Bearly Together

by Chant, Zoe

  “Your coffees,” Shaun said, setting steaming cups in front of them. Like the entire image of the shop, they were cute and quaintly mis-matched. “I’ll be closing up, but it will take me a while to finish in back, so don’t let me rush you.”

  “Thanks,” Deirdre said, and as soon as he had gone in back, she leaned forward avidly. “Dean’s what now?”

  “My mate,” Shelley said, and just hearing the words raised a wave of satisfaction and peace in her.

  “I knew it!” Deirdre crowed. “He wouldn’t come out and say it, but it’s obvious you’re a shifter, and there was just something about the way you looked at each other.” She lifted her cup and toasted a bemused Shelley. “I am so happy for you both.”

  She seemed greatly relieved and far less nervous after that, and Shelley found herself letting her guard down as they chatted. Just as she’d promised, Deirdre did have embarrassing stories about Dean in childhood, and Shelley shyly asked questions about Aaron that opened absolute floodgates.

  “He tried to explain a game to me yesterday and do you sometimes not understand him even though he’s using perfectly clear English words?” Shelley asked. “Because he was telling me about it for probably thirty minutes and I knew less about it at the end than I did at the beginning.”

  Deirdre held her sides and laughed. “That is completely normal,” she assured Shelley.

  They talked about the food he liked (nearly everything), and the tricks that Deirdre employed to get him to do chores and go to bed.

  “He’s allergic to cats,” Deirdre added, and Shelley was glad she’d already drunk most of her coffee, because she startled and the contents of her cup sloshed to the edge.

  “Probably not big cats,” Deirdre said with a grin. “Tiger?”

  “Lion,” Shelley confessed, finding herself smiling in return.

  “I’m a deer,” Deirdre said cheerfully. “Which is a little easier, if you ask me. I got caught in our backyard last year, and it’s a lot easier to explain a deer than it is an exotic wild animal. I just pretended to eat some flowers and was glad it wasn’t hunting season. My neighbor posted photos on Facebook and I tagged myself before I realized that was a bad idea.”

  “I don’t get a lot of chances to shift in the city,” Shelley said wistfully. “That’s one advantage to Green Valley. Lots of forest around here to go running in.”

  “Madison isn’t too bad. Plenty of parks.”

  They talked until Shelley was sure that Shaun was regretting his invitation not to feel rushed and the sun outside was starting to set.

  “Oh gosh,” Deirdre finally said. “I bet Aaron’s been home for ages and the boys are wondering where on earth we are.”

  Shelley left a generous tip and they walked outside.

  “Do you mind if we walk the long way around?” Deirdre asked. “I... wanted to go by and see the shop. What’s left of it.”

  It wasn’t quite as alarming with the garage door down as it had been with the charred interior exposed. Black smoke stains around every entrance and vent only hinted at the damage inside.

  “He was working there when we were both in high school,” Deirdre observed, subdued. “He talked about going to school for engineering. He could have gotten a sports scholarship, but he didn’t think it was fair because he was a shifter. He’s always thinking about everyone else, you know. And later, when we were thinking about it again, suddenly Aaron.”

  “He’s... a great kid,” Shelley said, guessing she ought to say something.

  Deirdre flashed her a swift look. “The best,” she agreed, and her mouth was firm and without a trace of regret.

  “I... I don’t know a lot about kids,” Shelley said, as if it wasn’t the most obvious thing in the world. “He’ll... probably come home with new swear words and bad habits, so I’m sorry in advance for that.”

  Deirdre’s eyes softened and she laughed. “You’ll do fine,” she promised. “Aaron already thinks you’re ‘okay, I guess,’ which is more enthusiastic than he gets about most people.”

  “I’ll take ‘okay, I guess,’” Shelley chuckled.

  “If you need anything, just let me know,” Deirdre said warmly. “I didn’t know a thing about kids, either, and honestly, you just make it up as you go. They’re a lot more resilient than you might think.”

  “Thank you,” Shelley said genuinely. “I really appreciate that.”

