“If You Run with the Wolves” by Andy Parker

С волками жить - по волчьи выть.

If you run with the wolves, howl like the wolves.

– Russian proverb

From the moment he sets foot on campus, Sasha can sense he’s being watched. The stares are coming from all directions, but each time he tries to look back, it takes the person only a half-second to realize they’ve been caught before they’re snapping away their gaze, keeping their head down and walking with just a bit more haste than before. He rolls his shoulders, trying to shake the itchy sensation of eyes burning into the back of his skull. He supposes he’ll have to get used to it; wolves are much rarer in the states, especially outside of the bigger cities. He’s probably the first one some of them have ever seen.

He gets lost trying to find the residence hall. It’s an old building, tucked into a secluded corner of campus — more reminiscent of a lodge or a camp cabin than a dorm. Away from all the other dorms, his brain helpfully supplies, so they can make sure you pose less of a threat. The advantage of its isolation, though, is the lush, densely wooded forest kissing the building on its north and west sides. They must like keeping all their wild things in one place.

“Hi,” he says to a student volunteer scribbling on a clipboard, “Sorry, I think I’m late. Got lost a bit on the way here.”

“Oh, no worries,” she responds, looking up from her work and, to Sasha’s pleasant surprise, holding his gaze, “Believe me, you won’t be the last. My name’s Natalie. I can check you in here and help you get your keys. Can I get a name?”

“Alexander,” he says, “Volkov?”

It comes out like a question. She looks back down at her clipboard, and to her credit, her face falls only for a second when she finds his name on the list and reads the little note on it that must out him as a wolf. She doesn’t meet his eyes again.

“Yes, right. You'll be in room 12, just upstairs, down the hall, and on your right.”

She holds out a ring of keys.

“The big one lets you into the building, the little gold one lets you into your room, and the little silver one opens your mailbox— the one with your room number on it. Any questions?” 

She says it all in one uninterrupted string. Sasha’s brain is working overtime to translate it back to his native Russian fast enough.

“I, um— no. No questions,” he lies.

“Great,” she says, “Let me know if you’re having trouble with your keys or anything. But other than that, you’re good to go.”

“Thanks.” He moves to grab his luggage, but before he can make his escape, she speaks again.

“Oh, your roommate’s already checked in, so he’ll probably be in there, too. I’m sure you’ll get along fine. I mean, you’re both — you know,” she gestures vaguely.

Sasha does not, in fact, know.

“Well, I mean,” she amends, “you both have a lot in common, anyway. Always good to be with your own kind, right?”

Ah. They’re both wolves, she means to say. Both different.

“Right,” he says blandly.

“Right, well, have fun,” she says, “And, uh, welcome to Cranford.”

Sasha nods and begins trudging down the hallway, feeling anything but.

When he finds it, the door marked ‘12’ is already cracked open. Hands full of luggage, Sasha shoulders it the rest of the way open. The room is small but bright — two beds, two desks and chairs, a closet, and not much else. The boy he assumes is his roommate is unpacking clothes onto the bed closest to the window, back turned toward him. He perks his head up when Sasha enters and turns to greet him.

“Hey,” he says, “you’re Alexander?”

“Sasha’s fine” he responds, dumping his luggage on the floor by the other bed.

“Oh, cool,” The other boy stands and offers his hand to Sasha. When he shakes it, the other boy catches his gaze. Holds it. “Good to meet you, Sasha. I’m Jude.”

“Jude,” Sasha repeats, “Good to meet you, too.”

They chatter idly as they unpack their things. Well, Jude talks mostly, and Sasha listens. He keeps a steady stream of small talk going, not seeming deterred that Sasha isn’t giving as good as he gets. He actually seems really nice, Sasha thinks, though he wouldn’t clock him as a wolf if he didn’t already know. The boy’s got a solid build — hair the shade of brown that implies it was once blonde, huge, expressive brown eyes — but nothing particularly wolf-like. Sasha knows there’s no one way a wolf ought to look, but people always seem to be able to sense it on him right away. Perhaps it’s his own dark hair, long limbs, and large, sharp features that give him away. Then again, maybe it’s something deeper, more intrinsic.

“Hey, did you see this view?” Jude asks, “It’s amazing. We’re facing the north, so you can see the forest, like, right there.”

