Drawn to you: Prologue: Ray
- N.J. Lysk
- Feb 9
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 6
Ray’s mum liked to tell people that he’d started drawing before he could speak. Most people took it to mean he’d been precocious; but it could mean the exact opposite as well.
Whatever it meant, it was still true: Ray preferred drawing to speaking one hundred percent of the time. It was slower, for one, and he needed that time. He didn’t know why, but the world felt harsh to him, too much and too fast and too careless. He managed, because he had to. Meals had to be prepared, schoolwork had to be completed, the house had to be cleaned and his siblings needed him awake and aware. Their need was a thread he could follow back to earth, strong enough to keep any distractions at bay.
But it was much easier when he didn’t have to fight his true nature, when he could just watch and reproduce, transfer reality to paper until it became a little less smudged. He rarely felt confident enough to add colour. Fearing he could never capture the specks of gold in the hazel of Josh’s eyes, or the way the sunlight hit the river turning it almost blue.
It was the only good thing he could find about the hole he’d just dug himself into.
***
Everyone knew the Riverside Pack was growing too large for the land they had occupied for centuries. It wasn’t even something you had to do maths about; when you ran under the full moon with your pack, you became one organism, but now they ran with wolves they barely knew in their everyday lives.
And wolves didn’t trust easy, which meant a lot more rowdiness. Especially amongst kids Ray’s age who weren’t quite settled into their roles in the pack—a lot of them had just presented, for one, which Ray imagined did your head in.
He was hoping he wouldn’t. Being a beta was hard enough; he didn’t want to think about what alpha hormones would do to his head. Besides, he hated all the wrestling and power games teenage boys insisted on and being an alpha meant always having to prove you were stronger.
At least the council had won the vote not to invite the new group of refugees their Alpha had attracted into their pack, which was getting a lot of people muttering about selfishness.
Ray wasn’t sure how to fix it; what they had been doing wasn’t right, he didn’t think it was just him who could tell. It didn’t matter that there was physical space to build more houses while still leaving plenty of land for them to run. At the same time, what would it have been like to be pushed out of your land by human greed and have nowhere to go?
“Ray!” Marisa called from the kitchen, and he quickly shoved the rest of his schoolwork into his bag and went to help her with their younger siblings.
***
It wasn’t until after dinner that day that he had a minute to himself to face the task of a proper search.
He’d convinced himself that he hadn’t had much hope, but he must had had some because he was blinking back tears when he turned the last white page of his notebook to no results.
The drawings were gone.
Not just some drawings, but the drawings. The ones he should have known better than to allow to exist outside of his mind.
He’d known from the moment he’d put pencil to paper that it was dangerous to indulge. But art was where he put everything he couldn’t say or do, everything that felt like it’d spill out of him if left unexpressed. The fear, the pain, the grief, and this… fascination. That’s all it was, a deep interest in the human body and its incredible complexity.
And it’d made sense to start with men’s bodies. After all, it wasn’t like he was going to stare at women when they were naked after the full moon run, was it? He was a beta, but he was still a guy and it would have been creepy. But the men didn’t give a fuck about walking around starkers, wrestling each other in the flesh as comfortably as they did when they had tails and teeth.
It wasn’t Ray’s thing, all that posturing, and since his last growth spurt, he was big enough to keep his agemates from targeting him. Well, that and what had happened with Thomas.
A couple years back, it had got bad enough to be called bullying. It hadn’t just been Thomas, but he had been the worst one. Ray didn’t get it at all, but apparently his reluctance to engage was like honey to a bear. It was stupid and plain rude, but no one made much of a fuss about moderate violence if it happened on a night the moon was full.
Except even werewolves had limits, and while Ray getting shoved and chased around had been fine, Josh breaking Thomas’s nose had made pack adults get involved.
Ray’s own mother had been shocked by the whole thing. Ray knew she had enough on her plate without him bringing in more trouble, so he hadn’t said anything, and even when there were marks, with the moon at the height of her power, they’d fade by morning.
But he didn’t see how everyone else had missed it.
He didn’t know when he’d gone from tracking other boys’ movements to stay away from the worst of the roughhousing to watching them to remember. But when he’d started drawing from those memories, he’d known to be careful. After years of focusing on drawing faces, he’d started with arms and backs, challenging and beautiful both, but not explicit or too weird. Hands had then taken him a good two months and some photo references to get right.
If he’d stuck to the plan, he’d have moved on to the chest afterwards, but he’d caught a glimpse of something much more… fascinating. Drawing the curled fingers on their own had come easier after so much practice and he’d got so lost in the nails—which he of course hadn’t seen in the moonlight and with the fast movement—that the thick cock had seemed to materialise on the paper.
It hadn’t been right, of course, the first time around. And that was something that offended him to the core. So he worked on it, looking at his own cock in the shower to fill in the details he hadn’t seen.
And now he’d lost it, the whole folder where he’d kept them safe from the prying eyes of his mother and his younger siblings.
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