Page 40 of Beau and the Beast

"From the way you talk, I'm guessing it wasn't the same with your father."

"My father Isidore is a hard man," Wolfram said. "I'll never understand what my mother saw in him that made a partnership seem viable."

"Hard," Beau parroted back. "In what way?"

Wolfram set down the teacup he'd been examining, laying his large hands out on the table and flexing them. Beau wanted to stare at them, to hold them between his own hands and learn everything there was to learn about them. He wanted to know what it was like not to have the finest motor skills, whether or not Wolfram struggled, and how sensitive the big black pads were. He wanted to understand how his claws worked and to feel the short tawny fur on the backs of them.

Instead, he forced his eyes up. Wolfram wasn't some exhibit for him. He was the man that Beau was tasked to interview.

"I'd rather not talk about him," Wolfram said finally.

Beau sighed. "Wolfram, it's going to be important for us to visit all areas of your life," he said, trying to sound as patient as possible. "The painful parts are the exact things that are going to make you sympathetic to a reader."

"I don't want their sympathy."

"That's not—I know that. I mean, I could've guessed that, at least. But if we only show them the good parts of your life, how are they going to see you as a fellow human being? See you as someone they can relate to?"

Wolfram frowned but didn't continue to protest.

Slowly, he balled his hands into fists there on the top of the table.

“Then I’ll tell you about my father,” Wolfram said, his voice as low as a growl.

Beau shivered, unsure of why he suddenly felt uncomfortable. It was as if something had shifted behind Wolfram’s eyes. The air between them chilled.

"I don't know what it was about me that made me such a disappointment for my father," Wolfram said slowly. He held his head up at a regal angle, the lines of his throat as he held his head high playing with the visual lines made by the enormous twisting horns atop his head. His eyes were so downcast that they almost looked closed, but Beau could still see the edges of their gold irises beneath a thick layer of long eyelashes.

He had the dignity, the power of a wild animal, but Beau was struck by the impression that what he was witnessing was Wolfram in his essence—not an effect of his curse, but a glimpse of the person he had been before it: proud, powerful, dauntless.

"He always found a subtle way to tell me that I was not what he wanted," Wolfram continued. "It almost would've been better if he'd hated me outright, like an enemy should. Instead, everything he said was so innocuous and insidious that if I expressed dissatisfaction with it, everyone around me rushed to his defense."

Wolfram's forearms began to strain, the ropey muscles and tendons growing visible as he clenched his fists harder where they rested on the top of the table.

"Everything I did was'fine.' Straight A’s in school were just'fine.' The lead role in a high school play was'fine.' Joining the football team was just as 'fine'as winning a poetry award to him," Wolfram said.

His voice had grown tighter but his posture remained the same.

"I looked'fine,' my accomplishments were'fine,' and the person I was to him was only'fine.' Always just satisfactory. Never good. Never wonderful. Never superior. Never above average. The goalpost for'fine' moved so fast that I never found myself moving past it."

Could it really be true that Wolfram’s father treated him that way? Beau could barely fathom it. Being without his parents for most of his childhood was terrible, of course, but he couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea of having a parent who treated him so coarsely. Beau and Noah had been so utterly treasured by both of their parents that it was easy to forget that not everyone had been. In his distress over the thought, Beau almost missed the fact that Wolfram's claws were out, were pressing on the pad of his palm now.

"Please, we can take a break," Beau said.

"I wish he could see me now because at least, perhaps, he'd have the opportunity to tell me that I'm anythingbutgoddamned fine. At least I’m something he could hate now out in the open, with no one pretending like they disagreed with him."

The pads of his palm were bleeding. The sight made something immense move inside of Beau, and he knew he couldn't let Wolfram continue.

"Please, Wolfram," Beau said. He got to his knees on the cushion, leaning over the table between them, putting his hands on Wolfram's.

* * *

Wolfram hadn't noticedwhat he was doing to his own hands until Beau was moving, leaning, placing his small, soft hands over Wolfram's big ugly paws.

Talking about his father had twisted everything up inside of him, had ignited the worst beastly parts of him that he hated, and as he spoke, something in him had been preparing to take on an enemy. Finding none, he’d turned the hatred in on himself.

Beau’s hands were warm and gentle and he pried one of Wolfram's fists open before grabbing one of the cloth napkins Wolfram had set out with tea and dabbed at the claw marks he'd made in his own palm.

Wolfram’s muscles went slack. He was so infrequently touched by others that it was easy for him to run through the catalog of every time that it had happened over the past year.

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