--

“Jake, what did you dream last night?” Deme asked as she came into the kitchen, tying the tie on her silk robe and reaching for the coffee pot.

Jake put the paper down and looked at her hard as she poured coffee into her favorite mug, then turned to lean a hip on the counter and watch him. He gulped. “I dreamed about the few days after Derek left me for dead on that tree. Why?”

She gulped cautiously at her coffee. “I dreamed that, too.”

Something was upsetting her; he could see it in her eyes. “So? Probably nothing more than the fact we crossed through the area where it all started. Deme, what’s wrong?” She’d started shaking her head.

“I think we dreamed the same dream, together.”

He frowned. “Together,” he repeated, trying to make sure he’d understood her correctly.

She nodded. “Together. Last night I felt…pain, emotions that I don’t recall feeling. I think they were yours.”

“You’re sure?”

She nodded again.

“How can that be possible? Can two people be so close as to share dreams?”

“People, probably not. But shape shifters, who knows? There are so many variables to our life, Jake. Nearly anything is possible.” She smiled, a wicked glint her eyes. “Besides, I rather like the idea of being so close as to share dreams.”

Jake extended an arm for her and she came to him, settling into his lap. He tugged at the slack knot she had made in the robe tie and it came undone, then parted the soft material to reveal even softer, naked skin underneath. His hands caressed her skin at her waist, moving up her sides, back and ribcage until he reached her breasts and could cup the fullness of them. They tightened in his hands, her nipples hardening as she laid her head against his. He squeezed, drawing his hands down from her body to the tips, again and again until she was squirming against him and he was hard and ready.

His loose jeans were easy enough to undo and once she had removed all of the cloth, he came free. Their eyes had been locked on his emerging cock, but then locked with each other as Deme stood up, the slid down, taking him completely into her body.

He thrust up against her and she twisted down against him. Hot and hard, tight and slick, it took only a moment for them to climax over the edge, still locked deeply together. She collapsed over him and he collapsed back over the chair.

After several moment of dazed silence, they began to realize the world around them again. When Deme realized that they were still dressed, she blushed wildly and Jake just grinned with reckless male pride. He kissed her, slowly and deeply, rubbing his hands over her back inside the robe. She melted back into him, the slight realization that she should get up fading with the rest of her thoughts.

Neither of them made it to work.

--

Jake sat at the desk in the den of the house later that day, tossing a ball between his hands, his mind in other places. Lately he’d been thinking a lot about the past. Why he didn’t know; though the past was never far from his present. The memories of those days refused to leave him alone, not matter what he tried. Therapy, meditation, a wild run as a tiger in the woods, hot and wild love with Deme. Nothing made the feelings and haunted remembrance leave him. It had been five years ago—why wouldn’t it all just go away?

Maybe he should stop trying to run from it. It was an approach Deme had suggested only slightly a few days before. It was worth a shot, he decided, since nothing else was working.

Always a writer, Jake decided to face his past head on in the form of words. He pulled his notebook and a pen from one of the desk drawers and flipped to a blank page.

He started writing….

I still remember the bone-deep exhaustion that consumed me that day we left the cabin in the woods. I was glad when Deme stopped to make an attempt at locating Derek, because I was on the verge of collapsing anyway.

I thought I would die there. I kept thinking about Derek and his thugs bullying me in the woods, about the knife in my shoulder, and how it wasn’t fair that I’d been strong enough to survive that, but now would fall to mere tiredness.

Deme took care of me, though. For some reason that I’ve only just recently truly understood, she refused to let me die, to leave me. She shifted into the tigress to carry me. I’d never seen a tigress shifter in her alternate form before and despite the weariness I was both fascinated, awed and aroused. I tried to stay awake so I could remember the experience later on, but couldn’t manage it.

The next time I woke up enough to remember, I was in a cramped building that stank of a city. Another woman who looked a lot like my tigress was watching over me and when she realized that I’d come to, she called for Deme. The other woman was Deme’s older sister, Ana.

We stayed with Ana for a long time. The city offered a strange kind of protection; with so many people around the only real way for Derek or any of his henchmen to find us was by direct contact. The currents of energy in a city are too powerful and plentiful for a shifter’s to stick out.

Both Deme and Ana taught me things about being a tiger shifter. About controlling the urge to shift, about shifting efficiently. They taught me about things that were necessary for health, like the regular consumption of raw meat (something that I had lacked all of my life, and once I had had the meat for a few weeks, all three of us noticed how much stronger I was). Ana said I was lucky that they had managed to begin teaching me while I was still growing. She said that if I’d been through with puberty before the changes had been made that they wouldn’t have done hardly anything.

