Dan & Tyler 2 - Wintergreen (2 page)

Close on Dan's heels, with his own snow shovel in hand, Tyler took a moment to breath in the crisp air. Not cold enough to turn the inside of his nose into a crackle of frozen hair and snot the way it had been on that job in Alaska, but cold enough that each inhalation left him conscious of the air funneling into his lungs. Air that bit and snapped, but playfully, given the blue skies overhead and the haven of the house behind him.

Dan was already sending snow flying up into the air, his shovel scooping the soft, powdery fluff with brisk effectiveness, his complaints ending once he started work. Tyler wondered if Peter Seaton missed Dan as a son as much as he was sure to be missing Dan as a worker. Maybe, maybe not. It didn't matter. Dan had turned his back on the farm he'd grown up on and showed no interest in attempting a reconciliation that was doomed to failure in the long run, since Dan wasn't going to wake up straight one day, and his father, from what Dan had told Tyler, wouldn't accept him any other way.

He worked behind Dan, widening and neatening the narrow path that Dan had made, and then branched off toward the shed. A handful of snow smacked into his arm after a few minutes, and he turned to meet innocent, amused eyes.

"Must have blown off a tree," Dan said.

"I'm going to blow some down your neck if you do that again," Tyler threatened, and hid a grin. When Dan began to shovel again, he delivered a snowball of his own, tightly packed and thrown fast, that hit Dan's ass squarely, and made Dan jump and yelp.

Honors even, they worked in amicable silence, their diverging paths soon separating them past the point where conversation was easy. Drifts caused by a westerly wind had left the snow over eight inches deep in places, and Tyler was starting to get tired. Soft in body as well as mind…

He took a break, leaning on his shovel and studying what he'd accomplished and what he had left to do. His fingers were numb with cold, even inside his gloves, but sweat was trickling down his back. He was thirsty, longing not for a hot drink, or an icy cold one, but a tall glass of water from the tap, water he could gulp down steadily until he had to stop to breathe.

He went back to digging, head down, his mind soon empty of anything but the slide of the wide shovel blade into the snow and the heave, twist, throw that emptied it, ready for the next assault on the drift. The tap on his arm came as a shock, more for Dan than Tyler, since it seemed that his body wasn't as out of shape as he'd thought. He spun around, operating not on reflex but ingrained training, and flipped the shovel so that the handle was pointing forward. That brought him face to face with a startled Dan. Luckily, Dan had reflexes, too, and they were fast enough to take him out of harm's way, even if he ended up flat on his back in the snow, the water bottle he held flying out of his hand.

Shit. Tyler threw the shovel away and took a long, deep breath. Dan was glaring up at him now, surprise wiped away by anger. Mute with annoyance aimed solely at himself, Tyler stepped forward and held out his hand. He half-expected Dan to take it and pull him down into the snow, but Dan ignored both the offer of help and the chance for revenge and struggled to his feet unaided.

They stood in an awkward silence for a moment. Dan brushed his clothes free of the dry snowflakes that individually weighed nothing and collectively had placed an ache across Tyler's shoulders, his eyes not meeting Tyler's. Tyler waited for him to speak, knowing that an apology would have to be given -- Dan wouldn't need an explanation -- but needing to know Dan's frame of mind first.
"The alphabet soup guys you worked for, they trained you to do more than shoot bullets, right?" Dan said, his voice level enough to worry Tyler. Dan's emotions were always there, visible, tangible. Hidden under a thick layer of icy calm, they were so much harder to read.

"They didn't need to train me to do that," Tyler told him. "I was born knowing how."

 

"Yeah, knowing you, that's an actual fact, not just a figure of speech," Dan said bleakly.

"But, yes, they trained me." In a windowless room that didn't contain a blackboard and yet still smelled faintly of chalk, and on a firing range where the targets weren't paper -- dummies so real, they bled red and jerked as the bullets drilled into them. Hollywood magic commissioned by Washington suits to teach men like him not to care about killing.

"Then where the hell were you the day they taught you to tell the difference between a friend and a target?" Dan yelled, his calm shattered, for which Tyler was profoundly grateful. "Shit, Tyler, look around you! We're in the middle of the fucking woods, miles from the nearest house, and we've just had a blizzard, so I don't think anyone's going to be dropping by to say hi. And before you get on my case about creeping up behind you, I called your name. Twice." He squatted down and scrabbled through the snow where the water bottle had fallen. When he found it, he stood and threw it at Tyler, who automatically put up a gloved hand to catch it. Dusted with snow, it was slippery, and he ended up cradling it to his chest as if it was something precious.