  They walked around the back side of the shop, where the damage was more apparent: the back wall had been eaten clean through by fire at the top, the roof noticeably missing in places. Charred bones of the structure held up a blue tarp that rustled in the autumn wind, bright against the soot darkening everything else.

  “It could have been a lot worse,” Deirdre said practically, as they came back around the front.

  Shelley wondered if that was the Green Valley motto.

  They walked quietly back to Dean’s house and paused at the curb before going in.

  “Oh,” Shelley said, suddenly remembering. “I offered to make Aaron a Halloween costume. He wanted to be Flash, we’ve bought fabric. I don’t know if you’d planned anything...”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful,” Deirdre said, to Shelley’s relief. “I would have picked something up last minute at the store. It wouldn’t have lasted five minutes into trick-or-treating. If I could have even found a Flash costume. Seven hundred ice queen costumes, a billion Batmans...”

  “Lots of options if he wanted to be a sexy nurse,” Shelley said dryly. “Even here.”

  Deirdre laughed. “You should get one of those for yourself,” she suggested with a wink. “Dean would love it.”

  Shelley felt her cheeks heat.

  “I like you,” Deirdre said frankly. “I’m so terribly glad that Dean met you and I’m so happy to have you as a... er... step-ex?”

  “I’m really happy to have you as a... step-ex, too,” Shelley confessed.

  “Moooooom!” Aaron was a small blue streak, accompanied by Bingo, who had only just noticed them when Aaron did and was barking twice as much to make up for it. The screen door was still slamming shut when the two reached them.

  Aaron flung his arms around Deirdre and Bingo tried to lick her, then moved to Shelley, who patted him sedately on the head. “Dad’s shop burned down, Mom! Did you know? The kids at school say it was a trad-egy and that Dad’s a hero even if he’s not a superhero and Trevor says they’re going to give him a parade and Clara said that was stupid and the teacher told her not to say stupid and I’m hungry and did you bring me a cookie from the bakery?”

  Chapter 28

  Handoff was always a measure of chaos, and Dean could not figure out how Shelley, with all her outward serenity, seemed to make it louder and more crazy just by being there. It took a solid twenty minutes of packing snacks for the drive and remembering a favorite stuffy that had to be brought and there was laughter and Deirdre was teasing them both without remorse and Bingo was so excited by everything that Dean worried his little dog brain was going to explode.

  Finally, they were waving Deirdre and Aaron away down the quiet street and Bingo, exhausted, herded them back into the house and lay down at the threshold like a doorstop.

  “Did you have a good cup of coffee?”

  “It was good,” Shelley assured him. “What’s with the boxes?”

  Dean grinned. “I’ll show you.”

  He took her hand and led her to the back of the house. “This was my mom’s sewing room. I thought you should have it. I don’t have a lot of closet space upstairs, but there’s another closet down here, and you should have your own space.”

  He’d only gotten about half of the boxes moved out. “I’ve been using this to store stuff my folks didn’t want when they moved, and I just never got around to getting rid of it.”

  It was a sunny little room, looking out over the backyard. Blackberries had grown up and were filling in the bottom of the windows.

  Shelley was quiet.

  “We could... look for
another house if you’d rather,” Dean said. It was a pretty small room, and a small closet. Shelley was probably used to spacious apartments with matching furniture and coordinating decor. “I mean, once the insurance is settled.” Probably she had enough of her own money to outright buy a house. There was so much they hadn’t talked about.

  “I love it,” she said in a very small voice. Her hands were trembling and Dean realized that some of the tension he was feeling was hers, bubbling up.

  Dean swept her into his arms without pausing to think about it. “What can I do?” he asked. “Do you need a pill?”

  She turned in his embrace and sighed into him. “No,” she said. “This is perfect. This is absolutely perfect. Just hold me.”

  They stood that way for an unmeasured time and he could feel her settle. “I’m sorry you have to have to deal with my stupid brain,” she said, muffled in his chest.

