Blackbird Knitting in a Bunny's Lair (12 page)

“Tomorrow, maybe you make it
through
lunch,” Aiden said optimistically. “Maybe in a couple of weeks, you can stay until the store closes, what do you think?”

“Peachy,” Jeremy grumbled. “I might not be a barnacle on your ass by then.”

“Hush,” Aiden whispered. “You’re never a barnacle on anyone’s ass. We
missed
you. Did you hear Rich griping about ‘Saint Jeremy’?”

“Yeah—what was that about?”

“That was because everything he did, we said, ‘Jeremy did it better.’ I mean, it was true—”

“Was not,” Jeremy argued. “I was a horrible employee.”

Aiden grunted and turned his head. “Babe,” he said, which woke Jeremy up considerably, since it was the first time Aiden had ever
used
that term, “what you got to realize is that I was a
kid
when you started working for Craw. I was
not
very nice to you. You did fine, you know? But I was just impatient—”

“I was stupid,” Jeremy reassured him. “I’d never done an honest day’s work in my life.”

“Yeah, but if you’d had someone older—”

Jeremy swallowed, thinking it was time to come clean. “It wouldn’t have worked as good,” he said, dropping his voice. “I mean, I still might’ve come clean, but I was sort of in love with you after that first day.”

Aiden made a noise, a sort of hurt noise that Jeremy couldn’t fathom. He tried to move so he could look up at Aiden’s face, but Aiden turned away.

“Me too,” Aiden said, speaking to the window with the pretty lace curtains. “I was. But I was young and stupid. Like the boys on the playground who trip the little girls and tease them and pull their hair. I loved you, and I showed it by being an asshole.”

“I was stupid,” Jeremy said again, not sure if he could ever explain how out of his depth he’d been. “I’d never met a nice boy before, much less worked with one.”

Aiden breathed out slowly and carefully. “I wasn’t a nice boy, even then.”

“You were,” Jeremy insisted. He wanted to prop up on his elbow and sit up, but that wasn’t going to happen. “You were such a good boy, and then you had to go and get mixed up with me—”

“Shut up,” Aiden muttered. “Shut up. I love you so much. So damned much. And you almost died. So no more about how I was a nice boy. I killed a man. I’m not a nice boy anymore, so that can’t be the only thing you loved about me, okay?”

“You shut up,” Jeremy snapped. “You’re
always
a nice boy. You killed a man inside the law—you’re
still
a nice boy. You saved my life. So no more of that. You were a nice boy then, and you’re a nice boy now. And I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and you stayed with me. And what the hell are we arguing about?”

Aiden cracked a smile. “We’re talking about why I was such an asshole to Rich from the minute he got here.”

“Well, that’s easy,” Jeremy muttered, settling down on him again.

“Yeah? What’d we resolve?”

Jeremy swallowed. Admitting this was admitting to so much, but he didn’t think there was any way around it. “You were mean to him because he wasn’t me,” he said slowly.

He could hear Aiden’s jaw working, it hurt so much.

“Yeah. You’re right.” Aiden’s chest rose and fell slowly, like he was controlling his breathing with everything in him. “You can’t do that again, okay? You can’t—”

“Everybody dies,” Jeremy said, hearing his own voice from a dispassionate distance. “You can’t make me promise not to do that.”

Aiden nodded, and Jeremy looked up to see a little bit of water leak out from where he was squeezing his eyes tight. “Okay—but I can make you promise you won’t try to go it alone, okay?”

Jeremy grunted. “My past will never hurt you,” he muttered, thinking that Aiden didn’t know what he was asking.

“Goddammit, Jeremy, it already has!” Aiden exploded, tightening his arm around Jeremy’s shoulders to the point of pain. “It hurt me. You told Johnny that it was easier from the side that took the beating than it was from the side that ran and hid. Well you know what? Tough shit. The next time it’s a difference between taking a beating and running and hiding, you know what you’re gonna fuckin’ do?”

Jeremy looked up at his profile in wonder. Gently, he traced the outline of those lean lips and the small jaw-to-cheekbone ratio that made his face so irresistibly small.

“I’m gonna do whatever hurts my boy the least,” he promised. This boy, here, he was still keeping Jeremy after all that. It was the least he could promise.

