Rippled (14 page)

Yeah, but what reason would I give for wanting the door opened? Bathroom? Food? I was pretty sure whatever spilled out of my mouth would make more sense to a leopard than any human left in the camp. “I need…” I began, fumbling with the words. “I need out.”

Brian turned me towards him and lifted my chin. “Hang on just a little longer.”

I held my stomach as it protested. “I’m not sure if…if I can.”

By now my cheeks were on fire, and my eyes didn’t want to stay open. If something didn’t change soon, I’d probably pass out.

Brian handed me one of the bottles of water he’d got a little while ago. “Drink as much as you can.” He smoothed my hair with his hand. “You’re dehydrated.”

I accepted the bottle and looked at it as if drinking was the most impossible thing to do in the world. My stomach turned, and the nausea in the back of my throat insisted I didn’t need it. Unfortunately, with Brian in the room, not following his directions wasn’t an option.

I removed the cap with more effort than I would’ve liked and pressed the bottle to my lips. Water that was room temperature kissed my skin. Sweet, but heavy—difficult to swallow. What should’ve felt smooth as it slithered down my throat felt more like needles biting at my oesophagus. I coughed around the discomfort and tried again. Sip by aching sip, I drank close to half the bottle of water before handing it back to Brian.

“Feeling a little better?” He set the water on the end table, never taking his eyes off me.

I wanted to say yes. To calm his nerves and possibly remove his intense gaze from my skin. I did the only thing I could—told the truth. Lying wasn’t possible. Not when I was like this.

“Not really.” I swallowed around the jagged daggers in my throat. “I think it’s getting worse.” I fought back the nausea, then continued, “Hard to…ignore it anymore.”

Brian bobbed his head. “Looks like you’re about ready.”

I forced a smile. “Ready or not, right?”

I bit my lip and imagined using a spoon to carve the pain out of my stomach. Going to the clinic now wasn’t an option. I was too close. Too far gone. I’d be lucky to even walk that far. If I’d hated cramps before, I hated this about one hundred times more. No pain killers. No warm baths. Just pain. Nausea and pain. Lots of pain. My body twitched. My stomach lurched forward. I somehow kept my balance.

“Look at me,” Brian ordered, his voice stern. “Focus on my words. You know how we’ve been playing with the idea of me controlling your orgasms?”

Another twitch. “Yeah…”

I thought you already did.

No, I’d only held them back for him.

“About how you cannot come unless I tell you to?”

I swallowed, then nodded.

“But each time I told you no, every time I told you to wait, you held back.”

“Of course I did. You…you told me to,” I stuttered and slurred my words.

“I know, which is why this is so important. You were able to hold back your orgasms for me, so why not do the same thing with shifting?”

But I thought you wanted me to shift?
“Because, an orgasm is… It’s nothing like shifting…or not shifting.”

“No, but it involves the same amount of brainpower. If you will your body not to shift, to follow my orders, you’ll stay in the same skin.”

“So, you don’t just want to control when we…have sex—if we have sex—and my orgasms, you’re also deciding when…when I can shift?”

“If you want to look at it that way, yes. If you can’t command your body to listen on your own, then tell it to listen to me.”

The pain ebbed just enough for me to talk without stuttering. “This is why you wanted to be my Dom, for me to submit to you, isn’t it?”

“A little, yes. But the first thing you need to know about shifting is to actually give yourself permission to lose control. The longer you fight it, especially when it’s so new, the more it will hurt.”

“Hurt?” Wasn’t I hurting enough? There was another pinch of pain, slowly growing. “Like, bones breaking hurt?”

He smiled. “Not exactly, no. The act of shifting doesn’t hurt much at all, but if you fight it—and sometimes you’ll have to—you’ll end up with a migraine or worse. That’s why I’m asking you to lose yourself. Your cell is locked. No one can come in, and neither one of us can get out.”

“What about you? Won’t I hurt you?”

“No, because I’ll be right there beside you, in whatever form you choose, but I’d still like you to try. If I feel you’re losing control, I’ll take over.” He rubbed at his temple. “Imagine you have a red button in your mind, something you’d like to push. I need you to build a cage around that. An invisible shield. Unbreakable. That red button symbolises the virus inside you—the power to shift. I’m the only one who can touch it. The only one who can activate it.” He held both my shoulders. “We’re going to do this at the same time.”

