by Q. Zayne
Letting her live stood as one of the best things I’d ever done, overshadowing even what I’d done for my patients who survived catastrophic illnesses and the ones who came through the most challenging surgeries.
I huddled naked within the hollow of a burned-out redwood. Hollywood gets it wrong. We don’t shift into human form with all our clothes and accessories on. We go from animal to human bare-ass naked. I don’t keep a pair of shoes and a full outfit up my ass.
My breath made big angel wings of steam in the night. I once started reading a book that referred to a bear as the alpha of a pack, apparently to fit a fantasy of someone who didn’t know anything about bears. I threw my digital reader against the hearthstones.
It was damp and cold. I shivered without my pelt. There were probably predators in the area, in woods there usually were. And I had no idea how to get back to where I belonged.
My only tie to my other reality was her.
The night seemed to deepen faster than I’d ever seen, as though I were in Alaska, and I couldn’t hear or smell Lida.
I emerged from the trees and longed for her. That’s the only way to describe it. The woods seemed a magic place, so I let my heart speak. Lida, Lida, Lida.
I began to sing, in some strange guttural growl as much like my voice as a bear as like my voice as a man. The sounds coming out of me were a mating song, a love song. I knew that although it was like nothing I’d ever heard before, not from my kind nor from human kind. I was something other here, like a hybrid of myself. A bear-man.
I longed, I called, and she came.
Lida entered the tree circle. Birches swayed like dancing maidens, losing their skirts of leaves. The leaves swirled around her as she transformed. She planted her paws in the musky mulch, bared her feline fangs at me, purred low in her throat and shifted gracefully, nose first, into the graceful, curvy young woman I’d undressed with my eyes and then with my physician’s hands in my office only days ago. Now she seemed to rule my life, like some atavistic goddess out of the work of Robert Graves. Cybele strung with bull testicles, glowing in her fine pale skin under the moon, her tawny, striped hair gleaming like strands of stars.
She walked toward me and I felt like an adolescent who’d never beheld a nude woman before, other than in National Geographic.
I wanted her. My erection strained toward her, aching. No clothes, no lunch box as in my younger days to conceal it.
I stood naked in my desire and waited for her to accept or reject me.
In my office I took her. Here, I wanted her to choose.
She approached closer. She lay down in the leaves and spread her legs.
My heart surged, thankful for her sweet gift. I mounted her, inhaling the gamy odor of heat that emanated from her. Delicious. I speared her deep, no finesse. I was no lover with her. Although man in form, I remained the beast, controlled by the need to mate, to seed her.
My lust tore into her. I grabbed her shoulders and pinned her, grinding into her hard and deep, longing to join with her completely as one being. I held her with all of me, my mind and heart locked to her as much as my body. She arched at me, purring, holding me tight. She grabbed my ass with her feet, rocking with me.
I felt us unified, I saw a glow surrounding us, like the outline of a large creature, similar to the gryphon of myth, a being made from more than one animal. Ursine and feline we were, two shifters in human form, completed with each other.
I found my true mate, although our union was forbidden. I knew that as though it was a law ingrained in me as early as America’s pledge of allegiance, but I didn’t remember how I knew it.
I’d break every law of were-beast and man to keep her. We were one and would be joined forever.
“Doctor, please, you have to come back with me.”
I roused myself from my post-climax daze and stroked her soft, soft hair. The cadences of her speech were like nothing I’d heard before and yet remained familiar as a lullaby.
“Back where?” I felt like I was in a haze, like when I’d gone two days without sleeping during my residency and was still awake writing case notes. What was she talking about?
What had I done? I had to get her dressed and out of my exam room. I’m not proud of that thought, but as a man as much as a bear, the instinct for self-preservation went deep. Taking a patient in my office, if anyone found out, could destroy me. How had I lost control? One glance at her under me, her big eyes and open legs, and I understood. I couldn’t regret it. I levered myself onto my elbows and looked into her anxious face.
“Back where?”
“To my world. It’s another realm. You’ll know it when you see it. It’s where you belong. You’re the only one who can save me, save all of us.”
I stared at her, her words a splash of ice water in my face.
I hadn’t just had sex with a patient, I’d had sex with a delusional patient. I could hear a disgusted judge pronounce my prison sentence, see the condemnatory faces in the court room. I read the headlines denouncing me for violating a young woman who wasn’t competent to give consent. It was a nightmare. The scientist in me stood back from my body still joined to hers and considered my odds of getting out of this with anything left. I shook my head. She blinked and her pupils looked cat-like. No. No. I had to keep my grip on reality. As familiar as she felt, the odds that she was a shifter, too, no. That couldn’t be true.
“I don’t understand.” I felt like a brute. I held my weight off of her. I couldn’t take back what I’d done. Listen. Just listen and try to help her.
“The strangers came and their leader took me captive—” her voice came as a whisper I had to strain to hear. She didn’t look at me, her shame palpable. “He’ll keep me as his property if no one intervenes. They aren’t our kind; they don’t understand about true mates.”
Some of what she said began to make sense, like a voice coming out of the shadows at a play. More truly, like a memory, a story told in the nursery and repeated until it’s part of your mind.
