Wolf, WY

by A. F. Henley

  Why those comments incited Randy to slam the door and lock it, Randy couldn't say. Nor could he explain why his hands were shaking as he set down the mail. It wasn't until Randy had carefully worked off his boots, hung up his coat, and began to shift through the mail that he understood why Lyle's attitude had pinged so many of his nerves.

  Tucked inside the mail, folded neatly and handwritten, was a note. It was from Lyle.

  I smelled you on his mouth when he walked in, you know. Your scent was so strong I could taste it. It was kind of a shame the flavor got poisoned by his breath. I think I might have liked it otherwise.

  The thing you need to realize is that this is meant to be. I'm going to have you because that's the way this has to play out. And if that means I have to take you when I'm at my strongest, well, I guess things will work out the way things are going to work out, won't they?

  See you soon. Lyle

  *~*~*

  Pacing was out of the question. Instead, as Randy watched Vaughn hook up what turned out to be a blade on the front of his pickup, then watched Vaughn make a few sloppy passes so he could get free of the driveway, Randy wrung his hands. He hated himself for doing it. It made him feel like a weak, simpering old man, incapable of anything else.

  But at least it was something he could do physically. Mentally, he was a wreck. He couldn't decide what would have the worst outcome: telling Vaughn about the incident with Lyle, or not saying anything at all. The last thing he wanted to do was get Lyle in serious shit, but he wasn't an idiot, either. If a person went around ignoring caution signs, eventually they were going to end up slipping on a wet floor, and Lyle's letter had gone way beyond caution signs. It was a great big flashing yellow beacon. It was six blazing, spark-showering flares around that beacon. If one of his clients had been handed a letter like that by an ex, Randy would have marched it up in front of a judge and demanded a restraining order. He'd have been telling his client to consider ramping up the security features on their residence, and notifying teachers and principals at their kids' schools. It wasn't wise to ignore crazy, and by the time somebody was writing down implied threats, there was a real good chance that someone was at least dipping in the pool of insanity. It was worth erring on the side of caution, anyway.

  Except this was Lyle. This wasn't some drunkard with a taste for dusting his knuckles when he was toasted. It wasn't some suit-wearing control freak with such an inflated sense of his own importance that he'd rather see his wife and children torn apart—physically and mentally—than admit that he was the problem. Lyle wasn't anything at all like the monsters that Randy had come to know during his short stint in the service of Lady Justice, which only raised the question: did that make Lyle safer than those guys? Or scarier?

  Vaughn's truck nosed between the two markers that staked out the edges of Randy's driveway and began to push accumulated snow. While crisp, heavy chunks of cold-hardened snow were forced out of the way, Randy's mind rolled with them. His hands rolled with them. His stomach rolled with them. But all the pondering in the world couldn't stop him from cracking a grin when Vaughn stopped the truck beside the porch and bounded out and around like a college kid at a ski lodge.

  He noticed Randy watching through the front window, lifted one hand in a wave and offered a timid smile. Then he held up both hands, crossed his fingers into an X, and finally released them to point at the window. Stay there.

  Randy lifted both of his in reply, bringing one hand to his head to pantomime putting on a hat, and making a zip motion up his chest with the other.

  Vaughn nodded, spied something beyond the porch, and was back in seconds with Randy's abandoned shovel. The steady shuck of the shovel scraping along the floorboards of the porch provided the background noise to Randy's steady stream of curses while he worked himself into outerwear.

  The last thing he did before Vaughn walked through the door was tuck Lyle's note deep into his front pocket.

  *~*~*

  The hallway was surprisingly warm, and the hospital nothing like Randy was used to. Concrete blocks made up the exterior walls and thick coats of soft cream paint covered both them and the flimsier interior ones. Depending on the location, the lighting was either too bad to even read by or so bright it could inspire headaches. It was clean, though. And no matter where they went—Admissions, Emergency Care, Radiology—there was a blue-coated volunteer, usually with silver hair and a brilliant smile, to offer a magazine or direct a person to a drinking fountain.

