“Seriously,” he said, the second she stirred awake the next morning. “What the hell happened?”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “You a little flustered, sweetheart?”

“You keep calling me that. Sweetheart.”

She hummed in agreement and rolled over to face him. Caroline felt delightfully loose and light. The thrumming frustration and irritation she’d felt for Tre had been thoroughly fucked out of her last night. She’d said her piece, made him hear it the best she could possibly do. If he turned away from her now, she figured she’d take the heartbreak on the chin and know that she’d done the best she could. She couldn’t be responsible for his decisions. The rest was up to him.

“No one has ever called me sweetheart before.”

“Really?” She steepled her hands under one cheek and just watched him. He stared at the ceiling. One of his hands was clenched in his hair and the other laid flat across her thigh.

He nodded. “Really. Not even my mother.”

“What did she call you instead?”

“Theodore.”

“What!?” Caroline laughed, a quick bubbling chuckle. “Why?”

“Because that’s my name. My real name. Theodore Rowley Sullivan the Third.”

She clamped down greedily on this piece of information. It filled her up and made her sad all at once. She knew so little about her lover. She was desperate for more. “Where did Tre come from?”

“The Third. Number three. Tre. It’s a family thing, I guess. I have a cousin they call Tre because he’s the third as well.”

“Huh. But your mother called you…”

“Theodore, yeah. Or Teddy sometimes. I used to pretend that I hated that. Being a ginger, I didn’t need to give the other kids any more reason to ridicule me. And allowing your mother to call you Teddy is signing your own death certificate. But I always secretly liked it.”

“What was your mother like?”

“She was… cuddly. And really, really strict. She’d lay down the law and stick to it. But always with a big hug or a back scratch or a kiss. She made sure I fell in line, but she was sweet about it.”

“She died when you were young.”

“Yeah. And then it was just me and Pop.” He paused and she knew better than to interrupt. “Who was neither cuddly nor strict. He let me do whatever the hell I wanted and barely noticed. He couldn’t pay attention to me to save his life. Or mine.”

“So as soon as you got out of there, you did.” So they both knew what abandonment felt like. Emotional abandonment, at least. The slow melting away of someone who is supposed to love you. Simply a physical presence where there should have been love.

“Yeah.”

“And you went and made yourself all colorful so that no one could ignore you ever again.” She traced his tattoos with one firm finger.

“Oh. I guess I never thought about it that way.”

“I know what it feels like to be ignored, Tre. I would never, ever do that to you.”

“I know.”
“Are you gonna do that to me? Even if you think it’s for my own good?”

He paused for a really long time until she sat up and faced him. Her knees were curled under her and her palms were planted flat on the bed. She was naked but it was her face that his eyes watched.

“Do you think I’m dumb?” she asked him.

“No! God, no.”

“Alright, so naive then?”

“No. Not naive. You’ve been through a marriage, a divorce. I don’t think anyone could leave those experiences as naive.”

“Innocent?”

He paused in a way that told her she’d hit the nail on the head. “Well,” he said eventually. “Yeah, I guess.”

“So,” she folded her hands over her lap and spoke slowly. “That’s why you think you can make decisions for me? That’s why what Arturo said hit you so hard? Because you think that I wouldn’t break up with you if you were bad for me? You think that if the demon came for me, I’d be so helpless that you’d have no choice but to sacrifice yourself on the altar of my soul?”

“Well, when you put it like that…”
“Not so complimentary, huh?” She sighed for a long time. “Tre, there’s a lot more to love than sacrifice.”

He went still beside her. He was looking right into her face, but she could see that his mind was racing, his eyes unseeing.

She thought there was a chance that she should slow down, let him digest this all a little bit. But she’d popped the champagne. She had to say it all now. “I think you worry that if you couldn’t love me perfectly you just shouldn’t love me at all. But the real point is that you care about yourself enough to try. You think you’re doing me a favor by pulling back. You’re saving me from some future heartbreak. But really, you’re just forcing me to carry both of our weights through this, Tre. When instead you could just be steadily at my side. Carrying some of this burden.”

Tre sat up suddenly, making her tip to one side. He jumped out of bed and dragged on his pants. Caroline quickly followed, pulling her pajamas on. “Tre!”

But he was out of the bedroom and striding toward the living room where the group was sitting, eating a late breakfast and talking in low, serious voices.

Arturo was there as well, frowning at something that Martine was saying to him.

“What happened to Amelia?”

Tre’s voice was loud and froze the room, including Caroline, coming in hot behind him.

Tre’s eyes bored into Arturo’s. “Tell me,” he demanded. “What happened to her after you pulled your hero act?”

Arturo looked at him, a bored expression on his face, but there was an incensed anger there as well, at the edges. “She lived her life. Eventually she died.”

