Page 9 of Have a Bear-y Little Christmas
Was it rowdy and juvenile? Yes. But I didn’t care. I was having a blast, and so were my girls. I truly didn’t understand how some men only did the bare minimum for their kids and said that providing for them was enough. Ilikedmy girls just as much as I loved them. Frankly, they were pretty fucking great in just about every way.
In my line of work, I had encountered a few guys who hinted I was feminine for doing my daughter’s hair or talking about taking a makeup course when they were older. Other men saidit was inappropriate for me to be so close with my “female progeny”—yuck—but those people were idiots. I wrote them off along with the people who insisted that an alpha shifter had to act a certain way and that having anxiety or being in touch with emotions somehow made me any less of an alpha bear.
They were all losers, and I pitied them.
“Okay, okay, I surrender,” Addy said as I finally made it all the way into their room. Chuckling, I set her on her bed, and she whirled at me defiantly, finger pointed. “You may have won the battle, but you will not win the war.”
“Of that I’m sure,” I said, leaning down and kissing her forehead. That seemed to change the mood, and a few minutes later, the girls were settled into bed, and I was reading them a story about a group of children who were obsessed with ancient Egyptology and formed their own club about it. I thought perhaps it was a little too advanced for Eva, but she insisted, and I didn’t feel the need to argue with her.
Unsurprisingly, Eva fell asleep first, looking as angelic as her full name—Evangeline—implied. I looked at Addy, and she gave me another one of her nods that said so much without saying anything at all.
“Goodnight,” I whispered, getting up to give Eva a kiss on the cheek, and then Addy.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you have any other activities scheduled before we leave?”
I paused, racking my brain to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. Normally, Zara and I took turns planning stuff, and our first year without her, I’d skipped activities, for obvious reasons. This was my first year riding solo as the Christmas guide.
“Why? Was there something you wanted to do in particular?”
“No. Just curious. A lot has… changed.”
Yes, it had.
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow since it’s your last day of school before winter break. For now, you just get some sleep, okay?”
“Okay. See you in the morning. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
She settled in, pulling the blanket up to her chin. I turned the light off, then shut the door behind me, making sure to walk quietly as I went. Although neither of my girls were old enough to have the advanced hearing of a shifter, kids always had an uncanny knack for being woken up by the last thing you’d ever expect.
Once I was at the end of the hall, I hurried to my bedroom and opened my laptop. After Zara’s death, I couldn’t stand to stay in the master bedroom downstairs, so I’d set up the largest unoccupied room on the second floor and made that my new bedroom. The master bedroom was now a combination study and a bit of a memorial to my wife. Nothing quite like a shrine, but I had a bookcase with her favorite books, a table with her prettiest crystals, incense burner, and candles, and two of her favorite plants hanging from the window.
I had a bit of a black thumb myself—ironic since I was a landscaper—but I had reminders in my phone to water them and even rotate them when needed, because I wasn’t going to let anything happen to her spider plant named Queen, who was bigger than I was broad, and King, a variegated Pothos that had multiple branches that stretched all the way around the room.
Then there were a couple of photos of her from babyhood to before she became terminal, photos of us together, including our wedding, then her and the girls, and finally all of us as a family.
Ilovedlooking at them, and I did whenever I was feeling a bit too down or terrified about where the world was heading and what my future looked like as the single father of two daughters who were black. So many people outside of our area didn’tunderstand the melting pot of being Creole. I was French, West African, German, and Spanish. My wife was Portuguese, Afro-Caribbean, Haitian, Spanish, and Dutch. And together, all of us were American through and through, with no plans on changing that anytime soon. I just had to be realistic that as both a shifter and a man of color, there were some trials and tribulations my girls would go through that I couldn’t shield them from, no matter how much I wished I could.
I tried not to worrytoohard about those. All I could do was be mentally prepared to deal with them as they happened. I would always protect my girls as best I could, but I didn’t want them to live their whole lives in fear.
So yeah, I looked at those photos quite a lot.
Wait, what was I doing again?
Oh right! Activities for the weekend.
I started to look at a few community boards and googled events in my area. I shuffled through a few—I’d already taken the girls sledding, and I also wanted to wait a bit longer before we went to look at all the light displays in the city—but then something caught my eye.
It was an advert for one of the bigger outdoor ice-skating rinks in the city. During the summer, it was a wading pool with geysers for city kids to keep cool, but in the winter they filled it, let it freeze over, and turned it into a skating rink. “Kids’ night, huh?”
According to the ad, it was free for anyone twelve and under. Not that I was worried about money, but it made me feel better that there wouldn’t be many teenagers or try-hard adults racing across the ice and possibly knocking one of my girls over. Besides, it seemed like a great chance for the kids to make friends. It wasn’t that they were social pariahs at school, but Addy wasveryfocused on her academics and extracurriculars,hence her self-induced competition with Symphony, and Eva was fairly reserved even among children she got along with.
Didn’t that work out just perfectly? It looked like we had a plan.
