The Bear With No Name (8 page)

“Damn it, I knew I should have taken that head injury more seriously. What if he’s passed out somewhere?” Pete said.

“Wait, isn’t that him?” said Hannah, pointing down one of the side streets.

Lauren jumped up and ran to him. He looked tired and grim, and when she took his hands, he gripped hers almost desperately.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” she asked. “Where have you been all this time?”

“I got turned around in the woods.”

“Really? All you had to do was follow the trail back down the hill.” She smiled up at him, expecting him to joke about a lousy sense of direction or something, but instead he sighed.

“Well, there’s more to it than that.”

Pete, Ella and Hannah had caught up with them by then. Before they could start adding their questions, David continued his explanation.

“I was clearing some street debris on my own when I saw a bear at the edge of town. After what happened at the town meeting, I didn’t want to get people all riled up, so I just followed it at a distance to make sure it wasn’t going to cause any problems. It wandered back into the woods and I tried to follow it there, just to make sure it kept heading away, and that’s when I got lost.”

“What, you’re a bear tamer now?” Lauren joked fondly.

“No, it was a stupid idea. I was kind of freaked out.”

He still seemed weary and distant, and he wouldn’t meet her eyes. Lauren couldn’t stop thinking about that moment up on the ridge when he suddenly changed and left the scene with thin excuses.

There was more going on here than just a bear – Lauren was sure of it.

Quite a few people waved to them as they walked back toward town hall.

“Oh good, you found him!” called Mrs. Randall.

Lauren tried to look happy and relieved, but she couldn’t tell how convincing her mask was.

Her friends all sat down to eat dinner together, and Lauren let them carry most of the conversation. People kept coming over to thank David for saving Mr. Mitchell, and that seemed to lift his spirits a bit. She wouldn’t say he looked happy, exactly, but at least he wasn’t distant anymore.

“No, thank
you
,” he was saying to Mrs. Mitchell’s cousin. “Everyone here has been so kind to me. You welcomed a total stranger at a time when you all had your own huge crisis to deal with, and that’s something that I will never forget.”

Sometime around the third variation of this, it hit her: that was just the kind of thing you would say to people when you’re getting ready to leave.

David seemed to be in no hurry to get back to her place after dinner, so they stayed there on Main Street as another impromptu party took shape. Someone started up a hula-hooping contest, and someone else found a bunch of sparklers left over from the Fourth and passed them out to all the kids. She and David sat on the steps of town hall watching all the action.

Tired and hurt by the confusions of the day, Lauren sagged forward, her elbows on her knees and her head hanging down. Then she felt David’s hand on her back. He started with slow caresses of comfort, then pressed harder, finding all the knots of tension in her muscles and kneading them out.

Lauren made little humming noises of appreciation, and tried not to gasp or moan out loud when he hit some of the really sore spots and slowly worked them out. His touch was soothing, and much as she might want to deny it, it was also electrifying. Pretty soon she was feeling as aroused as she had up on the ridge that afternoon, just from a good back-rub.

Finally she sat up and looked him in the eye.

“Are you going to explain what’s going on?” she asked in a level voice.

“I don’t think that I can,” David said sadly.

So many conflicting responses came to mind, all demanding to be said out loud, and she bit them all back. Lauren was not a woman afraid of arguments; she’d grown up in a family that debated everything passionately. But something told her that words were not the solution here. Instead, she decided to trust in that almost-mystical connection that they had had since that first moment on the river bank.

She stood and held out her hand to him. He took it, and together they walked back to her place. All the way there, up the stairs and into her apartment, neither of them said a word.

In the dark of her living room, she asked him one last time: “You still can’t explain?”

Wordlessly, he shook his head.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She couldn’t even say who moved first, but suddenly they were enfolded in each other’s arms again. Just like every time, it felt like coming home.

David was kissing her hair again, then tilting her head to kiss her forehead, her eyelids, her cheekbones, lightly but with such intensity, as if he was committing every inch of her to memory.
Even your kisses feel like good-bye
, she thought, but didn’t say it.

