by Lynn Red
Angie took a drink of her Coke. “Wait, really? Are you serious?”
“No,” Tenner said, “but I’m sure he’d like some help anyway. You have no idea how long this bear has needed someone in his life, and if Eve thinks you’re right for him, well what the hell, she don’t tell me how to pour drinks, so I’ll trust her.”
Angie shrugged. “If you say so,” she said in a consciously uninterested monotone. She hated the idea of giving too much away, or even really admitting to herself how much she was looking forward to all this. She didn’t even know what this was, except that it probably wouldn’t be as horrifically comical as her last date. Anything was going to be a step up from that circus adventure.
Then again, as she started thinking about how she really had no clue in the world what she was stepping into, she got a little of that percolating anxiety that reacted like most people get acid reflux. It kind of bubbled up in her throat, and gave her prickly, strange sensations from the top of her head all the way down to her fingertips.
“Go on,” Tenner said. “No one is expecting anything from you, just go talk to him, he’s a good guy.”
The old walrus went right back to cleaning glasses and when he was done with that, to idly wiping his bar cloth along the top of the massive, oak bar. He found a small splotch that bothered him, and worked at it for a few moments.
She found her feet moving toward the big, back and forth swinging saloon style door that led to the kitchen. “God that smells good,” Angie said as she pushed open the door and watched her mystery bear plucking pieces of chicken out of a giant vat of oil. “Did you make it?”
“Mhm,” Dawson said, carefully sprinkling salt over the steaming, golden-brown pieces. He chased the kosher salt with some paprika, some chili powder, and a squeeze of lime. “My grandma did it this way,” he said as he held out a drumstick wrapped in a cloth napkin. “Try it? Might want to hold on to it for a minute before you—”
She couldn’t. There was some kind of cosmic force that made Angie bite into that chicken leg without any regard for decency, safety, or dignity. The batter crunched like a bunch of incredibly crispy, extremely flavorful cornflakes. Her teeth sunk in, straight through the perfectly juicy chicken, and she heard herself let out a long, low groan of pleasure. “How did you... this is...”
“Grandma Lex would be proud,” he said with a smile. “Although she always made it better. Back in those days you could use lard and not have anyone frown at you and silently judge.”
Before she knew it, Angie had managed to lick the chicken bone clean. “How did you do that? It was so crispy and—”
“Don’t over beat the batter. That makes it all thick and weird. By the way, I’m Dawson Lex.” He went to shake her hand, but then put a hand on her shoulder instead when he noticed the slick of what grandma Lex called ‘flavor’ on her hand. “Nice to meet you. Hope this isn’t too much excitement. The bar and all.”
He had burning green eyes. He had a growly voice that reminded her of jagged stones in a river, washed smooth but still gravely. His cheekbones stood out beautifully against the slightly tanned skin of his face, and then... “Holy shit,” Angie gulped.
“What’s up? Or did you not mean to say that out loud?” The dark blue shirt he wore was open at the first two buttons. Not in a disco-time leisure suit way, but just a comfortable, cool look. The barest hint of chest hair was close cropped against his obviously muscular torso, but was still visible.
“Yeah, that might be one of my more unappealing traits,” Angie said. “It’s nothing, I just have these dreams and I can’t ever forget them. Anyway, I... you know what? Nah, don’t worry about it.”
She decided to keep from acting outwardly bonkers by informing this man she just met that she’d been dreaming about him off and on for months. She couldn’t admit it to him, and more than that she couldn’t admit it to herself. Hell, it made her feel crazy to think about. Angie smoothed down her jeans like they were a skirt. They left a greasy streak, but she wasn’t worried about that just then. “Don’t worry about it, it’s nothing,” she said again, more to herself than to him.
Deep down, Angie thought she was going from zero to completely nuts faster than a Mercedes hits sixty. This is too much. Psychic dreams? Throwing myself on some guy in a kitchen? What in the hell is wrong with me?
She made a move to back away, but stopped after a half step. Dawson saw her confusion and tilted his head just a little to one side.
