Hidden Heart

by Amy Lane

  And boy, did he ever seem obsessed with his dog.

  “I’m a cat person myself,” he said, thinking about poor Stupid. Thelma had been so upset. Theo hated to think of the cat alone and wet and scared, but the fact was, Stupid was not, actually, stupid. He was smart—a hunter, loyal, and clever. He’d once brought down a jackrabbit and brought it into the kitchen, then sat patiently as Thelma had skinned it and cooked it. She told Spencer that the cat had sat across from her at the dinner table and ate from his plate with all the manners of a duke, and when she’d been done, she’d left the bones outside for other predators, and he hadn’t touched one.

  “You got any cats?” Spencer asked, and since Theo had to move on to dress his leg next, Theo figured they could stick to pets and let Spencer distract himself.

  “Not since my mom passed,” he said, jerking on the fabric of the flight suit.

  Spencer gave a grunt and pulled something from his belt, unfolding it.

  “Wow, mister,” Theo said, feeling hopelessly naïve. “That is a big knife.”

  Spencer’s laugh was rusty but still a laugh. “Only big boys can handle a knife like that,” he said gravely. “Are you a big boy?”

  Theo winked. “I can grow into a knife like this,” he said, taking the bowie blade from him. Grimly, he went to work on the leg of the flight suit, more tolerant of Spencer’s bulldookie now that he’d seen the extent of his injuries. Theo had worked with kids at the rec center for years—even as a teenager himself. He was starting to recognize the symptoms of someone running their mouth off to mask their pain.

  He ripped at the fabric of the flight suit, the knife helpful but not eliminating the stress entirely. When he saw what lay exposed beneath, he refrained from letting out a low whistle.

  “Oh shit,” Spencer muttered, staring at his face. “That’s bad.”

  “I don’t think it’s broken,” Theo said, biting his lip. But that was a small mercy. It looked like Spencer had gotten stuck on something and had yanked his foot free—at the expense of the flight suit and the skin and the muscle beneath. Theo had never seen a person’s naked bone before, and he had to close his eyes for a moment to get himself under control.

  “Great,” Spencer said, breaking into his thoughts. “I’ll take it. Not broken will work. Just, you know, fix it up, and I can stand.”

  Theo glared at him. “No, seriously—”

  “Yes, seriously! Look, I’m not sure if the water’s going to stop rising before we get tangled with the branches of this tree, and even if it does, the current is going to be fierce. We’re going to need to steer, and that means I need to be standing up at the least. C’mon, Junior Woodchuck, I know you can do this because you brought the stuff! Patch me up and let me help!”

  Theo shook his head and slipped on the new gloves as Spencer asked, matter-of-factly, as though he wasn’t about to deal with massive quantities of pain, “Hey, talk about your mom’s cat some more, okay?”

  Wonderful. But, well, Theo’s pain was two years old, and it wasn’t bleeding all over the deck of a makeshift raft. “Yeah, well, my mom had a cat named Annie when I was a kid. We got her when I was in second grade, maybe. Delicate little thing—one of those eight-pound wonders, you know? Calico? Moved like she was on greased rails?”

  “Those are good cats,” Spencer mumbled. “I like those cats.”

  “Yeah, well, Annie was a trouper. When my mom got sick, she used to sleep on Mom’s chest every night. I was worried at first. Mom had lung cancer, and it seemed ill-advised, but Mom insisted it was the only time she could sleep. All that purring, she used to joke. Knocked the shit in her lungs loose and put her right out. So Annie was there, right up to the end. And the thing was, Annie was older—fifteen or so—but she wasn’t ancient. She was a little thin, a little long in the tooth, but sort of like Thelma. Tough. She’d spent her life hunting lizards and voles. I thought me and Annie would have another five years together after Mom passed.” As he spoke, he was rinsing out the skin and flesh that had been, well, rumpled for lack of a better word, and then pulling it up to cover the bone. The story hurt, but it was a sort of faded hurt. He’d told it to all of his mother’s friends and the people in town and even his aunt Cassie who lived in Vermont. But this telling now, to this man who was sucking air in through his teeth to keep from screaming, seemed to be the most important version of the story.

