Blackbird Knitting in a Bunny's Lair (13 page)

Rich rolled his eyes. “Or what are you going to do? Fire me?”

Aiden made one of those evil little grunting sounds that Jeremy remembered from when he was the one getting pushed around in the mill. “No, but just remember, one of Jeremy’s old jobs was mucking out the stalls. Once he can come out and help with the stock, you can stay in the nice warm store and he can do some of that again.”

Rich perked up and swallowed the rest of his sandwich in one gulp. “My God, Aiden, that’s about the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me. One more sandwich and I’ll get right on it!”

Rich grabbed the sandwich and fled, and Aiden sat down on the chair and held out his arms. “Come sit,” he commanded, and what could Jeremy do? A Federal Marshal twice this boy’s age had just run away to do his bidding. Jeremy wasn’t stronger than that.

With a sigh, he settled down on Aiden’s knee. “You know, you didn’t have to yell at him like that.”

“He’s a nozzle.”

Well, couldn’t argue with that. “He’s stuck doing a job he doesn’t like,” Jeremy soothed, and Aiden wrapped both arms around Jeremy’s waist and squeezed. Jeremy went boneless a little and reflected that Aiden didn’t have to pay anyone—he’d do whatever his boy wanted for free.

“How ’bout you? You like this job?”

Jeremy cuddled a little. “Boy, I even miss the alpaca shit.”

“Good. You just keep getting better, and one day you can help that idiot get rid of that too. Are you gonna be good here for another hour, or should I take you home now?”

Jeremy considered carefully, given that he didn’t want a repeat of that first day when he’d practically passed out on everyone. “I’ll stay another hour,” he said, and then, because it was such a good moment, he brought up that thing he’d thought was a con but really wasn’t. “Boy?”

“Jer?”

“Did Ariadne tell you about the baby?”

“Just that it’s gonna be born,” Aiden said, and he sounded indulgent, so Jeremy felt bad because this was serious.

“Did she tell you it’s gonna have problems?”

Aiden inhaled. “No!” he said, and he sounded reassuringly young. “What kind of problems?”

“Well, a cleft palate. Which is fine—you can operate on it and everything—”

“Operate on a baby?” He sounded horrified. Well, he’d seen babies before. Babies were really sort of a theoretical thing to Jeremy—he’d only ever seen the healthy ones who’d look shitty in pictures.

“Yeah. At two months, and then later—see, it sort of mangles about in their sinuses, and they need ear tubes and things—”

“Oh God.” Aiden looked at him, stunned, and Jeremy soothed him by kissing his forehead. “That’s gonna be rough on Ariadne!”

Jeremy nodded. “Yeah. I mean, I had savings when I came out of the hospital, but it’s sort of been hitting me. Ariadne’s going to be out for longer, and the baby’s going to need operations—I looked into it, and me and Ariadne have been texting and all—and she’s going to need to spend even
more
time at the hospital, but this time just for the baby, you know?”

“Oh geez,” Aiden murmured. “That’s… how’re they gonna do it, Jer? Craw’s barely scraping by now!”

Jeremy nodded. “Yeah. I know it. But I got to thinking. I was knitting that baby some socks and Mrs. Weston comes in. She mostly crochets, right, and her fingers don’t work with the fine yarn anymore. Anyways, she said she’d give me money for the socks so she could give them to her grandson. And a lady after that—she offered me twenty dollars for the matching hat.”

Aiden grunted. “Twenty dollars? That’s hardly a drop in the bucket!”

“Well, yeah,” Jeremy said, playing fitfully with the ends of Aiden’s scarf. “But, see, I was thinking. I sit here and knit when I mind the store, just like Ari and Craw. If I’m working on something simple, I can make one item a day, right?”

Aiden nodded. “Yeah, that’s about right. Baby socks, a hat, a quick sweater—you’re pretty fast.”

Jeremy flushed, pleased that Aiden had noticed. God, he’d worked hard to make knitting a skill. “Well, I was thinking that maybe I can start, I don’t know, selling, or even auctioning off items. Make it clear that the profits go to Ariadne—’cause everyone’s asking about her, you know they love her like crazy, right?”

“That’s a really good idea!” Aiden went to stand up, and Jeremy moved to let him. “Here—let me look.” He started searching the computer, and he came up with something. “Here—see? Maybe have a raffle. Have people pay you a dollar a ticket, and this here’s a number generator. You enter how many tickets you have and hit this button. And then, you know, the next day you can say, ‘The winner of Thursday’s hat is this number.’”

