Hudson carried Melissa to the backstage area and sat her next to Renee, in her empty pink chair, before Neil and Hudson headed off to talk to the stagehands.

“Where were you?” asked Renee. “I was starting to get worried.”

“I was getting pounded in the glacier bears’ room,” Melissa said bluntly. “What did I miss?”

“We’re on the second to last set of the night,” said Renee. “The sun bears are willing to do an encore performance. Everyone was bumped up a slot. The sun bears opened, then the moon bears went, then the spirit bears and finally, the yeti bears. We needed one more act to fill time before the finale. Wait.”

Renee’s headset went off, and Renee listened intently for a few seconds.

“Well, I’ll be,” said Renee. “I guess we aren’t having a second round of sun bears tonight.”

“Huh?” asked Melissa, but before she could say anything, she was told to stand up by one of the stagehands, who took her chair away from her. A giant blue velvet throne was pushed in her direction, and the stagehand sat her down. Before Melissa could ask what was going on, she was wheeled to an area behind the curtain separating the backstage area from the stage itself.

“Ladies, I know we promised that tonight, you’d seen some glacier bears,” said the DJ. “I know that tonight, we started the show off a little bit…differently.”

The crowd laughed.

“I’m pleased as punch to announce that tonight, you’ll get to see some glacier bear buns, so can you give it up for our ‘headliners,’ who are actually going to end up closing out tonight’s show?” asked the DJ. “That’s right. Give it up for Neil and Hudson…and their fated mate, Melissa!”

Melissa heard her name and her eyes went wide. She had thought that the stagehand just needed her chair for a random reason. She hadn’t exactly put two and two together until she heard her name called.

The stagehand wheeled the throne through the heavy curtains separating the backstage area from the main stage, pushing the curtains aside, so they didn’t hit Melissa in the face. Melissa looked out over the crowd. The house was packed. She’d never seen a full house from her unique position on stage, sitting in the throne, set right in the center of the back of the stage. The crowd was cheering. It was intense.

A split second after Melissa had been wheeled out, Neil and Hudson burst out on to the stage from opposite wings of the stage. The crowd hooted and hollered as the two glacier bears came out on to the scene, wearing way more clothing than strippers usually wore. They were wearing gear that made them look as if they were about to go and climb Mt. Everest, complete with thick puffer jackets and sunglasses.

Of course, these were no ordinary clothes.

Neil and Hudson took their place on the stage. The lights went low, and then came up, strobing blue and green before the laser light show started, reflecting dots and streaks of blue and green over the audience and over the stage. Melissa spotted the other dancers in the audience. They were giving something out to the women. Melissa couldn’t tell what it was until she realized that more than a few women were wearing plastic ponchos and putting their stuff into big plastic bags. Melissa wondered why the dancers were giving out ponchos and plastic bags.

The DJ put on Neil and Hudson’s mix, and she stopped caring about the silly ponchos and bags. Neil and Hudson’s playlist ran hot and cold. They played a medley of both hard rock and smooth rhythm and blues. During the hard rock parts of the medley, the glacier bears acted like they were fucking the air. During the rhythm and blues section, they moved like they were making love to the ground.

The first things to go were the glasses. Neil and Hudson tossed their glasses into the audience. At first, Melissa was annoyed, as the glasses looked like they were designer sunglasses. Then, she remembered the club bought all the disposable props in bulk. Neil and Hudson were just so hot that they made any accessory look designer.

Neil and Hudson slipped off their thick jackets, tossing them offstage, into the wings. They were still wearing loose cargo pants that contrasted with the tight but thin tank-tops the werebears were wearing. The spotlights illuminated Neil and Hudson’s chests, which glistened with sweat underneath the green and blue tinted lights, almost making them look like mermen.

Two stagehands wheeled in two large set pieces. Melissa recognized them. They were experimental, never tested before. They were two large ice flumes, like water-slides made of pure ice.

“Is that safe?” Melissa asked one of the stagehands.

“When it’s wet,” said the stagehand. “Wait a second. We need you for this part of the show.”

“You need me?” asked Melissa.

“But of course,” said the stagehand. “The women who end up on stage always end up being a part of the show. Didn’t you hear the DJ announce your name along with the bears? You’re performing tonight, Melissa.”