  Admissions had been easy, once he got past the humiliation of having to explain how he'd walked off his own front porch. He decided to leave out the first part of the event wherein he'd bashed his knee on the coffee table chasing a ghost in his front window. One could only handle so much embarrassment in one day. The doctor at the E. R. had taken one look at Randy's knees and sent them off to Radiology. From Radiology, his knee had been bound in a soft cast and, still laid out on the gurney he'd been put on, he'd been wheeled into his current spot—the end of a medium-wide, all but abandoned hallway. The blips from nearby machines suggested the potential of life beyond his own, and he knew that Vaughn and the doctor were sitting not far away. Otherwise, the area was creepily deserted. The overhead lights were either off or lowered to the point of non-existence, the darkness softened only by the glow from the empty workstation at the other end of the hallway and the wedge of light from the room occupied by Vaughn and the doctor.

  If Randy was right in his assumption, Vaughn had asked for the doctor by name, and in a move that startled Randy more than it probably should have in a town that size, the doctor had come. Immediately. The doctor—Clayton Briar, if Randy had heard right—had stared and hummed at the x-rays. Then he'd poked and prodded at Randy's knee. He's used the words "stable fracture" and "nonsurgical treatment." He'd made arrangements for Randy to get a set of crutches and asked if Randy knew how to "get along on them?" Then he'd given Randy a six-week decree against any activity that required taking more than five steps without those crutches.

  When he'd starting talking about things like rehabilitation and "long-term outcomes" that included such potentials as arthritis, muscle weakness, loss of motion, and chronic pain, Randy's brain started to shut down the part of it that absorbed information. He'd turned an exhausted gaze on Vaughn, and Vaughn had taken over from there.

  It had been nice to hear Vaughn speak again. But for asking for the doctor, Vaughn had barely uttered two words after Randy had voiced an "I think we have a problem," and handed Vaughn Lyle's letter.

  So Vaughn talked about the whens and wheres with Doctor Briar, and Randy took a trip down Naptime Lane. One minute later (or five, or nine-hundred, it was hard to tell), Randy felt Vaughn's palm on his forehead and heard Vaughn whisper, "Stay here. Sleep. I need to talk to the doctor in private."

  It took another count of unknown minutes for Randy's conscious brain to remold those words into the concept that there was a damn good chance that Vaughn was talking to the doctor about him. In private.

  Randy forced the cobwebs of almost-sleep away, and sat up, grumbling. "What in the ever loving fuck?"

  He swung his bad, inflexible leg off the gurney, trying to keep the creaks to a minimum. "Secretive fucking pricks and their secretive fucking games."

  He winced as he placed his other foot down, ignoring the crutches propped against the wall to his left. Then he began the shuffle that would take him toward the glow of the office door. A wise man would have probably just shouted, he told himself; they wouldn't put up with the idea of someone talking about their medical issues behind their back. Except, for all the nudging his internal self was doing, something in the deep corner of his psyche was sending out the vibe that maybe, just maybe, they were talking about issues that ran deeper than just his throbbing knee. It could be that they were having the kind of talk that Randy once had with his own doctor, albeit back in ninth grade—one of those 'how exactly does this sex with a man thing work?' conversations. As private as a talk like that sho
uld be, Randy told himself that all he needed was to confirm that was, in fact, what it was about and he'd back off. He'd leave Vaughn to work out the details with the doctor, and that would be that.

  Their voices were low and backed by the hum of a fluorescent bulb in its final hours of life.

  "I don't have to tell you this is normal, Vaughn. He's not the first one we've gone through, and he won't be the last. If there was some kind of drug I could give him to take the edge of, I would, but you and I both know—"

  Randy frowned and leaned against the wall. Normal? Drug? What was actually wrong with him, then? It was just a banged up knee, for heaven's sake.

  Vaughn cut the doctor short with a tone that was caustic, even though the reply sounded resignedly practiced. "That if he doesn't go through it, he'll never prove his right to own it. I'm not a moron, Clayton. I know this. I also know that we don't need Randy getting cuffed around and us trying to explain what happened to one of his folks' city doctors."