Jeremy nodded, getting excited. “Right? And we can take that money and put it in an account for Ariadne and the baby, for expenses and stuff. I mean, you know. A couple of weeks and we could have at least enough to pay for a trip to the doc’s.” Because hitching a ride with the mail plane was great, but it wasn’t always feasible. Besides, they’d need to stay in Boulder sometimes, and that meant the hotel room, and—well, there were a whole lot of expenses that Jeremy could help them cover by knitting simple items and raffling them off.

He smiled at the thought. “So that should work, right?”

Aiden nodded and grinned, then wrapped him up in tender arms and kissed him. “That’s a real good idea. Let’s clear it with Craw first, okay?”

Craw came in at the end of lunch like he’d been doing for the past two weeks, just to check on Jeremy. If Jeremy hadn’t been so embarrassed, he’d be sort of honored. He wasn’t sure if anyone had done that when he’d been a child, even. And it turned out Craw
had
known about the baby’s complications—and the thought had made him extra snarly.

“Oh God, Jeremy,” he muttered. “That’s a great idea.” He blinked bloodshot eyes at Jeremy, and Ben put a quiet hand on his arm. Of course Craw would be this tired. He was the one fretting about keeping the farm, and he was the one worried about his best friend and her baby. His mouth did this strange splitting thing that showed his teeth, and Jeremy took an alarmed step back.

“God, Aiden, is that a—”

“Yeah, it’s a smile,” Aiden muttered, and Jeremy took his word for it.

“Well, should we tell her?” Ben asked, and they all looked at Jeremy.

Suddenly Jeremy was afraid. What if this didn’t work? What if this great idea turned into a shitty idea? What if people didn’t trust him? He’d been waiting for his past to come out ever since the beating. When was that going to happen? Sure, people came into the store now and were happy to see him better, but what if that changed?

“No!” he said, half-panicked, and Aiden scowled. “What if it doesn’t work out?” he apologized. “It’s… it’s spun sunshine, you know. Pie in the sky—that sort of thing that doesn’t always happen like we think it should.”

“That’s a con that does that,” Aiden said flatly. “Something real, like wool, that pays off. You taught me that, remember?”

Jeremy shrank from him. “Come on,” he pleaded. “I’m still not able to feed the goddamned stock and you’re gonna put Ariadne’s hopes on something
I
cooked up?”

Aiden closed his eyes, looking unutterably weary, and Craw said, “You just knit the items, and Ben and me will make tickets and put up the sign and a lockbox.”

That sounded good—knitting the items was the one thing Jeremy was sure he could do, and sure he could do honestly. He figured that the conversation was over for the moment.

T
HEY
’
D
HAD
a routine, before the big event that changed everything so radically, and they lapsed back into it now. In the evenings they watched television, sometimes lying on top of each other, sometimes sitting at opposite ends of the couch with their knitting. The new house was big and drafty, as opposed to Jeremy’s snug little apartment, so they both covered up in blankets and used a space heater in the living room until it was time to go to bed.

For the first couple of weeks, Jeremy had trouble concentrating. He startled at small noises and spent minutes at a time staring past the double-paned windows, trying to see into the blackness outside. He could only work on hats or socks during those times—things he’d done so often he could create them in the dark—which was handy for the new endeavor they had planned at the store but not exactly comforting for a man who was proud of his craft. But pride be damned—truth was, if not for Aiden regarding him steadily, knitting without looking at his capable, big, deceptively nimble hands, Jeremy might have spent the nights hiding under the covers. But he would look up and Aiden would be looking at him calmly and that comforting, rhythmic movement of his needles continued.

It took Jeremy those first two weeks to look at the fabric taking shape in his hands. But this night, by the time Aiden got him home and they got dinner ready and the stock fed, Jeremy was anxious enough about his own knitting to ask questions.

The yarn was a rustic wool, the kind that would rinse out soft but felt coarse under the fingers as it was being worked, and the color ranged from rust to gray to pewter blue.

“That’s interesting,” he said on this particular night while the wind wuthered about the house, trying to find a way in for brittle fingers. “When did you make that?”

Aiden looked at his hands as though trying to remember. “The wool? I dyed that when you were in the hospital.”

