Gray Back Bad Bear(16)
“Ha, I doubt it. I heard your crew last night. I’m not your type. I imagine you don’t take many girls like me to your love shack.”
“Nope,” he agreed, lifting her foot out of the water with his again.
“Keep doing that,” she encouraged. “I like playing footsies with a werebear.”
Matt snorted. “Bear shifter.”
“So to become a bear shifter, I’d have to what? Let you drink my blood or something?”
“I’m not a vampire, and no. A deep bite would do it.”
“You ever bitten anyone before?”
His eyebrows arched up, and the smile dipped from his face as he let her foot splash back into the water. “You mean have I Turned anyone? Hell no. I’m an asshole, but I wouldn’t ruin anyone’s life like that. Putting an animal in someone isn’t a gift, Willa. It’s cursing them.”
“Sounds pretty awesome, though. Getting to change into this big strong animal, never getting bullied, always feeling like a badass.”
“Mmm,” he said noncommittally. “You were bullied?”
“You mean in school? College no, because no one cares what kind of freak flag you fly there, but in high school…you know, it might surprise you, but I wasn’t the put-together vixen you see before you.” She gave him a smile to let him know she was teasing.
“Braces?”
“Oh, yeah. Headgear. My teeth looked like old cemetery headstones. And my parents didn’t have much money, so when we figured out my vision sucked, my mom bought me some glass frames from one of those old thrift stores and had some lenses put in them, so I was rocking grandma glasses until I was a sophomore. I picked up a job tutoring middle school kids on the weekends just to purchase a snazzier pair. As you can imagine, an updated pair of glasses didn’t really stop the teasing.”
“Kids can be jerks at that age,” he said in a faraway voice.
“What about you? Were you the cool kid in school? Wait, wait, wait, let me guess. You were built like an eighteen-wheeler even in high school, so your coach recruited you early and you were star of your football team, taking them all the way to state by your senior year. You spent the entirety of your last year in high school smelling like cheerleader poon and managed to win homecoming and prom king. Am I close?”
Matt pursed his lips as the smile faded from his eyes. “I didn’t go to school.”
“You didn’t go to college?”
“No, I mean, I didn’t go to high school or middle school. I’m self-educated.” He frowned. “Kind of.”
Willa sat up, shocked to her core. “I don’t understand. So you did homeschool?”
“No, Willa.” A strange humming growl emanated from his chest. “I mean not everyone gets to go to school. Maybe for humans it’s easier, but for me and the kids I lived with, it wasn’t doable. We lived out in the woods in this shitty RV I found us, and I worked three jobs to keep us fed. There wasn’t a lot of time leftover for school. I was a kid raising kids.”
“What about your parents?”
“Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?” Shocked and horrified because the stuff he was telling her pointed to a long life of pain, and fun-loving Matt didn’t fit the bill for a wrecked life.
“Like you pity me. Fuck.” He shook his head and looked away, but she’d already seen it. His eyes had lightened to that inhuman silver color. “Don’t ask me questions like these anymore. One week, remember? I don’t want to talk about anything—”
“But maybe you should—”
“Not with you! I’m not keeping secrets because I’ve had some hard life I can’t come to grips with, Willa. I’ve talked to my friend, Kong. Told him everything. I know the dangers of keeping shit like that inside, and I didn’t do it. But with you… Don’t you get it? I just want to have fun. I don’t want the serious shit I have to deal with when I talk to my crew or my friends. I want things to be light with you. Easy.” Matt slid an angry glare to her. “I want to be someone else with you.”
Willa bit her lip and nodded until her words found her again. “Okay. Easy. I can do that.”
“Good.” Matt pushed off the rock and dove under the falls. The sunlight glinted off the silver spider webs of his scarred back as he swam just under the surface of the water and away from her, blurring as he escaped the edge of her good vision.
She unclenched her hands that she hadn’t realized she’d gripped into fists, and her heart ached. Matt wasn’t interested in her, or even interested in being friends.