Blackbird Knitting in a Bunny's Lair (8 page)

“Jeremy, go say good-bye to Ariadne and Stanley, okay?” Aiden said softly. “I need to have some words with the PT and the doc.”

“But, Aiden!” There was a high, thready note of exhaustion there that told Aiden Jeremy had about had enough. If he didn’t get out of here
now
,
he’d break into tears and they’d make him stay another day. Even though they were just going to Ben’s friend’s apartment for the night before they flew to Granby in the morning, Aiden didn’t think either of them could take another day.

Aiden ground his teeth, irritated and needing Jeremy alone, all at once. “Jer, I’ll make it good, okay? You’ve got to have some faith in me. I’ll take care of you.”

Jeremy nodded helplessly, and Aiden did what he’d been dying to do since the beginning of the week, when Jeremy had first called and told him that the doctors let him out of bed.

He bent down and kissed his man.

Jeremy opened his mouth and made a soft noise, an easy surrender, and Aiden breathed him in deep and tasted. Ah, God, yes.
This
was what he’d dreamed about as he’d grown up. He’d known
it was worth the wait then, and it was certainly worth the wait now.

Aiden pulled back and nodded at him. “Go say bye to Ari, ’kay? I’ll take care of you, I promise.”

Jeremy nodded and turned away without even looking at the PT and doctor who had taken care of him for the past two months.

“He needs to tend the stock,” Aiden said evenly. He looked around for Ben, who had gone to fetch an orderly and a wheelchair, because he didn’t want Ben to hear this either. This was private. “You don’t understand—the rabbits are the only thing that’s kept him from checking out AMA and freezing to death at a bus stop, do you understand me?”

The doctor looked shocked, but PT Davenport rolled her eyes. “Nonsense! He was talking the other day about how you two were going to run a rabbit farm and you were going to teach him how to spin and he was going to be there for your friend’s baby—”

Aiden winced. “Well, see, part of him believes that,” he said, nodding. “But part of him is sure it’s pure bullshit. He’d run away just so he didn’t have to be disappointed that it wouldn’t come true. So coming home with me? Tending the stock? He needs that. He spent three years being an honest man—these things make him honest. At least in his own eyes. We won’t let him work in the mill ’til he’s ready, but you’ve got to tell him he can go back in the barn.”

They both nodded, and the PT said, “Don’t let him lift hay over his shoulder and he should be fine.”

Aiden thought about that. He’d have Craw modify some of the feeders, and Jeremy would make it okay. “That’s a deal. And you said spinning was okay?”

“Yes, as long as he uses good posture, it should help his back.”

“Great. He’ll enjoy that, if we get time to teach him. And one more thing.” He glanced behind him and saw Jeremy and Ariadne talking quietly, like children telling secrets. Good. He didn’t want Jeremy embarrassed by this next thing. He turned back to the doctors, his face all business. “Sex,” he said seriously. “We both waited damned long to have it, and we’d like to have some more.”

Jeremy’s actual doctor didn’t bat an eyelash. “Internally he’s fine, but go easy. If you’re going to do something anally, make sure you stretch a lot, because his sphincter has probably tightened over the last few months, seeing as he was on nothing but liquids for the first four weeks.”

Aiden nodded seriously—it was all good advice—and then he turned to the PT, who was hiding a smirk behind her hand.

“What?” he challenged, and she shook her head.

“Nothing! I swear!” She let a giggle sneak out. “I was just remembering what it was like to be under thirty, that’s all.” Suddenly her demeanor turned sober. “And seriously? No hands and knees. On his back, and go easy on the shoulder. Nothing strenuous—like the doc said, go easy.”

Aiden nodded. “Thanks lots. I already got his scrip for painkillers, and we’ve signed your thousands of papers. You got anything else for us?”

They both shook their heads, and Aiden let out a sigh of relief.

At that moment Ben came in with the promised orderly and a wheelchair, and oh, thank you, Jesus, they could get going.

“Did you miss me?” Ben said perkily.

Aiden nodded in total seriousness. “Like you would not believe. Ariadne, Stanley, you about ready to let me and Jeremy go home?”

Stanley walked them out, and Jeremy must have exacted a thousand promises from him to look after Ariadne while they were gone. And then Stanley thanked Jeremy for the thousandth time for taking the beating that had saved his life.