Jeremy swallowed. “It’s… it’s a little colder than your usual,” he said, feeling apologetic.

Aiden nodded soberly. “It wasn’t a comfortable time, Jer. I was feeling pretty bleak.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I told you not to apologize.”

But Jeremy felt sorry anyway. He didn’t know what he would have done different, but he still felt sorry. Sometimes, like that afternoon in the store, he’d felt better about it. Times like now, he felt a little worse.

“What are you making?” he asked, hoping to restore some of the easy conversation they’d had before the beating and the hospital stay and Aiden’s fearful self-recrimination.

“It’s a scarf.” It was the right question, because Aiden’s voice suddenly became warm and vibrant, like the fiber if not the color. “See, it’s an undulating rib, right? And I figure that with the color and the way it goes in and out, it looks like chain mail. So I’m calling it the chain mail scarf, and I’m going to give Craw the pattern for his book.” Aiden’s patterns often sold on their own, even if people didn’t buy the yarn.

“That’s great,” Jeremy said, smiling tentatively. “Who’s that for?”

The hard planes of Aiden’s young face suddenly softened, and his smile was quirky and almost shy. “It’s for you, Jer.”

“But… but….” Jeremy stumbled. “But you always make me mittens!” He was wearing a pair of the fingerless gloves Aiden had given him right that second, in fact. They always made it easier to knit when a body was bundled up against the drafts.

“Yeah.” Aiden nodded, smiling faintly when he saw the sturdy red ones Jeremy had chosen to wear this week. “I do. But now that you’re wearing them, I think you need more stuff from me.”

Jeremy looked at the wool again, thinking that the scarf would be warm even if the colors wouldn’t. “Why that color?” he asked, afraid it would be some sort of punishment. Unfair, of course, since Aiden had never been the sort to punish a body, but to have that around his neck, a reminder of all the pain he’d put between them—that felt like he’d done something wrong.

Aiden smiled after a moment, and it was the sort of shy smile he’d worn when he proposed the raffle idea. “It’s like… like protection. I want to make you a scarf of chain mail in case I’m not already there to keep you safe.”

Oh Lord. His boy wanted to protect him.

Jeremy swallowed and put his sock aside. “Put the knitting down, boy, and come here, okay?”

Aiden settled his knitting in the basket by the couch and looked up. “Why am I coming over there?”

“Because just this once, I need to take care of you.”

He was warm. Warm and big and hard, and Jeremy wrapped his arms around his boy’s shoulders and tried to keep him safe from all the ways a boy, even a strong and capable one, could get hurt in the world, even from the person who loved him best.

A
IDEN
HAD
seen Jeremy get his hand mangled by farm machinery before and try to tell Craw they couldn’t go to the doctor, so he knew his boy was pretty good at masking pain.

He didn’t realize
how
good until he saw the doctor come back with a brace for his arm and shoulder.

“You’re overdoing it,” the doctor said bluntly. “I can’t trust a word that comes out of your mouth regarding how much it hurts or it doesn’t, but your arm was broken and your shoulder violently dislocated and your muscles were torn. Everything we touched with stitches or a scalpel is now red and inflamed, and you are not taking your pain meds like you should.”

“They stopped me up,” Jeremy said bluntly, his eyes narrowed.

The doctor didn’t blink. “Well maybe you should stop bottoming for a few weeks and let your body heal. I don’t think Aiden would mind some other activity for a while, would you, Aiden?”

Aiden felt like one of those cartoons where the animal’s face caught on fire. “No, sir,” he muttered.

The doctor turned to fiddle with the brace, and Aiden whapped Jeremy a good one upside the head. “Why didn’t you tell me that’s why you stopped taking your meds?” he hissed.

Jeremy scowled back. “Because I
liked
what we were doing when my stomach wasn’t wonky. Didn’t you?”

“Well, yeah.” Aiden looked at that scowl and counted that as maybe a good thing. And then figured that cutting him slack on this matter would not foster that sort of self-confidence. “But I like it when you’re not in pain even better.”

“Wasn’t the sex that hurt me,” Jeremy muttered. “Goddamned paper hearts. They were such a good idea too.”

Aiden scrubbed at his face and lost against the temptation to groan. “Augh, Jeremy. You’re killing me.
Killing. Me.
How are you supposed to hold Ariadne’s baby when it comes out if you keep fucking up your body?”