Nobody Told Us

A West Texas Coyote Shifter Story

The cotton rows were too narrow for a coyote moving at full speed, which was exactly why David was doing it.

Jenny was laughing so hard she had stopped running entirely, one hand pressed to her ribs, watching him tear through the rows in a wide looping arc that served absolutely no purpose except that the ground was warm under his paws and the evening air smelled like rain coming and she was laughing and he was the reason.

We are being ridiculous, the coyote’s voice echoed in his head.

He did another loop anyway.

Because he would do anything to see that smile on her face.

She called his name and he veered toward her, impossibly fast, and pulled up short about two feet from where she stood, skidding slightly in the dust, tail going, ears forward, breathing hard.

“You are so silly” she said, with complete adoration and full breathless giggle.

He sat down in the cotton row and looked up at her with enormous dignity.

She crouched down and put her hands on either side of his face, the way she always did, her thumbs in the fur at his jaw, and looked him dead in his mismatched eyes.

“Hi,” she said.

His tongue was warm and he licked her hand and then stood up and licked her face. She laughed more and he couldn’t get enough of that sound.

It was joy spoken out loud.

The smell hit him first.

Rain.

Still twenty minutes out maybe, but coming fast and certain the way West Texas storms came. The air pressure had shifted and the sky to the west had gone the color of a bruise.

David lifted his snout and his whiskers trembled and his mismatched eyes read the clouds the way his grandmother had taught him to read them, with your whole body.

We should go, the coyote said.

Jenny saw his face change, the animal version of it, the way his whole body oriented toward the sky, and she looked up.

“Oh,” she said. Then, delighted, “Oh!”

She took off running first.

David was past her in two strides, low and fast, cutting through the cotton rows, and she was laughing behind him again, that sound, that sound….

….. and the first rumble of thunder rolled across the sky like something waking up, and the lightning cracked sideways through the clouds and you could feel it in the air because the hair on your body just lifted up with the electricity of it.

The clouds were purple-white and enormous and Jenny made a sound that was half scream and half pure joy and ran faster, her yellow sundress flying between her calves.

The first drops hit when they were still fifty yards from the car.

Run, said the coyote, unnecessarily.

He shifted at the door.

One second coyote, next second boy, the way it had always been

Easy as a thought, easy as deciding.

And he yanked the back door open and she was already laughing and ducking in and he followed her and pulled it shut behind them and the rain came down.

Not gently. This was West Texas.

Jenny pushed her wet hair back from her face and looked at him and dissolved into laughter again and he was already laughing too because they were soaked, both of them, in about thirty seconds flat, and the windows were fogging up immediately and rain hammered the roof of the Duster like it had a personal grievance.

Outside the lightning cracked again, longer this time, traveling the whole width of the sky, and the thunder came right behind it, close enough to feel in the chest.

Jenny turned from the window and looked at him.

His shirt was soaked through and sticking to him and her sundress was the same and her hair was dark with rain and she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his seventeen years on this earth and he was very aware that he was staring.

“That was so fun,” she said, still laughing, water dripping from her hair.

She shivered.

David reached over the seat and grabbed the blanket he’d rescued off the hood and wrapped it around her shoulders in one easy motion.

“Thank you,” she said, pulling it tighter.

“We need music” she said and David leaned forward between the seats and turned the radio on and when he settled back on the rear seat she shifted and he lifted her and there she was, one thigh on either side of his, warm against him.

The dial glowed green in the dark of the back seat.

Casey Kasem’s voice came through the static, warm and familiar as a kitchen light left on…

…And then the song started.

Oh, said the coyote.

David went very still.

David.

I know.

That’s Sexual Healing.

I KNOW.

Jenny looked at the radio. Then at David. She blushed, and her smile came easy and he got lost in the way her eyes crinkled up then she bit her lip.

“Well,” she said softly.

“Yeah,” he said.

The rain kept coming. The windows were completely fogged now.

And the whole world outside gone soft and gray and irrelevant, and inside the blue Plymouth Duster there was just the green glow of the dash and Marvin Gaye and the smell of rain and Jenny, and she was vanilla and Love’s Baby Soft and warm damp skin and under all of that just.. Her. Sweetness and musk and real and warm an on his lap.

And David was seventeen years old and had never wanted anything as much as he wanted to close the six inches between them.

He didn’t have to because she did.

Her mouth found his and his hands came up to her face without deciding to and she made a small sound against his lips and the coyote said absolutely nothing at all which was somehow louder than everything he’d said all day.

She pulled back just enough. Her eyes found his in the green-dark.

“Have you,” she started. Stopped. “Have you ever —”

“No,” he said. Honest. No hesitation.

Something in her face went soft and certain all at once and made his breath go shallow.

“Me either,” she said.

She kissed him again. Deeper this time. And her hands found the hem of his soaked shirt and he reached back and pulled it off in one motion and dropped it somewhere in the dark and then her hands were on his chest, warm against his rain-cooled skin, and he felt it everywhere, everywhere.

…Oh, the coyote said again, very quietly.

But David couldn’t think really, because all his senses were firing at once and all he could focus on was the heat at her core and how her hips moved against his when she bit down on her lip.

Her sundress had small buttons down the front. He found the first one and his hands…

His hands that had pulled cotton bolls since age five, that had held chamois cloths and fence posts and beer bottles, were shaking.

She felt it. She didn’t say anything about it. She just waited, her forehead tipped against his, her breath warm on his face, and he worked the button free.

Then the next one.

Then the next.

Easy, the coyote said, almost a whisper.

David breathed. Kept going.

Her hair was down her back and her shoulders had freckles he hadn’t known about until right now, and he pressed his mouth to one, just one, and felt her breath catch. Something about that, the catching of it, the small involuntary sound she made, undid something in him completely.

His hands stopped shaking.

He kissed her throat. The curve of her shoulder. He was learning her the way the coyote learned a new road, completely, without rushing, because you only got to learn something for the first time once.

Yes, the coyote said softly. Like that.

Outside the storm moved through in that way West Texas storms did, loud and total and then rolling on, and the rain on the roof of the Duster found a rhythm that had nothing to do with them and everything to do with them and her head dropped back.

He watched her.

And something rose up in him that was older than seventeen, older than the coyote. Some instinct that had no name except the one his hands already knew, and he gathered her in like if he didn’t hold on he’d float away.

Hold her, the coyote said.

Like a sacred thing.

He did.

The Duster moved with them and Marvin Gaye kept going and the storm rolled east toward nothing and the cotton fields were dark and wet all around them and David — seventeen, wiry, mismatched eyes, boots on the floor somewhere, his grandmother’s stone warm against his sternum even now — said her name once, the way you said something when words were all you had left.

“Jenny.”

She said yes.

Not the word. Just the sound of it. Just yes.

And nobody, not Rico, not his grandmother, not a single person in Zavala County, Texas, had told him it was going to feel like this.

Nobody told us, the coyote said, awed and quiet and completely undone.

No, David thought, his face pressed to her hair, her name still on his lips, the rain going soft on the roof above them.

Nobody told us.