#glbtq

“Tell me you’ve never thought about the touch of another man, wondered how his strong hands would feel wrapped around your cock. Tell me you’ve never wanted to feel him inside of you, thick and long and hot, making you shake and shudder with every deep, slick thrust.”

Shallow breath caught in my throat, heat bleeding beneath my skin as his words made me painfully hard. Was he right? Was I one of those people that my father so despised? I couldn’t be, I didn’t want to be, but the reaction in my body was hard to deny.

After a moment, Sarael drew back.

“You are filled with such agonizing conflict,” he said, his eyes gray as he regarded me. “I don’t understand why you are so ashamed. There’s nothing wrong with what you feel.”

I took a slow breath. “That’s not how I was raised.”

He glanced into the village center, where the woman waited. Her somber expression now made a lot more sense. I couldn’t imagine having to kill my own child to keep them from turning into a monster.

“Hang on,” I said. “Why do I have to do this? Why can’t one of them?”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“Oh, but you’ll let me do it?”

“It not dangerous for you, only them,” he said. “Right now, Armiran is isolated, meditating, praying, but the presence of another shifter could set him off. The warrior form evolved as a means to fight their greatest enemy—each other.”

“Okay, so what about you? What’s your excuse?” I asked. I was desperate to find a way out of this.

“I already told you why I can’t,” he said, his eyes growing dark and hard. “You can’t imagine the storm of emotions inside that young man. Touching him would be like dropping a bomb on my psyche. I might never recover my sense of self.”

“This can’t be happening,” I breathed, turning away from him. I was done with this nightmare. I was ready to wake up. “Wake up, wake up, wake up,” I hissed, grabbing handfuls of my gritty hair and pulling until my scalp screamed. That was supposed to work, right? Pain always snapped people out of dreams in the movies. Maybe I needed to pinch myself. Grabbing the thin skin on the inside of my elbow, I squeezed until I cried out, but the nightmare persisted.

Then it hit me.

Maybe I wasn’t dreaming.

The realization was like being dunked in icy water. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think. How was this even possible? Portals and monsters and magic and shifters—I felt like I was losing my mind.

It couldn’t be real. But if it was...if it was...I looked around the village. These weren’t figments of my imagination, they were real people. I looked at the woman, stoic as she faced possibly the most difficult choice a mother could ever make, but I could see the pain and fear in her eyes.

I turned to Sarael, but he had drawn away from me, his face pinched, his eyes swirling pink and gray, and I realized how strong my emotions must have been, beating against him like waves crashing against the shore. I tried to rein them in, but it was like clawing at dry sand, exhausting and ineffective.

“I’m sorry,” I said to him. “I can’t help it.”

“It felt like you had your own emotional bomb go off,” he said. “Are you all right?”