Female ✔️

12: of sea and male

The moment I dip my toe in, I feel fear. A sick kind of infatuated fear that you can't help, it climbs up your spine and raises your senses and ripples a wave of goosebumps over your skin. Warning bells go off, banging around inside my skull. Eyes gone wide, I conjure up the picture some wolf took of me after they pulled me from the basin of punishing water. I saw myself, a skeleton, blue lipped and nearly blending in with the snow until I saw the soaked mass of brown curls beginning to freeze; that was my hair. 

I looked down at the water of the Sea and realized that it didn't look quite so different. A ball of spit seems to lodge in my throat as I stare out at the horizon of white caps marching for the shore.

Angry. The only word to describe the Ocean's winter side. The swells are whipped up with the cold gusts of wind as they sweep in and tug at my hair and the sea grass that seems to roll just about as united as the Ocean himself.

I look down to my toes, burning red with the cold, just out of reach of the tide. I take a few steps back and crouch, looking back up to the water. Like an adversary, I won't turn my back on him.

Movement at my foot makes me glance down, seeing the tiny shelled creature clatter over the pebbles in search of cover. Crab. It comes to me from a week in school where we watched movies on sea life and conservation. It was skirted over, and the crabs in the videos and books weren't nearly as small and innocent looking as this little guy. I smile, dipping my fingers down and letting it scuttle into my grasp. I raise it to eye level and watch it calculate my strange presence.

I giggle and set it back down with care, clearing a little path for it to follow before watching it create its own. I sit back on my heels and turn to a larger rock. It's speckled with white barnacles and stained by salt. Lifting it with a grunt, I roll it over onto it's side and admire the pool beneath it.

Tons of life forms spring into action with the sudden discovery, light flooding in. Small fish skirt into the sand, crabs clattering away, snails peeking heads out in unrest.

"Fishy!" A small hand shoots into the pool making the silt plume up and cloud the previously crystal water. Shocked and unnerved, my eyes swing over to the owner of the prying fingers. A small boy crouches down, bearing dark brown hair in tight ringlets that fall over his light blue eyes. His skin is pale and his body small and skinny in the way most young shifting males are. A wild grin is on his face.

"Hey-" I speak up shooing his hand  away. "You're hurting them!"

The male stands up and looks down at me, only a few inches taller in my crouched position as I try to slide the rock back over without harming the tide dwellers. Once I am appeased, I look back up to him. I've seen him before...

The nose. It so clearly belongs to the Kherrs brothers. I smile at him with teeth, aiming to intimidate his constant stare, though I don't know why. I feel like someone else from another time. Letting my lip fall, I can't recall this one's name, all I know is he's the youngest. At five winters, I discern he has never known his mother. John's mate died soon after he was born. I believe it must have been hard for John to raise a newborn pup all on his own.

"I'm Owen." His voice is light and happy, left cheek smudged with dirt, he smells of creekwater. I notice the bottoms of his jeans are sopping wet. I want to laugh at this but I don't.

"I'm Montana."

"I know that. You're friends with Jacky."

I laugh this time and nod. "Yeah." Everything about right now feels foreign, out of body.

Eyes wide and innocent, he watches me without saying anymore.