by Lynn Red
When she finally made her way out of the office, the world felt different, like how after the Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year’s holiday trifecta, the world just feels slightly off? That’s the sense she got.
But this? Definitely, definitely the good kind of off.
Chapter 3
“The size difference never really occurred to me. Well it did, but only once, and you know what they say tiny hands make look bigger, right? That can’t possibly hurt my self-confidence.”
-Thor Melton, DDS
“Abby?” Thor Melton called down the hall to his assistant – or at least that’s what she was right then. The patients were drying up. Hell, the whole town was drying up, so when there weren’t any teeth to clean, she answered the phones.
Of course, there wasn’t much of that to be done either.
She stuck her head in the door, a tendril of mousy brown falling across one of her tortoiseshell patterned plastic-framed glasses. “’Sup, T?”
Formality wasn’t something Thor Melton took very seriously. It actually made him nervous when people called him doctor, mister, whatever. He’d grown up too fast for his own liking, but barely fast enough to keep ahead of the cubs his mom and dad kept having without the money to support, or the bills that kept piling up.
Hippie parents might be awesome in all kinds of ways – open talks about the dangers of government intervention and public school, for one, and naming him Thor for goodness sake for another – but when it came to fiscal responsibility, there was a little to be desired.
He’d started working when he was thirteen, lying about his age to get a job sacking groceries. Having a huge, full beard turns out to help with that kind of thing. He just never stopped. He was the oldest of the bunch by three years, so by the time he was thinking about going off to college, he was helping his parents support twelve younger siblings. Mom was fertile, especially when it came to twins.
Thor turned the picture of the whole Melton crew around, it usually faced outward, and looked at them. It was taken two years ago, just after he’d left the commune and moved to Cedar Falls. “I used to think this was the big time, you know?”
“What, dentistry? Or the town?” Abby walked in, grabbed one of the chairs that was scattered with model train catalogues, and sat on top of them.
“I’m glad we’re at a point in our professional relationship that you’re comfortable sitting on my stuff.”
She shrugged. “I’m glad we’re at a point where you don’t bother to hide the model train catalogs when it’s just you and me in the office.”
He smirked at that, knowing she was right. She was the first friend he really had in town, and hell, really the only one. After he moved to the Falls, he spent a solid year building his practice as one of the only two – and the only licensed – dentist in a town of just about six thousand people. He’d spent lots of time thinking about relaxing, kicking back, finding a mate and getting himself a brood of cubs just like his mom and dad, but… okay maybe not just like that. He’d always thought two was a better number than thirteen.
“You wanna get married?” he asked casually. This wasn’t the first time, or the second, or the tenth.
“Sure,” Abby shot back. “But you oughta know that I’m not much into body hair. Might be a sticking point.”
That wasn’t the first time she’d given him that line, not by a long shot. She, outside of the pair of bulldog shifters, and the Lewis crew, was the only soul around who knew about the whole bear thing.
“Why didn’t it ever bother you?” he asked, leaning back in the chair and deftly picking the engineer’s cap up off his desk, stashing it in a drawer.
“The train thing? It does. Always did.”
He glowered playfully.
“Oh right, bear. Well, to be honest, you’re not the only one I know. I mean you’re the only bear, but I’ve known Clark and Dana forever, and I never understood why people were such pricks to them.” Clark and Dana were the bulldogs. “There’s all kinds of stuff we get along with, religion, Republicans, why not people who turn into animals?”
He snorted a laugh. “I kissed someone yesterday.”
“I know.”
“You what? How? You weren’t back there.”
“Because I know you and I know her. Both of you were all bashful and smiley and wouldn’t hold eye contact with me after she left. Paprika’s a cool chica, you know? She’s got some problems, but they mostly have to do with her crazy, way-too-open mom, and her sister who apparently is some kind of lunatic.” Abby stood up and leaned over the desk. She slid a hand slowly over the smooth, oak desktop and down the front, inches from Thor’s stomach.
