Blackbird Knitting in a Bunny's Lair (5 page)

W
HEN
HE
returned to Boulder the next day, Aiden had an entire garbage bag of things to bring Jeremy. He started out with the “emergency quilt” his mother and grandmother had put together in twelve hours, made mostly of flannel scraps and tied together at great intervals. He suspected they’d put an old blanket in the middle, the better to keep the center of the sandwich from bunching due to the hasty workmanship. The backing was made of one solid piece of material—more flannel—featuring realistic bunnies and sheep across the back.

Jeremy stroked it with his good hand when Aiden laid it out, and his fingers found the wool ties as though drawn by a magnet.

Aiden never told him, never even knew if he realized, but in the course of his hospital stay, Jeremy managed to felt and fray every tie on the blanket, just by his nervous fidgeting. Aiden figured if that was all he did after a beating like the one he took, then they were in a good place.

But they weren’t. How could they be?

The first time Jeremy went in for surgery, when he was getting his lung repaired and his insides looked after, Aiden was being questioned by the FBI. He got out, he wasn’t going to jail, Jeremy was still alive—he figured that was a win.

A week later, Jeremy went in again, this time for his shoulder. He mumbled fitfully through his mouthful of broken teeth, and Aiden held his hand. The nurse gave him the pretty pink pill that served as precursor to the anesthetic, and Jeremy started mumbling about home.

They caught the word “bunnies” and “critters” through his broken teeth, and “boy,” always, always, “boy.”

Aiden excused himself to the bathroom. Craw hauled him out fifteen minutes later, because he’d been sitting on the throne, fully clothed, holding his hands tightly so they’d stop shaking.

Craw’s hands shook too as he dropped Aiden in the seat next to Ariadne’s bed.

Ariadne was unabashedly wiping her cheeks with a tissue, and Aiden had the presence of mind to hold up a small trash can for her.

“Thanks,” she mumbled. “What are you all going to do while he’s in surgery?”

“I’m taking Craw out for a drink,” Ben announced, and everybody, including Craw, stared at him. His sweet oval face looked unusually stern, and the hipster’s stubble he usually kept had grown over in the past couple weeks until he was almost as bearded as Craw.

“What? You asked. I’d take you
all
out for a drink, but Ariadne’s pregnant and Aiden isn’t going to leave this place until he’s out of surgery.”

Aiden tried to make himself get up, but his knees were water. Next time he’d have to leave when they wheeled Jeremy out, because this thing here that he was going to do with Ari? The waiting and trying not to think about Jeremy? That was not going to be comfortable, that was for damned sure.

“Go get a drink,” he heard himself saying. “Drink one for me—I’m finally old enough now.”

Craw grunted. “I’ll drink one for Jeremy,” he said gruffly. “So he doesn’t have to when he gets out.” He stood there looking at Aiden for a few more minutes, but Ben was tugging on his arm, and eventually they went.

Aiden was left sprawled in the ugly, cheap wooden hospital chair, his legs taking up three times the space they should have, and leaning on an elbow on top of Ariadne’s bed.

He was staring out into space so he didn’t have to look inside the darkness of his own head and hear Jeremy calling for his boy.

Vaguely, he became aware that Ariadne was knitting and singing into the heavy silence.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night….

Aiden looked at her and remembered the song. She’d sung it to Jeremy that first night to calm him down.

Take these broken wings and learn to fly….

He started humming it, there in the hospital room, and she looked up at him, her wide green eyes overlarge in her pinched face. She was in pain too, he remembered. She was supposed to be in the hospital to get rest, and instead, her bedroom had become Grand Central Station while they all fussed over Jeremy.

“You got needles and sock yarn?” he asked, because he’d forgotten his own knitting back in Ben’s friend’s apartment. The guy was apparently in Florida until February—the perfect roommate.

“Yeah.” She put her own knitting—a bright-red hooded cloak that looked to be for her—in her lap and reached down beside her. She came back with a basket full to bursting not just with Craw’s yarn, all wound for her use, but with yarn from other mills.

Aiden found a smile in that pile of wool. “Stanley’s been by.”

“Uh-hm,” Ari said, apparently finding her own sparkle in the basket. “And so has his boss, Alice. I’ve got those nice laminate needles and lots of worsted-weight yarn—choose your poison.”

