Chapter 8
Lydia
I wake up the next morning sore for reasons I can’t remember initially, but that come rushing back the moment I reach down between my legs and feel the still swollen folds of my lips.
That was fucking wild. I have been completely ravaged, beyond what sex has ever made me feel like before.
He knotted in me, that thick ring of cock flesh keeping him deep inside me while his cum filled me and found its way deep into my womb. I know what it means to be bred.
“Baby,” he murmurs, reaching for me with a hand that I swear to god is bigger and hairier than it was before. He snugs me back against his body and I rotate to bury my face in his chest.
“I don’t think you entirely came back,” I mumble while trapped in the warm grip of his embrace.
“Hmm?” He pulls back a little so he can hear me.
“I said I don’t think you entirely came back,” I repeat. “You’re not the man you were before the forest.”
“No,” he says. “My cock certainly isn’t. Are you very sore?”
“I can feel it,” I tell him.
“Poor baby,” he says, dropping a sweet kiss on my forehead and running his hand down my back to cup my ass. He pats me there, where it is still sore, but I feel comforted anyway, because brain chemicals are odd like that sometimes.
I snuggle up into him for a bit longer and close my eyes.
He is different. He smells different. I think he even sounds different, if I am completely honest. I didn’t want to notice the changes all at once, or I put them down to the fact he had just emerged from three weeks in the wild as a beast. But I am wondering if he really did not shift all the way back to being entirely human. I’m wondering if he ever will.
I drift off again for a little bit, and when I wake up again there is the smell of coffee, toast, and eggs, because he has brought me all three of these things in bed.
“Aw, thank you, that’s sweet,” I say, very much pleased to be taken care of.
“You’re welcome,” he says. “Do you need to see a doctor, or do you think you are okay?”
“From our sex? I think I am okay,” I say. “It aches, but it’s not too bad.”
“Good,” he says. “I don’t ever want to think I’ve hurt you. You deserve to be taken care of and looked after.”
I think back to the ravaging he gave me last night, the relentless mating and endless orgasms that left me feeling wrung out. His version of taking care of me might not be all eggs on toast the morning after.
I start eating. The eggs are really good, lightly scrambled and fluffy.
The toast is crispy and the butter has melted just right.
I feel content, a warmth sinking through my tummy to find my soul.
I’d been single for a while before this, and I hadn’t planned on that changing any time soon.
But now, I think I am in a relationship.
We haven’t made it official, but endless amounts of sex and a vigil by a forest are pretty relationship-like things to do.
Simon slings himself across the bed and watches me eat with a sweetly satisfied expression. I think his jaw is a little more prominent than it used to be. His shoulders are wider. His neck is thicker too, and his hips are…
“You taking an inventory?” He winks at me as my eyes run down the length of his body.
“You’re different,” I say again.
“I know. I can feel it,” he confirms. “I am in a human form now, but obviously there have been changes. They might be permanent if it has overwritten my DNA. Further studies are needed. I’m going to be taking samples from myself today and running them as best I can here.”
“Because you don’t want Veronica knowing what you’ve done.”
“Because I don’t want Veronica knowing what I’ve done,” he winks.
I don’t know that I approve of any of this, but I am absolutely certain that my approval doesn’t make a difference one way or another. This is Simon’s life work, and the little matter of the fact he is turning into a monster probably won’t dissuade him.
“Stay in bed,” he says. “You need rest.”
“So do you,” I point out.
“No. I need to understand what I’ve done to myself so I can avoid doing it again,” he says firmly. “I know those weeks took an emotional toll on you. Best to regain some internal strength.”
I’m happy to lie around in bed. I really don’t have to be told twice.
Unfortunately, people have other plans.
Around 10:00 a.m., he gets a call from the company. I know that because we are both in bed watching the nature channel.
It’s Veronica, of course. Z-Corp is a massive multinational company, offices around the world, and the only person anyone ever hears from is Veronica.
“You’re not at work,” she says to Simon.
He’s put her on speakerphone of course, which I appreciate.
He has his finger over the button that would put it back to a normal call though, and I know why.
If she starts saying anything about their dastardly plot for my uterus he will be able to make sure I don’t hear.