“But what she doesn’t do is date.”
Her fingers locked on the knob, she slid it backwards, and retrieved the puffy, blue and white striped cap. “At least, she doesn’t date train engineers.” A wry smile crept across Abby’s lips. She set the hat atop Thor’s dark-brown mop and sat back in her chair. “I went to high school with her.”
“Everyone goes to high school with everyone here,” Thor said.
“Right, as opposed to just going to high school with your brother and sister?”
“Touché,” he said with a grin. “I just don’t know what the hell came over me. It was like… well I was reading online ads for other jobs, I was feeling kinda listless, I guess, and then she showed up and it was like a magnet was stuck in my mouth turned in the correct polar direction to attract to a magnet stuck in her mouth and—“
“You just made love at first sight sound less sexy than Nicholas Cage in Ghost Rider. I didn’t know that was possible.”
Thor sat for a moment, pondering that. “I liked that movie. I mean, flaming skulls, fire, bad guys getting blown up?”
“You’re a child.”
He raised one eyebrow, acceding defeat. “Anyway, I don’t know what happened.”
“What happened is what I’ve been telling you was going to happen for the three years I’ve known you. You and this gruff, growly, no-nonsense bullshit act you put on. I know you’re not a hermit, I know you’re not some kind of mysterious creature dwelling in the woods and only coming out to feast on the trashcan behind the Subway.”
Thor snorted a laugh. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it.”
“Point is, you’re lonely. Bear or no, you’re a man too, right? And she’s a woman, and…”
“I’ve had this talk before. My parents were very open about how the human body works.”
“With thirteen kids, I’d imagine so,” she said, reaching over to grab a Twizzler out of the bowl on Thor’s desk. “I wish I could eat this shit all day like you do.”
Where she took one, Thor grabbed five. “I weigh as much as six of you, probably,” he said. “It’s probably a more expensive habit than feeding that monster dog of yours.”
His attempt at changing the topic was valiant, but Abby didn’t fall for it at all. “You’ve got feelings, T, no matter how much you don’t want to have any, they’re there. And there’s going to come a time, which has apparently already happened, where you can’t bury your feelings in enormous, complex, admittedly sort of impressive but basically anti-sexy model trains.”
They sat in silence for a moment, Abby feeling very good about her well-timed japes and Thor trying to think of a comeback when she surprised him by talking first. “All right, I’m done. No more jokes. Serious talk – whatever you felt when that fiery-headed rabbit came through the door was uninhibited. You didn’t think, she didn’t think. Neither of you had time to get scared and back off, right? It just happened.”
Thor thought he knew where this was going, but continued listening intently, nodding along.
“Listen to your heart. Listen to your gut, your soul, the universe, fate, whatever you want to call it. You both got all nervous and then she left and you both looked all bashful, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” he said in his low, rumbling, thoughtful voice that could have turned on a litera
l wet blanket. “Just seems so… risky?”
“It is,” Abby said inhaling sharply through her nostrils. “Everything worth doing is risky. Otherwise, you’d… what? Still be back on a commune taking care of a bunch of cubs?”
“Most of them are grown, but—“
“But my point is, you took a leap. You left home, you went to school to become a dentist of all things, and then you had the further cojones to move here. This is all accurate so far?”
“Well, yeah,” he said.
“Then why are you so afraid of this? Of her? Why not just ask her out for coffee or a drink or whatever like a normal person? What’s the problem?”
“The problem,” Thor said before trailing off. The problem is that I don’t want to drag anyone into my crazy family, my weird head. I don’t want to drag anyone into my life, get scared and run away, is what he felt deep inside. “I’m no good at this stuff,” is what actually came out of his mouth.
Abby squinted, studying his face. “We both know I don’t believe that. You wouldn’t be sitting here pining over this girl if she didn’t do something to you.”
