The Thing About Olivia-

An excerpt from an unfinished story — because I didn't write an essay and I owe you something worth reading. Don't worry, it's good. Someone gets eaten. Someone gets laid. Not in that order.

The bar is loud enough to think in.

That’s the trick. Not silence. Silence is where the bad thoughts live. Noise is a room you can hide inside.

I’m standing near the rail, track pants still damp at the knees, jacket zipped to my throat. I ran here. Four miles. My hair is still wet at the temples. I didn’t bring a bag. Didn’t bring anything except my ID and a key that unlocks nothing important.

I felt every eye in the room make the adjustment. Because that’s the thing about walking into a room in the wrong clothes — you either shrink, or you don’t. I have never once shrunk.

The bartender catches my eye. She had purple hair and eyes that priced you before you opened your mouth.

“Water,” I say.

She raises an eyebrow.

“Bourbon after,” I add. “I need to stop sweating first.”

She pours the water. I drink it standing up.

My thighs are still burning from the run. I didn’t stretch. I wanted to feel it when I sat down. My brain had been quiet for the first time since I read his message.

I set the water down and turn to the room.

I flex my fingers under the bar. Still loose. Still steady. Tonight, I want them somewhere they don’t belong.

I start with the booths.

Couples pretending they’re not. A man in a suit leaning too far into a woman who’s already halfway gone. Two girls sharing fries, laughing at something on a phone, shoulders touching.

None of that helps me.

Him. Forty, maybe. Tie loose, whiskey untouched. His eyes are wet before the night’s had a chance to earn it. He’s already halfway through a conversation he’s having with himself. I watch him for a breath. He’d want me to sit still. Listen. Fix whatever broke him before I got here.

I don’t fix things for free anymore. And I don’t do it in bars.

Next.

Young. Cap turned backward. He’s trying to look older than his jawline. He sees me looking and his whole body goes hopeful. He’d want to know my name. Call me tomorrow. Tell his friends he met someone.

I’d have to be gentle with him. I’m not gentle.

My eyes keep moving.

No one. Not one worth the walk across the room.

Mark would win tonight.

The text is still in my phone. I haven't deleted it. I won't. I want to remember the particular cowardice of a man who climbed into my bed for six weeks and then remembered he had feelings he didn't want to name.

I finish the water. The glass hits the bar.

Drop a five, then turn to leave.

And I meet his eyes.

Green. Hazel. I couldn’t tell.

He hasn’t blinked. He hasn’t smiled. He hasn’t done a single thing to invite me over.

He’s just there. Watching. Still. He doesn’t look like a man who does it often.

I don’t look away.

I should.

I don’t.

My heartbeat turned sharp and loud, too close to my throat.

My fingers tighten on the edge of the bar.

The room keeps moving around us. I can feel it. Bodies, noise, the bass—still there.

Just not where I am.

I didn’t decide to move. My feet were on the floor, already crossing to him.

I stop at his table. I look down at him.

He looks up.

And there it is. Want. Clear and Unbidden. His eyes don’t try to hide it—don’t even try to soften it.

My knees go weak. I have to lock them to stay standing.

He sees it. I know he sees it. He still doesn’t move.

“Do you want to have sex with me?”

He says nothing. His hands are on the table. That’s what I notice.

I looked at them. Broad. Scarred. Still. And I imagine those hands on my hips. On my lips. On the small of my back.

Heat settles low in my belly and doesn’t leave. I drag my eyes back to his face.

“Here’s fine too,” I say. “No names. No call. No foreplay.”

He hasn’t looked away from me once. His jaw shifts. Once. Like he’s biting down on something. Then his mouth opens.

“We’ll do it in my truck.”

Low. Quiet. Like he’s been holding it since I walked in.

My heart is still pounding from the fact that he didn’t say if.

He said where.

---

My legs are jelly. Not from the run.

Three miles. I’ve done twenty-six in my sleep. This isn’t that.

This is him.

I push off the pavement and my thighs shake. Not the good burn. The used burn. The kind that says you were opened and you let him. The bite on my neck pulses with every heartbeat. I touch it. Don’t mean to. My fingers just go there. The skin is tender. He marked me. I let him.

The growl—God, the growl—it’s still in my bones. Low in my chest. Between my legs. Every step I take, I feel it again.

I stopped. One mile from home. I’m not tired. I’m standing on the sidewalk, Laurel Canyon, dark, no one out, and my whole body is singing. Like he wired me to something and forgot to unplug me.

We had gone three times. The third time, he held on. Arms around my back, face in my neck, breathing like he wasn’t ready to let go.

I don’t think about that. I start running again. Harder. Trying to outrun the memory of his hands not letting go.

The bite throbs again.

His name was Richard. I’d asked anyway. And he told me. I won’t need it. We’re never seeing each other again.

I run faster.

My body doesn’t care what I decided. It’s still on him. Still open. Still buzzing from the growl.

I stop again.

The running isn’t what stopped me. It’s the fact that I can still feel him holding me.

And I didn’t pull away.

A branch snapped in the scrub along the sidewalk. My head turned before I decided to turn it. The bushes were dark. The space between them was darker.

