Page 9

9

CAM

I saw the hurt expression on Penn’s face when I left him at the dorm, but I couldn’t stand looking at him. I couldn’t stand him seeing me and knowing what I looked like when I shifted. I hated that he had seen my blue skin and horns. I hated that he could now knew that I wasn’t the person I acted like I was. I wasn’t a human, no matter how much I looked like one most of the time.

And I know that he knew that already, but knowing it and seeing it were often two different things. I remembered when Ryder saw it for the first time. He’d freaked out. I didn’t want to see that same fear in Penn’s typically warm eyes. I groaned and kept walking. I’d been pacing campus for almost an hour, and I knew that eventually, I would have to go back to the dorm.

I would have to go talk to Penn, too.

I walked for another ten minutes before plopping down on a bench and pulling out my phone. I didn’t think before I found my sister’s contact number. If there was anyone that would be able to understand, it would be her.

“You never call. You always text,” she said when she answered, after we exchanged boring small talk. “So do you want to tell me what’s up?”

“I lost control.”

“Define?”

I sighed. “I shifted. Like full horns and teeth and creepy blue skin shifted. In public.”

I heard my sister’s musical laugh through the phone line, and I could practically see her shaking her head at me. “You go to a university full of Monsters. Most of them shift.”

“But I shifted in front of humans.”

“And they go to to a university full of Monsters, most of whom shift.”

She wasn’t getting it. She wasn’t understanding the big deal about shifting in front of people. Or maybe I wasn’t explaining it properly. I drew in a deep breath and tried to think of how to make her understand. I just kept coming back to one fact that I hadn’t shared with her. “I shifted in front of Penn.”

“Like during a feeding?” She sounded even more confused. Probably because I told her that the shift had been in public.

“No. I’m not feeding on him in the quad.”

“Shame. Might be hot.” Christa chuckled at her own joke. I wanted to hang up on her. Clearly the idea that she was the only person that would understand was grossly overestimating my sister’s empathy. When I didn’t say anything, she spoke again. “If you weren’t feeding, what had you feeling so intense that you shifted?”

“There were these guys,” I started. I explained the whole situation. Finding him pushed against the wall by some asshole, two of his friends standing off to the side. They’d scampered the moment I shifted, but the main guy had taken a little push to get him away from Penn. I couldn’t explain the white hot rage I’d felt when I’d seen Penn pinned to that wall or the anger that man had directed at him.

But Christa could.

“You like him.”

Three simple words and I felt the world tilt on its axis. The words hit me like a truck—both the words themselves and the fact that they were true.

I liked Penn.

“I think I need to talk to him,” I told her slowly. “I may have fucked things up after I walked him back to the dorms. I kind of just left him there.”

“Cameron!”

“Do not full name me! I know it was shitty.” Christa laughed again, and I rolled my eyes. “I think I do need to go talk to him. Explain a few things to him. Like what happened and what triggered the shift.”

“Maybe tell him you like him and figure out how that’s going to affect your feedings since you insist on only keeping one feeder.”

“How would that affect our feedings?” I questioned. I couldn’t think of any reason why liking my feeder would change up our feeding schedule. It wasn’t like we stopped getting nourishment the moment there were feelings.

“It might not,” Christa answered cryptically. “Most likely it won’t. But if he doesn’t feel it back, then it might make things weird.”

I hadn’t thought about that.

“I guess I should go talk to him then, huh?”

Christa and I said our good-byes, and I promised that I’d call her later that night. Or maybe the next day, depending on how well our conversation went. No, definitely that night. Even if our conversation went great, I wasn’t going to automatically assume that would mean an overnight visit. We both had roommates.

Ten minutes later, I was knocking on Penn’s dorm. One of his roommates opened the door. It took a few minutes to convince him to let me over the threshold, but soon, I was in Penn’s actual bedroom. I took a seat at his desk, and he sat cross legged on the bed.

I didn’t know how to start, how to tell him that I had feelings for him, or how to ask how he felt about the whole full shift thing. I sighed.

“Are you going to say anything?” Penn asked after a few moments.

I nodded. “Just don’t know how to start,” I admitted.

“Is it because I saw you shift?” I looked up at him. It was partially that, but it was something else, too. I wasn’t sure how to start on that part. While I tried to figure out how to verbalize that other part, he spoke again. “I didn’t—Your shift didn’t scare me; I felt safe. The moment you showed up, even looking the way you did, I knew that nothing bad would happen to me.”

Warmth washed over me. I was always so insecure about my shifted form. I worried that people would see it and see me as the monster that I was. That it would look too demonic. Unlike my sister and my parents, I didn’t embrace my inner beast. I fed because I needed energy to live. It wasn’t exactly a burden, because feeding was just sex, but it wasn’t sex in the way that everyone else experienced sex. The way that I’d never experienced first hand.

