by Amy Star
Casey snorted despite herself. “I’m not going to hope for that,” she informed him primly. “Unlike you, I’m not a complete barbarian.”
“But I got you to laugh,” he pointed out. “Anyway, I need to get to work. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Later.” The call ended, and Casey set her phone back down on the table before she mashed her face against her pillow again with an overwrought sigh. She wasn’t even a celebrity. She was just a celebrity’s peripheral. And already, this sort of shit was happening.
She grumbled to herself until she fell back to sleep for a couple more hours, until her alarm went off, squawking at her to drag herself out of bed.
She made her way downstairs, and at the bottom of the steps, facing the front door, she was greeted by the sight of the enormous black dog letting himself in, shoving the doorknob down with a paw and tugging the door open with his teeth. They stared at each other once he was inside, the door banging closed behind him.
Slowly, Casey approached, holding a hand out. The dog recoiled and bolted into a different room. Shaking her head slightly, Casey remarked, “Awfully skittish for such a big guy,” to no one in particular.
She stared in the direction the dog went for a moment just to see if he would come back, before she shrugged and carried on towards the kitchen. She needed breakfast. She wasn’t going to attempt to deal with the mess she had been made aware of on an empty stomach.
Maybe it was strange, but she was pretty sure her favorite part about living in the mansion was how well-stocked the kitchen always was. She was completely positive that Atticus had never had to subsist on stale cereal and instant noodles for three weeks straight, and she was also entirely positive that she was never going to have to do that again.
*
It was a slow day, other than that morning’s unfortunate discovery and a phone call from Annie around lunchtime to rant about it. In fairness, though, Casey avoided anything that might have brought it up. She didn’t watch the news. She didn’t read the news. She was already perfectly well aware of what had happened, and she didn’t need anyone to inform her of it. So, she felt no guilt in letting her use of electronics be completely recreational that day.
When Atticus returned that evening, he found her in the library, curled up on a couch with a book (ridiculously over the top with a few too many people waving around broadswords with one hand to be plausible, but it was a good distraction). He peered into the room and cleared his throat, and Casey’s attention snapped from the book to him.
He looked annoyed. She was worried for a second, but then the first words out of his mouth were, “Are you alright?”
Casey wrinkled her nose slightly as she replied, “Well, I wasn’t expecting my wake-up call to come in the form of my unmentionables on display, but yeah. I’m fine.”
Atticus sighed and dragged a hand down his face. “I should have warned you. Sorry. I just wasn’t expecting something like that to happen quite so immediately.” He folded his arms over his chest and leaned in the doorway. “Lydia is digging up whatever she can. If she can find out if the photographer put even a toe out of line, then she’ll be on his ass like a feral schnauzer.”
Casey couldn’t help but snort at the mental image. “Good to know. You’ll have to keep me up to date on whatever she finds.”
“And we’ll have to tighten up security around here,” Atticus sighed. “The property line has always been clearly marked, but if he just used a particularly long-range lens, then we’ll need to do… something to dissuade them from even getting close to the property.”
“What if I just hole up here and become a hermit?” Casey sighed. “I can close all the curtains and live like a vampire.”
“Then, you would get bored,” Atticus returned blandly. “And rickets.”
Casey heaved a blustering sigh. “Foiled already,” she mused woefully. “Here I thought you were on my side.”
Holding a hand up like he was giving an oath, Atticus assured her, “Then, from here on out, I’ll endeavor to only think of your health when it’s the most convenient for you.”
Nodding once in overly earnest satisfaction, Casey instructed him, “See that you do.”
*
There was one detail that didn’t occur to Casey until the next afternoon, after she got to work. Her face was known now. People would recognize her. She didn’t even think of that until someone showed up to take her picture while she was delivering a customer’s food to a car. The camera’s flash took her so off-guard that she nearly tripped over her rollerblades. The customer at least had the decency to ask if she was alright and to flip off the cameraman for her, and she was glad she didn’t actually drop anything.
If that had been the worst of it, she wouldn’t have cared—or rather, she would have cared, but she would have simply forgotten about it by the next morning—but it didn’t end there. The man with the camera lurked outside all day, snapping pictures of Casey whenever she was visible. He only bothered to back up to the sidewalk after Casey’s boss went charging after him with the ‘no loitering’ sign in hand, and even after that, he only bothered to stay on the sidewalk after the third time he was chased off.
It only got worse when it came time for Casey to clock out for the day. She lived too far away to simply skate home from work anymore, so she called a cab and listed an intersection a few blocks down to pick her up, because she didn’t want to just be standing around outside the restaurant while the man with the camera was right there.
She skated down the sidewalk, a few last camera flashes following her as she went. Regretfully, she still had to wait for a couple of minutes once she got to the intersection she had mentioned before her cab pulled up. Once it did, she threw herself inside like it was her last salvation and it would vanish if she didn’t move instantly.