I remember how Ana teased me, and so often in a sexual manner. Deme and I weren’t lovers at the time, and I was still too naïve to really understand much. One memory that really sticks out for me was when Ana told me a joke.

“A horny husband was helping his wife set a password on their computer. He typed in ‘penis.’ His wife fell over laughing when the computer told them it was too short.”

Ana hadn’t been able to contain her laughter, but I didn’t understand. I looked to Deme, hoping she might enlighten me, but she was staring at my lap. I knew instantly what she was thinking about, and she didn’t think mine was too short.

It was months after we met before Deme and I made love.

Jake stopped writing to recall the memory. It had been wonderful, violate. He’d been terrified, shaking. She’d been shaking, too. But their bodies joined and moving against each other had filled a gap in his heart that he hadn’t realized had been there.

I was so nervous I was trembling. She was, too. She made the first move; I’d been changing and she had been watching me, coming through the door and locking it behind her when I had stripped off my shirt. She skimmed her hands up my chest. I was so lost at that moment. Hers, completely.

That night changed both of us. I think we realized that we didn’t have to be loners. That someone cared, loved each of us. Later that I night, while Deme was asleep, I lay awake, holding her, crying because I’d finally found someone to love, someone to call home. It was one of the most fulfilling nights of my life.

Much as we would have loved to melt away into our own romantic little world, though, we couldn’t. Derek had always had impeccable timing and this round was no different.

He cornered me in the woods, recognizing me despite the fact that I was in my alternate form. It told me that he had known I was a shifter all along.

Derek thought I would be an easy catch. I know because I’ll never forget the look of pure surprise on his face when I fought back, maiming one of his men and permanently scarring his face with three slashes.

I was out numbered, though, and I knew it. I wouldn’t have made it out if Deme and Ana hadn’t come for me. I still don’t know how they knew, but they did.

The hunt was on, though. The three of us went back to Ana’s city apartment. Deme and I packed the little we could carry and left, leaving Ana, despite her protests.

“We could so easily die in the next couple of days, Ana. I won’t put you in that kind of danger.”

“But you’ll put yourself there, and Jake there, and expect me to be okay with it?”

“I don’t expect you to be okay with it. But I expect you to trust me.”

I didn’t want to leave; it was cowardice, but I’d found somewhere safe. Why couldn’t Derek just go to hell and leave us alone? I didn’t have an answer then, so I went with Deme. I vowed that night as we ran that I would follow her anywhere, that nothing would ever separate us.

Derek followed us; we went slowly enough to ensure that he did. That he left Ana alone.

It was Deme’s planning that set the trap, that tripped it, and eventually led to my brother’s death. I was the bait, though. It was easy enough to do; the real problem was both of us getting over our inhibitions about killing a human being. Derek had never truly seen a tigress shifter until the moment of his death. He never had the chance to understand.

I remember the blood that coated Derek’s body, and Deme. It clung to her teeth where she’d ripped at his throat. When she shifted back into the woman I knew intimately, I was violently sick. It took me several days to be able to stand the sight of her after that. And I know it killed her, to be so revolting to me. I still don’t know what, precisely, upset me so much. There were so many things…

But Derek’s death brought closure to us. And taught both of us the power and responsibility we wield by being shifters.

Jake set aside the pen and notebook, wondering at what he’d written. His brother’s death had brought him closer, when he was still struggling with the past? But then he realized that the closer he’d written of was something different. It wasn’t his problems with his history, it was his understand of himself as a shifter, and of the world he lived in. It was like those weeks he’d spent training physically, mentally and emotionally with Deme and Ana had all been ultimately for Derek’s death. So, yes, he had that closure.

And as he thought of the power that he wielded, even still as a relatively untried shifter, and he thought about the influence that Deme had, he thought maybe he understood his brother’s fear and hatred of shifters for the first time. If one of Jake’s kind so chose, she or he could manipulate the world around them, change it in ways a human could never hope to.

The weight of that responsibility settled on his shoulders firmly. It was not a burden he had expected to gain that afternoon, but it was one Deme had carried for a long time.

He realized something else, though. He would never escape his past; it would always be a part of him. He still didn’t know what to do with it—reject it, forget it, accept it and move on. But he knew now he couldn’t out run it. He could only survive it. And since he knew it would revisit him, he was determined to face his fears, and his past.

And he would. Jake smiled as Deme came into the den with two cups of something steaming. He would.