The stagehand went off stage and brought back a prop attached to a hose that led backstage. The prop was a giant plastic bottle that looked like a Melchizedek-sized bottle of champagne. The notorious Melchizedek champagne bottle was thought by some to be a myth, holding thirty liters of champagne, and the bottle brought to Melissa was not the genuine artifact. It was a prop, but it was still pretty heavy.

“Here,” said the stagehand. “Hold it like this. There are handles.”

“We haven’t tested it,” said Melissa. “Are you sure it’s ready?”

“The effervescent granules, food dye, and apple juice are all mixed up,” said the stagehand. “All that’s missing is you, to direct the stream. Just follow what that other stagehand does.”

Melissa looked and saw that the other stagehand was holding an identical bottle, aimed at the top of the ice flume. Melissa tried to mimic the angle the best she could.

“Ready?” asked the stagehand.

“It’s now or never. Ready,” said Melissa.

“All right, then in five…four…three…two…one,” the stagehand counted down.

Even with the countdown, Melissa was not prepared for the stream of fake champagne that came out of the fake champagne bottle. Some of the champagne hit the backstage curtain. She quickly redirected the flow so that it was aimed toward the ice slide. Melissa watched the stream of faux champagne glide down the flume and collect at the bottom of the slide, which had a drainage system leading to a set of tubes that led backstage. The stagehands had really thought of everything.

Neil and Hudson had been dancing to entertain the crowd while their prop was set up. They tore off their cargo pants and threw them aside, twerking for the crowd in their micro sequin fabric hotpants that glittered blue and green under the lights. The spotlight colors changed and turned a pale champagne color, the spotlights following Neil and Hudson to the ice slides.

Neil and Hudson each took a side. Neil was on Melissa’s side. Both glacier bears walked up the steps carved into the ice and, at the top of the slide, slid onto the slides, which by then were slick with fake champagne.

Melissa wasn’t sure what Neil and Hudson would take off next. She’d seen them rehearse before, but so far, the set had gone off-script. After all, Melissa wasn’t supposed to be on the stage, and their hot and cold playlist wasn’t meant to debut for another month.

Melissa should’ve seen it coming, but she didn’t.

Neil and Hudson didn’t take off their tank top first.

They didn’t take off their hotpants either.

Instead, they just shifted, their clothes ripping off as, in the place of the two men, two bears appeared, right when Neil and Hudson hit the midpoint of the slide. The spotlights switched from champagne to teal in an instant.

The crowd hooted and hollered. This is what they’d come for. They’d wanted to see shifters do things they didn’t do on a routine basis. That included showing off their shifts to crowds of humans. In essence, Bear Buns was only half-strip-club. The other half was a menagerie for the most curious women of Denver.

The crowd went nuts as the two bears slid down the slide. The bears climbed back up the slide and slid down again, turning human halfway through their second slide down the flume. Then, they went back up the slide, again, and turned into bears at the halfway point, yet again, and got off the slide entirely. Whenever the bears were in their human form, a champagne light had been fast on the stage. Whenever they were in their bear form, a bluish green light had illuminated the scene.

The champagne lights came back up even though Neil and Hudson were still in their bear forms. As Neil and Hudson had previously been illuminated by blue and green lights, many members of the crowd gasped when the warm nearly white lights came up, and the bears remained cast in blue. Their naturally blue coats seemed as if they’d be impossible to find in nature, but there was no denying nature when its bare buns were waggling right in your face.

The flumes were moved off stage. Neil and Hudson took the champagne bottle from the stagehand and aimed it toward the audience. Melissa followed the glacier bears’ lead and showered her side of the audience with the fake champagne as well. The champagne cannons stopped firing their bubbly, frothy mix of water, apple juice, carbon tablets, and food dye. Two stagehands came and took the bottles away while dancers walked around the club giving out Bear Buns branded towels to the audience, so they could mop themselves up. The bartenders went around with complimentary glasses of strawberry champagne.

The bears nudged Melissa back to her throne. In her quest to soak the crowd and show them a good time, Melissa hadn’t noticed that two stripper poles had sprung up from trap doors on the stage. The two poles were unique in that they were covered in a thick coat of ice. The lights went low, and a set of lights located underneath the icy poles illuminated the poles as if they were made of glass. The poles glowed in shades of blue and green. The glacier bears danced around the poles, in their bear forms. They used the slickness of the ice to do tricks they usually wouldn’t’ve been able to do unless they’d oiled up the pole. The lights went back up, and the light show stopped, the warm champagne lights again highlighting the fact that the glacier bears were naturally blue, that it wasn’t some trick of the light.

