ROMANCE: PARANORMAL ROMANCE: Coveted by the Werewolves (Paranormal MMF Bisexual Menage Romance) (New Adult Shifter Romance Short Stories) (86 page)

              Jen slipped into bed and started to drift off to sleep. Often times she would dream about the people she was involved with, and sometimes the dreams were disappointing, or about how things could so easily go wrong and she could end up getting hurt. But she knew that this time it wouldn't be that way. That she would drift off to sleep and instead of being assailed by terrible dreams and dark ideas she would sleep fitfully and wouldn't have anything to worry about at all as far as getting a good night sleep went. She almost wished Seth would have stayed, but she knew that giving into that wanting this early would only put a huge amount of stress of things. And that was the last thing that they needed. What she hoped happened wasn't important anymore either. She just needed to let go, to let things play out as they wanted to. There wasn't anything wrong with letting things go their own course. Especially if she wanted to keep Seth as a friend throughout all of this, she would have to keep to the straight and narrow of doing things like a person careful of the feelings of others, but in the way of just considering them, but also in the way of really taking into account that if things went bad that she wanted to be able to still talk to the person like a friend and hang out at the shop.

              Jen's dreams that night were pleasant, and when she woke in the morning she was glad that everything had gone the way it did. She got up and got ready for work, and right before she left she texted Seth a smiley face. He texted her back. All was right with the world.

THE END

Double Play

Maybe it’s because I’ve always loved the movies.  I follow the lives of celebrities as if I can call them up on the phone and say, “Hey, girl, did you see what they wrote about you in
People
?”  Researchers have proven that self-esteem goes down in girls around the time they reach puberty, when they start blossoming, so maybe my problem is that I never blossomed.

                      It’s an old story.

                      In the movie, the skinny girl always grows into this super-hot babe that all the guys who once wanted nothing to do with are suddenly clamoring all over themselves to get a taste of her cherry pie.  Because of course, she grows up free of bitterness and is able to put her ugly little past behind her.  She’s beautiful now—what does she need to hold onto that adolescent rage for?  Doors open for her as if by magic, people give her free stuff; somehow she never seems to think about the fact that looks are a transient thing, something that is evidenced by her own personal life story.

                      It’s a myth that it’s good to be skinny, by the way.  My dad always used to say, “A man’s not a dog, he’s not going to go chasing after a bag of bones,’ but then, my father has never been particularly sensitive to what was going on in his household.  Never mind the fact that I weighed about ninety pounds soaking wet and was the exact embodiment of the “bag of bones.”

                      Men crave curves, and so, I crave them, too.  Curves are substantial, curves are power.  This pop psychologist once wrote that men like women with bigger breasts because the older they get, the easier it is to tell their age—and therefore their fertility—by the droop of their mammaries.   So pretty much, if we were all going around braless in these modern times, I would be the one that would confuse all the men, given that I’ve been a member of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee ever since high school and never managed to evolve into the far reaches of my bra cups.  But in this day and age of push-ups, the caveman inside the man can no longer tell the difference between an old, less fertile female and a fecund one, so all the big, beautiful women of the world stay big and beautiful, marked by the ancient mark of femininity in all the right places for far longer than they would ordinarily have.

                      With curves comes confidence.  Take my friend Marissa, for example.  People who say big girls aren’t for everyone haven’t met Marissa.  She’s a big girl—never diets, never goes near an elliptical if she can help it, but she’s got those plus-size model curves that belong plastered on billboards everywhere.  Instead of selling those full Jolie mouth tubules and fine stretches of gorgeously tanned skin, she decides to go and become a reporter.  Seriously.  I see men go damn near looney tunes when they realize that the substantial woman with light green eyes framed by a hedge of dark brown lashes has a brain and if they don’t stop staring at the fold of her cleavage sometime soon, they’re going to be portrayed in a deeply unflattering light in a bigshot newspaper column.

                      Not that Marissa’s a monster, not by any means.  She writes the truth with a dash of tact, if not mercy, and it’s this in addition to the generous swell of her hips that gets the guys.  Every time she interviews a man, from a hotdog stand owner to a famous hockey player, the variety of reactions falls somewhere on the continuum of anywhere from a long, lingering look to an offer to have dinner in Paris.

                      Marissa laughs about it all.

                      “I’m a novelty to them,” she says of the more famous of her interviewees.  “They expect big girls to shudder into their Blue Bunny ice cream because nobody loves them, and then they meet me and I love me.  Men can’t resist a challenge, and they perk up at novelty.  It’s a scientifically proven fact.”

                      Told you she was smart.

                      Before you say anything, I would just like to point out that a little healthy competition is good for friendship.

                      Marissa and I met when she was interviewing the head of my company, which tests new cleaning liquids before they’re sent out to major warehouses.  I watched her waltz out of the president’s office like she owned it, and he followed her like a dazed puppy dog, which was certainly a big change from the man who was screeching at me to fill my quota just an hour previously.  He was trying to chat her up, and I could see his eyes lingering on her ass as she walked, a fact that didn’t seem to bother her one bit.  She had just taken the elevator to the first floor when I realized she had dropped her scarf, some white, lush, silky thing on the ground.

                      Before I knew it, I was chasing her down the parking lot, that gorgeous scarf in my hand.  I finally reached her when she was unlocking her car, and she gave me a minute to collect myself before speaking.  Since I couldn’t stop huffing and puffing like an inbred dog, she solved the matter for the both of us.

                      “Oh, that’s mine!” she cried out in this honey-toned voice, and scooped her scarf from my outstretched hand.  “You’re a dear, thank you!  You know, this was a very important gift from a very important senator, and I would have missed it very much—are you okay?”

