Golden Autumn - Part Sixteen
This episode is part of a larger story, Soft Touch. If you haven’t yet, you can go back and read it from the beginning right here.
“Amazing,” Aiden murmurs, his deep voice sounding immensely pleased.
“Aren’t they! Just beautiful.” I run my fingers over the leaves of the two pomegranate saplings, then lift my beaming face to Aiden, who’s sitting behind me on the couch. “Thank you, sweet thing! You know I saw these at the shop? I was painfully jealous of whoever had ordered them.”
“Oh, yeah?” Aiden breathes out a warm laugh, touching his fingertips to my hair. “That’s good to hear, but I was actually talking about this.”
He nods at the spice cabinet balanced on his lap, the one I had Raj make for him.
As with everything Raj does, it looks even better in its finished form than it did in the sketches. Raj changed the design, presumably right after I gave him a big box of broken glass from our kitchen. He ended up using some of that glass to create the front of each spice drawer.
Each little mosaic drawer-front is unique, a miniature work of art. They pick up a colorful glow just from the low light of the embers in our fireplace, so I have a feeling they’ll be beautiful in the sunshine of the kitchen.
I can tell from Aiden’s expression that he’s happy with the cabinet, too. He carefully sets it aside, then leans down to kiss me, taking the back of my neck in his hand.
“Thank you,” he purrs softly, nuzzling his nose into mine.
“You’re welcome.” I go back for another little kiss, nibbling his lip, then add - “Happy anniversary.”
Aiden smiles against my mouth. “Happy anniversary.”
We both lapse into blushing silence for a second after he draws back. I twist the heist ring around my finger, searching for something to say.
“Raj outdoes himself every time, huh?” I ask, trying not to sound as flustered as I am.
“Seriously. I’ve been thinking of asking him to make us a korsi, too. If he’s not too busy working on that treehouse Eduardo wants.” Aiden runs his admiring eyes over the spice cabinet again. “Do you think maybe Raj can’t dance because he got a triple dose of woodworking talent instead?”
“Yeah,” I laugh tiredly, lifting my eyes to Aiden, turning around on the rug to face him. “Pretty sure you have to do some kind of deal with the devil to get this level of skill.”
“Really? Then what did you trade for your skills, flower boy?”
I blush harder, smiling up at Aiden. “I’m glad you like your present. And your flowers.”
Aiden looks at the bouquet I made him for our anniversary, lets his blue eyes linger on the riot of blue and golden blossoms for a long moment. They retained a wild, natural look even carefully displayed in a vase, but I wanted them that way.
“I love it all,” Aiden says softly, returning my smile as he looks at me again.
I rest my chin on his knee adoringly. He goes perfectly still for a moment, then gently begins tracing the outline of my tattoo through my shirt.
“How’d you get the idea for the cabinet, Keane? Guess you got tired of me complaining about hitting my head on the ceiling every time I need to get to our spices?”
I shake my head at him as I get to my feet, then kiss the top of his head.
“It’s not about complaining, you big dumb idiot. I don’t know why on earth this would come as a surprise to you, but I’d actually rather you lived a nice long life. Getting smacked in the head a few times every day doesn’t seem conducive to that.”
Aiden breathes out a rumbling laugh. “Uh oh. You should’ve told me that before me, Ralph, and Noah spent years and years playing one-two-three-smack.”
I stop in alarm, my tea lifted halfway to my mouth. “What in the godforsaken fuck is one-two-three-smack?”
“It’s-” Aiden stops, considers for a second, then finishes – “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
“Aiden. Is that exactly what it sounds like?”
“No,” he says, unconvincingly.
“Oh, my god.” I bite my lip, then let out a helpless laugh, bending down to bury my face in his chestnut hair. “Someone help me. I fell in love with such a stupid ass.”
“Too late to go back now,” he murmurs playfully, pushing my shirt up so he can brush kisses up my stomach.
The warmth of his lips sends flutters through my chest, and his rich beard tickles my skin. I let out a gasp of laughter, pushing him away before I can accidentally spill my mug of tea all over him. A huff of warm laughter kisses my ears, making my cheeks burn.
“Mmm… what time is it?” Aiden yawns, sitting back to look up at me.
I check my watch, then blink in surprise. “Oh. Getting pretty close to dawn.”