The bears were naturally both gray and black, with sections that seemed blue, even in the warm champagne light. Hudson looked part polar, with an icy white base coat streaked with gray and covered in places with swaths of black and blue fur. Neil, on the other hand, was practically walking proof that the glacier bear was a subspecies of black bear. In the warm light, he almost looked like a black bear, but his coat shone blue in some spots, especially his lighter, grayer spots. They were one of Bear Bun’s more exotic novelties, but also, one of its rarest. Their shift could be found in no zoo in the world.

The bears turned back into men and swung on the poles, showing off their moves. The crowd hooted and hollered as Neil and Hudson did moves that would freeze any other werebear’s balls off, as the icy poles were pressed against their hot shafts. Neil and Hudson used the chunky parts of the ice to climb up the poles and then, slid down the poles in spirals. They didn’t have to worry about getting cut by the ice as the ice was melting, so every sharp edge and corner was melting onto the stage, leaving behind a puddle.

The crowd went nuts. They’d seen bears climb poles during other parts of the show. They’d even seen bears climb poles that were like fake trees, wood and all, but they hadn’t seen anything like this before. The bears were climbing pure ice. This wasn’t something the species could naturally do. This was something that Neil and Hudson had learned to do, just as they’d learned to dance in their human forms. This was the peak of shifter performance—the ability to do something in an animal form that couldn’t be done without human intelligence and will. Not only were Neil and Hudson apex predators, they were apex performers.

The glacier bears walked back out toward the audience and transformed into bears as they walked, not breaking their stride as they walked to the very edge of the stage. The bears crossed paths and walked back to the poles, Neil walking to Hudson’s pole and Hudson walking to Neil’s pole. They rolled around and got their coats wet in the puddle pooled around the base of the ice-covered stripper poles.

The bears plodded forward toward the crowd. They looked at the audience and then turned so that their sides were to the audience. Neil and Hudson nodded at each other. At the same time, they shook the water off their fur, like dogs that had just gotten out of the pool. The glacier bears roared out at the crowd before getting on their back paws and waving out toward the crowd. The crowd showered the bears in single dollars as the bears turned, poked their butts out at the audience, and shook their bare bear buns.

The bears walked toward the back of the stage and changed one last time as they approached their fated mate.

As the glacier bears shifted back into men, a cloud of blue ‘smoke’ and glitter covered the stage. Melissa realized the blue ‘smoke’ was really fog from one of the club’s fog machines. From her spot on the throne, she spotted a stagehand toss two pieces of black clothing on to the stage. Neil and Hudson each grabbed one of the articles of apparel and got changed. By the time the fog and glitter cleared, the werebears had gotten changed. Neil and Hudson were wearing new hotpants, patterned to look like novelty tuxedo shirts.

Melissa held her hand up to her mouth. She had seen another pair of bears, the mountain bears, wear the same outfit the week before when they’d done something she suspected Neil and Hudson were about to do to her.

“Melissa, over the last week, we fell for you, hard,” said Neil.

“You’re our fated mate if the audience hasn’t already guessed,” said Hudson, turning to the crowd. “There’s nobody else we want to be with. That’s why we have to ask you one question.”

“Melissa…will you do us the great honor of accepting our hands in marriage?” asked Neil. Hudson pulled an icy blue velvet ring box out of a secret pouch in his tuxedo hot pants and popped it open. Inside was a massive heart-shaped diamond flanked by two light blue sapphires cut to look like little bears.

“Of course, I will,” said Melissa. Hudson slipped the ring on her finger and lifted her up to kiss her. Melissa kissed Hudson and Neil. Hudson carried her off stage to thunderous applause.

“Well, ladies, be assured, that was not part of tonight’s program,” said the DJ, walking out onto the stage. “What you just witnessed tonight was a part of Bear Buns history. Remember, Bear Buns is the only place in the world where you can see the kind of show we put on, with hot bear shifters looking to complete their ménages by finding curvy women like you. Come back next week. Who knows which lucky lady might end up becoming a fated mate to another pair of our dancing bears?”