I managed to turn my head enough to find him, blinking away the afterimage of the sky.
He'd crouched a couple of feet from me, and looked almost normal again: just the slightest remnant of the glow in his eyes, but the claws and teeth retracted.
The glow hid whatever emotion lurked there, but he was far from calm. His muscles had a rigidity that looked like he was battling a fight-or-flight response of his own.
And he was still erect. That was impossible to miss. "I'm sorry," he said, his tone so flat I couldn't even tell if he meant it. Or what he was sorry for, exactly.
Of course. Here is the paragraph expanded to roughly double its original word count, delving deeper into the character's visceral reaction and internal conflict:
Lying to my face and coolly telling me he wouldn't fully shift to hunt me? How could I ever process that level of calculated deception?
