by J. S. Brent
For once I liked my routine. There was nothing else to do. There was some peace in it, some stability. Wake up. Assess my surroundings. If I was in a house or hotel have a shower and leave a note with the number of my stolen phone on it. If I was on the street my routine was a lot easier. I didn’t have to try my best to be quiet. If I woke up on the street, I’d stretch, take some painkillers for the aches, and move to find one of my spots to play.
I’d then play. Depending on if it was a good day or not, I would get lunch. In the evenings I would go somewhere more ‘touristy’. I always made more money that way. Everyone thought I was just part of the scenery. Part of the culture.
At night, if I was alone I might have gone out, spend five minutes dancing, ten scouting the place to see if I knew anyone. If I didn’t it was a level playing-field. I would try to find a bed for the night. For some reason I was alright with that. It was my reality. I had to do it. I didn’t want to catch something deadly. Well, not consciously.
I wondered if it was the summer holidays yet. There were more people walking around, more money.
My sorry attempt at a beard had left my face itchy. Well, it wasn’t a deliberate attempt. I got paid less until I bought a razor and used people’s sinks to shave. On the worst nights I would be forced to use the river. I couldn’t afford to have a beard.
It was about a month after my exile that I realised that I no longer existed. I had used a different name so many times that I was physically becoming someone else. Tom had died. Nobody had really cared. Nobody had really noticed.
This new man that clutched his guitar could actually play, and he appreciated the rising sun because it meant that he had survived the night. It bought a new meaning to the exchange ‘How are you?’, ‘Surviving.’ That’s all I needed to do, though. I had no responsibilities. I was practically immune to consequences. I had money in my bank, many thanks to my dead Dad. The pay was shit, but I didn’t care. I only had myself to blame. Some days, I could even spend the whole time sleeping. It was bliss. Even if my bag didn’t make for a very good pillow and even if it got extremely cold at night. I was fine. I was happy.
This new man didn’t cry when he didn’t make anything that day. He didn’t feel worthless when he caught his muddy reflection in the river. He didn’t hate himself for how he treated women. No. That had been Tom’s job. That had been Tom’s job.
This all came before the strangest day of my life.
I was playing my guitar when three men started to run towards me. I tried to ignore them and so I just continued to play. They sped up. It was distracting. My voice began to trail off, but the chords continued.
‘There you are, Johnny.’ One of them said to me. He wore a military marching jacket. I must have looked bewildered. He was pleading with his eyes. I saw someone in the distance looking around, as if he had lost his pet.
‘God, we thought we’d lost you. Thank fuck for that.’ Another said. On the back of his jacket was the biohazard symbol. I eyed each one of them, one by one. Sat down, the floor began to feel more uncomfortable. I shifted my weight. They all stood over me.
‘Wanna get something to eat?’ The final one asked.
‘How the fuck are you always hungry?’ The second looked at his friend. ‘Isn’t he, Johnny?’ He looked directly at me. I didn’t open my mouth. The figure from the distance approached. ‘Johnny?’ I stared back. ‘Play along.’ He whispered harshly.
‘Have you found him?’ A stern voice came from behind the three men. They spun around. I began to see what was going on.
‘Yup. Here’s Johnny.’ The first one smiled, slightly too wide. The fourth man looked past them and eyed me up and down.
‘Yup. Our guitarist.’ The second one added.
‘Are you sure?’ He asked, slowly. He had a soft, Irish accent. It was almost unnoticeable. It was as if he was trying to conceal it.
‘Positive.’ The three replied.
‘I thought you said he had a beard?’
‘Well he obviously shaved it off.’ The second said.
‘Yeah, just look at that rash.’ The first said. I put my hand to my cheeks.
‘Ok, then.’ The fourth man said, turning away. The three looked relieved. ‘Are you coming?’
‘Me?’ I asked, pointing to myself.
‘He must’ve been drunk.’ One said.
‘It’s half twelve.’ The fourth replied.
‘I told you not to drink without us.’ The third said.
I didn’t have anything else to do. They seemed harmless. I got up, packed up my guitar, and followed on.
‘Johnny.’ I said, putting my hand out to the fourth man. There was a flash in his eye.
‘What’s your real name?’ He asked me, still leading me to whatever place Johnny had gone missing from. I looked behind me to the other three in their jackets. The third one had picked some food up from somewhere. Every single one of them looked blissfully unaware of the world that was unfolding around them. Maybe I could have learnt to do the same.
I never met the real Johnny in the end. Apparently he always went missing when he was needed the most.
I turned back to the fourth to see if I could read anything on his face. There was nothing. ‘My names Edgar. Edgar Donn.’ He said to me, shaking my hand. ‘I’m the director.’
‘Jamie. Jamie Fitzgerald.’ I responded whilst we walked through the streets of that beautifully grey city. ‘I’m the guitarist.’
To be continued.....
