Page 48 of More Than I Can Bear

But I did.

I wanted to see what she’d done, what she’d made of my artwork. Our artwork now. And part of me… it wanted to know what she thought of my addition.

“Oh!”

I made a similar sound as I looked at the piece of paper, because there we were. Drawn in clear, curving lines, there was the dark and mysterious bear man, but he wasn’t alone. Small creatures rested on his shoulder, with another large bear man drawn on the side. The penetrating gaze, the frown, made clear exactly who it was, which made me grin. Kaine. But then there was one more. Drawn with a gold pencil, she created this grinning bear man who seemed the brightest thing on the page. I glanced up at her then, trying to understand what this meant.

“River, this is beautiful.”

People had told me that about my work before and I’d just shrugged it off. Not because I was arrogant, but because it didn’t matter. Good, bad or indifferent, the drawings seemed to need to come out, so they did. But right now I soaked the compliment up, then passed the drawing back.

“And this is amazing. I can tell exactly who everyone is.”

“They’re just silly little characters,” she said with a wave of her hand, but I caught it, not wanting her to brush this away, and as soon as we touched I felt it.

I’d had industrial accidents where I’d been electrocuted and they didn’t hit as hard as touching her. Our fingers locked together, holding on, as if the muscles spasmed in response to a galvanic bolt. But I was holding onto her and she was holding onto me for a whole other reason. I drew her closer, needing to feel her breath on my skin and to breathe in only her scent and she moved closer as I did.

There was this moment where we just stared at each other, that moment when you recognise something inside someone else, just as they do the same for you. My head ducked closer, not meaning to do anything, but unable to stop myself, moving closer and closer to the lips I’d just spent all that time recording, needing to touch them, taste them. Her tongue flicked across them, as if in preparation, but that was when the phone buzzed. We both blinked, some spell broken. Even though Freya tried to ignore it, another buzz, then another, and another stopping her from coming closer. She pulled away to pick up her phone, frowning as she saw notification after notification popping up on her screen.

“Freya?” I fought to keep my voice even.

“It’s my Insta profile,” she said with a frown, flicking through the little pop up notifications, but as soon as she read some, more appeared. “For my art work. I usually get a few hits…”

As her voice trailed away, I caught the moment her scent soured. She opened the app and then the frown grew deeper. Her fingers tightened around the phone, her knuckles white as she read what people had said.

“Freya?” I moved closer, the bear sensing a threat, but we couldn’t fight one that lived inside her phone. “Freya?”

“People have…” She let out a gasp. “So many people…”

And that’s when I realised what had happened. Adam was used to dealing with public adulation and attention, but the rest of us? It was a bit like fuckheads like Macca at our worksite. They all had so much to say. Adam invited the public eye to look more closely at our lives, and Kaine and I had become a lot more private because of it.

But Freya hadn’t had a chance to do that.

“Let me take that,” I said, keeping my voice soft and even.

“No…” She clutched the phone tight, her eyes trained on the screen. “No, I… No.” I watched helplessly as she sucked one breath, then another in, her eyes flicking so fast across the screen. She scrolled and she scrolled until finally she was forced to wrench her eyes away. “I walked away,” she told me, decisively, firmly. “I made the decision to leave. I didn’t want to.”

I knew what she was talking about, the morning after she was with Adam and I felt a surge of hope.

“Sun was streaming in through the window, turning his hair to gold, and I watched him sleep, knowing he’d tug me down beside him if he saw me. His eyelids fluttered and he let out a groan, but I grabbed my shit and bailed.” She tossed her phone down on the table then jerked her hands back. “I never wanted to be a WAG, never wanted that life.” Her eyes met mine and I saw the mute plea there, one I was dying to answer. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

I soon saw why, because there on her screen was a picture of one of her artworks, and below it were many comments. Most were celebratory, people seeing how freaking talented she was, but then there were the others. I growled, the bear and I in complete agreement. Our mate was under threat and we were ready to protect her. I grabbed the phone, scrolling faster and faster, seeing the danger but unable to formulate a response.Dumb slut, read one comment,Think you’re too good for Adam,read another. More and more people had found her profile, had decided to use the privilege of having access to Freya as a means to attack her.

She had made her decision to reject Adam, not because of his bear nature, but because of this. People say if you can’t cope with the heat, get out of the kitchen, and that was what she’d done. But somehow that wasn’t enough. I set the phone down and reached out for her, but that was the moment the foul smell of her distress reached me, forcing the bear forward, and my claws snicked out. Her eyes went wide and she jerked away, snatching up her phone and then scuttling backwards.

Chapter25

Freya

I’d always felt like the internet was my safe space, which objectively was a stupid thing to feel. I knew that cyber bullying was a thing, but it’d never been an issue for me. I didn’t get the dick pics and offers to be my sugar daddy that other women seemed to cop, probably because I had a gender neutral name for my artist profile and I never included images of myself. Instead my Insta profile was my own little bubble. I didn’t get a lot of views on my photos, but those that I did were largely complimentary. Somehow I’d built a tiny community of people that liked my work.

So that’s why the negativity was so hard for me to take.

You needed thick skin to be an artist, our lecturers had told us at art school, but I never did. I couldn’t. Mine just seemed to get thinner and thinner with each negative comment. They sliced into me, leaving me gasping and bleeding. My style hadn’t gone over well at university, but, as people said, you go to art school for four years and then spend the next ten getting over it. I got over it through this little space on Insta where people responded, people liked my pics and even left comments. I felt… that at least some people seemed to understand what I was trying to make, even if I wasn’t entirely conscious of that myself.

But now I felt like that had all been taken away.

My safe space had been shattered and all of these… others had come muscling in.

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