Good Bones (2 page)

“That and other reasons,” Rick said enigmatically. “Seven o’clock, Dyldo.”

Before Dylan had a chance to mumble a reply, his brother had hung up.

There wasn’t much point in driving all the way across town and then coming back, so Dylan stayed at the office, working on those plans. He waved at Matty when she left, refilled his mug from the coffeemaker in the corner, and by 6:40 he’d actually made some headway on the house.

The restaurant was crowded and noisy, but Rick had arrived early and snagged them a table, one of the tall ones with high seats. As soon as Dylan entered, Rick waved him over. Rick already had a plate of hummus and a pint of beer in front of him. “Organic IPA,” he said as Dylan took his chair. “Want one?”

Dylan shook his head, then scooped some hummus onto a little pita triangle. With his mouth full he replied, “Stout. And meat. Lots of meat.”

Rick’s bushy eyebrows drew together in a frown. “I forgot. It’s that time of the month again, isn’t it?”

“Last night. I’m good now.”

“You don’t look so good, Dyldo.”

“Fuck you.”

The waitress appeared at that moment. She was tall and lean and muscular with stars tattooed on her bicep. “What can I get you?” she asked. He ordered his drink and a burger as rare as they could get it, while Rick made a face and asked for a chicken wrap and another IPA.

“Two beers?” said Dylan with a smirk. “Really living it up tonight, huh?”

“Shut up. When’s the last time you went out with someone you weren’t related to?”

“Fuck you,” Dylan repeated.

Rick smiled and scooped hummus onto a pita. “I didn’t actually invite you here to nag about your social life, though.”

“Then why?”

A shrug. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Wanted to know how it’s going.”

“’M all right. Work’s busy. How about you and Kay?”

“Still trying on the baby thing.” He took a long swallow of his beer. “She’s got all these little charts. Man, it takes all the romance out of things when you gotta worry about ovulation cycles and the right position and all that shit.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Dylan replied, not without sympathy. He knew how badly Rick wanted a kid.

“Yeah, well, if it doesn’t work this month her doc says I gotta get tested. You know, jack off into a cup, see if the little swimmers know what the fuck they’re doing.”

“That sounds fun.”

“Remember back in high school? When me and Jessica had that scare?” He shook his head slowly. “Who knew that fifteen years later I’d be rooting for the other side?”

The waitress appeared with Dylan’s stout and Rick’s refill. Dylan took a grateful sip.

“You had another close one, didn’t you?”

Dylan didn’t realize he’d closed his eyes until Rick asked the question, and then Dylan looked at him sharply. “I’m fine.”

“No you’re not.”

“Look, Ricky….” That childhood name went way back, all the way to when Rick was Dylan’s god: the Big Kid who rode a bike without training wheels and wore a Spider-Man backpack to school and didn’t need a safety railing to keep him from tumbling out of bed at night. “It’s under control, really. Yesterday was a fluke. The meeting went late, and the bridge was up and—”

“How many flukes, Dyl? In the last six months, how many times have you just barely made it?”

Dylan didn’t answer. He looked away, over at the table next to them where a group of college students was laughing over a text message on someone’s phone. And Rick didn’t push it, so the brothers sat there drinking silently until the waitress came by with their dinners. Dylan’s burger was good, and he was hungrier than he’d realized. Before he knew it, his plate was empty except for a piece of wilted lettuce. He looked up at Rick, who was still toying with a strip of tortilla.

“I don’t know what you want me to do about it,” Dylan said quietly. “It’s not like I can hire a babysitter to make sure I’m locked up safely. Or… or a goddamn petsitter.”

“Move in with us. We can rig something in the basement.”

“Yeah? Are you really willing to trust me around Kay?”

“Kay knows the risks. She’s willing.”

