Eric's Edge (6 page)

In northern Delaware, sometime around dawn, Eric backed the RV into a space at a superstore and did some mental time calculations. The kids’ school started at nine, and he and Maria were about two hours away. Their ideal pickup time, according to a sympathetic teacher inside the school, was right before lunch. There’d be enough chaos around the school during that time because of parent co-lunching that Maria could get in and out without suspicion. That gave them another two hours of wait time. He figured he should probably take advantage and grab a couple of hours of sleep.

Maria picked her head up from the window she’d fallen asleep against and rubbed her eyes. “Where are we?”

“Delaware.” He pulled down he shades and double-checked that the doors were locked. “We’ve got a few hours before we need to be onsite, and I need sleep.”

“I can’t believe you factored that into the equation.”

“Why, because Shrews don’t sleep?”

“I think we can go longer than most people without sleeping.”

“Yeah?” He walked to the sleeper sofa and pulled it into bed configuration. His back would remind him upon waking that, Were-bear or not, he was too old to sleep curled up in a ball, and he needed room to stretch his stiff muscles. Maria could take the bed in the back.

“Yes. So, if we can’t make the time, we don’t worry about it too much. When we’re on the clock, our schedules don’t allow for much beyond catch-as-catch-can. We get sleep whenever we have a few minutes here and there, and
usually
our bodies don’t rebel too much.”

“I don’t believe that. That can’t be true.” He heeled off his shoes and removed his shirt. It was going to be hot in that tin can, and he didn’t want to turn the air on. He wouldn’t be able to sleep through the noise. That was one part of his newly improved hearing that he still hadn’t adjusted to. He opened the window nearest the sofa a sliver and hoped for a breeze.

Maria leaned against the little counter in the kitchenette and crossed her arms over her chest. “You think you know more than our own doctor does?”

He scoffed and unfastened his jeans.

Her gaze tracked down his body as he stepped out of his pants, her eyebrows raised in apparent surprise.

“What?” he asked.

“As far as I knew, you still wore underwear. I didn’t think you’d become one of
those
shifters who let it all hang.”

“Makes sense not to wear them when I might have to shift. I’ll probably change into some bummy clothes before we get to the school just in case. If I can’t retrieve the clothes I take off, I’d prefer them to not be my good stuff. And if I
do
shift”—he crawled onto the bed and pulled the single sheet over his body—“you’re going to have to drag my ass back here, so let’s pray it doesn’t come to that.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose and groaned. “That’s right. You’re a made-Bear.”

He grunted and set the alarm on his phone. “If I force a shift to my bear form and then back to my human shape, I’m not going to recover immediately.”

“Unlike Bryan and the Ursus.”

“Right. I’m pretty sure that if Bryan were passed out, though, Tamara would be able to carry him, even if she is does have the stature of some kind of cranky Romanian elf.”

“She’s the strongest of the five of us.”

“Well, she’s a
Bear
, even if she doesn’t have her brothers’ ability to freely shift. So, don’t go into this situation thinking that you can do what she can do. You’re not built the same way. Speaking of the situation, we’ve got to figure out now what our contingencies are.” He hit the reading light behind the sofa and burrowed down to get comfortable.

“You sound like Astrid. She’s more of a planner, whereas the rest of us tend to rely on the
wait and see
method more often than not.”

He closed his eyes. “I can’t tell if you’re insulting me.”

“No. I just…didn’t realize you two were so much alike. She’s very peculiar. I guess we all are, but she has certain quirks that make her Astrid. I guess they’re only unique within the Shrews and not in the Falk family. Do you have the same eidetic memory?”

“Nope.”

“Probably about the same IQ, though.”

“I couldn’t say. Astrid and I have never compared notes on that.”

“But you were tested?”

“Sure.”

“If you were tested, it was because someone was curious. Schools don’t test unless they’re curious.”

“Or if the kid has special needs.”

