Bear, Otter and the Kid (Bear, Otter and the Kid #1)

by T.J. Klune

“He did say one other thing,” she says, and I freeze. “Oh?” I choke out. “He said that he’d thought he’d lost his only chance to be happy. He refused to explain it any further. I wonder what he meant by that.”

There are enough people out there that will be more than willing to knock you down. There’s no reason for you to do it to yourself.”

First was nothing and then there was everything. Otter held me as my body rocked and shook, and for the first time, I realized there was such a thing as good earthquakes, that as long as you have someone to tether you to them, the shifting of the world can be a wondrous thing.

There is a moment of deceptive clarity, those few precious seconds between waking and awake where everything is right, everything is okay, because the slate is clean. The world makes sense because it’s not a place with hurt and anger. It’s just blank, a perfectly imperfect sane insanity. Then logic sets in, synapses fire, muscles spasm, the heart makes itself known as blood vessels and veins constrict and contract, and I remember everything.