“Tell me the truth!” Tre said through clenched teeth. He’d had enough of this horseshit from Arturo. This entire thing with Caroline was hanging in the balance and Arturo had answers. Tre needed them. “Just for once in your life, don’t be a deceitful asshole and just tell me what really happened.”

Arturo rose up quickly and the chair he’d been sitting on fell backwards. Blue energy crackled at his fingertips. The group seemed to be holding their breath for his reaction. A second passed, Arturo’s black eyes glaring into Tre’s green ones. Then Arturo turned, righted his chair and sat back down.

“You want to know what happened to Amelia? She was heartbroken. She didn’t take care of herself for almost a decade. She was lost over me. Just like I was over her. Eventually she married a nice man. One who was kind to her. But she didn’t have children and she didn’t ever find the kind of happiness that she and I had had. She died an old woman. Heart failure.”

“Did you make the right choice?” Tre asked, his voice hoarse. “When you sacrificed yourself for her. Did you make the right choice?”

Arturo dropped his head into one hand. “There is no way to beat the demon. Someone has to make the choice. I thought I was saving her. But really, I was just condemning her to a different kind of hell.”

The room was silent. No one’s eyes sought one another’s. Eventually, Tre felt a smooth, warm hand grip his. Caroline. He gripped her fingers right back. He tipped his head and stared down into her face. I understand, he wanted to say to her, but Arturo was standing back up again.

He strode to the edge of the living room, his back to the group. “You want in my head so badly?” He spit out the words toward the men. “You want to see what a man with half a soul feels like on the inside? Then by all means. Let’s go.”

 

***

 

There were four bears on the field. One of them horribly terrifying. The others were beautiful in their own rights.

A hawk swooped over top of them and caught the sunlight. Martine was so beautiful in her hawk form, Caroline thought as she watched the bears in the distance. Beautiful, but alone. She couldn’t communicate with the bears the way they could with one another. She was perpetually on the outside. Lonely.

But her attention was drawn to the bears as a blue light pulsed out from Arturo, almost invisible in the bright sun. It flung itself over all the bears and landed in a tent over top of them—they were inside the sphere of it.

“Wow,” Celia and Thea whispered from beside Caroline.

Arturo had no idea why he was doing this. His anger at the group had burned out. He hated that they’d made him tell his story. Riled himself up enough to speak about Amelia. But why had he insisted on showing anyone this rotted, torn away part of himself?

He’d been keeping it locked up for so long that opening himself up to them was like trying to open a door that had been grown over with a century’s worth of ivy. It was like digging himself out of his own coffin.

He just wanted to stay buried.

But as he watched his energy tuck in around them all, he figured that they’d come this far. These people were convinced that he had answers for them. Maybe, when he showed them who he truly was, they’d back off.              

None of the bears enjoyed the feeling of being surrounded by Arturo’s energy. It created a buzzing tension within each of them. It made Jean Luc want to fight. Made Jack want to find Thea and make sure she was a million miles away from all this. It made Tre want to sprint for miles. If they were being honest, it wasn’t a terrible feeling. It was just a strange, semi-out-of-control feeling.

“Alright,” came Arturo’s voice in their heads, complete with the horrible screeching static that always came with it.

The bears stood three in a row, all facing Arturo. It was Tre who stepped forward, swung around to form a half-circle with Arturo. Jean Luc did the same on the other side until all four bears were connected in a circle, the blue energy pulsing all around them. It was hard to read the face of a giant monster death-bear, but Tre thought that Arturo looked a little surprised by the move.

Regardless, Tre could feel the other two reaching out with their feelings toward Arturo, and he did the same. And came up against the exact same wall they’d been feeling for weeks now. All at once, though, with a downward contraction, like it caused him great pain, Arturo brought down that internal wall. And he let them in.

Tre’s eyes slammed shut as he felt what Arturo was feeling. Anger, that was the first and foremost. And pain. Arturo experienced a kind of low-level constant hum of cosmic pain that Tre couldn’t imagine having experienced for all these years. It almost made sense why the guy was such a dick.

Tre shifted through Arturo’s emotions and felt Jack stiffen suddenly beside him. A second later, Tre knew why. Because he’d found what Arturo was talking about. Deep within Arturo was the ragged edge of his soul where the demon had torn it away. It was noxious and toxic, like opening the door to a room where a corpse had lain in decay. There was something within Arturo that was rotting away. But never fully dying.

Tre fought hard not to recoil and he could feel his two brothers doing the same.

“This is what I am. This is what you seek help from. I’m not a man anymore. I’m half monster.” A moment later, the wall resumed. Arturo snapped it back into place. And his bear form was gone.

He fell to all fours in his human form, naked and trembling. Arturo hung his dark head and slammed one fist on the ground. “Why won’t you just let me be? Just let me be.”             