“Right. And…”

“I did.
Do
, rather, I guess. I compensate pretty well for it now, but I’m dyslexic.”

“Oh!”

He rolled onto his back and cradled his head atop his hands. “It was caught early because my parents knew to look. My mother was a learning disability specialist.”

Maria perched on the end of the bed, facing the kitchenette. “I remember Astrid telling me that. And your father…he—”

“He—”

“No.” She put up her hands and shook her head. “No, no. Let me remember. I can do this. I don’t always tune out. I…” She drummed the bed with her fingers and whispered to herself in a stream of words too broken for Eric to catch the gist.

Bemused, Eric watched her lips flutter and her brow furrow with obvious frustration. He couldn’t imagine what she might have been like if she’d grown up in a more mainstream household. She had some serious social and emotional deficits—that was obvious—but she was well attuned to other things in ways folks like Eric weren’t. She was a people-watcher and a good judger of moods and motivations. Those weren’t skills that necessarily came easily, but they certainly helped her do her job.

“He…uh… Oh.” She turned and gave his shin a poke. “Something about…wood. Pulp and paper!”

“Right. He was a pulp and paper chemist.”

“Ah, now my brain can breathe a sigh of relief.” She flopped back onto the bed and giggled.

“Good job, Granola.”

“I knew it was in there somewhere. Astrid can pluck information out of nowhere. She could probably remember the exact hole in a piece of lace that a fly landed next to. I’ve gotta work harder to pull up the information.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that. It just takes practice.”

“That’s what Doc says. She said I wasn’t forced to fetch information enough as a kid and that I suck at it now.”

“Yeah? What else does Doc tell you? Does she tell you that you don’t sleep enough and that Shrew or not, your body can’t fully heal or your brain can’t make the appropriate neural connections if you don’t get enough rest?”

Maria cringed. “She might have said that.”

Eric picked up a length of her hair that had fallen near his face and twirled it around his fingers. “You can’t remember or you just don’t want to remember it?”

“No, I remember.”

He laughed. “See.”

“Go ahead with the told-you-so and get it out of your system.”

“I’m not gonna do that. I think you already know you do a shitty job taking care of yourself. I harp on it with you the same way I harp on Astrid. Well, I
used
to harp on Astrid. I don’t have to so much anymore. Fabian does a pretty good job of it without any interference from me.”

“He…
loves
her,” she said in a near-whisper.

It didn’t seem so much like a statement of fact but more of amusement—as if it were some unexpected thing. Eric found that odd. “Why do you make that sound like such a fanciful occurrence?”

Maria shrugged. “I…I don’t mean to. It does amuse me, though, that none of them—Dana, Sarah, Tamara, or Astrid—were looking to be with anyone. None of them were ready to date and had all been single since the drug trial. They didn’t even…you know.”

He
thought
he knew, but he didn’t want to know specifics, especially not pertaining to his little sister.

“And yet, every one of them fell for a guy on the job.”

“Guys who understood what it meant to be a little weird. That counts for something, don’t you think?”

“Does it matter so much?”

That was obviously her upbringing coloring her impression. He might have gotten annoyed with it a few years ago, but it was glaringly clear to him that she really didn’t know any better. “In terms of relationships, yes, compatibility matters a lot,” he said. “You can’t force compatibility.”

“I’ve never tried to. But I’ve…never wanted to be with anyone for longer than a day.”

“Why not?”

“I grew up thinking that was normal. At least, for my mother, it was.”

“Do you think it’s normal?”

“It
feels
like my normal, and look at it from my perspective. The one man I dated in more than a casual capacity referred me to that drug trial.”

“I’m sorry he did that. I’m sorry all of you had to go through that, and I hope you don’t think that’s normal behavior for a man.”

“For the Shrew cross-section of society, it seems to be.”

“You should take it as a compliment that he wanted to change you. That he couldn’t handle you as you were because you were too fierce or too smart. Or because you had too much passion.”

“I don’t know what he wanted from me. Why he would… Why would he do that?”

