Chapter 44
MORGAN
I pull Jamie out of the shower and wrap him in a towel, then lead him back into the gym.
“I want you where you can see yourself…” I face the mirror and pin his back against my chest, pressing a finger into his mouth.
The sight of his naked body against mine, the way I dwarf him, makes the beast surge. I gain an inch of height as my spine cracks and pops.
“Look at this,” I say, brushing my fingers along his ears with one hand, and pressing a thumb to his canines with the other. “You’re beautiful.”
Jamie’s eyes roll back, his body shaking as the shift works its way out from his core.
I take a deep breath and shiver, heels lifting from the floor, and with one last crackling wave my shift is complete. It’s easier and easier every time.
Jamie’s will be slow and painful, and he’s going to love it. I reach down and stroke his cock, sending him screaming around my fingers. He writhes against me, coaxing my cock to grow and grow.
I am the beast, and the beast is me.
I lower slightly, shifting my hips to run my cock between Jamie’s thighs. He whimpers at the feeling of it along his balls, his perineum. His cock spurts over my hand, but it might as well be more pre-cum. There’s no release to it.
The beast knows what to do, and I drop my hand to my own cock, spreading Jamie’s slick pre-cum along it.
I lower to my knees behind Jamie and bury my lengthened tongue in his ass, shoving against his prostrate as I stroke his cock and milk another torturous orgasm from him.
Two more and he’s begging again. “Please, I need your knot, I can’t, please, oh god, Morgan…”
I straighten, and even with my knees on the ground I can easily hook my claw through his collar, pulling him down onto all fours. My cock is plenty slick now, and I consider taunting him one last time, but my patience falters.
With a soft growl, I press my tip inside.
It’s a slower, tighter fit without him being so warmed up, and I ease a little further.
“Fuck, you feel good…”
Jamie’s cheek sinks down towards the floor as he melts for me, and I turn his head towards the mirror.
“Watch yourself. Watch me fuck you.”
His eyes are dark with lust as I rock my hips, sliding deeper in, driving him into the floor.
Jamie claws at the gym mat beneath him, trying to press harder against my cock, gasping as a crackle runs down his spine.
I want to take this slow, to enjoy watching his first shift. But I’ve been teasing myself for a while now, and I feel my own pre-cum sliding down my length, lubricating Jamie’s inner walls.
I’m losing control, and my hips thrust harder, driving into Jamie, sending him screaming with pleasure and relief.
“Is this what you wanted?” I huff.
“Yes!”
“Is this what you needed?”
“Yes…” The word drags out into a long moan. His ass clenches tight with an orgasm, and he pours onto the gym mat, but he won’t feel any release until my knot is buried deep.
My cock slides more easily as his slick joins my pre-cum, and I pound Jamie relentlessly into the mat as his bones continue to pop and shift.
His moans are sweet music.
I blink away the haze and find him in the mirror, and he’s glorious. His shift hardly changed his height, and his muzzle is less pronounced than mine. His hands are lined with fine copper fur, and his claws dig gouges in the gym mat.
I can’t look away from are those bright green eyes, drunk with pleasure.
“Knot me,” he begs. “Please knot me, please—”
He repeats it like breath, and I drive in hard, stretching him with every thrust, wishing I hadn’t waited until my knot was already so swollen because I want it now, I want to claim him now—
My teeth drop to his collar, giving me leverage, and with one last thrust, I slide in.
Jamie screams and cums around me, milking me with every vice-like squeeze. I pump into him, emptying myself.
He slows, but I want more, and I reach around and press my fingers against his perineum again, crushing his prostate inside and out. He moans into another climax, adding to his puddle on the floor, keeping my cock pulsing.
I slide gingerly down onto my side and pull him against me, burying my nose in his hair. God, I could sit and smell him forever.
He’s still shaking and dripping, not quite settled.
“Please can I touch myself?”
“Still not done?” I tease.
“You got me so fucking worked up… and I haven’t… It’s all been hands-free…”
“Go ahead. Show me how you like it.”
Jamie has to adjust to his longer fingers and claws, but in short order he’s clenching hard around my knot.
“Please give me permission,” he gasps.
“Oh, what a good boy… I want you to cum so hard you hit the mirror. Can you do that for me?”
I return my hand to his perineum as he arches into me and clenches harder than he ever has. He doesn’t just hit the mirror, he showers it.
One by one, his muscles relax, and he goes limp in my arms.
“You’re perfect,” I murmur. “You’re so perfect.”
For once, he’s too exhausted to protest.
We lay like that for a while, Jamie’s cheek nestled against my arm.
A profound calm settles over me. This must be what Gia means when she keeps telling me to ‘relax.’ And it does feel good—every molecule aligned and at peace. No conflict. Only breath and presence. A contented purr rumbles in my chest.
“How does it feel?” I ask Jamie, nuzzling into his hair.
“You were right—it was a good hurt.”
“I’m always right.”
Jamie holds up a hand and stretches his fingers. “I feel… more normal than I expected, I guess.”
“It’s normal for you to beg to be knotted and then cum your brains out on a gym floor?”
He shudders. Fuck, I love this.
“You know what I mean,” he grumbles.
“I do,” I say quietly, but I have a different relationship to the revelation than he does.
I’ve spent so much time putting distance between myself and the beast that being this in-sync, feeling this complete, is…
worrisome. It’s forcing me to feel all these compulsions, feel them as mine.