“Yeah,” Aiden said, still looking away.

They fell asleep like that, Aiden looking toward the window, Jeremy looking at Aiden. Jeremy wondered, somewhere between when his eyes closed and his breathing evened, what he was going to have to do to make Aiden trust him again.

T
HEY
FOUND
a routine. They’d get up in the morning, Jeremy would take care of the bunnies, they’d have breakfast and go to work. Jeremy would work the register or help with the accounts or, sometimes, decorate the store. For Valentine’s Day, he spent an entire day cutting out paper hearts and doilies and hanging them with fishing line from the ceiling. The customers loved it, and that pleased Jeremy. (Craw, on the other hand, took two steps into the store, turned on his heel, and stalked out, muttering something about how the doctors swore Jeremy was all right, but they must have been mistaken.)

Customers came in, steady but not overwhelmingly so. Coloradans were great at driving in the snow, and hell, after you’d fought the cold all day, what else was there to do but knit? Ariadne used to sit and knit while the customers browsed, and when Jeremy wasn’t looking at stuff to order and trying to make the most of Craw’s patchy finances, he did the same. He still had to anchor his right arm to his side and use the other to do most of the work, but since he was left-handed, that wasn’t
too
much of a bother.

“Oh my,” said a tiny, tough elderly client dressed in jeans and a bulky sweater coat she’d made from what Jeremy recognized as some of Craw’s finest natural colored wool/alpaca blend. “Jeremy, I do believe that is the oddest example of throwing yarn I’ve ever seen!”

Jeremy grinned at her. “Well, ma’am, I don’t know what else to do. I get twitchy sitting here with nothing in my hands.”

The woman moved closer to see the tiny baby sock Jeremy was working on. The wool was brighter than bright, red-and-white-striped bright, like the valentines on the ceiling.

“Well, that is darling! Is that for Ariadne’s baby?”

Jeremy grinned at her. One of the nice things about working in this small town was that people knew people. Back in his conning days, that was why you looked for a midsize city—because you could live next to folks and they’d never know your name. But not here. Here, he couldn’t pull a con to save his life. The whole world knew him by sight.

“It is,” he said, showing the wee little stocking. “She and Rory wanted to keep the girl or boy thing a surprise, but I figure a little boy can wear these and nobody’d give him shit, you know?”

The woman’s eyebrows went up, possibly as she contemplated the fact that a little boy would have four gay uncles who would keep
anybody
from giving him shit, but she didn’t say anything. “Well, it’s wonderful. You know, I can’t work with yarn that fine anymore. I’d pay a good deal for socks like that to give my grandson’s baby.”

Jeremy grunted. It was not the first time in the past two days someone had offered him money for this pair of socks. “Well, ma’am, I wish I could knit faster so I could make them for everybody.” He smiled his most charming smile then, the one that he knew would make his dimple pop, and it wasn’t until she grinned back and flushed a little that he remembered: his face was scarred, and that smile was maybe not as attractive as it used to be.

But Mrs. Weston’s blush didn’t let up, and she ducked her head and went to buy some of the sock yarn Jeremy was using, in spite of her claim that she didn’t work with the fine stuff anymore. Of course, she was a crocheter at heart, and although those people worked with the same materials, all the knitters knew that they were odd birds when it came to yarn preferences. Maybe she was going to do something completely odd with that fine little merino blend, like wrap it around a Styrofoam form or something.

But her words about paying big money for that little sock stuck in his head. The next day he was making a hat to match, and another woman—this one in her thirties with streaked blonde hair and dressed right out of REI with the slim wool pants and the poly-whatsit jacket—came in. She was obviously from the ski lodge, but she had a knitting bag full of super chunky novelty yarn with her, so he figured she was tribe anyway.
She
offered him twenty dollars for the matching hat with the little pair of socks, and he had to tell her he was working on them for a sick friend to get her to back off.

And that was when he got his idea. It was a small idea, and at first, it felt like a con. A
really good
con where the take was legal and he could just stand there looking like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. But then, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that people would be getting something for their money, and that was maybe the difference between his idea and a real con. A real con didn’t have any hope, and this one did.

He figured he’d ask Aiden to be sure.

