Page 55 of The Alpha Experiment
I squeezed my ass around his knot. So full. That was nice too.
And I fell asleep between one thought and the next.
Chapter 17
Adjusting the Variables
Staggering out of bed that afternoon, it felt like I’d been on a week-long bender. My mouth was like a desert, and my stomach was collapsing in on itself from hunger. And I was sticky, sore, strange all over—like being in someone else’s body.
Colin had disappeared, and my room felt weird and abandoned. Too quiet, even though the usual sounds of a Sunday afternoon in an apartment building carried through the window and walls. Kids shouting outside. The slam of a car door. Someone running a leaf blower in the distance. I glanced at the phone I’d left on my bedside table. Nearly four P.M., ugh. I hated sleeping all day.
The phlebotomy kit sat next to my phone, and I winced. Shit, I’d forgotten to draw blood.
As exhausted as I’d been, it wasn’t surprising, but still. Hopefully the sample I took now would still be useful.
I shied away from thinking about what I’d been doing instead of focusing on my research. The way I’d behaved…nope, not going there. Not yet. Not until I’d had coffee.
I didn’t have any clothes on, of course, but it wasn’t chilly anymore. Colin must’ve turned on the heater. I found myself smiling a little. He never would’ve bothered on his own account. Like he said, he never got cold.
Getting dressed felt really counterproductive, since anything I put on my body would immediately need to be washed, so I grabbed a towel I’d had hanging off the corner of my dresser, wrapped it around my waist, picked up the kit, and dared the living room. Colin had left the door open a crack, so I didn’t make any noise opening it.
Of course, he turned around instantly anyway from where he’d been standing in the kitchen with his back to me. I smelled coffee and something cooking. My stomach let out a desperate gurgle, and Colin grinned at me.
“I’m making some eggs,” he said, his tone totally normal. “Obviously you’re hungry, yeah?”
“Shower first.” I stood there awkwardly for a second. Nothing. He just smiled at me and went back to cooking. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
“Sure,” he said.
I ducked into the bathroom, feeling wrong-footed, like I’d gotten shoved on stage after memorizing my lines for a totally different play than the one being performed.
The blood draw only took a couple of minutes. Even lightheaded and out of it, I’d done it often enough on myself and on research subjects to be quick and deft.
The shower, oddly, was a lot harder to deal with.
The day before, I’d resisted any temptation to touch myself, to feel the aftermath of being fucked.
Today, I didn’t even try.
The second I got under the hot water, I reached behind myself and slid my fingers between the cheeks of my ass. My hole didn’t feel as different as I’d thought it would. It wasn’t all stretched-out or anything, just a little puffy. Tender. And still slick. I wondered what it looked like.
I could always ask Colin.
That brought my brain to a screeching halt, and I leaned my forehead against the tiled wall, breathing hard, though my fingers kept probing, obsessively tracing a circle around my hole.
No, not asking Colin.Neverasking Colin.
What did he think of me today? I mean, I wasn’t going to agonize about whether he still respected me, or any of that kind of ugly, demeaning bullshit. But on the other hand…okay,couldhe still respect me? Did I still respectmyself? Not because there was anything wrong with having receptive penetrative sex, but because I’d lost my mind and lost the plot and lost my focus, completely losing sight of the goal of it all in my crazed need to get fucked?
I didn’t have a clue what’d come over me, unless I’d been more affected by the experiment than I’d thought. Of course all those new proteins zipping around in my body would havesomeeffect, but I’d expected something more…well, something more overtly werewolfy and less…not like that. More claws, less whining for Colin to knot me.
That was werewolfy too, I guessed, maybe? There was enough porn out there with dominant alphas and submissive non-alpha shifters begging for their knots to prove it wasn’t an unknown dynamic. It just wasn’t what I’d had in mind. I had to have alpha genes in me, given the DNA I shared with my siblings. Why couldn’tthosegenes be the ones to activate, dammit?
I finally gave up on fingering myself, blushing as I realized what I’d been doing that whole time, and washed up instead. You know, the purpose of a shower.
And while I got myself clean, I forced myself to face the facts: I’d definitely experienced a change in myself as a result of the experiment, but it wasn’t the change I’d wanted and hoped for.
Okay, research could be like that. You had to follow it where the evidence led, rather than the other way around. And I had results, both my subjective personal observations and the much more reliable evidence of the production of alternatively spliced RNA in my cells.