 

***

 

Arturo had already disappeared back into the house when the three others communicated in their heads with one another. It horrified them to see what the demon had done to Arturo’s soul. Jack and Jean Luc shifted back into their human forms. Tre, however, stayed in his bear form. He ambled alongside his human brothers until they got to the porch of the homestead where the women waited for them.

“I think he’s hoping you’ll join him, darlin’,” Jack said to Caroline.

Wide-eyed, she stepped off the porch and took a few steps toward Tre. He huffed out a deep breath that made her jump a little and then giggle at her own reaction. She jumped again when Jean Luc hoisted her upwards.

She suddenly found herself about six unexpected feet off the ground. “I’m riding a bear,” Caroline said in a tone as delighted as it was perplexed. Beneath her, Tre chuffed in amusement and slowly turned to amble towards the woods lining one side of Thea’s property.

“Don’t go far!” Celia couldn’t help but call out behind them.

Caroline nodded, turning around to wave at everyone, and then just sort of snuggled in to Tre’s long fur. It was thicker and coarser than she might have thought, but no less inviting. He was kicking off just as much heat as he did in his human form. Caroline couldn’t help but just sort of scratch at him, like he was a big…

“Teddy bear!” she chirped. “Oh my gosh, Tre. Your mom used to call you Teddy and now you’re literally a bear!”

She clapped her hands together and laughed. A noise rumbled out of him and Caroline could have sworn it was a chuckle. They got to the edge of the woods and Tre kept going. He seemed to know exactly where he was taking her. Caroline marveled at the beauty of his animal side. The grace and natural rhythm of his gait. He was perfect as a bear. She loved it.

They walked quietly for another twenty minutes before they came to a clearing in the woods. She hadn’t realized that they’d been going uphill, but she hadn’t been paying much attention to their surroundings, either. Tre slowly sat down and she slid off of his back. When she turned, she realized that he’d taken her into the hills, to a rise that overlooked Thea’s homestead and the miles of rolling landscape that surrounded it. The afternoon sun was bright and they were dappled with the shadows of the leaves that canopied over them.

“Wow,” she breathed and only turned back around when she heard a sound behind her.

It was Tre, back in his human form.

“It’s beautiful,” she told him, turning back around to the view. “Is this where you come when you disappear for a while?” He often did. She’d noticed that he needed more alone time than the rest of them did.

“Yes.” He came up behind her and plastered himself to her back, his arms going around her waist. They were quiet for a long minute, just watching the view. “Caroline. I’m always going to be a bear shifter. From here on out.”

“I know.”

“And who knows what the hell that means, right? Am I going to have to move out of Brooklyn? Probably. To someplace where I can shift regularly without anyone noticing. God. I have some money, but not very much. And if you really want me to, I’ll try to find a different line of work, a more legal one. But… that’ll mean I have even less money.”

She tried to turn and look at him but he held her fast, facing away.

“My house—” he gulped, as if the things he was saying were extremely difficult to get out. “My house isn’t great. I never needed anything special. So it’s just a little two-room apartment in Bushwick. My neighbors are kind of loud. It’s a bachelor pad, you know?”

“Okay,” she said slowly, carefully.

“I never see my dad. Like, never. I spoke to him on the phone about eight months ago. The conversation was probably 45 seconds long. And I hadn’t spoken to him for a year before that. As far as I know, he’s still living in Queens. But if he’d moved, I don’t think he even would have told me.” He paused and squeezed her a little tighter. “I never celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas. Sometimes I’ll get drunk on New Year’s with a few friends. I never go on vacations.”

“Tre.” She turned and this time he let her. She was very disturbed by what she saw on his face. He looked broken.

“The only thing I can give you, Caroline, is myself. And I don’t even know how to do that. I’m obviously bad at it. I’ve been trying so hard the last few weeks to show you how I feel and you still looked shocked when Arturo told you how much I care about you.” His voice broke for a second and she realized he was squinting so hard because he didn’t have his glasses on. “Is it selfish to want you? To inflict myself on you when you deserve somebody without all these hang-ups? I don’t know. But I know that I can’t make the decision for you. Isn’t that what Arturo did with Amelia? He made the decision for her and made both of them miserable. So, I just want you to have all the information. And then you can decide.”

Caroline blinked up at him, taking in that face of his that she’d come to care so deeply for. She loved his coppery facial hair, his thick eyebrows. She loved the winging lines at the corners of his eyes. She even loved the deep concern and worry that was radiating out of him right now. It was very, very Tre.

“You haven’t given me all the information,” she told him after a long minute of studying him.

“What do you mean?”

“You left out a really big part.”

“Which part?”

“The part where you love me,” she told him.