Which means we should’ve gone to bed forever ago, probably the minute we got home from the Fling Thing. We’re both exhausted from the all-night party, but here we are, still hanging out in our living room. I don’t know why Aiden hasn’t suggested heading up to bed yet. I haven’t because… I don’t know. I just want to spend more time with him, and I can’t do that if I’m asleep.
I’m afraid he might be about to say that we need to go to bed, knowing now that it’s almost dawn. Instead he bites his lip, then casually asks – “Play some video games, or?”
“Yes!” I answer immediately, full of relief. “Sure, yeah! Let’s do it!”
I pick up my controller and drop down next to him on the couch. He stretches out his long legs, settles down comfortably next to me, and slips a hand beneath my shirt to stroke my back.
“This the one you just started?” he asks, as the game loads up and drops me into the level I was working on.
“Mhm.”
“What is it?”
“Prince of Persia.” I flash him a sidelong smile. “Something about that title appealed to me.”
Aiden blinks in surprise, then breathes out a huff of laughter. “And what’s this level?”
“The Sacred Archives.”
Aiden cracks a startled grin. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah, and it’s only just now occurring to me how funny that aspect of this is,” I laugh, drawing a laugh from Aiden, too.
“Stop smashing stuff in the archives, Keane!” he complains, as I start to play and my warrior begins slashing decorative pots with his swords. “Jesus Christ, look at this place, it’s in ruins!”
“It was like that when I got here! Except for the pots I smashed.”
“Who runs into the archives sword-first, dude? Show some respect!”
“Excuse me, I’m trying to save the prince!” I protest indignantly. “Who I’m getting some sexual energy from, by the way, although I doubt the game designers intended anything as gay as that.”
Aiden arches an eyebrow. “Think he might put out if you can rescue him?”
“Maybe, so you can see what’s at stake here.”
“Smash away,” Aiden says promptly, and I pause the game to drop my face into my hand, trembling with silent laughter.
We lapse into cozy quiet as I play. Luna twitches her whiskers in her sleep, dreaming on the armchair while Jumble sleeps in his box. The gentle chiming of the malachite tree moving in the breeze outside reaches us every now and then. The fire snaps softly, and Aiden rests his head on my lap.
It feels so good to just be with him, doing something we do all the time. I need to stop even trying to process everything he told me tonight beneath his Guardian Tree. That’s going to take time, and besides, I’m too exhausted to think about it anymore. For now I just want to be close to him, feel his hand on my back.
But I can’t stop thinking about it. Every now and then something strikes at me like lightning, and some new realization startles me because I hadn’t thought of it yet. No matter where my mind wanders, there’s something that leads me right back to Aiden’s journey.
I think of Ralph and Noah, and immediately start thinking of how impossibly hard it must have been for Aiden to decide to leave them. I think of all those books on magical trees that Aiden bought and read, the amount of research and work and sacrifice this took… and that makes me think of Aunt Sarah, and how hard it must have been for Aiden to say goodbye to her, too.
But he did it. All of it. All because he thought in the end this would bring me and him together.
Whenever I try to really absorb any of this, I… I just can’t. My thoughts simply melt down into blazing, burning love that goes beyond words.
I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point I paused the game and set my controller aside. I’m sitting up in the corner of the couch with Aiden laying in my arms, his head resting on my chest. He’s been silent for some time, but I know he’s not asleep. I think he’s listening to me. Or to us. I know my note must sound wild with love right now.
We must sound really nice together. Aiden’s face is hidden against me, but there’s something about him giving it away. He’s holding almost perfectly still in my embrace, alternating between taking a few fast, deep, unsteady breaths, and holding his breath completely. His arms keep me pressed firmly and tightly to him.
The sky is beginning to grow lighter outside. The fire is slowly going down in the fireplace. Still, neither of us makes a move to go anywhere. The only movement at all in our living room is my hand slowly stroking through Aiden’s luxuriant tumble of chestnut hair. He begins to glow softly after some time, a gentle golden light emanating from his skin. I let out a soft sigh as his warmth melts into me. I’ve never stretched out in sunshine as warm and beautiful as his.