I feel myself boil a bit at the way I am being treated, but I manage to keep my face relatively neutral and if I seem annoyed I have no doubt he will put it down to her presence rather than anything else.
“I’m not,” he says.
“Am I to assume you’ve taken our technical writer home with you as well, along with the rest of the proprietary information that is missing?”
“You may assume that,” Simon says without a hint of guilt in his tone. He really doesn’t care. I think he’s enjoying winding her up, to be honest.
“You may have the option not to come into work,” Veronica says “But the company pays Lydia to be here, so I expect her to be here tomorrow morning.”
“She’s my assistant.”
“She isn’t, actually,” Veronica says. “She’s an employee of this company, and she has not been cleared for remote work, so I am going to need her to come in. You can stay AWOL for as long as you like, Dr. Seek. But Lydia belongs to the company.”
I bite my lip to stop from exclaiming that I belong to nobody.
Simon pauses for a moment. I think he is doing a similar calculation in his head. He’s trying to work out if this is a battle worth fighting, or if giving into Veronica is just easier.
“She’ll be there tomorrow,” he says, ending the call.
“I will be?”
“Sorry,” he says to me. “But she’s technically correct…”
“The best kind of correct,” I interject.
He smirks. “Right. So. Go in, play along. Let her get the sense that she’s in control somehow. She likes that. It will keep her quiet while I do what I need to do.”
I’m not going to enjoy working for Veronica.
But she’s going to enjoy me working for her even less, because I have formulated a plan.
This woman is far more dangerous than anyone gives her credit for. She has Simon off balance, and I suspect she’s been meddling, interfering, and perhaps even sabotaging him, and maybe me. She’s definitely comfortable with the way I am being used.
I am angry at Simon, but I am even more furious at her. He has a reason of sorts, a carnal one, a personal one. She doesn’t care about me at all. She just wants to see what is going to happen to me.
* * *
When I go in the next day, Veronica greets me with an expression I can only describe as smug. She thinks she’s won something. Maybe she has. Maybe I’m a prize in a contest I never wanted to be a part of.
“Simon says I have to be here,” I say, realizing for the first time how funny it actually is that his name is Simon. I should be making way more out of that.
“Simon understands his contractual obligations,” she says. “And he understands your place in this organization too.”
God, she is pushing all my buttons. It is so tempting to curse at her, or tell her I know what I’m not supposed to know, but I am not here because Simon told me to be.
I am here because I have my own agenda. That would shock her, I think.
It would probably shock Simon too. Neither one of them realize that I have free will.
“You can make coffee, can’t you?”
“Well, I can’t grow or grind beans, but I can pour it out of a pot into a cup, if that’s what you’re asking,” I say, answering in a too-detailed manner that makes people of a normal disposition want to throttle me after a while.
My plan here is two-fold. One, be annoying and make her regret using me as some kind of sick work pawn in her even sicker game of work chess. The other fold is mostly made of vengeance.
The coffee request really plays into that last one.
“Go and get me coffee. No sugar. Plenty of creamer. If you think you’ve used enough, no, you haven’t.”
I slip away, nodding and smiling.
When I was waiting for Simon in my car, hoping that he would come back somehow, I killed a lot of time reading through my own notes and reviewing his.
I learned a lot about the process that is being undertaken here.
I learned things that I doubt Veronica knows because I had Simon’s handwritten scrawls on bits of paper and napkins.
I know, for instance, that one vial contains a genetic priming mixture, and another contains an activator, and depending on what is in that activator mixture, that’s what you become, or not.
I think Simon’s accident was a result of too much priming and too much activator.
He basically turned his body into a willing receptacle for almost any form, and I guess he encountered wolf first. Or chose wolf.
It wasn’t really clear. I wondered at the time if humans and wolves just have a lot in common as a baseline.
Veronica is getting me to make coffee because she thinks I will think it is beneath me. She wants to humble me. That does not bother me. I am humble by default. The notion of being special seems weird and scary to me.
I’m alone in the kitchenette where the coffee machine is, and where the excessive amounts of creamer are.
I blend in so well here. I look so pedestrian.
So basic. This building is full of intellectual powers and compared to them I am basically the same level of intellect as the bench in front of me.