Chapter 61

Chapter 61

Jesse

"Jesse, love…"

The next morning I was sitting on the same shitty bed, listening to the metal springs creak and Mum go on. I closed my eyes, as if that would block it all out, but only this would. My thumb hit delete message, and for just a moment there was blessed quiet.

And a little more.

When I was a teenager, there were moments that felt like they were supposed to be more than they were. I'd walk into a party or the school corridors and feel… something. That the body I'd lived in my entire life didn't fit quite right, wasn't the correct one, and yet when I looked down I just saw brown skin and blunt nails like I always did.

So that's what I saw then, right?

That white-blond arm hair was back, or was that just the harsh light of the desert sun peeking in through the crumpled Venetian blinds? I turned my arm back and forth, flexing the muscles and felt… What? I shook my head, forcing myself to my feet. The room felt extra small when I did so, the window no longer at eye level. What the…?

"Bear boy. Getting real sick of waking you up each morning." Greg's voice cut through my fanciful thoughts, bringing me right back to Earth. The room was the same. I was the same: fucked. "Get your arse out here."

So I did. He was the last mechanic in the whole state who was willing to teach me what I needed to finish my apprenticeship at an embarrassingly advanced age. The least I could do was fucking show up. I shrugged on a clean pair of overalls and then walked out into the garage to find everyone else had already started.

"You can help Andrei today," Greg said, gesturing to one of the other foxes who was currently bent over an engine bay. The man in question stared at me balefully, then turned back to what he was doing. No further instruction, no explanation, that was the MO here. I learned by watching closely and trying not to fuck up.

"We're getting this engine out today," Andrei told me when I came close, eyeing my hands when I rested them on the front panel. His eyes narrowed until I snatched them back, and that's when I saw… What? Blunt nails that needed a good clean.

"You got that keyring?" Greg called out across the crowded floor.

"What? Yeah." I fished them out, the green stone on the bear keyring flashing for a second. "You want it back?"

"Just keep them on you," he told me before turning to deal with something else.

"Right. Right…"

"You finished fluttering your eyelashes at the boss, bear boy?" Andrei sneered. I shook my head, focussing on the job at hand. "You look like a big cunt. I'll undo all the bolts and bullshit holding this motor in and you'll hoist it up."

Something I'd never done. A familiar feeling rushed through me, of shame, of inadequacy, because that was the beast I'd ended up instead of a bear. A black dog that ate my soul in great gulps every day I walked the earth, ready to devour me whole if I didn't keep going. I reached over and grabbed the chain of the block and tackle and then nodded.

Andrei moved near silently, only cursing to himself, not sharing any information with me until now.

"Hold it firm, boy!"

His sharp bark, the epithet of boy when I was a fucking man, that would've been enough to tip me over the edge before, but not now. Because I'd developed some kind of iron control after leaving home? No fucking hope of that. The need to snap, snarl, bite his fucking head off for disrespecting me like that rose, the black dog inside incensed by the insult, but he wasn't the one in control.

I was.

My biceps popped then strained as all the supports that held the engine in place were removed one by one.

"Andrei…"

The foxes were cunning pricks, nasty ones too, and that was evident in Ivan's expression as he came over.

"Yeah?" Andrei looked up in irritation, but when he caught the other fox's smile, he followed Ivan's gaze as they both stared at me.

"I was thinking of getting a beer after work this arvo."

You mean the same thing we did every single day because there was fuck all to be done here but go to the pub? I wanted to snap that, but this was the game he was playing. It was already way too hot, the steel slippery in my hands. I couldn't hold the engine suspended forever, and that was the whole point. Andrei leaned against the front panel of the car and so did Ivan, chattering like he was in a mother's meeting, not midway through a job.

