“Could you shift for me? Just… it’s something that requires you to shift.”
“Okay. Right now?”
“Yes, please.”
Cal got off the bed and stripped out of his clothes, then called the cat forth and jumped back onto the bed.
The feeling was completely different now. He was an equal to his cat, not trapped, not holding onto the reins with shaking fingers. His cat appreciated him as much as he did the cat. They were one again, as much as they could be.
Derek didn’t sit up, but instead, patted the pillow next to his.
“Come here, sweetheart.” His tone belied his nerves, and the cat didn’t quite know how to feel about it.
It walked up to the pillow and sat down. Derek reached a hand to scratch it under the chin and it let out a long, happy purr.
Even if Cal hadn’t known it in his bones, his cat’s behavior proved that they were mates. The contentment the cat felt at Derek’s touch couldn’t be denied. The only other person it had liked to be close to before had been Kit, and even then, it had been more of a parent wanting to keep a child safe kind of a situation.
With Derek, the cat let go of everything but the feeling of having its mate so close.
“So here’s what I want to do,” Derek said quietly as he withdrew his hand. “Stay still. There’s something you need to see.”
Cal wondered what he could be talking about, and then cat felt curious to him.
Derek reached a hand up and—pulled off his eye patch.
Cal felt it in his soul, and the cat tried to back away while unable to take its eyes off Derek’s face. Cal did everything he could to keep the cat still, to stop it from escaping.
“No, stay,” Derek said firmly, even though his voice shook just a little. “Don’t go. Come back here.” He patted the pillow.
The cat felt the itch to flee under its skin. The proof of its mate, what it had done to its mate, was right there.
Mate was forcing it to look, to take responsibility, and it didn’t want to!
“Come here.” Mate patted the pillow again, and stared at the cat with his one eye, like he always would. Except this time, there was no cover over the one the cat had taken.
The man inside the cat nudged it forward, made it take those steps needed to get to the pillow. The cat felt the way its body jerkily moved until it was right next to Mate’s head.
A sorrowful sound escaped it then, but it couldn’t look away.
“It’s okay. I want you to look and to get used to it.”
With the hair of its back rising a little, the cat took the plunge. It moved even closer as Mate settled down on the pillows.
“There’s nothing in the socket. My reflexes were too slow to close my eyes, so my lid is intact as you can see. But they couldn’t save the eye.” Mate spoke as the cat peered ever so close, sniffing the area carefully. This was how the cat would know, how it would learn. “I’ve been wondering if I should get one of those prosthetic eyes. Maybe I’ll figure it out one day, when I’m ready. But right now, the patch is fine.”
The cat sniffed the air and the closed eyelid, and Mate chuckled. “You’re tickling me with your whiskers.” To its surprise, the cat felt amusement and happiness from the man inside. Ever so gently, the cat headbutted Mate’s cheek.
“I forgave you a long time ago. You need to forgive yourself.” Mate kissed the cat’s forehead.
The cat let go of the shift and let the man come back. For this, they needed human words.
Cal moved to lie against Derek’s chest and kissed his jaw.
“Thank you. For making us see that. The cat… it needed it even more than I did.”
“I thought so. It’s… I know it doesn’t have human emotions, those are your job. But it also hadn’t seen and… I’m kind of tired to be hiding it.” Derek smiled.
Until now, he’d always worn the eye patch, even during the nights most of the time. Cal had averted his gaze each and every time out of… he wasn’t sure what—the cat’s shame, probably.
