Blackbird Knitting in a Bunny's Lair (26 page)

“You two are grossing me out,” Rich muttered. “God, what’s a guy got to do to find a straight woman in these parts?”

“Maybe not curse in front of her mother,” Mrs. Fullmer said tartly. “Are you going to the benefit for Ariadne?”

Rich got off the stepladder and moved it a couple of feet so he could get to the next batch of ceiling. “I… I mean nobody had… I mean—”

“Oh my God,” Aiden muttered in disgust. “You are so damned stupid. Your place of business spends a
month
putting up fliers and taking out ads and hiring bands, and you don’t even think you should probably just show the hell up?” He sent his old teacher a cursory glance over his shoulder. “No offence, Miz F.”

“Of course, Aiden,” Mrs. Fullmer said dryly. “And I mean it, sir. My daughter is recently divorced and would love a date—as long as you can manage not to swear in front of
her
.”

Rich looked down from the step stool and nodded. For a minute Aiden thought he was going to turn the nice lady down, which would have been a shame since he was stuck here and all.

But he surprised Aiden—hell, surprised Mrs. Fullmer too.

“That would be lovely, ma’am,” he said gratefully. “Next time you come in, bring her by, and I’d be happy to give her my number after she meets me.”

Mrs. Fullmer smiled charmingly, then stood up with her yarn purchases in her basket. “Jeremy, stop pretending like you’re going to get up there and help him—”

“My shoulder is near to healed,” he said staunchly.

She patted his hand as he stood at the register. “Then let it get all the way, my dear. Now, you said you had that pattern I was asking after?”

Jeremy trotted around the little office space where they kept the pattern binders, and after an amazingly short time, he produced the factory pattern from the sleeve where it was kept.

“Here you go!” he said happily. “This is the one Aiden figured out, and this is the original Elizabeth Zimmerman baby surprise jacket.”

Aiden had merely adapted the jacket to crochet, since that was something he could do too, and added a specific gauge and yarn requirements in there. Elizabeth Zimmerman, bless her, had been a designing genius and as practical as Mother Earth, but some people got a little upset without the exact same gauge specification you found in most modern patterns.

Mrs. Fullmer looked at the pattern and stroked the warm spring mix of rust and purple in her basket. “So,” she said, thinking, “if I made one of these, could I donate it to the raffle?”

Jeremy sought out Aiden’s eyes immediately, and Aiden shrugged. Why not?

“You know, ma’am, I hadn’t thought about that, but yes. I don’t see why not!” Aiden could tell by the way Jeremy bounced a little on his toes that he was thinking this through. “If we end up with too many items to raffle, is it all right if we give it to a charity?”

Mrs. Fullmer nodded, smiling, which told Aiden that had been exactly the right idea.

“Since you’re the first person to offer,” Jeremy said, obviously still thinking, “then you get to name the charity. When you come back in to donate the item, you tell us, and in the meantime, we’ll put a sign up asking people if they want to do the same thing. That is an
amazing
idea, ma’am. Thank you so much for thinking of it!”

And damned if Aiden’s old schoolteacher who had terrified him in the fifth grade did not laugh like a schoolgirl and toss her hair. Jeremy smiled and played into that, telling her that crochet was scarce around these parts and she’d be as exotic as the Queen of Sheba, and other nonsense. Aiden got lost in his patter about two sentences in—he’d spent the first three years of their relationship coaxing real words and real things out of Jeremy. His ear had no room for that cheesy, flirty con-man’s patter, but he didn’t disdain it either. He’d noticed now that Jeremy wasn’t trying to scam women out of their money. The only side effect of his aw-shucks chatter was that women walked away feeling better about themselves.

It seemed that once Jeremy had a way to feed himself with hard work alone, what was left was a charming man who liked to please almost everybody.

And who would argue with Aiden about the color of the sky.

That didn’t bother Aiden none either. Jeremy argued with him because he
trusted
Aiden. Aiden would argue back, and he’d get mad, and he’d shout and wave his hands and bitch and bicker.

But he’d never hurt Jeremy. And he’d never dismiss him. And he’d never leave him.

So Aiden could watch his man flirt with any girl who walked into the store (with the exception of anyone related directly to Aiden, of course, which irritated Aiden for some reason). Jeremy trusted Aiden not to hurt and not to leave.

