The Winter Courtship Rituals of Fur-Bearing Critters (6 page)

“Didn’t you tell me you slept with her?” Aiden asked, and Jeremy rolled his eyes.

“Only to make you jealous!”

“Yeah,
that’ll
work.”

The two wandered off, bickering, and Ben looked at Crawford in true confusion. “Are they…?”

Crawford shrugged. “Nobody knows. They spend more time together than any married couple I know, but as far as I know, neither of them’s gay.”

Ben’s look was pitying. “Aiden definitely is,” he said, considering it carefully, “but I’m not sure about Jeremy.”

Crawford blinked and steered Ben outside so he could meet the alpacas. “How would you know that about Aiden?”

“Because he’s obviously getting over a long-term crush on
you
,
genius! Do they bite?”

“I told you, no,” Crawford shot back, trying to disguise the fact that he had almost tripped on a nothing, he’d been so surprised. “And I think you’re full of shit!”

Ben shrugged. “Yeah, you go ahead and think that. What’s this one’s name?”

“Burlingame. He’s one of three studs, and his coat is rated extremely superfine. See how light it is?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, alpacas come in nearly thirty natural colors—that one there is really rare. It’s a tough decision whether to dye it or to spin it raw. Seriously, you think he had a crush on me?”

Ben smiled that sudden, sun-in-an-open-sky smile. “Yeah, why—would you return it?”

Crawford grunted and shook his head. “Nope. He’s way too young for me. And too nice. Gotta be careful with that kid—I’ll squash him flat.”

“What about me?” Ben asked.

Crawford wanted so badly for that implication to be there in his eyes that he told himself it wasn’t so he didn’t dash his own hopes. “You’re tough,” Crawford said gruffly, thinking about Ben’s startled laughter when Craw had been mean to the sales clerk. “You’d fight back. That’s good.”

Ben’s smile was so bright it made Crawford’s eyes sting.

Ben started stopping by on a regular basis after that, often with some coffee or a muffin, sometimes with something healthy for Ariadne, who immediately recruited Ben to help her do a virus scan on the computer she’d set up for the register. September blew slowly into a crisp and bright October, and Ben visited the shop in the afternoons while Craw made a point of seeing him in the mornings. Ben could charm Crawford out of his most surly, obnoxious funks, and Crawford….

Well, one early October morning as Ben was out mowing his lawn, Craw saw that his thin denim jacket was hung up from a branch of the tree Craw had used (often now) to get into Ben’s yard. Ben was sweating a little with the exertion, but Crawford knew as soon as the lawn was mowed (all one acre of it, give or take a few fruit trees and some random granite boulders that just sort of hung around the sloped planes of their stretch of the Granby bowl), Ben would be shivering his thin, under-fatted ass off.

Good. Craw had a plan for that.

Ben’s back was turned, and he was at an angle not to see Crawford as he scrabbled over the fence, threw his newest gift on the branch with the jacket, and scrambled back. He was back on the horse and trotting quickly back before Ben even turned the damned mower around and figured out that he’d been there at all.

That was okay. Crawford had made his presence known.

 Ben was wearing the scarf and the hat when he came to visit. It was warmer in the afternoon, so he was a little red-faced and sweating some, but Crawford appreciated the gesture.

“Wow, Ben,” Ariadne said, looking at him with appreciation. “That’s some mighty fine work. I hope
whoever
made that for you also has time for
other things
he’s supposed to be working on!”

“He does,” Crawford said mildly, and Ari smiled. Then she raised her eyebrows and made a less than graceful exit, and Ben came up to lean over the counter, watching as Crawford spun happily.

“This yarn is different than the hat,” Ben said tentatively, and Crawford smiled up at him, his hands working on automatic.

“More complex,” Crawford agreed.

“Why?” Ben smiled a little and looked up as he asked, like he wanted to know the answer but also like he was asking it just to exchange words with Crawford.

“Because I know you better,” Crawford said primly. “More complex you, more complex yarn.”

Ben grinned then, and Crawford wondered that the sun did not just hide behind the clouds in shame, the smile was so bright. “I wonder what you’ll have for me next,” Ben said confidently, and Crawford was suddenly struck with some fear.