In those first weeks, Aiden took him home after lunch, and rightly so. Jeremy was a mess—by the afternoon he was sore and irritable and spaced out with fatigue. By the end of two weeks, though, he was able to make it through lunch well enough to talk to everyone, and he surely did enjoy the addition of Ben to their little family. Ben was sweet and charming—he would have been easy as pie to con, but even Oscar would have found it hard to dupe such a genuinely nice man. (Oscar still would have, Jeremy conceded, but Jeremy would have swung a wide berth around poor Ben.)

Rich, on the other hand, was just what Aiden had called him from the beginning: a total nozzle.

“I just want to know why we’ve got to go and fix something that worked completely well before!” Rich complained one day, stomping into the store behind Aiden, who was carrying lunch. Jeremy was in the back corner, stocking shelves while standing on a footstool so he didn’t have to raise his arm above his shoulder.

Aiden whirled and growled at him. “Look, are you or are you not getting paid the same amount from the government whether you help me install the new feeders or sit in here with the till?”

Rich opened his mouth a couple of times, but Aiden was right, and now Jeremy knew it too.

“So you will not ask questions and you will do as we ask, because whether you like it or not, you are working for us!”

Aiden turned back toward Jeremy like the matter was over, but Rich just didn’t catch a hint, did he?

“But it doesn’t even make any sense! You’ve got Ben on the mill where he’s clearly not comfortable, and you’ve got me replacing perfectly good feeders with ones at waist height! Why the hell are you wasting your manpower—”

“You’re replacing the feeders?” Jeremy asked curiously. He went to put a skein of gold-and-blue merino up above his head and winced. Nope, shoulder still a sore spot. They were due to fly into the hospital the next day so Jeremy could be poked and prodded and the docs could tell him he was healing all right, which was nice because it meant they could visit with Ariadne too.

“Yeah,” Aiden said, staring up at him from the floor. “What are you doing up there?”

“Stocking.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

Jeremy glanced around. “Well, so was pinning all the hearts to the ceiling, but I did it anyways.”

Aiden startled back, like he hadn’t put the hearts on the ceiling together with Jeremy’s wounded body, and then scowled.

“Great, Jer, so we’re putting Rich out here to put all the feeders down so you don’t have to lift hay into them, and you’re defying doctor’s orders and lifting your arms up anyway.”

Jeremy set the remaining skeins of yarn in the bucket he’d set up on an empty shelf, and then carefully made his way down the step stool. “You’re getting the feeders ready so I can feed the stock?” he asked, genuinely excited.

“Well, yeah! I told you that we’d let you do it—”

“But I thought you meant our own bunnies, boy. I’m missing the big guys—how’s the mama alpaca? Did she get over missing her cria yet?”

Aiden put out his hand, and Jeremy took it, no question, so he could get his weight settled. He got to the ground and kept hold of Aiden’s hand.

“No, Jer,” Aiden said softly. “She’s still pining—I think she misses you as much as the cria, though. That’s why we got to get the feeders out—so they can see their person again.”

“Am I their person?” he asked anxiously. Three years before, when Craw had picked him up panhandling on the streets of Boulder, he hadn’t even
heard
of an alpaca, much less handled a sheep. But damn if three years couldn’t make something you’d never seen before one of your most favorite things in the world.

“Yeah,” Aiden said, squeezing his hand. “Now come sit down and eat. Rich just set the sandwiches down and stole your chair.”

Rich looked up from where he was perched, devouring a tuna sandwich and keeping his hand under his chin for crumbs. “But—”

Jeremy waved him off. “Don’t worry none, Rich. I’ll sit down when you’re gone.”

Aiden peered into his face closely, checking him out for fatigue. Granted, Jeremy could use some sitting and maybe ten minutes of shut-eye, but nothing compared to the full-on meltdown of his first day back.

“I’m doing fine,” he said truthfully. “Craw brought me a pillow, and the morning rush has come and gone. Once you guys leave, I’ll lean up in a corner and catch a nap before late afternoon, okay?”

Aiden grunted. “That’s a deal. Maybe by tomorrow Rich will have gotten his shit together with both hands and you can leave the store and feed.”

“But we won’t be here, remember?” Jeremy asked anxiously.

Aiden grunted, then scowled at Rich. “Great—you get a reprieve. Just be sure to have the damned things done by the time we get back in two days,” he muttered.