Page 37 of More Than I Can Bear

“Well, I blew my chance too.”

Fuck. Revealing the bear to a prospective mate was about the most nerve-wracking experience a shifter could go through. I’d argued long and hard that we should just come out of the fucking closet and be done with it, but the older members of the community had shut me up real quick.

“And how’d that go?” River asked. And I saw it. Riv always played shit cool, but there was a gleam in his eyes, a hunger to know.

“She ran out.” In my mind, my brother was always Kaine the strong, Kaine the capable, so watching him crumple right now had me staring openly, trying to reconcile what I saw with the man I knew. “She saw the bear and bolted, took off out of the building.”

“Is she safe?” River’s tone was more bear than man. “Is she OK? Kaine—”

“Jack picked her up,” he replied finally. “I’ve tried ringing her but…”

They weren’t answering. Made sense, Jack had said she would promise me nothing, after we’d finished our conversation. She was my friend too, but her relationship with Freya trumped that and I… I loved that she had that, that someone was always in her corner. But it was River’s reaction that had me stunned. He let out a shaky laugh, slapping his hands down on the bench and then wrapping them around the edge, as if that was all that was holding him upright. We both stared as he shook his head.

“So…yougot carried away and bit our mate the first time you got close to her,” he said, stabbing a finger in my direction. “And then compounded the issue by going on state-wide television not once, but twice.”

“I needed to do something,” I said, jerking back like he’d slapped me or something. “I fucked up—”

“And made it worse. Freya’s not like you.” He dared me to contradict him, the bloke who somehow thought he knew more about her than me. He’d barely said two words to her. “She doesn’t feel like everything needs to be done on a grand scale in the public eye.”

“And how the fuck do you know that?” I shot back.

“I don’t, not really, but… I watched her at the cafe.” He flushed then, seeming to realise how creepy that sounded. “And she could’ve told any one of the people she worked with that she was the girl who owned the shoe you put up at the press conference. If she wanted that kind of attention, she could’ve notified the media herself.”

“But she didn’t…”

It was fucking obvious when he laid it out like that. I’d been brought up on tales of all the grand gestures bear shifters had made before us, trying to get their mates to accept them, but I’d never thought for a second that maybe some of the women hadn’t wanted all of that. We never really heard much about the failures because the pain of mates being rejected was felt as a community.

But what if those failures had been like this?

The guys thought they were doing the right thing, but really everything they did just pushed her further and further away. I looked up, seeing my brother and River with fresh eyes then. Every time I opened my mouth, I was sabotaging their chances at happiness. Both of them had had more real conversations with Freya, better ones than I’d had the entire night I’d spent with her. Kaine was honest with her. River was attentive and I… My train of thought was broken by the sound of Kaine’s phone ringing. He dragged it out and then blinked when he saw who was calling.

“It’s Jack.”

All three of us stared at that phone, transfixed, watching as Kaine’s thumb slid across the screen to answer the call.

“Jack,” he said, “what’s happening?”

“Kainey!” I could hear her voice, even though my brother hadn’t put the call on speakerphone. “How’s my favourite furry? Like, not that kind of furry… Hang on, maybe you are. Do you guys do it in bear form, because urk… Oh shit, I think I threw up in my mouth a little.”

“Jack, where the fuck are you?” he growled.

They were drunk, I just knew it, which made sense. What else would you do when you’d just seen a man turn into a bear?

“Give the phone to me.”

Both of us looked at River in surprise when he jerked Kaine’s phone out of his grip and then put it to his ear.

“Jack, it’s River.”

“River! Are you a bear too? Do you have those cute widdle fluffy ears.”

“Oh my god, the ears!” Freya cackled. “I always wanted to touch bear ears. They look so soft.”

“I do,” he replied in the even tones people use with drunks. “And I’ll let you do whatever you like with them, if you tell me where you are.”

“Hindley Street!” Jack replied. “We got kicked out of Merv’s, so we’re gonna try somewhere else, but then we thought you could come and transform into bears and then we could ride you and do bear races up the Rundle Mall, see who can get to the mall’s balls first.”

The mall’s balls was a sculpture completed in the 1970s by artist Bert Flugelman. It was a pair of massive stainless steel spheres balanced on top of each other.

---