A Change To Bear (A BBW Shifter Romance) (Last of the Shapeshifters) (7 page)

“Nope. They charge by the night, not the hour. At least, they did when I was last here.”

“You’d better not be taking me to a sex hotel,” Terry said, shaking her head. “Because I’m not having sex with you.” The last bit had just slipped out, and she fought the instinct to put her hand over her mouth.

Shit
, she thought.

“That’s alright,” he said, “because it’s not what you think. We’re here.” He walked down an alley, and turned and pointed up at something. Terry followed down, saw a narrow building, six or seven floors high. She followed his finger, saw the name on the sign: Lucky Phuc Guest House.

She laughed. “The
Vietnamese
word.”

“Yup. It means happiness.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked the owner the last time I stayed here.”

“Think it’s still the same one?”

“No,” he said. His expression changed. It was like somebody had tied an anchor to his mood and dropped it in the ocean.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Seriously, what’s wrong?”

“It’s not the same owner.”

“How can you tell?”

He looked at her but didn’t reply. Then he opened the door for her and she stepped through, seeing a small reception area with an older woman behind the desk. “Not the same,” he said. He walked behind her.

“Hi!” Terry said, smiling at the woman.

“Want a room?” the woman asked in accented English.

“Uh,” Terry said, looking at Liam and then back at the woman. “Two rooms.” She held up two fingers.

“Okay. Twenty five per night.”

“That sounds fine,” Terry replied, putting down her backpack to find one of her various money pouches she had concealed on her body and in compartments in her backpack. “She means American dollars, right?”

“Yeah,” Liam said. He pulled out a wad of notes from the pocket of his jeans and handed her three tens and a twenty.

“You’re
not
paying for my room,” she said, shaking her head.

“I know,” he replied. “It’s one night deposit.”

“Oh,” Terry said, chewing on sole. “I knew that.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Yes I did.” She found a fifty and handed it to the woman along with Liam’s.

“No fifty notes,” the woman said immediately, and promptly handed it back to her.

“Okay, okay.” Terry found change and gave it to the woman, who picked up two keys from the table.

“Floor five, two of you.”

“Neighbors!”

“Yeah,” Liam said.

She looked at the narrow flight of steps, and then contemplated having to carry her backpack up five of them. She looked at Liam, who watched her.

“Well?” he asked. “Let’s go.”

“Yeah.” It was like he was daring her to ask him for help. She bent down, hoisted her backpack off the ground with a grunt, and put it on, securing all the straps around her chest. She didn’t want the thing wobbling left and right as she took the steps.

Liam set off up the steps first, leaving Terry and the receptionist alone. “And they say chivalry isn’t dead.” The woman looked up, met Terry’s eyes, and then looked back down at the magazine she was reading. “My thoughts exactly,” Terry said to herself, starting up the steps.

The rooms themselves weren’t bad at all. With air-conditioning, a double bed, a hairdryer (which she noted with surprised relief), a ceiling fan, a desk, and a balcony with two chairs on it, hers was actually quite nice. Everything appeared to be quite aged, and a lot of the furniture smelled old. Terry simply decided to consider it character.

She set her backpack down, heard the impact of her empty metal water bottle clanging on the tiled floor. Liam’s room was opposite hers, and his door was still open, so she peeked into it, seeing that it was far less nice.

“Your room sucks,” she said.

He looked around, a blank look on his face. “It’s fine. Bed, bathroom, table.” He turned around in his smaller room. “Air-con, even. Small fan here.” He put his hand on top of the little fan. “Why, what’s your room like?”

“Come,” she said, jerking her head toward her room. He followed her into it, and stared at her balcony.

“You’ve got a balcony.”

“Sure have.”

“We’re paying the same?”

“I thought you knew the owner.”

“Maybe you just got the keys mixed up.”

“Well, you’re welcome to come over and use my balcony during the day if you like,” Terry said.

“Thanks.”

Terry watched him as he looked around her room. He was standing by the door, only a foot or two in. “So,” she said. It was starting to get dark, and she’d have to think about dinner soon. She was about to bring it up when Liam spoke.

“I’ve got some things to do tomorrow, so I’ll be setting out early.”

“Oh, yeah?” Terry felt a bit disappointed, but she supposed she didn’t really expect that the two were going to holiday together.

“Yeah. So, it’s been nice meeting you.”

“Yeah,” Terry replied, nodding. She swallowed. This was it?

Liam looked at her for a moment more, and then he turned to leave.

“Wait,” she said. She didn’t want to let him go just like this. She didn’t really see a reason why they should just stop seeing each other. At the very least, she decided she would try and push for them to eat dinner together.

“What about food?” she asked. God, that was clumsy, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“I’m not really hungry. I think I’m going to crash.”

“Oh, yeah, me too.”

He looked at her, as though he wanted to say something. She was desperately hoping that he would, but he didn’t. He turned and left, closing the door behind him.

Terry flopped onto her bed, rubbing her forehead. She had no idea what had just happened, but she did know that she wasn’t thrilled about it.

Despite being hungry, she fell asleep, only to wake with a dry mouth and a groan at nearly two in the morning. Her first night in Hanoi was now over. She showered off the day’s stickiness, brushed her teeth, dried her hair, and was asleep again by half past three. Her last thought before drifting into a dream was whether or not Liam was asleep.

Banal and boring, for some reason it mattered.

T
he city was ringing. All around her were mopeds struggling to negotiate the narrow weaving roads of Hanoi. A few cars, like islands devoid of heads without helmets, were scattered in amongst the throng, occasionally beeping their horns, but being ignored. The sun was beating down, and the air was close, and already, just minutes after leaving her air-conditioned room in the guest house, Terry was sweating. She might have found it annoying if she wasn’t preoccupied with something else.