"Thought you might be thirsty," Dan said, and turned to walk away. He took two steps before pausing and glancing back. "This sucks, you know that? The way you're so fucking jumpy. There's no one out there, Tyler. Your boss wanted you back, and you said no; it's
over
. It's not like you were working for the Mob. The government doesn't kill you for retiring." He waved his hand at the trees around them, every branch outlined in white, pristine, undisturbed. "There's no one out there. No one. Just you and me, and if you don't trust me enough to turn your back on, then--"

"Stop it. Please." Tyler didn't beg, ever, because there'd never been anything he wanted more than self-respect, but he was close to wishing that he'd learned how to do it. The desolation in Dan's eyes was hurting Tyler more than the increasingly likely prospect of Dan walking away -not running, just leaving -- as soon as the roads were clear, his patience with Tyler's issues exhausted. "I trust you, okay? And they didn't have that lesson, because we didn't have friends, any of us. Besides you, Anne's the first person I've thought of that way in, well, in years, and even she doesn't know what I used to do. There's only one person who knows all my secrets, that I trust enough to sleep next to, and that's you." He looked at the bottle he held. The top had been twisted off, and an inch or two of water was missing. He held it up. "You drank from this."

Dan shrugged. "I was thirsty, too. I finished my bottle and took a swallow from yours when I walked over here. What's the big deal? My spit has cooties now? It didn't this morning."

"The big deal? With you, nothing." Tyler uncapped the bottle and drank from it, swallowing with a throat that ached from tension. "In the field, I'd have poured this on the ground, certain that it'd been tampered with, no matter how much I needed a drink, no matter who'd given it to me. I didn't -- couldn't -- trust anyone."

"Your life sucked back then," Dan said. "Do I tell you that often enough? Because it did. It makes me feel tired just thinking about how careful you had to be, every single fucking minute."

"Yes," Tyler said. "Every single minute. It's hard to stop. I try, and then something like this happens and I realize I'm still being careful." He capped the bottle and slid it into one of the deep pockets of his jacket. "You want me to say I'm sorry, don't you? Well, I'm sorry for scaring you
-"

"I wasn't scared." Dan met his eyes. "I've never been scared of you. Ever."

That wasn't even close to being true. The day they'd met, Tyler knew that he'd frightened the shit out of Dan, by holding a rifle on him. The boy hadn't reacted well to finding out that Tyler's old job involved killing people, either. To be fair, though, Dan had kept his chin up at that first meeting and sassed Tyler as if his heart hadn't been pounding loud enough to be heard when Tyler had gotten close. Not that Tyler planned to point any of that out to Dan. He was in enough trouble as it was.

"Then I'm sorry for getting snow down the back of your neck."

 

"I didn't." Dan wriggled his shoulders and winced. "Much."

 

Tyler spread his hands. "So what do you want an apology for?"

 

"I never said I wanted one at all."

"Oh, but you do." Tyler could feel frustration sharpening his words. "You want me to get better because you're around. You want to feel you've made a difference in my life. Well, yeah, you have." He looked not at Dan, but at the woods. Something was glittering in the trees, low down, about the height of a man. Sunlight glinting off the barrel of a rifle? Binoculars? He felt vulnerable, the unobtrusive dark green of his jacket that hid him in the woods making him a target against the white snow. He stared harder, his eyes watering in the breeze that was stirring the air, and decided it was nothing to worry about; a scrap of litter caught in a branch.

He knew that he'd still have to check it out before dark, just to make sure.

 

"Yeah," Dan said with a cynicism that he couldn't quite pull off. "You get laid regularly now. Big deal."

"That wasn't what I had in mind, but it's a nice bonus." Tyler looked at Dan, his dark hair mostly covered by a black woolen hat that made his eyes look bluer. Pretty eyes, though Dan wouldn't thank him for saying so. Time to show some teeth. "If it's become a chore since this morning, boy, feel free to go back to sleeping on the couch."
"Maybe I will," Dan said, snapping back. "But you won't like it when you wake up sweating and moaning and there's no one to grab hold of--"

"Enough," Tyler said. Dan was getting close to saying something nasty enough that Tyler would have trouble digging it out of his memory, and Dan would feel guilty about it once they'd finished fighting. "Go back inside and hate me where it's warm. I'll be done soon."

