Page 2 of Coveted By the Bear

I shrugged noncommittally. Really, I didn’t have an answer. Staring at Crazy Mira had never bothered me before. Now, it left a sick feeling in my stomach.

By the time I turned for the door, Mira had pushed her meager groceries onto the checkout counter. She was staring longingly at a miniature refrigerator filled with small cartons of milk as if they were stacks of Spanish gold.

“Fifteen seventy-six,” Bernard told her as he began to bag up the food.

“Oh,” she said softly. She counted the change that sat in the bowl of her palm. “I don’t have enough.” She looked at the goods like she was trying to decide which to put back.

She didn’t even ask for Bernard to cut her a break, and something about that struck me. Evan snickered from the counter in the back. Mira apparently heard him, too, because she threw a terrified glance in his direction. The problem was, I was in the midst of leaving and right in her line of sight. She froze when she saw me approaching. I didn’t mean to scare her. I was only headed for the door to hear the dinging of the bell that meant salvation from this uncomfortable situation.

I’d never actually looked at her face before. She did an impressive job hiding it with all of that thick, wavy, devil-black hair that cascaded down her back and brushed her hips. She always leaned forward a little, though whether it was to help gravity to pull her hair in front of her face or to look at the ground where she was walking, I couldn’t guess. Maybe both. And here she was, terrified. I was the cobra and she was the mouse. Not one of the black and white, hand-reared mice they sold at the feed store, but a gray, matted, feral mouse with teeth. She was the assumed victim none-the-less. I hated her for making me feel this way.

Why couldn’t she just act normal? Say hi to people? Join a conversation? Smile? It was a small town. Everybody knew everything about everybody, but you couldn’t get more people willing to help you than in a place like this.

Despite my anger, I pulled a five dollar bill out of my pocket. “Here,” I said as I laid it on the counter with her one dollar bills and coin change.

“No, thank you.” Her voice cracked on the last word like she hadn’t used it in a while. Mira cleared her throat and looked down. She pushed the five dollar bill back in my direction and took a package of frozen broccoli and a loaf of wheat bread out of the bags. “Now do I have enough?” she asked Bernard.

He shook his head. “Still a dollar ten short,” he said in a regretful tone.

“Just take the money,” I said a little too loudly. I was baffled. Why was I still standing here trying to help her? And why couldn’t she just take the stupid money and give us both an escape?

Mira flinched at the quiet snickering from behind me as if the sound were the crack of thunder in her ear. Her shoulders hunched inward when Evan asked me, “Caleb, what are you doing?”

She threw a determined look at me. “I can’t.”

I was already angry and should have just left. Instead, I gritted out, “You know, you really are as crazy as everyone says you are.”

I regretted the words before they finished leaving my lips. The look on her face was something I would never forget. I watched her drown in sadness, in fear, and humiliation. She wasn’t angry with me. She was disappointed in me, and somehow that made it worse. I wasn’t usually cruel, and her confusion at my reaction held me in place, unable to take my eyes from her sorrow. The laughter around us had her dark eyes darting from one grinning face to another. She leaned her head forward and stared at the ground for a moment before she scooped up her change and bolted out the front door.

“What about your groceries?” Bernard yelled after her.

The dinging of the bell was the ugliest sound I’d ever heard.

Chapter Two

Mira

Such a fine line was drawn between life and death. No one knew that better than me. I sighed as my stomach ached deeply, and I imagined myself completely hollow.

The low-lying ceiling above my head was dim in the early morning light and covered in plastic stars that still glowed at night despite their age. The room had belonged to my mother before it had been cast into my ownership. I stamped the thought of her down, shoving it behind the locked iron doors in my head. Sometimes, if I did it quickly enough, the pain would be locked away with her memories.

I rubbed my fingers along the puckered scars across my hip bones and wondered what kind of story they would tell to a man who had reason to look at them. I had nothing to worry about. It wasn’t as if the boys in town were beating down my door. I smiled privately. God, a fist against my crappy front door would obliterate it. I couldn’t hope for even that. People scurried away from me, whispering and shielding their babies, and men felt disinclined to chat with a girl made up entirely of wild hair and disturbing rumors.

In my defense, the hair was a gift from my mother. Damn genetics.

Mother. There it was again. I growled and rolled ungracefully off the side of the bed. My feet and hands hit the floor. Might as well dig around for some clean clothes while I was down here. The search lasted seconds. My uncle, and barely willing guardian, had decided clothes were a thing of necessity only. If he could have gotten away with letting me run around dressed like Mowgli from The Jungle Book, he would have set the precedence years ago. That idea had failed when I grew boobs.

Other than the three tossed shirts and the cutoff pair of jean shorts, my room was tidy. I had a tendency to keep the entire house neat. It was as if the chaos of my youth had driven me to organization in adulthood. Okay, so maybe twenty wasn’t adulthood to others, but I had grown up long ago. Honestly, I couldn’t remember ever being a child.

The first of the morning birds sang its song outside my window, and it made me miss the rooster. He had been delicious. The panes of window glass were streaked and warped with age, and the wood around them held the remnants of what was probably a lovely shade of light blue at some time in the room’s history. The walls were bare other than a few pictures I had ripped out of an overdue library book one night when I was feeling especially volatile. They were pinned side-by-side, two pictures of little huts propped above the ocean water with transparent floors to view the fish, squid, crabs, sea stars, and other stuff I couldn’t begin to venture a guess at because I’d never actually been to the ocean. I’d never been much of anywhere—an unfortunate by-product of my secrets.

Next to the ripped pages was a small map with a red thumb tack I had not-so-artfully stabbed between the words Bora Bora. Paradise. My escape. It was where my mind lent itself when things got so dark I couldn’t breathe for fear of dying.

The rest of my walls were just that. Walls. No paint, no decoration, and absolutely no personality to say it was Mira Fletcher’s room. Just wooden plank after splintered wooden plank that told the square of my room to stay where it was. The shabby floors here had as much chance of escape as I did.

I had asked Uncle Brady to fix up the room for me when I first moved in. He’d said, “Ain’t gonna happen, darlin’. Stuff’s more valuable if it’s original.”

I flared my nostrils at the heady scent of mold and wood rot and thoroughly disagreed.