She shook her head, gazing out at the struggling mass of flesh and metal creeping by on the road. The average speed must have been only twenty, and the people never seemed to stop coming. It might have been amazing to her, or even odd, if she was paying much attention at all.

But the only thing she could think about was Liam. What was it about him that made him so strange? Why was he was actively trying to thwart any attempt she had made to get to know him? Why did he seem like a ball of dark energy just waiting to explode, or like a coiled spring just waiting to be sprung? Not only was his body whipcord lean, but it had a tenseness to it, and seemed as though it might crack or burst at any moment. She was certain he hadn’t been completely honest about what he had told her. Of what little he had told her. He had been so deliberately vague, so guarded about himself. She couldn’t stop her mind from racing through the possibilities of why he would even
have
to be opaque, of what dark secrets he could possibly be harboring.

Surely he wasn’t a criminal! He didn’t seem the type. But Terry reflected, and realized that maybe she was ill-equipped to make that determination. After all, she had no idea what the criminal type actually was. Her brothers Jason and Jeffery were criminals, she supposed. She knew that they dealt marijuana and sometimes ecstasy out of the taxi that Jason drove. And that was about as deep into the underworld that Terry had ever been. Her idea of what a criminal might look like was someone with too many tattoos, a mean-looking disposition, and maybe a leather jacket. It was a stereotype, she knew, but what were stereotypes if not indications of the truth?

And Liam didn’t fit that description at all! She wondered if perhaps he had been in the military. That could be the source for his lack of communication skills, she mused. Maybe he was a scarred veteran suffering from a stress disorder, had seen too much on the battlefield, experienced hell itself, and had come back a broken shell of himself. Terry groaned. It was starting to sound like the half-ass plot of a cheap novel, and on top of that, she was dealing in stereotypes again. That was one sure-fire way to make dumb assumptions.

There was, of course, another possibility, and it was the simplest one of them all. Perhaps he was just an anti-social type, one who harbored general indifference toward anyone and anything. He could certainly be one of those kinds of people, with a closed off emotional quotient, and a self-interest instinct that outweighed everything else. But again, the shoe didn’t seem to fit.

There was something else she had noticed, too, that had lurked at first in the background, difficult to see or quantify. He had a weighted weariness to him, and it was present in his whole body. It wasn’t that he had bags of black hanging beneath his eyes, and it wasn’t that he yawned, or that he slumped, or that he shuffled. It was in his motions, his movements, the kinesthetic impression she gleaned from his walk, from his facial expression, from the way he was so efficient, and seemed like he needed to be. He didn’t emote with the cavalier freedom that she did, or that most people did, and though his body always looked ready to perform, it also suggested that he was actively trying to minimize his actions, as though storing energy for some unknown thing or event.

And his eyes, the way they looked with indifference at the world around him. The only times they changed, the only times a different message was sent that went beyond mere observation, was when he looked at her. It wasn’t a large transformation, but she had noticed that he blinked less, and that his eyes stayed fixed on her. Maybe it was just natural, the difference between the way people look at people, and everything else. Or maybe it wasn’t.

The weariness extended into his ochre orbs as well. When she looked at them, she often felt like she was looking at a magazine cover whereon depicted was a person who had spent the better part of their life suffering, and as a result looked far, far older than they actually were. But Liam didn’t look old at all. In fact, he had pretty damn good skin, lacked any creases around his eyes or lips, and could probably pass for someone ten years younger if he shaved off the shadow and didn’t look so serious all the time.

Terry decided she’d spent too much time mulling over the possibilities of Liam and the secret past he appeared determined not to reveal. Wiping her upper lip with the back of her hand, she set off in the direction the traffic was going. That way was the city center, and what better thing to do on her first morning in Vietnam than to have a traditional Vietnamese breakfast, which was basically a bowl of rice noodles and thin slices of raw beef that cooked in the broth. She found it odd that there was no clear distinction between foods eaten at breakfast and lunch, and thought how polar opposite it was to back home where breakfast was cereal and toast, and lunch was simply not, unless you were a broke university student, or something of an eccentric.

Another breakfast food commonly eaten were the freshly baked baguettes, one of those odd cultural left-overs from the brief French occupation. She would definitely have to try one of those. It seemed like the day was starting to revolve around food, and coming from the nine-to-five where she ate tuna, ham, or egg salad sandwiches pretty much every day, that didn’t seem like such a bad idea at all.

Though the road beside her, was heaving with mopeds, the pavement was relatively devoid of people. It was the complete opposite of how it had been in the brief time she spent in Hong Kong, where it was often pavement warfare. Crammed uncomfortably close with others, there was no amount of shoulder-weaving, dipping, side-stepping, or opportune darting that could protect you against rubbing shoulders with at least a few strangers. Not that she really minded, or wasn’t used to it. Some parts of London were just the same. Just that stray thought of home, a bit like a mosquito that flits in and out of vision, was enough to illicit both irritation and relief from Terry. She was glad that she was not working at her old job, or not dealing with her family that were pretty much the model of dysfunction. Two drug-dealing brothers, both older than her, and both still living at home like she was. She frowned. She knew it was a little unusual at her age, but she simply couldn’t afford to live on her own on her salary, and she wasn’t going to be a commuter. Back then, she hadn’t been the compromising sort. Though now, she was willing to accept that things had already changed in just a few days. Now, compromises were almost always necessary.