  "So you're worried about the family? Are they around? You think they'd interfere—"

  "Of course they'd interfere. His mother is some big-time judge back in D.C. and I've seen his father. For Christ's sake, I watched him come out and snug up the goddamn tires I put on Randy's truck. Randy's thirty-two years old and his daddy's still checking his tires for him. That's the kind of dad that's going to ask questions if—"

  "City folk get mauled all the time in places like this."

  "Not this one."

  Something creaked—a chair, the floor, the window—and Randy plastered himself against the wall with wide eyes and a thumping chest. But no one came out of the doorway. Nothing moved in the hallway.

  "Besides, you know the rule. And an attack on a person is an attack on a person even if it's not on purpose. The committee will lose their minds—"

  "No one here is going to let the committee know if your boy gets a little out of square with an outsider." The doctor's voice fell to a level that Randy had to strain to hear. "Not your boy, Vaughn. We wouldn't let that happen."

  Something slammed—a fist, a foot—and it was followed by the sound of plastic tumbling. "That's not how it works, Clayton!" Though Vaughn's voice was still low, the hiss behind it gave every indication to the fact that had they been anywhere else, Vaughn wouldn't be nearly as quiet. "The rules exist for a reason and I damn well intend to make sure they are being followed, because that is the only thing that keeps us safe!"

  A silence fell over the room and it lasted long enough that Randy began to edge away. He needed a few minutes to pull his thoughts together and figure out exactly what the two of them were talking about. It had to be Lyle. Which meant there was the possibility that Lyle would actually do something to harm him. Had something happened before? What did they mean by 'this wasn't the first time'? And if that was the case, why in the hell was Lyle out walking the streets? With two little kids in close proximity.

  He didn't get far, though. The doctor's next question stopped him still and had him pulling back to the doorway.

  "Who is this guy, Vaughn? Why don't you just chase him off? It's not like you don't know how."

  Vaughn's voice dropped lower still. "I can't do that. He's got me. I'd say about as bad as Jackie got me back in her day. The smell of him, the taste of him, the whole fucking lot of him."

  His tone was full of emotion, though whether that emotion was reverence, disappointment, or something entirely unrelated to either of those things, Randy couldn't decide.

  "And that's why Lyle's got him targeted, I'd say."

  "Ayup," Vaughn replied. "I'd say, too."

  "So what do you figure his opinion is of you?"

  Good, Randy wanted to shout. He screwed his eyes shut and pushed the back of his head against the wall to keep the words in his mind. Really fucking good.

  It would get better, too. Randy was sure of it. Once they got past the newness of each other's bodies and figured out the secrets on how to make one another talk. Yeah, he was even pretty sure that it wouldn't take much more than a nudge for him to stumble past the I-like-yous and fall right into the I-love-yous. There was a fuck-ton of emotion in those O'Connell eyes and he'd like a closer look. Maybe a couple of hundred closer looks.

  "I don't know," Vaughn said finally. "But I reckon anybody who hangs around through what's been tossed at him must have some kind of interest kindling."

  "Ah."

  The sound of palms falling on a pair of sturdy thighs forced Randy's eyes open. That was the sound of a man getting ready to stand. He pushed himself off the wall and turned away from the door.

  "—tell him."

  Randy's attention swiveled back toward the opening. Tell him? Who? Him-him? Or some other him? About what?

  He never got the chance to dwell on those questions. Movement beyond the doorway signified more than rising; it told Randy there was a good chance that one, if not both men, were on the way out of the room. Without a second's pause, he hop-stepped his way back to the gurney and wiggled himself onto it. Then, with gritted teeth, he pulled his bad leg up, and lowered himself into place. He turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes. He held his breath and hoped the sweat popping out on his forehead wouldn't give him away.

  *~*~*

  "Jesus H. Christ," Randy growled, tucking both hands under his arms. "It is going to warm up at some point, isn't it?"

  Vaughn passed him a quick glance and a smile. "It's February. What do you expect?"

  "Chubby blond cherubs with chocolates, arrows, and OTP promises," Randy grumped. He reached for the dash and pushed both palms up against vents that still blew cold air.

