A Girl's Best Friend: An Erotic Shapeshifter Paranormal Romance (2 page)

As time passed they spent more time together than he would have liked, and he wished she would get going already, but when he asked, she said she was looking for a job and could only leave as soon as she had one, and she hoped he didn’t mind. He did. But he didn’t tell her so.

Then one evening, Pam decided, it’s now or never, she took Logan by his two hands, and she flattened him with her unexpected confession, “I think I’m in love with you. No, I know I am. I am completely in love with you, Logan.”

She started with telling him how much he had taught her, how much she enjoyed spending time with him, how he had changed her life. She told him what a good friend he had become to her.
He stared at her blankly as she spoke, wondering if he had heard her right.

“You’re in love with me?” he asked, unable to find anything else to say. Logan pulled his hands back from her.

She blushed and looked down at her hands, “You’re my best friend Logan, and you’ve always been there for me. You’re a great guy.”

Oh no, this is not happening
. He couldn’t deal with this, he knew it was a mistake taking her in. She was so stuck in this whole misery thing with her family, it was almost pathetic. He knew he was being harsh in his judgment of her, but his sudden irritation refused to let him feel bad for thinking it.

“Look, Pamela, you’re great too, an amazing friend. And we’ve been close for a long time. I know you’ve been struggling and staying here hasn’t been a problem, but it’s not going to work.”

The color drained from her face. “But… why not?” she asked so softly he almost didn’t hear her.

“Because you’re just not the kind of person I want to share myself with in that way.”
She looked like she was going to cry, and he felt a faint pang of guilt.

“Look,” he tried to make it better, “you’ve been through a lot and it’s not over yet. You just need to sort yourself out first before jumping into something like this. You have so much going on. You can think about a relationship later.”

“But it won’t be with you,” she said dully.

“No, Pamela.” He said, “I’m sorry.”

Not knowing what else to say, and feeling rotten for being the reason she was crying this time, he walked out the door.

When he came back, hours later, he found that she was gone. His mom told him that she’d found a job in town and left straight away, not wishing to impose on them any longer. A strange combination of feelings lodged themselves in his stomach at the news, and he called his friend Thomas, arranging to meet at the pub again.

“So she left? Alright, so tell me then, what is it that you want?” Thomas asked.

“She did… and it is. I didn’t mean for her to leave right away, but Tom, I swear I couldn’t do it,” Logan confided to his friend. “She’s just too much for me.”

“What did you expect she would do? Stick around after you made it clear you didn’t want her?”

“Quit bugging me okay? It’s not my fault I don’t want to date her is it? I didn’t ask for her to tell me she loves me.” He got annoyed when Thomas pointed out the obvious.

“How well do you really know her?” Thomas asked.

“Too well, my friend. She’s been at my house for months now, moaning about her father.”

“Yes, you said that, but what do you know about her besides that?”

“What is there to know besides that? The crazy bastard rules her life.”

Suddenly, a strange tingling started spreading through his body until it reached every part of him. His throat felt dry, even when he took sips from his drink repeatedly, and he felt inexplicable itchy. Thomas watched him coolly as he frantically tried to quench his thirst. He didn’t even flinch when Logan dropped his glass, losing control of his hands. Blackness started to take over his vision, and before long he gave in to it.

When Logan opened his eyes again he was in the park, lying on the ground in a patch of soft grass, and Thomas was sitting on a bench close by. He blinked, and blinked again, squinting against the bright glare of the sun, but he was sure his eyes didn’t deceive him. Logan tried to get up but his body didn’t do what he told it to, and when he tried to call out he could only produce a funny whine, almost like a groan or a muffled bark… unlike any sound he’d ever been able to make before.

“Before you do anything,” Thomas said as he bent closer to him, “you need to listen to me. You wouldn’t have believed me before now, but I’m something like a modern day wizard, and as punishment for making your judgment without getting to know the real Pamela, I’ve changed you into a furry little brown and black dog. But magic, as you might call it, well, it doesn’t always work smoothly and definitely not as you might have planned it. It’s not always kind and gentle that way. Just like life I guess you’d say.”

