Dancing Bearback (BBW Shifter Cowboy Western Romance) (Bear Ranchers Book 3)

by Becca Fanning

  The past twenty-four hours unspooled in her head like old typewriter ribbon. She tried to remember a time before she stormed out of that bar, before Henry followed her, before he shared this day and these places with her. Even her apartment was hazy, like a place she’d lived in when she was too small to remember anything but shadows.

  “You’re unreal,” Lila told him. She licked her dry lips, then reached out and dusted her fingers along the curve of his jaw.

  Overhead, a raven cawed, sudden as gunfire.

  Lila lurched away, scrambled to her feet, startled back to reality. She could still feel Henry’s side pressed to hers, could feel the long swath of shared heat spread from her shoulder to her thigh. “Oh god.” Her face was hot and flushed. “Sorry. Oh my god. We should get back. It’s late. And I’m… god, sorry, I’m never like this. I never do this.” She fumbled with the clips of her camera bag, blind with the white-hot burn of humiliation. “I’m so sorry.”

  She heard Henry stand, heard him sigh through his nose and step closer to her.

  “I just can’t, I mean, I’d never—”

  “Stop,” Henry murmured.

  “I—”

  He brought his bare hands to her cheeks, and Lila leaned up to meet his kiss halfway. She was frozen and melting all at once: her body stiff, immobile, trembling, but her lips were viscous against Henry’s, like they were dissolving into one another, inseparable, indistinguishable.

  Henry pulled away, but he rested his forehead against hers, his mouth curling in a sublime smile against her cheek. “You’re one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met, Lila Ellis.” His thumb stroked her cheekbone. “But I’m just about cold as hell.”

  He offered her his hand. Lila hesitated. Holding hands with boys in high school had always been sweaty and awkward. She didn’t date much after high school. Didn’t do much of anything after high school. Just traveled, took pictures of wild things, and disappeared further and further inside of herself. She claimed it was part of her grieving process, but after eight years, it felt less like grief and more like an inescapable rut.

  But Henry’s hand was so warm and large and careful.

  Lila slipped her fingers into his. He raised their gloved hands to kiss her knuckle, then gave her hand a little squeeze. “I’m ready if you are.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m ready.”

  They wandered hand-in-hand down the mountain, neither willing to be the first to let go.

  That night, Lila and Henry lay side by side in his bed, curved like two halves of the same shape, their hands meeting in the middle. This was after dinner with Henry’s makeshift family, after they’d sat on opposite sides of the table and tried to remember how they were before that first kiss. Most of the men didn’t notice, but Lila saw Matt watching Henry with his eyes narrowed, saw the older man follow Henry’s quick stolen looks at her from across the table.

  This was also after she went upstairs, and he followed with a dinosaur of a laptop, muttering something about going through the pictures. And it was after Henry shut the door and circled his hands around her narrow hips and pressed her hard against the door, his mouth on her neck, and then her mouth on his, while their hands searched the lines of each other’s bellies and backs and throats.

  But they had to stop, had to pause and breathe, because any more kissing would lead them someplace under clothes, under covers, someplace neither wanted to blunder into. So instead they lay still and silent and breathing, caught up in the wonder of one another.

  The laptop and Lila’s camera bag sat on his desk, untouched.

  Lila’s fingers traced his hand. Callouses ridged his palms like tiny mountain ranges.

  “I think Matt knows,” she said. The first real words between them since they had escaped upstairs.

  Henry rolled onto his back and laughed, the knob of his Adam’s apple dipping low. She wanted to lean over and kiss it. She wanted to kiss every precious new thing she noticed about him: the little twisted white scar on his wrist, the way he chewed at his lips when he was thinking, the port-wine birthmark speckling the back of his neck.

  “Of course Matt knows.” He turned his head toward Lila, his brilliant dark hair flipping back from his forehead. Lila couldn’t spend enough time looking at him. “He’s practically my brother. We can’t lie to each other anymore. We know each other’s tells.”

  Something turned in Lila’s belly. Not envy, exactly. Longing. She flicked her stare away.

  “Tell me something about yourself,” Henry said, suddenly. “Something I don’t know but should.”

  Lila raised her eyebrows, struck speechless for a moment. “Uh. Well. I don’t do a lot.”

  “I like biographies,” Henry offered. “Like, the kind where it’s a story with the history stuff. They’re like regular books, but they’re about real people and things that really happened, so it’s actually meaningful.”

  She giggled. “God, I don’t know. Um. I used to paint a lot in high school. Like, watercolor stuff. I was pretty good. I stopped practicing so I’m kinda bad now, but I won a couple awards back in the day.”

  “I don’t doubt that for a second.”

