Page 20 of The Barn: Frost and Q

Sixteen

“ B abe? Come look at this.”

Frost had been home a day, and it felt damn good to be back in the lap of luxury. He’d loved being useful out there in the field, training the new crews, but he’d forgotten how gross they got.

Seriously.

He’d had a shower. A gourmet meal. A little tender slap and tickle with Q before getting a damn good night’s sleep in their amazing bed.

Now he was gnawing on a chocolate croissant and reading the Seattle newspaper on his tablet while Q did his morning computer shit.

“What is it?” He rolled to his feet, his sweater flopping back down around his hips. He was kind of freezing and he didn’t really want to go look.

“I wanted to show you.”

So, he humored his hubs and wandered over to peer at the computer screen.

“It’s a dog.” It was, in fact, a relatively large dog, one who looked like maybe a sled husky and Great Pyrenees mix.

He had a goofy, friendly grinning look on his face, and he had a banner over his head that read, “Congratulations, Graduate.”

“Neat. What about…him?”

“Yeah. His name is Yukon.” Q gave him a sideways kind of look. “He’s two years old. He was in the shelter in Ketchikan, and he was pulled out to be trained as an assistance dog. He just graduated as a balance and wheelchair assist dog.”

“Ah.” He got it now. “He looks like a hoot.”

“Yeah. I put an app in on him before he graduated. If we can get there to pick him up, I’m approved.”

“Nice.” He grinned slowly, feeling a little evil. “You don’t want to take the ferry?” The ferry was scenic and took about twenty-one hours.

“It’s an hour to fly…”

“Baby, of course I’ll fly you.”

Q shot him a shit-eating grin. “We’re going to figure this out—the walking. I mean, you’re the money guy.”

“I think we should just hire you a personal assistant. You know, like I have Ender.”

“Ender would never work for me.”

“Or walk a dog. Which is what you need. Someone to walk the dog and deal with anything you need as far as errands, coffee, paperwork. Mostly the walking, though. There are lots of people who could use the work, the safety net.”

It actually made sense to him. Rather than go to all the work to build a dog run, or Q having to deal with coming down from the fourth floor ten times a day. They could totally bring in an assistant. Maybe a little pool of assistants, something for all of them to share.

He tilted his head. “Now this is an idea.”

Q blinked at him. “Okay…”

“No, seriously, hear me out. What if we hired a pool of assistants? Three or four guys. And they would be available twenty-four/seven. I mean, one of them would be, for any one of us.”

“Oh, I see, so we’d have to find a little herd of them is what you’re saying?

A pod of people who wanted to do this job.

You get room and board; you have a salary.

That’s cool.” Quentin wrinkled his nose as he thought, and it was so damn cute.

“If there were four of them… I don’t know.

We’d have to do the math. Can you do some quick math? You’re the money person.”

“Okay… Well at forty hours a week, we’d need four point two people.” That was some mental mathematic gymnastics.

“I love those point two types…”

Frost glared at Q, who chuckled.

“So we get either four full-time and one part-time, or?—”

“We just hire five full-time people and work out their schedules. That way, you’re covered night, weekends, you know, all the time.” It didn’t have to be hard.

“What if they’re doing something for someone else?” Q was always coming with problems.

“Well, then maybe you have to walk your own dog, or maybe we have a rider who says the dog gets priority. Or maybe we just call down and ask if there’s someone available with the staff who could do it real quick.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I can walk my own dog. I love this idea of my own dog.”

“Yeah, but more than that, I just like the idea of you researching a dog and agreeing to be out and about.” Frost smiled at Q, who nodded.

“It was time to rejoin the workforce, so to speak, I guess. I mean, I don’t know.”

Frost thought he did know, but there was no sense in arguing.

“Let’s go do it then.” It didn’t matter the whys of this. What mattered was that it had happened, and Frost was going with it.

“You sure you don’t mind? I know you just got home.”

Frost rolled his eyes. “Oh, it’s a hardship, I tell you. I dread flying.”

“You’re such a fucker.”

Frost stared. “Do you kiss your momma with that mouth?”

“Nope.” Q held his gaze. “But you? Yeah, I totally do.” Quentin stopped as if he’d just thought of something. “Did you know that Boone called me the worst sub ever?”

Frost only had to think about that for a second. “Totally tracks. Totally. You’re like the pushiest, brattiest, topping from below son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”

“And you love it,” Q said.

“Every second.” He stole a hard kiss. “So is this just a meet the dog or are we bringing the dog back? In other words, do I need to arrange food and bed and stuff?”