“I only do so many things right,” he said sharply, and the hurt on Ben’s face was so acute that Crawford cursed himself and stood up, disregarding his yarn tangling around the bobbin. “I just….” He grimaced and then just finished. “My knitting is simple,” he said desperately, hoping Ben would read between the stitches with this one. “My knitting is simple,” he said again. “I can make anything you want with it, but it will always be simple.”

Ben’s hurt went away, and his smile this time wasn’t that charm-the-birds-from-the-trees brand of sunshine. This smile was much gentler—much more Crawford’s dye lot, actually. “Simple is good,” he said. “I’ve lived through complicated. Complicated hurts. Simple sustains you. Complicated makes you hungry for simple.”

Crawford wanted to know about complicated. He wanted to know what kinds of simple Ben hungered for. He wanted to figure out the things Ben needed that Craw could make for him.

Oh, how Crawford hungered to knit for this man.

Chapter 5
Tangled

Ariadne said the moment was promising, but Crawford, well, he was cautious. Ben was not his first rodeo, and Stanley hadn’t been either. He’d ridden a few times like the alpaca johnnies, and after a few randy pokes, he’d been spit at and had that horrible, disdainful sniff of rejection. Not a lot of men could put up with Crawford’s raw way with words or his obsession with fiber. His business meant everything to him, or almost everything. He really, really wanted to find someone to share it with.

He’d rather give away half his stock as winter wear than give up his heart to someone who wasn’t going to keep it warm and cozy in baby-bunny fur gloves.

Which was exactly what he made for Ben the third go-round.

He didn’t know what that yarn he and Aiden had developed was going to be. A subtle midnight teal with a rust overdye, it was, as Aiden said when he saw it, very much Ben’s colors, and Aiden had helped Craw put up a cone of it special, spun with the bunny fur. (Ben had kept bringing them bags, just like Gertie had done, and they had some very lovely batches of Sweeps
because of it.) Aiden hadn’t said anything as he was helping Craw with the task, but he had once brushed the yarn with his index finger, a sort of wistful look on his face as he did so.

“Craw, if you were going to make a yarn for me, what colors would it be?”

Craw thought about it. “Sky blue,” he said, matter-of-fact. “Sky blue, with little dots of rust and gold, like a field of spring flowers under the Easter sky.”

Aiden nodded his head then, as though that made sense. “Not as dark as this?”

Craw shook his head.

“You like the dark, don’t you? The complex? The older?”

And Craw had known then, known that what Ben had seen in a moment was true. “Yeah, Aiden. You need to find someone who likes that spring sky color, you think?” There. How was that for subtle?

Aiden blushed, so apparently not very. “I don’t know if he’s… uhm. You know. Like us. Like us and Ben.”

Crawford didn’t spend any time wondering how he could have been so blind. That was what happened when you surrounded yourself with your gruff, growly grizzly bear shell. All of the deer, rabbits, and even the occasional fox ran around behind your back, hoping not to piss you off. Aiden was too young for him. Even if Aiden had been Ben’s age, Aiden would have been too young for him, and Ben was not.

Crawford couldn’t help him with the other thing, though. His way of courting might not work for another soul on the planet. “If he is, he is. If he’s not, he’s still your friend. And if he’s not that, I’ll fire him. Fucker.”

Aiden looked at him dryly. “Life’s very simple for you, ain’t it, Crawford?”

Crawford shrugged. “Yup.” And then he went down to the south pasture to check in on Ben. The time had long passed when he could claim he was checking on the fences, the critters, or even just to see what crossed the road down there. Nobody was fooled. Ariadne had started chiding him about bringing sunflowers. Jeremy had started asking him if he could rent Gertie’s cottage when Ben moved in with Craw.

Craw told them both that nothing was certain and that all he was doing was being neighborly.

But he was starting to be neighborly with a hard-on an awful lot.

Ben was pretty—he’d seen it himself a thousand times. But he also cared for the critters and spoke nice to Craw’s staff. He was honestly interested in the knitting and had been taking slow, patient lessons from Ari. And he got Crawford’s sense of humor like nobody since Ari and maybe Aiden and Jeremy.

He liked to smile in a way that tugged Crawford’s heart right up to the stratosphere like a kite.

And the man sure did appreciate knitwear.