I stopped. Every instinct said move away. My mother’s voice, actually—You don’t go toward the thing that hides, Olivia. You go the other way. She told me that when I was twelve and I tried to follow a coyote into the arroyo.

Then it came out.

Black. Shoulders higher than my hips. Eyes that don’t reflect the streetlight. My knees locked. My heart slammed once, twice, then went quiet.

That’s not anything that belongs here. But my brain wouldn’t accept it.

It’s just a big dog. I told myself. A big dog.

“Go on,” I said.

My voice didn’t shake. That was the OR voice. You tell a nurse to hand you a clamp while someone’s heart is in your palm, your voice doesn’t get to tremble.

But the wolf didn’t move. Clearly not a nurse.

It stood there, shoulder muscles bunched, head low. Its lips peeled back from its teeth. White. Long. Wet.

Not a dog.

It’s going to jump.

I knew it the way you know a car is going to run a red light—a half-second before it happens, everything in your body screaming move.

I turned to run.

My right foot hit the pavement. My left foot lifted. That’s how fast it was—I remember the lift of my left foot.

My back opened from shoulder to hip. My knees hit the ground. My hands came out on instinct—protect your hands, protect your hands—and I tucked them under my chest before my face hit the pavement. One second of nothing. Then the pain, hot and wide, and I screamed. The sound did not feel like mine. It tore out of me raw and high.

The wolf shook its head. My whole body shook with it. My teeth clicked. I tasted blood. My legs kicked behind me and I could not feel them but I saw them moving. My fingers stayed curled under me.

Its jaws closed on my neck. Hot breath. Wet. Smelling like iron.

The world was getting smaller. One streetlight. One shadow. My own hand, still tucked, fingers curling around nothing.

And I knew. Not “I knew I was dying.” I knew. This is where I die.

Not in an OR like I’d thought. On a sidewalk in Laurel Canyon, wearing track pants, with my hair still wet from the run. Still protecting my hands like I had a surgery tomorrow. I didn’t have tomorrow.

I knew blood loss by the way the streetlight was getting smaller. I’d seen it before. I knew what came next.

My sister’s cat. I hadn’t fed him.

My mother’s birthday. I hadn’t bought the earrings.

My brother. He was going to cry, and I wasn’t going to be there to see it.

Japan. I never made it to Japan.

That’s what dying was. Just a list of small things you forgot to do.

I stopped trying to move. Okay, I thought. Okay.

Then something hit the wolf on top of me.

A body. Heavy and fast and intentional.

The weight lifted off my chest.

I heard a sound—high, shrieking, animal. It took me a second to understand that the sound was coming from the wolf that had been attacking me.

My eyes opened. The streetlight was a blur of orange. Two shapes moving. One black. One blacker. Teeth and muscle and a growl so low I felt it in my spine, in the pavement, in the blood pooling under my back.

There’s two of them. Not one.

I told my legs to push. The signal left. Nothing came back. Like paging a resident who’d already gone home.

Then nothing. Blank.

Something wet on my face. A nose. Then licking, slow, and my body did the thing I’d been running four miles to undo — it stopped fighting. Just stopped. Like it recognized something it wasn’t going to ask my permission about.

Then nothing.

The weight shifted. Not gone—just not on me anymore. The pavement was cold against my back. I hadn’t noticed that before.

“Olivia.” The voice was low, but I felt it the same way I had before. In my bones.

I couldn’t see his face. The dark was too thick. A shape leaned over me, close enough that I could see skin where there should have been fur. No shirt. His hands were on my face, brushing my hair back, warm and calloused, and my body knew them before I did.

I settled into the touch.

“Richard?” It came out thin. Barely there.

His hands. That’s what I got. The weight of them, one under my back, one under my knees. The wound registered somewhere far away. Then I was up, and the sky was where the ground should be, and I thought: too easy. I don’t weigh enough.

“Richard—“ I tried again.

“Yes. Stay with me.”

It settled in my chest.

Oh god—

I was with him.

Not him. A wolf.

Three times.

He chuckled. It vibrated in my ribs. I leaned into his chest. His heartbeat was slow. Steady. Nothing like mine.

And then I didn’t say anything else because the dark came back and took me with it.

---

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🍿 Author’s Note

THE THING ABOUT OLIVIA. Dig this out of the archives. Old draft. You see, I had an essay ready—Who Is a Man: His Origin or His Choices?—very clever, very Greek. Then the month went feral. You know the one. Deadlines, disasters.

So instead of the essay, you get a woman who walks into a bar in track pants, fucks a wolf, gets mauled by a different wolf, and is rescued by the first wolf, who also happens to be the man she just fucked. Yes, that is the plot. No, I don’t have a title. No, I’m not developing it further.

But Olivia has been screaming in my ear, so I gave her two chapters. She was my experiment in emotional legibility. I haven't touched her since.

If you want more, bribe me. Until then, back to our regularly scheduled programming: Why a Cat Has Nine Lives (spoiler: it’s spite).

Unless you bribe me. I am very bribable.