Bitten by the Doctor

The inn at Kenai had one good room and I had rented it for the night, which was the first reckless thing I had done in eleven years. The second was the woman in the bed behind me.

She was asleep, or pretending to be. The blanket had slipped off her shoulder and I could see the line of her back, pale in the light from the parking lot. Snow ticked against the window. I sat on the edge of the mattress with my socks in my hand and thought about how long it had been since I had done anything without a reason.

Her name was Nadia. She had told me that much at the bar downstairs. She had come in off the highway at nine with snow in her hair and a bag she kept between her feet, and she had ordered a coffee and then changed her mind and ordered whiskey instead. I had been sitting two stools away with a beer I did not want. She had asked me if the salmon was any good. I had said the salmon was frozen and the cook was honest about it. She had laughed with her whole face and something in my chest had moved that had no business moving.

The wolf in me had known before I did. It usually does. It stood up behind my ribs and paid attention, and I told it to lie down and it told me to go to hell.

We had talked until the barman started stacking chairs. She was a doctor. She had driven up from Anchorage on bad tires and she was starting at the clinic on Monday. I told her I worked there, nights, and she looked at my hands and said, "You are the nurse, then," and I said, "I am the nurse," and she said, "Good. I hate working with people who do not know where things are."

In the hallway outside my room she stopped and looked at me a moment too long. Her eyes were hazel, almost green in the bad light, with small lines at the corners from squinting into weather. I said something stupid about the storm. She said, "I am not good at this," and I said, "Neither am I," and then she kissed me.

She kissed like someone who had decided to do it and was not going to waste time. I got the door open, we got inside, and the rest happened the way it happens when two people have been alone a long time and neither wants to talk about it. She had a small scar on her shoulder blade and warm hands, and she laughed once, quietly, when I fumbled with the lamp, and then she did not laugh anymore.

I sat there in the dark with my socks and listened to the snow. That was the sensible thing, to leave before she woke. A man with a secret gets out of the bed, gets into his boots, goes back to his cabin, and pretends the whole thing was a dream.

My clothes were on the chair. My coat was on the hook by the door. The clock said one forty in red numbers, and the room smelled of her and radiator dust and the soap from the bathroom.

Then the wind shifted.

It came through the window frame, a thin cold thread of it, and it brought the parking lot with it, the diesel from a truck, the salt off the water, the wet wool of somebody's coat downstairs. Underneath all that was something else. Something clean, like birch bark peeled back in summer, and like the air after a hard frost, and like a woman standing in a doorway with snow in her hair.

The smell was coming from the coat on the hook. Her coat.

I did not move. Every hair on my arms had lifted at once. The wolf came up so hard and so fast that I put a hand on the mattress to steady myself, and it did not argue with me this time, it just stood there inside me with its ears up and its whole body shaking.

Mate. That is the word. There is no other word for it. It is not a thing you decide. It is a thing that happens to you, the way weather happens, and there is no arguing with weather.

I had been in love once, badly, a long time ago, and I had thought that was the same thing. It was not. This was like standing too close to a fire and finding out you had been cold your whole life.

The coat was dark green canvas with a hood and a broken zipper pull. There was a badge pinned to the collar, small and silver. I had noticed it at the bar and thought it was a hospital badge. It was not a hospital badge. It was a hunter's badge. I had seen one before. I had worn one myself, once, in another life with another name.

Two things happened in my head at the same time, and they did not fit together, and I knew they were both true.

She was my mate.

She was a hunter.

Behind me she turned over. The sheet pulled across her and she made a small sound, the sound of someone coming up out of sleep without wanting to.

"Aaron?" Her voice was rough. "Are you awake?"

I got my socks on. It took two tries because my fingers were not working properly.

"I have to go," I said.

She sat up. The blanket fell away and she did not bother to catch it. Her hair was a mess of chestnut brown and her eyes in the red light from the clock were sharp, not sleepy at all. "Now?"

"I have a shift. The night man called in sick and Mira will have my head if I am late."

"That is a lie," she said. She did not say it angrily. She said it the way she might have told me I had a fever. "You were fine five minutes ago."

I got my shirt on. I got my coat on. She watched me the whole time, and the wolf was clawing at me from the inside, screaming at me not to walk out of that door. It wanted me to go back to the bed. It wanted me to put my face against her neck and breathe.

"You are the new doctor," I said. "You start Monday."

"That is right."

"I work nights. We will be working together."

"I know."

I put my hand on the doorknob. The metal was cold, and her coat was right there next to me, and it took everything I had not to lean into it.

"You should request a different clinic," I said.

There was a long pause. Then she said, very quietly, "Why would I do that?"

I opened the door, went out into the hall, and closed it behind me. The click of it was the loneliest sound I have ever heard. I went down the stairs, through the lobby, and out into the snow, and the wind took the door out of my hands.

The clock in my truck said two in the morning. I had twelve hours before my shift. I had a clinic to go to and an Alpha who was dying by inches in the pack house behind the trees.

And I had a mate, and she was a hunter, and she was going to walk into my clinic on Monday morning with that badge on her coat.

I started the engine and sat there with the heater blowing cold air in my face. I had been lying to my pack for twelve years. I had gotten good at it, the way a man gets good at anything he does every day.

I did not know how I was going to lie to her.

Halfway home I realized I did not even know her last name, and I had to pull over because my hands would not stop shaking.