The Winter Courtship Rituals of Fur-Bearing Critters (5 page)

Crawford started out by marking when Ben was outside, tending to his small acre and his unassuming animals. It was usually in the morning, which was good, because that was when Crawford was tending his own stock, and Craw got into the pattern of being down on that end of his property, feeding the alpacas and the sheep and making sure their pens were secure.

The first day he did this on purpose, Ben looked at him a little oddly. Craw rode the horse directly for the corner of the yard where Ben was standing, then dismounted and began feeding the animals, who looked a little surprised.

Craw could have smacked himself, but then, subtlety had never been his strength.

He looked up at Ben, who stood scratching his one sheep on the head, and did his best to make small talk. He was lucky Ben was feeling cooperative.

“You need help getting that insulation installed?” he asked, and Ben shook his head.

“No, thanks. I’m actually okay with the do-it-yourself stuff. All that time as an electrician.”

Oh. Well, shit. Craw didn’t have a lot to offer. Home improvement for the tenderfoot had been his ace in the hole. “You got your computers and shit set up?” Good. Get him to talk about work. Craw seemed to remember something about getting people to talk about themselves from college.

“No, but I will. I’ve got a nice consulting check coming in this week. It’ll hold me until spring, so I’ve got time.”

Well, there went that conversational gambit, but still, Ben had stopped scratching the sheep’s head and was now leaning against the fence post, a look on his narrow, pretty face that said he was willing to continue to engage in this conversation if Craw was game. His beard scruff was especially nicely trimmed this morning, but Craw could hardly say
that
,
could he?

“How about the critters?” he asked a little desperately. Jesus, talk about broadening a guy’s skill set!

But as it turned out, he got lucky on this one, because Ben could
not
shut up about the rabbits. “They’re really wonderful!” he said after about five minutes of describing personality traits and bunny quirks and the whole “bathing them in the bathtub” thing that sort of made Craw’s eyes bulge out. “I was afraid they’d bite at first, because, you know, the only part of Bugs Bunny that sticks out is his teeth. And they do nibble if you’re not careful, but mostly, you have to worry about their back legs. If they get unhappy, they can scratch.” With that, Ben pulled back the sleeves of his Henley shirt, and Craw was appalled to see some ugly red slashes up on his forearms. He actually
twitched,
wanting to go doctor those up, even though he likely had some bruises and some scratches of his own from dealing with critters. This wasn’t him. This was
Ben,
with the light-up-the-world smile.
Ben
didn’t get hurt.

“Lucky they didn’t get made into stew!” Craw grunted, and Ben looked at him with that familiar outrage on his face.

“Jesus, Craw! They’re just little bunnies!”

Crawford turned red. “That just looks like it hurts,” he mumbled. “I take it you got them all penned and everything.”

Ben apparently forgave him for being a bastard, because he nodded and his face got all eager again. “Yeah. I made them a pen for the front yard. I saw it in the lumber store, actually and went back and got it. You want to see?”

Rabbits? Really?

“Yeah,” Craw heard himself saying. “Yeah. Sure. Here.” This side of the field sported an overhanging oak tree with low branches stretched over Craw’s head, leading to a sturdy trunk. Instead of trotting the quarter mile up to the gate for the fence or climbing over a fence that was mostly pig-wire, Craw reached up, grabbed the branch, and swung himself awkwardly over the top of the pig-wire, leaving Ben to look at him with that uncomfortably familiar shocked expression.

“Oooooo-kay,” he said, inviting Craw to laugh with him.

Craw didn’t see anything shocking or funny about it, though. It was just practical. “Where’s the rabbits?”

Much of Gertie’s land was pretty lawn, different from the long grasses of Crawford’s land. It was scarcely an acre—the little white house was right in the center of it, with the back end facing Craw’s property, complete with lean-tos and pens for the sheep and the rabbits and a roost for the chickens. The rabbits were in the front yard, huddled together in the wind, nibbling on the grass in a little wire contraption that was, apparently, designed to let smallish critters enjoy the great outdoors without becoming somebody’s food.