“You’re all right,” he said, wiping his business hand and clapping her softly on the arms with those huge hands. “I’m pretty out of practice with all this stuff too. No reason to be nervous.”
Somehow his soothing voice, and the slow gentle motion of his hands against her upper arms calmed the anxiety that almost always haunted Angie. In a way it was unbelievable that he’d managed to calm her nerves with just a touch but in another, it made perfect sense. She’d known this guy a lot longer than she’d known him.
“There,” he said. “Now it’s my turn to freak out,” he said with a smile. “But seriously, it’s been approximately forever since I’ve dated, so yeah nothing at all to be nervous about.”
“Thanks,” she said, eyeing the plate of chicken. “You gonna eat all that?”
“Yeah,” he said with a smile. “But I’ll share.” He took a breast, she took a thigh, and they hit their chicken together like they were toasting drinks before taking bites. “So, Eve told me you were a police dispatcher? That must be a hell of a job.”
She chewed while considering her response. “Yeah,” she said. “Although I’m sure it’s a lot crazier in some big city. Here I mostly deal with people losing their pets or complaining about neighborhood cubs of one sort or another throwing eggs at a house or shoe-polishing some dirty words or dick pictures onto someone’s windshield.”
Dawson snorted a laugh, and for a second, she thought he’d sucked a hunk of chicken into his lungs from the color he turned. When he started wheezing, Angie slapped him on the back. “I killed you, didn’t I?”
Dawson rolled his eyes back and let his head hang limply on his neck before sticking out his tongue in a universal gesture of being dead.
“I have no idea why I’m going to do this, but I’m going to tickle you,” Angie said. I mean, of all the idiotic things to do, I’ve already started down a laundry list of them. Tickling this guy would just about top the list. If he was going to realize how crazy I am and just bolt, this would certainly do it.
“Brrr?” the fake corpse mewled, and scrunched his eyebrows. “Hunh?”
For some reason that she will never for the rest of her life be able to understand, Angie wiggled her fingertips and stuck them straight into Dawson’s ribs. He erupted in laughter. He sounded like a bunch of firecrackers exploding one after the other. As he laughed, he started actually choking on air, sucking it in so hard he couldn’t get much back out. The giant bear fell over backwards, first into a rolling office chair and then when that fell out from under him, he bellowed a roar and fell flat on his ass.
Without really meaning to, Angie fell with him. It was only when she was on the ground and in his lap that she realized his hand was locked on her wrist.
“You pulled me down!” she said with pinpoint accusation. “You made me fall down!”
“You tickled me!” Dawson laughed again. “Nothing that happens is a person’s fault if they’re being tickled. That’s just how it is!”
The two of them laughed until they were howling. Out front, Tenner just smiled. When Wally walked through the front door and ordered a beer, the two of them listened to the joy.
“There was a time when I acted like that,” Tenner said. “Although it’s been so long I can’t particularly remember what it felt like.”
Wally Hartman, one of Tenner’s oldest friends, smiled broadly. “I do,” he said. “It feels good. Real good. So good that I imagine if I felt like that again, I’d keel over dead and start foaming at the mouth. At least that’s what my
mate says.”
Where before there were two laughing, suddenly there were four. Tenner and his friend, Angie and Dawson, all of them laughing for different reasons, but all of them laughing true. For those few moments, her anxiety and his reclusiveness didn’t matter. They didn’t exist.
*
As the time rolled by, and she listened to a few of his best songs, Angie was slightly surprised when she happened to look down at her watch and notice that somehow, time had ticked away with such rapid procession that she thought it was half past six, but it was quarter of seven. “Shit!” she yelled, over the slight din of noise that filled Tenner’s. “I gotta get to work. I can’t believe time flew like this.”
Dawson turned his beautiful face to her and unconsciously played a scale as he smiled. “I hope I’m going to see you again,” he said. “I don’t think I’d like it much if I didn’t.”
