by Jade White
“What is this?” she asked him.
There was a void in the room as he looked at the book, staring at it like he hated it more than anything in the world. It might be in her favor now, but she knew it was only a matter of time before it slipped into the privacy game. She knew it was coming and she was ready for it.
She was hungry for the fight and she didn’t know why. She just felt extremely hurt by the whole thing and she wanted to know why he had treated her like this. Why had he turned on her with such cruelty and barbarism? She had done nothing to earn this kind of suspicion or deceit. She needed to know what she was getting into.
“You found my journal,” he said with a voice that was anything but calm, like he was trying to portray.
She knew he was mad; there was a fury inside of him. She was eager to draw it out. She was eager to see what he had inside of himself that he was willing to fight with.
“I didn’t know you would be going through my things.”
“It was open on the desk in your library,” she said strongly, not willing to fall for that. “It’s not like I cracked open a safe to find it. What the hell is this?”
“The truth,” he said after a deep breath and exhaled.
She looked at him in confusion. She didn’t know what that meant. What did he mean, the truth? The truth about what? Was he trying to convince her that he could actually turn into an animal in the middle of the night, stalking the world and striking fear into the innocent? Was that what he was really trying to convince her of?
This was worse than she thought. She had been hoping it was a test she had failed and that she would have to apologize to him and they would need to set some boundaries that would explain what was and what wasn’t acceptable for each other to see, but this was so much worse.
This was the worst possible outcome she had honestly not been expecting. How could he actually believe he was capable of turning into a bear? She looked at him and tried to find the words to speak. This was madness. This was the actual definition of madness and she was going to have to deal with it.
She was going to need to explain to him that he had a serious condition and he couldn’t just let this go on. They were going to need to find a doctor he could talk to.
She shook her head and took another drink of wine. She was going to need it for the courage. She was going to need it so she knew what she was going to be dealing with. She felt the fear trickling deep down inside of her and she didn’t know what to do with herself. How was she going to be able to handle this? She stared at him, trying to decide what the best course of action was going to be.
“You think you can turn into a bear?” she asked calmly, trying her hardest not to freak out at him.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said, shaking his head.
No, she could honestly tell him that he had no clue what she was thinking right now. No one in the world could know what she was thinking right now. She stared at him with her eyes wide, thinking about what her options were.
“You think it’s impossible for someone to turn into a bear and I must be absolutely insane, but I’m telling you, I wanted to keep this from you as long as possible. I am a bear, Tiffany. Whenever I get too angry, or if I want to, I can turn into a bear. It happens without my desire twice a month and I have to take precautions to make sure everyone around me is safe, but I can turn into a bear. I can turn into a bear and that’s all there is to it.”
“You realize that you sound insane right now,” she said to him, taking another drink. “You sound like you’ve been taking drugs and you’re trying to convince me of something that is impossible.”
“It sounds impossible,” he said, nodding to her, “but I can do it.”
“No you can’t, Gus,” she said to him strongly. “No one can turn into a bear. What you’re talking about is magical. Jesus, Gus, why didn’t you tell me you had this problem before you proposed to me. I would have helped you find a doctor to talk to about it or something like that. We could have found you a doctor who could meet with you privately. Now, I don’t know what we’re going to do. I can’t have a child with a man who is clearly having a mental breakdown.”
She watched him as she was shouting at him, staring as he started to take his clothes off. He was stripping right in front of her and as she shook her head at him, he didn’t say anything. When he was completely naked in front of her, he finally spoke.
“I’ll show you, Tiffany,” he said with a shrug. “That’ll be the easiest way to settle all of this.”
She stared at him and knew he was going to do something stupid and she was going to be left less than approving. Something in her mind was going to snap. She was going to make sure that there was nothing he could do to argue with her though, so she was going to humor him, this once. She was going to let him make a fool of himself and then she was going to tell him to go see a doctor if he wanted anything to do with her.
If he was devious and setting up traps for her, then she would have walked away from him right then and there, but this was harder to walk away from. He was having a mental breakdown.
She watched as his whole body shivered, quivering like he was freezing. Tiffany couldn’t tell if it was freezing or not, her whole biological rhythm was off since she had found out she was pregnant. Sometimes she would feel balmy, but it would be subzero to everyone else. She was learning to cope with it and trying her hardest not to be a frustration or an annoyance to her fellow coworkers.
But as Gus quivered, she knew he was trying to look like he was transforming. The veins in his neck and on his face were beginning to pop out and she wondered if he was having a seizure or a heart attack, but as she watched him, she noticed there was something different about this.
