Page 17 of True North
“I can tell it’s juicy from the look on your face,” Curtis said. “Spill.”
JT sighed. He stared fixedly through the windshield so he wouldn’t have to meet Curtis’s gaze. “Remember how you said he’d be living in my guest room soon?”
“Yeah,” Curtis said, and then, “Holy shit, you really did it.”
“I really did it,” JT admitted. “You don’t have to tell me I’m nuts. I know it’s weird.”
“That’s one word for it, yeah.” From the corner of his eye, JT could see Curtis looking at him, but he didn’t take his eyes off the road. After a moment, Curtis laughed a little and said, “All right, tell me all about it. When did this happen?”
“We talked about it a couple days ago, but last night was the first night he actually spent at the house.” JT decided to leave out the detail about Misha sleeping the night away in his bed. Curtis would definitely take that the wrong way. He finally sacked up enough to glance to his right to check Curtis’s expression. Curtis looked more amused than judgmental, so that was good.
“You must really like this guy,” Curtis said. The creases around his eyes deepened, maybe a little knowingly.
JT could feel the back of his neck heating up. God damn it. “It’s not like that, okay?” It was absolutely not like that in any way. At all. “I’m just trying to help him out. Get him back on his feet.”
“Uh-huh,” Curtis said. “Very charitable. There’s a homeless shelter downtown, you know. They offer a lot of services. I’m sure they’d be happy to help out if you gave them a call.” His playful tone was shifting to seriousness. “This isn’t like taking a clueless rookie under your wing, JT. What happens to this guy when you go back to Toronto? He’s back in the woods right where he started.”
“No, I mean—I’ve thought about that.” JT swallowed. He didn’t want to admit to some of the wilder thoughts he’d had, like letting Misha stay in his house even during the hockey season or—even more damning—taking him back to Toronto. He knew that was crazy. “I’m gonna talk to the local shifters again and see if they’d be able to help him out. You know, find him a job, a cheap place to live. His English isn’t great, but he could probably mow lawns or something.”
“All right,” Curtis said. “I won’t hassle you about this. You can do whatever you want. Just promise me you aren’t thinking with your dick.”
JT tightened his hands around the steering wheel. He regretted ever coming out to Curtis. “I’m absolutely not thinking with my dick.”
“That’s a shame, because I’m not sure what else you’re planning to make decisions with,” Curtis said. “Your brain?”
The teasing meant Curtis was willing to let the subject go, at least for the moment. JT drew a slow breath and deliberately relaxed the tense muscles of his neck and upper back. Curtis might judge him a little, but he wasn’t going to berate or belittle JT for the decisions he made. It was possible JT had kind of developed a complex after years of dealing with the Toronto media.
He put Misha out of his mind during his workout. Skating had always had that effect on him, ever since he was a kid. When he was on the ice, nothing else mattered. He had spent his childhood practicing before school and playing games after, but even with a schedule packed with hockey, he had spent every spare moment playing street hockey with other kids in the neighborhood during the warm months and pond hockey in the winter. As he got older and scouts started to come around more and expectations mounted, he escaped the pressure by driving out to the woods and finding a secluded pond or lake to skate on. Alone with the snow-covered trees and the quiet, cloud-heavy sky overhead, he skated until the only tightness in his chest was from flying across the ice as fast as his feet could carry him.
But, as it always did, reality returned as JT changed out of his gear in the locker room. At the stall beside him, Alex went on and on about some new Twitter meme that JT was obviously too old and out of touch to understand, and JT nodded and laughed and made all the right noises, but he wasn’t really paying attention. He was thinking about Misha that morning, still warm and soft with sleep, and about what it meant that Misha had crawled into his bed.
Probably nothing. The guy was feral. He’d been out in the woods so long he’d forgotten all the norms of human behavior. Or maybe that counted as normal in Russia, for all JT knew.
It probably didn’t. It was probably weird in every human society to sleep all night beside someone you barely knew. It was certainly weird in JT’s society, and probably weird in Misha’s, too. Russia wasn’t on the moon.
He was already tired of thinking about this. What did he hope Misha’s motivation was? He didn’t know, or maybe he knew but wasn’t willing to admit it to himself. It probably wouldn’t happen again, and if it did, JT would worry about it then.
He told Alex and Curtis he needed to run some errands to get out of going to lunch with them, and drove the few blocks to The Ursid. The place was packed as usual at this time of day, but JT was able to find a seat at one end of the bar, wedged between two salt-of-the-earth types dressed in flannel and work boots who didn’t so much as glance up from their plates as he settled on the bar stool. Fine with him; he preferred being ignored to having to sign autographs and make small talk. He appreciated the fans, but the attention got old when he just wanted to eat a meal in peace.
Within a few minutes, the bartender came over to take his order—the same woman he’d talked to before, way back at the beginning of all of this. She was dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans, and wore her hair in a thick braid that fell over one shoulder. Belatedly, JT realized that this was Lenny’s wife, Marie. JT had never spoken to her, but as with Lenny, she was a fixture in the community. Although she wasn’t a shifter, she was deeply embedded in shifter business via Lenny and also did most of the work of running the pub. He was a little embarrassed not to have recognized her before.
“What can I get for you?” she asked, smiling a warm customer-service smile that shifted into something less friendly but more genuine as her gaze slid over his face. “Or are you here about that bear again?”
“Both, actually,” JT said, and Marie’s eyes crinkled, her expression regaining some of the warmth it had lost. “I just finished a hard workout, so what do you recommend for a hungry hockey player?”
“I’ve got just the thing for you,” she said. “You want roasted vegetables on the side or sweet potato fries?”
“I’d better take those roasted vegetables,” JT said, although he’d much prefer the fries. There’d be plenty of time for sweet potato fries during the season, when he struggled at times to keep his weight up. “And a Molson, please.”
“Coming right up,” she said. “Stay after you eat and we’ll talk once this place clears out a little.”
Fine by him. He had no plans until dinner that evening. He sipped his beer and read the news on his phone while he waited for his mystery meal. The other patrons at the bar were a somewhat incongruous mixture of blue-collar types and yuppies, punctuated by a few older guys dressed in golfing gear. Everyone was eating intently and nobody came over to bother him, so he was already pretty happy, and then Marie brought him an entire half of a chicken with the promised vegetables on the side, so big and beautifully roasted that he took a picture to send to Alex and Curtis before he remembered he’d lied to them about his plans.
He ate slowly, savoring every bite and washing down the food with his increasingly room-temperature beer, as the lunch hour drew to a close and the pub emptied out. At the other end of the bar, Marie washed and dried glasses and ignored him so intently that JT began to wonder if she’d forgotten they were going to talk. But at last, the guy seated to JT’s right closed out his tab and left, and as soon as he was out the door, Marie came over to JT with a second pint of Molson and said, “On the house.”
JT could afford a beer, but he knew better than to say that. “Thanks. The food was delicious, by the way.”
“I’ll send your compliments to the chef,” Marie said. She looked him over warily, like she’d had time to think about what he might be here for and wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it. “So. Lenny told me about your last visit, of course. You having problems with that guy?”