Page 113 of Have a Bear-y Little Christmas
Oh, how could I have forgotten about that? Of course that would be an issue. While I found it highly amusing that one of Jeannie’s biggest clients was a paranormal romance publisher, it hadn’t quite registered how confusing that might be. It was a bit like having to work on one of those many hospital shows, then marrying a doctor. Probably not a position many people would be in considering shifters rarely married other humans. It wasn’t completely unheard of, but it certainly wasn’t common.
“Sorry, sweetheart. I should have been a lot more forthcoming with this. I guess a lot of my attention went into the kids and my business, so I forgot some of the essentials.”
“That’s okay,” she murmured, resting her head against me again. As usual, the weight of her touch was grounding, reminding me to stay in the moment. “I know I haven’t always made it the easiest with how I tend to isolate. A lot of people would have stopped seeing me after I ghosted them for a month. Thank you for showing up to my door and proving to me that it was okay to let someone help me.”
I kissed the top of her head and breathed in the scent of her shampoo. “I’m glad I was there. Otherwise, you would have had to deal with your parents alone.” I shuddered at the thought. Not because I didn’t think Jeannie could handle herself—she definitely could—but it was the idea that she would havehad to.
“Ugh,God.No, thank you. That’s a zero out of ten from me, dawg.”
I chuckled a bit at the slang. “Bear, actually.”
I didn’t need to see her face to know that she was rolling her eyes, and that filled me with glee as all her terrible punsdid. Hey, she was the one who started it with the Goldilocks reference.
“Speaking of bears…” She murmured slowly, one of her fingers making little figure eights on my arm. Even after seven months of dating, so much of my time with Jeannie was spent laughing in some form or another.
“Yeah, yeah, hold your horses.”
“No, I don’t got any of those. Unless it turns out that some of Max’s medical team are secretly horse shifters.”
“Is that a real thing?”
She gave me a bit of a look. “How should I know? You’re the shifter!”
“Yeah, but I’m a bear shifter. We’re not exactly the most social outside of our own.”
“And I’m a human!”
Now it was my turn to flash a cheeky grin at her. “Are you? I didn’t even notice!”
“Sure, yuck it up, wise guy. Less of the comedy, more with the bear stuff,” she said, putting on a thick accent. I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be mob adjacent or imitating someone from Yonkers. My baby had many skills, but impersonations was not one of them.
“Careful, sweetheart, one could say you’re acting entitled.”
“If you can say it, that means you’re not a bear yet, so what’s the hold up?”
She managed to maintain a straight face for a couple of seconds before breaking into giggles. She was cute like that. As much as I would have loved to keep bantering, it was like my bear had stirred at the mention of being let loose, and was now quite eager for a chance to get out and scent who he considered his mate. He had been patient about not seeing her since that fateful night when he chased the juvenile away, but now thatthe door was cracked open, he was making it very clear that he wanted his time at the surface, and he wanted itnow.
“I guess there isn’t any,” I said, stepping away from the blanket and shaking my limbs. More psychosomatic than necessary, but it readied me to shift in a much more comfortable way than the rapid shift I’d done in the cabin all those months ago. “You ready?”
Jeannie was still sitting on the blanket, hands clasped, still looking at me like I was something miraculous. And the craziest thing was, she made mefeelthat way too. She nodded, a broad grin on her round face, cheeks already pink.
“All right, here goes nothing.”
I was both afraid and unafraid. I knew my bear wouldneverhurt her. He was an alpha, and he would force me to take over before he’d harm Jeannie or Max. It was more that I was a teeny bit worried that Jeannie was asking to bite off a little more than she could chew. That it was one thing to see my bear save the day in a time of crisis, and another to justbein front of her.
But even though I had those worries, I wasn’t going to let Jeannie down. So, I concentrated and reached down into myself, extending a hand to the animal part of me.
This time, the exchange between us was gradual. Instead of a volcano erupting and irrevocably affecting all the land around us, it was more like the ocean meeting the shore. Hard to say exactly where one ended and one began, and yet still a steady transition between the two.
Flesh receded, fur grew, teeth expanded, and bones cracked. It would have been horrific to others, but to me, it was just life. Proof of the beautiful community I was part of. While I was a wee bit embarrassed that I had let that part of me fall to the wayside for so long, it felt good to acknowledge that side of me again for no reason other than wanting to be seen. Not everything needed to be a great emergency.
Steam began to pour into the air around me, but we were in a wide enough space that I knew it didn’t obscure the transformation. The good and the bad. The beauty and the grotesque. Being a shifter was the ultimate dichotomy; two sides that most would consider opposite entangled and working with each other to become something greater than the sum of its parts.
Strange, that I’d let myself forget that.
Even stranger and lovelier still to have a partner who wanted to share that side with me despite not being a shifter herself.
Finally, all four of my massive legs hit the ground, and I gave my much larger body a shake. It felt good, albeit a little strange, a bit like trying to move after sleeping for way too long.
