by A. E. Grace
“Oh, Miles,” she breathed into his ear. “Oh, God. Don’t stop, don’t you dare fucking stop!”
He claimed her lips with his, forcing the kiss upon her moaning mouth.
“I’ll never stop,” he whispered, his voice imbued with affectionate, impassioned double-meaning, but Circe was too wrapped up in her own impending rapture to be caught off guard by it.
“Faster!” she screamed. “Fuck, fuck, FUCK!”
She crossed that line, like a thump in her chest, and it was just a full sprint to the edge. She dived off.
She soared.
“FUUUUCCKK!” she wailed, digging her nails into Miles’ back as he drove her through her crisis, his deft fingers slowing, drawing out her orgasm, prolonging it.
“Oooohhh!” she moaned, pushing her head back against the bed, angling her chin upward to the ceiling, teeth gritted and toes curled.
Her bliss, sharp, so intense it almost hurt, crested, and like the tide receding at sunset, her sensations cooled, and she met his eyes with her own heavy-lidded orbs, and told him in a voice so lust-laced that it even surprised herself: “Come inside me, Miles.”
He grinned at her, before scooping up her head with his huge hand and pulling it upward for the kiss. And he held the kiss, tongue dancing with hers, while he fucked her shallowly, just with the tip, his thrusts rapid, like the firing pistons of a sports car.
She moaned continuously as he brought himself to bear, and she held him tight when she felt his body grow tight, when he drove himself all the way inside her for that final, gushing thrust. And then he was twitching, groaning, emptying himself for all he was worth within her.
The thought of his seed filling her up turned her on to astonishing extent, and in a moment of pure impulse, she reached for her clit and rubbed it wildly, bringing herself to a second climax, joining in with her bliss at the tail-end of his.
And then it was over. He lay on her, breathing hard, and she held him tight, panting back.
Sweating, gasping for air, never wanting to let this moment of closeness go, Circe realized just how much she had wanted that. This whole time, for two weeks… had been agonizing self-restraint.
She clasped onto him, pressed his body as close to hers as she could, felt their sweaty skin stick together like static joining two sheets of paper.
“Wow,” she heard him say, his voice deep. “That was amazing. Give me a moment, and I’ll mount you again.”
Circe laughed.
I’ll mount you again.
*
Miles held his lover in his arms, smelling her hair, and letting his hands run over the shape of her body, over each part of her he could grab. With an arm around her back, his hand nuzzled where her breast met her armpit, he could feel its weight, its softness, and he loved it.
“What’s it like?” she asked, her voice scratchy. She leaned up and reached for a glass of water on the bedside table, and sipped on it before passing the crystal container to him.
“What’s what like?” Miles asked, the cool liquid running down his gullet, soothing. The two had reached completion a pair of times over, and were now exhausted.
“You know. Being a shapeshifter.”
“Depends where you’re standing. To me, it’s normal. I guess the main thing is that it’s kind of addictive.”
“Addictive?”
“Yeah,” he said, leaning his head against hers. She crossed her hands over her belly, and he pulled a sheet up over her. He found her fingers with his, and weaved them in between hers. “You just want to do it more.”
“Be an animal?”
“Yes.”
“So why not be one all the time?”
“We’re human first. Animal second. It’s a bit like flexing a muscle. It can be tiring. It takes energy, exertion. Holding it forever would be difficult… and it makes you loopy.”
“Loopy?”
“I’ve met a few in my time. A couple of them stayed in the shift as much as they could. They became strange. I can’t really describe it. Just, you know, off-kilter. Like that guy on the train who acts weirdly that everybody avoids. They became like that.”
“Do you know many others?”
“No.”
She leaned up and turned in his arms, looking at him. He saw a great swell of compassion in her eyes. She probably thought he was lonely. But he was no poor thing.
“Why not?”
“Don’t care to.”
“Is there any particular reason?”
“This is all off the record, right?”
Her eyes gleamed with playfulness, but Miles didn’t dare doubt her intelligence or ambition. After all, she had done all this, followed him around, had gone along with vague terms and completely undefined roles, not to mention his frequent unprofessional behavior. She wasn’t just brave. She was driven. And he admired that about her. But it also made him weary.
“I don’t know,” she said, kissing him quickly on the lips. “After all, you showed me of your own volition.”
“Yeah… I’m starting to regret that now.”
Her voice grew serious. “Really?”
“No. But I am starting to wonder if I was careless.”
“You were.”
“So you could print this.”
“I could.”
“And I’d have no recourse?”
“Not entirely true, but you know what professional capacity I’m here under, and you did sign those papers Ms. Jennings had sent over.”
“I did,” Miles said, sucking in air and biting his teeth together. “Oops.”
“You don’t really care, do you?”
Miles considered it. Perhaps he didn’t. “I don’t know. Maybe. But I haven’t told anybody until now, so maybe I do care.”
“Nobody? In your whole life?”
“Nobody who didn’t already know when they saw me.”
“Why?”
“Never felt the need to.”
“But you did tonight?”