She caught herself staring at him, and before she could go anywhere, one of his hands grasped hers. With the other, he kept playing the scale. “Call me when you get off tomorrow morning?”
“You can’t be serious,” Angie said. No matter what she said, her heart thumped heavily in her chest as she imagined that he might, in fact, be serious.
“I work nights too,” he said, kissing the back of her hand. She felt her knees go wobbly, like they were made out of Jell-O. “And I like being up anyway. I never liked sleeping much, I always feel like I’m missing life. And now that I’ve met you? I really, really don’t want to miss any more life than I have to.”
“Oh,” she said with a smile. “That’s quite a line you have there. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you got it out of a book.” She remembered poor, helpless Jake and his horrible sunglasses and completely misguided method for getting her attention. There wasn’t a shred of that in Dawson, though. This guy was so alpha that he didn’t need to bother acting like it. You just knew he was in charge. “You didn’t, did you?”
His response was just a smile that remained on his lips even as he dropped her hand and went back to playing, a jazzier tune this time; peppier and livelier than the scale. “No,” he said finally. “I don’t even know what section you’d look at to find one of those. I gotta admit though, you made it easy for me to feel comfortable. I’m never like this.” He took a drink from his beer, and set it back down on the coaster. “Laughing with you, acting stupid, playing around, I haven’t done anything like that in—I have no idea how long. I don’t know if I ever have. You made me feel... at ease. That’s not something I can say for many people.”
She didn’t know how to react to that, so she did the only thing she could – stared at his face and smiled. Angie felt her eyes beginning to moisten. “You too,” she said. “I’m not exactly the most socially dynamic fox in town. So thanks, you made this really easy.”
“Play me a song, piano bear!” Tenner’s friend Wally, who was slowly getting stoned, shouted. “Make it a good one, I’m feeling all right and need to sing!”
Dawson shrugged and Angie laughed. Once again, he took her hand, but this time, pulled her down and kissed her cheek. “Call me when you get off?”
As she wandered toward the door, she waved again. “See you soon.”
By the time the door shut behind her, a rousing rendition of the Cheers theme song was filling Tenner’s Bar. She didn’t think it was ironic, and for once she had nothing cynical to say. For once, Angie felt like things may well just be going her way.
5
“What is it with me?” During the first break of the night, Dawson shook his highball. The ice cubes in his whiskey clanked against the sides of the glass. He preferred it neat, but Tenner never remembered and he wasn’t going to complain about free booze. “Why can’t I just take a good thing at face value?”
Tenner shrugged. “It’s a thing we do, us rambling, restless men. A life of adventure calls us, and we can’t help but answer.”
“You’ve been married for forty-eight years, Ten,” Dawson said, draining the last of his drink. “The hell would you know about it?”
The barman snapped his suspenders and twisted the ends of his ample mustache. “Walruses live a long time, boy, a real long time. I remember what it was like before I ended up with Vera. Lots of heartbroken ladies, and a long string of disappointments.”
“Right,” Dawson said with a grin. “Let me guess, the disappointment was with how you actually were once you stopped trying to get in their pants?”
The old man closed his left eye, and scrunched up his nose. When he did that, his mustache pulled up just enough that you could see his bottom lip and he looked almost human. “You son of a bitch,” he said before howling with the sort of laughter that only a person who has spent a lifetime laughing can manage. It might sound like the most easy and natural thing in the world, laughing, but it takes practice to do right.
Dawson reached over the bar and shot himself a cup of water from the soda fountain. “Well, either way, thanks for setting me up and tricking me into getting a date with her.”
“She’s got some hair, huh?” Tenner said. “Vera’s used to look like that, you know.”
The old walrus got a wistful, far-off look in his old, drooping eyes.
“I didn’t know she was a redhead?”
“Oh no,” Tenner said. “I didn’t mean redheaded, I meant that she had a gigantic mane like Angie. Seems like a nice girl on top of that exciting hair, huh?”