Jeremy shrugged—just shrugged—like the past two months weren’t no big thing, and Aiden had to take deep breaths to see past the red in front of his eyes. “I’m just glad you’re such a good guy, Stanley. It would have sucked if I’d done all that and you were screwing around on Johnny already. You’re worth it!”

Rory traded places with Ben so he could go in and visit Ariadne, and Aiden got in the back with Jeremy. He couldn’t seem to stop staring. The scars had faded, but Jeremy’s normally oval-shaped face was still so thin it was almost just a stripe of pale skin with giant brown eyes.

“What?” Jeremy asked defensively.

“You’re worth it?” Aiden growled in frustration. “
You’re worth it
?”

Jeremy gazed levelly back at him. “Stanley never hurt no one, boy. He never conned nobody, he never took their money. About the only thing I can see he ever did wrong was fuck around. But even then, he wasn’t fucking around
on
anybody. So my friend comes along, looking for a reason to stay straight, and Stanley gives it to him. That’s a bad thing?”

Aiden could only shake his head, throat working, and wonder when this sort of seething feeling was going to level off. Jeremy sighed then and leaned back into his arms, and the seething got shoved down into Aiden’s toes or somewhere, because all he knew was he had an armful of tired man, and it was all his.

Jeremy slept most of the afternoon and all of the night after that, and Aiden simply lay next to him while Ben worked quietly in the next room. (He liked the apartment—claimed the Internet was a dream and that he could get more done here with his laptop than he got done with all of the equipment it had taken them days to move into Craw’s place back in Granby. Aiden liked a computer well enough, but he wasn’t willing to concede that Boulder had anything more to offer than superlative Internet and a decent hospital.) Jeremy woke up periodically, eyes rolling in his pale face, breath quickening to the point of panic, and Aiden soothed a hand along his arm and whispered in his ear.

“Sh. S’okay. I’m here.”

Jeremy just shivered, and Aiden draped his body over that shaking form, careful, so careful, of healing muscles and sinews. Very clearly, he heard Jeremy say, “Harder, boy. I’m freezing.”

Aiden lay on top of him like a muscle-and-skin blanket, holding him tight.

Deep into the night, Jeremy fell asleep for real, and Aiden did too. He dreamed of rabbits jumping out of his embrace, scratching his arms and his chest with their powerful back claws.

E
XCLUDING
THE
life flight from Granby to Boulder, Jeremy had never been on a plane before, small or otherwise, which was funny, because by now, Aiden was about sick of them.

Of course, anything that made Jeremy nervous resulted in the talking, and Aiden could do nothing but hold his hand and let him go.

“Wow, them mountains’re pretty in the snow, aren’t they? Look at all of that—think that’s what’s making us bounce, all that air running around? Whoo-ee, lookit that road—that’s about plum impassable, isn’t it?”

Aiden looked down to the series of fifteen-mile-an-hour switchbacks that made up the pass over the mountains into the bowl of Granby. “Yeah, looks like they had another rockslide,” he said grimly. “I think we’re damned lucky the mail plane agreed to take us.” He looked to the front of the little six-seater plane. “Thanks again, Angus!”

Angus, a beefy guy with weathered brown skin and lots of creases, nodded affably. “My pleasure,” he called over the engine noise. “I’m gonna miss taking you guys around—you were at least company!”

“Well, you won’t miss us too much,” Aiden told him. “We’re still going to be checking on Ariadne until she’s had the baby.”

“We are?” Jeremy turned away from the window—which had delighted him as much as it unnerved him—for the first time since the plane had taken off. “That’s good—great, in fact. I’m damned excited about that. She was worried, right? I mean, Rory comes once a week, and I know Stanley is going to bring his friend there and all, but you know, she and me….” He swallowed unhappily and stared out of the plane, and Aiden touched his shoulder. He had three sisters and two brothers. The next oldest after him was his sister in junior college, who had not
graduated valedictorian just to show him up like she’d threatened, but who had not graduated pregnant either, so that was something. He remembered the first day he’d come home after spending the night with Jeremy, and how he’d met his mother’s eyes evenly, and that had been just fine.

But Elaine had done one of those complicated gestures using the fist and the tongue and the mouth to simulate a blowjob as she stood behind Mom’s back, and while on the one hand it had outraged him, on the other, it had been a pretty clear indication that business was usual. Aiden did things first and Elaine gave him shit about it, and that comforted him on some level.

