What No One Else Can Hear (30 page)

He chuckled, but then started to kiss my neck, and run his hands down my back to grip my ass. All talk, or even thoughts, of puppies or ponies, or preteen empaths were gone.

“Drew.” I pulled him tighter into the hug.

He ran his hands under my T-shirt and up my chest. Once he pulled the shirt over my head and threw it on the bed, he started kissing my shoulders and my chest, pausing long enough to tease my nipples into hardened nubs, then kissed farther and farther down on my chest, my stomach.

“Drew, you’re driving me crazy.”

“That’s kind of the whole point, Jess.”

“I want to reciprocate.”

He was on his knees at this point, and looked up at me—leered at me actually. “Oh you’ll have time to do that later.”

He unbuckled my belt and slowly slid it out of the loops, then unbuttoned my jeans and toyed with my zipper using his teeth. I could tell he wasn’t having any luck with actually lowering my zipper, but he sure was having an effect on what was behind it.

“Well,” he purred, “someone likes that.”

I gripped his hair and groaned. He continued to breathe on my cock through my jeans as it became painfully full.

I endeavored to move his head out of the way so I could unzip my pants, but he slapped my hands. “I’m running this show.”

“Really?” I grinned down at him, then dropped to my knees. I still had my hands in his hair, so I pulled his mouth to mine. “Are you sure about that?”

I took control of the kiss and bent him backward until he lay on his back on the floor. Not something I could have done without him allowing it, but I was still going to pretend I was in charge.

“Who’s in charge now, lover boy?” I was fully stretched out on top of him.

Then he flipped me over until he was on top of me instead. “Me,” he chuckled, and brought his mouth down hard on mine. I ran my fingers through his hair and down the back of his neck. I continued caressing his back and brought my hands around his sides.

Then I tickled him viciously. When he pulled away, I sat up and used his momentum to get him flat on the floor again. Then I quickly sat astride him and leaned over and resumed the kiss.

When we broke for air, he chuckled. “Okay. You win. Come here.” He pulled me down close, then let me slip to the floor beside him. “Let’s both be in charge.”

We started caressing and undressing each other.

Between kisses, I purred into his ear. “You only want to compromise because I won.”

He chuckled and kissed me some more.

T
HE
NEXT
morning, Stevie could barely settle down enough to eat his meal. He kept pestering me about when the vet would call.

“Steve, it’s not even time for them to be there yet.”

“But the doctor said he’d call first thing in the morning, and it’s first thing.”

When I saw his scowl, I suppressed a grin at his usual literal take on the world. “He meant
his
first thing,” I explained. “As in the first thing he does once he gets to work.”

“But—”

“Stevie, eat. You want to be finished eating by the time he calls don’t you? So you can talk to him?”

“I can talk to him if I’m not finished, can’t I?”

“Not if you haven’t even started, no. I’m sure the poor dog wouldn’t want you to go hungry waiting for news from the vet.”

Finally I convinced him to eat his cereal. In what seemed like the first quiet moment I had had all morning, the phone rang. Stevie hopped up and pranced around as I answered it and put the call on speaker to talk to the doctor.

“Well, that little dog sure is a fighter.” The vet repeated what he’d said the previous night. “She made it through the night. We have her on pain medication and she’s mostly sleeping, but she’s doing fairly well.”

“Can I come over and see her?” Stevie asked.

The doctor hadn’t known he could hear, I guessed. I sometimes forgot to tell people when I put them on speaker. He chuckled.

“Well, not right now. She’s sleeping,” he answered. “But if she does well today, which I think she will, she can probably go home with you this evening if you want to pick her up.”

“But I want to take him home now.”

I fielded that one. “You heard the doctor, Steve. She’s sleeping right now. Would you want someone to wake you up, especially if you were sleeping because you were hurt, and take you someplace you’d never been before?”

“But this is his home.” Again with the wrong pronoun. I didn’t know what this kid had against female dogs.

I nodded. “Yes, we’ll bring her here and this will be her home, but she doesn’t know that yet.”