It’s strange, but the longer we lay here, in this peaceful stillness, the more my heart pounds harder and faster for the body tangled up with mine. The more the flames slowly throb up and down within me, the more my cheeks burn with the heat of them. And Aiden only listens more and more closely, breathlessly.
In a sort of daze, I open my eyes. I find myself staring straight at the two saplings we rescued. Linden and sugar maple. Both were in bad shape when they came to us, but they’re beginning to show signs of sturdiness and strength they didn’t have before.
All of a sudden I desperately want to go outside and plant them on the meadowy hill that Aiden and I picked out for them. I want to do it right now, for reasons I can’t explain to myself. But from here on out we can probably only expect cold weather until spring, and delicate young roots can’t always withstand that.
I just have to be patient, wait until they’re strong enough.
Still, my hands are itching to plant them. If I can’t do that right now then I’ll just have to do some other gardening, so I gently ease Aiden back and get to my feet. He sits up and rubs his eyes, slowly coming out of his reverie. Watching me in confusion as I stuff my gardening gloves into the pocket of my jeans and pick up my gardening tools.
I reach for him when I’m ready to go, but he’s already gotten up to follow me. He trails me through the kitchen and out into my garden, where I fall to my knees to start working on whatever’s closest.
Aiden watches me quietly for a moment, then disappears back inside. I sit up on my ankles, wondering if it’s too needy and desperate-sounding to insist that he come back and stay just as close to me as he was before.
He returns before I can decide, having refilled our mugs of tea. He places one in my hands, then sits down on the kitchen step with the other.
I take a long sip, then sink my fingers back into the soil, my heart full of relief. Why does it feel so good to have Aiden here, even if all he’s doing is sitting there behind me, drinking some tea? Somehow just his presence makes everything completely different.
He keeps silent while I work, but eventually his deep voice breaks the dawn quiet.
“Are you okay, Jamie? Like… handling everything I told you alright?”
“Yeah, I am.” I look at him over my shoulder, so he can see in my eyes that I mean it. “Just – trying to let it all sink in.”
Aiden nods slowly, then asks, with a tiny bit of anxiety in his voice – “Not freaked out by what I did, though?”
“No, definitely not. I understand completely.”
Silence falls again, but Aiden seems reassured by my answer. He knows it’s outside of my capabilities to tell him anything but the truth.
He watches me with his sweet, sleepy blue eyes, his bearded chin resting on his palm.
“I also see why you didn’t tell me the truth as soon as you got back to Ketterbridge,” I add, going back to my gardening. “I would have assumed you’d lost your mind.”
Aiden breathes out a laugh through his nose. “Well, suppose I did. Just not in the way you mean. In many ways I’ve never recovered.”
I laugh softly, too, shaking my head at him. “I don’t mind it one bit if you lose your mind over me. Just don’t give up your covenant for me.”
Aiden smiles, but after a moment he grows serious and thoughtful.
“I do wonder sometimes, about my covenant…” he begins, then trails off.
I sit back on my ankles to look at him curiously. He takes a long moment to choose his words. I wait patiently until he gives his muscled shoulders a shrug.
“Just… son of Fate,” he goes on, slowly and haltingly. “That’s what I supposedly am, right? If that’s the case, then why couldn’t I control my own fate? I was born into my Guardian covenant. I never agreed to it, even though that’s what a covenant technically is, an agreement, so how’s that work? Covenant makes it sound like I made a deal with someone, but I didn’t. I was just born with it. I couldn’t get rid of it when I wanted to. So what, I’m a force of Fate, I can do fate magic, but my own fate is just – out of my hands?”
He stops, then looks at me with a baffled expression in his blue eyes.
“I always thought Guardian magic is kindly magic, at its heart. So I could never understand why it forced me into being a Guardian. Why do I get no say?”
I turn that over in my mind for a minute before I answer.
“I’m… not sure about the covenant, or why you had no choice… but what I do know is that Fate ultimately put you here, Sugar Maple. And who actually put you here? You. Because you didn’t give up on us when you couldn’t find the first Tree. You put yourself back together, and came home, and tried again.” I move closer to him, then lean in to gently kiss his cheek. “You did steer your own fate how you wanted it, right? It just took time, and patience, and hard work.”
