A Change To Bear (A BBW Shifter Romance)

by A. E. Grace

  Was there something she had missed? She hadn’t even given an ounce of thought to the fact that the bar had remained empty while the others had filled up. After a long and tiring day, Terry had simply been happy to find a quiet place to sit and sip on a drink.

  “Why not?” He looked at his mates and repeated it. “Why not? It’s not hard to figure that one out.”

  “Well, okay, I get the message,” Terry said. “I’ve paid, just let me finish my drink, and I’ll leave.” She looked from the man talking to her to the other two still seated at the bar, hoping to at least appeal to them. But it was clear when she looked in either of their eyes that they were going to be playing follow-the-leader tonight.

  “Oh, no, it’s nothing like that, love. You’re fine, you’re not like the rest of ’em.”

  “Oh yeah?” She looked at the gold-toothed man. “How’s that?”

  “Well, you’re alone, for starters. You’re not with a pack of hooligans puking and pissing everywhere. You don’t look the hippie type, either.”

  Terry might have smiled if the tension level hadn’t become suffocating. “Is that what they’re all like?”

  “I’ve been living here thirty-five years,” he said, tapping the table with his index finger to punctuate his statement. “And I’m telling you, that’s what they’re all like.”

  “Well, that’s a shame. Anyway, I need to go.” She started to get up off her stool.

  “Aw, no, don’t leave. I was beginning to enjoy our little chat.” He spread his arms, nodded at her with raised eyebrows. “Come on, love.”

  “It’s late.”

  “It’s not even twelve! We don’t close until three, you know. And even then, we stay open longer if there’s good times to be had.”

  “I’m afraid that’s way past my bedtime,” she said, forcing a smile. “Sorry, but I really should go.”

  “Stay for just one more drink,” the man said. He got up too, and stood in between her and the exit. “On the house.”

  “I really don’t want another drink. It might get me started on the puking and the pissing, right?”

  “Lovely lass like you? You don’t seem the type.”

  “Look, guys, I’m really going to head out. You’ve got a nice bar, thanks for the good night.” She walked toward the entrance off to the side, but he shifted into her path, hands out in front of him. Terry was beginning to feel that she was heading for trouble, and she was telling herself not to panic, despite the fact that her heart was thumping painfully in her chest. The aggressive energy of adrenaline coursed through her veins.

  She wondered how she should play this. Should she scream? The door was open and someone on the street outside might hear. Should she make a run for it? Should she play nice with the men and chat with them for a while until they got too drunk to stand up. That might work.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d had trouble with drunk men before, but all alone in a foreign country, it was the first time she felt she wouldn’t be able to handle it. It alarmed her that she actually didn’t know the emergency number for the police, and even then, she wasn’t sure if the operator would be someone she could communicate with.

  Damn, that was a rookie mistake!

  Her mind went to Liam again, and not for the first time that day, she wished he was with her. She hoped he would just show up, that like in a movie he’d be in the right place at the right time. And he did. And she couldn’t believe it.

  “Liam!” she called, her voice shaky and bordering on a scream. He was walking on the other side of the narrow street. “Liam!” This time, the tremor of fear in her voice was audible. He looked up at her, surprised, and then his eyes went to the man standing in between her and the door. Something in his demeanor, his stature, ignited.

  “Your boyfriend?” the man asked, turning around to look at the approaching Liam.

  Each of Liam’s steps was hard, matching the fury she saw in his eyes. Relief flooded through her.

  “Yes. Sorry, boys, but like I said, I’ve really got to go.”

  She pushed past the bar owner, and found the hot and still air outside strangely refreshing. Already, her nerves were calming, and her heart was slowing.

  Liam walked quickly to her, and he took her arm and guided her away from the entrance to the bar. “These guys giving you a hard time?” he asked, voice low. His angry eyes darted back to Gold-Tooth.

  “No,” she lied. “No, everything’s fine.” They stopped just meters away. The bars were shouting loud overlapping music at each other across the street, and Terry was quickly growing sick of the din.

  “They were, weren’t they?”

  Terry sighed. “A little. Nothing bad… yet.” She looked at them, too. Gold-Tooth, was grinning.

  “You sure you don’t want to come in and have another drink with the boys, love? But sorry, you can’t bring your friend.”

  Terry groaned. The bar owner was looking for a fight, and Liam left Terry’s side before she could stop him.

  “Christ,” she said to herself, pinching her brow and watching him approach the bar owner. If there was one thing she didn’t want to have to go through, it was watching men act like boys. She got enough of that at home from her brothers.

  Liam walked toward Gold-Tooth, dwarfing him. Terry watched the bar owner hiss something to his mates, and then a moment later he had caught a short shotgun thrown through the air, and had it leveled at Liam.

  “I wouldn’t.”

  Liam ignored him, and in a blur of motion had snatched the shotgun out of Gold-Tooth’s hands. He whipped the gun around and jammed the butt into the man’s face, and Terry heard the clink of one of his teeth slapping the concrete pavement.

  “Say something,” Liam growled as he unloaded the shotgun and threw the shells into the gutter. The shotgun went down the street drain after. “Please,” he said, hoisting the bar owner back up to his feet, and pinning him against the wall. Blood poured from his mouth.