  “It wasn’t to be?” Spencer asked, when Theo spent a moment too long in the telling.

  “No,” Theo said, surprised that he’d been paying attention. “No. But it was okay. I was next to Mom’s bed when she passed, and Annie was on her chest, and about the time the machine told me and the attendant Mom had left us, I noticed that Annie had stopped purring. She and Mom, I guess. Two kindred souls, you know?”

  “Aw, man.” Spencer took a deep breath, in through the nose and out through the mouth, and when Theo checked, he saw that the man’s dark gray eyes were red-rimmed and shiny.

  “Sorry. Did I pull too hard?” Oh hell! Theo wasn’t a doctor. He was barely an EMT. He’d taken the training to help with things like sprains on the softball field and kids with the flu.

  “No.” Spencer gave him a crooked little smile, and even in his drawn and pale face, it made Theo’s heart twinge. God, this flyboy was pretty. “It was a good story, that’s all.” Spencer leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Gives me hope. Me and Colonel, we can go out together.”

  “Wait a minute,” Theo muttered, doing math while he was cleaning what he hoped were the last of the splinters out of Spencer’s flesh. “That don’t make no sense. My mom was barely fifty when she passed, and that’s still too damned young! What’re you? Thirty?”

  “Thirty-three,” Spencer muttered. “Why?”

  “Because you’re planning to go out in, what? Ten years? That’s stupid!”

  “I said I planned to go out with my dog,” Spencer replied stubbornly, and Theo was glad he sounded surly now, because he was going to have to do some jerking on parts of this man’s body that were not designed to be messed with. Maybe the adrenaline would help.

  “Well, that’s still stupid! You’ll have a good forty years left. That’s not one dog, that’s at least five!”

  “You can’t replace Colonel!” Spencer argued. “How often do you find a German shepherd mix that thinks you smell like cocaine!”

  “Well, maybe you’ll find a Yorkie that thinks you smell like bacon,” Theo shot back. “Did you ever think of that? Here’s a Yorkie, looking for his perfect human, and his perfect human isn’t there because he jumped out of a helicopter with his dying German shepherd. You know what that is? That’s plain selfish!” Oh, ducking shells, he was going to have to reposition that flap of skin and meat next. Okay, one, two—

  “Self—”

  Theo pulled.

  “—ish! Holy fucking shitballs, Woodchuck, the motherfucking hell!”

  “Selfish!” Theo argued back, poking and prodding and using Spencer’s absolute indignation and adrenaline to give them both strength. “You would deprive a Yorkie of its soulmate—”

  “I may not even like little dogs!” Spencer snapped, but Theo had his doubts.

  “Oh, that’s a lie. Anybody who would plan to be buried with his German shepherd like an Egyptian pharaoh doesn’t discriminate dog breeds. You’d love that Yorkie or that Chihuahua or that Shih-Tzu or that Chocolate Lab like it was your long-lost son!”

  “Augh!” Spencer cried out, right as Theo tucked the whole thing back where it might belong.

  Theo sat back on his heels and looked at Spencer’s bone-white face, a few tiny freckles standing out on his cheekbones that might ordinarily have been missed. Spencer’s eyes were squeezed shut, and for a moment, the only sound was their breathing and the rattle of the heavy rain on the branches above.

  “That the worst of it?” Spencer asked in a small voice.

  “Yeah,” Theo acknowledged. “I’m gonna unwrap the gauze now and dress it. You gonna make it?�
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  “Sure. Just… you know. Don’t want a damned Yorkie. Still think going out with Colonel is a better idea.”

  “And I think you’re stupid, but I figure we’ve got a few hours until we’re rescued, and I can change your mind.”

  “Can’t change my mind if you don’t got an animal of your own,” Spencer taunted. He’d pushed up a little, keeping his weight on his elbows, and was turning his face to the sky, his eyes still closed.

  “I’ll change mine if you change yours,” Theo said, although that made no sense. “Except you have to change sooner.” He breathed out and picked the gauze up. “Because I’m not going through all this for you to throw my work away in the lifespan of a dog, even if he’s only a little stupid.”

  He started wrapping the gauze and was surprised to hear Spencer’s rusty chuckle.

  “How do you know he’s only a little stupid?”