October swept on to November, and Crawford rode the horse down to the end of the pasture to watch Ben raking leaves. He hadn’t had to mow the lawn since the last time Craw had seen him, and he’d gradually started wearing oversized hooded sweatshirts underneath his denim jacket, along with his hat and his scarf, because November was a little bit brisk. The snows hadn’t come enough to stick yet, but Crawford kept waiting for the day Ben would cave and go buy a parka or something warmer than a denim jacket and a hooded sweatshirt, and the day hadn’t come yet. Besides that, there was the purely physical desire to see more of Ben when he walked into the store, which couldn’t happen unless he took off the hooded sweatshirt. This was a shame, because his waist was narrow and tapered, and his chest was a little broader than his waist, and his muscles were small and defined—all things Crawford had noticed under the T-shirts and such he’d seen in the early fall but which he could not appreciate now that Ben was freezing to death.

Today, his hands were red and swollen from raking leaves in the cold, and Crawford sighed. Ben was pretty good at the weatherproofing. He had shown Crawford that the little house with its doily-covered couches and elaborately carved furniture was now much warmer and a good deal more hospitable than it had been. So Ben had been right—he was good at home improvement in general. It was just
Ben
that needed to be weatherproofed with some skill.

Crawford reached into his pocket and stroked the coarser wool of the project that had been riding him the night before, reflecting on this very dilemma. Well, he thought, he was a fast knitter but not in such a hot hurry as a suitor. Maybe it was time he stepped things up a bit before Ben’s balls dropped off from exposure.

He pulled his hands out of his pocket and put on his own leather-covered gloves so that when he swung himself over the fence, his hands wouldn’t sting like a sonovabitch from the cold.

He dropped lightly to his feet to see that Ben had leaned the rake against an aging pear tree and was walking forward, a welcoming expression on his face. Two months they’d been doing this, and Craw had come to treasure that expression more every day.

“I’m going to have to put in a gate,” Ben said, grinning. “You keep doing that, eventually that tree’s going to just drop the limb out of sheer irritation.”

Craw flushed not because he thought he was fat or irritating the tree any, but because Ben had sounded like him. He rolled his eyes and pulled the half-mittens out of his pockets. They were made with the dark-teal yarn with the veil-dyed rust overtones that Aiden had helped to dye, much like the scarf that Ben had wrapped warmly around his neck.

“Here,” he muttered gruffly. “Give me your hands.”

Ben had that look on his face—that bemused look that he often wore when talking to Crawford—but he put his hands out obediently and let Craw slide the half-mitts on. He didn’t move his hands when Crawford was done and instead clasped his fingers lightly over Craw’s, holding Craw’s hands in his as he examined the mittens.

“They’re not soft,” Crawford said into the sudden heart-thumping silence. “They’re not soft, but I’ve got some alpaca spun with that rabbit you gave me. It’s real fine. I was going to make you some inner gloves for these to go over, but they take time, and….” He trailed off and swallowed and found that even though he had gloves on, he was stroking Ben’s cold, red, work-roughened fingers as they peeked out from the opening of the half-mitts. “You just looked so cold.”

He couldn’t look at Ben then. He couldn’t bear the thought of pity, or amusement, or anything else in his eyes. He’d make those gloves, the ones with the fine wool, and bring them, and then Ben’s hands would be warm too.

Ben’s fingers tightened over Craw’s. “You don’t need to coddle me, Crawford,” he said softly. “I can take care of myself.”

Crawford concentrated on the backs of Ben’s hands and the new half-mitts. He’d put a cable on them because the cable was a little more complicated than the simple seed stitch on the scarf or the hat, and he wanted Ben to know he wasn’t stupid. “You need a winter coat,” he said softly, still not looking up. “We could go into Boulder tomorrow, if you want. I’ve got some deliveries to make, we could make a day of it. Stop for lunch and….” He swallowed. He must not make too much of this. He mustn’t. He was a big scary man in a big-skied windswept place, and he must not frighten the new, amazing creature who had wandered into his paddock before he had time to sniff around a bit and decide Crawford was really all warm fur instead of just grim, spitting attitude. “It would be… it would be fun,” he finished lamely. “We could have a good time.”

“Yeah,” Ben said, that sweet thread of humor stringing through his voice. “We could have a
great
time. Pick me up at eight thirty?”

The change in his voice gave Crawford permission to look up, and when he did, instead of Ben’s usual bemusement, he saw something dark and yearning in his eyes.