Octo BEAR fest (Renaissance Shifters #1)

Chapter 22

CHAPTER 22

" I s she always that subtle?" Bill asked as Penny disappeared with the other three band members.

Gwen laughed. "That was pretty subtle for her, actually. She didn't actually say anything like 'Gwen and Billy sittin' in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g,' which I promise has been done in the past." She made her way to where he was at the edge of the stage, just in the shadows where the crowd couldn't see either of them, and sat.

Bill sat beside her and gave into the impulse to put his arm around her shoulders. To his relief and joy, she leaned against him immediately, exhaling into relaxation that turned to another laugh when he said, "Nobody's called me 'Billy' since I broke five feet at age nine."

"Jeez, really? That seems tall for that age. Maybe not for your family," Gwen added. "But still. Tall."

"It is. Not 'this kid has no choice but to be a pro basketball player' tall, but about half a foot taller than average. I outgrew my mom when I was twelve, and she's tall . Five ten. Also the shortest in our immediate family, but still tall!"

"I noticed. I'm a shrimp compared to the Torbens. I'm going to have to take up wearing four inch platform heels."

Bill, imagining her in those torn-up jeans and leather jackets in those kinds of heels, swallowed on a suddenly dry throat. "That'd put you right about six feet, wouldn't it? That would be…tall." Tall was not really what he was thinking of. Hot started to cover it, but a number of much more intriguing images involving her in short skirts and those heels were much closer to the mark. He wondered if she might have some leather bras to match those jackets, and then wondered who the hell he was. He'd never imagined anybody in leather bras before.

"Yeah, like, I'm about five eight, I'm not short, it's just you guys are all tall . It was a good show," she added in a complete change of subject, and with just the faintest hint of a question in her voice.

"A good show," Bill echoed disbelievingly. "Gwen, we sold just under five hundred tickets and there were people in the street that I'm sure didn't buy them. You guys brought the house down. I don't know why—I mean, I do, but—you should be selling out stadiums."

She leaned against him a little harder, turning her face against his shoulder, and when she spoke, her voice was a bit muffled. "I think we're on the cusp of something here," she admitted. "This is—tonight, this was something new. The way people showed up for us. Um." She breathed deep, and exhaled even more deeply. "The Pix, we started by playing dives. Hell, we still play a lot of them. But, you know, forty, fifty people tops. Maybe a couple hundred if it was a popular bar, but that was more about the venue than us . The past few years, we've been pulling our own crowd, and, like, I know that. Two, three hundred people, mostly at places that don't hold a lot more than that so it feels like we're doing good, you know?"

Bill made a sound and Gwen shook her head, muffling a chuckle against his shoulder. "No, I know, we are good, but doing good in this industry is different. And I kinda know if we booked a venue that would hold five hundred, we've kind of reached a place where we'd be filling it. But I'd expect that to be with several months' notice, you know? People having time to find out about it, arrange to be there, all that. But this…they just showed up." She laughed again, the sound incredulous this time. "Five hundred people just showed up with barely a day's notice. And there's gonna be a new, maybe different, crowd tomorrow night."

"So." Bill turned his head to press his mouth against her hair. "On a scale of one to ten, how terrified are you?"

"I'm at about seventeen." Gwen fell silent a long time, and he thought he felt her shivering under his arm. "It's not just that if we lean into this moment everybody who doesn't know is going to realize I used to be Emma Hart. Although I don't think the band really gets how much that's going to be a thing, so it is that. But even more, it's…I've been successful," she said slowly. "Nobody tells you how scary it can be. How much you get judged and weighed and how much you judge yourself. How afraid you are that whatever you've done, you're never going to live up to it. That you can't repeat it. That you don't even know why it happened in the first place, even if you're good at what you do. So the truth is I'm really scared of succeeding. And that sounds stupid . People talk about fear of failure, of not trying things because what if you fail, but if you try something and succeed, then you're in completely new territory that you have no idea how to navigate, and that's also terrifying."

Bill, cautiously, said, "Especially when somebody took advantage of you the last time you succeeded?"

"Heh. Yeah, probably. Yeah." Gwen nodded. "That, and last time it was all really somebody else's doing. I was a kid. I was the talent, but I wasn't the driving force, right? Adults—my dad, showrunners, producers, whatever—were making most of the big decisions and I didn't even get that I could say no if I wanted to. And I'm not sure I really could have, because Dad would have…" She shrugged. "Pressured me. Told me how it was my Mom's dream, how every kid dreamed of this, how I'd be disappointing my audience. Things I felt like I couldn't refuse."

"It's just as well he disappeared," Bill said, trying to keep his voice light when he felt the words in his soul. "I'd be tempted to knock him into next week if he was around."

"You can get in line," Gwen said dryly. She hesitated. "Do you think I'm nuts? For being scared that we're maybe on the verge of a breakout success?"

"No. No, not at all. Partly because you actually do have experience in being, what, successful? Famous? In ways the rest of us are probably never going to. But also because you're right. I don't think I ever really thought about it, but everybody kind of assumes success is its own reward, don't they? I never thought about as being scary all by itself, but what you said about being out there in new territory, dealing with you don't even know what because you've never been there before, that makes a lot of sense. I wonder." He breathed a short little laugh. "I wonder if that's part of why I haven't tried changing anything around here."