Aiden gazes at me silently, thinking. I wait for a minute or two, gardening quietly, then add -
“I won’t pretend that I know anything about how Guardian covenants work. Maybe covenant is a misnomer, or something…? Someone in your Guardian line just started calling it that, and it stuck?”
Aiden shakes his head. “Rose calls it that, too.”
“Okay, yeah, then I have no idea. But like you said, maybe understanding it isn’t the most important thing. I’m just glad that you’re here now. Home. With me. Where you belong. And still… yourself. Guardian and all.”
I drag the back of my wrist over my cheek, having tickled my face with some leaves by accident. There’s some topsoil stuck to my cheek now, but I’ll deal with it later. I go right back to sifting through the dark earth with my hands, giving it a nice airing out before the cold sets in and packs it down.
“Honestly, the part of this that’s really killing me is that you thought you had to be someone totally different before you could be with me. I love that you’re a Guardian. And you were just telling me about the magic you did when you were little, it’s like… it’s part of who you are, Aiden. It has been your whole life. To think that you really believed you just had to get rid of it to be with me, that’s the part I… that’s the part that’s fucking me up.”
There’s a long silence from Aiden, and then – “You really mean that, don’t you?”
“Yeah, absolutely. The rest of it I can completely understand. You know that traveling isn’t my thing, but if it was me in your place, and I knew what was on the line… if I thought that was the only way to you… I’d probably have done the s-”
Aiden interrupts me by softly laying a hand on my back. I look at him over my shoulder, blinking in surprise, and find myself enveloped in a deep, lingering kiss.
I slowly fall onto my back into my garden, and Aiden climbs over me, kissing me deep down into the flowers. The rosy dawn sunlight makes its first rise into the sky, but the air in the garden still has a dim blue tint, and Aiden glows a happy shade of golden within it. I blissfully soak up his light, wrapping my arms around him.
His hands begin to roam beneath my clothes, and I begin to pant softly, holding tightly to him, kissing him back with all the passion blazing up in my heart.
More certain than ever that in him, I’ve found my fate.
~~~~
As usual, we’ve completely fucked up our sleep schedule. I woke up to find our bedroom glowing with apricot-colored afternoon sunshine.
It pools beautifully against Aiden as he lays in bed beside me. It gives the more coppery locks of his chestnut hair a warm shine, and it illuminates the little fine lines at the corners of his eyes, which are crinkled up with a shy smile. He’s stretched out like a giant cat, his powerful body half-buried in the sheets and blankets. But I can make out a faint, barely controlled glow of happiness coming from his bronze skin.
“Did yesterday happen?” was the first thing he whispered to me when I woke up, and I laughed helplessly, wondering the same thing.
Yesterday a volcano went off within me, and today there are blazing pieces still raining down out of nowhere, making me burn and shiver with wild love every time they hit me.
“What time is it?”
“Mmm…” Aiden turns his head and gazes out of the window, scrutinizing the sky. “Probably around two o’clock.”
“Noooo, we missed breakfast, Aiden! Our anniversary breakfast! I was so excited for whatever you were gonna cook!”
“I’ll just make it right now,” he laughs, kissing my jaw and climbing out of bed. “Just gotta run to the store real quick. Where are your car keys?”
I sit up, rubbing my eyes, then quickly fling the blankets off of myself. “Wait for me, I’ll just come with you!”
I don’t want him to be apart from him today, not even for a few minutes. I can barely keep my hands off of him at Mugshot, and then again at the grocery store while he gathers up our breakfast supplies. I keep finding myself leaning against his back or holding his hand or leaning up to quickly kiss him.
By the time we get back out to my car he looks seriously flustered, an expression he wears so well that I immediately set about trying to make the problem worse for him.
“Are you trying to make us crash?” he groans, when I teasingly stroke his thigh through his jeans as he drives us home.
“No,” I purr softly, playfully. “So pull over.”
Aiden lets out a startled huff of laughter, blushing all the way to his ears.
“Little Demon. If you want anything resembling breakfast before it’s time for me to start making dinner, we need to get – oh, man. You know what? Okay.”
I blink at him in surprise as he starts slowing the car down. “Are you seriously pulling over?”
He flips on the blinker. “Like you said, dude.”
“Oh my god, Aiden!” I laugh, blushing harder than he is. “I was joking! We’re like five minutes away from home!”
