Page 5 of A Quiet Man

Tomas smiled. "Well, I thought I'd take my keys with me. Besides, do you really want to steal the car from a cop — one who's trying to help you, by the way?"

The kid's gaze dropped, and he played with his piercing. "No."

Tomas waited.

The boy finally said, "I guess you should go first. Make sure he's got room." He sounded so nervous now, as if he'd let himself hope, and that hurt more than anything.

"I'm sure he will. Like you said, it's practically a mansion. Lotta foster kids, lotta bedrooms."

Tomas got out as casually as he could and started up the long drive. He tried to hurry without looking like he was hurrying. How long before the kid freaked out? This wasn't a compulsory thing; he could run away, and Tomas couldn't stop him — wouldn't try.

He pulled his phone from his pocket and texted jerkily as he walked:Riley come to door.

His breath made clouds. The door opened as he got to the porch, and Riley stood outlined by the brightness inside, a huge bulk of a man, a massive wolf shifter with a big, tender heart.

"Tommy?" he said, sounding tentative and scared.

"There's a homeless kid in my car. He was hanging around the docks and getting into trouble. Nowhere to sleep tonight. I said you'd take him in tonight. Okay?"

"Of course." Riley headed out, gave him a quick embrace, and started towards the car. Then he stopped, awkward. "Will I scare him? Because I'm so big?"

Tomas hesitated. He was winging this, as nervous as Riley that he was doing it wrong. "I don't know. I'll go first, okay?"

Riley hung back, itching to go and help a kid in need, but most of all concerned not to cause any fright. He was such a good guy, good with kids and sensitive to their needs in ways many adults forgot to be.

"Hey, kid?" Tomas remembered he hadn't even asked the boy's name. Even that had felt like too much, like the boy might bolt. Tomas hated being pushy. He edged away from crossing people's boundaries. It was a wonder he'd even dared grab the kid's sleeve. But it had worked. Now he leaned down to look in the car, standing at the driver's side, holding the door open. "Riley says cool, you can stay. He's a pretty big guy, okay? So, don't freak out. He looks like a professional wrestler, but he isn't."

The boy gave a nervous laugh that was close to not being a laugh at all. "Yeah, sure. Why would that bother me?"

"Okay. Well, then, come in and get warm. They'll have food. They always do."

The boy moved slowly getting out of the car, as if he was wondering whether he'd made a big mistake. But he followed them up to the house, his steps dragging despite the cold.

Riley introduced himself shyly and tried to draw the boy out about what he liked to eat. Nothing about the boy seemed to surprise or unnerve Riley, who was usually a good judge of character, so Tomas put that worry out of his mind.

He'd sometimes wondered about the rough, angry kids Riley and Justin took in, whether they were putting themselves in danger. So far, although they hadn't been the right fit for every foster kid they'd tried to take in, they'd managed to keep most of them and fit them into their ragtag, jigsaw puzzle family. They were learning about the adoption process, although they knew better than to rush into it. Still, they wanted to adopt, not just foster. They didn't care that most of the kids weren't little and cute anymore. Some of them were dangerously close to aging out of the system, and Riley was adamant that they could be adopted as well, if they wanted to be, if everything went through.

The awkward, miserable teens seemed to transform under Riley's tenderness and Justin's strict but fair rules. Most of them blossomed in the safe and caring environment. There were massive needs — the boys' stories, at least what parts of them Riley felt free to share (which he often didn't), were often heartbreaking enough to make Tomas wonder how they'd managed to survive this long. Riley saw no one as being past hope, past help, or beyond love.

Riley had learned to cook since they first met, when he couldn't make toast without burning it. Now he could fill his house with food — a guaranteed way to make any shifter, or teenage boy, feel ten times more welcome. Justin and Riley had been open to taking in shifter kids in need, and they were qualified to take care of them. So they got a lot of them from a system where shifters were often the least wanted and most feared.

As they approached the house, Tomas could smell chili. The faint smell of its meaty flavors seemed like heaven, slipping out into the cold night to greet them. The boy's stomach growled loudly, but nobody laughed. Riley, who had introduced himself and had learned the boy's name (Asher), said earnestly, "Let's eat before we talk anymore." Nobody argued.

Tomas hadn't meant to stay, but of course he did. The warm, lively house filled with good things to eat and the feeling of family was too hard to leave when the alternative was a cold night of pondering his life and wallowing in sadness. He stayed and ate chili, cornbread, and devil's food cake, and then some s'mores with the kids because Justin wasn't home from work yet, so there was nobody in the house willing to say no to a second dessert.

While Riley got Asher settled into a spare bedroom, and no doubt extracted more information from him than Tomas could have in two years of interrogation without even trying, Riley pitched in and helped with dishes, gratefully received by the boys whose turn it was to handle dish duty. The kids had a lot to say to him, something most people wouldn't have guessed, considering how shy and awkward most of the boys were around strangers. All he had to do was be quiet, and they'd start sharing stuff with him. Of course he wasn't a stranger, either; he was like an uncle, at least according to Riley.

A couple of the boys wanted help with homework, and he only managed to avert a fight by promising to help them by turns. For some reason, Tomas was a hot commodity in the homework department. He thought it was because he always read the assignments aloud for them and then helped, rather than asking them to try to read it by themselves first.

So far, all the foster kids were boys. Problem children, too strong, big, or clumsy to find places easily in other foster homes, many of them bearing the shifter stigma as well. ("Who knows what someone that strong might do?") But Riley and Justin weren't intimidated by big, sullen boys — who never seemed to stay sullen for long under their protection and care.

Sometime later, on his third and last homework session, Tomas was working on English Lit assignment with Carson, whose brow furrowed in concentration as he listened hard to the short story. He gripped a pencil, trying to focus on the themes. His paper was due in two days. Tomas knew he found school particularly frustrating because, although he always tried his best, his best never seemed to be good enough. Life had hit him some hard blows; survival had been top priority for a long, long time. He wasn't up to the grade level he'd been passed through to, and every single thing about school was a struggle for him. Tomas wished he could help take the pressure off the poor kid; the last thing he needed was a heart attack before he turned eighteen.

They were halfway through the reading when Justin got home for the night. Everybody stopped what they were doing. A couple of boys, in the midst of throwing progressively harder objects at each other, froze. A few who'd been working hard abandoned their assignments and thronged Justin. A couple were still small enough to admit to wanting to be picked up. Justin swung them in the air by turns while the older boys hung back, wanting to talk to their dad, wanting to tell him what was happening and get a few moments of his attention for themselves alone. The more talkative kids were already speaking over one another to try to get his attention.

Carson cast Tomas an agonized look, then stared back down at his tablet, where he'd written three words so far.

"Shall I come over tomorrow to help you, then?" Tomas offered.