Bears Not Included

Chapter One

Livia

“Livia Daniels, I love you, but honestly, you need to less nerd and more hot girl, or you’re never going to find a boyfriend, let alone get laid. Seriously, if your virginity screams ‘take me’ any louder, the furniture is going to start humping you out of pity.”

I pause for a moment, and in that minuscule amount of time, my entire body goes ice cold, and my insides lodge in my throat, making me want to throw up at the thought of what my future holds. I quickly swallow down the rising anxiousness inside me and cover up the deathly white sheet that remains engulfed over my face before my cousin, Faith Marsh, sees it.

Too late.

“Okay, what’s up?” Faith asks, climbing off the edge of my bed where she’d been sitting like a princess, her pretty brows tightly knotted as she scans my face.

“Nothing,” I say, perking up as I resume bundling way too many wads of underwear into a backpack.

“Something is up because you usually say, oh, boyfriends are overrated, and sex is—”

“The funniest thing humans do,” I add, sticking out my tongue at her. “Well, it’s true. I stand by my opinion.”

“Again, sex is so not funny, Livia. It’s hot and dirty, and it’s supposed to make you feel all hot and gooey, and I swear to god if you mention cupcakes—”

“Well, it’s true. A decadent double chocolate cupcake with peanut butter filling and a side of especially creamy vanilla ice cream gives me all the hot and gooey feelings I need without having someone bump my private parts as if they’re having a conniption.”

“The word is hump. Hump. And that’s why you’re never going to get laid. Because you use words like conniption. Girl, who hurt you?” Faith asks with an exaggerated, serious expression on her face.

Faith doesn’t know who hurt me. She knows only what I tell her, which is more than I tell anyone else. We didn’t grow up together. In fact, I didn’t know she existed until about three years ago when we were both around twenty years old, and she introduced herself as my cousin—my father’s sister’s daughter.

It made perfect sense that my father was severely estranged from the only other family he had—his sister—and hadn’t spoken to her in over twenty-five years. I don’t think even my mom knew he had family. He’s just that type of man.

After the death of Faith’s mother in a senseless car accident, Faith showed up on our doorstep determined to have a relationship with me since I was all she had left now. My father forbade it. But Faith had no plans to leave, and I had no plans to listen to my father this time around.

“How could you not laugh? I mean, sex is the most hilarious thing people do. It’s basically just a man shoving his odd-shaped appendage in and out of your private part, grunting like some bear or something. I don’t think I would be able to keep a straight face if I tried.”

“Trust me, you’ll be too busy moaning out in pleasure to laugh if you ever allow yourself to get some good-grade dick. But no. And how can you not hear it? I’m over here, and I can hear your virginity screaming, take me, take me, take me. Sigh,” Faith says then sighs theatrically to get her point home.

“There’s no hope for you, Livia Kate Daniels,” she continues. “None whatsoever. Go be with your nerd friends trying to prove fairytales exist.” She sticks a grumpy expression on her face as she goes to my sock drawer, piles her arms with as many pairs of socks as she can, and tosses them into my bag.

This is probably how it would have been for us if we had grown up together. She’d be trying to talk me out of something while helping me prepare to do the very thing she was talking me out of doing.

“But if it’s real, Faith? What if the stories we know as fairytales really truly happened in real life? Wouldn’t you want to know?”

“No,” Faith says without hesitation, shaking her head and making her thick curls bounce in the winter sunlight streaming in from my bedroom window. “First, because I’m a grown-up. And second, because it’s literally a fairytale, as in, it was made up. As in, it never happened. Like ever.”

“Fine, be a pessimist all you want, but I want to believe, and I want to know, and now I may have proof of its existence. Actual proof. This is huge, Faith.”

Finding the secret online group Fairytale Femme Fatales, or FFF, changed my life. Not only did those girls validate both my and my mom’s aspirations, but suddenly, I was no longer alone in my quest.