They wanted me to drop the engine, to give them yet another opportunity to put shit on me for being a weak human. I'm not sure what Roxy thought, bringing me up here, but surely this wasn't it. I wrapped the chains tighter around my hands, a dangerous fucking move if ever there was one. The weight of the engine, when I inevitably let go, was enough to sheer my hands off at the wrists. I'd bleed out on the floor, and Andrei and Ivan would just step over me, complaining about the mess.

We should have a fucking proper engine hoist, but fox shifters didn't need to use machinery like that. With their strength, a simple block and tackle set up worked fine for them, but I wasn't a shifter. Every muscle quivered and shook as I tried to hold on. They kept shooting me sidelong looks, waiting for me to crack, but I forged on. I wouldn't, couldn't, say the words that they wanted to hear. Hurry the fuck up, was one lot. What the fuck are you doing? was another. Or worst, I can't hold this anymore.

But I knew something that they didn't.

I'd taken plenty of kickings in my life before I was sent to live with Bjorn's family and that had taught me a hard lesson. That as long as you were still breathing, you could survive anything. Perhaps in a different form than before, one more battered and broken, but still. You would keep taking one step after another, always moving forward.

But that ignored a crucial law of physiology.

Muscles exhaust themselves when put under strain and then they fail, my small sound of pain making clear that. I was losing this fight, no matter what I thought or felt about it.

"Fuck's sake, Andrei!"

The two of them stared at me, cruel smiles on their faces, and that brought too many memories back. Of men towering over me, fists raised. Of my birth mother watching everything happen with sleepy eyes and a dopey grin. I wasn't a child anymore, and I did not have to put up with this shit. I threw my whole body into the chain, trying to use my weight as counterbalance, and that's when something miraculous happened.

I should've collapsed, the chain ripping my skin as I let it go, gravity finally winning. The engine should've gone slamming back into the engine bay, shearing off what restraints remained and going crashing to the floor. The torrent of abuse would've started, telling me how fucking shit I was.

But that's not what happened.

Bolts broke and metal groaned as I wrenched the engine up and out of the bay and then I pivoted before letting the chains go so the engine slammed into the concrete floor.

"Well fuck…" Andrei walked over and nodded at the engine. "That's one way to get the thing out. You fucked up some of the engine bay in the process."

"Maybe don't play fucking games when I'm holding a damn engine!" I snapped back.

Tools clattered to the floor and I remembered then why no one fucked with foxes. It was never just one. Where there was one shifter, there were many. Green eyes bore into mine, watching my every move until I jerked myself away from Andrei.

"I'm having a smoke."

I waited for someone to shout, to tear me a new one as I walked out the back into a cordoned off area where old car hulks rusted back into the dirt, but they didn't. There was only quiet and stillness and this. Adrenaline, I rationalised, pumping blood frantically through my blood in response to danger, carrying oxygen around, but it felt like more than that. I was damn near immune to its effects. Each time I drove drunk, or did something reckless, I felt an adrenaline surge and that was nothing on this.

I reached for my cigarettes in an attempt to calm myself and instead my hand closed around the keyring. The metal felt white hot, then ice cold, forcing me to snatch my hand away in time to see a bear-shaped burn mark on my palm.

"What the?—?"

"Are you done?" Greg appeared in the doorway with a frown. "Break time is later. Work now."

My teeth ground together, forcing me to swallow back my shitty response, but he was the boss here. I nodded and then walked back inside.

"Don't help Andrei. He needs to fix up your fuck ups. There's oil changes for you to do," he told me with a dismissive nod.

Back to doing the same fucking shit I had been doing since I arrived here, learning nothing new, but I didn't say anything in response. I just moved forward like a good little bear…

Like a good little boy, that's what I meant to say. A good little boy.

I grabbed a wrench and a dolly and slid under the nearest car, going to work.

"Did you piss in that bloke's cereal or something?" the publican asked when the day ended. We'd come straight to the pub after work, not even stopping to get cleaned up. Daisy looked up when I approached, but glanced away quickly. However, she wasn't my focus, he was. Phil was using that overly loud bullshit tone blokes do when they're talking a steady stream of shit. I knew that because I'd done the same more than once.