  “Say something,” Liam said again.

  “W-what do you want me to say?”

  “You figure it out.”

  Gold-Tooth turned to Terry. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Terry almost wanted to grin. She felt an alien fire ignite in her. She almost wanted to milk the moment. But she didn’t.

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  Liam dropped the man, who crumpled to the floor, and walked away. He gave his arm to Terry, and she held onto it, and he walked her briskly down the other side of the street, away from the bars.

  “Thanks,” she whispered.

  He looked at her. “You were stupid to stay in that bar.”

  Terry’s indignation flared. She didn’t need a lesson!

  *

  “What the hell is your problem?” she barked at him.

  “I don’t have a problem. But you should have known better than to stay in an empty bar when every other one was full.”

  Liam didn’t speak his words with anger, and he wasn’t meaning to make her feel as if she was being rebuked, but damn it, the signs were obvious!

  He steadied his temper, remembering this was her first time here, and her first time in poor-Asia.

  “It wasn’t empty the whole time,” she said. “There was another couple in there.”

  “Terry, look at all the mopeds out front.” They turned around, looking back toward the bar with the banana sign. “Fifteen? Twenty?”

  “So?”

  “Only three staff inside?”

  “So?” she asked, exasperated.

  “The bar’s a front. The business is upstairs.”

  “Upstairs?” she echoed, looking at the guest house above it. Every room was lit up, which struck Terry as odd. That was when she saw the silhouette of a couple in one of the windows. “Prostitutes?” she asked, eyes widening.

  “Yes,” Liam said. “And it’s very illegal here. You were in a gang’s bar. Their business is the sex trade! Those guys were dangerous.”

  “I didn�
�t know.” Liam watched as her eyes went to the ground. Her shoulders dropped.

  “You didn’t know,” he said, and he held her shoulder. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “But the sex trade out here,” she said, voice shaking, wrinkles creasing her forehead as she raised her brows. “It’s full of underage girls. They’re trafficked!”

  Liam sighed. “Yes.”

  “They get them addicted to drugs!”

  “They do.”

  “Fuck!” Terry shouted, rubbing the bridge of her nose with two fingers. “Damn it.”

  Liam felt an ache in his chest. She was disappointed in herself; that much was clear. “You didn’t know,” he said, and he held her by the shoulders. “But next time keep an eye out.”

  “I can’t believe they have my money.”

  “You paid for drinks, Terry.”

  “Damn it,” she said again. She turned angry eyes on him. “But you didn’t need to be a dick about it.”

  Liam considered it. He’d been running solo for so long that maybe he’d forgotten how to soften his edge around other people.

  “I was worried about you.”

  “I know,” she said, waving her hand. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s forget about it.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Together they walked in silence for a while.

  “Where are we going?” she eventually asked. She was peering to read a sign, but clearly did not recognize the street name.

  “Shortcut back to the Lucky Phuc,” he said. They both grinned at each other.

  “Are we being juvenile?” she asked.

  “Absolutely we are,” Liam said, grinning.

  “So, did you get up to much today? Take care of that, uh, business you can’t talk about?”

  “Not really,” he said. “How about you?”

  “Yeah,” Terry said. “It was actually a pretty great day. I went down to the lake, had breakfast at this gorgeous restaurant that overlooked it. Got the French bread, too.”

  “Was it still hot?”

  “The bread? Yeah.”

  “That’s the only way to have it.”

  “It’s so weird, you know? Coming all the way out to Asia only to see baguettes being sold on the street. I mean, it would be like people selling skewers or those rice dumplings wrapped in banana leaves on the road in London! Just unthinkable, really.”

  “Part of the charm. Hey,” he said, turning on her. “Do you believe in the supernatural?”

  “What, you mean like aliens?” she scoffed.

  Liam smiled. “What about werewolves?”

  Terry tilted her head to the side, and made a ‘Are you serious?’ expression. “Really?”

  “Yeah. Across distinct cultures all over the world, there have been myths of shapeshifters, in one form or another. The werewolf is a classic, but think about, you know, the chupacabra, the yeti, sasquatch… these are all variations on a similar theme.”

  “You’re not a conspiracy theorist or something, are you?” Terry asked, slapping his arm with a playful exuberance.

  Liam grinned again, but in his chest his heart was hammering. He wanted to show her. He couldn’t explain why. It was just a compulsion to… to include her into his world. The grief he had felt as he had dipped back into a past that haunted him was always lessened when he thought of her. There was something there… he liked her, and he didn’t like withholding the truth from her. It was unfair.

  “There’s something I want to show you,” he said.

  “Is this related to what you can’t tell me about?” Her voice had lost some of its playfulness. So she was starting to believe him.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Show me.”

  “Not here,” Liam told her. “Let’s go to the lake. We’ll need a bit of space.”

  *

  Liam was taking her back to the lake, though she couldn’t figure out why they needed ‘space’. It occurred to her that she was allowing herself to be led to a place that would be dark an empty by a man she barely knew. But somehow that worry seemed muted and distant. She felt she could trust him, though she couldn’t fathom why.

