Re: Bonfire-adjacent: Aubrey/Lou
Lou didn't give a shit about dicks. Not in a town small enough you could stand on one side of it and spit and hit the 'welcome to' sign on the other side. Problem in a small town like this was shitting on your own doorstep. Did it often enough, people remembered. The smell clung long after you'd gotten over the bad idea to begin with. Take Adrian. The kid was spiralling like a cotton reel unravelling and he'd done it public. Lou didn't have a problem with sex, didn't have a problem with wanting it rough. But wanting, and making an audience out of other people, two separate things.
She'd walked. From the middle of town, from her apartment. Walked. Boots, laced at her ankles and old denim jeans, the kind that washed pale blue and went from thick cardboard to soft as leather. Not flannel, but a shirt loose at the throat and rolled at the elbows, and Lou ran warm enough that the fire flickering over her skin that painted her outsider-flesh burnished copper, climbed the heat and dampened the tendrils of hair around her forehead. Lou's wolf she'd made peace with a long time ago. Bars did that. A lot of solitude did that too. When it was just the two of you, you learned to live with each other. Accept, instead of tolerate.
Lou's wolf wasn't separate. Lou's wolf was her, and her shoulders rose and her back straightened as she came into the smoke and char of the fireside with a beer in her hand and quiet on solid-shod feet. Wolf. Different kind, different pack. She shuffled a pack of cigarettes out of a pocket, tucked the beer between her feet and lit. Let the thread of smoke, thick and dark and uncut, clutter the air along with the woodsmoke.