Headstrong

Laura Hansen was coming back from the grocery store the day her life flipped on its head. The last thing she had expected to see in the ditch by her house was a naked man. Her first instinct was to ignore him and call the police, since there had been a lot of drug busts in the newspaper lately and she figured he was probably drunk or high. However, on second glance, she noticed he was injured. She parked her truck a few feet up her driveway and ran back to the highway.

"Shit! What happened to you?"

He was all crumpled up in the overgrown grass and weeds, muddy from the rain, and unconscious. It looked like he had been attacked by wild animals and left for dead. He still had a pulse, but he had gashes all over that looked like claw marks.

"Oh man, ok dude, you look heavy and I know I can't carry you, but I can't help you very well here either, and it's going to take help at least 20 minutes to drive out here, so we gotta do something.."

Laura tended to ramble under stress, but she didn't worry about that now since he was unconscious. She grabbed him under the arms and began dragging him through the grass to her truck, but jumped back and squeaked a bit when he groaned.

"Oh! Can you hear me? Are you ok?"

His eyelids fluttered a bit, but that was all. She shook his shoulder, and he groaned again, but this sounded more conscious, so she shook him a bit harder. His eyes opened, and she gasped. Even in the midst of her panic, she was captured by their movement. They had swirling hues of blue and green that she had never seen before, and the fact that they were changing color as she watched could only mean one thing. Shifter. She shook her head and focused on the task in front of her.

"Hey! I can't lift you into my truck, so I'm going to need you to wake up now. Yeah, that's it... ergh!"

He halfway opened his eyes and tried to sit up, so she grabbed him around the waist and pushed and pulled until he was upright and leaning heavily on her. Once she opened the side door, he was steady enough and was able to climb into the cab with her help. She went around the side and hopped into the driver's seat.

"What happened to you? Are you ok? Do you know where you are? What's your name," she cut herself off, realizing she was talking way too much and too fast for someone who was barely conscious. Oh! And he was still very naked.. She tried not to look too closely as she grabbed an old hoodie from the back seat and tossed it on his lap. He grunted, then said, "my name is Wilson, and I'll be fine." Laura was just surprised he was able to put two sentences together, so she decided that would have to be good enough until they got to the house. She put the truck in drive and started up her long driveway. She lived in the country, so her driveway was about a quarter mile of gravel, but the view from her back porch was worth it. Laura lived on a patch of land just outside the Pike San Isabel National Forest in Colorado, and the mountains here were her favorite place on Earth. As she drove, she took note of his features. He was very well built with a dark brown buzz cut and possibly caucasian features. He had a sharp jaw and a tattoo about the size of her palm on his left shoulder that seemed to be some kind of tribal pattern. Laura didn't know much about shifters other than the general crap the government had added into their curriculum when she was a sophomore in high school because the shifters had been outed and it was causing mass panic. She had never seen any this close, and she was surprised at how human he looked and smelled. In fact, she had been given the impression that their faces were usually animalistic to the point where you could guess their kind just by looking at them, but he just had a human face. A very attractive face, she noticed with a blush. He seemed to wake up again as they got closer to her house, but neither of them said anything. Laura parked the truck and said, "I'll run inside and get you some sweatpants."

By the time she had returned, however, he was gone.