Page 80 of Bears Behaving Badly
“Okay. Move on your side, I want to be the big spoon.”
“Sure.”
“Really? There won’t be a spoon-related argument?”
“Hey, I’m just happy to be here.”
She laughed, her breath tickling him between his shoulder blades, making him wriggle and giggle against her. Which was adorable.
Why can’t I have this?
But she knew why.
* * *
The upside: the table was all but groaning beneath her favorites: broiled rainbow trout stuffed with lemon slices, rare rib eyes, gazpacho, a platter of butter-basted morel mushrooms with thyme and parsley, a bowl of ripe raspberries and blackberries as big as her thumb, and all of them swimming in cream, Breyers vanilla fudge twirl,
(You have to special order that! It’s so hard to get!)
her mother’s homemade fried chicken
(even harder to get!)
scallops brushed with butter and lime juice, then skewered onto kebabs with cherry tomatoes and shallots, medium-rare venison backstrap with blackberry sauce, carbonara, fresh-squeezed lemonade, pumpkin pie, iced tea, passion-fruit pavlova,tres lechescake, grilled lamb chops, milk tea, and a go-cup of KFC gravy to wash it all down.
The downside: the loved ones sharing her meal were all dead—her parents, smiling at her while wearing the clothes they’d died in, her best friend from childhood, Willa Chapman, her nose in a book as she absently ate cashews, Opal Adway, whose heart shrank even as she refused food, the grandparents Annette had never met and only recognized from photos… They were all with her, which should have been comforting but wasn’t.
They never spoke to her. Only to each other. And they couldn’t hear her, either, because they always, always ignored her warnings. Soon enough, the food tasted like ash and one by one, each of them got up and slipped away, and she knew they wouldn’t return, and it was all pointless, really, as pointless as her work. What had she been thinking?
She couldn’t save Caro or Dev, she couldn’t save anyone and here was the proof, and it was ridiculous that this,thiswas the one lesson she could never learn, ridiculous that she kept trying—and to make matters even more aggravating, one of them must have cranked the thermostat on the way to their death because she was roasting, she would have sold every one of them for a pitcher of Thai iced tea and no matter how much of the lemonade she drank she couldn’t cool off, she could only boil in her own skin while guzzling glass after glass after glass…
…and then she was awake, quick as snapping her fingers. There was no gradual return to consciousness; one moment she was at the death banquet, and the next she was alone and trembling in the dark.
The den smells wrong!her brain screamed. Completely wrong, nothing like home, not a single familiar scent, and worse, the place was crawling with
(predator!)
Stables, but before she could investigate, or charge, she caught the scent of
(David)
another werebear
(David)
relaxed and snuggled close to her
(David)
so that was all right. She squeezed him back
“Muh?”
and got up, made straight for the kitchen, opened the fridge, seized the half gallon of skim milk
(ugh white water, but you know what they say about beggars and choosers)
drank half of it down, paused to take a deep, gulping breath, then finished it off. Set the empty container beside the sink
