“I’m sorry if I’ve insulted you. I didn’t mean to.”
I didn’t realize I was just gazing at her with heart eyes and Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” still wailing in my head until she mistook my silence for insult.
“I’m only trying to protect myself,” she said. “Though, I’ll admit…”
She peeped up at me with a shy look, then glanced away. “You’re not only handsome, you seem really nice.”
My heart stopped and restarted, like it got hit with a defibrillator.
Did she haveanyidea at all how cute she was? Howperfectfor us?
The way…the wayI was going to fuck this woman. In my bed. In Gideon’s. Against the wall, in the shower—everywhere and anywhere, all night long, if she let me.
But somehow, I managed to keep all that out of my voice as I replied, “Well, my moms always say the best way to turn a stranger into a friend is to get to know them.”
And that’s exactly what we did for the next two hours, talking about where we’d grown up, her university experience versus my Coast Guard one. We also discovered that both of us were twins, though she and her sister were more like womb twins, but they only had one dad she rarely saw after her parents divorced.
I listened intently and let her do most of the talking.Thirty-five years… I’d gone thirty-five years without knowing her. And now I was greedy for every crumb of her backstory.
Though I occasionally interrupted her to call out, “Hey there, grab a table and put in your order,” to anyone else who tried to sit at the bar.
That way Keli—my older sister’s oldest girl, who waitressed for us after school—could handle their orders.
“How old is your waitress?” my mate asked after I sent Keli away with a whole tray of Hibernation Stations—my specialty drink. This year it had featured at #3 onBritish Columbia: Let’s Go!magazine’s Best Drinks list, so I was getting a lot of orders for it.
But Lark just looked worried, not impressed. “I don’t think you’re allowed to serve alcohol if you’re under nineteen….”
“No, you are not,” I conceded. “But she’s my niece, so she knows better than to touch the hard stuff. And the Ayaska have a special exemption from most child labor laws because we’reridiculous about family first here. All three of her dads would ground her for life if they found out she was underage drinking on the job.”
“Oh, does Bear Mountain have a lot of exemptions from provincial laws?” she asked between bites of her steak. “Also, you have three moms, and your niece has three dads. Is, like, everyone that lives here in a polycule?”
That kicked off a long conversation about Ayaska culture, all their rules and exemptions from human—I mean, Canadian—law, along with my family and our status as outsiders.
“So, you and your family—which has three moms instead of three husbands—came here after leaving a religious cult?”
By this time, she’d finished her meal, and my heart thrilled when she tucked into the piece of Cody’s strawberry-rhubarb pie I’d set in front of her without protest.
“Something like that….” The polycule as law stuff was already a lot to take in without adding in the part about all of us being bear shifters, and my parents having basically left a breakaway sect of LDS that were not only bear shifters but believed the opposite of the Ayaska—that every male was supposed to have at least three wives that attended to their every need.
“So is this town also a cult?” she asked off my vague answer.
“No, not at all.” I chuckled, forking off a bite of my own pie. “Though I get how it could seem that way. The Ayaska have a ritual for everything. But that’s based in tribal tradition, not religion.”
I tilted my head. “I guess you could call us a town that’s agreednotto disagree when it comes to forming quads of any variety. And anyone who doesn’t want that life has to either leave or not form permanent partnerships.”
“So, you don’t want to settle down into a quad,” she concluded, “just hook up with tourists during the summer.”
I frowned. “What makes you think that?”
She shrugged. “I extrapolated your position based on your abrupt disengagement with the perhaps-too-young woman who was flirting with you so you could engage with me—a more age-appropriate prospect who you guessed could be easily swayed to agree to casual sex.”
“Easily swayed,” I repeated with a slow grin. “Does that mean you want to?—”
“Wait, I’m not finished with defending my thesis point.”
She set down her fork and held up a finger while taking a moment to dab the pie crumbs off her mouth—herplump, incredibly kissable mouth.
“Also, you’d score superior on a scale of relative physical attractiveness,” she continued, bringing my attention back from my singular focus on her lips. “The only reason you wouldn’t already be in a quad of your own, at your age, which I’d assess to be mid-thirties, is because you didn’twantto settle down and start a family.”
