Page 73 of Shaped to Be Yours

“What doesthatmean?” Jensen Senior growled.

“Oh can it, Mark, these people are friendly,” someone else said, but I didn’t get to hear anything else of the exchange,because Bo led me and Jason into one of the buildings at the base of a nearby tree.

Maybe instead of an elven village, it was also like a hobbit hole. Within the hollowed-out tree home, it was cozy and warm. Everything was made out of the available natural materials, but that still meant seating, blankets, books, even art on the walls. The door had been tall enough that Jason hadn’t needed to duck, and everything was a little oversized to accommodate how big this species was, making human Bo look a little diminutive in his own… home, I assumed?

When he’d turned human, he hadn’t been left naked. He wore a simple shirt and trousers like villager garb from a Renaissance fair.

“How do I, um… be me again?” Jason asked once we were alone with Bo. Though Bo had gestured for us to sit, Jason hadn’t moved far from inside the door, still holding tight to me. “It feels different than when I’ve looked like this at home.”

“Being here, your body wants to retain its form that is most connected to nature,” Bo explained. “But the principles are the same. However you willed yourself to look human before, you still can. You might just need a little boost.” He smiled and came back toward us. Jason tensed a little but let his father press a hand to his chest.

Slowly, Jason’s form wilted, shrinking and shifting back to how he had been before we got sucked into the monster realm. He reached up to hold his father’s hand to his chest and looked down at himself. “My clothes came back.”

They had. I hadn’t registered that his already torn clothing hadn’t simply torn more when he transformed at our arrival. They had somehow disappeared into him? Transformed with him? I wasn’t sure which, but now that he was human, his tatters were back.

“Oh, Jason.” Bo chuckled. “I have so many questions for you. You look so much like your mother.”

“She always says I look like you.” Jason was clearly still in partial shock, but he let go of Bo’s hand and said, “My questions first. That day in the woods, one of these things took you? Turned you into one of them? Which one—”

“Jason, I didn’t need to be turned into anything. I got sucked home. I was born here.”

“What…?”

Again, Bo gestured for us to sit. This time, we did, with Bo in a chair and us on something like a sofa, while Jason clung to my hand still like he couldn’t handle this if our skin stopped touching.

Jason shook his head. “You… you were a monster all along, and you never told Mom?”

“I wanted to. Every time I thought I’d finally gotten up the nerve, she’d say I love you for the first time. Or propose. Did you know your mother askedmeto marryher?”

“Yeah. Because shetold me. She told me everything. You didn’t even tell her the truth about what you were after she had me?”

Bo did look a lot like Jason, his hair a little longer, his face a little more aged and covered in scruff, but his eyes especially were so much the same, bright blue, and deeply haunted. “Everything about the pregnancy was so normal by human standards. I thought, maybe, because I was human when we… were together, maybe you wouldn’t be like me at all. Maybe you’d just be human. And I didn’t know then if I’d ever get the chance to see home again. Your world didn’t know about mine. I know it does now from our recent visitors, but at the time, it all would have been so much more alien to her, to everyone. So I thought… maybe I’ll be human too. I was so afraid I’d lose her if I told her and showed her the truth.”

“I guess I can… understand that.” Jason glanced at me.

I squeezed his hand.

“But now there are official portals.” Jason turned back with a scowl. “Stable ones. You never tried to come home to us? Why would you, when this is your real home—”

“No,” Bo said with an assertive lean toward Jason. “My real home is wherever you and your mother are. I did try to find a way back. The unstable portal on this side, even when it was active, never allowed me to pass back through. I tried. It was what brought me to the human realm originally, but completely by accident. I never knew how, and I could never recreate the conditions that made it work both directions. When it acts up on this side, it only causes a shock to anyone who nears it. I promise, I promise you I tried.” He reached for Jason’s other hand, and Jason let him take it.

“How, um, did you learn to look human at all?” Jason asked.

“I was in those woods, hiding what I was, watching people from the trees, for several weeks before I was able to take human form and blend in.”

“But you had a social security number. A past.”

“Boris Bosco was a real man once. He died, alone, without friends or family. Since he had no one to mourn him, I took over his life. My nameisBo, just not Boris. It’s Bodhi. It seemed like fate when I found his body, complete with ID and the keys to his home. I vowed to make the most of my new life, for his sake and mine. But it didn’t feel like a life until I met your mother.

“I tried everything to get home to you both, Please believe that. But while our part of the woods here is safe, everything surrounding this village is very dangerous. Anyone who has ventured too far out never returns. I still tried. I thought perhaps there were other portals, stable ones that I could find out there. But I never got far. That’s howthishappened.”

He retracted his hand from holding Jason’s and turned that arm in the light. It was slightly discolored from his other arm. The veins beneath his skin that should have been bluish-purple were green with protrusions like some of his branching vine parts were beneath the skin too.

“You lost an arm and formed your own prosthetic?” I asked with a bounce in my seat. Those were my first words to Jason’s father and sounded maybe a bit too excited given the somber mood.

“Replacement more than prosthetic,” Bo explained, “given the materials are all living.”

“Wow. Sorry.” I added in an aside to Jason.

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