"Not that I'm aware of," Greg replied, pushing money across the bar. "Prick can't pay his repair bill."

"Not surprised with the way he's drinking in here," the other man said with a shake of his head. "Just giving you a heads up, he's out for blood."

"Ours?" I blinked, wondering who'd said that and surprised to realise it was me. "Or Daisy's?"

"I told him to leave the barmaids alone." The publican was so fucking oblivious, because it'd take a whole lot more than that to shake a prick like Phil off someone's tail. "He'll be kicked out if he keeps hassling them."

He should've been turfed on his arse the first time, a voice growled in my head. He never should've been allowed to approach the girls, but that's not how places like this worked. They had young girls working the bar, not big blokes, because it sold drinkers a fantasy. That each time a guy bought a beer from her, he was buying just a little of her time. Maybe she'd look at him, see him and her heart would flutter in her chest, like his did when he took in her shapely form. Maybe she'd reach out and touch him, choose him above all the other fuckheads clamouring around her feet and then he'd have it all. A hot, wet pussy to sink into, but also the adulation, the approval of his fellow men.

"Make sure you've got enough security," I said in a low, rumbly voice. "Ensure the boys are on high alert."

"You volunteering?" The publican looked me over with new interest. "Someone said you made sure Daisy got home in one piece last night."

"So that's why you were slow getting your shit together this morning," Greg said with a sidelong look my way. "Balls deep in?—"

"Don't say it."

Why the fuck was my hand out, gripping my boss' shirt by the collar? Why did his green eyes roll up to meet mine, sheer devilry dancing there as his lips twisted in a smile?

"Aw, someone's crushing on the barmaid," Ivan cackled and I wondered how the humans didn't hear it. The high-pitched chitter of a fox in his voice, the sound completely inhuman.

"That's the way, isn't it?" I pushed myself back from the bar. "It's always gotta come back to someone's dick. We're supposed to be the bigger ones, protective ones…" Sometimes it felt like everything my foster fathers had tried to teach me was just a bandage slapped over a weeping wound, the blood stopping it from sticking. Other times, like now, it all fitted together. "But if that's a power that men possess, we're really slow to use it. Because using your muscles, your strength, to stand up for a woman usually means stepping up in the face of not another woman, but a man."

I didn't want a beer, a meal, anything, right now. If I was home, I'd have my pipe out of my pocket, packing the cone full of weed in seconds. That acrid, herbal stink would calm me back down, keep the adrenaline tamped down, but I didn't smoke drugs anymore.

So what could I do?

My eyes found Phil's across the pub, his eyes narrowing at the same time as mine did. My fists flexed, ready to drive them into his stupid fucking face. That'd make me feel really good, but I didn't do that anymore either. Instead, I jerked out a chair, sitting down with a thump to watch the prick turn back to his friends and continue his bullshit, right before a beer was pushed in front of me.

"Your instincts are good, when you listen to them," Greg said, sitting down beside me and so did many of the others. "They're telling you something important."

"To get the fuck out of this shithole?" I replied, looking the pub over with a weary eye.

"That and something else. You'll work it out at some point." The bloke always had this fatalistic little shrug he used when dealing with difficult customers or cars and I was on the receiving end of it. "Or you won't. The goddess know." He raised his beer then, the last rays of the sun glinting in the amber depths. "To the goddess."

"To the goddess," the other foxes said, performing their savage little ritual.

I didn't. The bear gods had deserted me a long time ago, I decided, from the moment I was born. That's when I realised why Phil bugged me so much. It wasn't his bullshit or the fact he tried to bully his way through life, but that all that was the result of him trying to escape something he never would.

That he was a small, small man in a big world and he'd never be anything more.

I lifted my glass then, unconsciously saluting a man I never thought I'd feel a moment's connection with. Yet here we were. Here we fucking were, two small men together.