So Much To Bear: Shifting Devotions (Werebear Erotic Romance)
Read So Much To Bear: Shifting Devotions (Werebear Erotic Romance) Online
Authors: Bethany Rousseau
So Much To Bear
Shifting Devotions
By Bethany Rousseau
“So then, no clothes in the bedroom, but anywhere else in the house, clothes.” Damon nodded.
“Good compromise.” He tugged her jeans down over her hips quickly, smiling into her eyes as he stripped her naked. Jennifer liked the new, fresher clothes she had bought him in their first week out of the forest together; she had let him pick out the things he liked from the sale section of a discount clothing store. Jennifer had been pleased at the fact that Damon had innate taste, picking things that were not only durable but also sexy on him. She began to slip his clothes off as Damon trailed his lips down from her mouth to her neck, down along the tops of her breasts, lavishing attention all over her body and making her tingle everywhere. Her pussy was getting wetter and wetter by the moment, heating up and tightening and Jennifer was more than a little pleased with herself when she felt the hard ridge of Damon’s erection pressing against her, digging into her thigh as her lover moved lower.
The sequel to this story is available now!
So Much To Bear: Avenging Instincts (Werebear Erotic Romance)
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It had been a few days since Jennifer had taken Damon out of the forest, taking charge of him and bringing him out of his existence as a hermit and into regular human society. The first night they had been in the hotel together, Jennifer had been positively giddy, excited to introduce him to the pleasures and conveniences of the modern world. He had, after all, been living in a cave when she had met him; and before that the level of technology his clan had was comparable to the middle of the 20
th
century—not exactly up to date, though he knew somewhat about the existence of more advanced tech.
But after her initial excitement at the thought of ushering Damon into the twenty first century had started to wear off, Jennifer’s responsibilities crept back into her mind. She would have to eventually go back to school; she wasn’t about to give up on her degree, even though she was in love with Damon. “I want you to go back to the city your university is in,” Damon had insisted when she had broached the topic tentatively, lying in his arms the third night after they had fled the town—and the woods that bordered it, Damon’s home—together. “I want to go with you. You shouldn’t have to give anything up for me, Jenn. We can do this together.” She was impressed with how quickly he had begun picking up the complexities of modern life; Damon had been thrilled with the idea of room service, and understood immediately why a gratuity was considered necessary, not just a courtesy. When they had left the hotel, careful not to attract attention to themselves, Jennifer had taken him to a clothing store to get him a few things that didn’t mark him as a long-time hermit, Damon had managed to go with the flow.
He had followed her lead, but so imperceptibly that anyone watching them—at least, Jennifer thought—would have just considered them a normal couple, going about their business in the town. But it was a whole different situation to how it would be once they were in the city where her university was located. The town they had fled to was almost a mirror of where Jennifer had grown up; it was small, not heavily populated, and from the hotel, everything they could need was within a reasonable walking distance. The city that held her university was much larger—and there would be no way for her to keep Damon at her side while she was in school. She lived on campus and there were strict rules about outside guests. Damon would have to be able to fend for himself in a much larger city, to navigate and deal with public transportation, handle money, and not get himself into trouble. Thus far, she had handled the money for everything they needed to pay for; if Damon was going to live in the city, he would have to have money to spend—he would need to buy things while she wasn’t there.
Jennifer had taught him about money the first night; Damon had vague knowledge of it from the limited socialization his clan had had with the town she’d lived in. He knew the idea of money, the basic concept and how it worked, but he’d never had much use for it personally. Amongst the clan everything was done by trade and barter, and when his kith and kin had all died out, Damon had chosen to make whatever he could—and if he couldn’t make something, he lived without it. The result of that lack of education was that he had no idea of what reasonable prices were for anything. He simply didn’t have the life experience to be able to know if something was overpriced—and when Jennifer had taken him on a brief shopping expedition, not only to get him newer, more current clothes, but also to expose him little by little to the world, he had been shocked at the cost of a pair of jeans, but not at all startled at the expensive prices on a menu posted outside of a restaurant.