She watched as the hair on his arms began to get darker and coarser as he quivered and his five o’clock shadow started to get darker, as well. She looked at him and wondered what was happening. As his whole body continued to get more and more hairy, she stood up from the chair, staring wide eyed at the insane man she was supposed to marry.
He dropped down onto his hands and knees and she watched as his whole body began to swell, muscles growing and expanding as he began moaning and groaning with the pain of his body transforming. She could feel her own heart pounding against her chest, harder and harder as she looked at him, not sure how this was happening.
How could any of this be happening? She wanted to scream and run away, but as she watched him, something inside of her made her want to run for the door and never look back. Soon, there was a bear standing in front of her and her whole body felt like she was going to collapse. Her mind was whirling and she didn’t know what to do or say. She didn’t know what was happening right now.
His hands were expanding, thick hair covering them as claws grew out of his fingertips, expanding and stretching as she looked at them. All she could do was not look at it. She wanted to run and hide from the sight of her fiancé turning into a bear, but there was nothing she could do, she just watched him as his whole body began to expand and she was looking at a bear.
There was no sign of a human left and there was nothing even remotely similar to the man she had seen. There was nothing about him that was present. His clothes scattered all around the floor was the only thing left of the man she was having a child with. She looked at him and knew it was impossible, but somehow she was seeing it. Somehow, she was looking right at it and she was going to have to explain it to herself rationally.
The bear was enormous, much too large to be in this room with her and as she looked at it, all she could think of was that she had never seen a bear in person before, at least not this close. There was something thrilling about it, beyond the horror and the terror that was inside of her.
She didn’t know how she was going to explain this to herself, but she just stared and hoped it would make sense to her in a few minutes. She doubted very much it would, but she was being optimistic at this point. Right now, all she could think about was
the fact that she was looking at a bear that had just been a man a minute ago.
The bear seemed to know exactly what it was and exactly where it came from. There was no confusion or clumsy knocking over of things, but rather a sort of calm that existed inside of the bear as it looked around the room, its eyes settling on Tiffany as though he were proving a point just for her. She had received the message and all she wanted was for him to turn back.
She was done playing and messing around with him. She just wanted to be left alone to think about what she had just witnessed. The bear panted and grunted at her a few times while she stared, blinking at it.
Tiffany liked to believe she was a reasonable person and she didn’t believe in silly things or put too much stock in things like UFOs or zodiac signs, but when she was looking at this, she wasn’t quite able to reconcile what she was seeing to what she was told all of her life.
It was like she had slipped and fallen out of the real world and was now standing in some kind of alternate reality where the insane things of the world were totally allowed to happen that no one bothered to question or think about too hard.
She witnessed something that could be explained by nothing other than magic. There was no way someone was going to explain to her that what she had just witnessed was genetic or that there was a rational answer or explanation behind it. She looked at the bear and all she could think about was that there was something wrong with the world.
She was dreaming or maybe she had had too much to drink right now. She looked at the bear and it stared right back at her. It was living proof there was magic in the world and she didn’t want to cope with that right now.
“I can’t handle this,” she told him with all seriousness. She didn’t know if the bear could understand her and she swore to God that if the bear talked to her, she was going to run away and never look back.
She turned away from the bear and headed to the nearest bottle of wine that was waiting for her in the kitchen. The bear looked at her and grunted a few times, puffing, and she was suddenly terrified that maybe the bear couldn’t understand her and it was something more animalistic and wild than Gus was. Maybe there was no controlling the beast.
As she looked at the bear, it began to quiver and shake, its whole body began to shudder and she watched as it began to transform back into a human. The hair began to fall off of his body and his muscles began to shrink. The mass of the creature began to change and she watched with morbid curiosity as the bear became a human. It was the most frightening thing she had ever seen.
The transformation had been something spooky, but watching him go back was even more disturbing to her. She watched him until he was standing naked in front of her. His body was red and his eyes were exhausted. She looked at him, wondering what the hell she was supposed to say right now. Was she supposed to be happy about this? Was she supposed to clap him on the back and cheer him on for being a mythical creature?
“I need a drink,” she told him, heading for the kitchen.
“Tiffany, we need to talk about this,” he said, chasing after her to get a word in.
She wasn’t interested in hearing anything he had to say right then. In fact, she was fairly certain she wasn’t going to be able to listen to him for a very long time. Telling someone they were able to transform into a mythical creature was one of those things you needed to squeeze in somewhere between the initial meeting to the proposal and he had somehow forgotten that crucial piece of information.