  “We don’t use the word stupid in this house,” he scolded her, just as if she was Aaron. Then he kissed the top of her head and added, “Besides, it’s no hardship to have an extra excuse to hold onto you. You tell your brain to do whatever it needs to.”

  She smiled up at him. “I don’t know about my brain, but the rest of me is exactly where I want to be.” Her hands slipped up around his neck.

  Dean leaned over and kissed her, slowly and full of promise. “We can live anywhere you want,” he said seriously, drawing back. “Maybe... maybe the fire at the garage was a good reminder. It’s just stuff. And this is just a place. We can be a family anywhere we go, anywhere we choose to be, whatever we decide to do. This is our chance to redefine our lives, make a new start. Yours and mine. Together.”

  Shelley looked at him so warmly, her silvery eyes full of wonder, that Dean wanted to drown in them. “Together,” she agreed. “Here.”

  “It’s a small house,” Dean warned. “It’s a small town.”

  “Then you’ll never be very far away from me,” Shelley said softly.

  Then his mouth was on hers, and her arms were around his neck and he was perfectly, absolutely home.

  Chapter 29

  Sure enough, Tawny did have a sewing machine, and she was more than happy to set it up for Shelley.

  “I haven’t unpacked this since we moved,” the gray-haired woman said, putting it out on the desk in the spare room. “I’ll show you how to thread it... if I remember.”

  “I’ve got it,” Shelley said, popping the bobbin out and looping the thread around the pick-up hook.

  “You know your way around a sewing machine,” Tawny said with surprise.

  “Why is everyone shocked when I can do something domestic?” Shelley asked more sharply than she intended. “I like nice clothing. Sometimes I make my own.”

  “Ever thought about going into fashion design?” Tawny asked innocently.

  “It’s not practical,” Shelley said dismissively.

  “Not everything has to be practical,” Tawny said and Shelley gave her a wry sideways look because Tawny was the absolute epitome of a practical, down-to-earth grandmother. Shelley doubted she had ever done anything impulsive in her life.

  She wondered if Tawny had talked to Damien; Shelley had once dreamed about working in fashion. Did her father even know that?

  They set up the machine and Shelley lay the fabric out with the pattern pinned on top. It all looked adorably small and she held it up several times as she worked, bemused that someone so short could be so full of life as Aaron was.

  Tawny offered to help and Shelley graciously accepted. Tawny cut the top while Shelley sewed the bottoms.

  “I was looking at kids costumes online,” she said. “You can find some really nice handmade costumes, but they are expensive, and it seems like a lot of investment into a one-time costume for a kid that will grow out of in a few months.”

  “I think that’s why those cheap, disposable costumes are so popular,” Tawny observed, adding a sleeve to Shelley’s pile.

  “It seems like there ought to be some kind of middle ground,” Shelley mused. “A well-made costume that doesn’t cost the world. Maybe with hems you can let out as they grow?” She held up the pants, which she had deliberately made longer than Aaron’s measurements. They could be tacked up for now, and let out as he got taller.

  “That’s a great idea,” Tawny agreed.

  “I didn’t think to get elastic,” Shelley said, when the bottoms were otherwise finished; she wouldn’t hem them until she had a chance to try them on Aaron.

  “I’m sure I have some,” Tawny said. “Let’s see...”

  That led to dismantling an entire closet of boxes containing fabric. “I should make your father something out of this,” Tawny laughed, holding up a folded square of bright yellow fabric with cartoon bees all over it.

  “That... doesn’t look like Dad,” Shelley said skeptically, biting off an extra string from the pajama shirt she had just put together.

  “It’s an inside joke,” Tawny explained. “Your father is allergic to bees.”

  Shelley stared. “I had no idea. I didn’t realize shifters could be.”

  “He went into anaphylactic shock right in front of me,” Tawny recounted. “Collapsed right in my living room. I’ve never been so frightened.”

  “What did you do?” Shelley asked curiously. 911 wasn’t exactly an option for shifters.

  “He shifted. He explained that shifting can cause muscles and bones to heal, so there was no reason that it shouldn’t also help stop an over-active histamine response.”

  “And it worked?”