Miles pulled her back down onto the bed, lying her in between his legs against his body. Both beneath the sheet, he ran his hands over her breasts, felt her nipples grow hard beneath the touch, but when he started to send his hand south she stopped him.
“But you did tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted you to know.”
She leaned back, looking up over her head at him. “Why me?”
Kissing her forehead, he shrugged. “Why do you think, Circe?”
She remained silent, but grabbed his hand and pushed it back down over her stomach, and he pinched her, causing her to squirm, before running his fingers through her pubic hair.
“So why don’t you care to meet others like you, Miles? If I were you, I would.”
Miles sighed. That was a long story, and he told her as much. “Well, there’s probably something else you should know, too.”
After a pause she hit his thigh with her knuckles. “Well, tell me, then!”
“You’re pushy with your questions, you know? You’ll make a great journalist someday.”
“Ha, you don’t even know what a journalist is if you think all we do is ask questions.”
“Guilty. I’m just a dumb race-car driver, driving around in circles endlessly while risking my life.”
“Exactly,” Circe said. “That’s exactly what you are. And don’t think I can’t tell that you’re deflecting. Now stop changing the subject and tell me the truth about yourself. I want to know.”
Miles ran a finger down either side of her nether lips. He could feel himself growing hard again. God, he would ravish her again if he didn’t get the impression she needed some answers.
“We live a lot longer than regular old humans.”
“Oh? And how old are you?”
“That’s the thing,” he said. “I stopped counting at one hundred.”
She sat up, pulled his hand from in between her legs, and scooted forward on her bum, before turnin
g around to face him, loosely crossing her legs. “What?”
“That was a few years ago, too.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I’m not.” He tilted his head to the side. “You find that harder to believe than what you just saw?”
“Hell yes! You don’t look a day over thirty five.”
“What do thirty-five year olds look like?”
“Like you.”
“Not many of them look like me.”
“Shut up,” she said, but she nodded, conceding. “So, tell me your long story. Why don’t you want to meet other shifters?”
Miles pushed his lips together. “I once met a shapeshifter, a wolf. We got into a bit of a scuffle. He broke my back, my spinal column, but the cord didn’t sever. I was in my cheetah state.”
Circe gasped. “That’s more than a scuffle.
“Shifting when you’re injured like that helps, but it’s painful as hell. The most painful thing I ever experienced.”
“Why did he do that?”
“He was trying to kill me.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing,” Miles said, shaking his head. “He was crazy. He said he was going to kill all shapeshifters. This was about forty years or so ago. His name was…” Miles trailed off, dipping his toes back into his newly reopened puddles of memory. “His name was Marcus Ranum. Big guy, bigger wolf. Savage. Evil. I could tell he was going to kill me. I couldn’t move, you know? I had no support. When you walk on four legs, and you break your back, it’s like… it’s a strange feeling. It’s like the stretch of your skin is holding you upright.”
She winced at him. “So why didn’t he kill you?”
Miles grinned, then. “A tiger saved my life.”
“A tiger?”
“Yes. Not a huge tiger. I actually researched it afterward. This was back when we didn’t have the internet. I had to go to a library.”
“You poor thing,” Circe mocked.
“As far as I could tell, it was a Bali tiger.”
“You were in Bali?”
“No,” Miles said. “I was in Cape Town.”
“What was a Bali tiger doing in Cape Town?”
“Well, that’s one question, yes. Another I found when doing my research was that the Bali tiger had gone extinct nearly ten years earlier. So, put two and two together, it becomes obvious this was a-”
“Shapeshifter,” Circe said over him.
“Yes. Saved my life. Fought the wolf, drove it off. I had shifted back into a man then. The tiger never came back. Not long later, an ambulance picked me up. I mean, we were in the middle of the streets at night time. Somebody must have heard something. Tell you what, I had a hard time explaining what I was doing naked, with a broken back and a busted up face.”
“You never saw the tiger again?” Circe held onto his calf, before sliding her hand up and down his thigh.
“No.”
“What happened to the wolf?”
“No idea.”
“So that’s why you don’t want to meet any more shapeshifters? Because you ran into one bad egg? That’s like somebody not wanting to interact with humans because there are bad ones.”
“No,” Miles said. “It’s not just that. Afterward, my curiosity was piqued, obviously. I mean, why would a shapeshifter want to kill off his own kind? And to have a tiger show up miraculously to save my life? I started to wonder just how many there were. I started asking questions, following strange sightings in foreign newspapers that all came a week late in those days. Anyway, whisperings got to me about wolf sightings in Borneo.”
“Borneo,” she echoed.
“On the Indonesian side. A wolf there is definitely an unusual sight. Anyway, I went, did a bit of digging, and ran into a man named Leon. Big guy, sociopath if I ever met one. He was just… cold. There was something completely off about him. He was a wolf, too. But he let me talk to him. I remember sitting in a small fishing village by the river, drinking arak.”
“Arak?”
“Local moonshine.”
“I thought that could make you blind.”
“If it’s got methanol in it, yeah. I guess we got lucky. Anyway, he’d been alive far, far longer than me at that point. He told me about some of our history, about how my kind had been hunted throughout history, our existence so rooted in fear that we were erased, relegated to myth and nighttime whispers between children.”