Lone Bear
BBW Bear Shifter Romance
by
J. S. Brent
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
Chapter 1—Olivia
Kim Darren had just finished wiping down the counter when I walked in that night.
“Any mail?” I asked, stretching my tired bones, as I approached the bar.
“No mail,” she said tersely. “No males, either.”
“Color me shocked.”
She laughed, and I gazed for a minute at the menu in silence. Grilled swordfish was the night’s special—not an uncommon occurrence in a coastal tavern like this one—prepared and cooked by Kim herself. This frumpy, bespectacled woman who wore her hair in a tight bun and looked like she belonged behind the counter at a Waffle House, had turned out to be the best thing about my current archeological expedition.
Not that she had had much competition.
“How’s Gaston?” asked Kim. “Gaston” was her name for Devin Garner, the leader of my archeological expedition, whose constant come-ons and ass-slappings were threatening to ruin what might otherwise have been a fairly pleasant trip.
For the last month I had been sweating myself dry in the tropical sun to recover a fabled treasure that was said to exist in a giant octagonal sand pit on an island just a few miles off the coast. So far no trace of the supposed treasure had been recovered and tempers were beginning to flare—none more so than my boss, whose only source of comfort in life was harassing those beneath him and making unwanted sexual advances because he was feeling bored or lonely or fed up with his sad life.
Seeing the cloud that fell over my face at the mention of his name, Kim gingerly set down a tower of plates and faced me at eye-level.
“You know that you can report him, right?” she asked, in a voice only I could hear.
“To whom?” I said, in a harsher tone than I had intended. “If you hadn’t noticed, we’re a little bit out of the way here. A man does what he wants.”
“You shouldn’t have to put up with it.”
“I don’t have a choice.” The coldness in my v
oice put an end to any further discussion.
I ordered a bowl of clam chowder with crackers and a mug of beer, which Kim brought out and set down before me without a word, and ate hungrily. All I had had for lunch was a bottle of Gatorade and half a Snickers bar. Lately we had been working overtime, convinced we were approaching the goal of our excavations, the fabled Oak Island money pit.
A loud scraping noise beside me jarred me out of my reverie. Someone—an old man—was pulling a chair up to the bar.
“Cold night, in’it?” he mumbled. Given that there was no one else in the vicinity, I assumed he was talking to me.
I grunted in response, which must have irritated him, because he said in a louder voice, “How late you stay up at night?”
I threw him an annoyed look, but undeterred, he pressed on. “I always pass by your room on my way to bed. Your light never goes out. You up studying?”
“I’m reading,” I said. Reading. Just like I had done when I was a little girl. Just like I had always done.
“Bet you get awful lonesome in there at night.”
Here it comes. I began slowly edging away from the table.
“Some of us prefer to be alone at night,” I said acidly.
“Well, if you ever want company—” he began to say, but then with an almighty thwack! he had crashed to the floor, and never managed to complete his sentence. That’s the danger of setting your stool too close to me—it could go toppling over at the slightest hint of danger.
The old man dusted himself off, took his stool and retreated to the furthest corner of the room. Kim glared at me—she had come walking in just as I kicked him over. “He was hitting on me!” I mouthed in protest.
“Liv, what have I told you about tripping guests,” said Kim, in more of a statement than a question.
“I maintain that if the guest had it coming,” I replied, “said person should be tripped, and tripped hard.”
She then brought me vanilla ice cream with wafers (“on the house,” she said, without bothering to explain why), which I ate with relish though I was so absorbed in my own thoughts I could barely taste them. Yes, now that he brought it up, there were times when I felt lonely. More than one man had thought he was the one who was destined to melt my cold heart. More than one man had been wrong.
The problem with most men was… well, they were just men. Hardly better than boys, if you asked me. I had a yearning to wrestle with thunder, and I didn’t care if the thunder won in the end.
Lately I had given up on ordinary men completely, and had spent hours alone in my room—when I should’ve been studying—browsing the shifter dating sites. The revelation 10 or 15 years ago that there was an entire community of shape-shifting humans was a boon for dating companies, with sites like Dare2Bear and Roar4More and Coogars.com springing up seemingly overnight.
“It’s fine,” said a low, breathy voice beside me. “If you don’t have a room, I can sleep outside.”
A man had entered the tavern and was standing a few feet away at the bar, talking to Kim. He was arrayed in full Aragorn-getup, with a long cloak concealing most of his features. Water was pooling onto the floor in a puddle at his feet—evidently he had been caught in the rainstorm that had ended my digging an hour early tonight.
“I’m sorry I can’t be of more assistance,” said Kim, “but you don’t have to try and make me feel guilty.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t have to try.” He turned and swept from the room, his cloak trailing behind him like the wings of a giant bat. Pausing for a moment at the door, he looked directly at me. My heart gave a nervous jolt—I was being judged and measured, all in a single glance—and I strove to respond in kind, but a veil of mystery concealed him. By the time he finally walked out of the tavern, I felt like he knew everything about me. And I had learned nothing.