Logan couldn’t make sense of what his friend was talking about, but slowly the reality of what his friend was saying dawned on him, and he took in his brown paws and the dog sounds that came from his throat when he tried to talk. He still felt strange, having to orientate himself in his current form.

It’d been several minutes yet he still didn’t feel right at home in this new body. He felt dizzy, disoriented… And weird… for lack of a better word, he just felt weird!
What is happening to me?

“You don’t know anything at all about Pamela.” Thomas went on. “You’re selfish and clueless and have never really cared about her problems. So here’s your new job, you have to go find her, and find out more about her. Until you can prove that your reaction to who she is, who she really is, is justified, you’ll stay just like you are right now.”

Then Thomas got up, but before he left he told Logan one last thing, “Alright kid, the only way you can reverse this is by proving that you will make sacrifices for her if it comes right down to it. If you don’t, you’ll both be done for.” Then he turned and left, leaving Logan all alone in the park.

As he lay there, new senses flooded Logan’s mind… smells he had never noticed before and sounds he’d never heard. He lay there for a few moments, trying to make sense of everything, trying to stay calm… until he realized that nothing was going to change if he didn’t do something. Anything.

So he managed to get it together enough to sit up on his haunches and look about the park from a completely new vantage point. And then a natural urge that he didn’t have before came upon him and told him which way to go to find her, and a loyalty to her overcame him. So he started walking and after a few steps that changed to a run.

All the new things he was now encountering… overwhelming would have been an understatement. But he kept on moving anyway… he had to find her! In the middle of the city square he stood, admiring the sheer size of everything around him… Past the new smells, new sounds, barking, cat… whoooh, that was a tough one because he really wanted to find out more about them.

But he couldn’t call her – obviously! And he couldn’t ask for directions… even if he wanted to… so he just kept on moving toward his intended target like a dowser searching for underground water. He was on her trail.

Hours passed… but he still had no idea if he was closer to finding her or not, but some unknown sixth sense seemed to be leading him to her – he had no idea how. Then the wind changed and suddenly he caught a scent, drifting across the streets on the breeze, and reaching deep into his soul. He breathed in deeply, and felt almost giddy at the scent.

Then he became aware of another problem that was starting to slowly rear it’s head – he was hungry. Not long after that the need to eat soon overruled the search for Pam. He was in search of something to fill the dark hole in his belly.

Sniff, sniff, sniff… he smelled the air and the ground looking for something to eat. But he kept on moving too. He started tasting new things on his mission just in case they might be edible… grass… nah… piece of unwrapped candy… yes… orange peel… ick… wood chips… nah… earthworm… surprisingly, not bad… then finally, a few loose french fries. Yum! And at that moment he smelled something new and exciting. Something that smelled heavenly – and the scent was getting stronger.

It’s some sort of perfume, he gathered, because he’d never smelled anything as sweet before, but it numbed his mind and he could only drink it in. Nothing else seemed to matter at that time! He continued to move on in the direction of the new scent and then he found the source – an overturned trash can filled with bags! Score!

The bags strewn about the street were all tied up but the plastic bags were no problem for Logan’s sharp claws and teeth. He sniffed about the treasure to find the exact thing he caught a whiff of a few blocks away… and then he found it. A steak bone wrapped in tinfoil! Perfect!

With an enthusiasm he hadn’t had since he was a kid, he ripped open the trash bag, located the steak bone and removed the tin foil in seconds. Then he sat down licking his prize and finished chewing it up in minutes.Yum! he thought to himself. That was a good start but he was still hungry – and now thirsty too, but with a good treat in his belly he moved on, pulled by an invisible desire to find Pam. Call it doggie GPS if you’d like.

It took him most of the night to find her, but he finally did! He was tired, his paws and shoulders ached and he was even more hungry than ever… but he did it! This was her place, he had no doubt about that fact in his mind. Exhausted, he walked up the 3 steps to her tiny porch and sat down in front of the white door with the peeling paint panting almost uncontrollably.