As he nuzzled down to her jaw, she turned and captured his mouth. Their kisses were deep and slow, soulful and compelling. Part of her mourned the loss of the happy, uncomplicated lust they’d shared on the mountainside just that afternoon and she felt her frustration with the inexplicable change begin to rise again, but she shoved it away. Her only goal right now was to connect, and she held onto it with all her determination. Whatever he was feeling, whatever was weighing him down, it could not break their bond.

Lauren stepped back far enough to push David’s shirt up. He followed her lead immediately, stripping down and then setting to work on her clothes. Once they were both naked, Lauren had a thought: what if this did turn out to be her last night with the most beautiful man she’d ever been with? She’d hardly had a chance to really
see
him with no clothes or blankets in the way – just a quick glimpse this morning as he arose from bed and went to the shower.

David was already reaching for her, ready to pull her back into his arms, but she ducked his hand.

“Wait,” she said and lit the candle on the table by the door. Then she lit a second candle to take with her. “Close the curtains. I’ll be back in a second.”

Lauren ransacked the kitchen for every candle she had left, and brought them back to the living room with a stack of dishes to put them on. As she lit the candles around the room, David followed her, the magnet pull of attraction between them keeping him always within reach.

“You don’t need to do this on my account,” he said with a shaky smile. “You’re all the ambience I need.”

“Oh hush, this isn’t ambience, it’s task lighting. I want to see what I’m doing.” Then she gave him a challenging smile of her own.

She could see the wave of desire hit him, as his eyes widened and he drew a sudden breath. He grabbed her hand and pulled her to him, then started bestowing wild kisses along her neck and shoulder and as far down her chest as he could reach. She was this close to just blissing out and letting him take complete control of their lovemaking, but if this might be their last night together, there was one more thing she wanted to make sure to do.

She maneuvered him over to the sofa and they fell onto it together. David immediately took the chance to move his kisses further down her breasts, and as his tongue made contact with a nipple, Lauren decided her plans could wait a few minutes.

His mouth felt amazing as he circled each nipple with broad strokes of his tongue. She brought her arms down in a way that pressed her heavy breasts together, a view that previous boyfriends had always appreciated.

It did indeed wring a groan of lust from him, but what made him special is that before disappearing into Cleavage Valley, he looked up at her face.

“Lauren, you are so beautiful,” he told her. “Everything about you is beautiful.” Then he pressed one soft kiss to her lips before heading south.

Lauren surrendered to overwhelming sensation as he played her like an instrument. As he buried his face between her breasts, his stubble rasped against her sensitive flesh with the kind of intense pleasure that was just short of pain. He read her twitch and gasp perfectly and experimented with other sensations, licking, sucking, nipping and scratching to find the perfect combination of feelings to drive her wild.

Lauren had always had mixed feelings about her breasts. There was no denying they were magnificent to look at, and they were so sensitive that she could almost always get turned on from the right attentions paid to them. But she had often felt like some of her exes were only there for her breasts; they tolerated her other, less-fashionable curves so that they could have access to the curves up top.

What ever else might be going on with David, she knew that that wasn’t him. She knew that their connection went soul-deep, and so she was able to relax and just revel in the maddening pleasure that he was creating. When he sucked hard on her right breast, it sent a lightning bolt straight to her clit and made her back arch like a bow. It only took a single touch of his hand between her legs to set off the chain reaction, and he kept suckling her all through it until she was almost sobbing in relief.

He moved up and kissed her again, just tender little kisses as she finished catching her breath. Before she could get distracted again, she pushed him to sit back against the couch. She knelt on the floor between his feet and gazed up at him, finally getting a leisurely chance to enjoy the view.

He reached for her and she held up a hand.

“Wait.”

Once he understood what was happening, he almost looked a bit embarrassed, though heaven knows what he could possibly have to be embarrassed about. He was sculpted like a statue, a classical god come to life. He was broad and strong, but the lines that defined his muscles were almost delicate. She traced the faint shadows with her fingertips all along his chest and down his abdomen onto his thighs.