Normally, given all that selection, Aiden would have gone for some of the bigger mills, some of the more popular brands, just to see if he and Craw could up their game a little. But not tonight.

He recognized a lone skein of yarn there, bright gold, bright azure, touches of midnight purple. It was a big skein—nearly three hundred yards—and worsted weight. He grabbed a pair of twenty-inch circular needles and started to cast on blindly, thinking that everyone needed a gaiter this time of year.

“I like that colorway,” Ari said. “One of yours?”

Aiden nodded. “Jeremy came up with it. Said they were my colors—it’s the only colorway he’s ever created.”

Ari made a little sound—helpless and trying so hard not to be broken. “I don’t know if I’ve ever thought of you that dark,” she said quietly. “But you must be.”

“He knew,” Aiden said, remembering that moment. Jeremy looking at the sky, seeing the darkness of the night as it gave way to the promise of an autumn dawn. “He’s always known I’ve got that darkness in me.”

Ari placed a gentle hand on his arm, and he stopped casting on for a moment and squeezed her hand.

“So he’s probably not surprised at what you did,” she said, and he wondered, what was it about women that they knew the size and shape of the splinter as it worked its way to your heart.

“No,” he said softly. “But we haven’t had a chance to talk about it.”

“Well, no.”

He looked up and saw that she was smiling at him, and he finished casting on quietly, working the slingshot cast-on without conscious thought until there was no yarn on the long tail.

“I’m not going to say anything,” he muttered after a few minutes.

“Whyever not?”

Aiden glared at her, surprised. “Because it’s not something a man talks about!”

Ari snorted. “Oh the hell it’s not. Jesus, kid—if I killed a man, protected my family like that, I’d be all posturing, right? ‘Look at me, uh-huh, I’m a bitch, uh-huh, don’t fuck with my family, oh no you don’t!’”

Without warning, Aiden chuckled. “You’d do it, too!”

“I would take out an
ad
,” she vowed solemnly. “So what about you?”

“I’m the baby,” he confessed.

“Not to Jeremy.”

That earned her a quick grin. “No. Not to Jeremy.”

“You’re the older one with Jeremy, I don’t care what his forged birth certificate says.”

Aiden had started to look for the real thing, but in order to find it, he’d have to dig into Jeremy’s past a little too deeply. Jeremy’s wounds were healed—reopening them when he was happy? That was just cruel.

“Yes,” he agreed, perfectly content with this. “He needs me.” Then, the real pain festering inside: “I let him down.”

Her strong, skinny fingers clenched on his wrist with enough force to bruise.

“You know that’s a lie,” she said, and in that moment, he felt like he’d walked through another grown-up door, like drinking or deciding what was worth killing for. “You’re one of the people on the short list who has
never
let him down.”

“But I want someone to blame,” he said rawly. “Someone who’s not Jeremy or Stanley”—who hadn’t asked for it either—“or Gia—Johnny or Craw or you—” His voice grew squirrely then, running from one octave to another, finally cracking right open in the middle.
Boy? Boy? Where are you, boy?

He wiped his eyes for the first time since his mother had comforted him in his kitchen, and was not surprised when Ariadne snuck her thin arm behind his shoulders.

“He keeps calling for me like I’m not going to come,” he said at last, and Ari kissed his shoulder.

“That’s going to be harder to fix than anything,” she told him, and God, it wasn’t anything he hadn’t thought of before, but oh
damn
, it was so good to hear someone else say it, someone else admit that Jeremy would need more than stitches and bed rest to be better.

His breathing grew harsh and loud in the room as they waited, but his hands kept moving. A gaiter, like a scarf, but something that would surround Jeremy, something that would keep him warm and protected, front, back, or on top. That was what he’d try to make for Jeremy—although the color bothered him.

He grunted quizzically, and Ari stopped humming Beatles songs at his side and looked at him. “What?”

“These aren’t his colors,” Aiden said apologetically.

“No. They’re yours. Maybe make it for yourself and see what happens.”

What happened was he leaned against her voluntarily, just to feel those strong fingers in his hair. “You know,” he said conversationally, “I don’t even let my mom comfort me.”