“Well, we need to rush right over there and tell him, then.”

“Steve, I said no. You’re going to school. I’ll pick you up afterward and we’ll go over then and get her if she’s doing well.”

“But Bear—”

“Stevie.” Sometimes when he got something in his mind, he just didn’t want to let it go. “That’s the deal if you want the dog to come home today. After school or not at all.” I hated getting that stern with him, but sometimes it was all that would work.

He slammed himself down in his chair and pouted. “Fine,” he griped. “But he’s going to be lonely all day.”

“He’ll be sleeping the whole time.” Great, now he had
me
calling the female dog “he.” “He won’t even know he’s alone.”

The doctor had waited patiently on the line through our whole dialogue, so I told him our plan, thanked him, and said good-bye.

Stevie still pouted, but he finished his cereal and I took him to school. He seemed to have forgotten the whole argument by the time he arrived. He took off toward the classroom as fast as he could, as if he thought moving quickly would make the day go faster.

S
TEVIE
WAS
literally bouncing on his toes when I returned at three o’clock sharp from paying bills and running errands. He didn’t stop talking about his plans for the dog all the way to the vet’s office. He showed me a picture he’d drawn of the pup, now sleek and well nourished, chewing a bone in the middle of Stevie’s bed at the center. That touched off a conversation of where the dog would live and whether or not she would be allowed on furniture. I stressed that she would definitely not live at the center—they had rules and regulations to back me up on that one—but thought I’d probably lose the argument of getting the dog to sleep in her own bed.

We finally got to the vet’s and he came out to talk to us.

“You know,” the doctor began, filling us in on a theory, “this dog looks like she’s lived alone for a good part of her life. I’d estimate she’s about five months old. She might have been dropped off, or maybe just wandered away, but aside from the injuries, her condition matches that of a stray dog. She was filthy and malnourished. We cut out the burrs, wiped off or brushed out as much of the mud and blood as we could, but we can’t really get her wet enough to get her totally clean yet. We’re giving her IV fluids to address dehydration, and I can suggest some dietary supplements that will help with the malnutrition. “

I was glad that the vet had addressed all that, but one thing weighed even more heavily on my mind.

“How’s her disposition?” I asked the doctor using a word I thought Stevie might not know, just in case he told me she was wild.

The doctor seemed to realize what I might be thinking since it was clear Stevie was going to keep her. “She’s quite docile at the moment. She’s pumped full of painkillers, for one thing, but the few times she’s been awake and alert, she seems to be really sweet. That’s not always the case when dogs have been on their own for a long time, but it seems to be true for her. Then again, as I said, she’s pumped full of painkillers right now.”

“Do you think she’s safe for Stevie to be around?” I had to just come out and ask. I didn’t want to take any chances.

The doctor hedged his bets. “I think so but I can’t guarantee it. She seems sweet right now, is all I can say for sure.”

I nodded. I would have to watch her for a while and come to my own conclusion.

He led us to an examination room just as the vet tech was bringing the dog out. She laid it on the examining table, and Stevie broke free from me and ran to the scruffy thing. He gently laid a hand on either side of her face, looked into her eyes, and said sternly, “Don’t you ever scare me like that anymore.” The dog, for her part, seemed to be quite contrite and reached up weakly to lick Stevie in the face, as he peered closely at her.

After another moment of what seemed to be silent communication between child and dog, Stevie looked at me and said, “Wolf and me are ready to go home, Bear.” As I stood dumbfounded, the boy continued, “He says he’s all better now.”

Aside from his obvious misuse of pronouns, I could see numerous problems with the appellation “Wolf.” This dog showed traits of just about every breed of dog in existence, except for anything
that might remotely resemble a wolf. Judging by her height at five months, I estimated her adult height would be about the size of a large cocker spaniel. She had small droopy ears, not at all like a cocker spaniel’s or a wolf’s. Her short bristly hair included about every color I’d ever seen on a dog, and a few shades of red I could have sworn just weren’t in a canine’s repertoire. All in all, she looked nothing like a wolf. I decided to express my concerns to Stevie.

