So Much To Bear (A Werebear Erotic Romance) (10 page)

“I didn’t think you’d actually let me
in. I wouldn’t blame you.” Jennifer sat down on her couch, not
quite looking at Robert.

“I didn’t think I’d let you in,
either,” she admitted. “I guess it was just… we’ve been friends for
too long.” Jennifer sighed and scrubbed at her face with her hands.
Her throat was still raw from screaming. When she had finally made
it back to her house, she had fallen to her knees at the door and
began sobbing. In spite of her hope that Damon was okay, the shocks
of the day, seeing him stabbed, overwhelmed her. She had stayed on
the floor for over an hour, shaking and crying, vowing that she
would never forgive anyone involved in the whole horrible mess for
as long as she lived. It had only been after that was out of her
system that she had gone into her bathroom and laid in the tub for
longer than she even kept track of; she couldn’t even remember
eating, only that she had been in an acute misery that nothing
could seem to dull.

“So then you’ll hear me out?” Robert’s
voice was almost pathetically hopeful. Jennifer looked up in time
to see him watching her, biting his bottom lip. She nodded, taking
a deep breath. “Look, I know—I should have known better. I’d seen
you. I knew you were okay. But when I saw that guy turn into—a
bear? I just… I was so scared. And I had to do something.” Jennifer
nodded dully. She had to admit to herself that the first time she
had seen Damon transform, it had been a shock. But then, she
thought with a flicker of resentment, her first instinct hadn’t
been to sneak up behind him and stab him in the back. Her first
instinct had been wonder and curiosity, followed by an interest in
the werebear’s well-being.

“I get it,” she said, closing her eyes
and rubbing at her temples. “It’s not the sort of thing you expect
to see happen in real life. And you were probably swept up in the
whole… the ugliness of it all.” Jennifer almost spat the words out,
remembering the glee on people’s faces when they had thought that
Damon had been killed. They had been so ugly in their joy, so
utterly inhuman that Jennifer remembered the sight like a nightmare
she couldn’t quite shake. She had seen some of the members of the
town looking up at her house as they walked past, looking furtive
and ashamed. They knew what they had done. Their shame didn’t even
gratify her; she knew better than to think that they would ever
really examine what had happened. They would forget about it—and
the next time something like that happened, they would do the same
thing over again.

“I guess I was. I thought I was doing
the right thing, Jen.” Robert’s voice was beseeching, his dark eyes
pleading with her even more than his words. “Do you believe me?”
Jennifer shrugged. She felt numb, cold, almost but not quite aching
with what she had been through.

“I know you pretty well, Rob,” she
said, feeling the fatigue setting into her bones once more. “I
don’t think we can ever be as close as we used to be, but I can
forgive you. I know you wouldn’t do something like that unless…
unless you thought it was absolutely and without question the right
thing to do.” She swallowed the lump that formed in her throat,
remembering Damon’s kind eyes, his gentle hands and the bone-deep
pleasure he had given her. Robert didn’t have the information she’d
had. He didn’t know how Damon really was. He had only seen a
creature.

“I’m really sorry. I don’t know what
happened to you while you were in the woods… but you obviously
thought—you obviously know more about that thing, that—person—than
I do.” Jennifer shook her head; she wasn’t going to tell even
Robert about what she knew about Damon.

“I just know that he wasn’t harming
anyone. There was no reason for anyone to want to kill him.” Robert
nodded, accepting that Jennifer wasn’t going to tell him any more
than that. “And I know that Liam is a putrid snake.” Robert smiled
sheepishly.

“I know you’ve never liked him,” he
said, hesitating a moment. “And it… that whole situation yesterday…
it made it clear to me that Liam isn’t the kind of guy that I
thought he was.” Robert sat down heavily in a chair, picking at the
arm. “He obviously lied about seeing you killed. He must have known
that you were okay… but he whipped everyone into a frenzy about it,
had them all set to kill that guy.” Jennifer shrugged. There were
things that she couldn’t tell Robert.

“He… tried to make a pass at me after
you, Alex, and Lucy left,” she said. “He got scared off by…
something. After we fought. He got pretty aggressive, and I don’t
know what he would have done if he hadn’t been scared by whatever
was moving in the woods.” Jennifer swallowed down the omissions in
her story.

“He made a pass at you? He was
aggressive?” Robert’s eyes widened.

“Yeah. He grabbed me and called me an
idiot for not being attracted to him and… well, the rest is pretty
much obvious.” Robert cringed.

“I can’t believe I ever liked that
guy.” Jennifer laughed shortly.

“None of us could believe it either. No
one but you could ever stand the twerp.” Robert smiled
ruefully.

“Are we going to be okay, Jen?”
Jennifer shrugged.

“I forgive you. Like I said, it’s not
going to be the same between us, but I don’t hate you.” Robert
nodded, standing awkwardly.

“I hope you’ll eventually forget it
ever happened.” Jennifer smiled sadly.

“That I can’t do,” she said, leading
him to the door. Her skin crawled slightly as Robert hugged her. In
spite of forgiving him, even knowing that he had thought he was
doing the right thing, knowing that he had been scared by what he
hadn’t understood, Jennifer didn’t think anything would ever break
the chill that now existed between them. She would never have that
special place in her heart for Robert’s smile anymore. “You’ll just
have to take my forgiveness and give me a little space.”

Jennifer was surprised at the amount of
avoidance she had to do; she had thought that, shamed as they were,
the rest of the town would steer clear of her house entirely. Most
of her neighbors managed to keep away, leaving her to her own
miasma of grief, but the local news came calling, and that was
something that Jennifer knew she would be best not to entirely
avoid or put off. She let them come as far as the front porch, and
sat down to be interviewed. “So, Jennifer, what really happened
while you were in the woods?” the interviewer asked her, right
after introducing her on tape. Jennifer shrugged.

