Page 63 of True North

He stayed there on his knees for a while, his cheek resting on JT’s stomach as JT stroked his hair. He had lost control of his life, and all of his fears were waiting for him as soon as he got up again. But for now, here, surrounded by the sounds and scents of JT’s body, he could pretend he was safe.

* * *

He slept hard and deep for the first part of the night, then woke in the early morning hours and couldn’t get back to sleep. JT had a nightmare as Misha lay there staring at the ceiling, and he was able to rub JT’s back until JT quieted and fell back into a more peaceful slumber.

Misha had brought too much trouble into JT’s life. He had overstayed his welcome; he could see that now. At first, he had been vigilant for signs that JT was growing tired of his company, but as the weeks went on, he had relaxed into their routine, and after they started having sex, he basically stopped worrying about it altogether. But JT was right that Misha hadn’t been honest with him. He had kept a lot of things from JT, and now JT was spending a lot of time and money dealing with those things. If he had told JT the whole truth from the start, JT probably wouldn’t have let Misha stay with him for so long, or at all. Misha’s entire relationship with JT was based on false premises.

He had felt so safe with JT from the very beginning, and his deep certainty that JT would care for and protect him had only grown as he got to know JT better. But JT deserved care and protection, too, and Misha couldn’t provide that for him. He couldn’t keep JT safe.

It was clear that he needed to leave.

He got out of bed, moving as slowly and silently as he could to avoid waking JT, and walked through the dark, quiet house. He left through the mudroom and locked the door behind him. The night air was cool enough to make his skin prickle with gooseflesh. He heard an owl calling, faint in the distance. He shifted forms and headed north along the lake.

At dawn, he cut inland into the pine forest that lined the coast and found a glade of ferns to bed down in. He slept until the sun was high overhead and woke hungry and disoriented. He wasn’t used to sleeping in the woods anymore. He caught and ate a rabbit, then doubled back to the tree where he had hidden his clothes and shifted forms. Everything was just as he had left it. He got dressed and walked back out to the road.

Walking to the main road into town took him an hour, a long, sweaty slog through featureless pine forest, interrupted only by the occasional driveway. At this time of day, there was almost no shade, and he was desperate for water by the time a passing car finally responded to his hopeful thumb by slowing and pulling over.

The driver was an older guy with a bristly white mustache and a beat-up baseball cap embroidered on the front with a picture of a bass. He leaned out his rolled-down window. “Where ya headed?”

“Gianni’s,” Misha said. “You know?”

“Headed right by there,” the guy said. “Hop in.”

Mercifully, the guy didn’t want to talk, or maybe picked up on how little Misha wanted to talk. He turned up the country station he was listening to and didn’t say a word to Misha the whole way into town.

Hunched in the passenger seat, Misha pulled his phone from his pocket and turned it on. He hadn’t looked at it once since he was released from jail. He had some missed calls and a voicemail from Brandon, which he deleted without listening to, and a bunch of text messages from JT, which he didn’t open. No one else had tried to contact him in the past five days. Who would? He didn’t know anyone. He was a ghost in his own life. He could sink without leaving a ripple.

The old guy turned into the parking lot at Gianni’s and pulled up to the door. “Thank you,” Misha said, about as grateful as he’d ever been.

“Take care of yourself,” the guy said.

Gianni’s wouldn’t open for another hour. Misha found a shady spot around the side of the building and sat on the sidewalk curb. Out of the sun, it was a nice afternoon. A light breeze rustled the leaves of the row of trees that separated Gianni’s parking lot from the building next door. Perfect, puffy white clouds scudded across the sky. His T-shirt slowly dried out. His phone buzzed in his pocket twice in quick succession. He didn’t look at it.

Half an hour before opening, Brandon’s car pulled into the lot. Misha rose to his feet. He was painfully aware that he was wearing clothes that had been under a tree for nearly twenty-four hours. Nothing he could do about it now.

Brandon stepped out of his car and shaded his eyes with his hand as he squinted in Misha’s direction. “Misha?”

“Hi, yeah.” Misha shuffled closer with his hands in his pockets. “Sorry I miss work, um—”

“You got arrested. I heard.” Brandon sighed. “You’re here for your shift?”

“Yes,” Misha said eagerly. “I’m sorry I missed, but I work now, I—”

“You missed three shifts,” Brandon said. “I’m sorry, Misha. I already hired someone else.”

Misha stuffed his hands farther into his pockets. He had never felt smaller, dirtier, or more at sea. “Oh.”

“Nothing personal,” Brandon said. “We really need two dishwashers on staff, and I need people I can rely on to show up. I hope everything works out for you.” He nodded at Misha and turned away.

Misha thought about begging. He would do anything; he would peel potatoes, he would scrub the floor after closing on hands and knees. He didn’t say anything, though, and Brandon went through the door of the restaurant and was gone.

The trees swayed. The world turned. Misha was back where he had started at the beginning of the summer, only worse, because now he had things he would grieve losing.

He stood on the sidewalk for a minute, weighing his options. He wasn’t that far from where the dense residential neighborhoods turned into rural sprawl before the forest began; he could walk until he hit trees and pick his way north from there in bear form. No one in the Sault would ever hear from or of him again.

Everything in him rebelled at the thought of going back into the woods. He was a bear, but he was a person, too, and he was starting to remember how good it was to have a community of other people to rely on and care for. JT, obviously, but also Sveta, and the local shifters, and the coworkers he’d exchanged chit-chat with, who were lost to him now. He didn’t want to go back into the woods and lose his personhood again.

He pulled out his wallet and rifled through it. He had some cash, but only about fifty dollars, and he didn’t want to spend a cent unless he absolutely had to. But there was a bus stop directly in front of the restaurant. He looked up the route on his phone and saw that he could go straight to the terminal downtown, only a block away from Lenny’s pub.