  “Can’t you just tell me?”

  “I’m not good with words,” he said matter-of-factly. He smiled at her with his eyes. “But I think you should see this.”

  “Can you at least give me a hint?” Terry asked, growing exasperated.

  “Yeah, it’s not what you expect.”

  “Why the lake?”

  “Because there are strong smells there.”

  Terry blinked. “What?”

  “They will obscure my scent.”

  “From what?”

  “The wolf that is hunting me.”

  Terry couldn’t help herself. She laughed beneath her breath. “God, what am I doing?” she muttered to herself.

  They went to the lake, walked down the leafy bank until they were near the lip of the water. Beside them was a pier, a small wooden jetty that extended outward, at which was moored a tiny wooden paddle boat.

  “Stay here,” Liam said, and he walked out onto the jetty. Terry saw him start to remove his clothing, and she guffawed, rolling her eyes.

  “Don’t tell me you took me out here so we could go skinny dipping!”

  But he didn’t reply, and continued still to remove his clothing. She was reminded of when she had watched him from her balcony, watched him work out and get all sweaty, watched him pleasure himself…

  Once naked, he crouched down into a ball, knees by his shoulders. Terry squinted; she could barely make him out for he was just a silhouette against reflected blue moonlight off the water’s surface.

  That was when she heard it, a splitting crack that jolted her. Had one of the jetty’s wooden boards cracked beneath his weight?

  Then there was another, and Terry gasped, covering her mouth, suppressing a wretch as she saw Liam’s hips wobble, like he had dislocated both of his legs. He fell onto all fours, and she saw his silhouette start to change shape. It lost the definition of his man’s form, and seemed to collapse in on itself, like earth being turned over.

  Terry took a step back. Was he… was he changing shape?

  That was when she saw his elbows reverse with a pop. They just bent the other way, and she gagged, was reminded of when she had broken her arm as a child.

  Then he began to grow in size, first double, then triple. It was then she recognized the shape she was watching being formed. It was a bear.

  She heard the cricking of bones, watched as the bear rotated his head. In an explosion, fur erupted onto his body, turning his sharp outline fuzzy. There was another crack, but this one sounded wet, waterlogged, and she realized that one of the wooden panels of the pier really had split beneath Liam’s weight.

  The bear padded toward her, was illuminated by moonlight, and Terry’s mind whirled.

  “Oh my God,” she hissed, stepping forward, grinning. “Holy shit, you’re a shapeshifter?”

  The bear was brown in color, had a small head with tiny eyes, and a massive hulking body that held in it a no-doubt brutish strength. But the bear let its tongue stick out, just a smudge of color against an otherwise blue, black, and brown image, and she laughed, thinking that it looked cute.

  Somehow, her instinct to run, her instinct to feel fear, was held at bay. She didn’t even know if Liam retained full control of his bear, or if he just became an animal in totality. She realized with a start that she didn’t know what to do if attacked by a bear. Should she climb a tree? Should she lie down and play dead? She at least knew that she probably shouldn’t run. Should she try and scare the bear? Wave her hands and make deep noises?

  The bear huffed a breath of air at her, shook its head, and then rose up onto its two hind legs. It towered over her, but then the bear fell backward, rolling onto its back, four legs up.

  He was telling her that it was safe!

  She moved toward him, her heart hammering in her chest, and extended a trembling hand. L
iam rolled back over onto all fours, and sat down. In that moment, the bear lost all of its frightening appearance, and instead it just looked… cute.

  Terry laughed when her fingers touched his fur. It was so soft, and it was thick and lush. She rubbed her hands over his head, touched his tiny ears, and the pulled her hand back, realizing she couldn’t possibly treat him like he was just a cute animal for her to pet.

  “Wow,” she said, her grin toothy and wide. “I can’t believe this. This is insane.”

  Liam began to change then. She watched as his arms dislocated, as his shoulder blades pushed out through his skin. Terry backed up, seeing blood trickle down over his fur. But then the wounds closed, and his shoulder blades flattened against his spine.

  He dipped low, let out a hoarse grunt, and this time she felt his hip snap, split clean in two, before realigning, rejoining, in the shape of a man’s.

  Slowly his body melted down into a puddle of red and white goop, still retaining basic form, but morphing and changing constantly. Scar tissue wrapped around bits of exposed muscle, split, then healed again.

  But out of the mess of writhing flesh formed the shape of a man. The fur of the bear was sucked inward into nowhere. Wide shoulders grew, the snout of the bear punched inward, the forehead rose.

  Then he was his man, cricking his neck, cracking every knuckle, and looking at her with those same piercing eyes. He was completely naked, and her eyes wiped over his gorgeous body, settling on his dangling manhood for just a moment before they snapped back up.

  “That’s why I had to show you,” he said. “I’m a shapeshifter.”

  *

  Terry just started laughing. She doubled over, slapped at her thighs. Her whole body shook. It was definitely not the response Liam had envisioned, but he allowed for the possibility that maybe he had been just a little vain.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her laughter fading. She wiped tears from her eyes. “Just… just this is so crazy. I thought you wanted me to come skinny dipping with you.”