“You know, for a dumb race car driver, you do have a way with words.”
“Anyway, I asked about Marcus, why he would have attacked me. This guy, Leon, he seemed to know Marcus, though he wouldn’t tell me how or why. He just laughed, told me that Marcus was damaged goods. The shift had ruined him.”
“What did you do next?”
“Asked about the tiger. He said he knew who I was talking about, and that it was lucky he was there to save my life. Nothing I didn’t already know.”
“He didn’t tell you who it was?”
“I didn’t ask.” Miles shrugged. “I just left. I thanked Leon, left him some money and told him to buy more arak on me, and went back to Cape Town, where I was living at the time. I had just won the Can-Am final race in Las Vegas, and had gone back home. I just tried to forget about it all. I don’t care about it. I don’t want to get involved. I don’t want to get swept up in any sort of politics. I just want to race.”
“You were racing then?”
“Been racing since before that, babe.”
“Under Miles Cohen?”
“No. Matthew Cohen. Miles Matthew. Avery Cohen. Miles Avery. Matthew Avery.” He ticked them off on his fingers and grinned. “My full name is Miles Matthew Avery Cohen, believe it or not. I just used variations.”
Circe pulled the sheets over her shoulders. “Nobody noticed?”
“Nobody was looking. So… anyway… Now you know my big secret.”
“It’s why you race so well.”
Miles nodded. “Yes.”
“So, you mean, you have some crossover, right? Like, animal instincts?”
“Clever girl.”
“Then it’s kind of like cheating. You’ve got an unfair advantage.”
“Why do you think I chose ‘Cheat’ for my nickname?”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
Miles shook his head. “No. I race for myself. I couldn’t care less about the standings, that’s just an added benefit. I couldn’t care less about the fairness of the race. Going fast makes me feel good. I do what makes me feel good. That will never change. Besides, it’s not like I should turn my gifts into a handicap. Why should I abstain because I was born different?”
Circe nodded. “I can get behind that.”
Silence shrouded them for a moment, and Miles gazed at her naked body, her thick thighs that he wanted to squeeze, her wide hips that he wanted to hold, her heavy beasts that he wanted to cup.
“Circe,” he spoke eventually, his cock rock hard, hidden from sight beneath the sheets that were tented around his knees.
“Yeah?”
“Want to go again?”
*
So, tonight was a bit crazy. Miles is asleep, and I’m at the table, scribbling into you, dear diary.
Yeah, that was quite a night. I’m not going to write the details down, though. I think that would be a bit embarrassing.
But yeah. Wow! What can I say? The man knows what he’s doing in the bedroom!
He’s a shapeshifter, too.
I mean, he can actually change fucking shape into an animal. Just one animal, though.
I don’t know why I’m not more bewildered. It was shocking at first, yes. Actually, it was a bit gross. Watching him shift, I recalled that documentary on meat processing plants. Just… ew!
I guess a lot of things make sense now. Isn’t that funny. More makes sense after learning that he is a shapeshifter. A creature of myth.
I’m suddenly in the mood for a scary movie.
Yeah, I know. I crossed a line. Now it’s
all muddled. I’ll have to figure that one out by myself. Suffice it to say, getting your personal life and professional life mixed up is probably the biggest rookie mistake in the book.
But, then again, this was personal from the start. Miles picked me because he liked me. I guess I always knew. I could hardly believe it, though. I’m not exactly… never mind.
We’re going back to his home in Bali tomorrow. He’s got a flat in Bahrain – where the next race is – but I told him I wanted to go back to Bali.
I’m *not* going back to London this time around. I don’t want to deal with the flat. I know Jake and Gary have it all fucked up again.
Shapeshifter!
How can I become one? Is that a bad thought to have? Is there any downside at all to being a shapeshifter? I can’t imagine so! Even living for nearly forever is a seductive thought.
He’s so old! When I think about it too long, it’s a bit icky. I mean he doesn’t look old. He doesn’t really act old. He acts like a boy, actually. Totally childish sometimes. But when I think about the fact that I just slept with a one hundred year old man and…
Stop it, brain!
Go to sleep, Circe!
It’ll all still be real when you wake up.
On the eve of the Sakhir Grand Prix in Bahrain, and Miles once again finishing the qualifying round last to start at the back of the pack, Circe was beginning to wonder about him. Since they had arrived in the scorching Arab island kingdom, he had been quieter than usual, more reclusive, and less talkative.
They had made a habit of seeing each other nearly non-stop, and sharing a bed nearly every night for the last two weeks, and so his changed behavior was in stark contrast to the man she had gotten to know since meeting him in Melbourne.
And it worried Circe. Not just the usual insecurities and questioning – Is he bored? Is it over? Is this the beginning of the end? – But because whatever was bothering Miles was having such a pronounced effect on him that his lap times at practice the day before were fifteen percent slower across the board.
“Miles,” she said, sitting down next to him on the sofa in their rather disgustingly luxurious hotel suite. It was a penthouse with spectacular views of the stretching desert, a fully-equipped kitchen, and more square footage than a family of five would need.