He heaved a heavy sigh. “I don’t even know where I’ll be next year.”
“A year? T-man, most people think in days, some think in hours… and you’re talking a year?” she shook her head. “I’ll tell you this right now. The guy who impulsively lip-locks a girl who is strapped into an exam chair is not the sorta guy who worries about what’s going to happen next year. Live for now, for once. Take what you can get. Most people go whole lives without doing something like that.”
Without saying anything, Thor stood up and placed his engineer’s cap on top of Abby’s head. She swore under her breath, but laughed at the same time.
“I gotta think,” he said, as he began stripping off his clothes. “The last thing in the world I expected when I was making a bunch of appointments and surfing the ADA’s job bank was that I was going to have to seriously consider whether or not my mate just walked into my life and I let her walk out.”
“That’s the spirit!” Abby cheered. She also stared directly at Thor’s back, and then his ass, when he stripped off his slacks. She caught him doing this once, and that icebreaker was all it took for him to realize she wasn’t going to get upset by much anything that happened.
Truth was, she liked staring at a nice, muscled-up ass as well as the next girl. And she got to do it every time her boss got stressed out and needed to prance through the woods.
He grabbed the handle of his office door and turned the knob, then froze, turning back to Abby. “Thanks,” he said. Fur had already started creeping out of his forearms, the defined lines on his abs had begun to disappear into a forest of dark brown. “For talking. For everything. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”
She smiled, touched the small, bent-up bill of the engineer’s cap and nodded. She didn’t bother hiding the fact that she looked down at the rest of Thor. We’re all animals, right? What’s the sense in being ashamed?
“No,” she said as he stepped through the door and out the totally illegal, not-alarmed emergency exist. The joke was that instead of it being for fire safety, it was the bear escape hatch. When he got stressed, he needed to run, and fast. “Thank you.”
She let out a long, low whistle as the back door swung shut and closed tight with a metallic thunk. “Thank you.”
Leaves crunching under his paws, slightly damp ground giving slightly with each step, Thor bounded through the forest surrounding Cedar Falls with one goal in mind – to figure out what the hell was wrong with him.
This is what he did.
Running cleared his mind, made him forget his normal day-to-day bullshit, and remember what he really was. Somehow, moments of pure peace gave him the clearest thoughts he had. He ducked under a low-branch, catching a face full of moss and roared as he shook it off. Thorns from some kind of vine tugged at his fur, but he hardly even felt the points scraping at his nearly impenetrable hide.
There were a lot of things he liked about Cedar Falls, and if he was being honest, quite a few he didn’t. But what made it all okay was that at any point, at any second, he could be out his office door and splashing into a creek not thirty seconds later.
And then, be at a pretty good Chinese buffet as soon as he managed to get back into his clothes. He accidentally wandered into Panda Porch one time when he was dazed after a particularly long run, and forgot that part. Luckily, the owner was the only one around, and apparently had some experience with confused shifters, because he just gave Thor some ill-fitting clothes and filled his stomach with General Tso’s chicken. Turns out, that stuff can ward off the worst hangover in the world, and when paired with some hot and sour soup? Can banish even the most confusing of post-shift hazes.
Thor gave him and both of his kids free teeth cleaning for life for doing that, and went by to eat at least three times a week. With bear metabolism, unlimited eggrolls and dim sum for ten bucks is a godsend. Especially when your client base is dwindling off to nothing.
Oh, and the fact that Mr. Tan, the guy who ran the place? He was so amazed with how much General Tso’s Thor could put that that he gave a standing invitation for him to come in whenever. Included in ‘whenever’ was any time he found himself naked and needing clothes. He promised there would always be something for Thor to wear, and whatever he wanted to eat. It was a pretty heartwarming gesture, especially in Cedar Falls, where people were wary of shifters at the best of times, and fairly frowny at them at the worst.