And Aiden trusted Jeremy not to cheat and not to betray.

Mrs. Fullmer was walking out of the store, but before she left, she turned and waved at them. “Bye, Jeremy. Aiden, you’ve met yourself a really nice boy there. Doesn’t
quite
make up for blowing off a full ride to Colorado State, but it’s close.” And with that, the door closed on a bell, and what had been a nice little interlude suddenly became a subarctic silence.

Aiden winced.

Jeremy did too.

“Boy—”

“Jer—”

“Tell me you didn’t!”

Rich looked from one of them to the other and scrambled down the stepladder. “I’m outta here.”

“Don’t you dare,” Aiden said flatly, and Rich scrambled up again. Yeah, he was afraid of Aiden. So what?

“But—” Jeremy was looking at him helplessly, and that pissed Aiden off.

“It was three years ago,” Aiden said, trying to keep patience in his words. “Three years ago, and I’d decided not to go away to State long before you came along, remember.”

Jeremy nodded, but that charming, confident smile had faded, and they were left in a room full of brilliant yarn and regrets Aiden refused to own.

“Rich, you wanna mind the till for a minute?” Jeremy asked, his geniality obviously forced. “You can hang up the Easter eggs any way you want.” He disappeared out the door, and Aiden took a deep breath and bit off a curse.

“What’s the problem?” Rich asked, and Aiden fought the temptation to savage his ass again.

“You think that man had a chance to go to college?” Aiden asked bitterly. He remembered asking Jeremy what his high school graduation had been like. Jeremy had responded—quite matter-of-factly—that the mail-call guard at the prison had told him he had mail and shoved his diploma envelope through the slot.

He’d been so casual about it, like that was fine, it was what everybody did, and that a high school stadium full of proud parents and families only happened to the shining and the chosen ones, like Aiden.

“Well, no,” Rich said, like it had just dawned on him. “But—”

“But what?” Aiden scowled.

Rich took a deep breath, like he was remembering Aiden was half his age and a third his education and should not be intimidating. “But you chose him. You chose this
life
. I mean, when I started working here, I’ve got to tell you, I was expecting hicks—semiliterate people who could barely lift a pencil, much less run a computer. I mean…
knitting
,
right?”

Aiden narrowed his eyes and thought seriously about kicking the stepladder out from under him. “You have a
point
?”

Rich sighed and grabbed another egg, then looked around the store and changed his mind for a different one. The boy must have been learning, because it was a better choice. “The point is, none of you are stupid. You are obviously brilliant—”

“What in the—”

“Look, boy,” Rich said deliberately, frowning down at him, “I’m not shitting around. You just looked me in the eye and told me that maybe my work here could be therapeutic. You
have
killed a man, and you walk in this world like you can live with that. You think I didn’t know that? You think I haven’t been taking lessons with you about how to make that right in my head?”

Aiden shifted from one foot to the other. “If you’d seen him,” he said after a raw moment. “If you’d seen what Carelli had done to him—if you’d seen him just looking at the guy, waiting for the shot, serene as anything ’cause he’d paid back a debt—if you’d seen that, killing the man wouldn’t be your nightmare.” Aiden knew what his nightmare was, and that wasn’t it.

“Yeah? What
would
it be?” Rich asked bitterly.

Aiden made a sound in his throat and hated Rich sincerely and with great depth. “It would be not getting there in time to kill him,” he said gruffly.

Rich nodded. “See? You’re not stupid.
He
isn’t stupid. You put him in here and hoped he wouldn’t suck, and he’s a natural. Ben is finally getting time to tend to his
own
business, and that’s helping keep the place afloat. And between you two and Craw and Ben, you must have read half the stock at Barnes & Noble.”

Aiden grunted. “The winters here are fucking long,” he said, because that was a reason to make allowances.

“A-fuckin’-men,” Rich averred. “But what I’m saying is, you know what you’re doing. All of you. Five minutes getting my ass shoved down my throat in your and Craw’s company and I knew you’d both chosen this life because nothing in the world would suit you better. His only problem,” Rich said, and given the little jerk of his head toward the front door, it was clear he was talking about Jeremy, “is that he thinks so much of you, he doesn’t see that.”