True mates. Recognition stirred in me. Or was it just that she was a beautiful young woman in need, and I wanted to be her hero after all these long years alone?
As bad as I’d already been, I wanted an excuse to get her out of the room so I could search her purse for psych meds. If she was on anti-hallucinogens, that would explain a lot.
“Tell me about the strangers.” I wanted to know her story. As dangerous as it was to remain with her, I didn’t want to let her go. I didn’t want to move, to peel my body from hers and risk never seeing her again.
“Their ship crashed. They can’t get away. But I got away from them. I went to all the elders of our kind and found an old woman, an eagle, who knew. She worked with me and guided me until I was ready to make the leap here. We don’t have time to prepare you. You’ll have to turn off your scientific mind and jump with me.”
“I can’t.” My response came out of my mouth unthinking. As much as I wanted to do anything for her, as a healer, a werebear, and a man who had just taken her and experienced such pleasure my mind barely worked, her words and the concept of leaping to an unknown world filled me with dread. Was it the place I’d imagined being with her as I dozed?
She had to be crazy. Because if she wasn’t, the underpinnings of everything in my life were about to shatter and never mend. Like the pilings of my house above the beach splintering, if the Big One hit.
She swallowed and turned her head. The dark and gold stripes of her hair curtained her face. The wounded look intensified in her eyes.
I withdrew gently and kissed her cheek. Regret for her broken mind filled my heart. I’d give her time to put herself together and then we’d talk. That’s what I told myself. I zipped up, tucked in my shirt, straightened my white coat, nodded to her and left.
Tiger Tiger
Even in luscious, curvy human form, Lida retained tawny stripes in her hair reminiscent of her pelt markings; she had those inscrutable feline eyes and sinuous grace as though she had
a longer spine than most people. She approached slowly, giving me time to master my reaction to her and keep from jumping on her delicious body like an animal. I wanted to, more than anything I wanted to land on her back, hold her with my teeth and hands and rut with her as rough as we both needed to do.
I looked away to keep from staring at her beauty, all her vulnerable female bits exposed and so enticing in the cold, her nipples crinkled, goosebumps down her arms and thighs. I wanted to clasp the wings of her shoulders and draw her to me as the most precious gift. I wanted to throw her on the ground and fuck her hard. I growled. Even in human shape I sometimes forgot my voice and words in frustration. It made my nurses giggle and some of my patients sigh with desire. I wasn’t immune to my effect on women, but I’d never taken advantage of it with a patient until now.
That night, she wore a dress of dove gray silk dipped in blood red from thighs to hem. It clung to her like skin and lay open down her back with folds of red hanging like miniature bull fighter capes from her shoulders. I imagined her torn by my claws with her blood running down her heart-shaped ass, the marks I’d leave on her. Pale scars showing on her skin all her life to commemorate our mating.
I wanted everything with her, everything. Except to risk her. As much as I longed to hurt her, I forced myself down, like a human mastering a dog. Down boy, down. I mustn’t do any of the things I longed to do to her. For once in my life, I didn’t trust myself to be able to stop if I ever started on her, if I let my bear all the way out of control. I could damage her—or kill her. I’d never burned for a woman the way I burned for Lida.
She led me into the garden, and into a maze, a boxwood labyrinth.
She was playing with me. Catlike, with that seeming cruelty. A lack of awareness of other lives. I was what to her? The older man who mounted her, the doctor who crossed the line?
Did she have any idea how much power that gave her, the power to destroy me? She didn’t seem the type to care about that. She seemed more a creature of that woods that existed outside of our time and place. It seemed like a vision, a shared vision perhaps, yet somehow real. The place as familiar as Lida, recalling the almost remembered things that made me ache when I smelled the forest in autumn.
She led me down sinuous paths, now visible, now gone.
Each time she looked close enough to reach out and touch, to slide my fingers down her spine, she disappeared. A silky, sexy song of fabric and she was gone. The boxwood tunnels kept closing around me like her woods.
I longed to go back there with her. I wanted to chase her with the full abandon I felt when I didn’t have to consider my life here in this town, my neighbors, my other patients. Reality was too disturbing to consider: the consequences of who we were together, of what was happening to me, this opening of my heart like my scalpel slicing through scar tissue.
I bled for her. In secret, I bled. I knew a longing I’d never expected to feel. Any hope of a mate had closed off long ago.
Lida, Lida roused me, all of me, the hidden beast no one here must ever see. She saw me and didn’t flee. I, all of me, was who she came to find. Even though I wasn’t what she expected. It tormented me when I could think. What had she expected? A younger man, probably.
If she needed my help, I had to give it.
The woods freed me from the inhibitions I had against mating with one who was not my kind. In that place, outside the strictures of my upbringing as a bear, it didn’t matter that her pelt was different than mine. I didn’t care that our features, natures and cultures were different. I didn’t care at all. Coming back to my reality was like being gripped by gravity and falling hard, that jolt of a dream ending. I still felt the shock of it, and my mind fell into judgment, thinking I was wrong and bad to even want what I wanted. The good man in me, separate from the bear, likewise judged I was doing something wrong, committing an unconscionable sin. I had committed the worst act of my life. Put the events of her first visit to me as a patient in front of any ethics committee. I deserved to be hanged. My bear nature argued that we were two creatures mating. She needed me as much as I needed her. That didn’t change the fact that she came to me as a patient and I had unprotected sex with her in my office.
