by B. G. Thomas
Kevin nodded. “Right! Like who is it who says we’re supposed to get a kind of weather! Who really knows? Except maybe God.”
“Or Snedronningen?” Wyatt offered.
“Or her.” Kevin grinned. “Blessed be her name.”
Wyatt laughed again.
“We don’t want to piss her off,” Kevin said, brow furrowed but eyes twinkling.
“Never,” Wyatt replied and looked once more into Kevin’s handsome face. Who knew the guy was so sweet? “I like talkie-Kevin.”
“Talkie-Kevin?” his companion asked.
Wyatt nodded. Actually giggled. “Talkie-Kevin. The one who says more than ‘Hodor.’”
Kevin shrugged. “Like I said, I talk.”
“Then why don’t you do more of it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve just never been comfortable talking around people.”
“You’re talking to me,” Wyatt said.
“I guess I’m comfortable with you, Wyatt,” Kevin said. And a blush crept over his cheeks.
Wyatt’s heart skipped a beat.
He cleared his throat.
What did he say to that?
Kevin stood up and walked over to the door, pushed the lacy curtain aside and looked out. “Gryphon thinks we got close to three feet. That we won’t be able to get out of here until at least tomorrow. I wonder if even then. If they had more than one Bobcat, I’d help him plow the snow.”
Which quite suddenly reminded Wyatt of something else. He sighed. “Well, crap. It sure did mess up my plans….”
Kevin turned, a sad expression flashing across his face. At least Wyatt thought he’d seen it. “Because you wanted to be alone?”
“I wanted to work a ritual up at Pax Place. I had it all set up and everything. Now I can’t get there.”
“At least for a couple days,” Kevin said.
Wyatt sighed again. It was part of why he’d come here. That and to be alone. He wasn’t going to do either now.
“What kind of ritual?” Kevin asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Wyatt replied. It wasn’t something he was in the mood to answer right now.
“You sure?”
“Sure,” Wyatt said with a nod.
Kevin looked around the room. “I think I’ll make my bed.”
For some reason that sent a little pang to Wyatt’s heart. He glanced at his own bed. Big enough for the two of them? If they got close?
Kevin looked at the bunk beds on one wall and then the two by the door. “Think I’ll take one of these. Last thing I want to do is wake up in the night to take a piss and bonk my head on the upper bunk.”
Wyatt looked at the little beds. Could Kevin even fit? “They’re awfully small. Won’t your feet stick out off the end?”
“They’re the same size as the bunk beds.”
“We could switch,” Wyatt said. “You can have my bed.”
Kevin shook his head, a sharp expression on his face. “No. Absolutely not. I’ve already taken your cabin. I’m not taking your bed.”
I could share, Wyatt thought. In fact, he knew he would like that. Sex or no sex, it had been a long time since a man had shared his bed. He missed it. A lot.
But he didn’t offer. Kevin was already making the bed.
Wyatt did help, though. It was the least he could do.
It was while doing so that Wyatt kicked something under the bed. “What was that?” he wondered aloud.
Kevin crouched to look. “Well, look at this!” He pulled out some boxes and put them on the bed. “Games.”
And games they were. Monopoly. Checkers. Scrabble. Uno. Yahtzee. Sorry! Even Chutes and Ladders.
“How cool is this? We won’t get bored!”
Kevin was grinning like a kid. Wyatt, however, immediately felt himself begin to sweat. “I… I don’t know.”
Kevin looked up, and after a second his smile turned into a frown. He looked concerned. “Wyatt?”
Wyatt’s mind was filled with memories of Howard and the board games they used to play. How seriously Howard took it. How competitive he was. How mean he could get. Slaughtering his opponents instead of just playing to win.
“Wyatt?”
The look of concern on Kevin’s face!
“I—I’m not very good at games,” he said, omitting the total truth of the situation. He’d loved games growing up. He and his sister and mother used to play by the hour. And every Christmas both he and Wendy each got a new game. For them it was for the fun, not the winning. He also suspected his mother let them win many a time.