Despite his despair, Dylan felt a touch of warmth for his sister-in-law. Poor thing didn’t have a clue what she was marrying into a couple of years ago, but she’d loyally stuck around. Too loyal, maybe, because it didn’t sound like she and Rick had thought through all the consequences. Dylan sighed. “And what happens when that baby finally appears?”

Rick winced a little and looked down at his plate. “That’s not gonna be for a while yet.”

“I know. But I’m not going to find a miraculous cure in the meantime.”

“But you can’t just go on like this, Dyl. Sooner or later you’re gonna be just a little too late, and then….” He didn’t finish his sentence, and he didn’t have to. Dylan knew what his brother was thinking:
And then it’s going to be like the first time
.

Dylan couldn’t argue because he knew Rick was right. In fact, he knew if he ever screwed up again, it was going to be a hell of a lot worse than the first time, because now Dylan was stronger. Hungrier. He dropped his head into the palms of his hands and rubbed at his brows. “Maybe I should move to the wilderness. Alaska or something. Somewhere… far.”

“You can’t live by yourself.”

“Well I can’t fucking live with anyone else!” Dylan replied, louder than he’d intended. People nearby turned to stare for a moment before looking away again. They all had normal problems, like cheating boyfriends or crappy bosses or cars that kept breaking down.

Rick, bless his stubborn hide, didn’t take offense. He knew that Dylan tended to react angrily when he was actually scared. “How would you even survive?” he asked reasonably. “I mean, I guess once a month you could, um, hunt. But what about the other twenty-seven days? Gonna take to designing igloos? I bet you’d make really cool ones. Green materials and energy efficient.”

Dylan snorted a small laugh and even managed a smile when the waitress came to take their empty plates. He’d worked his way through school as a barista, and he knew how shitty it was when customers took out their hard days on their servers. When she went away, he said, “Maybe I could telecommute from the North Pole.”

The grin left Rick’s face; he was suddenly all serious. “Could you really do that? Telecommute, I mean?”

“Sort of. I could probably pull off going into the office, like, twice a week. For meetings and stuff. But I don’t really see myself hopping on a plane from the Great White North twice a week.”

“You don’t have to!” Rick was bouncing up and down a little with excitement, so much like his younger self that Dylan had to smile. “There’s plenty of boonies around here, Dyl. Get yourself a cabin in the Coast Range or something—that drive wouldn’t be so bad a couple of times a week. Could you time it so you’d be out in the woods every twenty-eighth day?”

Dylan swallowed the last of his stout as he considered his brother’s idea. He’d never been a back-to-nature type—they’d lived in the ’burbs when he was a kid, and he lived there now, albeit in a somewhat more stylish and expensive incarnation. He’d always thought it might be kind of cool to live right downtown, but that was… before. He spent a few minutes imagining himself loping through ferns and leaping over downed tree trunks, snuffling at the feast of scents, maybe finding a flat spot where he could finally run full out, his muscles bunching and flexing as he flew over the ground. And then leaping, feeling his powerful jaws clamp down as hot blood filled his mouth—

He looked up at his brother guiltily, feeling absurdly like he’d been thinking about sex. “That’s an interesting idea, Dickhead.”

Rick grinned hugely. “I guess big brother’s still got it, Dyldo.”

The waitress came by with their bill, and Rick pointed her in Dylan’s direction. “My little brother’s got it.”

Dylan pulled out his wallet good-naturedly. “Is that all this was? A way to scrounge a free meal?”

“You owe me.”

As Dylan counted out the cash, Rick slid off his stool and stretched a little. “I’m gonna head home, see if the little woman needs some help with her mustaches.”

D
YLAN
was always restless for a night or two after he changed, so knowing he wouldn’t sleep anyway, he decided he might as well get some work done. On the way home from Hopworks he did a drive-through for a Venti latte with a quad shot of espresso. It was still hot enough to burn his tongue when he walked into his house. He set the coffee and laptop on the kitchen table and went into the bedroom to undress.