  They lay that way for a long time, trading stories like secrets, carefully reconstructing the high points of one another’s adolescence and young adult years. They talked until they couldn’t talk anymore, and then Henry kissed her temple, her mouth, her cheek, and whispered, “I’m glad you lost your luggage, Lila.”

  Lila smiled into his skin. “Me too.”

  The next few days were ethereal and endless, the way holiday breaks had felt when she was small. Sitka-time felt infinitely long, as though Lila could stretch out each individual second like a rubber band.

  She and Henry fell into a comfortable routine. They rose with the sun, made breakfast, made plans, and made out before any of Henry’s buddies even stirred. The early morning silence felt holy, almost church-like, and it made their kisses that much deeper and hungry and needy. Then they spent the day wandering Sitka and the little crumbs of islands near port. Lila took constant pictures, but her lens shifted gradually away from the edenic scenery and more towards Henry. At night, they would cozy up at Henry’s house—The Cave, they called it, like it was a college town bachelor pad—and play card games with his housemates, or they’d rifle through their stacks of worn VHS tapes looking for something they hadn’t seen in a while.

  Lila had never slipped so seamlessly into a group of people before. She usually stalled and stuttered, terrified of saying the wrong thing. But these men—boys, really, Lost Boys in a wintry Neverland—made her smile, made her feel like she was in on some kind of inside joke. Like she was right at home.

  They were the kind of grown men who still threw themselves around and got bruised up like witless and immortal teenage boys. But under all that grit and gristle, she found herself learning all these brilliant hidden things about them. Like how the tattoos engulfing Matt’s arms and back and belly recounted the events of The Bhagavad-Gita, beginning at the base of Matt’s left wrist, looping around his body, and finally ending at his right. And that Finn spent lazy weekend afternoons knitting everyone socks and scarves and hats, listening to sports on the radio, cussing his head off and banging his needles together when his side lost. And that Colt could spell any word you threw at him without a second’s thought.

  She wanted to stay here. She wanted to excavate their quirks and charms like diamonds. She wanted them to keep hooting and hollering when Henry invited her to sit on his lap. She wanted December 31 to never arrive.

  Sitka-time was elastic, but it still crept inexorably forward, one protracted second at a time.

  Lila woke on the last day of the year with a stone in her belly. Her room—no, she reminded herself, Henry’s room—was as cool and clear as a bowl of water. The sky was lilac and lightening fast.

  She stood and went to the window to watch the sun come out.

  Tomorrow, she thought, would be her last day to enjoy the cathedral-quiet
of that sliver of time between night and day, as though the world was holding its breath, waiting with her for the sun to finally rise.

  And then after that she’d be back in Toronto. Back to her sink full of unwashed dishes, back to a sky that would never go quiet, not really. Not the way that Sitka’s did.

  Lila turned away from the window. She tugged on her fleece leggings, then her jeans, and threw on the softest sweater she could find in Henry’s dresser. She tiptoed down the hall, past the long row of shut doors. Today, she decided, she would be the one to wake up Henry, and they could go out and watch the sunrise together.

  At the top of the stairs, she paused.

  She heard Henry and Matt downstairs, but they weren’t carrying on their usual morning banter. They spoke in hushed, urgent tones, like they were having the world’s quietest shouting match.

  “You haven’t told her yet?” Matt hissed, and then he made a sharp sick sound of disgust through his teeth. “Are you joking?”

  “There was never a good time.”

  “A good time was three fucking days ago, buddy.”

  Lila winced back and leaned against the wall. She’d never heard Matt sound severe before, or even any mood worse than vaguely annoyed. Anger was almost too astonishing to process.

  “I know. I know.” She imagined Henry sitting with his head in his hands, the line of his lips going tight.

  “You gotta say something, man. If this is a real thing.”

  “Of course it is,” Henry snapped.

  Matt said something else, something low and inaudible, and she heard Henry scoff like it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.

  Then the scrape of a wooden chair moving as someone stood, and Henry muttered, “I’m gonna go see if Lila is up. Don’t tell her anything. I need to be the one to do it.”

  “C’mon, Henry—”

  “Not one goddamn word.”

  The floorboards creaked under the weight of Henry’s approach.

  Lila darted on the toes of her feet to Henry’s room. She shut the door behind herself as quietly as she could, then sat at the desk, grabbed her camera, tried to look like she’d been flicking through photos for ages.

  Henry opened the door gently, peered inside, and smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “That’s cute.”

  Lila looked down at her sweater and said, “Oh. Thanks.” She looked away, at the window, a dozen questions poised on the tip of her tongue. Most of all, she wondered what could get Matt of all people so intense.