Aiden looked at the door and sighed. They’d gotten in the new feeders, and Jeremy had taken to wandering the stalls and giving the animals treats at odd times. It was a terrible thing to do to stock, because they swarmed like bees every time someone wandered into the barn. All those critters were just
sure
the humans who did not pander to their every whim were holding out on them. Aiden had started throwing carrots and little bits of oatcake toward the back wall just so the damned things wouldn’t make him feel guilty.

Aiden looked up and saw a group of regulars pulling up in the drive. “You can help them, right?” he said, and Rich nodded.

“I’m not as good as Jeremy, but yeah.”

Aiden looked around at the inexpertly hung eggs and offered up a growly sort of smile. “Well, we all have our skill set,” he said without sarcasm, and then he dodged out.

Aiden walked into the barn and remembered Jeremy’s first trip there, when he couldn’t stop talking to save his life and he didn’t know an alpaca from a sheep from a hole in the ground to hold a rat’s ass.

He’d been a mess in the mill too, all thumbs, nervous talking, paying attention to everything but what his hands were doing. It was like his years in Granby had given him a still place inside, a place where the talking didn’t
have
to happen and a place where he was sure nobody judged. The barn and the mill were Jeremy’s still places, and Aiden was not surprised to see Jeremy in the mill, petting one of their more social alpacas on the neck and feeding him hay.

Aiden didn’t speak at first. Jeremy’s eyes were closed, and the alpaca was resting his chin on Jeremy’s shoulder. Aiden walked softly up behind him and wrapped his arms around Jeremy’s waist, then rested his chin on Jeremy’s other shoulder.

Jeremy leaned back into him with all of that trust Aiden had just seen.

“I am not a nice man,” Aiden said baldly into the quiet. “If my father hadn’t been around to soften me, I would have grown up into a right bastard. What you thought was a crush on Craw was really me finding someone in the world who was just as mean and ornery as I was, and knowing him like kin.”

“You’re a ni—”

“No, it’s my turn to talk,” Aiden said, plowing right over him. “You are charming. And pretty—not pretty ’cause you’re young, like me, but pretty ’cause you smile and you look people in the eye and you just dazzle them. And you may think that’s your conning days in you, but you know what, Jeremy No-last-name?”

“I’m boggled,” Jeremy said dryly, and that too made Aiden smile.

“You
like
people. You charm people because you
like
them. And you make
me
want to like them too. Now Ari, she’s good in the store too, because she knows damned near everything and because she’s got an eye for art, even if she doesn’t have your technique with the needles. But you have every bit as much potential as I do to go to school, to learn another trade. You could be Stanley in Boulder, or a lawyer like you first told Craw, or a sales associate, or a thousand other things in the world. But you stay here. You know why?”

Some of Jeremy’s tension seeped out. “I like it here,” he said, his voice almost too soft to be heard among the breaths and the grunts and the panting noises animals made just by
being
.

“And so do I,” Aiden said, breathing in the warmth from the hollow of his neck. “I like it here. I
love
what we’re doing here. And that we work together. And that there’s a way to challenge myself with my craft almost every single day.”

“That sounds pretty,” Jeremy murmured, “but what if there’s a day—”

“If there is
ever
a day I need to leave Granby, wouldn’t you want to come with me?”

Jeremy turned a little and kissed Aiden’s jaw. “Boy,” he said, and Aiden relaxed a little. Whenever Jeremy called him that, the world would turn apace.

“Yeah?” Aiden prompted, closing his eyes under the caress of Jeremy’s lips and nose.

“You told me that first night, and I believe it.”

“Yeah?” Aiden smiled because Jeremy was nibbling and it almost tickled.

“You told me you were my home.”

“Fucking finally,” Aiden groaned, and turned his bunny into his arms for a kiss.

Long and sweet, dreamy and soft, the kiss went on until Jeremy pulled back and grinned. “You know what’s good?”

“What?”

“Ariadne comes into the shop tomorrow. We’ll get to see the baby.”

Aiden grunted and shrugged. He
was
the oldest of six, and babies were babies. But just like high school graduation, there were some things Jeremy really hadn’t had in his life.

“You ready to be Uncle Jeremy full time?”