“This is me you’re talking about, Frost.” Ah, he knew that look.

“Food, bed, bowls—you’ve already got them all ordered. They’re probably waiting downstairs.”

“No, they’re already up here, you just didn’t notice them last night.”

“Cool. Well, get on that hiring process and try not to take subs from the guest list, please, because I don’t want to have to pay them and lose the money that they pay to come here.” Frost gave Q a cocky grin.

“Jesus, you’re such a picky bitch.”

Frost nodded. “I am, but I do have a bottom line.”

Q reached out and patted his butt. “And a cute bottom line, it is.”

He rolled his eyes, but the touch pleased him, to the bone. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. So why did you pick this one?”

He wanted to put on some real clothes and his boots. He needed to file a flight plan and make sure the guys didn’t need anything, all that happy crappy.

Q followed him, wheeling along. “I watched a lot of videos. There was something about his smile. And, you know, it’s chillier up here than it is down in Seattle, so I wanted him to be fuzzy.”

“No Chihuahua balance dogs, got it.” The visual made him snort, though. “Can you imagine?”

Q tossed his hair and grabbed a heavy sweatshirt. “Well, no, because that’s not a thing. But, okay?—”

Frost looked to Q and shook his head. “That’s a terrible thought.”

“I know. I didn’t have it. You did. You’re to blame.” Q stripped off his ratty sweater, baring that gorgeous belly. “If I find myself a giant throwback balance Chihuahua, though, he’s coming to live here. You’ll just have to buy him a big coat.”

“I think I’d rather get you a baby bear.”

Q’s eyes lit up, and Frost shook his head.

“No, no, no, no, no. I was joking. That was not a real thing. Bears are not friends. Bears are not pets. Baby bears belong with their moms out in the wilderness.”

“We live in the wilderness.”

“You live on the fourth floor,” Frost shot back.

Quentin pursed his lips for a second, then grinned. “Bears like to climb. If the baby bear climbed up the mountain and into my window…”

“Stop it. I’m getting your dog. The fuzzy one. And I’m getting you an entire staff to deal with the dog. No bears.”

“Okay, no bears.” There was a pregnant pause. “In the house.”

“Ugh.” He chuckled. “You are a hell of a bargainer.”

“What can I say? You actually taught me all that. I never had enough money to bargain for shit.”

He chuckled, and for the first time, he didn’t flinch at the mention of the money, which had been the damn devil in the first place. He managed to grin over it now.

“Shit, baby, you know I ate ramen noodles for years.”

“I do. And now look at us. You can hire four and a fraction assistants and round it up to five.”

“I can.” He texted the other guys to see if they wanted a pickup, then called in to say he was filing a flight plan. By the time he had it all arranged, Q had a go bag out for each of them.

“Just in case?”

“Yeah. You haven’t filed the return plan yet. I thought we could meet him today and pick him up tomorrow. Have a night at a hotel and go to supper at the Bush Pilot.”

“I’ll make reservations.” Frost knew what a big deal this was. A huge deal. This wasn’t just going to get a dog. This was going to a nice restaurant in Ketchikan where they might see another pilot or two that they knew, since the place did like a dinner and a tour package.

“Cool.” Q said it with elaborate casualness.

“What brought this on?” he asked, keeping it offhand as well.

“I figure you went back to work because I asked. I can go out in public.”

“That’s amazing, baby.” He stopped to take a kiss. “What do you need?”

“Carry the bags? I need to grab my arm crutches, just in case.”

“You got it.” He wasn’t about to argue, and he was going to get this show on the road before Q changed his mind. He knew it was a little harder for Q to get into the float plane, but they had a decent dock, and a good attendant, so they would make it happen.

He was going to take his husband out to supper and maybe get laid before they welcomed a dog into their lives.

That was a pretty damn good trade.

“We have a reservation for two for Kelly,” Frost told the host, smiling some. He looked damn handsome all cleaned up in a fisherman’s knit sweater and dark jeans, his hair brushed back off his forehead instead of kind of all over the place.

Quentin felt a bit dumpy by comparison in loose khakis and a pair of henleys, one over the other, but it was comfortable, and he prioritized that these days.

“Would you like one of our more accessible tables, or is a regular one okay?” she asked.

Q grinned a little, because that was delicately phrased. He was in his chair, even though the restaurant was on a float plane dock. It had been easy enough to arrange. “Wherever there’s room for me.”

“Oh, we have plenty of options.” She grabbed some menus and led them way back. “Do you want something by the windows. It’s still shoulder season for the whales.”