“The city my school is in is… it’s a lot bigger, busier… it’s a different kind of place to here,” Jennifer told Damon. “I can’t just drop you off at a hotel there and expect you to be able to thrive on your own.” Damon shrugged.
“Why not?” he asked her, his hands trailing over her body in a possessive, loving caress. “After all, I’m catching on pretty quickly here.” Jennifer thought about the fact that—for at least her first few weeks away at college, when she had left home for the first time—she had, herself been bewildered by the city. It had taken her a while to get to know the landmarks, to adjust to how far away everything seemed to be, the shift in prices, all of the myriad of differences compared to the small town she had known all of her life. How much more difficult would it be for Damon, who had never really been used to regular human society, who had grown up in the woods with his fellow were-bears for company and who had had an instinctive distrust of all regular humans right up until they had come together? Damon would be eaten alive, Jennifer thought. The shopkeepers would take advantage of him, he’d get lost on the bus—the only thing she wasn’t particularly worried about was the possibility of him being attacked or injured by someone else; Damon could certainly fend for himself.
“I have an idea,” Jennifer said, kissing Damon lightly on the lips. “We’ll check out from here and we’ll go into the city together tomorrow. We’ll rent a room and I’ll spend the next couple of days teaching you about city life and how to get around, so you won’t be stuck at the hotel all day while I’m in school.” There were plenty of other girls on campus whose dorm rooms were more or less a formality. While the housing rules prevented keeping any guests in the dorm for longer than a few nights—and guests who were not relatives could be declined by the administration at any time—there were no rules about how many nights a week, month, or semester a girl had to stay in the dorms. As long as the room was empty on move-out day, and as long as the fees were paid, the administration didn’t care whether someone was or was not actually sleeping in their own bed. Jennifer could get Damon situated, and then meet up with him wherever they managed to find him a place to stay, as often as possible. She counted her blessings that she didn’t have any late-night classes like one of her roommates had had the previous semester.
“Is it really so different?” Damon asked her. Jennifer was delighted by his curiosity, his hunger to learn more about the broader world. She thought it was interesting—almost amusing—that in spite of the fact that he was unquestionably partly an animal, he was courteous and polite as a default, pleasant to every clerk, cashier, waiter, or other employee they ever had to deal with. It certainly smoothed the way among the employees they had dealt with in the town so close to her own, but in the city Damon would need to cultivate more of an ability to draw on his territorial, stern bear traits.
“It’s hard to explain just the magnitude of how different it is.” The university wasn’t in a huge city—it wasn’t a New York, or even a Chicago or Miami, but it was a major metropolitan area, and Jennifer didn’t want Damon to be miserable—culture-shocked, trapped in a hotel room because he didn’t know how to get around, dependent on her not only for love but also for money, entertainment, and everything else. She knew too that—since Damon had always been self-sufficient, trapping and gathering his own food, washing his own clothes by hand, building his own furniture—he would resent like hell a lifestyle that didn’t afford him the opportunity to move about freely and make his own choices. But she wanted to make sure that he knew what choices there were, how they worked, what was at stake. Eventually they would integrate him completely into society, and he could get a job, they could get an apartment together—somewhere. Since Damon didn’t have a degree, his ability to get work would be limited to trades and other non-degree-requiring spots, and Jennifer was both hoping that he would find a job of his own, and dreading the process and his disappointment when he compared the effort he was putting in to the money he was receiving.
It would potentially be better if Jennifer could get work as an anthropologist studying the developing world; Damon’s skills would help him fit in among societies where there was still a premium on building your own home, maintaining self-sufficiency, where electricity was inconsistent and technology was more strictly utilitarian. But it would be a while yet before she could even contemplate that option; she was only finishing her basic degree—Jennifer would need to go to graduate school in order to really be able to participate in real ethnographic study. In the meantime, Damon had to be able to participate in the society he had joined her in. So she had to teach him not just generally about regular human society, but about how completely different life in the city was. They lay in bed together, starting to assemble a plan.
