a man I thought I could truly love, whom fate had taken away from me . . . and a husband . . . whom I had killed myself.  Richly deserved, I assure you.  But losing both of them had hurt me in different ways.
	Now, the men in my life were an equally varied lot, but for all their frustrations and oddities, they were all decent at heart.  And at least two of them that I knew of had admitted they yearned for me.  I probably shouldn’t complain, I know.  But I didn’t know how to handle this.  I’d never been prepared for anything remotely like this.  I was supposed to be the girl no one wanted, remember?
	It’s not that I felt I had to choose.  Men weren’t air, or water, I didn’t need one to live.  I wasn’t even looking to fall in love again.  I’d lost too many people I loved in the last few years, I knew myself well enough to realize that I needed more time.  I enjoyed having friends, and some of them were male.  That’s all it needed to be.
	Unfortunately, there was one thing I couldn’t get from mere friendship. 
	I’d managed to push Grayson far enough that I was able to escape from under his arm, and once I’d achieved that, I shimmied off the large four-poster bed that took up at least half the room in his quarters, and padded across the cluttered space as quietly as I could.  Which in this place, spoke to my skills at stalking.  Not only were the floor boards in this aging ship unbearably creaky and poorly-maintained, Grayson was something of a hoarder, and his. . . he would call them ‘treasures’, but I’m just going to call them what they are. . . garbage. . . was strewn everywhere.  
	I was nearly all the way to the cluttered table and my belongings, when a rum bottle (of course) became my undoing.  My toe must have clipped it when I stepped over it, and caught it just enough to send it rolling across the room, the hollow glass tinging on every uneven nail and floorboard.  	
	“Good morning, beautiful.”
	His voice was about the only thing I liked about him in the morning.  Most times, really.  Even husky with sleep and what I’m sure would become a hangover if he didn’t immediately start drinking again when he woke up, the depth and the low timber of it always made something in my belly flip-flop.  It was something about canines, I’d long since decided.  The shape of their mouths, of their muzzles, or perhaps something deeper in their chest, lent a gruff, growling tone to everything they said.  And for some reason, I couldn’t get enough of it.
	I didn’t turn to regard him, not wanting to bait him.  It was pointless, of course.  The wolf and I did this dance every single morning, and he never gave up.  The man was either the most incorrigible creature I knew, or he liked disappointment.
	While I went about getting dressed for the day, pulling on my leathers over my undergarments and the one threadbare shirt I’d managed to save from my time with Puck and Ransom (it still smelled like the coyote, no matter how many times I washed it, and I loved that), Grayson pushed himself up unsteadily in bed.  I heard the creak of his large body shifting, then the unmistakable sound of permanently extended claws on wood.  
	I still didn’t turn.  I knew he was nude, and while nudity in and of itself didn’t bother me, and never had from the time I’d started staying with him, I hadn’t allowed myself to look on him unless he was dressed for a while now.  Part of it had to do with the other man in my life, and a strange sense of obligation to him that really, considering how secretive he treated even the most casual friendly contact with me, was pretty undeserved.  But part of it had to do with respect for Grayson himself.  Not that the wolf gave a shit about me seeing his bits, or presumably he wouldn’t strut about like this in the mornings. 
	But, I expected him to honor our agreement – namely that we shared a room, platonically, because I needed a place to stay and it wasn’t really safe for a woman in the men’s barracks, and in exchange he got to confirm the rumors that we were in fact lovers.  Which, of course, we weren’t.  
And thusfar, he’d honored our agreement, been something of a gentleman in fact, even when I needed to change.  He never gaped or gawked, and save calling me ‘beautiful’ from time to time, refrained from cat-calls (trust me, I realize the irony there).    
	So, when I started to realize, much to my chagrin, that I actually wanted to stare at him walking around in the buff. . . I stopped doing it.  Because it had begun to feel dirty, and dishonest.  I knew full well that the wolf wanted me in the same way I’d begun to realize I wanted him, he’d never exactly been subtle about that.  But the fact that we both wanted it now was just. . . dangerous.  Because every single night that he crawled drunkenly into bed and pressed his chest to my back, wrapped his big paw around my hip, every single morning that I pretended I hated it and tried to escape before he woke up, every time we kept circling each other. . . we were getting closer to the inevitable.  And it would change things.  I knew it would.
	It wasn’t supposed to change things between me and the last man I’d been with.  But it had.  
	“Miles away, are we?”  The wolf’s voice broke through my reverie, snapping me back into the present.
	I shook my head, trying not to show how right he was.  “One of us needs to consider the day ahead,” I pulled my quiver strap over my shoulder.  “You have a meeting with the Admiral-“ I glanced out the window, at the sunlight streaming in through the salt-speckled glass, “-now.  He’s probably out there waiting for us right now.”
	The wolf snorted and I heard a bottle uncork, followed by what I’m sure was him emptying its remaining contents.  Then the clack of it settling on his bedside table, and heavy steps as he went to his footlocker.  “He’ll be late,” he assured me.
	“You sound pretty certain of that,” I arched an eyebrow.
	“He’s been seeing one of the local ‘talent’,” he chuckled.  “He went to see him late last night.  Again.”
	“How would you-“
	“Ariel.”
	I shook my head.  “Isn’t the Admiral your friend?  You’re having your bodyguard. . . essentially spy on him.”
	“Essentially,” I could hear the grin in his voice.  
	“Why?”
	“It’s for his own good,” he assured me, his voice somewhat muffled, which meant he was finally getting dressed.  “The dog’s an idiot.  If any of the men see what he’s up to in port, he’s likely to get himself a mutiny at best, a beating at worst.  Man like him should be a lot more discreet.  Ariel keeps an eye out for him, that’s all.”
	“I’ve seen the Admiral fight, he can defend himself just fine,” I rolled my eyes.
	“Ability and willingness to fight are two different things,” he stated, and it took me a few moments to realize I didn’t exactly know what he meant.
	I turned around, finally, looking at him quizzically.  He had on a shirt and britches, which he was still buttoning up, and I caught a hint of his sheath before he tucked himself in.  I averted my eyes immediately.  But it had been innocent enough.  I hadn’t meant to see anything.
	“I don’t really understand your meaning,” I said, figuring this was another language issue he’d have to explain.  I spoke Amurescan around Grayson because his tribal tongue was rough at best, but it meant I was the one dealing with the language barrier and the frequent need for translation or explanation.
	“Luther’s emotional,” he explained.  “Even if it’s not always reciprocal, he looks on his men as his family.  He loves them.  He’s loyal to them, all of them. . . even the shitty ones.  He’s lost a lot of them already, which I’m sure he blames himself for, like a damned fool.  He won’t fight his own men.  Not even if they turn on him.”
	“Well. . . “ I paused, carefully.  “Spending that much time with someone. . . living together, sailing together, facing death together. . . one’s bound to get attached.  I don’t know about ‘love’.”
	He flashed a fang at me.  “That sounded almost like you were drawin’ parallels, beautiful.  You getting ‘attached’ to me?”
	I didn’t answer his question, only asked one of my own.  “Would you fight me?”
	“No,” he responded quickly enough that it made my heart clamp.  Was he saying he loved me?  “But Shivah,” he narrowed his blue eyes at me, still smiling, “that’s because I’m fuckin’ terrified of you.”
	Despite myself, I smiled back.  “Damn straight.”