by Lynn Red
“I wanted you for longer than you know,” West said, finally admitting the words he thought every time they were together. “I watched you, I couldn’t help it. The first time I saw you, I knew it was—”
“Wait,” Elena said, her voice quickening. “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. We all do crazy stuff when we fall in,” she trailed off, not quite sure it was time, not yet.
West squeezed his eyes shut. He shouldn’t have said anything. It just slipped out. He knew better than to admit the truth, but there it was. The bear was out of the bag.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t help myself. I saw you just doing normal things. I was in town for supplies, and saw you leaving your office. Your hair was down, and you were talking to your partner – smiling – and I knew right then that I had to have you. You were the one I spent all those long, lonely years hunting.”
The scanner beeped again, and as she moved the slide to “3b,” Elena kept watching West. He couldn’t tell what the look was supposed to be, but she was certainly concentrating on something.
“How?” she asked. Her voice had gone cold, like she was suddenly speaking as an analytical scientist. “How did I never notice?”
West shrugged. “I never made much noise. I’d just watch, and think. But I knew – or thought anyway – that I was just being stupid. I’m a lonely bear, out in the world, with a rage problem and a chip on my shoulder. I stay alone so I don’t hurt anyone. Looking at you, though? Just watching you? Just imagining you made my heart slow down. You made me calmer than digging vegetables ever did.”
She was still watching his face, and he was still trying to figure out what she was thinking.
For a second, she looked like she was going to speak, but just closed her mouth instead. “It’s done,” she said.
It’s done. The words had a finality to them that made West wince. “I had a feeling,” he said.
“The scanner? Is finished? What else would I mean?”
Was this it? Did she really not care that he’d contented himself with watching from the bushes, with what amounted to stalking her?
“You’re not angry?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I’m just amazed more than anything. I mean, my whole life is dedicated to sneaking around and staying out of sight, and a four hundred pound hunk of man-bear managed to keep away from me? Maybe I’m not as good at this as I thought.”
Without going further, she turned back to the scanner. “Holy shit,” she said.
“What is it?” West realized he was still stroking her back, and she still hadn’t said anything about it. He flattened his hand against her skin and watched over her shoulder. “Elena?”
He was talking, but she wasn’t listening. Not right then. Elena’s mind was fourteen light years from earth, completely absorbed in the image appearing on the screen. It was like something out of a sci-fi movie made in the 80s about the twenty-first century. A raised, three-dimensional model of the fingerprint showed up.
“Pressure,” she said, but not to anyone in particular. “The colors are the different pressures, and that shows how hard the fingerprint pressed into the glass. The red ones are higher, blue are lower, and...”
It started whirring again, buzzing and beeping. The highly non-futuristic green light on the front of the eggshell colored computer tower blinked madly. In the bottom quadrant of the screen, thousands of pictures flicked by at blinding speed.
Every time the computer stopped flipping through the images, Elena jotted down a number with a pen she fished out from behind her ear.
“What are you writing?” West asked when he noticed her scribbling.
“Numbers, be quiet.”
She hit a button and the images went again. Another pause, another beep, another number, another note. For what seemed like hours, West watched her, completely enthralled, writing number after number. Finally, the machine ran out of images, and Elena began breathing like she’d just had a monster orgasm four seconds before.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “You look... flushed.”
“God that was incredible. I had no idea they had so many fingerprint records.”
“That was all records?”
She nodded. “Yeah, every arrest made since 1972 in Jamesburg County. Before that the police didn’t bother keeping them for very long, but for most anyone alive these days? Golden record. Wait, how did you never know about this stuff?”
West shook his huge head. “I never came down here. Just sorta let the techies handle this stuff. I’d send fingerprints, they’d come back with matches. So this is how it works? Shit.”
“Well, it’s how it works for the last year or so. Last time I broke in... er... borrowed this room, it was a lot more rudimentary. What I just did would have taken hours with the old system. Remember when you went to the library and had to use the card catalog?”
“Sure,” West said. “The Dewey Decimal system. Yeah.”
“Okay, same thing, pretty much. Oh and you had to do all the comparisons by eye. There weren’t all these raised ridges and perfect computer models. I had thirty-three near matches. The computer does its own matching, but I write down the numbers anyway. Ever since I saw Terminator I don’t really trust computers very much.”
“Hasta la vista—”
“Just no,” she said, smiling and interrupting the bad impersonation.
One by one, she entered the numbers, her fingers flying over the number pad like she was a CPA on meth. Just as quickly, they came and went. Until West’s eyes started going a little fuzzy from trying to keep up.
“There we are. Hot shit, I found her.”
That got him to perk up. “You did? How?”
Clicking her teeth, she tapped the capped pen on the screen. “We’re just lucky she was arrested before.”
“We’re also lucky she bothered to keep an updated license plate. Look there,” West said. “BGH-717,” he read. “Does this mean we have her?”
“You know what this means,” Elena said. “It means it’s time to call in one more favor. Well, and you need to make up for creep stalking me.”
“Wait, me? What favor could I do?”
