Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 258(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 258(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
A little voice in the back of my mind tells me that if he wanted them, he could have had them at any time, that he chose me and told me that I’d be his mate for life. But I am not good enough for him. I look around myself, I see the family I came from, and I see the place I came from. I see how poor and stupid and unworthy we all are, how we keep choosing that poorness and stupidity and unworthiness. My uncle drank himself stupid. My aunt has wiles. She didn’t need to live like this. Even Colton had potential before he started getting picked up by the cops in his early teens.
I thought I was going to be the one who was going to escape. But there’s no escaping what’s inside you. I am made of polluted land and a neglected home. I am made of poverty and cruelty, and going to college and getting a job at a big shiny corporation and getting fucked by my boss isn’t going to change that.
These are the things my aunt would say, but she doesn’t need to say them. Now I say them to myself.
“Show me that wolf form,” she says.
I’m not even sure I can assume it on command.
“I haven’t been in it much,” I stammer. “I don’t know.”
“I can force it out of you if I have to,” she says.
I catch a scent from her that I don’t think I have ever smelled before. It is one of pure female dominant threat. She will hurt me if she needs to.
“I just need a minute,” I say.
I go to the bathroom, because it’s the only place in the house that has a lock on the door. I take off my clothes, and I look at myself in the mirror. Deep dark eyes look back at me. There’s a stranger in the glass, someone who used to think better of me and now thinks nothing of me at all.
It might be a relief to turn myself into the beast now. I think less in that form. Things hurt less. Life is much more simple.
I take a deep breath in, and I let it out, and I embrace the pain and sink into myself as a simpler, better thing.
Shifting hurts. But it hurts less when you’re already in so much pain. The physical ache of shifting flesh and bone is preferable to the agony of circling thoughts of regret and shame. I shrink in some ways, and I grow in others, and instead of being naked, I am covered in fur and a thick pelt which protects me in a way my thin human skin never could.
I also realize that I just shifted in the bathroom after locking the door, and my wolf body doesn’t have opposable thumbs. I’ve locked myself in here.
It takes me a moment to even understand. My mind is so different in this state. All I have to do is knock a latch over, which I can do with nose and paws. My claws scrabble inefficiently at the door, chipping old paint. It takes a moment to pull the latch open, but I manage it.
The smell of the place is intense. It should repulse me, but this is where I was raised. This is home. I smell my family. I smell their similarity to me. It is a comfort. But there is something else going on too. An absence of scent. An absence of my mate. I miss Cain. I miss him like I am missing something fundamental to my survival. I missed him in my usual human form too, but being an animal makes it so much more intense. There are no other thoughts to distract me from what I am experiencing. There is just the experience itself. The longing. The need.
“What’s taking so long?” My aunt’s voice rings out, disrupting my misery. I have to do what she wants. I’ve always had to do what she wants. For as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve done what she wanted. That’s how life works.
I pad out through the hall and present myself to my aunt, and by default, Dale and Colton.
There’s a brief gasp, which is quite astonishing from a woman who never seems surprised by anything.
“Look at you!”
I didn’t think they’d be surprised. I thought for sure I would look just like them. I thought she’d make some scathing comment about me, but I didn’t think she would be surprised.
“Look at this!” She points at me, laughing. Colton joins in with a snickering nastiness. He doesn’t care what I look like. He doesn’t see me at all. I’m like wallpaper to these people. Wallpaper that occasionally gets them a beer. Even Uncle Dale manages a chuckle.
“What the… I said retriever. I didn’t think you’d actually look like a dog!”