Page 42 of More Than I Can Bear

“Why are the other bears going?” Jack asked querulously from the back seat as I got in the car. “How are we gonna have races if they aren’t here?”

“They’ll meet us at the mall,” I told her, turning the engine over.

Adam looked up at the sound, glancing at us as he signed t-shirts and arms and whatever else people had on hand, talking as fast as he could to keep their attention until we drove away.

“OK,” Jack said sleepily and then nestled into Freya.

The two of them were toast, all of the hilarity of before exhausted and so were they. I drove to the car park under Kaine’s apartment. Once I’d turned off the engine, I moved around to Freya’s door.

“She’s asleep,” Jack slurred. “Frey. Frey!”

“Whaa…?”

I watched my mate blink slowly, my teeth locking tight as she struggled to do even that. We’d done this to Freya, made her need an escape this badly. I was willing to bet she didn’t do this often.

“Kaine said to give you guys the only keys to the apartment on the fifteenth floor,” I told Jack, willing her to listen to me. “I’m going to carry her up, make sure you’re OK and then let you guys sleep this shit off.”

“So no bear race?”

She asked me that with a wobbly smile, some of the real Jack coming back online.

“Imagine the PR nightmare that would cause,” I said and she wrinkled her nose.

“OK, yeah, let’s not do that.”

I made sure she could get out of the car in one piece, then looked down at a sleeping Freya.

No doubt she would’ve hated me looking at her like this, but I couldn’t stop. My eyes ate her up, whether I had a pen in my hand or not. But then Jack started singing the Tiger’s anthem in an off-key voice, and I moved in and picked Freya up.

I shouldn’t have been taking this much pleasure from carrying a drunken woman but I felt a deep satisfaction from having her in my arms as I collected her up, then shut the door with my hip.

“Use the fob to select the floor,” I told Jack once we got into the lift.

“The floorteenth?” she asked, then started to cackle.

“Fifteen. One five,” I said, watching her finger circling in the air, then finally tapping the right one. But it felt like more than just my body climbed up, up, up. A feeling of satisfaction rushed through me, followed by something less pleasant.

Guilt.

It felt like we’d crashed into Freya’s life like a comet, destroying everything in its path just because she had the misfortune to be the one we were fated to love. I watched her breathe, reassured by the regular rise and fall of her chest, then anticipated the pain she’d feel when she woke up, and I wished I could take it all away.

All of it.

“You really like her.”

My eyes jerked up to meet Jack’s and I caught that knowing twist of a smile, a little marred when the lift stopped and she stumbled forward.

“That’s the way it works,” I told her as the door opened and we walked into the living room. I went into the bedroom, using only the neon lights streaming through the uncurtained windows to guide me over to the bed and then laid her down.

I didn’t want it to be like this, that the first time I put her down on a bed was because she was too drunk to do it for herself, but someone had to. Freya made a little mumbling sound, then curled up on her side, tucking her hands under her neck before nestling into the pillow. I went into the kitchen and grabbed bottles of water and painkillers, putting some in front of Jack.

“Thanks, Dad,” she said, grinning sloppily up at me, then dry swallowed the pills before taking a big mouthful of water. When she did that, I took the other stuff with me, collecting a blanket from the couch. Jack followed me into the bedroom, watching me set the bottle and painkillers beside the bed, then flick the blanket out and over Freya. “You want to look after her.”

She said that with a kind of wonder that had me confused. I couldn’t even put it down to dudes treating Jack badly, because she liked girls. Jack watched me cover Freya up and tuck her in lightly. Then my mate snorted and her eyes blinked open. She stared at me fuzzily, then smiled.

“River…” She breathed my name, the only way I wanted to hear her say it going forward. “Do you have a bone in your penis?”

Chapter22

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