So he got Ariadne and Jeremy—and he got that they’d been in the same room for eight weeks, when they’d both been at their loneliest and Jeremy had probably been more scared than he ever had been in his life.

“Yeah,” he said now, leaning over Jeremy’s body gingerly. “If you’re up for it, we can put you back on the plane in a week.”

Jeremy looked at him sharply. “You don’t wanna come?”

Aiden grimaced. God, he was really starting to hate this plane. “I’ll try. The shop’s been shorthanded for two months,” he said apologetically. “It goes under, that’s you, me, and Ari all out of a job, and Craw with a whole lot of land and a whole lot of critters and no way to feed them or pay taxes.”

Jeremy nodded. “Well, then—it’s a good thing Craw’ll have you again.”

“And you!” Aiden protested.

Jeremy shrugged, and then the plane started jouncing about in the turbulence that the Rocky Mountains harbored like an escaped felon.

The drive to Ben’s was slow and careful, because even in the valley, the roads were icy, and the truck Aiden borrowed from Craw was squirrelly even with chains. But eventually they were there, and Aiden didn’t miss Jeremy’s grateful glance up the road to Craw’s house and mill and the barn, which they could see from Ben’s little house on its acre of land.

“That’s a comfort,” Jeremy admitted.

Aiden agreed and reached into the truck for the two bags of Jeremy’s stuff that had migrated to the hospital over the past two months. Aiden wondered if Jeremy would let him put the woolen stuff in the drier with a damp washcloth soaked in lavender and eucalyptus to get rid of the hospital smell. Probably—he was reasonably sure Jeremy was as grateful as Aiden to get that stink off his skin.

Together they walked up the recently iced sidewalk toward Ben’s little house. Jeremy was shivering hard, or Aiden would have taken him into the little hutch on the side of the house to see the bunnies and the chickens Ben had kept. Craw had moved in Jeremy’s favorite rabbits from the mill, figuring that Jeremy did the brushing anyway for the fur, and then Stanley had surprised everybody by having a pair of Angora bunnies, which had this fabulous fur, shipped to the farm in the winter. Craw had told Ben privately (who had then told Aiden publicly, because apparently the habit of keeping secrets was not one Ben had developed) that Stanley wasn’t rich. Those bunnies had cost him a lot of his savings, and Aiden tried to be grateful.

It might be easier to be grateful to the little man if he could see Jeremy’s face light up when he saw the bunnies, but it wasn’t going to happen tonight.

“Y
OU
EVEN
put up the valances!” Jeremy said for the umpteenth time since they’d walked in.

Aiden looked at him and swallowed. Jeremy was tired, there were no two ways about it. For one thing, he hadn’t stopped talking since he’d walked through the door, but for another, well, he was just plain nervous. Aiden remembered before the beating, when a body could just tell him to shut up and take a breather. Aiden didn’t have the heart to do that this time.

He was so thin.

And the doctors had done a really good job of minimizing the scarring, but it was still there.

And his nose wasn’t ever going to be the same.

Yes, Aiden had seen all of these things in the hospital. He knew they were true. But here, in this place Aiden was trying to think of as home, they were even more apparent.

It didn’t make Aiden want him less. When Jeremy had first moved to Granby and into Craw’s little room in the barn, Aiden hadn’t really thought all that much of his looks anyway. He had a small nose when Aiden sort of preferred bold noses, and a sweet little pillow mouth, and Aiden had always thought he’d fancied a lean mouth. He had also had eyes that had always seemed to gaze far, far away, and that, of all things, had turned Aiden off the most.

After their first week of working together, after Aiden saw that all of the complex little pieces of Jeremy were in no way close to being revealed, he realized those faraway eyes pissed him off because he wanted Jeremy’s eyes on him.

Once Aiden had kissed Jeremy for the first time and he’d focused his big brown eyes on Aiden and Aiden alone, all of those other features just fell into place. The entire package—surprising strength, the cleverness, the “aw, shucks” patter—that was Jeremy. Aiden could not pretend he chose to love Jeremy. After the first six months of watching the man try so hard to be a good person, he had no choice at all.

Aiden wished he did.

Standing here in Ben’s sweet little house with the newly painted walls and the sparkling double-paned windows letting the darkness in, Aiden could only remember that terrible moment, the one he’d been pushing into the back of his mind for the past two months.