Sasha puts down the pens he’s organizing to join Jude at the window, now open. The view is breathtaking. Ancient-looking pines stand tall just a few hundred feet away. The sun, which has gone down considerably since he’s been inside, peeks over the treetops, staining them gold. He can taste the fresh air wafting in from outside, cool and clean, and in that moment, he wants nothing more than to run out there and free his wolf, to feel his paws beat down on soft earth and to weave between tree trunks wider than he is tall and to leave behind the complexities of being human for a while.

“Wow,” he breathes, “it’s—” before he can think better of it, the offer’s coming out of his mouth, “Did you want to… I was thinking of going running, maybe. If you want to come.”

“Oh, yeah, for sure,” Jude nods, “I have running shorts somewhere in here, I think—”

“No, sorry, I meant, like…” he trails off, “I mean, I was hoping…” He huffs, his English and his patience failing him simultaneously, “I’m just really fucking tired of being a person right now. Did you want to go running as…” he lets the rest of the sentence hang.

As wolves. As us. As people who have to pretend around everyone but each other.

“Oh,” Jude’s flushing a little bit like he’s embarrassed, and it makes Sasha’s cheeks burn too.

It’s a bit forward, maybe, for an American wolf. Running together is seen as more of a pack activity here, not something for practical strangers to offer—

“I don’t. Ah,” Jude pauses, “I’m sorry, I should’ve said earlier. I don’t, um, do that.”

“Don’t run with strangers? Sorry, shouldn’t assume—”

“No. I don’t shift.”

“Don’t shift?” Sasha echoes dumbly.

“No.”

“At all?”

“At all.”

Sasha shuts his jaw, which he realizes belatedly is hanging open, with an audible click. Not at all? he wants to ask. Never? How? He’s only gone a few days without letting out his wolf, and he already feels halfway to crawling out of his skin. Apparently, he’s been silent for too long, or something’s wrong with his face, because Jude’s talking again.

“You don’t need to feel weird about shifting around me, though. I just— my family didn’t really encourage it? So, I never got in the habit, or something. But I don’t have, like, a problem with— sorry, I’m rambling,” Jude says, the words tumbling out of him like a flood.

“No, it’s fine. You don’t have to explain, sorry,” Sasha replies, unsure what else to say. The silence hanging between them feels suddenly palpable. Tense.

“Don’t be. I’m sorry to disappoint,” Jude gives a self-effacing shrug, “But don’t feel like you can’t do it around me, really. I promise I don’t mind. And I would like to go on that run if you’re still offering. If you ever want to do it as, like, a human. I know I’m not… what you hoped, maybe, but I’d still like to be friends.”

“Right.” He tries not to let his disappointment show — that the one person he thought would understand his situation here still doesn’t really get it. He knows it’s not fair to hold it against him. “Right, yes, me too,” he says, and tries to mean it.

***

The school year ramps up quickly and without warning, and to Sasha’s surprise, Jude makes good on his word that he wants them to be friends. Jude makes a beeline for the desk next to his when he finds out they’re in a math class together, and they chat easily while folding laundry or poring over textbooks, though Jude still mostly talks, and Sasha still mostly listens. They eat together at the canteen most days, and if someone else snags a seat next to him at lunch first, Jude doesn’t kick them out, so to speak, but he does sort of hover until they leave, and he can assume his rightful place by Sasha’s side.

They run together, too, though both stay human. It’s nothing compared to the pure, instinctual physicality of running on four legs, but it’s still nice. The forest air is still cool and fresh, the trees still dauntingly beautiful.

The one thing Sasha wasn’t counting on, though, is that Jude is a fucking freak. When he says ‘run,’ he doesn’t mean leisurely jog. No, he means no-holds-barred, get-up-at-the-ass-crack-of-dawn-and-run run — the kind of run that leaves Sasha’s lungs pleasantly aching and his knees pleasantly weak.

“Next time we go, I’m running as a wolf,” Sasha declares one early autumn morning, panting, after Jude’s once again handed his ass to him.

“I mean, if that’s the only way you think you can beat me,” he shrugs with a shit-eating grin.

Sasha rolls his eyes. He’s going to fucking kill him.