“I got lost deep in the forest,” she
said simply. “Before my parents died, my mom taught me how to find
edible plants, and my dad used to take me in the woods a lot. But I
guess I got further in than I knew that night.” The lie came easily
when it wasn’t being delivered to the man she had considered her
best friend since high school. “I found my way out and there was
this crazy mob of people who thought I’d been killed by some
beast—even when I was right there in front of them.” Jennifer set
her jaw. “I will say that I thought it was reckless and horribly
irresponsible of the mayor and his son to whip everyone into an
insane frenzy out to kill someone.” The interviewer’s eyes widened
at the bald statement of fact.

“What do you think was really in the
woods—the thing, the person?” Jennifer pressed her lips
together.

“It was a person. I think that everyone
lost their minds, and they saw something in nothing, and they
killed a guy.”

“But he disappeared—a normal human
wouldn’t have survived that.” Jennifer shrugged.

“You of all people should know that the
news is full of humans surviving things they shouldn’t. I don’t
know that he survived. Maybe he had just enough strength to stagger
away from the water. Maybe he got pulled downstream. Nobody knows.”
Jennifer swallowed as surreptitiously as possible, denying the
possibility in her mind. If she knew for sure that Damon was dead,
she didn’t know if she could sustain any hope.

“Do you think the mayor should be
recalled?” Jennifer shrugged again.

“I would hate to think that he was
motivated by anything other than good intentions, but I definitely
think he should be investigated—as should his son, Liam. Someone
impartial should look into just how everything went down.” She
swallowed again and set her jaw. “It’s been an exhausting few days.
I hope you’ll excuse me.” The interviewer finished the piece and
quickly left, seeming to read something in Jennifer’s reticence
that made her eager to leave the porch and get back to the news
desk.

The next day, Jennifer had to play host
to the mayor himself; she didn’t invite him in, but she offered him
a glass of water, remembering her parents’ oft-repeated catechism
about guests. “After how you behaved,” Jennifer said, sitting down
several feet away from him, “I wonder that you have the nerve to
come here.” Liam’s father shrugged.

“I’m just wondering about a few things,
Jennifer.” Jennifer rolled her eyes. She had never been over-awed
by the mayor; he was a slightly pudgy, balding man, and had started
running to fat when Jennifer had been a teenager. At one point in
his life he had been lean and muscular, like his son—not as
attractive, but with a kind of ambition that had secured him a
wife, based on his prestige and power rather than for his
looks.

“I’m sure you wonder about a lot of
things, Mayor.” Jennifer shifted in her seat, wishing that she
could just send him packing with a flea in his ear about his stupid
son.

“I understand you’re upset—it must have
seemed like a dreadful calamity, what happened to that…” The mayor
paused. “Jennifer, you saw it as well as I did. That man wasn’t a
man.” Jennifer shrugged.

“I saw an angry mob attack someone who
was living in the forest not harming anyone, led by you and your
snake of a son. That’s what I saw. If there’s justice in the world,
you’ll both be charged with some kind of crime.” The mayor made a
wry face, looking down at his feet for a moment.

“All that notwithstanding, I was hoping
you would clarify something for me.” Jennifer took a deep breath,
controlling her impatience. The mayor may not be a good type of
human being, but he was not stupid. She would need to guard her
tongue and not let his cruelty and manipulation get to
her.

“What do you need clarified?” Jennifer
crossed her arms over her chest, pinning the man down with a
stare.

“What exactly did happen to you while
you were in the woods?” Jennifer shrugged.

“I already told the news. I was lost. I
found some food while I was looking for a way out.” She narrowed
her eyes, staring at him more intently. “It seems to me like if you
were really concerned about my well-being; you would have organized
a search party much sooner than you did. I was in the woods all
night, another day, and another night. If you really believed
Liam’s story, I would think you’d be in the woods the next day to
find my body.”

“Liam needed a little time to recover
from his injuries,” the mayor said smoothly. “And of course, we
thought you were dead; so there was no real hurry involved at that
point. Recovering the body of someone without a family… well, you
can see.” Jennifer snorted.

“Glad to know that I am held in high
enough esteem by this town to be the subject of a lynch mob, but
not in high enough esteem to try and discover if Liam might have
been mistaken. Just what injuries did Liam have, Mr. Mayor? Because
when I saw him running scared out of the woods, he was unharmed.”
The mayor’s eyes widened.

“Perhaps he ran into the beast he saw
after he left you,” the mayor said, his voice hinting that that
would be the official story. “He may have assumed you had been
killed, and said that he saw it by mistake.” Jennifer shook her
head.

“The only beasts I saw in the woods the
other day are all members of this town,” Jennifer told him coldly.
“Is there anything else you need to have clarified?” The mayor
stood uncomfortably, setting down his water glass and looking away
from her.

“No, I think that settles everything in
my mind. Will you be giving any more interviews?” Jennifer
shrugged, feeling a kind of insidious pleasure at the half-fearful
look that mayor turned on her.

“If more news people come with
questions, I will do my best as an honest person to answer them.
But I would really rather not be disturbed before I go back to
college in a few days.” The mayor smiled.

“Of course. This has been a terrible
ordeal. Perhaps once you’ve graduated, you can get in touch? I have
a few friends who might be able to help you get into a good area
for study.” Jennifer’s lips twisted in an involuntary
smirk.

“I am sure you know people, Mayor,” she
said, standing and gesturing for him to leave. “But I am also sure
that they are probably not the kinds of people in my field that I
would like to know. Have a good day.”