Now it was his turn to blink. She watched panic flit across his face. He tamped it down with a strangely neutral expression that gave way to something like bright fear. He took a ragged breath. “I love you?” he asked her, his voice hoarse and torn off at the edges.

“Pretty sure,” she nodded. She bit her lips to keep from smiling, but it was hard. “I’m pretty sure that’s what this is.”

“Huh.” He was trying to play it cool, she could tell. But then he audibly gulped. She could see his pulse banging in his throat and she wondered if he realized just how tightly he was gripping her hips. Like he was hanging on for dear life.

“You freaking out a little bit?” she asked him gently.

“Ah. Yeah. Just a little bit.”

She anchored her hands at his elbows and helped him down to a seated position. Which she enjoyed, considering he was butt-ass naked. He put his elbows on his knees and she watched while his hands shook. Caroline gently took Tre by the back of his head and guided his head between his knees.

“Just give it a minute,” she told him and then occupied herself with the gorgeous view.

After a few minutes, he spoke. “This has got to be the least cool thing I’ve ever done. Seriously, this is humiliating.”

She laughed. “Why?”

“Caroline, in a perfect world, I would have figured out I loved you on my own and then told you on top of the Eiffel Tower, or at a candlelit dinner, or like, on a gondola or something. But instead, you had to tell me what the fuck was going on. And now I’m naked and hyperventilating on the side of a mountain. I’m a complete dork. And an idiot. I’m an idiot dork.”

“An idiot dork who loves me.”

With that he finally lifted his head and looked at her. His voice was still a little shaky but his eyes were steady as he locked gazes with her. “An idiot dork who loves you.”

She couldn’t stop her smile then, or the happy laughter that came with it. She immediately crawled onto his lap and flung her arms around his neck.

“Caroline, everything else I said still stands. I don’t consider myself a catch.”

She reared back and pinned him with an annoyed stare. “I wish you would. Because from where I’m sitting, you absolutely are. You’re good at your job. Loyal, funny, kind. You’re brave. You want me. You pay attention to me. My God! Tre, you listen when I talk, no matter what I’m talking about. I mean, you’re everything that I want. But I can’t believe in you for the both of us. You have to help me carry that burden, okay? Self-confidence is extremely important.”

“Self-confidence,” he repeated, as if he’d never quite considered the concept before. “I’m a confident person when it comes to almost everything.”

“Except for your ability to love,” she finished the thought for him. “But I figure some therapy will probably fix you right up on that front. And some time. And a relationship with me. Give it a couple years, you’ll be right as rain.”

“Therapy,” he repeated, as if it were yet another concept he’d never even considered.

“I think I probably need some, too,” she told him. “Hey! We’ll go together.”

He laughed at the expression on her face and at the entire situation. “I love you,” he told her and this time it was with certainty. He still felt like someone had unplugged a bathtub in the middle of his belly, but he figured that feeling was bound to subside sometime or another.

“I love you,” she told him. “Very much.” She nodded her head once, as if she were putting punctuation at the end of her thought. I love you very much. Period. Full stop. No asterisks. No room for any sidebars or parentheses. It just was what it was.

Tre took a deep breath and just let his heart race itself into the future. “What if I’m bad at it? What if I bring you pain and heartache?”

“Well,” she bit her lip. “I guess that’s just life, right? And I’m capable of getting over pain and heartache. Are you?”

“Capable of getting over you if I have to?” He thought for a second. “No. Absolutely not. If I wrecked things with you, it would wreck me.”

She shook her head. “If we broke up, I wouldn’t let you get wrecked, Tre. Just like you wouldn’t let me get wrecked. Right? You’d never abandon me?”

“Of course not. I’ll always, always be here for you, Caroline. In any capacity that I can be.” He held his breath for a second and then let it out on a bit of a laugh. “Wait a second, are we arranging our break up right now?”             

She laughed too. “I guess?”

“I don’t want to break up,” he told her, pressing his forehead against hers and staring into her eyes at such close range everything was just a honey brown blur.

“Me neither.”

“No, love,” he told her quietly. “I don’t want to break up ever.”

“Me neither,” she repeated in a hushed voice.

His hands shook at her back so he flattened his palms against her. “If we survive this thing, I don’t want to break up.” He was really having trouble verbalizing this feeling that was trying to bang its way out of him. So, he found himself just repeating the words. “Like, ever.”

She laughed at him, at herself. At their naked, hyperventilating, unexpectedly romantic declarations to one another.

“I’m in,” she told him. “I’m in for not breaking up ever.”

“Okay.” He let out a long breath. His pulse still jumped like crazy in his throat. She could see the green leaves of his tattoo seeming to beat with life. “I guess that makes you my girlfriend?”

“You have to ask.”

“Will you be my girlfriend?”

“Yes,” she nodded that punctuation nod again. And kissed the hell out of him.