Free The Bear With No Name by Zoe Chant

bear at the edge of town. After what happened at the town meeting, I didn’t want to get people all riled up, so I just followed it at a distance to make sure it wasn’t going to cause any problems. It wandered back into the woods and I tried to follow it there, just to make sure it kept heading away, and that’s when I got lost.”
    “What, you’re a bear tamer now?” Lauren joked fondly.
    “No, it was a stupid idea. I was kind of freaked out.”
    He still seemed weary and distant, and he wouldn’t meet her eyes. Lauren couldn’t stop thinking about that moment up on the ridge when he suddenly changed and left the scene with thin excuses.
    There was more going on here than just a bear – Lauren was sure of it.
    Quite a few people waved to them as they walked back toward town hall.
    “Oh good, you found him!” called Mrs. Randall.
    Lauren tried to look happy and relieved, but she couldn’t tell how convincing her mask was.
    Her friends all sat down to eat dinner together, and Lauren let them carry most of the conversation. People kept coming over to thank David for saving Mr. Mitchell, and that seemed to lift his spirits a bit. She wouldn’t say he looked happy, exactly, but at least he wasn’t distant anymore.
    “No, thank you ,” he was saying to Mrs. Mitchell’s cousin. “Everyone here has been so kind to me. You welcomed a total stranger at a time when you all had your own huge crisis to deal with, and that’s something that I will never forget.”
    Sometime around the third variation of this, it hit her: that was just the kind of thing you would say to people when you’re getting ready to leave.
    David seemed to be in no hurry to get back to her place after dinner, so they stayed there on Main Street as another impromptu party took shape. Someone started up a hula-hooping contest, and someone else found a bunch of sparklers left over from the Fourth and passed them out to all the kids. She and David sat on the steps of town hall watching all the action.
    Tired and hurt by the confusions of the day, Lauren sagged forward, her elbows on her knees and her head hanging down. Then she felt David’s hand on her back. He started with slow caresses of comfort, then pressed harder, finding all the knots of tension in her muscles and kneading them out.
    Lauren made little humming noises of appreciation, and tried not to gasp or moan out loud when he hit some of the really sore spots and slowly worked them out. His touch was soothing, and much as she might want to deny it, it was also electrifying. Pretty soon she was feeling as aroused as she had up on the ridge that afternoon, just from a good back-rub.
    Finally she sat up and looked him in the eye.
    “Are you going to explain what’s going on?” she asked in a level voice.
    “I don’t think that I can,” David said sadly.
    So many conflicting responses came to mind, all demanding to be said out loud, and she bit them all back. Lauren was not a woman afraid of arguments; she’d grown up in a family that debated everything passionately. But something told her that words were not the solution here. Instead, she decided to trust in that almost-mystical connection that they had had since that first moment on the river bank.
    She stood and held out her hand to him. He took it, and together they walked back to her place. All the way there, up the stairs and into her apartment, neither of them said a word.
    In the dark of her living room, she asked him one last time: “You still can’t explain?”
    Wordlessly, he shook his head.
    “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She couldn’t even say who moved first, but suddenly they were enfolded in each other’s arms again. Just like every time, it felt like coming home.
    David was kissing her hair again, then tilting her head to kiss her forehead, her eyelids, her cheekbones, lightly but with such intensity, as if he was committing every inch of her to memory. Even your kisses feel like good-bye , she thought, but