Read Online A Change To Bear (A BBW Shifter Romance) (Last of the Shapeshifters) by A.E. Grace - Free Book Online Page B

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.
    She remembered her university years, and thinking at the time that it would be far better if she lived in a house full of girls. There was no way she was going to have a bloke in there with her, pissing all over the bathroom like a cat marking its territory, leaving sweat-soaked shorts on the sofa, and being a brutal font of body odor. It turned out that living in a house full of girls wasn’t actually any better. Piles of clothes, dirty dishes, and bathroom bins went unattended to, often for weeks at a time. Yeah, that had been a lesson learned. Living with people had the potential to be utter shit, and Terry didn’t care if she was jaded. She knew that from then on, she’d only be at home where the rules were clear and her space was, at least, hers, or on her own, where other people weren’t there to muck it all up.
    Terry stopped dead on the street. Before her was a wide road by Hanoi standards, and absolutely teeming with mopeds. God, she thought. She was going to have to cross this. She looked around for someone to cross with, a local who knew how, but there was nobody around her. For a city so jam-packed with people on pseudo-motorcycles, it was annoying that there wasn’t one lone pedestrian on this road who also wanted to cross. She could have hid in his or her wake, clinging as close to them without actually touching them. But, instead, she was going to have to quash every one of her survival instincts, and simply step out into a road full of vehicles and walk, without dodging or changing direction, to the other side.
    “Shit,” she murmured. Every instinct, honed by millions of years of evolution, was telling her not to do it. There, she might get hurt. It was all ‘DANGER! DANGER!’ announcements blaring in her mind, red lights flashing and bomb sirens wailing. It wasn’t like crossing at a red-man, either, where she waited for there to be a gap in the traffic before she darted across the road, hoping there wasn’t an overzealous police officer, new and looking to meet quota, walking that beat. Here, there would be no gap. She would simply step out, and let the traffic funnel around her.
    “Okay.” Terry told herself to stop being a big baby about it, and to just do what she had done with Liam the day before. In front of her, on the other side of the road, she could see a lake, and in the middle of a lake was a small island with a building on it, perhaps a temple. On the edge of the lake was a restaurant that overlooked the lake, with yellow curtains hanging over the terrace handrail, drying in the sun. She saw a few people in the restaurant, sat at small tables, being served by waitresses in long, colorful dresses: purple, blue, red, yellow, and gold. That was where she was going. She’d made up her mind. It looked lovely. She focused on the restaurant, took a deep breath, and stepped