But he knew she was inside. He didn’t know how he knew, he just did. So he waited there at her door, sometimes sleeping, but often waking up  to sounds he didn’t know. Finally, dawn came, and the sun colored the world to him in different ways. He yawned and rolled over on his side, tired but happy, and fell back asleep.

Moments later he heard footsteps inside, as he pricked up his erect ears, looking at the crack at the bottom of the door intently. Minutes later a key turned in the lock, and he was momentarily distracted by the sensation of his length of a tail, wagging. Then the door swung open and there she was, looking worn and tired, dressed in a waitress uniform.

“Well, hello puppy,” she said to the big dog by her front door, kneeling down and holding her hand out to him. He licked it immediately, not knowing what else to do, and she giggled. Hmmm, that was new. He hadn’t heard her laugh like that before.

“Who do you belong to, boy?” she asked the stray while scratching behind his ears. “I love your black coat and red coat – and your lovely tall ears!” She giggled again. “You’re such a handsome German Shepherd – I’ve always wanted one, and here you are.”

He was vaguely annoyed at how good the scratching felt, but gave himself over to the feeling and before long she was knelt over him petting him all over. Then he rolled over, showing her his empty belly that definitely needed a rub.

She complied immediately by squatting down and scratching his belly and all over his chest. And just then she found a spot right underneath his rib cage that set his back legs to twitching like they had a mind all their own. He smiled that perfect doggy smile upside down at her as his lips curled back to expose a set of teeth that demonstrated no threat of any kind to her.

“You don’t have a home, do you, boy? No tag or collar. Hmmm, you can stay with me if you don’t mind being alone all day while I’m at work.” She kept scratching as she cooed to him, and he had to admit that her voice was soothing and the scratching felt great. His legs kept wiggling now just as fast as his lovely little tail.

“Come on in, boy,” she said to the big dog. “I have some leftovers I can give you. But then I have to go to work, so you’ll have to wait until I get home if you want to play some more, okay?”

She fed him some pizza crusts and poured him a bowl of water that she put just outside the door on her small porch. Then she left for work. Logan went over, circled a few times, then laid down just outside her front door and fell asleep. The later in the day it got, the more intense his desire to see her grew. New and exciting sounds and smells surrounded him but he fought the temptation to wander.

He stayed there all day long just outside her front door, except for the few times he needed to go relieve himself, until she returned later that evening. Needless to say when she returned, he did a dance for her like none she had never seen or had a chance to enjoy. He literally jumped for joy! And his lovely long tail never slowed down once! That was part of who he was now, loyal until the end.

This became their routine and the days passed so quickly. He spent his time with her when she wasn’t at work, always by her side, feeling lost when he wasn’t. He waited at her door until she came home, not wanting to wander off, and she fed him and took him for walks, talking to him about everything, from her hobbies and dreams to her fears.

Logan found out that she was a whole different person than he’d always made her out to be, and as the days passed he found that a different feeling was developing, something deeper and stronger than the natural loyalty of a dog to its owner. Logan began to admit to himself that he was falling in love with her.

Thomas’s words were haunting him. He didn’t know how to prove his renewed devotion to her in the form of a dog. He couldn’t do anything else than be by her side whenever possible. One day when she was at work he made the trip to the suburbs to find Thomas, but his friend was nowhere to be found. His frustration grew as time passed and he started to realize that he might never change into a man again, and might never be able to show Pamela exactly what she meant to him now, and that he was wrong in turning her down the way he did.

On one of her off days Pamela was sitting on the plastic chair she had in her sparsely furnished duplex, reading the newspaper. The inside was neat and smelled of disinfectant, and it didn’t look worn down and neglected like the outside and the rest of the lot. A knock on the door got Logan up, growling at whatever stranger was interrupting their time together.

Pamela opened it, and it was her father. And old man with white hair stood there in the pale yellow light, looking at her with an expressionless face. The old man stood back a bit at first, but after a few moments Pamela slowly gestured for him to step inside. Logan felt the tension ripple through her, almost as if it rippled through him, and for the first time since she started telling him about her dad, he understood what fear she’d known.