“Not you doing the favor, you making the call. Your old partner said one single thing about you. He didn’t say anything about you being a rage-a-holic or anything else. All he said was ‘he’s a good man’ and that was that. If I have to quit giving up on everything that gets remotely hard in my life, you have to stop running.”
“Running?” West asked. “What do you mean?”
“Really? A farmer? A vegetarian bear who keeps an organic farm? That’s not running?”
West pursed his lips for a moment. “Yeah okay, fair enough.”
“Say it right,” Elena said, grabbing the hand that was still on her back, and pressing it against her bare skin. “Bear, bear...”
“Oh, Jesus, really?”
She nodded.
“Give me the phone and let me keep my dignity.”
Elena shook her head. “Say it,” she bit her lip to keep from laughing. Her eyes sparkled when she did, and that florescent box light above their heads still had her hair glittering. No one else, never for anyone else.
“Bear, bear, that’s fair,” West said, faking a frown. “Now gimme the phone.”
“Catch me first,” Elena said, and hopped up on her tip toes, kissed West on the lips, and dashed away.
-13-
“I guess we may as well!”
-Elena
“Come back here! This is stupid!”
But I’m not sure I’ve ever had this much fun in my life, is what he meant.
Elena had bolted the second she told him to chase her, and ran like hell. The only thing he could think is how glad he was it was after hours, and hyenas didn’t much care to work late. The Buick was close, but as West charged after Elena, he didn’t give it a second thought. If she wanted to be caught, he was going to give her the chase of her life.
At
the time, it seemed like a good idea, but now, charging through the world after his mate, West vaguely wished they hadn’t been quite so careful. She was fast and he was losing breath quick.
There was really only one choice.
Well, there was only one choice that he was going to take. We’ve got important things to be doing, he thought as he crouched. Why are we out here playing around?
The hair sliding out of his pores and his jeans splitting along their seams on his massive legs made him feel as alive as he ever had. With the moon a small disc on the horizon, just rising, his bear eyes weren’t perfect, but they were good enough.
He lifted his head skyward and inhaled through his nose.
Then it occurred to him that maybe what started as a cute, exciting, slightly-naughty game was going to end badly. After all, if she was just out scampering around, and they had no idea where Petunia was, that just seemed like a recipe for disaster.
West shook his huge head. She’d have to be looking for us for that to happen. No way, no how.
But he couldn’t shake it. Aside from the rage, his paranoia got him in trouble more often than not. The rage was from being a bear. The paranoia? Can’t take the cop out of the bear, not completely.
He inhaled again, and finally caught her scent, but it was distant and vague. Just that much of her, was enough to fill West’s nose, making him ache to hold her again, but more than that, making him yearn to assure her safety.
Why do I keep thinking she’s in trouble? What sense does it make? She just ran, she’s playing – why can’t I stop my own brain from panicking?
Her scent was getting more distant – she was going away from him. She was running, just running, just playing. As he began to chase, the muscles in West’s legs, his massive chest, and his powerful back all tingled with the rush of blood. Tilling ground and picking up eggs and brushing horses never got him going this way; never made him feel this alive.
A roar, but a soft one, filled the empty night. He started with a light jog, then a trot, and then a full on run. His pads slapping against the ground, his claws scraping the concrete, and then the grass when he left the parking lot on his mate’s trail, gave him a sense of driving purpose.
Giving in to the wildness, to his feral nature, was something West didn’t allow often – anymore, he allowed it approximately never out of fear that he’d do something he regretted, out of fear he’d lose control and find himself in a real bad place. But with her? Whether it was trouble, or just playing, just the thought of Elena was enough to calm those animal rages. He didn’t fear falling into the trap of his own anger. And that? That gave him more courage than he’d ever felt.
He roared again, this time calling out to her. In the distance, he heard a yelp, a bark.
West’s lips curled in something halfway between as mile and a snarl.
Elena, he thought. You can run as long as you want. I’ll never stop until I find you.
*
Elena giggled, turned back and watched bear-West roar. The Zip-Lock bagged dentures bit into her hip as she ran, but that was better than having left them at the station to be found.
She tingled through her chest, her stomach, and down below. She could almost feel the way his breath caressed her neck when he kissed, almost smelled his leathery, rough scent. Just the memory of his hands on her skin sent a chill down her back that made Elena’s coppery fur bristle.
Come on, she thought. Come after me. Catch me, hold me, don’t give me a choice.
She didn’t know why she was running. At first it was a game, just a little playing to lighten the mood that had definitely taken a turn for the somber, but after she’d been running for a bit, she realized it was something else.
Maybe she was testing him? Making sure he meant what he said about not letting her go? Or maybe it really was just a game. The longer she went though, the further she ran, the less she believed she was just playing.
“Elena!” a roar came. “Come back!”
She yipped in return, and watched as West turned his head in her direction. Every so often, she’d give him a little call to keep him on her trail, and he’d roar and start chasing again, she’d run.