“Who cares?” Kevin said. “It’s not about winning. It’s about having fun.”
And just like that Wyatt’s sudden fear evaporated. “Really?”
Kevin nodded. “Give it a try?”
“I—I guess so,” Wyatt said, a long-lost tingle starting in his tummy. Of how much fun he used to have with games.
“Monopoly?”
“I’m probably more of a Candy Land kind of guy,” Wyatt answered.
The smile that spread over Kevin’s face was almost radiant. “Candy Land it is!”
Wyatt smiled. “R-really?”
“What game is more fun than that?”
To Wyatt’s surprise, he saw that Kevin meant it.
And so play they did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
KEVIN COULDN’T remember when he’d last had so much fun. He’d had to brush up on the rules of Candy Land. It had been about a zillion years since he’d played it last. Wyatt knew the rules, though, which really shouldn’t have been a surprise. And he was smiling. A smiling Wyatt was a simply adorable Wyatt.
Why would anyone want to see Wyatt do anything but smile?
What pleasure could Howard have gotten from making this sweet little man do anything else?
He was startled when he quite abruptly realized that this was the first real one-on-one time he’d ever had with the little bear. Getting signed in at the front gate at Camp during Men’s Festival didn’t count (especially when gatekeepers always had a partner), and that drunken pass Wyatt had made at him one night most certainly didn’t either.
It did hurt Kevin’s feelings a bit that Wyatt didn’t remember the last time they’d played a game together. Of course, that was about seven years ago, and there had been a bunch of them sitting around that dining room table playing the card game Magic: The Gathering. And Wyatt was being the social butterfly and entertaining everyone with his jokes and antics, while Kevin had only had eyes for Wyatt. Thinking back on that day, Kevin wondered if that was when his little crush on him had begun.
I don’t have a crush on Wyatt!
But he’d no sooner thought the denial when he understood he was lying to himself.
Wyatt had been adorable that day too. His face had grown dark with a thick shadow over the week, and he was wearing this big necklace of clunky carved bears and a sarong so short his balls were showing. Not that Kevin had been looking, per se, but a card dropped on the floor had to be picked up, after all. More than once even. Wyatt’s thick brows had been all bunched together, the tip of his pink tongue peeking out from the corner of his mouth as he concentrated, trying to decide what card to play next. It had been fun that day too. Howard hadn’t been playing, but then it all seemed to fall apart when the big man did join them.
For just a moment Kevin was brought up short as he semiremembered that day. He had to stifle a gasp. Had Wyatt’s lover been rushing him? Pushing him? God! Yes. And he’d slaughtered Wyatt, hadn’t he? He’d destroyed Wyatt’s hand with about twenty points in Fireball damage when it would have only taken about three points to take him out of the game. Humiliating.
And then Kevin was remembering that day, even if he couldn’t quite remember the rules of that game anymore or the exact sequence of cards played. Wyatt had been clearly shocked when Howard threw down the cards that inflicted the damage. For a moment Kevin thought Wyatt was going to cry and then—clear as a bell—he remembered what Howard, Wyatt’s “lover,” had
said that day.
“Oh no! Is the wittle bear-wah gonna cwy?”
And then the expressions that had flashed across Wyatt’s face—all very fast—panic and hurt and embarrassment and maybe anger but ending with the magnificent (if not completely believable) smile that he had chosen to let win.
Kevin remembered Howard’s words, and he almost broke out into a cold sweat because he’d heard words like those himself once upon a time, hadn’t he?
“Oh, are you going to cry now, Kevie?”
…and…
“For Christ’s sake, Kevin! Can’t you fucking shut up for just one single solitary goddamned second?”
…and of course…
“Children should be seen and not heard. And preferably not seen.”
That moment, that day, sitting at that long table in the dining hall across from Wyatt, filled Kevin’s mind.
That’s when I fell in love with him.
What?
Fell in love?
Or at least got my crush.
