Chapter 16
Everything had been fine, even maybe very slightly flirty, and then Laurie hadseenthe trauma of the last day suddenly slam into Briana and knock her down. She went cold and stiff and trembly, tears starting to fall even though she obviously had no idea they were.
Laurie was a lot of things, but able to watch a woman cry without trying to comfort her wasn't one of them. He only hesitated a moment, wanting to see if she would snap out of it on her own, though he was pretty sure she wouldn't: like everybody else, she'd cried on and off at the pub last night, too, but this was different. So he pulled her close, murmured a promise that it would be all right into her hair, and was strangely grateful as she held on and sobbed.
The truth was, he knew exactly how she felt. He'd almost snapped in the same way just a few minutes earlier, before deciding he needed to talk to the Faire councilnow. Mostly because doing itnowmeant he could try to avoid the kind of breakdown Briana was currently experiencing. It meant he didn't have to think about the terrifying way the earth hadthrown him around effortlessly, or about his friends who had been killed or badly hurt.
He pressed his own eyes closed, feeling tears leaking down his cheeks, and made no effort to brush them away. It was more important to hold Briana and give her a place of safety to unleash her feelings in. Laurie was almost sure that if—when—he was overwhelmed, Briana would do the same for him, even if shedidn'tlike him very much.
Her storm of tears didn't pass quickly, and she was obviously exhausted when her crying began to peter out. Even then she didn't move for a long time, her fingers curled in his shirt and her hair soft beneath his mouth. Eventually, hoarsely, she snuffled, "Did you snot in my hair? My head's wet."
Laurie, taken by surprise, giggled into her hair. "I'd like to think it's just tears."
"Okay." Briana sat up, wiping her face with both hands, and cast him an embarrassed sideways glance. "Sorry."
"It's okay. Are you?"
Briana wobbled her head and wiped her face again, then slumped in the Jeep's driver seat, shoulders sagging and eyes closed. "Apparently not. Maybe better than before. I don't know what that was. It all just hit me."
"There was a lot to do yesterday in the moment, and focusing on an immediate crisis is a great way to avoid thinking about the underlying one," Laurie said softly. "We're probably all going to be dealing with the aftermath for a while."
"Yeah, that's…I thought something like that before I fell apart," Briana admitted in a whisper. "God, I'm tired now, though."
"You want me to drive?" Laurie crooked a smile. "In my truck, I mean? I'm not ballsy enough to volunteer to drive your Jeep. And even if I was, we'd have to get out to switch places anyway, so in that case we might as well switch cars, too."
Briana raked him over with a look and laughed, although it sounded incredibly tired. "Yeah, I can't imagine climbing over each other in here to switch places would work well. You're too built."
Laurie, partly to push the idea of Briana crawling over him out of his head, and partly out of genuine indignation, said, "But I'm flexible!"
His fated mate said, "Unf," in a way that absolutely did not help to push the idea of her crawling over him away, and then, much more formally, even prissily, said, "I'm sure you are."
Laurie stared at her, unsure how to take any of that, and she kept her gaze locked forward until she dared another sideways glance that led to another tired laugh. "What? Nothing. Never mind. I'm sure youareflexible, that's all. Truck. Let's go to your truck."
There was abedin his truck. Not like a bed to sleep in, but trucks by definition had some kind of bed. With Briana goingunfand thinking about his flexibility, Laurie was having a difficult time not reading "let's go to your truck" as an insinuation that they should go to the vehicle with abedin it.
He knew better. He really did. That didn't make it any easier to stop his brain from going places it obviously shouldn't. "Right," he said, a little too loudly. "Yes. Truck. Me drive truck. Ook ook."
Briana, opening her car door, started giggling again, still very, very tiredly. "You cave bear?"
"Me cave bear. Grr grr. You cave…goat?"
"Baa-aaa," Briana agreed through her tired laughter. She followed him to his truck, which was a personal vehicle today, not one of the Thunder Bear delivery trucks, while Laurie's bear peered at them both from inside his head, clearly of the opinion that the humans had lost their damn minds.
He couldn't help a smile for the poor confused bear, which cautiously said,Is this human…mating?
Laurie's laughter caroled out before he could stop it.Yes, kind of. Bonding, anyway.
"Your bear thinks we've lost it?" Briana asked as they climbed into the truck. "My goat issurewe have."
"Pretty much, yeah. Bears don't, uh, bond with their mates. Boars are solitary."
Briana did a double-take that ended in a snort. "I forgot male bears were called boars for a second there and was like, what do pigs have to do with this? So are bucks. Or not solitary, but they don't stick around to make happy little mountain goat families, anyway. Have you ever thought about how weird it is we shiftersdo?"
"Um." Laurie blinked at her. "No."
"Oh. Well. I have." She smiled lopsidedly. "There are some monogamous species, but most mammals aren't. It's the dominant human side of us, obviously. I just think it's a little weird."
"So are you, uh." Laurie didn't know how to ask this, and approached cautiously: "Uh. Not into monogamy?"