“So what’s the biggest difference between the city you’re in for university and here?” Damon asked her, hands trailing over her body in casually possessive caresses. Jennifer considered the question.
“It’s bigger. I mean, that’s sort of an obvious thing, but I don’t know if there’s another way to explain it. Two of these towns would fit inside of the city where my college is.” She called up the city to mind, thinking about the things that had caused her flashes of culture shock. “There are tons of people there. Way more than here or even the other town. It’s never really completely quiet, you know? Things slow down but there’s always someone out and about.” Damon nodded slowly.
“What else?” Jennifer considered what they had already gone through in terms of socializing Damon to regular human life in the town, comparing it to the way things were in the city.
“People aren’t as personable. They aren’t exactly mean, but they don’t really—there are so many people that they don’t know each other, they don’t particularly care about each other. In some ways, it’ll be easier for you that way… you’d be just another stranger to everyone.” As people from outside of the town, they were both conspicuous in a way that they wouldn’t be in the city; Jennifer worried frequently that they might run into someone from the other town—that she would be recognized, that Damon would be.
“You seem to like it better there,” Damon observed, turning her onto her side to face him. He kissed her lightly on the lips. “Whatever I have to do to adapt, I’ll do.”
Jennifer considered the situation from all angles; she wanted to get out of the town sooner rather than later. While she could afford the hotel they were staying in, every day they stayed so close to the forest, so close to the town she had used to live in—and the people who had gone after Damon, hunting him like a rabid animal—the greater the chances that they would run into someone. As the time drew near for her to return to classes at the end of break, to finish her final semester before graduation, she came up with an idea. “We’ll go ahead and go to the city right now,” she suggested to Damon. “We’ll take the train up and get a hotel room somewhere, and we’ll give you first-hand experience before I have to go back to classes.” Damon laughed.
“I’m completely willing to stay in another hotel with you,” he said, looking around the room they had taken. “But I think you’re overestimating how hard it will be for me to adapt.” Jennifer shrugged.
“I mean, it took me a while to get used to living in a big city, and I’m used to living among humans.” Damon made a face.
“If you insist that I will be horribly shocked by the city, I’ll take your word for it. Teach me all about it.” Jennifer shook her head, smiling to herself. Damon was learning quickly, but she couldn’t imagine he wouldn’t find it at least a little odd.
Jennifer managed a pair of cheap train tickets, choosing an off-hour in the early afternoon for them to travel to the city. “The joys of commuter rail,” Jennifer told Damon wryly. “Since it’s expensive to live in the city proper, a lot of people live where it’s cheap and take the train every day—so the best times to get into the city are the worst times for train fares.”
“I’m excited to be riding a train,” Damon pointed out with a grin, and Jennifer had to echo the smile, impressed at Damon’s optimism. They waited on the quay, sitting around in the chilly air for their train to arrive, snacking on vending machine viands. “It’s funny to me,” Damon said, popping a cheese doodle into his mouth and chewing it experimentally. “You have food just… everywhere. But it’s not real food.” He shook his head.
“Some of it’s real,” Jennifer protested. “Pizza is very real, and I don’t care what you say.” She had taken Damon for pizza their second night in the town, and the were-bear had been initially a little perplexed at the concept. He understood the components in theory—crust was essentially bread, sauce he could understand, but cheese was foreign to him, and the toppings seemed to be strange.
“Pepperoni isn’t real food even if it is tasty,” he insisted. Jennifer laughed.
“It totally is! It’s meat and spices and stuff.” Damon shook his head again.
“So much of what you eat is ‘and stuff’! How do you even know it’s food?”
“Because it’s edible?” Damon snorted at that simplistic criterion.
“You all put so much trust into whoever is handling your food; how do you know people aren’t spitting in it, or giving you cardboard instead of bread dough?”
“Well, one—if they started serving up cardboard they wouldn’t last in business long. But there are tons of laws that are about what they can and can’t put in food, so they’d have to pay fines or maybe even go to jail depending on how bad whatever they did to the food was.”