Kevin came back to the real world then because Wyatt was asking Kevin if he was okay, and he found himself sitting across another table from Wyatt, Candy Land spread out between them.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Sorry. Woolgathering.”
And he understood clearly then why Wyatt hadn’t wanted to play any games.
Those voices. Wyatt had heard voices asking him if he was going to cry. Or expecting Kevin to hit him with twenty points of Fireball damage—or whatever Candy Land’s equivalent was.
But now?
Now Wyatt was smiling. It looked genuine. He seemed to be having fun.
And that made Kevin very happy.
But there was one thing Kevin didn’t do. He didn’t tell Wyatt, “I know just how you feel.” Because he didn’t know just how Wyatt felt. Was there anything worse than someone telling you they knew just how you felt?
Echoes from the memorial service….
“Oh, Kevin. I’m sorry about Cauley. Be strong.”
“He’s in a better place.”
Except Cauley didn’t believe in “other places.”
“He did what he came here to do, and it was his time to go.”
Maybe. But Cauley wouldn’t have thought so.
“I understand just exactly what you’re going through.”
But they didn’t!
And he really didn’t know Wyatt at all, did he?
Wyatt won the first game, and Kevin could have easily beat him the second time, but instead he let the little bear win. Somehow he thought it was important. Wyatt gave him one or two suspicious looks, but Kevin did his best to return an expression of pure innocence.
They advanced to Chutes and Ladders after that, and just as Kevin was convincing Wyatt that they could progress to Sorry! there was a knock on the door.
It was Saffron, and she was inviting them both to lunch. And it was delicious. A big pot of soup. Chicken noodle. And of course it was homemade. Saffron didn’t do anything else.
After that Kevin offered to take a shift with the plow, but Gryphon turned him down.
“It’s my job, Hodor.”
“Call me Kevin, okay? Please.”
Gryphon smiled and Saffron gave a laugh and shook her head. “So different.”
“Different?” Kevin asked.
“Most people who come here? They want to leave their ‘real’ names behind. It’s not just you Men’s Festival people with your Faerie names.”
Kevin nodded. Yes. He knew that, didn’t he?
“And how many of them want to be called Raven?” Wyatt asked.
Saffron gave a pursed smile. “As many as want to be,” she said. “As well as Phoenix and Cat and—”
“Don’t forget Griffon,” Gryphon said. “Of course, I spell mine differently.”
“Because nobody does that either,” Saffron said.
They all laughed.
“You know, it’s almost always the new pagans,” Wyatt said. “I wanted to go by Ursa! I had no idea there were hundreds of Ursas. I was so naïve. Thankfully a few people clued me in. What we need is someone in charge of all of that. Registering names, you know? Warning them that they’re picking a name a thousand other people already chose.”
Saffron leaned forward on the table and clasped her hands together. “But why? What difference does it make? So they want to be called Merlin or Morgan? Brigid or Morgana? Who cares? Don’t you think those gods, those archetypes, are happy to inspire a thousand-thousand people? Look how many Jesúses there are. How many Marys. Marias. Johns. My family is Jewish, so I grew up knowing several boys named Moses, and there were some Jacobs and Isaacs as well. I knew at least two men named Ram when I was in college. How many Mohammads do you think are out there? There is a lady who comes here who kept her real name. It’s Tara, and she was given that name by her Buddhist parents. I dated a man who went by Tenzin, the fourteenth Dalai Lama. So what’s wrong with wanting to name yourself Thor or Athena? Why can’t there be a hundred Phoenixes? Why not a thousand Ravens?”
It was food for thought indeed.
Wyatt had certainly gotten very quiet. A silent Wyatt wasn’t anything Kevin was used to. In fact, he looked a little stung. He wanted to reach and lay his hand on Wyatt’s, but balked at the idea. How would that look?
“How did you choose your name, Kevin?” Saffron asked then. “Your Hodor name that is. Isn’t he a character from Game of Thrones? Big hulking man? Mentally challenged. Can’t talk except to say his name? That doesn’t seem like you.”