  “Well, like you said, he’s not one-hundred-and-ten percent, because if he was, he’d know you weren’t cocaine. But if you fell out of the helicopter and he didn’t follow you, there must be something going on up there.”

  The chuckle intensified. “Aren’t you clever. Although, you might want to give your Junior Woodchucks some credit. I think they were holding on to him when I fell out.”

  “Why were they holding him?” Theo asked. “Although they must have loved that. Errol especially—he and his dad have like six Labrador retrievers.”

  “I dunno,” Spencer breathed in and out carefully while Theo worked. “I guess I figured they were kids. They were freaked-out. Colonel chills me out, so he might do the same for them.” He let out a long, shaky breath as Theo finished and wrapped the tape tight. “Boneheaded move, probably,” he breathed.

  “Well, was possibly not so bad until you fell out of the copter,” Theo said, giving him a brief smile. “How’d that happen, again?”

  “My flight suit gave.” He sighed, not looking at his leg but obviously thinking about it. “It was probably getting thin and worn—bad move, that. Not taking care of my equipment. Elsie’s gonna chew my hide.”

  Theo double-checked his work and went to strip off his gloves, hiding a tiny ping of disappointment. “Elsie? Your wife?”

  Spencer’s snort gave him a little hope when there was probably none to be had.

  “God no. My flight partner. We went through basic training together, our stint in the Air Force. We got out and have stuck like glue ever since.”

  “Sounds like marriage to me,” Theo said, gathering the used supplies into the med waste bag and the tubes of antibiotic and bottle of hydrogen peroxide into their container.

  “Her boyfriend might object to that,” he said. With a groan he pushed himself up so he was sitting. “You got some Advil in your ice chest there, Woodchuck? A little bit of painkiller and I think I might not be dead weight.”

  Theo tucked everything into the ice chest, including the medical waste bag. “You sure you don’t need to rest?” he asked, and Spencer looked up and shook his head.

  “You and me got better things to do,” he said, and his jaw was so tight he was probably forcing his teeth not to chatter. “We’re getting to the part where the tree limbs are going to be a problem, and I think we should cut one or two of the long ones off so we can steer.”

  And with that, he shoved himself to his feet, clinging to the guardrail for dear life.

  Up a Lazy River

  SPENCER took the ibuprofen gratefully, washing it down with a bottle of Gatorade Theo kept in his magic ice chest. Spencer was hoping it would help with the pain—and the spots that had danced in front of his eyes as he’d stood up—but even more, he was hoping it would help with the fever he could already feel raging under his skin. Theo had done his best with the hydrogen peroxide and the ointment, but he was dressing a wet wound in the rain—he didn’t really have a chance.

  He grimaced as he set aside the empty bottle, knowing the ibuprofen was going to burn a hole in his stomach until he ate something, and his eyes caught on the sodden cardboard boxes, one of them marked as granola bars.

  “Hey, Theo,” he said, gratitude singing like the hallelujah chorus in his veins. “Those wouldn’t be real granola bars, would they?”

  Theo had been gathering a saw and a hatchet from a little wooden compartment built into the porch, and Spencer wondered whether that was due to resourcefulness or stunning good luck.

  “The real kind,” Theo said. “But good reminder. I’m going to put these and the MREs in here with the tools. Don’t know how long those boxes will last.”

  Spencer took a step away from the guardrail to help him, and Theo waved him away. He set the tools down carefully in front of the box to keep them from being washed off the deck, and set the cardboard boxes with the supplies in the wooden box.

  When Theo ventured his way across the creaky raft, he had two granola bars in one hand and the tools in the other.

  “Here’s to lunch,” he said. “If we can get this thing sailing on a smooth path for a while, we can treat ourselves to turkey stew in a foil pouch.”

  Spencer laughed a little as he took one of the bars from one hand and the hatchet from the other. He rested the axe, head down, against his foot and balanced it there with his arm while he used his teeth to rip off the wrapper from the food. “I’ll take it,” he said. “One of my bosses got stranded on a mountain in the snow once. He and two guys lived for a week on six packets of broth and a couple of protein bars. This is like room service right here.”

