The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,108
me. I thought he needed me.”
The light changed. They accelerated again. Jem was having trouble keeping his head up, so he nuzzled against the seat, which smelled like his hair product. “Do you need that? Need him to need you?”
Tean answered as though he hadn’t heard. “And he’s Mormon, or he was, and Mormons are supposed to talk about their feelings. They’re always talking about their feelings. So he calls, and I have to hear about his feelings. And now I find out he’s been talking and talking and talking and he hasn’t told me shit. Not anything that matters, anyway. He didn’t tell me he’d moved out until he had to. He didn’t tell me he’d come out until he had to. He looks sick and tired, and why the fuck can’t he just talk to me?”
It might have been a mile. Maybe two. Jem’s eyes closed, dark washed in, and after a while he managed to open them again. Tean was staring fixedly out the windshield as he drove.
“Poor Ammon,” Jem said; he sounded drunk even to himself. “It’s never his fault, is it?”
Tean shook his head, his shoulders drawn up tight.
When they got home, Scipio was ecstatic, jumping and licking and once whipping himself in the head with his own tail. This sent him spinning in a circle, trying to bite the tail, probably to teach it a lesson. It all would have bothered Jem another day, sent him bursting into panic, if only for a moment. Today, though, he was buried so deep that it didn’t matter. He stumbled to the couch, kicking off his sneakers.
“No,” Tean said, catching his arm and steering him down the hall. “Bed. And take off your clothes.”
“Sexy times.”
“No. Real sleep. Not whatever you’ve been doing.”
“I like the couch.”
“Great.”
“It’s comfortable.”
“RC Willey’s will be ecstatic to hear that.”
“Maybe I should—”
Tean gave him a half-hearted shove into the bedroom—the doc really wasn’t any good at being a bully—and said, “Pants. Now.”
After undoing the waistband, Jem did a little shimmy, and the denim slid down to his ankles.
“Are you sure about sexy times?”
“I’m sure. If I want ‘sexy times,’” he made the words sound like the bubonic plague, “with a heavily tranqued blond, I’m sure I can find someone on Prowler.”
“I’m not tranqued.”
Tean shook his head and pointed to the bed. Jem climbed under the sheets, still wearing his purple grandma shirt—THE BIGGER THE HAT, THE BETTER IT GETS. He patted the mattress next to him.
“What are you on?” Tean said.
“Come over here and I’ll whisper it in your ear.”
“If you die in my bed, I’m going to go crazy. I’ll probably become one of those people who are homeless in San Diego, and I’ll pass out from sunstroke in La Jolla and get eaten by a seal, and then it’ll poop me out, and whatever’s left of me will get processed by mollusks, and I’ll end up being a bunch of low-luster, misshapen pearls that they’ll put in a cheap silver setting and sell out of a Fred Meyer’s jewelry display case.”
“Because I died in your bed.”
“Exactly.”
“I thought pearls came from oysters.”
“An oyster is a mollusk. Now go to sleep.”
“I won’t die in your bed. Because I don’t want you to be a Fred Meyer’s discount pearl jockstrap or whatever you were saying.”
Tean said something else, but the bed was just as comfortable as Jem remembered, and the pillow smelled like Tean’s hair, and all the chemicals he’d piled on top of his brain forced him down, down, down, and he disappeared for a while.
He woke, he ate a Big Mac and fries that Tean had kept warm in the oven, and then he slept again. When he woke the next time, the light was different. Morning. And not even early morning. His head was relatively clear, although he was dehydrated and all the shit he’d tried to bury was climbing up to the front of his brain again. The air that came through the open window smelled clean, like spring, and cool. But Jem wasn’t cold; a warm body was pressed against him. Then he heard Tean in the other room, his voice pitched low and angry. Jem glanced over at Scipio, who was taking up most of the bed and watching him through half-closed eyes.
“I guess I should deal with that,” Jem croaked.
Scipio responded by stretching out all four legs as far as he could and, in the process, shoving Jem out of the bed.