The house was as neat as always. The reinforced door to the spare bedroom was, as usual, tightly closed so the shredded clothes and new claw marks on the walls were safely hidden. He’d need to go in and clean in a day or two. In his bedroom, everything was in place. He always made sure of that on the day before he changed, as if having a couple of throw pillows on the bed and the dresser thoroughly dusted would help remind him that he was human and civilized. He liked to think that his bedroom—and most of the rest of the house, for that matter—looked like a magazine spread.
Dwell
, maybe, or
Wallpaper
. But tonight it suddenly struck him that what his rooms actually resembled was a boutique hotel: attractive and sort of hip, but devoid of life.

With a touch of defiance, he kicked his shoes randomly across the bedroom floor and left his jeans and shirts in a heap near the door. It didn’t help, though. Now it just looked like a slightly messy hotel room.

He tended to run hot this time of the month and padded back into the kitchen wearing only his low-rise briefs. He sat down at the table and sipped his coffee while his MacBook booted up.

He tried to answer a few e-mails from work and tweak his kitchen plans for the Maywood Drive project, but he couldn’t focus. “Fine,” he muttered to himself. He’d surf a few real estate sites instead. Maybe Rick’s idea wasn’t such a bad one.

Somehow, however, he found himself typing
gay.com
instead.

The photos varied: men in various states of undress posed in front of mirrors; men looking rugged beside waterfalls or atop boulders; men in suits and ties; men in plaid shirts, grinning, with their arms around their pals; men close up and smiling; men in black and white, striking models’ poses. Men with muscles and men with pudge; bulky men in leather and fey boys with eyeliner; men with forests of dark fur on their chests and men whose skin was bare and oiled. Young men and old. Men who looked scary and men who looked like tax attorneys. Handsome men. Plain men.

These men listed kinks aplenty: BDSM and cross-dressing and role-playing and spandex and exhibitionism and watersports and threesomes and medical play. There were some kinks Dylan had never heard of and a few others he hoped he’d never hear of again. But with all this variety—a rainbow of gayness—not a single man mentioned the one thing that mattered the most to Dylan: not one of them said a word about having a thing for werewolves.

His chest tight, Dylan slammed the laptop closed without shutting it down, ignored his cooled latte, and wandered into the living room to see if
House Hunters
was on.

Chapter 2

“
Y
OU
’
RE
gonna love this one!”

The Realtor’s attempts at sounding positive and enthusiastic were becoming a little strained. Not surprising, considering that this was the tenth time they were driving way the hell into the middle of nowhere to view a property—the first nine tries had been complete failures. They had all been rural, but most had been nowhere near isolated enough for Dylan’s needs. They had looked at one place that had no neighbors for miles, but it turned out to be a falling-down shack halfway up the mountain, on a road that would be impassible part of the year, with no cell phone signal and no power supply other than a generator.

Dylan squirmed a little in his seat and grunted in reply. Matty had recommended Steve Nguyen, but it turned out that Steve usually specialized in high-rise condos and knew almost nothing about country living. Considering Steve’s bold attempts at flirting, Dylan suspected that Matty had something other than property acquisition in mind when she hooked them up. Dylan was going to have a little chat with her about how much he didn’t need a matchmaker.

But for now, he was stuck in a Honda Civic with Steve, a good hour from anything resembling civilization, with Steve looking at him nervously, as if he wasn’t sure whether to kiss Dylan or boot him out of the car. Dylan had turned slightly sullen after the seventh or eighth unproductive viewing.

Steve had already turned off the main highway onto a state road that twisted through farmland and trees, and now he turned onto gravel. “The county maintains this road, and the elevation is too low for snow,” he chirped. The Civic bumped along, sending up little sprays of mud.

“How big is the property?” Dylan asked.

“Almost thirty acres. Most of it’s too steep to grow anything, and there’s a pond covering part of it. It was once a Christmas tree farm, but I guess that’s all gone wild now.”

“Neighbors?”

“Just one. And the land backs up to state forest.”