Her tone was usually so even and flat that on the rare occasion that it went breathy from fear or anxiety, his heart raced. It wasn’t just his inner bear agitated by her discomfort, but the man part of him that had always wanted to shield her from the world as well. He still wanted to, and didn’t think he was doing a very good job of it at the moment.

“Hey.” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “Does it matter now?”

“No. I guess it doesn’t. I don’t want him anymore.”

“But you’d kill him if you saw him again.”

“I did see him after the study.”

“So either you were able to control your murderous impulses or you hid the body very well.” He laughed, but her expression was dark.

That telltale cheek twitched.

Shit
.

She nudged his hand away and turned her back to him.

“Maria, what did you do to him?”

“What makes you think I did anything to him?”

“Because I know you.”

“And you think I’m some kind of homicidal woman scorned.”

“I know there’s a side of you that’s very soft that I rarely get to see. Everyone else gets to see it. There’s no way for me to know what you’ve shown to other men. For all I know, I’m the first you’ve been so…
practical
with.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“I believe you.”
But?

“But I hit him. I hit him hard, and I sat there waiting for five minutes for him to wake up so I could threaten to hit him again. I wanted to make him flinch because he didn’t want to apologize.” She rolled onto her other side and caught his gaze in the dim light. “That’s what I did, so congratulations. You pegged me again.”

“You think I take joy in this?”

She shrugged her top shoulder. “Do you?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely not. I like being right as much as the next guy, but not continuously at your expense. I don’t get any pleasure out of making you confess things to me.”

“So why do you make me do it?”

“Because I’m in a unique position to
make
you do it. Who else is going to?”

“Why would you even care?”

“I…” Because he’d been in love with her for as long as he’d known her, in spite of her numerous deficiencies. Lord knew he had enough of his own that he couldn’t climb up on his high horse for too long without getting knocked off.

He ground his teeth and closed his eyes again. “You deserve it. You deserve to actually
feel
that inner peace you’re always preaching about and to be comfortable in your own skin.”

And to be comfortable enough to let someone else in, and not just into her body, but into her heart. Well, not just anyone, but
him
, specifically. He couldn’t think of a single other person who could handle her. And maybe he was a little like her in a way. If there was a guy who came close, Eric might just find him and hit him hard enough that the guy might not wake up, too.

But maybe that was the bear in him talking. It was so hard to tell whether it was man or beast running the show lately.

___

Eric’s phone alarm went off in what seemed like five minutes later. He got up, being very careful not to disrupt Maria from obviously needed slumber, and made his way to the tiny bathroom. He got in and out before commode claustrophobia could settle in, redressed, and jogged across the parking lot to the open superstore.

He used to joke about those kinds of places for being open all night, saying that the folks who benefitted most from the obscene shopping hours were potheads, college students, and folks who worked the graveyard shift. He could see the benefits of the place for travelers, though, and judging by the other RVs parked in the lot, he wasn’t the only one taking advantage of the brightly lit, bustling premises.

Moving efficiently through the grocery section with a cart, he loaded up with fruit, vegetables that didn’t need much handling, eggs, cheese, good bread, some meat for him—because he was a fucking Bear—and various other perishables small enough to fit into a compact refrigerator. In front of the cases of bottled water, he paused to pluck his vibrating phone out of his pocket.

On the screen was a message from Bryan. The Bear alpha obviously got up early.

Status?

Eric thumbed in
Stopped for a couple of hours to nap. Parked in a store lot. Inside now getting real food to eat. Two hours south of destination. About to move again.

Noted. Everything all right?

I’m alive?

Not what I meant. Any weird Bear stuff? Feeling amorous at all?

Maybe. I don’t know.

?

It’s complicated.

Explain. It was a yes or no question. You should know the answer.

Eric shoved the twenty-four pack of water under the cart and moved forward a bit, out of the way of the store clerk who was trying to run a dust mop under the lowest shelf.