                      I stopped huffing long enough to nod and bend over at the waist, propping myself up on my knees.  Skinny I might be, but in shape was certainly not something I could add to my resume.

                      She considered me for a moment.  “You work in there, don’t you?”

                      “Chemical engineer,” I finally managed to sputter out, a little in awe of the head to toe white on white suit she had on.

                      She nodded.  “And you came out all this way to give me back my scarf.  That’s the sign of a good person.”  And then she got into her car and drove away.

                      When she called two days later asking me if I would like to go to this fancy gala dinner she was invited to, I didn’t even think about how she got my number at the office.  I was so glad to have such an empowering female friend that I nodded empathically into the receiver for a full minute before realizing she couldn’t see me.

                      It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

                      I watched her handle people.  Handle as in they were putty in her well-manicured, smooth as honey fingers.  She glided through that gala introducing me to people as if we had been buddies for years, for which I was eternally grateful.  For the first time, people looked at me.  So what if their eyes quickly slid off of me in my shapeless black dress to Marissa, who glowed like a jewel in her pale lavender gown?  If I was popular by association, well then, I didn’t care.

                      Did I?

                      As I sat at the gala table stuffing myself with paper-thin slices of roast beef, I wondered who it was that Marissa reminded me of.  I mean, I knew, even then, but I didn’t want to admit it out loud.  It was only when I saw Marissa lean on this guy’s arm that I finally knew.  Watching her, gorgeous white teeth flashing as she gripped his muscular arm, made me realize she was like Chrissy.  Except, as I was to find out, significantly kinder.  They both had that thing about them, the one that made men hang on their every word as if it was a pearl exiting the lips of an oyster shell.  Except Chrissy had used it for what I considered evil.

                      It all started with Rob.

                      Have you ever seen that movie
Riding in the Car with Boys
?  Well, picture me being Drew Barrymore and Rob being that jock she’s got it bad for.  Except that I was a bony little thing and Rob was actually nice to me.  He had it all going for him, I swear to God.  He had this long blond hair and these squinty little blue eyes that were the same color as my lightest jeans.  His mouth was the stuff of daydreams; it was sour-looking and hot, as if he rode a motorcycle and could drive you to madness with little nibbles of his teeth.

                      Needless to say, he was the stuff of my daydreams.

                      I can’t even tell you exactly when it began.  I mean, obviously I noticed him first—he was easily six feet tall and had these wide, graceful shoulders off of which he slung his backpack casually, as if he didn’t give a single damn that he was in school.  He was never afraid to speak his mind in class, which ironically, made our creative writing teacher love him.

                      “I don’t get poetry, okay?” he burst out at the start of one of our units.  “Why can’t people just say what they mean?”

                      That stopped our class short.  He had a point; poetry is always couched in these vague, half-certain terms, perfect for the passive-aggressive sort like me.  I looked at him with new eyes.  Sure, he was the head quarterback and nobody had any idea what he was doing in the middle of such a “feminine” class, but because he produced the necessary work and never talked about the work of his classmates outside of the class, nobody minded much. Besides, the rest of the guys in that class were a reedy-looking bunch, all messed-up hair and huge glasses, mouth-breathers, every last one of them.  So yeah, he was our eye candy, and I would base most of my male leads off of him and those ripped Metallica T-shirts he wore, exposing adolescent rippling biceps.

                      The day he said that, though, I forgot myself for a moment and treated him like he was any one of those other male nerds.

                      “Sometimes, it’s hard to say the things you want to say.  Not everybody is that brave, okay?”  I hissed at him in response, loud enough for the class to hear.  Everyone turned around and looked at me in shock; you don’t piss off beauty for the danger of scaring it off, and now it seemed I had just done that.

                      Rob just looked at me curiously, though, his blue eyes mild.  As I slunk lower in my seat out of embarrassment, I noticed his sustained gaze and wondered whether or not I would be hearing from the cheerleaders, the football team’s groupies soon, and whether or not I should just vanish from this Earth altogether.

                      After class, I gathered all my books to my chest and tried to slink out of the class without anyone noticing.  I had just entered the hallway and breathed a sigh of relief when Rob stepped towards me and I realized he had been waiting for me the whole time.

                      “I get what you said in there,” he told me, as my heart thudded inside my chest and the blood roared in my ears.  “Sometimes, using other words lets you say what you wanted to say all along, but were afraid to.  You’re not hiding from what you feel, you’re gearing up to be direct.”

                      Mutely, I nodded, unable to look him in the eyes.  He took that as agreement and seemed to gaze off thoughtfully.  “Claire?’ I heard him ask, and tentatively, I looked up at him.  His eyes threatened to swallow me whole, to drown me in a sea of tenderness, so soft was the look he gave me then.

                      I cleared my throat.  “Yes?” I asked, hardly above a whisper.

                      “I hope you finally find the strength to be direct,” he said, and walked away.

                      It was one of those moments that you never think can actually exist.  One of the ones that changes you forever.  It’s that moment when you get a look inside somebody’s soul, and you find that no matter what your external differences are—here, it was that I was a skinny little nobody and he was the school hunkathon—that underneath, you’re really all humans, after all.

                      It was slow going at first.  He would volunteer to be in my peer-review groups in creative writing class, and give me truly insightful commentary.  Then he mentioned that he liked to go walks after every game, and invited me to one.  Before I knew what was happening, we were talking all the time.  I would gather up my courage and call him on weeknights after football practice, and he would tell me about how his dad had split after his mom started drinking, and now he lived with his uncle, who was pretty much never around.  I would read him my poems, still not brave enough to tell him that they were all about him.