“Yeah,” he agrees, widening his eyes at me. “Five whole minutes.” He pulls my car onto an unmarked forest road, glancing around with obvious urgency. “See anywhere with decent cover? Or do we just not care?”
“Stop it,” I laugh desperately, pressing my fingertips to my blushing cheeks. “I was joking, I was just joking!”
Aiden stops the car and puts it in park. I expect him to either turn us around, or keep up this ridiculousness and take me into the backseat of the car. But when I look at him he’s just sitting there with his wrist against the steering wheel, smiling at me.
“Can’t believe that this is your reaction to me telling you all that stuff last night. I was afraid you’d be running for the hills. I know how crazy it must sound to anyone else.”
“Anyone but me,” I answer softly, my heart flaming up as his blue eyes gaze deeply into mine.
Aiden matches my smile, then leans across the car to kiss me.
“Thank you, Linden,” he murmurs, against my mouth.
I blink slowly and dreamily at him as he pulls back.
“For what-?” I begin, then stop abruptly, freezing in alarm. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what? I’ve mostly been listening to you, if I’m being honest.”
I look out through the windshield, my eyebrows furrowing. “I thought I heard some kind of animal sound. Right near us.”
Aiden glances through the window, then unstraps himself and gets out of the car. I follow him out into the afternoon sunlight, where we both stand still, listening.
After a moment I hear it again. A frantic shuffling sound, coming from the undergrowth on one side of the forest road. Aiden must have heard it that time, too, because he quickly catches my hand and pulls me behind him.
“What is it?” I whisper, peeking around his arm. “Is it a bear?”
Aiden can see further from his tall vantage point, and his eyes are narrowed like they just found something.
“No, it’s… oh, my fucking god. You set this up, Keane, didn’t you?”
I look up at him in bewilderment. “Set up wh-?”
I break off with a gasp as something comes bursting out of the treeline with a wild fluttering noise. Aiden instinctively throws one hand out, and a transparent dome of golden Heliomancer light snaps into existence around the thing that’s flailing around in front of us, trapping it in place.
I lean down to see what it is, then let out a startled laugh, realizing why Aiden just threw that accusation at me.
“No, I didn’t set this up! I swear I didn’t!”
“Oh, really?” Aiden points down at it, arching an eyebrow, his eyes wide with indignant disbelief. “You had nothing to do with this?”
The alarmed rooster does a speedy lap of the dome of light Aiden made around him, trying to find a way out. But after a second he crumples awkwardly to the forest floor and lays still, breathing hard.
The laughter falls from my face and Aiden’s at the same time. We take a simultaneous step closer to get a better look at the rooster. He tries to scuffle backwards, but he must be too tired to move.
“Oh, no,” I murmur softly, my eyes widening.
The rooster’s body has patches, places where his feathers have fallen out. He has unusually long tail feathers with a blue sheen to them, but many of them are gone. There are patches of blood on him, scratches in his skin. He’s much thinner than I think he should be, too.
“Aw, man,” Aiden murmurs sympathetically, dropping down onto his knee. “What happened to you, buddy? And what were you doing wandering around the forest?”
“Do you think the storm blew him away from home?” I watch with worried eyes as the sickly rooster struggles to regain his feet. “How do we find his owners, so we can take him back?”
“I…” Aiden straightens up, a grim frown turning down his mouth. “I don’t think we should take him back to his owners.”
I follow Aiden’s gaze to the rooster’s foot, where… there’s a piece of string, knotted tightly. Much too tightly, in fact. It must be hurting the rooster. The end of the string is very short and uneven, like he pecked his way through it, or somehow snapped it. Broke himself free.
I don’t think he wandered away from home. Looks much more like he put in a serious effort to escape.
The rooster has stopped trying to struggle. He’s glaring up at us defensively from one beady black and orange eye now, but he’s clearly too exhausted to even try to get away.
I look at Aiden, who breathes out an enormous sigh, then gets to his feet.
“Stay here and keep an eye on him. I’ll go home and get a box.”
~~~~
“Goddamnit, Jamie.” Aiden leans one shoulder against the wall of the barn and folds his arms over his chest, frowning suspiciously down at me. “I’m still not sure you didn’t orchestrate this.”