  “He was right as rain, in just a few minutes. Faster than a shot of epinephrine.”

  Shelley knew the trick for healing faster after shifting, but she hadn’t imagined that the process would apply to the more complex parts of the body. “Curious,” she said, filing away the information. “Oh, that’s perfect!”

  Tawny was holding up a strip of white elastic, excavated from the bottom of a bin.

  “I’ll take this with me,” Shelley said. “And I can put that in by hand and pin all the cuffs for sewing tomorrow once I’ve had a chance to try this on him.”

  She glanced at the clock. School didn’t get out for another hour, but she wanted to be sure to be there when Aaron came home. Dean was working late at the store to get ready for the fire sale and Shelley was already feeling anxious about helping Aaron do his homework and keeping him fed and entertained.

  “This is a good stopping place, can I come back tomorrow morning and finish these up?” Shelley folded up the pants and shirt with the loose elastic.

  “That sounds like a great plan,” Tawny agreed. “He’s going to love them.”

  “I hope so,” Shelley said fervently.

  She got back to Dean’s house in plenty of time—her house? Could she think of it as her own? As theirs? Certainly nowhere else Shelley had ever been had felt as much like home.

  But Aaron didn’t come home. Shelley paced the house until Bingo whined at her anxiously, and the clock ticked past the time she had expected him... and then ten minutes past that.

  She checked her phone, even knowing that Dean’s phone still wasn’t working, and wondered when it was acceptable to open a search with the police.

  Finally, when Aaron was officially fifteen minutes late, she called her brother Shaun’s number.

  “Welcome to the zoo,” Andrea answered the phone merrily. “How can I direct your call?”

  “Hi Andrea,” Shelley said, feeling the tightness of worry in her chest and the panic that was starting to make her breathe funny. “I was just wondering if Aaron had come home with Trevor. I...” I’ve lost him, Shelley thought in horror. I’ve lost Dean’s son and proved that I’m the worst mother ever. “He was supposed to come straight home, but he never showed up.” She sounded as hysterical as she was starting to feel.

  “I haven’t seen him,” Andrea said, sobering. “Hang on, let me go see if Trevor knows anything.”

  Shelley concentrated on breathing,
running through all the meditation tricks in her mental bag. She wasn’t going to freak out. She was going to think logically. She was going to find Aaron and strangle him (just a little) for making her worry so much and then they’d laugh and everything would be fine.

  “Shelley?”

  “I’m here, I’m here!” Shelley almost shouted into her phone. “Does he know where Aaron is?”

  “He says they had a fight and Aaron went to the place where Trevor was practicing shifting. Do you know what that is?”

  Shelley blinked, remembering their outing—had it really only been two weeks ago? “Yes, I know where that is.”

  “Do you need any help?”

  I need Dean, Shelley thought. But she could do this. She scrawled a note to Dean and left it on the table. “No, I’ll just drive up there and see if I can find him first. He can’t have gotten very far yet.”

  It was a few blocks from school to the deserted property they’d gone running in. Aaron was fast, but he wasn’t that fast. He couldn’t have gotten very deep into the forest in such a short time. Could he?

  “Call me when you find him,” Andrea said firmly. “If I haven’t heard from you in half an hour, I’ll send out the cavalry.”

  “Thank you, Andrea!” Shelley was already at her car when she hung up, making a swift, squeaking-tire spin in the middle of the deserted street to point herself in the right direction.

  It was cold, and the friendly, warm sun of the past few days was hidden in a gray bank of clouds that threatened snow. There were more leaves on the ground now than there were on the trees, and they swirled away from Shelley’s car as she drove down the isolated drive.

  As she pulled up at the trailhead, she had a moment of doubt. What if Aaron was just now arriving home, confused because no one was there? She reminded herself firmly that if he was, the house was warm and full of food. But if he was here, if he’d gotten lost, he would be cold and hungry.

  She closed her car door and stood in the chilly air for a long moment, listening and scenting. Her senses were not as good when she wasn’t a lion, but they were still better than a normal human’s, by a long shot.