“Somebody gave me the name,” Kevin replied, trying to recall exactly who it was. “I don’t remember. We were all sitting on the big raft in the lake one night and I was being quiet as usual, and they started talking about the books—this was before the series even started—and somebody said I reminded them of Hodor because I don’t talk much….”
“But you’re talking now,” Gryphon said. “You have since you got here.”
Kevin shrugged, suddenly self-conscious.
“Maybe you’re comfortable here?” Saffron offered. “I hope you’re comfortable here.”
Kevin looked around the table. At Gryphon. Saffron. And… Wyatt, who finally seemed to have come back from wherever he went, eyes sparkling in the way only his could. “I guess I am.” A smile tugged at the corners of Kevin’s mouth. He nodded. “I know I am.”
After lunch, Kevin insisted that he take at least an hour shift on the plow. He liked the work. In New York he didn’t even have to shovel the sidewalk, of course. Keeping his condo clean, and his workouts at Club Fitness, were about the only physical exertion in his life.
The air was crisp but not terribly cold. It gave him a little alone time, and Wyatt too. Except for the muffled roar of the jenny that was providing Gryphon and Saffron with power, and the little Bobcat, there was no other noise at all. How many hundreds of hours had he used a snowplow like this to clear his parents’ driveway? Most kids thought it was the worst chore in the world, but it got him away from the yelling. The silence had become his only true friend. Like in that song he loved so much.
When they stop fighting to turn out the lights
I pretend I’m already sleeping
After the violence alone in the silence
Just me and the secret I’m keeping
But then…
But then Kevin couldn’t stop thinking about Wyatt. What was the little bear doing? What was he up to? He couldn’t blast his music—not if he wanted his iPod to last.
Kevin finished the parking lot by the main hall and dining room. Gryphon had been focusing on the huge hill that went down to the main gate, and that was a good thing. The hill was mostly gravel and it was steep, and Kevin had no experience with anything like that. His grandparents’ little farm (where he’d spent Christmas breaks when he was a boy, and the only reason he’d had any kind of traditional holiday) had been as flat as Kansas could be. He would leave the hill to more practiced hands.
And he wanted to see Wyat
t.
He wanted to talk to Wyatt.
He wanted to see if he could get him to smile again because that made his pulse quicken (as well as a few other things, dammit!).
They could play Sorry! That was a fun game. Play some music. They both had their iPods after all, and he had a charger, and he was sure that Gryphon and Saffron would be happy to let them charge their devices. He could play Wyatt some of his favorite songs. He wouldn’t blast them like Wyatt’s boom box, but it would give them something to listen to and help calm his nerves. Wyatt gave him goose bumps. The good kind. And music would keep Kevin from blurting out something stupid. Fears of such occurrences were another reason he preferred to keep his talking to a minimum. But that wouldn’t really work today, would it? With only the two of them? He couldn’t just sit in the background and let others do the talking.
But then he got an idea. It would take some time, but it was something he wanted to at least start.
So he went to Saffron—Gryphon was halfway down the hill in the Bobcat—and asked if he could use the snowblower. Gryphon had made a path only a few feet north of “their” cabin and stopped. It would have to go a good bit farther. Of course she said yes. She even insisted on topping it off with fuel, despite his objections.
“I can do it.”
“Posh,” she’d said, and the deed was done before he could say much else.
So he took the blower to where Gryphon had stopped and started it up and began clearing the snow past North Four. He was worried that Wyatt might stick his head out the door and ask what he was doing, and he didn’t want him to do that. Not yet.
He did grow more and more conscious of how long he was leaving Wyatt all by himself, though. And while he knew Wyatt had come here to be alone, mightn’t he wonder what was taking Kevin so long? Or was he happy to have this time alone?
Kevin hoped not.
Because he was growing more and more anxious to be back with his little bear and…
Your little bear?
He is hardly your little bear.
Oh shut the fuck up!