“Stevie,” I said, finally finding my voice, “first of all, it’s a girl. And second, if any canine ever looked less like a wolf, I don’t know what it would be.” Stevie cocked his head and gave me a look that clearly said, “Deal with it, Bear.
His
name is
Wolf
.”

So I began thinking about where to take, and how to take care of, this mangy, gender-confused mutt who didn’t have a hope in hell of living up to its name. I could see in Stevie’s eyes that regardless of what
I
thought, we had just found ourselves a new dog.

L
IFE
WAS
good. Stevie was doing well, work was fine, and Drew and I were stronger than ever. I should have known it wouldn’t last.

Watching TV with Drew in my apartment several days later, we saw a news bulletin announcing that Robert Marlow, the man running against Liston for governor, was bowing out of the race. He cited personal reasons but wouldn’t go into detail.

Drew and I looked at each other in shock.

“Liston’s running unopposed,” I all but whispered.

“Maybe it won’t have any effect on anything.” Drew said just as quietly, but we were both too intelligent and too leery of Liston to believe that.

The next morning’s mail brought something utterly unexpected: a certified letter from Mr. Liston’s lawyer revoking my limited power of attorney. There was also a typed letter from William himself, unsigned, of course, so we would never be able to prove it was from him.

Sitting in the break room on Hall 3-B, I opened the letter with a good bit of apprehension. I handled it by the corners only, just in case we might be able to obtain prints off it later—but I highly doubted we would.

I must admit, of all of the things I expected from that man, the information revealed in this letter threw me.

Mr. McKinnon,

I no longer feel the need to honor our arrangement giving you power of attorney, nor the one demanding increased monthly payments to the center, since both of those—indeed all our agreements—were based on the fact that you possessed certain items that would be damaging to my political career should they come into the public eye. Since you no longer have access to those items, I am terminating our agreement.

I harbor no animosity toward you personally—well, maybe just a little—but it really isn’t worth the trouble that would be generated by having you fired and kept away from Stevie again. Besides which, I just don’t care—as long as you realize you have no more power over me. You are no longer calling the shots. Your “aces in the hole” have gone up in smoke—literally.

As to custody, I really would never be able to explain that satisfactorily to my constituents, so I don’t see the need to honor that part of the deal either. Please don’t attempt to manipulate me again. The better man has won in this situation, and always will. Don’t cross me again.

Dottie grabbed the letter from me, still touching as little of it as possible. She read a little to herself. Then, realizing everyone would want to know what it said, she read the whole thing out loud. When she was finished, every adult in the room uttered, at some volume, variations on the same theme.

“
That son of a bitch
,” Drew said, since no children were in the break room. “He started the fire.”

M
R
. L
ISTON
was a man used to getting his own way, so it came as a great surprise to him when I bulldozed past his secretary and burst through his office door. I slammed a file folder full of papers down on his desk, and he could only sit behind it, staring incredulously.

“You son of a bitch,” I started, but was far from finished. “Are
these
the items you were trying to destroy? Do you really think we’d keep the originals in a place so easily accessible? And don’t bother looking. These aren’t the originals either. I may not be as experienced at this cloak-and-dagger stuff as you are, but I am not stupid. Neither is Kyle or Sara. We had numerous copies made of all of this stuff and hid them in any number of places. The originals are secreted away where you will never be able to get to them.”

Liston started to respond, but I wasn’t finished talking yet. “You
asshole
. You would really risk the lives of all those kids just to destroy our evidence? When given this information, the police will at least seriously look at you as a suspect on 127 counts of attempted murder.”

William’s voice was quiet and confident. “Oh, please, Mr. McKinnon. Let’s dispense with the theatrics, shall we? The kids were never in any real danger and the fire was certainly not attempted murder. There are no residential halls directly above the administrative offices, and if the sprinklers worked as they were supposed to, the fire would only have burnt some papers. Even as it was, there was no danger to the children.”