They were, Craw understood, big for their kind. Lop-eared angora bunnies did have a certain charm, and their fur was long and silky. There were two black and white spotted rabbits and two brown ones, and as they sat in their pen, they seemed placid enough. Okay, well, two of them seemed placid enough. The other two were—

“Oh for Christ sake!” Ben exclaimed. “Are they doing what I think they’re doing?”

“Fucking?” Craw asked, to make sure he wasn’t surprised at something else. “Yup. I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re doing.”

“Well, shit. Gertie told me she’d had them spayed.”

Craw had to laugh. “I think she got the two brown ones spayed and neutered—the black and white ones she got from the fair this last year. They’re sort of a breeding pair.”

Ben looked at him and rolled his eyes. “Well, that
would
explain the separate cages.” The female let out a squeal at his feet, and Ben eyed her sourly. “Yeah, you have your fun
now
,
sweetheart—you’re going to be up to your eyeballs in baby bunnies in about three months.” He looked at Craw unhappily. “It’ll be so cold! Will they be okay?”

Craw shrugged. “That’s what the fur is for. Besides, that lean-to and the rabbit hutch are nice and snug. I helped Gertie do that when she got her first pair, long time back. Did you brush them?”

Ben nodded. “Lots of fur came off. I kept it.” He blushed and looked away. “I wasn’t sure… I mean, you’ve got the shop and the mill… I thought you’d be interested.”

Crawford couldn’t help the smile that creased his blunt features. “Of course I am! Gertie used to save me the brushings too. I might not do anything with them immediately, but I usually find a place to work them in.” And then, belatedly, because it was thoughtful, “That’s really nice of you. Thank you.”

Ben smiled back, looking for all the world like a child who had pleased a big brother or a parent. “Well, you’ve gone out of your way to be nice to me,” he said. “Returning the favor.”

Crawford blushed. Oh geez. Quid pro quo. He didn’t
want
quid pro quo. He wanted… well….

The male rabbit gave a little
squee
of completed copulation at his feet, and the two bunnies separated, panting. The male gave the female a little bit of a nuzzling, and the female gave an irritated chuckle and a hearty hindquarter kick to the male’s face as if to say, “Fuck off, asshole! You’ve done enough damage!”

Okay. Crawford didn’t want
that.
But that part where the one rabbit had been riding the other? Yeah. That had been promising. He wanted
that
with some foreplay and a lot of afterglow, and maybe some, “Gee, Crawford, you
are
a nice guy, and I’d really like to do this frequently, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

Except with more grunting, moaning, and hot male kisses and stubble burn and maybe a blow job or two. And breakfast in the morning and dinner together and sharing each other’s day and….

Well. Maybe he was moving a little too fast. After all, look where that got the boy bunny.

“That’s a real nice offer,” he said, knowing the pause had gone on too long while he’d been watching hot rabbit sex. “Thank you.”

He looked up and caught Ben’s eyes on his face, like Ben had been looking at him and trying to read him like a book. “Here,” he said after a moment. “I’ll go get the bag. I’m curious as to what you’ll do with it, I won’t lie!”

And Crawford had his first real inspiration of this entire courting business, because suddenly, his shop and his mill and even his house didn’t seem too personal at all. “Would you like to come by tomorrow and see the business?” he offered.

Ben turned around from the door of the little cottage. “I’d love to!”

Crawford wondered if he should have… primped more for Ben’s visit, but then he figured that if Ben couldn’t take the business, and Crawford, as they were, well, things probably wouldn’t work out anyway. For a moment he thought that maybe he’d go back to banging Stanley when he made deliveries, but the thought of Ben not liking the business just made his heart too sore to think of Stanley at all. That night Crawford took a look at his orderly, colorful little shop with its white walls and brilliant rainbow of yarn colors and his clean, no-nonsense mill next door, and decided that this was his home, and maybe a little bit of optimism wouldn’t be out of order.

Apparently
something
was, because as he settled down to his afternoon spinning (he was spinning up the variegated teal roving that Aiden had dyed the day before), he actually
broke his thread
,
which was unheard of
almost since he’d first taken his foot to the treadle nearly twenty years before.

“What in the fuck?” Ariadne said. She’d watched him do it as she’d chattered on about her husband trying to paint an ultrasound in rainbow colors and failing because he kept getting the details too fine, and suddenly she couldn’t stop staring at Crawford’s bewildered expression or talking about what a dumbfuck he was.