"Hah!" Gwen looked up at him, her dark-rimmed eyes clear and gorgeous in the dim light. "Look at us, birds of a feather."

"Bears," Bill said with a chuckle. "Bears of a fur."

"You've got a real thing about bears, big man. What's that about?"

Now ! his bear said eagerly. This is the right time! Tell her now!

The bear was absolutely right. It felt right, emotionally. This was the moment he'd been waiting for.

The problem was that Gwen was very, very unlikely to believe him unless he shifted into a grizzly, and doing that backstage in a pub with hundreds of people a few feet away, and a back door that might open without warning at any moment, was obviously a bad idea. Bill put his forehead against Gwen's and sighed. "My family likes them. Has an affinity for them, you might say."

"Because you're all huge?" Gwen grinned, almost against his mouth. "Yeah, I can see that."

"Well—" He was just about to give in and explain—to show her—when the back door did, in fact, sweep open and Penny threw herself in, then mashed the door shut again. Bill's shoulders collapsed in resignation as Penny stared, wild-eyed and dramatic, at Gwen.

"They are literally chanting your name," she informed Gwen. "Hundreds of them. I do not think this crowd is going to thin out until after you've put in an appearance. I did get some of the security crew to herd the Canadians off to one side so they can meet us later, but G, we are at the start of a moment. A movement. I completely get your reservations, and also, I will totally kill you if you blow this for the rest of us."

Bill bristled a little, prepared to defend Gwen's decisions, whatever they were, but to his surprise, she cackled and stood up. "Yeah, no, that's fair. Like I said, I'm one of five, it would really suck for me to bring everybody else down."

"You're not, you know." Penny was watching the singer with an intense gaze. "I mean, you are, yes, but some animals are more equal than others, even if you go to huge lengths to keep yourself out of the limelight except when we're actually on stage. The truth is you could walk away and have a solo career in a way none of the rest of us could, or you could decide to stay right here behind this door and make sure we never climb any higher than we are right now. And I would totally kill you, but I'd also get it."

Gwen made a face that looked like it came from the bottom of her soul. "You know I'd never go solo."

"Yes. But I also know you could."

The face Gwen made that time was more resigned than rejecting, and she walked over to give Penny a heavy hug. "Yeah. I could. And I could also not go out there right now and just let you guys enjoy the glory."

"But it's not what they want, and we know it," Penny said gently to the lead singer. "They got their time with us. Now they want to see the main event."

"I'll come with you, if you want," Bill offered quietly. "You said I made good security."

"'You are the brute squad,'" Penny said to him, and Gwen laughed, then put a hand out toward Bill momentarily, accepting his offer with the gesture.

"That would be great, yeah. For the record, I'd be okay without the brute squad, but it'd be nice to have it. All right." She gave Penny a nervous grin. "Let's go blow the roof off this thing, I guess."

"Damn straight." Penny grabbed her hand and pulled the door open to a roar that nearly knocked Bill backward. Even she said, "Oh my God," under her breath, and then the two band members were out in the beer garden, pulled into a security line of people guiding them down toward the crowd.

Bill fell in right behind them, abruptly aware of his own size in a way he usually wasn't. The women looked small in front of him, and it was clear that the people clustered around the cordons just off the beer garden all suddenly felt like maybe it wasn't quite as important as they'd imagined to be the first ones to touch, or get pictures with, the band's star. One of the security guys—not someone he knew, but a shifter from the sense of him—gave Bill a brief, approving nod that gave him an odd sense of satisfaction. The security dude couldn't possibly know Bill was there to protect his mate, but it felt like he'd been recognized as Doing His Job, and he liked it.

It was much, much more chaotic than the Harlequin had been the night before. For one thing, although there'd been a couple hundred people at that gig, only two dozen or so had hung around after the show. Tonight there were five times that number, some of them with the frenzied, glittering looks that Bill had seen in videos of Elvis, or the Beatles.

His bear rumbled. Those people aren't safe for our mate.

Most of them are, Bill disagreed, and honestly believed it. But it did make him remember that fans was short for fanatics . He'd never really been in the firing line of that kind of intensity before.

But Gwen had, he realized. He knew it: she'd told him. He just hadn't fully understood, not until right now, and he bet that this—a last-minute gig at the edge of the Rockies—wasn't anything compared to what she'd experienced as a kid in Hollywood.

The bear rumbled again. These people aren't safe for us .

That, unfortunately, could well be true. Shifters usually tried to stay out of the spotlight, and with good reason. But nothing external told the world Bill could turn into a giant grizzly, and he said, Well, we're certainly not going to shift in front of them. It'll be fine, with as much calm reassurance as he could. It was something he hadn't considered, though. Maybe it wasn't possible to safely build a relationship with a burgeoning rock star while living in a small shifter town.

He'd never really considered leaving Renaissance, before. Not until that moment. But as he watched Gwen laughing and bumping elbows and taking selfies with fans, signing things—including their faces—for them, he realized that whether she knew it or not, she was in her element. This was her fate, and he knew in his heart that she was ready to embrace it.

Which might mean his own fate was a future he'd never even dreamed of.