  “Listen, Lila.” Henry sat on the edge of his bed and rubbed his face with both hands. His eyes looked heavy and sleepless. “Maybe we should talk about something.”

  Lila raised her head. Her heart started rabbiting in her chest. “Talk about what?”

  “What you wanna do tonight. I mean, it’s Lila’s first grownup New Year’s Eve. That’s something worth planning, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.” She turned to sit sideways in the chair, resting her chin on the chair’s back, and searched Henry’s face for a hint of his secret. She wasn’t sure how to feel about it. There were things she hadn’t told him, things she kept locked away in the deepest catacombs of her heart. Things even she didn’t want to bring up.

  “You know,” she said, finally, “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “Yeah. I know.” Henry laughed humorlessly at the floor. “It sucks.”

  Lila nodded.

  The first few rays of sunlight peeked through the window, almost shyly. Lila crept to Henry’s side and sank down into the warm and total embrace of his arms. She didn’t know what to feel.

  They sat there and watched the sunrise in silence, neither willing to voice the impossible question that hung between them, souring the dawn.

  In the end, Finn and Matt wanted to spend New Year’s Eve at Pioneer Bar, though they had two entirely different reasons for it. Finn liked being drunk in public, and Matt hated cleaning up after everyone at the end of the night.

  So Lila and the boys packed themselves into both trucks and rambled down the mountain. Finn even persuaded Colt to come along. The brothers rode with her and Henry, and she’d never seen them so opposite. Finn was in a state of eternal motion, like he was positively vibrating with kinetic energy. He kept jabbering and shaking Lila’s shoulders to “make her feel more festive” and lurching over her lap to change the station every minute or two, hunting for something better. And Colt, his younger mirror image, sat calm and soundless in the back, pressing his nose to the window to look up at the stars.

  Lila just held Henry’s hand as he drove. They shared small, bemused smiles with every one of Finn’s excited outbursts, like they were his exasperated parents.

  Pioneer Bar was a madhouse. Matt and Sherman had managed to arrive early enough to secure one of the lone booths, but all the bar’s standing room and scant stools were full to the brim with drunk exuberant fishermen and high school kids trying to sneak liquor in the mayhem. The bar was all music and joy and free-flowing booze.

  Maybe it didn’t count as a party, but it was the closest Lila had ever been to one. She had to shout for anyone to hear her, and Henry insisted on paying for her drinks—“You’re so small,” he’d told her with a mischievous grin, “that you’ll be smashed after three drinks, so don’t you worry about my wallet, lady”—and men eyed her for the sole reason that she was young and attractive and unfamiliar.

  The year dwindled to its final hours, and she didn’t care about whatever memories Henry still kept from her, or that her flight was set to leave in less than twelve hours, or that this may be her last night to see her only friends in the world.

  Instead, Lila sipped whiskey and told stories and made people laugh, and Henry held her like she was the most precious thing in the world. She had never felt so alive.

  By ten o’clock, Finn was eight beers deep and stumbling drunk. He pushed himself up from the table and shouted, “Holy Jesus, I’ve never had to pee so bad in my life.”

  Colt scooted out to let Finn go by. His cheeks were rosy, but he still had his motor planning. “Don’t break the seal, brother,” he said as he sat again. “You’ll piss every fifteen minutes if you do.”

  Lila felt blurry but rational. She was Lila gone soft at the edges. She was Lila grinning like an idiot at Finn and Colt, Lila who suddenly found talking about pee enormously funny.

  Henry leaned his head down and said in her ear, “You okay, Lila?”

  “I’m great. Drunk, but.” She smiled blissfully up at him. “I’m really, really great.”

  “Good.” He kissed her nose, and Lila giggled in delight.

  Finn grabbed his coat from their pile of jackets and tugged it on. “You know what’s irritating as hell though?” he said suddenly to the table as a whole. He pulled a lone grey glove from his pocket and shook it like it had wronged him personally. “I ordered these brand new nicer’n hell goddamn gloves off the internet, and it took them some, I dunno.” Finn staggered and grabbed onto the edge of the table, making their glasses shudder. “Like two weeks to get here. Two goddamn weeks. And I ain’t even got ’em a full forty-eight hours before one of these little bastards just up and disappeared one day. Right out of my pocket.”

  “Great story, Finny.” Sherman held up both his thumbs. His glasses were so smudged they couldn’t possibly be useful anymore.

  “You’re goddamn right it’s a great story.” Then Finn slapped the glove on the table, turned, and flounced out the door.

  Colt took his spot again and sighed, heavily.

  Lila frowned at the glove. “Let me see that.”

  “All yours.” Colt tossed it over to her.