“Yes.”
“But you’re not always a coyote.”
“Do I look like a coyote right now?”
“No.” She smiled.
I sighed. I lowered myself to a crouch. I was tired. “I’m lots of different kinds of animals,” I said. “Some of them, I don’t even think are real. Some are definitely extinct. I don’t always know, when I change, what I am, what the English name is or the human idea about it. I can’t make it stop, usually, and I don’t decide when it happens, and there’s no rule, that I can tell, except that—it happens when I’m feeling something. Not one thing in particular, just—strong things. And not even always then. I don’t know why.” She nodded. I sucked in a breath, dug my fingernails into my palms, and said it fast. “I turned into a bear when Polly broke up with me. And I scratched her. Badly. That’s really why she transferred.”
She laughed. I blinked at her. Then I laughed. I landed full on the ground, with a bump, and laughed.
“It was bad,” I insisted when I’d stopped laughing. “I mean, yeah, she was a bitch, she really was, but I attacked her. As a bear. It’s not…”
“You didn’t kill her,” she pointed out. “I mean, you might have, but you didn’t.”
“Bully for me,” I said.
“I mean it.”
“You don’t seem scared.”
“I am,” she said. She reached and put her hand on my thigh. She crawled her fingers up and brushed them over my pubic hair, this way and that, her eyes rising to mine. “I’m scared,” she said. She cupped her fingers over my vulva, and I could feel it warm and swell beneath them. “Is this okay?” She waited a moment. “It turns me on because it’s magic and because it’s yours.”
I was quiet. I felt the throb and pulse push out from my center to her hand. She took her hand away.
“I want to fuck you,” I said, looking at the grass under my fingertips and not at her. “When I see you in class, the smart things you say, you get under the skin of things. And your hair and your feet in those high heels and the clothes you wear. The curves of your ass and your boobs and your belly. And the shape of your jaw and the strength of your back. I shouldn’t fuck anybody, this thing that I am. But I want to fuck you.”
I could hear her breathing as I spoke and then she was on me like a wild thing, leaping and pressing and tumbling me back against the floor of the almost-forest. Her hand returned to my labia and my clit, drawing me up against her like a magnet. My back arched and my hips pushed forward. She bit me and scratched me with her other hand and I giggled helplessly and then grew still.
I felt stillness, circling, and a throbbing hunger, great, fierce, in the center of my body, sucking away my breath and giving it back in bursts. The noises in my throat were strange but human, for all their ferocity. I felt her middle finger dipping and playing at the opening of my cunt, teasing the puckered edge and sending a jolt straight from there to her palm against my clit. My hips surged and bobbed like a toy boat in a rough current, and I came in sudden, pulsing jolts, and then I forced myself back, down, away.
“Take off your dress,” I said hoarsely, and she looked at me and did. Her bra was purple and satiny, and her underwear was a plain cotton bikini. She undid her bra and pulled her underwear off. I was on her breasts as soon as I could see them, raisin-dark nipple sucked hard between my lips. She made a quick, deep, grunting sound, and then a higher, floating cry. She got back her breath. “Your period’s about to start,” I told her. “I could smell it.”
She laughed softly, breathlessly, but I saw a real stab of fear in her eyes for the first time. She didn’t hide it, just looked at me as she pressed her back against a tree trunk and parted her thighs.
“I like it deep and slow,” she said.
I circled her breasts with my mouth and her cunt with my hand, taking in the shape and the soft folds that surrounded me. Different from mine, larger, more contoured. I swept my fingers over the top of her clit, felt her shudder and pressed in harder, circling and finding the opening, slick and warm. I straddled her thigh and rubbed my own cunt against her, drawing out bursts of color under my skin, all up and down. My thoughts whirled and splintered, and I let my first two fingers slide inside her, deep and slow. Her arm came around my back and gripped me, hard. We rode each other and I pressed her, deeply, inside and out, the heel of my hand and my thumb searching out her clit. I lost my balance against her leg, dropping to the side of her. I closed my eyes then opened them again to watch her face. Her mouth was opening, wider and wider, and she was almost silent, straining against my hand. She laughed, suddenly, and then choked on the end of it, and I felt her clench and rise and come, the tension in her bursting like a bubble, opening like the new leaf on a tree, fresh, green, fiercely connected.
I pulled my fingers out of her, showed her the blood at the very tips, and then put them between my lips to suck them clean. Threatening, warning, daring, accepting—I couldn’t have said. Woman-time without words. Her eyes were locked on mine, and when I ate her blood they lit like I had touched her. She groaned and pushed me back, grabbing my ass in both her hands and squeezing, lifting my hips toward her and pressing her face into my crotch, nuzzling and licking and then rising to kiss my mouth. She lingered there, long and sweet and dizzying, and her hand slid between my legs and stroked me until I came again and again, easily, without strain, fire-bursts in a show I did not have to control.
We lay on the ground afterward, separate and quiet, our fingers touching. At last I stood up and began looking for my pants. We got dressed, still silent. She picked a few leaves out of her hair, steadied herself against a tree trunk, and looked at me again. Her eyes asked questions. I wanted to answer them. I felt a change at a distance, hovering, not yet here, something with wings.
“Will you come back with me?” I asked. “I want to show you my room.”
She took my hand and squeezed ’til I could feel the bones beneath.
“Yes,” she answered. “Yes.”
KITTY AND THE CAT
Amelia Thornton
It was near midnight when I got there, and I knew she could see me when I walked in. And by “walked in,” I mean sashayed in, hips swinging, head high, every curve perfectly contained and displayed and inviting the gaze of every person in that room. I knew she could see me, and I knew she would want it. She just didn’t know what it was yet.
Lynn had told me about her, said she’d just moved into the flat below, seemed ever so sweet and unassuming and just generally nice. I like nice girls. Especially when I can make them be so not-nice when I try. Of course it only seemed neighborly that Lynn would invite her to the party, and of course she had warned me to “be good,” but good is not something I am particularly capable of, especially when I am presented with a specimen so utterly, unquestionably adorable. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her, staring, trying hard to compose herself and continue her small talk, but not quite able to. She couldn’t help it. Girls like her never can.
Of course she would submit; there was no question about that. She would be on her knees, her tongue caressing the slick shine of my heels, her worshipful eyes looking up at me, begging me to fuck her ass and cane her thighs and do whatever I wanted with her, whatever that was. She would tell me how much she needed it, tell me she was mine, tell me her whole body and being belonged to me entirely. But that’s never the best bit. The best bit is always the part when they just don’t know they’re submissive yet, when they haven’t realized the true equality of inequality and the beautiful release of giving themselves over. This chase, this game, this revealing of what I always know and they never do, this is the part that makes the blood pump through my veins. And I intended to savor every tiny, minuscule moment of it.