“Literally how would I even have done that? Did I make you pull off the street and onto that particular road?” I pause for a moment, realizing that I kind of did, then quickly shake my head. “You know I wouldn’t have made us miss breakfast on purpose! Besides, this isn’t even what I wanted! I wasn’t hoping for a rooster! I just wanted a few hens, so we could have eggs! Did you read that pamphlet Alix wrote on food sovereignty? It was interesting stuff, you should have a look-”
“What are the odds,” Aiden cuts in, wholly unmoved, “That we just so happen to run across a stray rooster when you’ve got chickens on your mind?”
I smile adoringly up at him, reaching up to tap his nose with my fingertip. “The odds don’t mean anything when a Guardian is involved, babe. You should know that.”
Aiden blinks, then twists his mouth to the side, fighting back a smile. He hesitates, searching for an answer. Mitch leans out of the barn before he can find one.
“Come on in, boys,” Mitch calls softly, with a beckoning toss of his head.
We follow him into his barn, where late afternoon sunlight is falling in tangerine stripes against the walls. The box is on the floor, and Emmett is sitting on his knees in front of it. He looks up anxiously at Mitch as we cross the barn towards him.
“He’s not moving too much, dad…”
“He’ll be okay.” Mitch smooths a hand over Emmett’s russet hair reassuringly, then turns to us as we stop next to him and look down into the box. “With some help.”
Mitch and Emmett have rearranged the box, added a soft bed of hay to it. The rooster is huddled in one corner, looking exhausted and bewildered. There’s gauze covering one of the deeper scratches, and some kind of purple medicated powder brushed over the shallower ones. Based on the bottles next to the box, Mitch and Emmett already took care of disinfecting all the injuries.
“Said you just found him wandering around the forest?” Mitch asks.
This is the most I’ve ever heard Mitch talk. At an extremely soft volume, admittedly, and he still won’t look at us while he does it, but it’s nice to have an actual conversation with him.
“Yeah, the poor guy was just out in the woods, looking like this,” Aiden answers. “With that tied around his foot.”
He nods to the piece of string, which is sitting with the discarded medical stuff just outside of the box. The very first thing Mitch did when we got here – besides wrapping the rooster in a towel to hold him still – was cut that string right off.
Mitch nods, frowning a little.
“Run along, Emmett,” he murmurs, tugging on a strand of Emmett’s hair. Emmett immediately opens his mouth to protest, and Mitch quickly adds - “See after that colt we’re watching for Mr. Davis.”
The prospect of getting to hang out with a new horse clearly changes the equation for Emmett. He gets up without arguing and makes an eager beeline for the door of the barn.
Mitch waits until he’s gone, then turns back to me and Aiden, running a hand through his hair.
“I think what you’ve got here is an injured gamecock. That’s why he’s got these special tailfeathers.”
“I – sorry, what’s that?” I ask, bewildered. “A gamecock?”
“A fighting rooster,” Mitch explains softly. “Who lost his last fight, by the look of it.”
Aiden and I both freeze, then look in startled dismay at the miserable rooster.
“It’s a mean business,” Mitch goes on sadly, nodding at the too-skinny rooster. “Sometimes the owners stop feeding them when they start losing, to motivate them for the next fight. He looks like a spirited thing to me, and a good breed. See the blue of those tail feathers? Rare specimen, maybe, before he ended up like this… so he should’ve been a good fighter. But he’s also very young, so my guess is his owner got too excited, fought him against a bigger and older bird. Then he probably escaped when they stopped feeding him afterwards, and got blown around in the storms until he ended up near your house.”
“Oh, no…” My heart twists painfully, and Aiden winces beside me. “Poor thing!”
“He’ll be alright,” Mitch murmurs, sounding sure of it. “It’s bad what he’s been through, but he’s not sick, at least, just hurt. He’s quiet because he’s in shock, but that won’t last forever.”
“Do you want him, Mitch?” Aiden asks hopefully.
Mitch breathes out a laugh, folding his arms over his chest. “Afraid I can’t take him even if I did. If I let him loose on the farm he’ll try to kill the rooster I already have.”
“What?” I widen my eyes at Mitch, considerably taken aback. “Are you serious?”