"We're done now," Dan said. "Soon as the snow's gone, so am I. And it's not running away, because I'm telling you about it in advance."

 

"God, you can be such a fucking brat sometimes, you know that?" Tyler shook his head. "Fine. Whatever. Go. Be nice to get some peace again."

 

He picked up the shovel and -- very deliberately -- turned his back on Dan and went back to work. Slide, lift, toss…

Dan slammed into his back with all the strength anger could lend a man, and Tyler fell forward, releasing the handle of the shovel and gasping as the snow met his face in a smothering, burning kiss. He turned his head so that he could breathe, but refused to fight back. Tyler had invited this attack, knowing that Dan needed the release it would give him. Cruel, bitter words… oh, yeah, they worked as an outlet, but they weren't really a weapon Dan was comfortable with, as Tyler had learned. Dan had had too much experience of how deeply they could wound when his father called him a stranger, unwanted. His fists, though, yeah; Dan didn't mind using them.

When the rain of blows started to hurt -- his left ear was hot and swollen, though Dan was mostly pummeling Tyler's back -- Tyler heaved up and rolled far enough to the side to dislodge Dan, who slid off him in a tangle of flailing arms and legs. The boy had clearly never been taught to fight; a gut full of anger only took you so far.

Dan was practically melting the snow bank at his back with his temper, his face flushed hot, his eyes sparking. All that raw, vital emotion on display… Dan didn't know how appealing that was to a man who'd spent his adult life hiding every feeling behind a carefully constructed wall.

And this wasn't a stranger, a casual pick-up. This was a man he'd fucked into blissful oblivion more than once and who returned the favor regularly. This was his personal stray cat, sickly and starved, brought into the warmth to be fed and petted. This was Dan, who was as far from understanding what Tyler was capable of as a real kitten would be, but who still, on one level at least, got it completely and only cared because the memories made Tyler a moody, brooding son of a bitch.

He captured Dan's fist when it came at his face, his hand locked around Dan's wrist. The thick gloves they both wore made his hold less secure than he'd like, but it did the job. Dan choked out a curse and threw a handful of snow into Tyler's face with his other hand, loose and soft, floating in the sunlit air like a cloud of diamond dust.
"Easy, boy," Tyler said through the siren song in his ears, the beat of his blood. Sex and violence. Peanut butter and chocolate for some, and he was starting to see why when it was like this. Dan's mouth… chapped lips, half open on an angry pant as he caught his breath, and there, right there, the pass of tongue across them, painting them shiny. Dan did that lick and pout a lot. It usually got him kissed, and he knew it.

"Don't call me that," Dan said. He jerked his hand free and stabbed Tyler's chest with a blunt, bulky fingertip. "You want me to go? Huh? You asshole! I say I'm leaving and you say 'whatever'? What the fuck is wrong with you?"

If he didn't get his mouth on Dan's skin soon, he was going to break down and tell Dan things he wasn't ready to say just yet. Too soon to spill sentiment over them like sticky syrup binding them together: I love you, stay with me, don't go.

"You're what's wrong with me. You've changed me so I don't recognize myself." It sounded like a continuation of the fight, but it wasn't. It was the truth; it was Tyler as close as he was ever going to come to flirting. "Like knowing that, do you?" he said quietly, Dan's face so close that he didn't need to do more than shape the words in this empty, white silence. Tyler wasn't worried about being seen. The narrow trail was sheltered by snow banks on either side, with rough, unbroken snow ahead; walls to hide them from view. "Like having that much power to hurt me?"

"Don't want to hurt you." Dan tugged his gloves off and slid a warm hand against Tyler's neck, working it between skin and collar. "But, yeah, it's kind of cool knowing you care, seeing as how you never fucking tell me that, either."

"Didn't say I cared. Maybe I don't. Maybe I'm just--"

"An asshole," Dan said, and ran his other hand along Tyler's thigh and then shoved it up, finding a way through layers of clothing to the bare flesh of Tyler's belly. On Tyler's neck, Dan's hand had felt warm; against his stomach, not so much. He grunted and felt his muscles tighten in anticipation of that hand moving. "You're just lucky I always seem to fall for bastards. Or attract them."