Jude’s competitiveness, it turns out, is not the exception, but the rule, especially when it comes to anything athletic. He’ll turn anything into a contest — I bet I can toss my shorts into the laundry bag from across the room; I bet I can make it to the dock before you — and each time he loses, he petulantly demands best of three, best of seven, until he wins. It’s sometimes easy for Sasha to forget Jude’s a wolf, too. But when Jude goes red-faced with righteous, disproportionate fury after letting a goal squeak past him in field hockey, it’s easy to imagine his canines sharpened into fangs. And when he lets out a victorious whoop after finally beating Sasha at cards — which Sasha totally lets him win; Jude’s poker face is shit — it sounds just shy of a howl.

For all that they do end up close, Sasha never lets his wolf out in front of Jude. The other boy’s never indicated he’d be anything but kind about it, but it seems like a cliff from which he can’t un-dive; a reminder of all they don’t share.

Instead, Sasha will sneak out to the woods when he gets the chance, shift and let his wolf run until the singing in his blood quiets to a tolerable hum, until he feels like he can stand to cram himself into a human body again. Jude doesn’t bat an eye when Sasha comes back at odd hours smelling like forest and sweat. Have a good run? Jude will ask, and Sasha will only nod, not quite ready for such complex things as speech just yet. He doesn’t know how Jude manages it all the time — being human. But then, Sasha thinks, some people were born to be people, and some were born to be wolves.

***

It all comes crashing down eventually, of course. November’s in full swing, and Sasha’s had a shit day — the hot water in the showers was turned off, he got a worse grade on an essay than he thought he would, and a member of his group project failed to show up to class. He trudges back to his dorm and faceplants onto his bed the second it’s within reach.

Jude makes noble, if slightly overenthusiastic, attempts to cheer him up. He brews him a cup of the strong, smoky black tea from home that Sasha saves for special occasions, stirring a little bit of jam into it like his mother used to do when he was sick.

“Can you tell me how to help you?” Jude asks gently, after Sasha’s finished his tea. “I don’t really know what I’m doing here, bud.”

Sasha lets out a noncommittal grunt.

“I can pull up old episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and you can laugh at David McCallum’s shitty accent?” Jude suggests, “I can get Kolya to steal some of his mom’s pelmeni for you? I can let you beat me at cards?”

This, of all things, manages to startle a barking laugh out of him.

“Let me beat you?” Sasha asks, incredulous, “There is no let. You’re terrible at cards.”

“Am not,” Jude lies, grinning.

Sasha knows he’s being baited, but he bites anyway.

“You’re the worst. Your face gives away everything.”

“Does not.”

“Everything.”

“Care to test that theory?”

On any other day, Sasha would, but —

Jude seems to read his reluctance for what it is. “Hey, it’s fine. I can just leave you alone for a bit, too. There’s supposed to be pick-up volleyball starting in a bit, so I can head out with some of the others. Just let me know if you change your mind and want to come with, yeah?”

Sasha nods, trying not to look too grateful as the day’s exhaustion descends upon him once more. Within a few moments, Jude is gone, and Sasha’s got the dorm to himself.

He lays there in the dark, thoughts racing. He’s exhausted in a way that the word exhausted can’t capture, but his mind just refuses to settle. He doesn’t know how long it is before he gives up — gives in — and begins stripping down, folding his clothes carefully and setting them at the foot of the bed. His human self will thank him for it later. He knows it’s risky to shift in the dorm, but he just needs to sleep. Needs to turn off the parts of his brain that refuse to quiet.

The process isn’t painful. It’s catharsis, shedding his coat after coming in from the cold. The world narrows down to the slightly stale taste of the air, the remnants of Jude’s scent threading through the carpet.

Some vital, coiled-up part inside of him finally unclenches. Grades and hot showers and asshole students are of no concern to a wolf. Sasha treads a circle on his bed, tucks his tail over his muzzle, and sleeps.

“Hey, Sasha, you okay? Kolya gave me some pelmeni to give to y—”

Sasha jolts awake to see Jude standing frozen in the doorway, Tupperware of pelmeni in hand. He shoots upright, and for a moment, all they can do is stare, two deer caught in each other’s headlights. Jude’s face, one of the only one’s Sasha’s ever been any good at reading, is inscrutable.

