Heather woke naked, hot, and sticky in the brightness of a morning sunbeam. Cam was gone from bed already. She could hear him doing push-ups on the other side of the loft. Her body was small and human once again, which was both a relief and a disappointment all at once. The futon smelled like sex, and so did she, but it didn't smell like pungent flowers and wasn't soaking wet with slime like it had been last night. All evidence of her mysterious monstrous side had vanished like a shadow, once again.
Outside of Cam's windows, Houston waited like a sweltering exhausted animal, even now at breakfast time. Heather didn't feel like going out into that city, but also didn't want to still be here in Cam's loft when the day began to roast in earnest.
As she rose, she saw that he was in his boxers, his well-formed back and shoulder muscles tense as he moved his rigid body smoothly up and down. She stopped for a bit to properly appreciate the sight. A little flutter of arousal welled up inside her as she thought about how those strong arms were capable of lifting both their body-weights locked together. She wondered if he'd showered already.
Whether he had or not, however, she didn't want to wait herself. She headed in and brushed her teeth, did her business, and turned the water on. Stepping into the shower, she washed her body and her hair efficiently, then played with herself a little as she thought of Cam, one hand down between her legs just kind of toying around her pubic hair and labia with her fingers, the other pulling a nipple lightly between her thumb and index finger.
Temptation struck. Heather thought about how things had felt last night, and wondered about exploring her body further in its other state. Stepping out dripping from the shower, she quickly flicked the light switch off and hopped her way back in, returning to the water even as she felt the dark set in and her body begin its monstrous change. Her head rose up above the spray, then back in as she wobbled downward in the change to tentacles from legs. Her arms ended up braced stickily against the rippled glass sides of the shower stall, adhering to it with their slime. Her breath was coming coarse and raspy once again through rows of mangling teeth. And she was done, back in her monstrous other form, standing with the water pounding a massage on her surprisingly sensitive and rubbery skin, her slimy coating seeming to have washed right down the drain.
As she stabilized on her tentacles, Heather reached up with her hands to touch her face, beginning for the first time to truly take inventory of this body. Her questing fingers found her mouth was huge, the whole bottom of her head distended to accommodate it. The edges of her mouth went back and back and back, nearly to her ears. She didn't seem to have any lips at all, just two hard and rubbery edges of skin that came together with a few of her straggling sharp teeth protruding out between them at odd angles. Opening wide, she found her mouth could gape open nearly a foot from top to bottom. Her tongue was thick and bulbous, perhaps the size of a clenched fist, but felt strangely delicate when she touched it.
Her teeth, she thought, made no damned sense at all. And she should know, since she spent her every work day cleaning people's teeth. Her teeth were asymmetric and almost tangled, and none of them matched the shape of any normal human tooth. Previously, she had thought that they were in rows, like a shark's teeth, but as she inspected them more closely, carefully moving her tongue around and away, it became clear that there was no such order to them. They were jumbled together in a way that made no sense at all for any diet she could think of. No molars or other flat surfaces for plants, no incisors for slicing. They were sharp enough, fangs far sharper than canines, but they were angled haphazardly rather than at a good angle for gripping prey. They also didn't seem to be hollow for injecting venom. She could probably cause a lot of damage to something if she clamped her teeth on it, but it would be more a random pointy mauling than an actual bite. They'd be really scary looking if anybody could see them, but what the hell was she supposed to have evolved to eat with a mouth like this? Then again, who said evolution had anything to do with a monster that magically vanished when it was hit with light?
Leaving her crazy mouth behind, Heather found her nose had become wide and flat, stretching out to meet her monstrous mouth. Above that, however, her head seemed hardly to have changed at all. Her eyes were where she expected them, her hair felt entirely normal as she ran her hands through it, and her ears were just her ears. As she ran her hands downward, she felt her skin was kind of odd, however, rubbery and pliable with the slime washed off. Her breasts were small and sensitive as usual, her nipples hardening quickly at the lightest touch. As she did so, she realized that her fingers had changed. Feeling them, she realized that they were somewhat longer and thinner than usual, almost elegant, and when she pulled on them her whole arm stretched. Reaching down without bending her body, she effortlessly stretched her arm to lay her strangely large palm flat on the bottom of the shower.
And then she started to explore her legs. Her tentacles. That was clearly the strangest and most changed part of her anatomy besides her nonsensical teeth. Running her hands along one tentacle, she raised it up, agile and flexible. It seemed to be much like the tentacle of an octopus, with big round suckers on the inside, except that it remained thicker and wider for longer, more like a leg, coming to a blunt round end rather than quickly thinning to a point. She raised another and another, feeling the supple strength of the remaining tentacles still holding up her weight.
Then blinding light and bang! Heather gave a high-pitched shriek in surprise and pain as her head struck the side of the shower stall as she fell down, one leg in the air and the other slipping sideways. She was human again and awkwardly lying on her back with water falling on her face.
"Oh, shit!" said Cam, from where he was standing in the door, light spilling in, "Are you OK?" He rushed inside, flipping on the light as he came in.
Heather felt her head to check for blood, finding nothing but a tender spot. She struggled to her feet, feeling more foolish than anything else. Cam was opening the shower and reaching for the control. She waved him off, saying, "No, no, I'm fine. I was just, well." She felt her face color. "I was exploring things. In the dark. When you came in, I turned back and I lost my footing, that's all."