Compulsions that I cannot control without that distance.
Compulsions like ripping Jamie’s collar apart thread by thread and claiming him right here, right now.
“I just feel… less filtered. More… in my body,” Jamie continues. “More intuitive. I… I want to run. I want you to chase me.”
“I want to chase you,” I purr.
“I want to fight back. Is that bad?”
“Does it matter if it is?”
“Do you want that?” he murmurs.
I drag a claw down his side. “I do.”
“A-are you sure? I don’t want you to worry…”
“Intuitive is a good word. I… never mind.”
“What?” Jamie asks, with such tenderness that I can’t possibly deny him.
I sigh and search for words. “I’ve always called this part of myself ‘the beast.’ The suppressants help create a…
distance, as you’ve felt. I’ve always been frustrated that’s the most that we could do, even after all these years…
but that’s not the point. That part of me does not think long term.
I can’t let it make permanent decisions for you.
But I also… I’m fairly confident… I can’t hurt you in ways you don’t want to be hurt. Not when you’re in this form.”
“I want you to hurt me,” he says quietly. “But there’s a part of me that’s having trouble reconciling… does that make me… I don’t know, the omega stereotypes…”
I reach down and press my palm across Jamie’s collar.
“I want you to listen very closely. You were right. You are not just any omega. I am not just any alpha. We’re not strangers to each other anymore.
You can revoke your permission at any time, for any reason.
Tell me to ‘stop,’ and I will do absolutely everything in my power to do so. ”
Jamie relaxes back into me.
“Don’t you ever give me carte blanche just because I’m an alpha, okay? Promise me that if I am hurting you, in a way that you don’t want to be hurt, you’ll tell me.”
“Okay.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Good.”
The thought of anybody hurting Jamie, the thought of what I would do to them, is enough to quell my cock for now. After Jamie’s shift, the fit isn’t quite so tight.
I’m reluctant to let him go, but he wriggles free with a slight tug, and my cum joins the puddle Jamie started.
The sun falls towards the west horizon, casting the garden in shades of gold and scarlet. The full moon crests over the trees.
I stand and stretch, my cock returning to its sheath. Jamie does the same.
A temporary calm and lucidity settles over us—the eye at the center of the storm.
“How much of a head start do you want?” I ask, unhurried.
Jamie turns back with those wide green eyes. “Right now?”
I shrug. “It’s as good a time as any. And it’s the full moon.”
Jamie steps closer to the glass, silver moonlight reflecting in his emerald eyes. “Do you think people really used to roam in packs? Hunting with their bare hands?”
“It’s plausible. But there were probably as many different ways of dealing with it as there were alphas and omegas. Tribes, communes, hidden-in-plain-sight. There are ties back to vampire legends, werewolves, cryptids like the Chupacabra and Bigfoot, even fae.”
“Yet the wolves stuck, huh?”
“Ridiculous,” I say with a slight shake of my head. “Years ago, I joined a renaming committee. But the terms have taken on a life of their own. Wolves will never recover from the reputational damage.”
“Yeah, I was reading that the whole alpha/beta thing was just… a complete misinterpretation of captive group dynamics. Though I mean, props for being the dysfunctional wolf pack that named an entire… I don’t know, biological phenomenon.”
“It’s easy to get credit for a discovery when you make it up.”
Jamie snorts. “Yeah… I guess so… What’s your take on the whole alien DNA thing?” He says it with a twinkle.
I roll my eyes. “Those people need to take an Occam’s razor to the throat.”
Jamie laughs, husky and rich, tone deepened by the shift. “What’s your hypothesis?”
“All science seems like magic until we explain it. It’s metaphysical, yes. But it follows predictable patterns of inheritance and expression. It’s a simple homozygous recessive trait, for fuck’s sake. It doesn’t take a genius to fill out a punnet square.”
“We’re no closer to understanding why any given person is born an alpha or an omega though, are we?”
“A full sequencing study recently hit peer review. It’s not single-gene, that’s for sure.”
“What do you think of the… personality theory?”
I raise a brow at the omega, his green eyes twinkling with intellectual curiosity despite his nakedness and monstrous form. “Jamie, this is a very technical conversation for me being minutes away from jumping your bones.”
“I’m stalling. Humor me.”
I chuckle, shaking my head as I join him at the glass, eyes sweeping out over the garden. “I find it… extremely plausible. But I keep that opinion quiet.”
“So you don’t get labeled an abuse apologist.”
“Mhm. I might ask Eileen to preemptively block a bunch of bio-essentialists for me because if I see one more of their brain-dead asshat takes, I will be showing up on their doorsteps and dismembering them. So.”
“I kind of… see where they’re coming from…”
“Jamie, when is someone’s personality ever grounds for abuse? How could someone’s private, intimate preferences ever give a stranger justification to strip their autonomy away? Just because you want to kneel and beg for my cock doesn’t mean anybody else ever gets to touch you.”
My breath comes fast, fury rising. This is the other thing the beast holds, the other thing I push away: the violence that comes so quickly. The strange way I’ve thought about all omegas as my omegas. But now, there’s only Jamie.
He scents my anger, and his pupils widen, spice weaving through his scent again. His breath quickens to match mind, the thudding of his racing heart reaching my swiveling ears.
“I want to run now,” he breathes.
“You have thirty seconds,” I growl, and I begin counting.