With a grunted yell, Thor leapt off a pile of rocks and into the stream that ran all the way to the middle of town and out the other side. At some point, it apparently fed into the Mississippi, but even at his most adventurous, Thor never followed it that far.
I’m going to do this. I’m going to take her advice.
It hit him mid-jump. He looked like something you’d see on Wildlife Gone Wild jumping around, jowls flapping all over the place.
The thought hit him like a bullet in the brain. I’m not gonna let this girl get away. Those eyes, that hair, the way her skin felt when I touched her, the way her lips tasted against mine, the way her barely-there lip balm stuck to my lips.
The combination of his pining, his longing, and his continued gleeful bounding around in the stream led to a slip of the paw, then a slip of two paws, and before he knew it, Thor Melton, DDS, was upside down in a four-foot-deep stream, soaked to the skin.
Laughing – and a laughing bear is no laughing matter – he clawed his way to the bank, climbed out, and shook. The torrent of water flying from him soaked a passing squirrel, who looked his way with something that resembled a glare before the little guy split.
I’m gonna get her, I’m going to ask her out for a drink and then I’m going to invite her to move with me. Even he realized that was getting ahead of himself, at least a little. At least I’m going to ask her to go on a trip with me to see whatever that town is. That’s a normal thing to do, right?
Since Paprika started getting cleanings, getting a lot of cleanings, Thor’s bear-senses had been going nuts. They have this thing where they just know, without a shadow of a doubt, when they find their mates. There’s no doubt, no question, which can be fairly alarming to their mates-to-be. It... usually worked out fine, though.
As soon as his Herman Munster bellowing started to calm, and the swell of love and glee in his chest quelled a bit, Thor collected himself enough to start making his way back to the office.
Halfway back, he thought of something else he couldn’t live without. Garlic beef and shrimp.
He took a left at the fork in the forest that only he knew about. Or, at least that he thought only he knew about. Right went to the office, left went to town.
Abby would understand. She always did.
Chapter 4
“Every now and then, I get a really good idea. And almost always it turns out to be not quite as good as I thought it was initially.”
-Paprika
“I am an idiot,” Paprika said, falling backward onto her bed.
“Well, yeah,” Petunia fired back, through the phone’s tinny speaker. “But at least you’re not doing community service for wrecking a carrot field. I still owe you for that bail, by the way. I’ll pay you back someday.”
Rika stifled a chuckle. Her sister really had come a long way in a half a year, from looped out to lucid. Mostly. “On the other hand, I made out with a bear-shifting dentist. And,” she added, maybe trying to avoid a sisterly lecture, “I don’t want money from you. You’re my sister, that’s what we do.”
Petunia grunted in acknowledgement, and then seconds later, she gasped as the other part of Rika’s sentence hit her ears. “You did not. Really? Like in the chair and everything? That’s sorta Japanese horror movie, isn’t it? Did you do it? Like did he raise and lower the chair and say a bunch of porny one-liners?” She started laughing. “Hold still, lady,” she used a deep, comical voice. “Hold still and let me drill this.”
Rika snorted and shook her head. “I just kinda grabbed him. It was like I got possessed by a horny demon and just had to kiss him right then and there.”
“Wait, just for context, we’re talking about that big one, right? The, uh, God, what’s his name? Ragnar, Odin, some Viking thing, right?”
“Thor,” Paprika said.
She thought her sister was going to actually choke to death laughing so hard. “Yeah,” she finally said in between coughing, snorting chortles. “Yeah okay, easy to take a guy named Thor seriously. But he’s, he’s pretty hot, Rika, what exactly are you upset about?”
That’s the thing – she wasn’t even sure why she was upset. She could barely decide if she was or not. It seemed like the kind of brazen, obnoxiously over-the-top stuff that someone should be embarrassed about, or regret, or maybe that only happened after a beer pong session. But for all that she knew she should feel bad, she kinda just didn’t.
“Earth to Rika? Come in, sister rabbit, come in?”
