Page 35 of OctoBEARfest

Another silence fell as the others exchanged looks and, with their gazes, pinned Penny as the spokesman. "G, you know we're okay with the way we're going, right? You don't have to, you know, risk everything for us."

"I'm one of five here, guys. It'd be pretty lousy of me to throw up a big roadblock on your careers because I've got issues."

Penny got to her feet, signaling to everybody else that they might as well get up, too, and offered Gwen a hand so she could grin at her. "G, baby, you've gotsubscriptions. Thank you," she said, although not to Gwen: she turned to Bill, who was standing awkwardly at the very edge of the stage shadows, trying to be present while also not being in the way. "Thanks for the intro, and for knowing to text Gwen to ask if it was cool before you did. Me and the rest of the band are gonna go out to meet the crowd. We'll try to winnow it down to the road-trippers before you come out, G. We'll text when it's safe. C'mon, losers," she said to therest of the band, and a moment later, Gwen was alone in the dark with Bill Torben.

CHAPTER 22

"Is she always that subtle?" Bill asked as Penny disappeared with the other three band members.

Gwen laughed. "That was pretty subtle for her, actually. She didn't actually say anything like 'Gwen and Billy sittin' in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g,' which I promise has been done in the past." She made her way to where he was at the edge of the stage, just in the shadows where the crowd couldn't see either of them, and sat.

Bill sat beside her and gave into the impulse to put his arm around her shoulders. To his relief and joy, she leaned against him immediately, exhaling into relaxation that turned to another laugh when he said, "Nobody's called me 'Billy' since I broke five feet at age nine."

"Jeez, really? That seems tall for that age. Maybe not for your family," Gwen added. "But still. Tall."

"It is. Not 'this kid has no choice but to be a pro basketball player' tall, but about half a foot taller than average. I outgrew my mom when I was twelve, and she'stall. Five ten. Also the shortest in our immediate family, but still tall!"

"I noticed. I'm a shrimp compared to the Torbens. I'm going to have to take up wearing four inch platform heels."

Bill, imagining her in those torn-up jeans and leather jackets in those kinds of heels, swallowed on a suddenly dry throat. "That'd put you right about six feet, wouldn't it? That would be…tall."Tallwas not really what he was thinking of.Hotstarted to cover it, but a number of much more intriguing images involving her in short skirts and those heels were much closer to the mark. He wondered if she might have some leather bras to match those jackets, and then wondered who the hell he was. He'd never imagined anybody in leather bras before.

"Yeah, like, I'm about five eight, I'm not short, it's just you guys are alltall. It was a good show," she added in a complete change of subject, and with just the faintest hint of a question in her voice.

"A good show," Bill echoed disbelievingly. "Gwen, we sold just under five hundred tickets and there were people in the street that I'm sure didn't buy them. You guys brought the house down. I don't know why—I mean, I do, but—you should be selling out stadiums."

She leaned against him a little harder, turning her face against his shoulder, and when she spoke, her voice was a bit muffled. "I think we're on the cusp of something here," she admitted. "This is—tonight, this was something new. The way people showed up for us. Um." She breathed deep, and exhaled even more deeply. "The Pix, we started by playing dives. Hell, we still play a lot of them. But, you know, forty, fifty people tops. Maybe a couple hundred if it was a popular bar, but that was more about the venue thanus. The past few years, we've been pulling our own crowd, and, like, I know that. Two, three hundred people, mostly at places that don't hold a lot more than that so it feels like we're doing good, you know?"

Bill made a sound and Gwen shook her head, muffling a chuckle against his shoulder. "No, I know, we are good, butdoinggood in this industry is different. And I kinda know ifwe booked a venue that would hold five hundred, we've kind of reached a place where we'd be filling it. But I'd expect that to be with several months' notice, you know? People having time to find out about it, arrange to be there, all that. But this…they just showed up." She laughed again, the sound incredulous this time. "Five hundred peoplejust showed upwith barely a day's notice. And there's gonna be a new, maybe different, crowd tomorrow night."

"So." Bill turned his head to press his mouth against her hair. "On a scale of one to ten, how terrified are you?"

"I'm at about seventeen." Gwen fell silent a long time, and he thought he felt her shivering under his arm. "It's not just that if we lean into this moment everybody who doesn't know is going to realize I used to be Emma Hart. Although I don't think the band really gets how much that's going to be a thing, so itisthat. But even more, it's…I've been successful," she said slowly. "Nobody tells you how scary it can be. How much you get judged and weighed and how much you judge yourself. How afraid you are that whatever you've done, you're never going to live up to it. That you can't repeat it. That you don't even know why it happened in the first place, even if you're good at what you do. So the truth is I'm really scared of succeeding. And that soundsstupid. People talk about fear of failure, of not trying things because what if you fail, but if you try something and succeed, then you're in completely new territory that you have no idea how to navigate, and that'salsoterrifying."

Bill, cautiously, said, "Especially when somebody took advantage of you the last time you succeeded?"

"Heh. Yeah, probably. Yeah." Gwen nodded. "That, and last time it was all really somebody else's doing. I was a kid. I was the talent, but I wasn't the driving force, right? Adults—my dad, showrunners, producers, whatever—were making most of the big decisions and I didn't even get that I could say no ifI wanted to. And I'm not sure I really could have, because Dad would have…" She shrugged. "Pressured me. Told me how it was my Mom's dream, how every kid dreamed of this, how I'd be disappointing my audience. Things I felt like I couldn't refuse."

"It's just as well he disappeared," Bill said, trying to keep his voice light when he felt the words in his soul. "I'd be tempted to knock him into next week if he was around."

"You can get in line," Gwen said dryly. She hesitated. "Do you think I'm nuts? For being scared that we're maybe on the verge of a breakout success?"

"No. No, not at all. Partly because you actually do have experience in being, what, successful? Famous? In ways the rest of us are probably never going to. But also because you're right. I don't think I ever really thought about it, but everybody kind of assumes success is its own reward, don't they? I never thought about as being scary all by itself, but what you said about being out there in new territory, dealing with you don't even know what because you've never been there before, that makes a lot of sense. I wonder." He breathed a short little laugh. "I wonder if that's part of why I haven't tried changing anything around here."

"Hah!" Gwen looked up at him, her dark-rimmed eyes clear and gorgeous in the dim light. "Look at us, birds of a feather."

"Bears," Bill said with a chuckle. "Bears of a fur."

"You've got a real thing about bears, big man. What's that about?"

Now! his bear said eagerly.This is the right time! Tell her now!

The bear was absolutely right. Itfeltright, emotionally. This was the moment he'd been waiting for.

The problem was that Gwen was very, very unlikely to believe him unless he shifted into a grizzly, and doing that backstage in a pub with hundreds of people a few feet away, and a back doorthat might open without warning at any moment, wasobviouslya bad idea. Bill put his forehead against Gwen's and sighed. "My family likes them. Has an affinity for them, you might say."

"Because you're all huge?" Gwen grinned, almost against his mouth. "Yeah, I can see that."

"Well—" He was just about to give in and explain—toshowher—when the back door did, in fact, sweep open and Penny threw herself in, then mashed the door shut again. Bill's shoulders collapsed in resignation as Penny stared, wild-eyed and dramatic, at Gwen.

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