“Are you sure I’m—?”

“No more holding it off. I’ll go first, and then I’ll have you do the same.”

Even though I was against shifting at all, if it would help with the pain, I was willing to try anything.
Just make it stop.

“Krista…”

Someone was calling my name. My vision went dark.

Make the pain stop. Keep the world from spinning around my head
.

“Krista.”

The voice came again, faint but still insistent. I opened my eyes, which I hadn’t even realised I’d closed, and stared right back at Brian.

Leopard, if you’re in there and you can hear me, please make this all go away.

“Shift.”

Chapter Thirteen

Krista

My body tensed, faltered, but I didn’t shift. Brian, on the other hand, did. And, just like he’d said, there were no broken bones protruding from his skin. His body slowly changed shape. He knelt close to the ground, completely ignoring the fact that he was still clothed. My mouth watered at the thought of him shifting back into human form, completely naked.

I wasn’t even sure if that was how it worked, but I didn’t care. The thought calmed me just enough to look him over before losing myself again. As he knelt in front of me, his arms, legs and face were the first things to change. Ripples, like the kind you’d see on a lake, rushed all over his body. His biceps twitched, rippled, and were soon replaced with ones covered in fur.

The process continued. His face elongated, a muzzle appeared between his eyes, which stayed the same. In total, his shift might have taken a minute, possibly more, and every second of it was mesmerising. He didn’t groan. Didn’t flinch. It almost seemed as if he was enjoying it.

When his shift was complete, he stood no taller than my thighs, beautiful white fur speckled with rosettes covering what once was his human flesh. He flashed me a toothy grin and cocked his head to one side. At first, I wasn’t sure if he was going to speak at all. So when he rumbled a handful of words at me, I almost fell back on my ass.

“See?” he asked, tail flicking behind him. “Not painful at all.” He padded forward and pressed his nose against my leg. “Now, you try.”

I’d seen him shift. Watched him. I’d even felt a twitch, something that wasn’t pain, deep inside my stomach. And yet, I couldn’t do it. Something inside me said this wasn’t right.

This isn’t something you’re supposed to be able to do.

Where had his clothes gone? Would he have them when he shifted back?
Am I supposed to strip down first?
How much clothing had he ruined just by shifting?

I kept the questions to myself, and instead of shifting—rippling—I reached my hand out to touch him. There was a snow leopard in front of me. In my room. The same one I’d seen before. The one I’d feared. It had Brian’s voice.

That doesn’t mean it is Brian.

Of course it did. Who else would it be?

You could be dreaming.

I doubted that.

This has happened once before.

All of the dreams I’d had as of late were nightmares.

This isn’t a nightmare.

It wasn’t a dream at all.

Have you ever thought that all of this could be a dream?

I shook my head. The pain was too real. The nausea. The shots. All of it felt too real.

“You aren’t relaxed,” Brian purred.

In less than a heartbeat, he shifted back into human form. There were no ripples. No going one limb at a time.
No clothing.
Holy hell, if I’d thought he was attractive before, his ability to shift without any effort at all aroused me to the very core. I swallowed and pressed my legs closer together to ward off the throbbing in my clit. It was so strong it was almost painful.

Sucking in a breath, I froze when Brian pressed a hand to my shoulder, the same hand that had been a paw moments earlier.

“How…?” I tried to find the right words. “How did you do that?” Heat brushed my cheeks at his obvious erection. I couldn’t look away.

He chuckled and took my chin in his hand. “I’m up here.” He lifted my gaze. Held it. “How did I shift back so fast?”

I managed a nod. I’d stopped breathing. Thinking.

He gave me a knowing smile. “I can shift as slow or as fast as I want.”

I frowned. “Seriously?” He nodded. “Then why did you take so long?”

“So you could watch and see that it doesn’t hurt. The first time I shifted in front of you, I didn’t really give you a chance. As for you, in the beginning, your shifts could take an hour or more, but once you get used to it, they get much faster.”

I forgot his naked form for the moment. “So, I need to kneel for an hour?”