  “Wait!” Theo said, doing his own balancing act to eat his own lunch. “I heard of that.” He took a bite of the granola bar, and his brown eyes seemed to dance up at Spencer, full of excitement and hero worship. “That was the snowboarder, right? Tevyn Moore? The guy’s a hero in these parts. A lot of people here work at the ski lodges in the winter—they love that guy. They even love his husband!”

  Spencer chuckled. Tevyn and Mallory were still tight with Glen Echo and Damien Ward. Damien had been the pilot who liked to brag about making it down the mountain strapped to the back of an airplane wing. Only those close to Glen and Damien, though, knew how much that helicopter crash and Damien’s recovery had cost their little family. Spencer didn’t know Theo that well. Telling the truth felt too personal, so he’d stick to Glen and Damien’s hero-swagger bullshit because it was fun, and it looked like Theo was a fan.

  “Yeah. They’re still tight with my bosses. They give the company lots of contract work.”

  But Theo’s eyes narrowed. “Wasn’t the pilot like, seriously injured, though? I remember that. People going bananas over Tevyn coming down the mountain practically married to a man they’d never heard of, but they seemed more worried about the pilot than the press. Is that your boss?”

  Spencer sighed. “Yeah. It took Damie a while to recover. I got hired because he was still not one hundred percent, and then Glen got injured too. It was funny. I hit on them both, because I felt like being an asshole, and then Damien was like, ‘No! That will get you fired!’ and I realized that these really were people I wanted to work for.”

  Theo frowned. “Why’d you feel like being an asshole?” he asked.

  Spencer gave him a sideways look. “You’re not going to question that I hit on my male bosses?”

  “You’re not going to question that my last roommates were my mother and her cat?”

  Spencer widened his eyes and then blinked rain out of them. “Oh,” he said. Honestly, this had not occurred to him. “Well, that’s what I get for making assumptions. I felt like being an asshole because Elsie and I had just walked off our fourth job in a month. One job hated me ’cause I was gay. Another hated her because she was a woman. One job expected to hit on her, and another job thought being Black was some sort of a disease. I was so pissed off by the time Damien interviewed me, I expected him to be like every other asshole we’d worked for, so I came at him first.”

  Theo’s smile held a certain sweetness. “Didn’t work out that way?”

/>   Spencer’s snort took Spencer by surprise. “God, no. Damien and Glen are as gay as I am—but both in love with other people,” he said. “So that was good. Couldn’t shock ’em with the gay, couldn’t fuck up the relationship by hooking up. Best job I’ve ever had.”

  “How long have you worked there?” Theo asked, and he sounded like he really cared.

  “Going on three years. Have done some freaky shit and some fun shit and some boring shit, but Elsie loves it as much as I do, so it’s all good.” He sighed, pocketed his trash and hefted his small blade. The first of the branches was getting close enough overhead for him to take some swings that might not maim him. “We ready to go?”

  “One more thing,” Theo said. “My entire town has known I was gay since I was twelve years old, and I never said a word. How did you not know?”

  Spencer looked him over. “I don’t know. Guess I figured you were destined for a picket fence and a couple of kids. Heteronormative thinking, I guess. Don’t worry, Junior Woodchuck. You can still have all that.”

  “Maybe I don’t want that,” Theo said. “Maybe I want adventure—wait, what are you doing?”

  Spencer paused in the act of climbing the porch railing. “Uhm… lopping off a couple of long branches for you to strip with the saw?”

  “You’re going to do that from the fence rail? Are you insane? Do you even know what your leg looks like right now?”

  Spencer stared at him. “No, because I had the good sense to not look. Yes, it hurts. And yes, I’ve got a limited time of usefulness before you’re back in charge. So let me do my thing and you might not have to pitch me overboard as ballast.”

  “Oh my God, you are obsessed with being useful!” Theo snapped, and Spencer used that indignation to spur him up. He wasn’t kidding—his leg ached like a motherfucker, and he had some adrenaline and some Gatorade, and he was going to run with that until he couldn’t anymore.

  “Lucky you,” he panted. Good. He was about shoulder level with the branch he had an eye on, and it was perfect. Around ten feet of usable length and three inches or so in diameter. He looked down, scoped out his surroundings, and hefted the hatchet. “Make sure we don’t get hit or something, okay?”