In fact, she was fairly certain there was nothing he could say right now that was going to make her want anything more than something stiff and strong.
“Tiffany, wait a second. We need to talk about this.”
“I’m not talking to you until you put some clothes on,” she said to him, refusing to look at him. There was no way she was going to take him seriously now that he was naked. She wasn’t going to look at his penis while he was trying to explain to her why he was able to transform into a bear.
He left her alone as she stood in the kitchen and opened another bottle of wine. No, she thought, stopping before she filled the glass, she was going to need something much stronger than that. She was going to need something to make her forget all of this and make her feel good about her life again.
She poured herself a glass of whiskey and took her first drink, feeling the burn and wondered why anyone ever drank this stuff in its raw form. It was potent and disgusting. But, it was going to do the trick for her.
Was this what she was going to live with, knowing this was the truth about the man she was going to marry? Was she supposed to be okay with knowing he could turn into a bear at any moment and twice a month without his permission? She didn’t think this was the kind of relationship she wanted to have.
No, what she wanted was a relationship that was going to make sense and wasn’t going to make her want to take pills to cope with it. She was certain there were people out there who would be totally fine with the information she had just been shown, but she wasn’t one of them. In fact, this was going to haunt her for a long time.
She kept thinking back to his journal and how he had mentioned a curse over and over again. She had read those entries in the journal a thousand times and she knew he only knew a little about the curse in and of itself, and it was that the curse would fall upon him if he impregnated a woman was outside of wedlock.
As far as Tiffany knew, it was to make sure there weren’t a bunch of Shifters out there impregnating everything with a vagina and making an army of unstoppable bear people to take over the world with.
But, as far as the curse was concerned, she knew he would be turned into a bear for the rest of his life if they didn’t get married before the child was born. That made her think this was nothing more than an excuse for him to stay a human and that he wasn’t actually in love with her.
If he was just marrying her so he wouldn’t be a bear for the rest of his life, then that wasn’t a life she wanted. Sure, it might seem selfish and cruel, but as far as she was concerned, she only wanted to marry someone if they were actually in love, not because there was a mystical gun to their heads. She looked at the glass of whiskey and downed the last of it, shaking off the burn.
This wasn’t what she wanted. She didn’t want to have a relationship where he was only in it because he had no other options. No, that wasn’t romantic or beautiful at all. He wanted to marry her to save his own skin and that made her feel like she was cheap to him and nothing here was actually of any value to him. If that were the case, then she was going to find another person to marry and she would be just fine on her own, raising a child that may or may not be a bear.
“Tiffany,” he said, walking into the kitchen in a long sleeved shirt and pajama pants. “Can we talk about this?”
“What? You mean the fact that you can turn into a bear?” She poured herself some more whiskey as she looked at him. “Is that what you wanted to talk about? Because you seemed pretty content keeping that a secret from me until I found your little diary.”
“I was going to tell you,” he assured her. “But I didn’t want you to freak out. I wanted you to be in love with me and I wanted to make sure this was for real.”
“No you didn’t,” she said, glaring at him. “You wanted to cover your own ass. I know about the curse.”
“Do you?” he asked her, his eyes narrowing. “There’s no guarantee the curse is real.”
“It’s real enough to get you to want to marry me. That’s all that needed to happen, right? You just needed to marry me and all of your problems would go away.”
“Tiffany, I don’t want to fight about this,” he said to her in a strong voice, finally getting angry and pulling out of the apologetic phase.
Good, she was ready for a good fight. She was ready to let the truth fly and let it have its day in the bright sun. She was tired of playing coy with him and thinking this was a decent and healthy relationship when it was anything but that.
“Well, too bad,�
�� she snapped at him angrily. “You lied to me, Gus. You told me that you were falling for me and you said all the right, romantic things to me and I believed them, but in the end it was just words. It was all just words so you could get me to marry you and you could be free of some stupid curse. You don’t care about me. You don’t care about our child. All you’ve ever cared about was your own skin. I can’t even look at you right now.”
“That’s unfair and that’s not true,” he snapped back at her, slamming the palm of his hand down on the island counter with a loud smack.
She looked at it and knew there was something she hadn’t been thinking about when she was analyzing all of this.
He could kill her. There was nothing stopping him from turning into a bear and killing her if she said she wasn’t going to marry him. He was going to be desperate, right? He was going to want to make sure the curse didn’t fall on him. So, what was stopping him from turning into a monster and ripping her head off right here in the middle of his apartment if he knew he was going to get the curse no matter what?