The cab ride was calm enough. Traffic was only moderately horrible, which was better than it usually was at that time of the evening. By the time the cab made it to the driveway, it wasn’t particularly late, though it was still late enough that Atticus was likely to be home. To Casey’s irritation, the cabbie refused to actually drive down the driveway, instead insisting she get out at the top of it. After a few moments of arguing, she tossed open the car door and then sat there, legs hanging out of the car as she pulled her rollerblades off, for as long as she feasibly could, just to listen to the cabbie get steadily more irritated behind her.
Finally, she started jogging.
She made it only a few hundred yards when she swore she heard a car pulling to a halt in the street. She glanced over her shoulder, but the curving of the driveway and the trees combined to make it so she couldn’t see much. Clutching her rollerblades more tightly, she picked up her pace.
She heard noises in the woods to either side of the driveway, but for all she knew, it could have just been normal things that lived in the woods. She was just psyching herself out, probably.
And then, she heard the sounds of something very large lumbering through the underbrush, and she ground to a halt. It probably would have made more sense to move faster, but she panicked, and besides, wasn’t the advice for dealing with wild animals always telling her to stand her ground and try to look bigger than she was?
She ran out of time to argue with herself when a large, boxy head with small, round ears and a long muzzle poked out of the trees, followed shortly by the rest of the bear. It was not a cute, round black bear. It was the rough brown of crackling tree bark, with eyes so dark they were nearly black. It was enormous. It looked right at Casey for a few seconds before it carried on across the driveway and into the woods on the opposite side.
She heard a breathless, panicked voice hiss, “Shit,” and the clattering crash of a camera meeting the forest floor as it was dropped, and then the hasty retreat of fleeing footsteps through the leaves. Casey was still rooted to the spot, though, so she couldn’t exactly check.
The bear emerged from the woods once again, standing in the middle of the dri
veway and just staring at Casey. It almost looked expectant, but that was crazy, because it was a bear, and it shouldn’t have been able to look expectant.
And then, it jerked its head towards the house and shuffled in place.
Casey stared at it, gaping openly. When it sighed and pointed its muzzle towards the house more emphatically, she jerked into motion once again, continuing her trek along the driveway.
The bear followed only a few feet behind her, silent and benign, which were probably not words she was supposed to associate with a bear the size of a family van, but there they were.
As they got closer to the house, it picked up its pace, moving ahead of her. It paused only to look over its shoulder at her, making sure she was following.
She probably should have just bolted for the front door. This was a bear. Not a bear cub. Not a black bear, which were mostly the size of a particularly round human. Not a teddy bear. But an incredibly large bear, with teeth and claws.
But it was looking at her like there was something going on in its head, and she found herself following it as it led the way around the side of the house to the garage. The garage was tucked beneath the mansion’s foundation, with three bay doors that typically hid a muscle car, a slightly more practical hatchback, and a pair of motorcycles. The door that typically hid the motorcycles had been rolled up towards the ceiling, and there was a pile of clothing on the ground.
Casey watched with enormous eyes as the bear turned into a very naked Atticus. He shook his head slightly and carded his hand through his hair a couple times before he began to get dressed again, pulling his boxers from the pile on the floor.
Casey was a little unclear on what happened after that. She was pretty sure he said something to her, but everything sounded fuzzy and distant, tinny as if it was echoing to her ears from the other end of a long tunnel. She backed up a few paces, but then her knees buckled and she sank to the ground. Her vision was going a bit spotty, tunneling inwards rapidly from there.
She was pretty sure that passing out was a completely logical course of action, so she did exactly that.
*
When Casey swam back to consciousness, she was in a dim room, laying on something comfortable. She opened her eyes slowly with the greatest of reluctance, at first just cracking one eye open before finally taking a proper look around. She was in the library on a couch. Most of the lights were off, though there was a lamp lit on the other side of the room, and when she looked in that direction, she saw Atticus sitting in a chair beside it, reading a book.
Casey sort of wanted to just pretend she was still asleep. She also sort of wanted to just pretend the entire evening had been a dream, but she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have passed out for no reason. If she had, Atticus would probably be slightly less calm. So, her memory was probably regrettably reliable just then.
And then, her window of opportunity to pretend she was still asleep vanished as Atticus observed, “You took it surprisingly well, all things considered.” He was looking at Casey over the top edge of his book.
“That’s me,” Casey returned faintly. “I’m a trooper.”
Atticus breathed out something that was sort of a laugh. “Indeed. How are you feeling?”
“You’re a bear,” Casey threw back, rather than actually answering the question. “When you said this deal was to get rid of some rumors, you neglected to mention that the rumors were true!”
“I’m only marginally inhuman,” he returned, “and I’m not a monster. If I were a monster, I would have done more than simply scare that man off.”