“It’s just in his instincts,” Mitch explains gently. “They’re territorial, especially the prideful ones, and this rooster-”
We all pause as a long and loud rooster call comes from somewhere outside of the barn. The injured, scrawny rooster in the box stirs immediately, his clouded eyes blinking open. He lifts his head and opens his beak like he’s going to issue an answering challenge, then lowers it in exhaustion again, too tired to do anything.
“He wants to fight right now,” Mitch laughs quietly. “In this state. So that about confirms it. Fierce little fellow, this one.”
I look pleadingly at Aiden, who lets out a quiet sigh.
“Would you happen to know any other farmers who might want him?” he tries desperately, begging Mitch with his eyes.
Mitch winces apologetically, shaking his head. “Ain’t none of them are gonna want a fighting rooster.”
Aiden closes his eyes, rubs his temples, and asks - “Is he dangerous?”
“Likely only to other roosters.”
“What about to our cat?”
Mitch raises an eyebrow at Aiden. “Are you two thinkin’ about keeping him? I can show you how to look after the scratches, give you a bottle of the spray for them. And we’ve got our old coop out in the storage shed. I could bring it over in my truck. Although it might be in bad shape… I think you’ll need to fix the roosting bar.”
“We have a friend who can do that!” I answer immediately.
Mitch shrugs his shoulders. “Alright. I’ve got an old hanging feeder for it somewhere.”
I intensify the pleading expression I’m fixing Aiden with.
“Free coop, even,” I whisper to him, tugging on the sleeve of his jacket. “Free hanging feeder!”
“Goddamnit, Jamie,” he whispers back, screwing up his face in frustration. “Goddamnit, god fucking damnit!”
“You agreed to this like four separate times at the Fling Thing, and I never even asked once! Besides, it’s like I told you, this wasn’t my plan, all I wanted was a hen or two-”
“Oh, one more thing,” Mitch adds, closing up a bottle of disinfectant. “He’ll be wanting a few hens, once he’s feeling better and starts getting lonely. If you don’t have some, he’ll probably run off to find some. I’m guessing you two won’t be tying him up with a string, right? I’d say he’s lived enough of his life tied down.”
Aiden stares down at the sad bird hunched up in the corner of the box, picking gingerly at what remains of his long blue tail feathers. I keep my hopeful eyes on Aiden’s profile. I know he feels them there.
He falls silent for a moment, then curses violently beneath his breath.
“What the fuck, Jamie?” he asks, some twenty minutes later.
We’re in the car on the way home, having arranged for everything with Mitch. We didn’t want to subject Blue to another car ride today, so Mitch and Emmett will drop him off later, when they drop off the coop and the other supplies.
I look up at Aiden, stopping halfway through a text to Raj about coop repairs. “What, what’s wrong?”
“Oh, nothing. Just thinking about how you wanted a few hens so we could have eggs, and now we’ve taken in the one kind of animal who’s going to battle us every time we try to take the eggs out of the coop.”
“Mitch said that might happen, not that it’s a certainty! Don’t forget he’ll help keep the hens safe from actual predators, so there’s that!”
“And now we’re gonna end up with chicks every now and then.”
“Mitch said he’s happy to take those, so it’s fine! Did you hear what he said about his friend who sells livestock to farmers? We can send the chicks home with Emmett when we need to.”
“Right, Mitch will take the chicks, but he doesn’t want the rooster that we’re choosing to keep. Because if he stays here he’ll try to commit – bird murder.”
“Oh, don’t be so hard on Blue! It’s not his fault he does what his instincts tell him! And you know he won’t try to murder anyone at our house!” I make a pouty, pleading face at Aiden. “Come on, what else could we do? You want to release Blue back into the wild, where he doesn’t belong? Give him back to the owner who tied him up and made him fight?”
“I’m just saying,” Aiden laughs helplessly, leaning back in the driver’s seat. “We haven’t even named our saucepan yet, and here we are taking in another stray.”
“It’s true.” I bite back a laugh, too, finishing up my text to Raj. “Our family is getting bigger faster than we can keep up, huh? I definitely don’t mind it, though.”
“Should we even buy the hens, or will we just find a handful of them somewh-?” Aiden begins, laughing over every word.
He stops mid-sentence, stares at me for a silent moment.
“Our family,” he repeats, then shakes his head as he turns away, smiling to himself. “Yeah, guess – guess I don’t mind it, either.”
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