Morosely I handed Kim my bowl and meandered up to my room. Oddly, both the chat with the old man and the sight of the young man—was he young? It was hard to tell, his face was so grizzled and rugged—had stirred deep longings in me. Longings that were best left unexpressed, or ignored altogether.
I stayed up late in my armchair reading, long after the footsteps of my besotted dinner partner had passed the bedroom door for the last time. The small print ran together, forming a single blur on the yellowed pages. At around two, feeling myself beginning to nod off, I dragged myself to my laptop to record the day’s findings—a two-inch clay shard and an empty root beer glass. This done, I logged into Dare2Bear.
It was the world’s premier website for those who craved flings with bear-shifters. The last few weeks I had been pursuing an occasionally heated flirtation with the world’s most stubborn and delectable man-bear. As with most dating sites, I had initially been attracted to his pictures—his body, mostly, given his tendency to obscure his face in most of them. I told myself I was just fascinated, as an archeologist, with the strange tattoo on his chest, a tattoo inscribed with some symbolic markings that I couldn’t quite make out, given the poor quality of the photo. The truth was, I was probably drawn to him for the same reasons I had been drawn to archeology as a child, for the love of all things that are mysterious and unknown.
Hey girl, he had messaged me during our last conversation over a month ago. What’s going on.
Not much, I said, playing coy. Just studying, reading books, looking at old maps. The good life.
Sounds like a party, he replied.
This is how it was most of the time, this harmless banter that never threatened to become anything serious. That night we had talked about our favorite TV shows (his was Lost, mine was House Hunters International but I said Breaking Bad) and the slightly more risky subject of whether we wanted kids, and how many we wanted (I was willing, but he was reluctant). Then somehow the subject had gotten onto the subject of his looks—I had never seen a clear picture of him—and the conversation had spun wildly out of control.
Why u wanna know what I look like, he had typed. So u can judge me?
At first I thought he was joking, so attempted to play along, but this turned out to be an even more costly mistake.
It’s not funny, he said. A woman who truly cared about me wouldn’t be demanding to know what I look like. Ur just trying to decide whether or not u should bail before u make too big an investment.
No, it’s not that, I had said helplessly. It isn’t that at all…
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Wasn’t it usually the case that the man demanded pictures, preferably nudes, and the woman got offended and sulked because she knew she was being judged by the quality of her assets? How had the script gotten flipped the other way? But then I reminded myself that I wasn’t dealing with a script, I was dealing with people, and people were unique and not easily reducible to gendered stereotypes.
That was the last I had heard from him. Of course he had mentioned towards the end of the conversation that he was taking an unexpected trip across the world and might not be able to reply for many weeks, but I naturally assumed (and all my friends agreed) that this was a copout designed to extricate him from our burgeoning online flirtation as painlessly as possible. Sure enough, he hadn’t been online since the fight and he hadn’t responded to any of my messages. Eventually I just gave up trying.
Before I went to bed that night I checked my inbox, but he hadn’t replied to my last message. That was the most frustrating thing about him. One day we were cracking jokes and trading songs; the next, it was like he had never met me. Though, come to think of it, I guess he really hadn’t.
With a final shake of my head I rolled into bed, wondering why men were so frustrating and whether I might have better luck with the stranger in the bar, the one who was sleeping outside, lulled to sleep by the pounding surf. I had to remind myself that sometimes people were stupid, sometimes men were stupid, and it wasn’t your fault. You did the best you could and they still ended up being jerks. I just had just to let it go and move on. By throwing a tantrum, he had only proven t
hat he wasn’t worth my time.
Chapter 2—Henry
Kim’s bed and breakfast wasn’t the only one on the mainland. After I left there, I sought out a second one about a mile down the road, a ratty and disorganized place that bore an unhappy resemblance to the gin joint in Casablanca.
It was already getting dark by the time I neared Maude’s Inn. Cars are a luxury on this outpost, and only the privileged few who really need them have them. The rest of us have to get by, by walking. You learn to measure everything in terms of how long it will take you to foot it from one place to another. One mile (the exact length from Kim’s to Maude’s) takes about 20 minutes. If it turned out she didn’t have a place for me to stay that night, there was still just enough time to catch the ferry back to the island before it shut down for the night. I could have swum the distance, but I was already exhausted and the currents are strong at night. Best not to chance it.
My life hadn’t always been like this. Mom and dad weren’t exactly rich, but we lived in a certain level of comfort. And when they died, my grandfather made sure I was always taken care of. His house in Nebraska had been small, but for a young boy unused to the world it had seemed like Aladdin’s cave. The pantry was well-stocked and the library held more books than I could possibly read, stories about explorers traveling to the ends of the earth and (more often than not) dying on the way there. Some of those books he had written. Some had been written about him.