“Jesus, Crawford! You… what the hell were you doing? I mean, you
never
break your yarn. That’s such a rookie move! And you’re working with what? Merino and alpaca? That doesn’t break! Well, what are you waiting for! Splice it back together and reaffirm my faith in the universe! What were you thinking about when you did that?”

Crawford smiled, and the look he gave her must have been mighty helpless in texture, because suddenly her face got all soft.

“Really?” she asked quietly. “You were really thinking about him?”

“How do you know who he is?” Crawford asked, looking at the frayed ends of the yarn-to-be between his fingertips.

“Because you said ten whole sentences about taking him shopping for weatherproofing, Craw. That’s something of a record. You took a week-long trip to Denver last year that didn’t get talked about that much.”

“He’s coming to visit tomorrow,” Crawford said apologetically. “No. It’s not a date. He’s just being neighborly.” His hands started moving independently, and he licked his palm to make the spit-splice work better.

“Are you sure about that?” Ari asked gently, and Craw gave the wheel a couple of pumps to get the spinning past the break. That done, he stopped spinning, because it was clear he needed to have this out, or he’d never get his spinning even.

“He likes baby bunnies,” he tried, wondering if even Ariadne spoke enough Crawford to put that connection together. “He likes baby bunnies. He thinks they’re cute. He scratches the sheep on the head like a kitten. Ariadne, do I
look
like the kind of person who would do that?”

Suddenly his big, battered, lanolin-soft hands—the hands that could spin and knit and repair a fence and pick a horse’s hoof and rope a critter down to shear—were covered by Ariadne’s small, delicate little hands with electric-blue nail polish at the tips.

“You don’t
look
like the kind of person who could do that, Crawford. But I’ve seen you do it just the same. Hey—he’s talking to you. I mean,
Jesus,
that’s an improvement over every other gay man you don’t know, right?”

Crawford managed a half smile, half scowl. “He’s only talking to me because I made him a hat.”

“Yeah? What’re you going to make him next?”

Oh, crap. The sad truth was he was already started on the project.

Ben liked the shop. He must have—he spent over an hour just wandering around, petting each kind of yarn while Crawford and Ariadne waited on customers. He didn’t say anything, although he did look wistfully over his shoulder when Crawford took a break and took him on a tour of the mill.

“You want some?” Craw asked, and Ben startled and looked at him almost guiltily, blushing.

“Yes, and some yarn too!” he quipped, and Crawford blushed, not sure if that meant what he thought it meant, so he was relieved when Ben just kept on talking. “I don’t know how to knit, though.”

“Ariadne could teach you,” Crawford offered, and Ben looked up at him sideways.

“Not you?”

Crawford blushed even harder. “Ari’s a real good teacher. I’m sort of horrible. I managed to teach her, but only because she kicked me in the shins and called me a grumpy asshole so I remembered to lighten the holy fuck up.”

Ben laughed, the sound echoing off the ceiling and the concrete floor of the big room that housed the mill proper. “Well, then, maybe I’ll ask Ariadne when it starts to get a little colder. Something about knitting during a cold winter’s night has some real comfort appeal, you know?”

Craw nodded. “Now see, here’s the fleece room. After the critters are sheared, we wash the fleece to get the dirt out, and we’ve got to do this a couple of times with the sheep, and the water can’t be too hot, or the fleece will crimp and we’ll lose all the lanolin, and here’s the big sinks that we do that in….”

Crawford loved the mill. He loved the big machinery and the tiny thread that seemed to come from it, and he loved the big vats of dye and the unexpectedly beautiful hanks of yarn that came from
that.
He took Ben through it piece by piece, often giving the history of each piece.

“Yeah, we had to make do with three small drum carders until last year, when a small mill in upstate New York went belly-up, and I took a trip up to convince the owner to let us buy his industrial-sized one.”

“He brought me to flirt with the owner’s daughter,” Jeremy said sourly.

 Crawford caught the look Ben gave him. It was appreciative—as it should have been, because Jeremy was slickly handsome—but it was also a little repulsed.

“God, if we hadn’t needed that damned piece of machinery so damned bad… it was
almost
not worth it!”