Bear With Me (BBW Paranormal Shifter Romance) by Jasmine White Page A
Authors: Jasmine White
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roommate’s recommendation – apparently she’d been going there every summer without fail for the past decade or so. I figured, if she can stand to spend time with her whole family with going completely stir crazy and want to keep going back, it must be something pretty special.
So far on our road trip, Mom was doing a pretty decent job of driving me mad. We’d been sitting in the car for two hours straight and she had not shut up for a single second. And it wasn’t interesting, two-way conversation, like you’d expect from your mother who you only saw once in a blue moon – she never once asked me anything about myself, about school or my friends or guys – it was just two solid hours of inane babble. She seemed to take great pleasure in providing a running commentary of our trip, like a broken discount GPS, pointing out everything from gas prices every time we passed a station to reading the number plates of the other cars around us, as if somewhere it contained crucial information.
Never had I been so grateful for the Delilah Show.
Everything was pitch black by the time we turned off onto the gravel road which lead us far away from the clamour of the highway and down into the secluded valley where our home would be for the next few days. As the rumble of cars grew quieter, so did the hum of silence thicken around us, broken only by the odd howl of coyotes and the eerie hooting of owls sounding high above us from the canopies of trees over our heads and the frost-capped mountains in the near distance. Even though it was no later in the year than mid-October, this far north it was practically winter. Thank god for thick fleece-lined sleeping bags is all I can say!
Even my mother had finally fallen quiet, her eyes wide as she peered out of her window into the darkness – perhaps as stunned as I that we had undertaken such an absurd trip. Camping in fall… even the voice in my head was derisive and disbelieving.
But we were there now and by god! We were going to make the best of it. Even if we killed ourselves in the process.
Mom hovered a little way off, her arms wrapped tightly around her thick middle in a useless attempt at warding off the night’s sharp chill as, by myself, I hauled all our equipment out of the trunk and began assembling the small pyramid of a tent – a relic from my school days when my class would be dragged out on the annual camping trip in a bid to make us well-rounded and self-sufficient individuals. My fingers were numb and stinging within seconds handling the thick metal poles. None of your new-fangled fibreglass nonsense for us! We were going old school here! Speaking of which…
“ Hey,” I called out over my shoulder to my mother, who was still doing her startled deer impression. “Go and find something we can make a fire with if you want to be useful.”
She hastened to obey, almost tripping over herself in her eagerness to do something that would make me happy. It was excruciating , the way she would grovel for praise. It was definitely for the best that she had never managed to have a man in her life, he would be able to trample all over her. For the millionth time, I gave sincere thanks that I was not like her.
But, still, I kept one ear sharpened for her as she shuffled off into the forest, quickly swallowed by the density of the trees, listening out for the crunch of paws that might signal danger. My friend had assured me that she had never come across a wolf or a bear or anything of the sort in all the years she had come here. The fiercest animal she had ever seen had been a fox snapping at the heels of a rabbit. But, nevertheless, I didn’t want to get complacent. You only get one mother in your lifetime and, no matter how annoying mine was, I wasn’t about to lose her to a four-legged freak.
*
The silence around our makeshift camp fire was almost tangible. I sat silent and fuming, staring avidly at the flaming lump of molten marshmallow on the end
So far on our road trip, Mom was doing a pretty decent job of driving me mad. We’d been sitting in the car for two hours straight and she had not shut up for a single second. And it wasn’t interesting, two-way conversation, like you’d expect from your mother who you only saw once in a blue moon – she never once asked me anything about myself, about school or my friends or guys – it was just two solid hours of inane babble. She seemed to take great pleasure in providing a running commentary of our trip, like a broken discount GPS, pointing out everything from gas prices every time we passed a station to reading the number plates of the other cars around us, as if somewhere it contained crucial information.
Never had I been so grateful for the Delilah Show.
Everything was pitch black by the time we turned off onto the gravel road which lead us far away from the clamour of the highway and down into the secluded valley where our home would be for the next few days. As the rumble of cars grew quieter, so did the hum of silence thicken around us, broken only by the odd howl of coyotes and the eerie hooting of owls sounding high above us from the canopies of trees over our heads and the frost-capped mountains in the near distance. Even though it was no later in the year than mid-October, this far north it was practically winter. Thank god for thick fleece-lined sleeping bags is all I can say!
Even my mother had finally fallen quiet, her eyes wide as she peered out of her window into the darkness – perhaps as stunned as I that we had undertaken such an absurd trip. Camping in fall… even the voice in my head was derisive and disbelieving.
But we were there now and by god! We were going to make the best of it. Even if we killed ourselves in the process.
Mom hovered a little way off, her arms wrapped tightly around her thick middle in a useless attempt at warding off the night’s sharp chill as, by myself, I hauled all our equipment out of the trunk and began assembling the small pyramid of a tent – a relic from my school days when my class would be dragged out on the annual camping trip in a bid to make us well-rounded and self-sufficient individuals. My fingers were numb and stinging within seconds handling the thick metal poles. None of your new-fangled fibreglass nonsense for us! We were going old school here! Speaking of which…
“ Hey,” I called out over my shoulder to my mother, who was still doing her startled deer impression. “Go and find something we can make a fire with if you want to be useful.”
She hastened to obey, almost tripping over herself in her eagerness to do something that would make me happy. It was excruciating , the way she would grovel for praise. It was definitely for the best that she had never managed to have a man in her life, he would be able to trample all over her. For the millionth time, I gave sincere thanks that I was not like her.
But, still, I kept one ear sharpened for her as she shuffled off into the forest, quickly swallowed by the density of the trees, listening out for the crunch of paws that might signal danger. My friend had assured me that she had never come across a wolf or a bear or anything of the sort in all the years she had come here. The fiercest animal she had ever seen had been a fox snapping at the heels of a rabbit. But, nevertheless, I didn’t want to get complacent. You only get one mother in your lifetime and, no matter how annoying mine was, I wasn’t about to lose her to a four-legged freak.
*
The silence around our makeshift camp fire was almost tangible. I sat silent and fuming, staring avidly at the flaming lump of molten marshmallow on the end
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