Overhead, the moon was growing rounder, more full and yellow, and beginning to ride high in the night. And all around the two playful mates, nothing was happening. The entire town seemed to vanish around them. For the two of them, the world was an open playground.
Back and forth, around and around they went, roaring, yipping, chasing.
And not too long after, they were both laughing.
The laughing though, didn’t last.
Elena turned left, past The Tavern, Jamesburg’s premiere drinking establishment. She dashed to a shadowed corner of one of the four Starbucks in town, where Elena waited, breathing heavily and needing nothing more than to feel West near her. Stopping to let him catch up was just the cure.
Above her, a strange smell wafted through the window. A mixture of lavender and lilac, oddly pungent, but somehow comforting, filled Elena’s nose. In the distance, West’s pads thumped on the road, approaching. She craned her neck to look at the source of the smell.
Of all the shit I’ve seen, Elena thought.
Two very, very large, and slightly green, bear-shifters, sat at a booth.
The booth, for its part, seemed only slightly strained by what must be tremendous weight.
“De...delish...us,” the larger of the two, groaned. He smiled in a way that was partly endearing and partly haunting.
“Be-be-ba-ba-beans are burned!” the smaller, but not very much smaller, of the pair said. “Atlas! Do like ma-ma-married!”
A confused look crossed the man’s face, although his general appearance suggested more than a little confusion anyway. A tendril of drool slid out of his mouth, but his... mate? caught it with a napkin.
He tuned his head to the side, gawking in a way that made Elena giggle. “What am... doing?”
“Ba-ba-be-be-this!” The smaller one stood up and wrapped her arm around his, like married people do for their first toast.
Only instead of champagne, the two were holding coffee.
Whole pots of it.
A long, steamy slurp later, Elena was snickering so hard she could barely keep from snorting. West had padded up beside her and was staring just as hard. “What in the hell are we looking at?” he whispered, as best a bear can whisper.
Thankfully, the two slightly-drooly lovebirds inside weren’t paying a single lick of attention to anything else in the world. “We’re looking at love,” Elena said. “Simple, pure, pot-of-coffee-sucking love. Remind you of anything?”
She slid her tiny paw into West’s massive one, and gave him a playful nip on the neck. He let out a low, rumbling groan of agreement.
Before they knew it, the two inside had somehow drained their entire pots of coffee, and sat back down. The one with the ponytail grabbed about four biscotti and bit them in half, spraying cookie crumbs all over the place as she chewed.
Amazingly, none of the three counter clerks, who were also watching the two, seemed upset at all. The three were watching just like Elena and West, and they were smiling, too.
“I wanna be like that,” Elena said, watching the ginormous male part of the pair grab the half-eaten biscotti and shove it in his mouth.
“Green and sharing biscotti?”
Elena slapped her bear on the side of the head with a paw. “Just look at them. They’re... I mean, they’re mostly human, I guess, or at least used to be, or they’re parts? I’m not sure. But anyway, you can still see how much they love each other. It’s incredible.”
“Oh, that part,” West said. “Look at ‘em!”
He moved closer to Elena, throwing a huge arm around her and pulling her close.
“Jamesburg,” Elena said softly. “Gotta love it. But,” she trailed off.
“But what?” West cocked his head, eyeing her sideways.
“Not as much as,” she paused again, pulling
a fox lip between her teeth.
West shot her another sideways glance, quirking an eyebrow. He opened his mouth, anticipating what was coming, but not knowing how to take it, not really.
“Not as much as I love you,” Elena cut him off.
Even though he knew it was coming, it stunned him. He stared, open-mouthed. She slipped out from under his arm and vanished again into the night.
*
That time, she didn’t have to tell him to chase her.
Love, he thought. Not as much as I love you, the words rang in West’s mind. He felt the same thing, so hot in his chest that it may as well have been a bomb going off in his heart.
There was no fear, no second guessing, and no paranoia. Elena just ran, and West just went after her. As he ran, those two zombie bears were on his mind. The way they stared into each other’s slightly off-center eyes, and the way they talked to each other, and smiled in a drooly, kind of way. And then drank entire pots of coffee, but that wasn’t what he focused on.
He lifted his head to the sky, sniffing Elena’s scent on the air, crashing through grass, over a small creek, across a railroad track and into the edge of a forest. Again he raised his nose to the sky, but this time, something was different – something put him on edge.
A sound in the distance, the sound of a car door, some screeching? No, he told himself, no, it can’t be. There’s no way she got into any trouble. There’s no way.
The road sounds met his ears. They were real, he knew then, and they were exactly his nightmare. But he wouldn’t believe it, not without seeing for himself. Fear gripped him then, ripping at his heart, twisting his mind. He wouldn’t believe what he thought he heard.
Not until he rounded a bend in the road, and crested the top of a hill.
There, in the road ahead, was a car. He squinted to read the numbers, but his bear eyes were no good at that distance. But the shrieking, the shouting, the screams... he had no doubt. A kicking leg, a lash of a scratch, and then the slam of a door.
The screech of tires – the sound of West’s heart being ripped at and pulled away.
But how? Who had her? And why?
