Chapter 16 #2
“Nope.” He took it from her hand. “I love it cold. I used to sneak it late at night after everyone had gone to bed. Always ate it cold then.”
“Told ya,” Alan quipped to Becca as he straightened off the wall. “I don’t know about you two, but I’m beat. Dawn comes early for lawyers, too.”
Carl frowned. “Anything I need to know about?”
Alan waved absently behind his back. “Not unless you enjoy the finer details of estate taxes.”
“Kill me now.”
“Exactly how I felt this afternoon when I started with it.” And with that, Alan climbed the stairs to his bedroom, leaving Carl and Becca alone with blueberry pie.
A third of the pie was gone—probably what Alan had eaten—and Carl could easily finish the rest. But he figured it would be crass to eat the thing straight out of the pie tin. So he once again pretended to be civilized and got himself a plate. “Want any?”
“I had some earlier,” she said.
He paused, frowning down at the plate. He knew his brother. Alan took the missing chunk. “Did you make two?”
She shook her head. “Just the one.”
He set down the pie long enough to look at her hard. “Don’t lie to me Becca. It makes me nuts.”
She opened her mouth on a gasp, then slowly closed it. “Sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”
He did. “Because Alan probably pushed you to eat when you didn’t want it. So it’s easier to lie to me than go through that again.” He leaned forward, needing to press his point. “Except it isn’t easier because I can tell. Just say you don’t want it. I won’t force you.”
She nodded. “Is that a bear thing? Does my scent change or something?”
Yes. No. Her scent was a constant bouquet of temptation for him. It probably did change when she lied, but if he started focusing on her scent, he’d be hard and horny by the next breath. “Not this time,” he said. “But I can still tell.”
“I won’t do it again.” Then she gestured to the pie. “Want any ice cream with that?”
He didn’t care about the ice cream, but he didn’t want her leaving his side. Not yet. So he used the excuse to keep her near. And while she scooped, he looked at the laptop open on the dining room table. “Is that yours?”
“It’s Alan’s old one. He set it up for me. I’ve been catching up on emails and…” She shrugged. “Killing time, mostly.”
As hard as today had been for him, how much harder had it been for her just sitting around waiting for news? He’d texted when he could, but there were only so many variations on “Nothing yet. Hope for a lead soon.”
Still, he had to care for her somehow, so he pulled out an extra spoon and bowl for her. “Why not scoop a little for yourself?”
She shot him a glance. “You said you wouldn’t push.”
Oh, right. “It was just a suggestion.”
Her expression turned wry, but then she pleased him by taking the bowl from his hand. “Maybe a little.”
A few moments later, they settled down at the table, each enjoying the dessert.
It was ridiculous how happy the domestic scene made him.
He couldn’t remember the last time he felt so content at the end of the day.
Certainly never after a day as bad as today.
But then Becca started to shift uncomfortably in her chair.
She opened her mouth twice as if to say something, but then abruptly shoved a spoonful of ice cream in instead.
Clearly she wanted to talk to him, but wasn’t sure how to broach the topic.
And given how happy he’d been a second ago, he wasn’t sure he wanted her to break the peace.
But in the end, he had to know. So in the split second between one bite and the next, he gave her an opening in the most off hand way he could think of.
“You can tell me anything.” He smiled at her and wished for the thousandth time today that their morning after had gone differently. That he’d had time to hold her in his arms and wake her slowly in the way of a skilled lover.
She flushed and looked away. “It’s more of a question.”
He nodded. “So ask.”
“It’s personal.”
He huffed out a breath. Didn’t she get it? He’d give her anything she wanted and that included all the intimate secrets of his life. “Ask.”
“What’s it like to shift? Is it just you with a different body? Like putting on a different coat? Or are there other changes? Do you think like a man? Or…”
“Like an animal?”
She nodded. “I don’t mean to be offensive.”
He snorted. If she thought this was offensive, she hadn’t met any of the crass members of the community. “These are normal questions. The kids ask all the time. I just…” He shrugged. “It’s hard to explain.”
She looked down and fiddled with her empty ice cream bowl. “Oh. Okay. Forget I—”
He touched her hand. “No, I’ll explain. It just may not make any sense.”
“You transform into a bear more than double your weight. I think we left rational behind a while ago.”