“I’ve made subs kneel just as long if not longer, and not for the sake of shifting.” His eyes darkened, and the voice he used was the same voice he’d used on me when we were in bed.

Arcs of electricity ran through me, and I couldn’t help it when I shivered. The delicious image of submitting to him on my knees was almost too much to bear. And when his hands grabbed at the bottom of my shirt to lift it up over my head, my mind was already in bed, waiting for our bodies to join it.

I moved my hands to explore his body, but his hands around my wrists stopped me.

He shook his head. “That isn’t why I’m doing this.”

I tried not to sound too disappointed. “Where do your clothes go?”

He shrugged helplessly as he went to work on my pants. Fire radiated from my clit, and when his fingers pressed against it, I melted in his arms.

If this isn’t what this is about…why is he fingering—?

“Fuck.” The word came out in a growl, and, as he guided me to the bed, I almost squealed with glee.

He leaned me against the side of the bed but didn’t let me lie down. Against my ear, he whispered, “I need you to relax.”

I tried. God, did I try. But it was hard not to tense up, not to think of his fingers, his lips, his cock, when he removed the rest of my clothes. Chewing at the inside of my cheek, I stepped forward, leaning in to kiss him. He pulled back, but not before kissing me on the forehead. He’d been serious when he’d said no sex. But no kissing as well?

Kissing can lead to other things.

No, it won’t.
Only if you let it.

And I always did.

When every single one of my bones had liquefied from his touch and I thought I couldn’t take any more, Brian guided me back into the centre of the room.

“We’re going to try again,” he said, his voice a lot steadier than mine would’ve been. “Are you ready?”

Ready for what? To take you on the bed? To submit to you? To
—

“Krista.”

Are you ready to shift? Not really
. “Yes.”

“Get on your hands and knees.”

I did, wincing at the floor that felt a lot harder than I’d remembered. Brian circled around me, his eyes always on me, burning at my skin. That wasn’t fair. He got to stare at me while I was naked and I couldn’t do the same to him?

What the hell?

He was to my left, leaning over my shoulder to talk against my ear.

“Come for me.”

My body tensed. Something inside me released as my mind insisted that wasn’t what he’d said. In the next breath, I was looking down at a set of white paws. I glanced up at him. A smile was splayed across his muzzle.

“Never thought that would’ve happened,” he said, sounding somewhat amused.

I blinked, feeling rather confused. “What…?” I turned my head to look back at a tail that was more than likely mine. It waved hello, and I glanced back in Brian’s direction. “What just happened?”

I thought you said it could take up to an hour? Didn’t he tell me to come? Maybe it was shift.

That was probably what it had been. My mind had just been in a different place. Shift and come sounded similar, didn’t they? All I’d heard was ‘for me’. Come or shift…it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t have heard it, anyway.

At least not how I was supposed to hear it.

“I’ll have to remember that little trick for later on,” Brian said, sitting back on his haunches. “I wasn’t actually sure if it would work, but apparently getting you aroused before you shift works better than if we don’t.”

“Yeah…about that. What did you say again?”

Not that I had to hear it, but the argument going on inside my mind was almost as loud and annoying as a car alarm.

No pain. No nausea.
I breathed around my relief. Not because the pain and the other side-effects were gone, but because they didn’t carry over to this form. And, surprisingly enough, considering all the fur I had, I wasn’t warm at all.
Comfortable.

“What did you think I said?” Brian asked, cocking his head at me.

I would’ve bit my tongue if I knew how. “To come?” I bowed my head and lowered my ears, which I assumed was a leopard’s way of blushing because that was exactly how it felt in my mind.

He let out a raspy laugh. “Not quite, but close enough.”

Staring at my paws, I asked, “How was that possible? I shouldn’t have been able to shift that fast…without pain, right?”

Brian released a breath. “If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about shifting, it’s that you can’t overthink things. Though, if I had to guess, I’d say it had something to do with the fact that your body’s been ready to shift for weeks—you just needed permission to do so. Aside from that, don’t trouble yourself with what should’ve happened and what actually did. In fact, I take that back. Don’t think at all.” He perked his ears in my direction. “Don’t think, Kris. Just do. What is your body telling you to do?”