“Fuck, sorry, I—”

Sasha doesn’t wait for him to finish the sentence before he’s bolting into the closet like it’ll make Jude forget what he just saw. Running on pure panic, he shifts back as quick as he can, and it sucks. It’s shoving an unfurled mattress back into its box, jamming a square peg in a round hole, but at least he can slam the closet the rest of the way shut with clumsy human fingers, breathing hard.

“Jesus, Sasha, I’m so, so sorry, I swear I didn’t know you were—”

He can hear Jude’s muffled stream of apologies through the door, the English blurring together in a constant din which he has no hope of translating now. His body may be human, but that doesn’t mean his brain has caught up.

“Please, Sash,” he can make out, “I’m really sorry, I really am.”

In the dark, Sasha wills his hands to stop shaking, his pulse to stop rabbiting frantically in his chest. His tolerance for being stuffed back into this body returns to him slowly, a paresthetic limb prickling back to life. As the initial animalistic panic softens into something more like embarrassment, Sasha fumbles around blindly for clothes, drawing out slowly the process of dressing himself until he feels fairly certain he won’t turn tail the moment he opens the door.

“Oh, thank God. Look, I’m really sorry. I—”

Jude cuts himself off. His face does something strange Sasha can’t parse.

“You’re wearing my hoodie.” Sasha looks down.

Fuck.

“Shit, sorry,” his voice sounds gravelly, unused. “I’ll change—”

“No, it’s uh. Fine. You’re… you can keep it on.” Jude’s face is bright red, “Look, I’m really— I know you didn’t want me to see that. I didn’t mean to. And I swear I don’t have a problem with it, but it made you uncomfortable, so.”

Sasha knows his wolf is intimidating. It’s larger than other wolves the same way he’s larger than other people — an all-black coat and massive paws and yellow eyes. He’s proud of it, wouldn’t trade it for anything — not even Jude’s friendship. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less when he notices Jude dodging his gaze.

“Listen,” Jude breaks the silence once more, thrusting the pelmeni-filled Tupperware out toward Sasha like a peace offering, “I really don’t want things to be weird between us. So, I’ll— I’ll forget what I saw, or whatever, and it’ll be like nothing ever happened. Or you can— you could start shifting in the dorm if you want. If that would make you— I mean, I’d like it if you—”

Christ. If Jude can’t even get a sentence out, there’s no hope for either of them at all.

“I’d like that,” he forces himself to say, “If you’d do that. Forget. Or try to. I didn’t mean for you to see that. See me like that.”

Jude’s face does something funny again, something Sasha might’ve been able to decipher if he wasn’t tired and embarrassed and still a bit hungover from the shift.

“Okay, cool,” Jude says, “so, we can share these over Man from U.N.C.L.E?”

He shakes the container of pelmeni and inclines his head toward his laptop.

Sasha contorts his face into what he hopes is an easy smile, “Share them? I thought you said Kolya gave them to you for me?”

“It’s a delivery fee,” Jude shoots back, sounding a bit forced.

It’s like they’re not them anymore, but actors playing them — doing all the motions, but something still feels wrong.

“Delivery fee. Jesus.”

Sasha pats the space on the bed next to him, moving to grab his laptop. Jude sits next to him — keeping a couple inches between them, a distance Sasha feels acutely. He queues up an episode, tells himself everything’s going to be fine, and tries to mean it.

***

They both try to make good on their word — that it’ll be like nothing ever happened — and sometimes it is like that, their camaraderie feeling natural and easy. But other times, there’s this lingering undercurrent of strangeness which Sasha has no clue what to do with. It doesn’t help that Jude keeps staring at him when he thinks Sasha won’t notice — like if he looks hard enough, he’ll be able to see the wolf peeking out from under his skin.

Sasha doesn’t even think of shifting in front of Jude again. He saves it for the woods, where the soft earth under his paws morphs into leaf litter morphs into hard ground robed in a thin layer of frost. He comes back to the dorm later and later, hoping Jude will be asleep by the time he returns. But he’s awake, always awake, always asking have a good run? And Sasha can only nod, trying to ignore the kicked-puppy look Jude gives him every time he asks.