His cock jutted up from his lap, hard and eager. This was what she’d been imagining ever since Hannah interrupted them up on the ridge. She leaned over to taste it, licking the delicate skin of the head and dipping her tongue into the tiny slit on top. He threw his head back and moaned, and his hands rose to her shoulders, moving in trembling caresses.

She took the head in her mouth, swirling her tongue around and sucking gently. He thrust up minutely, and she could tell he was working hard to restrain himself. She moved one hand to his hip, holding him down, and with the other she encircled the base of his cock.

She took him deeper. She concentrated on the taste and the feel of him, the stretch in her jaw and the hot slide of him over her tongue. She was doing this as much for her pleasure as for his, but it pleased her to hear him getting frantic as she sucked and worked him.

Just when she thought he might be getting close, though, he pulled back.

“Please, Lauren, wait,” he said. “You are so amazing – but I want to be with you when I go. Can we?”

“Of course!” she said, as his slow, sexy smile kicked the heat up yet another notch.

He left to grab a condom, and when he came back he sat back on the sofa and pulled her onto his lap. She straddled him and put her hands on his shoulders.

They stared into each other’s eyes. Lauren tried to tell him everything with that look – everything that made them perfect for each other, everything that their future could hold if only he could trust her enough to let her in.

He pulled her closer.

“I love you,” he whispered in her ear.

“I love you, too,” she said. They would just have to let tomorrow take care of itself.

She rose up on her knees a little, and sank down on him.

At first, she rocked gently, feeling herself stretch to accommodate him. He took hold of her hips and pulled her closer as she rocked, adding just a little extra pressure.

But soon neither of them could hold back. He grabbed at her ass and thrust up into her and she ground down onto him just as hard, every thrust stoking the flames higher and higher. She took his face between her hands and kissed him with desperate, panting kisses until passion exploded within her.

He joined her just a few moments later, his hips bucking beneath her until his passion was spent.

His hands caressed her gently up and down her back, until finally she climbed off of him, and he went to the bathroom to clean up. She blew out all the candles, finally feeling relaxed and at peace. She slipped beneath the covers of her bed, and David joined her there.

They lay spooned together tightly, just as they had the night before. How could that have been only 24 hours ago? Lauren felt that she had lived a lifetime with him in just two days. Exhausted and sated, she fell asleep in his arms.

Chapter 13

Sunrise found David staring out the window with bleary eyes, no closer to clarity than he’d been the night before. Lauren was still curled in his arms, as she had been all night. His mind had raced all through the dark hours, endlessly replaying the same dilemma: giving up Lauren would be like losing a limb, but he would rather die than endanger her.

It’s not that there wasn’t any room for compromise. He could imagine telling her part of the truth; he could say that he remembered something about himself that worried him, and he had to leave while he investigated whether or not it put her in danger. Maybe he could hint that it was about criminal involvement or something.

But there was something about her, about their connection to each other, that made half a truth feel as bad as a lie.

Not to mention the practicalities: she would never believe that it was safe for him to hike out of there alone. People had been talking at dinner last night about hiking over the mountain to Kirk, and it sounded like it would take around eight hours … for a human. If her told her he needed to leave, she and her friends would insist on hiking over the mountain with him, and then they would all spend the night, and then they would see him off on the bus or something, and that just would not do. And what if Lauren in her cheerful, determined way decided to follow him? Or what if he turned into a bear in a mountain meadow along the way and went berserk and slaughtered them all?

What about that bear inside him? He had searched deep within himself for any scrap of knowledge of the bear. One thing he had become sure of was that the transformation was utterly familiar. As he concentrated there in the dark, he found that his control of the process was complete and nuanced. He could turn his nails into claws. He could cause fur to sprout all over his body and then to disappear. All of it felt as familiar as breathing. This was not some sudden change that had come upon him when he was injured, this must have been a part of him for years.