She couldn’t be my patient anymore, that was the first thing.
Her hands gripped my chest and her soft body pressed against my back and ass. Somehow she’d won her way through the labyrinth and stalked me from behind. I swung around and pulled her to me, gripped her at the small of her back and kissed her breathless.
She met my passion, her tongue shy then probing, her body shaking, swaying on tip toe to reach me better. I grabbed her ass and hoisted her to my hips.
“I want you. Right now, Doctor. Fill me up.”
I freed my cock. My fingers found the gown’s slit and caressed her bare leg. I shook with desire, excited to find her free of restricting hose. Keeping her secure with my arm, I pulled her gown and panties out of the way and positioned her on my cock. I lowered her body, impaling her. My sacrifice in this sacred glade.
“Oh, oh.” She moaned as she slid all the way down my cock.
Easy to take her, holding her with her legs wrapped around me, pushing her into the boxwood to allow the maze to score her tender back as we fucked. I wouldn’t mark her with my claws and teeth, but she’d wear marks from this mating for me.
She growled, purred and mewed. I bucked into her in a slow, emphatic rhythm, following her excitement, her breath, her moans. I ground deep in her, making our mating sensuous, making it last. I thumbed her bud, working her to find her best pleasure spot, stroking her and not letting her go, making her cries rise higher and higher as I rocked her sweet, snug body on me, working her so good to make her come. She bit her lip. The moonlight showed the strain on her face, how tight she held herself.
“Let go for me, Lida. That’s it, beautiful. Feel me, feel me, my beauty. Yes. Yes, I’ve got you.” I held her and thumbed her, didn’t let her get away. She raked my back, angry, shocked, and out of control at last. Her face opened with a cry of wild joy.
She shook and voiced her coming in ululations. Her gushing orgasm soaked my dress slacks. I growled in pleasure at the hot emission, her pleasure, her essence, all over me.
I let go, joining her, filling her, giving her everything, a deep hard thrust, shooting all the way inside her, feeling as though I were swelling in her hot, snug core. Oh, sweet.
“Lida, Lida, love.”
She didn’t call me Doctor, only purred. She rested her face against me, soft hair spilling on my throat. I smelled my blood and hers with her mating juices. Her claw marks on my back stung.
I lifted her to uncouple us, let her slide down my body and held her close against me, our hearts beating in unison. No way I could let her go.
The difference in my back office didn’t register at first, just a sense that something had changed.
Her scent alerted me. Like jasmine in sunlight, heady, clinging. She lay nude on the exam table, her feet in the stirrups, her treasure exposed right at the edge, right at the height convenient to enter her. I’d never thought of the table that way. Now it was for sex, because of Lida. She held onto the sides of the table so hard her fingers had turned pale, as though braced for a blow.
“Please. Please, doctor. Do it again, like the first time. Don’t talk, just take.” Her voice was barely a whisper. I had barely sense enough to lock the door. I fumbled with my zipper and rushed to her.
The sight of her and her entreaty maddened me and I was hard and crazy.
I forced my way into her, gasping and growling at the tight fit, the impossible pleasure of her vulnerability, her pain. I treasured her wincing, her whimpering, her legs shaking as I rammed all the way into her full force, taking her as my own, shoving deep, giving her the brutal fuck she needed.
Even when I was fully a man she roused something that was nothing like the educated and trained physician I spent my life being, the gentleman I made myself in every sense. I was an animal in a
man’s body and she was my sacrifice to some atavistic god I’d known in some far away forest so far back in time there was no language, only the wordless worship of something immense and all-powerful. I celebrated that power, slamming her tender, voluptuous body, making her breasts and belly shake, making her cry.
I grabbed her wrists and pinned them over her head, stretching her lovely torso so her breasts rose, her throat arched. She clenched around me, wet and fiery from my friction, my forced possession of her treasure. She shook, panting and crying out as I levered myself higher on her mound, mashing her bud as I ground hard on her, forcing deeper and harder to make her feel me for days.
I wanted her to wake aching and remember what I did. I wanted to be the bad doctor and bad bear she’d never forget. She yelled as her climax took her. I put my hand over her mouth to muffle her cries as I shot right up her womb.
“Here’s your medicine. I’m glad you came back for more.” I felt dirty saying it, looking at the tears on her flawless young face, the redness on the wrists I still pinned. Hot, damn she was hot. Jolts went through her, giving me aftershocks as I softened inside her in the pool of our juices, held in her tight sheathe that seemed made to fit me. Snug, snug sweetness. All mine.
I released her mouth, feeling her tears cooling on the side of my hand. I licked them off. Salty and sweet like her intimate scent.
“Thank you, Doctor,” she whispered.
Perhaps that was the secret of her accent. She was from there, that other realm, not of this world. Was that why she hadn’t fully filled out the form on the reception desk? I looked at her intake sheet. It was illegible. How could one expect a great cat to write?