In mid-December, as final exams near, they spend late nights quizzing each other with flashcards or passing essay drafts back and forth. Sasha’s mother sends the two of them a care package full of Russian snacks — chocolate-covered halva, which Jude turns out to love, and tinned salmon swimming in oil, which he valiantly pretends to. It’s nearing midnight, and they’re taking a study break, Sasha tearing apple-flavored zefir into chunks. He’s tossing them into the air for Jude to catch in his mouth when Jude, in his characteristic inability not to fully commit to anything even remotely resembling a contest, overshoots and practically headbutts Sasha in the chest, sending them both tumbling to the floor. Sasha’s back hits the ground with a thud, Jude coming down on top of him. They’re both laughing, flushed and out of breath with it, when Jude freezes and scrambles away like he’s been burned. He extricates himself from Sasha and scoots back so they’re both sitting down, facing each other.

And he doesn’t know why it’s this that finally sets him off, why this is what finally causes him to break, but Sasha snaps.

“Are you ever going to be normal around me again?” he asks, and he doesn’t mean for it to sound like an accusation, but it does.

Jude’s got that deer-in-headlights look again, his big brown eyes wide with nerves, with guilt.

“I’m trying, really,” he says quietly, “I just haven’t been able to stop—” he pauses, swallows, “—thinking.”

Sasha fights the urge to roll his eyes. “You say you don’t mind. You say it’s fine— it’s a lie. If I knew it would be like this, I never would have let you see.”

“I thought I wouldn’t mind! I thought—” Jude cuts himself off, “Did you know you’re the only other wolf I’ve ever seen?”

Sasha thinks he must have mistranslated something. “What? But your family—”

“Never. Not around me. We just— it was like, I don’t know, an inconvenient truth.”

“A what?”

“Like,” Jude groans, “Like, we’re all— we’re wolves, obviously, but it was just something we had to deal with. Not something to be proud of. Not like you.”

“Just because your family is ashamed of being wolves doesn’t mean I have to—”

“I know! I know, okay? That’s not— that’s not what this is about. Not at all.”

“Then what?” Sasha’s patience is wearing thin.

Jude is silent for several long seconds.

“When I saw you,” he says slowly, “It’s like— it’s like up until then, I’d never really seen you before. It was… you. Your wolf. It didn’t seem like something you just had to deal with.”

“It’s not. Not for me. It’s… being human. That’s what I have to deal with,” Sasha says, punctuating the phrase with air quotes.

“And I just saw you that day, and now I can’t stop thinking about—”

Sasha braces himself as if for a punch. About how you shouldn’t be here. About how you’re feral, how you’re a beast. Too wolf to boy, too howl to speak, too wild to tame.

“--about how badly I wish I’d said yes when you first asked me to run with you. As wolves, I mean.”

“I— what?”

“I haven’t shifted in, I don’t know, a decade? Longer, maybe. And I saw you and you looked so… so yourself, and now all I can think about is how much time I’ve been wasting trying to pretend I’m not what I am.”

All the anger deflates out of Sasha so quickly it makes his head spin.

There are no words. He knows it. No words that could possibly be adequate. Not in English, not in Russian, not in any human language. So, when Sasha makes his way over to Jude — who still looks so afraid; God, they’ve both been so, so afraid — and bundles him into the tightest hug he’s ever given, it’s the closest he can get in this body to speaking like a wolf.

Jude’s squeezing him back, and he’s shaking — or maybe they both are — and the collar of Sasha’s sweater is growing damp because Jude is crying a little bit and Sasha wants nothing more than to shift and let his wolf figure out what the hell to do next, to surmise through smell and taste what he can’t himself through tone and facial expression.

“I want to be like you,” Jude murmurs into his shoulder, “I want to be able to be like you.”

Sasha cups Jude’s head in both hands and leans back to look him in the eye, and his fingers are sticky with zefir, but he hopes Jude doesn’t mind.

“You… you should do that,” he says, “you should shift if you want to shift.”

Jude gives a little half-laugh.

“I’m not used to getting the things I want."

“You should get what you want,” Sasha says, “Get to be a wolf, if you want. Get to be human if you want. Get to run together, if you want, as humans or wolves. Get to…” he can’t help cracking a tiny smile, “get to beat me at cards sometimes, even though you suck, if you want.”

And that startles a laugh out of Jude, who punches him softly in the chest in retaliation.

