Stressful Relief

After a while, it was almost as if Anna had forgotten that James wasn't supposed to be a dog. They had spent much of the afternoon at the park where James had been made to chase sticks and the occasional tennis ball. Anna seemed to be having the greatest day of her life but to James this was both tedious and exhausting. With human intelligence it was an extremely repetitive and pointless task to retrieve a stick and bring it back to Anna only for her to throw it as far as she could for him to run after again.

And he was getting tired too. So much running he was expected to do! He had only a few hours experience of moving on four legs and he wasn't as graceful a runner as the other dogs. Who also irritated him. Either they would bark at him expectantly and sometimes aggressively he would have no idea what they wanted of him or how to respond or, worse still, they would attempt to sniff his butt.

Meanwhile Anna just sat lazily in the sun taking videos of James in dog form for posterity or chatting with actual dog owners. She was chatting with another young woman who had sat down at her bench, one James would very much have liked to have conversed with himself had he been himself and not a golden retriever. Still, while she was somewhat distracted it gave him an opportunity to attend to a pressing matter. He had needed to pee for sometime but the dignity he was still clinging onto prevented him from doing it right in front of Anna, so while she seemed lost in conversation he trotted over to some nearby trees. They weren't exactly out of people's vision but that didn't seem to matter that much with him being a dog.

As he cocked up his leg and began to pee James realised he had been spotted by Anna who was running towards him. He'd been busted but it hardly mattered at this point, he could go back to chasing sticks soon enough. But what she whispered to him once she caught up was truly horrifying.

"Turn back like you did in a pet store!"

All of a sudden James was human again, naked and continuing to pee on the tree like a dog.

"Ruff! Are you crazy! Ruff!" James looked over at Anna's new friend. All she needed to do was turn her head and she would be staring right at him "Ruff! What if she sees me? Ruff!"

"Then you tell her you're my pet dog James and you needed to pee!"