The room was fairly dark with the heavy black drapes drawn over the windows and only one small lamp on a bedside table to offer any illumination to the space, the air in the room was so thick with tense anxiety… you could probably cut it with a knife.

In an armchair by the entertainment center, a handsome young man with long black hair and anxious forest green eyes sat there trembling, his fingers gripped the arms of the chair so tightly, his fingernails almost tore the fabric… beads of sweat left wet trails down the exposed skin of his upper body. A shirt seemed rather pointless when he would just keep soaking the damn thing in sweat.

Liam knew it was coming, tonight was the full moon… he could feel it in his blood as it began to boil, a warning that the full influence of the moon would soon be upon him… he felt terrible keeping all of this from Rosalyn, but it really was for her own good… perhaps a bit for his own as well…

Liam and the entire Riley family were descended from an ancient line of pureblood werewolves, highly respected among the secret community of werewolves in the area. They were different from turned werewolves in the way that the moon did not force them to turn, rather they could turn at will whenever they pleased and the effects the full moon had on them… Well, that applied more to their werewolf instincts.

Quite often for a pureblood werewolf during the full moon, things that deeply impacted their deepest desires were always next to impossible to resist acting upon. Instinct was amplified and impulse control drastically decreased.

Many purebloods followed the practice of turned werewolves in locking themselves up before the full moon rose in order to prevent themselves from doing something incredibly stupid that they couldn’t take back. To be fair though, with purebloods, the outcome being bloodshed was immensely lower than a turned.

For Liam Riley… the deepest desire he hungered for the most… was his best friend, Rosalyn Hayes…

He’d been in love with her for years now, ever since that day in middle school… one look into those gentle milk chocolate eyes and he’d been hooked.

Rosalyn had a way of making a downright rotten day seem like maybe it wasn’t so bad… for him, her smile was like rays of warm sunlight at last cutting through the cold clouds of winter to bring back Spring… and as corny and cliche as it sounded, he couldn’t get enough of that adorable involuntary pig snort she did when she laughed really hard at something she found hilarious or when she laughs at her own silly jokes, like that one about the t-rex being so cranky because his arms were too short to reach his pecker.

Though as deep as his feelings ran… Liam could never bring himself to confess how he really felt… there was always that nagging fear at the back of his mind that if he did this and things went south, he could lose his best friend. They wouldn’t be the first and they’d definitely not be the last to fall victim to this.

Even more complicated was that Rosalyn didn’t know that Liam was a werewolf and he already felt shitty about lying to her every month… if they got into a romantic relationship, he’d feel even worse about keeping his girlfriend in the dark about this. It would feel like such a betrayal of her trust.

On top of that, if he did tell her about the whole werewolf thing… part of him feared she might think he was off his rocker insane or that maybe he was trying to prank her… but what if she did believe him? 

In that scenario, he knew she wouldn’t be the type to turn away… No, she’d want to help take care of him each month, help him resist his urges that might get him into trouble… and then he would have to tell her the reason why he was struggling so much and kept himself shut away during the full moons was because his every instinct screamed at him to go to her, bite the base of her neck and leave his mating mark before making love to her until her legs became as stable as jello.

Now that was a genie you couldn’t put back into the bottle once it was out. Best to just leave the bottle corked… even if it made him sad to do it.

The image of Rosalyn’s exposed neck stuck in his head, begging for his mark to be placed there with his scent permanently embedded in the teeth marks… her lips full and pouting as she whimpered his name, pleading for him to make her completely his at long last… 

Liam groaned as his nails dug into the fabric of the chair, the sound of material tearing filling the air around him.

“I can do this… I can do this… I can do this…” Liam repeated to himself “I made it through last month and the one before that… I can do this… I can do this…”