Every sexual experience I’d ever had was about feeding.

I didn’t know how to have feelings for someone, how to have a relationship with someone, any of it. When I told Penn, we’d be embarking on new territory and frankly, I was kind of terrified by the whole thing.

At least he wasn’t afraid of my shifted form. He’d seen me in my rawest form, and it hadn’t phased him in the slightest.

I felt my lips curve up into a smile. “I should have stayed with you,” I told him softly.

He nodded. “I thought I upset you.”

“I thought I scared you.”

Penn stood up and walked the few steps across the room. He knelt down on the ground in front of me and took my hands in his. “You didn’t scare me, Cam. I don’t think I could ever be scared of you.”

“It’s not just that,” I started. I glanced down at him, meeting his dark eyes. He was possibly the most beautiful human I’d ever seen in my life. “Shifting isn’t something I do a lot.”

“Just when you’re feeling something intense, right?”

Of course the journalist would remember. He had made learning about concubi his price for our arrangement. It shouldn’t be surprising that he would remember what I said about shifting.

“Yeah,” I confirmed with a quick nod of my head, “and I was feeling something really intense when I saw that guy had you pinned. It pissed me off, thinking that he could hurt you because of me.”

“It wasn’t just because of you,” Penn countered. His voice was gentle but firm, like it was critical that I understood what he was saying. “It was because of me, too. Because of what I wrote.”

There was blame in his voice, but it wasn’t directed at me. I squeezed his hand. “That’s not on you,” I told him, overpowered by the conviction in my own voice. Clearly, I didn’t have the same ability to be soft and firm at the same time. “Some idiot having a problem with you isn’t your fault.”

“I wrote the story.”

“About me.” I dropped one of his hands and lifted his chin, thumbing over his lips. “You wrote the story about me, and I thought it was an amazing story. I loved seeing the human perspective about what we’re doing, and I think once you start interviewing other feeders and getting their point of view… It’s a great series. And you know it’s great when people are having that visceral of a reaction. It means that what you wrote touched people.”

Penn’s face softened. He smiled, and his eyes lit up with happiness. He looked more beautiful than I’d ever thought a human could look. My stomach swooped, and I knew in a moment that the feelings I had for him, while scary as hell, were real. He deserved to know.

I pulled in another deep breath. “It wasn’t just fear and anger that made me shift,” I started. Penn looked up at me, concern etched across his face. “It was about you.”

“About me?”

“About you. Seeing you in danger sent a huge rush of emotion, and I couldn’t control the shift. I couldn’t stop myself from shifting, because I couldn’t stand the idea of something bad happening to you.” Another inhale. I held it for a moment before exhaling. “I couldn’t stand something happening to you, because I have feelings for you.”

Penn sat in silence for a few moments, moments that spanned centuries. My mind raced with worst case scenarios. He didn’t feel the same way. He was freaked out. He had no problems hanging out with an incubus, no problems feeding one, but he had no interest in dating a monster. He only viewed me as a friend. He barely viewed me as a friend and only viewed me as a means to an end.

I don’t know how long he sat there, holding my hand. My hand that was now wet with sweat. My heart pounded against my rib cage, and I tried to focus on something other than his eyes. I didn’t want to see what he was thinking, didn’t want to see any disgust there. I didn’t want to see the moment he decided that I wasn’t worth continuing a friendship with. Instead, I looked at the blue-gray comforter on his bed. I looked at the abstract art print on his wall, gray and black ink with splashes of blue that matched his bedding perfectly.

I noticed other small details of his room. He had a stack of books on a small table by his bed and bright, colorful magnets on his mini fridge holding up nothing. There was a fake plant resting on top of the mini fridge, some kind of cactus. I wondered why he’d chosen a fake plant instead of a real one. It was easier than wondering what he was thinking.

The gentle squeeze of Penn’s hand pulled my attention back to him. “You have feelings for me?” I nodded. “Romantic feelings?” I nodded again.

He didn’t say anything. Instead, he leaned forward and gave me the most gentle kiss I’d ever experienced. It wasn’t like the kisses we’d shared during feedings. It wasn’t hungry. It wasn’t heated. It was like a cool summer breeze, soft and romantic. My stomach fluttered and churned, and I felt more certain about my feelings than I had about anything in my life. I had never been kissed like that.

I didn’t try to feel the threads of energy. I didn’t want to feel them, to pull any of this into me for sustenance. Not when it felt like something more powerful than any of the lust I had ever tasted. I wanted to leave it pure, untainted by who I was by my very nature.

Penn pulled away from the kiss and rested his forehead against mine.

“I like you too,” he whispered.