“I—I need to… go. Back to my room.” Slowly, Casey sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the couch so her feet hit the floor. “I need to think about… everything. All of this.”
“Of course,” Atticus agreed, and though it was hard to tell, Casey was pretty sure he sounded a bit apprehensive. She didn’t give herself time to think that over before she got to her feet and fled the room at a very hasty walk.
*
One direction, then the other direction, then back in the first direction, and in the second direction once again, and the pattern repeated ad infinitum. Casey paced back and forth across her suite’s sitting room, wringing her hands together as she did, nails digging at her cuticles.
When she agreed to marry a celebrity, she supposed she should have expected the harassment, and to some extent, she had. She just hadn’t expected to be stalked. But she was pretty damn positive that no one would have expected to find out that Atticus was a bear.
She didn’t know what she was supposed to do with that detail. Just calling it ‘a detail’ seemed to sort of minimize the entire thing, but she wasn’t sure what else to call it. She legitimately had no words with which to describe the evening’s events. She had been watched at work, followed home, rescued by a bear, and then the bear turned into her husband.
She was married to a bear.
A reasonably gentlemanly bear, true, but the fact remained that he was a bear. That changed everything. She just… wasn’t sure what she wanted to do about it. Logically, she knew she could leave, and Atticus wouldn’t stop her. She could leave whenever she wanted; that had been part of the deal. Considering she had already undergone artificial insemination, he would keep paying her hefty allowance.
But that was sort of the crux of the issue, right there. She wasn’t sure yet -- she probably wouldn’t be sure for a few weeks -- but for all she knew, she could have been pregnant already. If that was the case, she didn’t know what to do about an inhuman pregnancy. She didn’t know what to do about an inhuman baby. And if she left, she would be going into it blind.
So, she supposed she would just… stick it out. Bear or not, Atticus hadn’t hurt her. He hadn’t even been impolite to her. So, things probably wouldn’t change much.
She couldn’t believe she was rationalizing it to herself, but sticking around was probably her best option. Especially since if she left, she really doubted the harassment would stop, since then, she would just be The Ex-Wife Who Couldn’t Put Up With Some Photographers. Maybe she was being shallow, but she didn’t want to deal with that on top of everything else.
Sighing, she dragged a hand down her face and pulled her phone out of her pocket. If nothing else, she wasn’t going to stick it out on her own.
She dialed in her sister’s number first and didn’t even give Annie time to properly answer. As soon as she heard her sister’s end of the line pick up, she said, “Hang on, I need to conference Jason in.” She put her sister on hold and dialed Jason’s number, and once again hardly gave him time to react before informing him, “It’s a group call,” before she merged the calls together.
“Why the conference call?” Annie wondered, her bemusement clear in her tone. “Do we need to get ready for battle or something?”
“My armor’s at the cleaner’s,” Jason deadpanned.
Casey rolled her eyes. “No, it’s just been… an interesting day.”
“You’re using the diplomatic voice,” Jason accused. “What happened?”
“A paparazzi -- paparazzo? Whatever. A camera guy was lurking outside the restaurant all goddamn day, and then he followed me home.” Casey paused as, predictably, Jason and Annie both erupted into outrage, rambling over top of each other so Casey could hardly pick out any individual words. Raising her voice to be heard over them, she added, “And then, a bear moseyed its ass out of the woods and sent the camera guy scampering. He dropped his camera and everything.”
The other two fell quiet so abruptly that Casey almost swore she could hear crickets chirping. After a few moments of silence, Annie hesitantly wondered, “A bear?”
“A bear,” Casey confirmed. “Fucking enormous, too. Followed me back to the house, where it then promptly turned into my husband.”
The silence after that was so intense that it almost seemed to echo, and Casey counted down from five in her head. As she reached zero, both Annie and Jason erupted into noise, both of them once agai
n babbling over top of each other so Casey could hardly understand a word of what they were saying. She was pretty sure she got the gist of it, and the gist of it seemed to be that they were worried she’d been drugged or hit her head or that she had gotten food poisoning at some point.
Before either of them could threaten to drive down to the house and drag her to the emergency room, Casey cleared her throat loudly. “So, I passed out because watching a bear turn into my husband wasn’t how I was expecting my evening to go, and then I had a very thorough think about everything that’s happened so far.”
They didn’t believe a word she was saying, and she knew that, but even so, it felt good to get it off of her chest. If nothing else, at some point down the line, no one would ever be able to accuse her of keeping secrets, and she supposed it would eventually make one epic “I told you so.”
For the moment, though, it was mostly annoying. It took another fifteen minutes for her to convince them that no, really, she was fine and she didn’t need to see a doctor. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting them to say, but either way, the entire conversation left her more than a little irritated after she hung up.