Dawson was staring off in the distance remembering the way her skin felt under his fingers. “Yeah,” he said, not realizing quite how ridiculous of a smile he’d acquired. “She really does. I can’t wait to see her again. Tomorrow. Tonight, whichever it is. She’s great.”
Walruses have this way of laughing that sounds like it’s halfway between a clown horn and a guffaw. Tenner let out a series of those. “Get back to work, piano bear,” he said. “Otherwise you’re gonna give me a heart attack makin’ me laugh like an idiot.”
When quarter of ten rolled around, the bar was pretty well hopping. A football game let out a little early as one of the teams had too many injured shifters to continue, so the general mood was one of jovial happiness.
Dawson was the first to see the customer who was going to ruin the night. He’d stepped up to the bar to freshen his club soda when he saw a strange silvery flicker underneath a dark-clad stranger’s coat. The guy was sweaty, nervous looking, and very obviously having some kind of problem.
“You all right, friend?” Dawson asked, grabbing the guy’s shoulder to check for a holster. Old habits die hard. “You seem a little shaky? Had too much?”
“Shut up,” the sweaty stranger growled. “Nobody asked you.”
Dawson narrowed his vision, concentration on the man’s watery, almost eerie eyes. “I don’t like the way you look.”
“Who asked you?”
“He did,” Dawson nodded toward Tenner. “Go on, get out of here. Come back another night when you’re feeling better, friend.” Dawson reached for the guy’s hand, to try and help him out of the bar, but when he did the man pulled back fiercely.
“Leave me alone!” he snapped, sweat running down the sides of his face.
Dawson put his hands up, defensively. “Fine. Don’t make any moves you’ll regret.”
The big bear went back to his soda, and then sat at the piano, eyes never leaving the stranger, or the jerky, unsettling movements he made. A few moments later, the man shouted for Tenner to get him a beer.
Then, that silver flash came out of his jacket.
There were three blasts, and then Dawson threw himself across the room on pure instinct and adrenaline. He felt the bar slide underneath him, and the soaking wetness of beer glasses overturning as he went. In a split second, the hair on his arms and neck extended, his cheekbones twisted into a snout and those big, strong hands that had enthralled Angie so.
As his jaws closed around first a wrist and then a throat, he heard his oldest friend cry out in pain. He felt a crunch in his side, then anot
her. He was aware, vaguely, that his entire side was being damaged, but with the adrenaline coursing through his veins at a thousand miles an hour, he didn’t feel any of it, not the barest hint.
More crunching, more shouting, outcries and screams.
And then before he knew it, the only sound in Dawson’s ears was the soft tinkle of broken glass, and the patient drip-drip of beer running off the bar and to the tile below. When he came back to himself, he was shaking, Tenner was holding his side, and the guy who had just pulled a gun was a bloody damn mess.
“What... what happened?” Dawson asked.
“You saved my damn life from that lunatic,” Tenner answered, standing as best he could, but then collapsing back onto the ground. “I got no idea why he was here, but... shit, I can’t believe I didn’t recognize him.”
And somehow, with all that going on, as soon as the panic slid away, the only thing on Dawson’s mind was Angie, and how badly he wanted—no, needed—to see her. Thankfully, he knew that once someone called the police, she’d know.
His head went all fuzzy for a moment as Dawson slumped back over at his piano. There was a dull, thudding ache in the back of his skull just like there always was when he shifted. Warmth pooled in his hand where he rested his head and when he looked, he realized he’d sustained more damage than he thought. Blood ran down the side of his head, collecting in his short sideburns and the stubble along his jaw. “Did anyone call the police?” he asked. Tenner pointed at someone standing by the doorway with an old flip phone against his cheek.
Dawson felt his blood rise again. “I need to talk to her, get the phone, Ten.”
“You sure? You’re kinda tore up.” The old walrus was holding his side still, unsure on his feet but standing nonetheless.
“You need to sit,” Dawson said, coming to his senses and realizing how badly his friend was hurt. “You’re bleeding all over the place.” He grabbed Tenner around the shoulders and eased the old man to a stool.