He nodded. “It’s like opening a cage door inside and just letting it have free range. The bear takes over, and I sit in the back and kind of watch. The body change is secondary. Suddenly, everything’s instinct and action. What words I have are simple. Want. Need.” Kill. Destroy.
She tilted her head as she looked at him. “You sound as if you’re two different people.”
“That’s how it feels. There’s me, the one sitting here talking to you. I’m the one who plans and strategizes. Who acts as Max and watches over the kids.” He leaned back in his chair. “And then there’s him.”
“The grizzly part of you?”
“Sometimes he’s so close to the surface, I worry he’s going to explode out of me. It used to happen all the time as a kid. Now it’s just…” A constant war. “A balancing act.”
“It doesn’t sound like balance,” she said. “Actually, it sounds like what Theo was talking about with his friends.”
“A bear under his skin?”
“Not the words he used. His football coach told him it was hormones. All that aggression and lust.”
“I can relate.”
“So it’s like adolescence, only forever? Like your hormones take physical shape?”
He’d never thought about it like that. “I don’t know,” he said honestly.
“I’ve always been a shifter.” But he spent a great deal of his time with kids, especially boys.
They all had the wild inside them. Shifters just had to be extra careful when and how the wild got loose.
“But I don’t want you to think I can’t control the bear. You’re safe here.”
Becca released a huff. “Why does everyone keep reassuring me that I’m safe? I never thought I wasn’t. Well, except for when you kidnapped me, but that was just at the beginning.”
He looked at her, his heart filling with emotions he couldn’t control. “But what about this morning? What about…” He gestured vaguely to the front yard. He vividly recalled the way she’d turned from him.
“You protected me this morning. Me and the rest of the Gladwins. From what Alan said, Nick has been a problem for years.”
“But weren’t you afraid?”
“Not for me.” She stroked her thumb across the back of his hand. “Were there others who haven’t felt safe around you? Did someone get hurt?”
How to answer that without spilling his entire heart and soul? “We’re all raised from birth to keep this quiet. Sure, we have normal friends, but we don’t talk about shifting. And once we start dating…”
“It’s a closed community,” she finished for him. “Only look at girls who can shift.”
“Or grew up around shifters. It’s dangerous to share this stuff. Normal people tend to freak out.”
She nodded her understanding. “Paranoia probably gets ingrained early.”
She didn’t know the half of it. “Our kind have been hunted since the beginning of time. But it goes the other way, too.” He sighed. “People have a reason to fear. When shifters go feral, they destroy everything in their path. It’s insanity at its most brutal and violent.”
“You’re talking about Mark.”
He shook his head, his tone firming. “He’s not there. Not yet.” But he might be any minute now.
She flipped his hand over so that they could touch palm to palm, and that gesture pulled him out of his dark thoughts. “He seemed in complete control to me.”
He flashed her a grateful smile. “He’s strong.” Then he forced himself to return to the main topic. She needed to understand the reason for all that paranoia. “We’ve all broken the rules at least once. We’ve told an outsider and had them lose it.”
“Told them you can shift into a bear? Like you told me.”
“Yes. You don’t know how rare it is for someone to take it as well as you did.”
She stood up, picking up their dirty dishes and carrying them to the sink.
Her mouth was pursed as she moved, her expression drawn into one of concentration.
“I did freak,” she said, quietly enough he had to strain to hear.
Then she returned to the doorway. “But you’re not violent or insane. You’re just people.”
“I’m ‘people.’ My grizzly is a bear.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You two are one and the same.”
And here was the crux of her confusion. “No, we’re not.
Not really. Because if the bear slips its leash, it’s my job to kill it.
” His gaze shifted to the window. Miles away his best friend lived with that certainty.
One day he would turn too much a bear and would go insane.
And it would be Carl’s job to put him down.
Then he felt her hand on his cheek, gently but firmly guiding his gaze back to her. She was standing above him as he sat in his chair, and she used the superior position to emphasize her words. “You are the same person,” she repeated. “Bear or human, you are one person.”
“You don’t understand.”
She sighed. “So explain.”
“The grizzly is a wild creature. The man keeps him under control.”
“Two entities in one body?” she asked.
He nodded.
“I don’t believe it.”
He stared at her. He couldn’t fathom the audacity of her—a completely mundane human—telling him the details of who he was or how he functioned. It robbed him of words. And in the silence, she issued him a challenge.
“Can you let him out?” she asked. “Without shifting, I mean. Just let me talk to him if he’s someone different.”