“Your mom doesn’t mind that you killed someone,” Ari said. “But I bet she didn’t offer to do it herself.”

“No,” Aiden said thoughtfully. Then: “Do you think Jeremy would kill for me?”

“Not a doubt in the world,” Ari responded, and he sat up and looked at her.

“Really?”

“You ever see a jackrabbit fight?” she asked. “They’re stronger than they look, hon. So’s Jer.”

By the time they’d wheeled Jeremy out of recovery and back to the room, Aiden was halfway done with the gaiter. He moved his chair next to Jeremy’s bed so he could be the first thing Jeremy saw when he woke up.

And it was a gradual thing. No calling his name, no plaintive moaning. One minute Aiden was looking at his knitting, seeing his project take shape, and the next? Aiden looked up and those sweet brown eyes were watching his hands move like it was the most fascinating thing in the world.

“Bor oo?” he asked, and Aiden found he could smile into his lover’s eyes after all.

“You like?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you want for yourself?” Because Aiden was going to be using a lot of yarn if the past seven days were any indicator.

“Anyting,” Jeremy said dreamily. “Long oo make i’.”

“God, you’re easy. Maybe next time you get beat up, you try bargaining a little. We could have milked the FBI for all they’re worth!”

“No,” Jeremy said soberly. “No’ ’onnet.”

And that, that right there, was when Aiden knew they would eventually be all right.

“Yeah. It’s gotta be honest,” he said, almost crowing.

Jeremy fell asleep on that note, so he didn’t see Ben coming in later to take Aiden back to the apartment to sleep, nor did he hear about Craw, drunk and asleep in the truck downstairs.

But he was still Aiden’s Jeremy—he’d be there to hear the story later.

L
ATER
,
WHEN
he thought about it, Jeremy would realize that much of the living he did in the hospital, he did in his head. And much of it was for Aiden.

Yes, his body was doing the things—the resting, the physical therapy, the surgeries. He got his teeth back, which was nice, and when his physical therapist found out he was a knitter, that made things a damned sight easier. The PT kept working on Jeremy’s shoulder, and Jeremy was given balls to squeeze to build up his triceps again and to stretch, but the nice woman with the soft blue eyes and three kids said one of the best things he could do was to keep on knitting.

So, propping one needle in the hand of his wrenched shoulder and knitting and yarn throwing with the other hand, that was what he did. He didn’t last long at first, and that was a problem. He couldn’t read—if he couldn’t hold his knitting, he couldn’t hold a book!—and they couldn’t prop him up to see the television well enough to make it worth his while.

Some days it was just him and Ariadne, and bless it, without the knitting in his hands, he felt compelled to talk.

“Aiden said he was coming, but I said not to. I mean, he’s got work to do, and what’s he going to do, sit in here and watch me heal? Not that I’d mind healing, I tell you what, but seriously, if it’s as boring for him as it is for me, it’d be a mite comfort if he stayed home. He could tell me how the rabbits are doing—we lose some every year ’cause of the cold, and I’m worried about Harvey—”

“Harvey?” She sounded weary, and she probably was, because he was exhausting
himself
.
She was game, though, hanging in there, trying to stay with him when the sound of his own voice was more than just for company. Oh no—Jeremy’s rambling had a definite purpose now: he needed to keep his mind off of the fact that pain had not been a word until they’d taken away his morphine button after the last surgery and the nurse wasn’t due in for another hour.

“That old gray one I liked so much—he was my friend my first year, you know? Aiden was trying not to kill me and Craw was probably wishing I’d been panhandling on another corner, and that rabbit, well, he’s only a rabbit, but he was a good friend, and now he probably thinks I deserted him. The ’pacas, too—they look for me, right? Betty just miscarried the cria….” His voice broke, and he tried to treat it like any other time. “The night Stanley came over. That’s why I was out by myself. Anyway, she was doing poorly, and I hope she’s okay. All the fuss with… with that guy, you know, Craw probably didn’t have a chance to make sure the animals were doing okay. It’s a good barn and everything, but, you know, everyone who cares for the stock was in this damned room for a couple of days.”

“Aiden’s family looked after them,” Ariadne said quietly, and that caught Jeremy by surprise.

And shot a sudden shaft of guilt right there in the kidneys, which had finally stopped bleeding.