  Vaughn checked his side mirror and pulled out of the hospital parking lot. "What in the Sam Hell is an OTP?"

  Randy's frown softened into a grin. "Uh, one true pair? I mean, seriously, do you even have an Internet connection?"

  "Yes," Vaughn said, voice firm and eyes on the road. "But I use mine for porn."

  "Ah!" Randy gasped. He put one hand over his mouth and spoke through his fingers. "Sinner!"

  They shared a laugh and as Randy wiggled in the seat to try and find a more comfortable angle for his leg, Vaughn's expression dropped to a serious scowl. "So, uh, Randy..." Vaughn cleared his throat and began to tap out a beat on the steering wheel with both his pointer fingers. "You got a couple of spare rooms in that house of yours, right?"

  Randy turned to eye him. "No, Vaughn. Not a one. The only rooms I have are the kitchen and the living room. It's a weird design, I know."

  Vaughn grunted. "You really are a sassy little thing when you're not being mind-blown into silence, you know that?"

  "It's been brought to my attention," Randy said. "Why? What's up?"

  "I'd like to send the kids over tonight." Vaughn kept his gaze in front of him, his jaw set as if he was getting ready for an argument. "The little ones, of course. Just to help out. Keep you from getting up or doing something stupid like chasing wildlife in the middle of the night."

  "That was one time!" Randy scoffed. "And I figured it was a squirrel, not a damn wolf..." He let the word trail off and frowned. How in the hell had Vaughn known about that? Had he said something? He was sure he hadn't.

  He turned in the seat and watched Vaughn's face as he spoke. "Wait a second. Who told you about the wolves?"

  The only change in Vaughn's body language was the swallow that bounced his Adam's apple. "I'll send them over with a set of PJs and clothes for the morning. If you don't got guest beds, they can sleep on the couch or the floor. I'll feel a lot more comfortable knowing that they're there."

  "Because two little kids are going to do what? Scare off anything that might come my way?" Randy's frown deepened. "If you're that worried about Lyle, maybe you should be there."

  "I can't." Vaughn's jaw tightened more than it already was. "I would if I could. And I never said I was worried about Lyle. I said I didn't want you moving around."

  Randy spit a huff of air and crossed his arms. He dropped back against
the seat, but stared unblinkingly at Vaughn's face. "You didn't have to say it. I don't need to be a mind-reader to know what's going on in your head. You think Lyle's flipped out and it's got you worried. What do you think he's going to do? And if he does do something stupid, what exactly are you planning to do about it? Lock him in his bedroom? Knock him out? You're freaking me out here, Vaughn, and I don't like it. I don't want my head to go back to that place where I was worried that you were some kind of crazy-assed father—"

  "I'm not." Vaughn shook his head, be it in thought or commenting on his own reply, and then lowered his voice. "Tell me something, Shield Wolf. What is that you really think of me? Why are you still hanging around? Why me?" He flicked Randy a quick look and then turned back to frown at the windshield. "You know, with the sex and the kissing and stuff. With you talking to the kids and being a pain in the ass until I let you hang around. Is it just because we're neighbors? Or the fact that you don't know anybody else?"

  Randy shrugged. "I like you."

  "Yeah, but why?"

  Once again Vaughn looked over, and whether it was the expression on Randy's face, or his own realization that he needed to be concentrating on the still-slick roads and wasn't, Vaughn drew the pickup to the side of the road and shifted it into park. When he turned to give Randy his full attention, his eyes were intense and somber. "I need to know. It's important that you tell me. Make me understand what a guy like you sees in a guy like me."

  Randy tried to ignore the rush of self-righteous posturing that insisted that Randy not only throw the question right back at him, but add a comment over how failure to exchange necessary information was way more of a fault of Vaughn's than of his. Randy hadn't been having conversations with doctors behind all but closed doors about situations that pertained to the other's well being.

  Vaughn's voice sounded in Randy's head, "That's the kind of dad that's going to ask questions..." and a shudder went down his spine. It didn't stop him from replying, though. For whatever reason, something in his psyche refused to get spooked enough to shut up.