“Babe,” Jem said as he turned the subtitles on.
“Right,” Tean said.He collected their plates.“It’s just that the more dominant hyenas actually uselowertones—”
Jem paused the episode.“Come over here so I can wrestle you.”
“You know what?”Tean said.“I’m going to do these dishes.”
All of that was normal.All of that was good.Well, not the wrestling, which Jem enjoyed way too much.
Whatwasn’tgood were the slips.The skids backward.Tean was taking an open box of spaghetti noodles out of the pantry, and for a moment, he saw the cigarette burns on the soles of Rydel Owen’s feet.Or he stooped to collect a ball for Scipio, and he was back in the basement, facing that hunched thing that was sloping toward him.He took out the trash, and the smell put him back in that hallway, with its butcher-shop reek.
Scipio insisted on sleeping between them.
When Tean woke, he called Jem’s name until he got a mumbled “’sup?”
“I’m going out to the living room.”
The noise that followed was a little too mumbly for a proper mm-hmm, but Tean decided to take it for acknowledgement.
He read.And then he tried to read.And then, for a long time, he sat on the sofa in the shrinking darkness of the small hours.Thinking.
The next day, though, the rhythm was off.Tean was still on leave.And Jem, after returning the Subaru, was officially out of a job.Tean tried to make the morning enjoyable.He whipped up a batch of pancakes—according to Jem, his specialty, although Tean insisted there wasn’t anything special about adding water to Krusteaz.Tean even proposed some fun alternatives.They could try milk instead of water.Or what about a little sour cream—wasn’t that a thing people did?Or almond milk!
But Jem always asked for his favorite: Tean’s specialty.
The pancakes turned out perfectly, as usual.Jem fried up bacon and eggs.He poured them each a glass of orange juice because it was, as he put it, basically the same as eating vegetables.They ate.This was what couples dreamed about: a slow start to the day, the luxury of time to make meals together, to eat together, to enjoy each other’s company.They cleaned up together.
And Tean had no idea how people did this without going crazy.
“Go work,” Jem said with a laugh.
“What?”
“You look like you’re going to crawl out of your skin.Go do something.Go play with your chemistry kit.”
“No, this is our time together.”
Jem raised his eyebrows.
“We went through something traumatizing together,” Tean said.“And it was only yesterday.We should be—”
“Watching each other eat pancakes?”
“Supporting each other!”
“Babe, I’m good.Go measure a ferret or whatever.”
“People do measure ferrets, actually.There are all sorts of metrics to evaluate the health of a population, or how environmental changes might be impacting them, or—oh.”
Jem flopped onto the sofa and smirked at him.
“A dick joke, Jem?Really?”
“Life is a dick joke,” Jem told him.And then he started to play on his phone.
Even though Tean was, technically, still on leave, he still had access to his DWR email and cloud storage.In their home office, he finished reading a few reports, made some notes to himself for follow-ups, and checked his calendar to see if he could reschedule a visit to Weber River.He sent Hannah a note about bluehead sucker spawning and started to catch up on the rest of his emails when a quick reply came from Hannah.
You’re on leave!Stop working, or I’ll tell Ed!