“Fuck you so incredibly much,” he says, but he’s smiling a bit now, and that’s all that really matters.

“You deserve… everything, Jude,” he says far too earnestly, “Everything.”

“Would you?” Jude asks after a moment, “Run with me? I know I don’t have any right to ask you after everything, but—”

“Yes,” Sasha won’t let him finish the thought, “Of course, Jude. Yes, yes, yes.”

***

The December air is freezing, snow coming down in delicate flurries, but they both agree to go right away anyway. It feels fragile, this rekindled closeness between them, like if they let themselves sleep on it, it’ll dissolve into thin air once more.

“Fuck me, it’s cold,” Jude mutters, plodding through the fresh powder that comes up to his ankles, “God, how do you take off your clothes off in this weather?”

“Quickly,” Sasha says, deadpan.

Jude gives him a shoulder check for his trouble. They walk, and the world quiets to the muffled crunch of snow underfoot. Jude is half a step ahead of him, so Sasha takes a moment to catalog the slightly tense set of his shoulders, the way his fingers twitch with the barest of tremors. He wants to reach out, to give Jude a soothing word, but before he can cobble together anything that feels even close to adequate, they’re at the threshold between campus and forest. Jude’s world and Sasha’s.

“You ready?” Sasha asks.

“Hell no,” Jude says, and his smile is a little shaky, but it’s there, “Let’s do it anyway.”

Sasha tips his head back and laughs, and they let themselves get swallowed into the trees.

They don’t make it far before Sasha stops, deeming this spot as good as any. The snow around them is fresh and untrodden, blanketing the earth in white. The pines are dusted with it, nearly tall enough to block out the stars.

“You first?” Jude asks, and Sasha nods.

He strips down quickly and efficiently, too eager for the warmth of fur to be self-conscious. Jude’s got his back to him as he shifts, trying to give him some privacy, maybe. Not that they’ll have any secrets between them after this — not ones that matter.

Sasha takes a deep breath, and in the space between inhale and exhale he is finally returned to himself. He pads up to Jude, shoves his muzzle into his palm, huffs warm, damp breaths against his fingers.

“Oh,” Jude says, running an icy, gentle hand through Sasha’s thick fur. It sounds like a prayer, “Oh, wow.”

Sasha lets himself be pet for another moment before finally detaching himself from Jude’s touch. He sits back and fixes him with a look. Your turn.

“Can you, uh,” Jude makes a turn around motion with his finger. Sasha laments his inability to effectively roll his eyes like this, but acquiesces, nonetheless. He turns his back to Jude, trying not to listen too hard to his clothes rustling as he strips, belt buckle clinking against the button of his jeans. He only turns back around when he hears what sounds like something halfway between a bark and a whimper — an unpracticed sound, a pup’s first attempt at speech.

Now it’s Sasha’s turn to stare.

His first thought is that Jude’s wolf is tiny. His coat is light tan, nearly blonde, and his build is lean, bordering on emaciated. If Sasha didn’t know any better, he’d almost mistake him for a puppy — the way his paws seem too big for the rest of him, the way he looks like he isn’t quite sure what to do with himself. When Sasha’s eyes travel back to his face, Jude’s averting his gaze, self-conscious. He stands crouched, tail pressed between his legs, ears flattened back against the wedge of his skull as he waits for Sasha to pass judgement.

Sasha pads around him in a circle, noses into the dense fur at Jude’s neck. He smells like fear mostly, but also like himself, stripped of the chemical scents of his shampoo and deodorant and toothpaste. Jude tenses like he thinks Sasha’s about to bury his canines in his throat and start thrashing. Sasha backs up, faces Jude once more. Slowly, he stretches his forelegs out in front of him, pressing his chest low but keeping his haunches raised — a play bow. Hesitantly, Jude tries to mimic the motion, overbalancing and nearly face-planting in the snow.

He’s the most beautiful thing Sasha’s ever seen.

About Andy Parker
He/They

Andy Parker (he/they) is Colorado-based recent college graduate of English literature and political science. They work as a research assistant and tutor by day and write poetry and prose by night. He enjoys baking, ice sports, and overusing em dashes. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the Greyrock Review, Gasher Journal, new words {press}, and elsewhere. You can find them on Instagram at @_andy.parker_.