Meeting Skyler McNeil, Demi Carlson, and Kyla Webb, the other three girls in the club, gave me hope. Skyler’s dad is a billionaire. Demi has some rather interesting family connections, possibly on the wrong side of the law. And Kyla has family in law enforcement. We’re educated, smart, logical, and determined, and each of us believes the same thing. Fairytales were real. They happened.

We bonded instantly over a shared fascination and an obsession to be proven right. Scattered across the States, we meet up in the dead of night online, pouring together over new information we found and sifting through to find the facts.

Now a thrilling beam of excitement follows my every breath instead of the constant heaviness I carry in my heart. They share the exact same excitement I do, something I can’t expect Faith to feel as well.

I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t wait for the next day because I get to unearth more things and piece together more clues, and I do it around people who don’t think I’m crazy, like how my father thought about my mom.

Faith has no clue about the extent to which I’m hanging on to the one thing that my mom and I used to do together before she died—I was thirteen years old then.

It was our secret, my mom’s and mine. She believed that fairytales were true-life accounts of things that happened. And I do, too. So if I can prove that fairytales existed I can lay her to rest.

Now ten years after her death, I may be able to finally say goodbye to her when I show her she was right all along. I hope she’s watching from wherever she is.

I roll up two pairs of leggings and a thick hoodie and add them to the bag already stuffed with bunches of underwear and socks. I have no idea how long I’m going to be gone. This could go either way. I’ll either be back in a few hours or a few days.

Or maybe never if I were braver.

“Your father is going to be so thrilled when he finds out this is the reason he’s sending you to law school. And he will find out, you know. He always seems to know Livia. Might sever a vein, too; he’ll be so excited.”

He’s not technically sending me to law school. In other words, he isn’t paying for it. He didn’t pay for college either. I took a student loan for college, then worked my ass off, and got a part scholarship for law school.

I work two jobs as well, at two different restaurants. The waitressing job at The Elliott, four nights a week, earns me way more than the one at Jimmy’s BLT where I work Friday through to Sunday, but nothing would make me leave Jimmy’s.

I have a soft spot for the elderly Jimmy Keppler, and his wife, Babs, the owners of Jimmy’s BLT, and helping them out makes me feel good about myself, which I crave. It’s nice to feel wanted.

I pay for all the other costs my scholarship doesn’t cover, including my own food and rent. Yes, I pay my father for living at home, because it’s a ‘teachable moment,’ he calls it.

I also use my own money for food and make sure my father has a decent meal at the end of each day. Most nights he eats at the office and doesn’t bother to tell me and doesn’t bring anything back for me either.

I do all this so I can become a lawyer, like him, to please him. A lot of hard work for something I have zero interest in being––I don’t want to be a lawyer like my father––but I’m a sucker for his affections. Stupid me.

I also stay at home because I feel closer to my mom.

I refrain from telling Faith my father forced me out of law school even before I got a proper start for reasons that turn my stomach. I don’t want to get into that right now with Faith. I don’t want anything to mar this day. Not when I’m this close to proving fairytales were real. Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps.

I need this to be true like I need my next breath.

For now, what my father doesn’t know won’t hurt me. I don’t care about the repercussions I’m going to face when he finds out, either, because this is about my mom first and foremost.

This is for you, mom.

After my mom died all I wanted to do was please my father and follow in his footsteps where really my passion is folklore and mythology, like my mom’s

My father called her interests whimsical, and he said it like an insult, blunt, and condescending. Pretty much the same tone he uses on me every day, probably there since the first moment he realized his first and only child was a girl.

Me.

I’m stupidly still plagued with the need to please my father; I don’t know why. Even when he yanked my world out from under me in less than a minute a few weeks ago, delivering a statement so appalling and unsettling, I thought I was going to pass out as I watched his lips move, forming words I never thought I would ever hear.

He doesn’t want me to be a lawyer anymore. He wants me to be something else entirely now.