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Chapter Thirteen
Edie
Myanxietydreamsalwaysstart the same way.I’m in my high school chemistry classroom with an array of bottles and flasks in front of me.They’re unlabeled and mysterious: some foamy, some glittering, some bubbling.The pages of my textbook are slipping through my fingers as I desperately search for a formula that eludes me.I’m sitting on a stool, but my legs are too short to reach the rungs and I’m constantly off balance.My classmates are all around me, whispering and snickering while I desperately search for an answer to a question I can’t remember.As I flip through the book, ever more frantic, the stool rocks beneath me.I can hear the roar of my classmates laughing as I’m tilting, I’m falling…
I landed in bed, jerking myself awake.The dream was still lapping at me, threatening to pull me back under, but arms snaked around me before I could sink again.Jasper.I turned, burrowing my face into his warmth and scent.My jangling nerves settled.Jasper was there, his breath in my hair, his hands stroking my skin.My eyes were too heavy to open.Everywhere we touched, my skin turned to glitter.I arched against him, wanting the bright heat everywhere.
When his hard cock pressed against my belly, sparkles hummed through my blood in the same ancient rhythm as the clutching need inside me.This is still a dream, I realized as our weightless bodies turned in a void lit only by the heat between us.I could do whatever I wanted in dreams.So I snaked my hips up and took him inside me.
The pleasure was so intense it almost hurt.Or was it that the pain made me feel so incredibly alive?He’d stretched me wide open, driven so deep that everything inside me felt rearranged, and there was still more.I was so full of him I could barely breathe.
“Stay with me,” he said, so close to my ear that his voice might have been in my head.Our limbs were wrapped around each other like ropes.Our bodies were frictionless.He ground against me and a moan vibrated through both of us.“Take all of me.”
“It’s too much,” I whimpered.“I’ll never be the same.”
“You’re already changed,” he said.Sharp teeth brushed my throat.The golden light of our bodies turned red, then scarlet.“You want to change.You want it all.”
“I’m not ready,” I said, even as my hips pumped furiously against his.
“Yes, you are,” he said, driving the last inch of his cock inside me.There wasn’t enough room in my skin for me and him and the glowing core of heat we’d stoked between us.I cracked open, exploding as I screamed.
I gasped, jolting awake.I was tangled in sweaty sheets, my legs vised around the pillow I’d put between my knees before I went to sleep.I groped for my phone, relieved when it filled the unfamiliar bedroom with a pale light.
Did I just have an orgasm in my dreams?
My body was still vibrating with pleasure, but my mind was reeling.It had felt so real.Much more real than the dirty scenarios I’d thought up last night, when I had finally given in to my arousal and tried to masturbate my anxieties away.It hadn’t worked.Two gasping orgasms hadn’t been enough to silence all the questions that circled in my mind.The residual sexual tension must have invaded my dreams.
I lay back against my pillow, gazing up at the dark ceiling.The bed was deep and soft, the silence absolute.I couldn’t shake the feeling that Jasper was here with me, just on the other side of consciousness.
In the distance, I heard the lonely howl of a wolf.
Jasper’s wolf?
I blew out a breath.Jasper was a wolf.My father’s theories had been true.
The thought was still too big to comprehend.
Not only was a Jasper a wolf—they were all wolves.I knew from my father’s research that there were over two hundred people in the Twisted Pines clan, and it seemed like all of them worked at the Lodge in some capacity or another.I tried to imagine the middle-aged woman who had checked me in transformed into a wolf and howling at the moon.The thought made me snort with laughter.Would the lipstick on her teeth still be there after she transformed?
Even as I giggled, my mind buzzed.Had she been wearing jewelry?Since I’d noticed Jasper’s bracelet, I’d clocked similar bracelets on his brothers.My father had theorized that there might have been some sort of external factor that allowed shifters to access their animal form.I could have sworn that when Jasper kissed me, the stone on his bracelet flared with light.
My thoughts had taken me right back to him.How could they not?He’d told me I wasn’t welcome and done everything he could to make me leave.Then he’d laid a kiss on me that fried my entire nervous system and fought with his family to give me a chance to stay.He’d turned into a wolf in front of me!In a split-second he’d wiped the taint off all the memories of my father and upended the way I saw the world.
Of course he was on my mind.I wasn’t proud of it, but of all the questions that whirled through my mind, the pettiest and most selfish was also the most urgent.Why did he kiss me?
How soon would he kiss me again?
I exhaled in puffs, using breath work to calm my autonomic system.It was a trick I’d learned in med school, when sleep was precious and I couldn’t waste it.It felt strange to do it here.The familiar rhythmic breathing reminded me of everything I’d left behind.
An efficiency apartment near the hospital.
Long hours, stressful patients.
The bleak suspicion that I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and it was too late to turn back.
I wasn’t going back until I’d examined Melinda.My father would surely haunt me forever if I turned down the chance to learn everything I could about shifter biology.Besides, I didn’t want to spend every night for the rest of my life waking up like this, with unanswerable questions throbbing in my mind.That must have been what it was like for my father.The difference was, the answers were at my fingertips.
I got up, put on my father’s robe, and booted up his laptop.I needed to read everything my father had on shifter biology.I had a breakfast meeting to prepare for.
