Bruce frowned. “You’ve fought Monty Python killer rabbits?”
Laddin’s lips curved into a ghost of smile. “No. Normal, everyday kind of bunnies living out their lives in the woods.”
“And they attacked?” Bruce couldn’t picture it.
“No. They were normal rabbits.” He blew out a breath. “I ate them. We were running as a pack, doing something. I smelled them, dug around until they came hopping out, and then I….”
Ate them. Right. What the hell was he supposed to say about that? “Wolves will be wolves?”
Laddin shrugged. “Something like that. The thing is, I wasn’t really popular as a kid.” He held up his weird hand. “It was hard to play ball well with this. I managed okay and I had friends, but for baseball or basketball, I couldn’t be as good as the other guys. Even video games had extra challenges.”
And boys that age were all about sports. “No good at soccer?” He wouldn’t have needed good hands for that.
“Not good enough, and believe me, I tried. I never made it onto any high school sports teams.”
That was weird because Laddin seemed all about the pack. Unless…. “That’s why you keep talking about the pack. About how you love running around as wolves. It’s your team sport.”
Laddin nodded. “It’s the best. Sometimes, there’s a goal—find something, hunt something, I don’t know. But we’re all together, part of a pack even though we’re doing separate things.”
A team. And when a team worked well, there was nothing better. “A good firehouse is like that too. It works whether we’re fighting fires or hanging out eating barbeque.” But how did the rabbits fit in?
“I never had that as a kid. Not after peewee football ended. It was just my mom and me, and sometimes my grandmother.” He rolled his shoulders back and lifted up off his knees enough to look at Bruce. “Except for my mom’s rabbits in her lab. I would go there after school and she’d let me play with them. When I was really little, I used to fall asleep in a pen with three or four of them hopping around. And when I grew older, I would talk to them. If Mama was busy, I’d tell them about my homework, I’d practice my speeches.” He closed his eyes. “I told them I was gay before I told Mama.”
The rabbits had been his friends, his confidantes, and his pack. Lab animals who probably had a doomed life, but Laddin hadn’t cared. They were there for him when his mother was too busy. “Then you ate wild rabbits as a wolf?”
“Yeah.” He looked up, his expression haunted. “Bruce, they tasted fantastic.”
What a mind-fuck that had to be. “Finding it hard to reconcile the two? Childhood bunnies with—”
“Romping through the woods with my pack and eating whatever hopped into view. Yeah.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah. And then today I was nearly killed by pixies. Cute little fairies that are on cereal boxes and children’s books. Those fuckers nearly did me in.”
And in a pretty awful way.
Laddin closed his eyes. “I can’t wrap my mind around it.” He dropped his forehead onto his arms again. “And now I can’t go outside because I’ll see the field. I’ll look out there and—”
“Remember?”
Laddin’s answer was a shudder. Bruce could relate. He was very grateful to have his back turned to that circle of doom where he’d been pinned down. He wasn’t looking at it, but he sure as hell knew it was there.
Bruce pulled up everything he knew about Laddin. They’d talked a little, shared about their before-werewolf jobs and lives.
“You’re an explosives expert, right? I bet your work area was meticulous. Everything in its place, everything under control.”
Laddin rolled his head until he was looking at Bruce. “Yeah. It’s demolitions. Careless people get killed. Disorganized people lose body parts.”
“We’re taught the same thing in the fire academy. Everything in its place. Everyone doing their job. Protocol, procedure.”
He stroked Laddin’s cheek. It wasn’t something he thought deeply about. He just wanted to touch the guy more than shoulder to shoulder. So he caressed the hard angles and rough five-o’clock shadow, then let his thumb roll over the man’s lips. He felt the fullness of it and the texture. Soft. Rough. Wet.
His dick jumped in hunger.
“It all goes to shit in the field,” Bruce said. “Not the protocols, of course, though that sometimes happens too. I mean the logic, the organization. The whole fucking system sometimes. We scramble to do what needs to be done, and after it’s over, we put it back together. Hoses where they belong. Equipment cleaned and reset. Supplies refilled, bandages restocked, and everything in its place.”
Laddin exhaled. “I worked on movies. If something went to shit, it was because someone fucked up. The demolitions were under control, the actors were only pretending to get blown to hell. And we didn’t have to put shit back together because I made sure it didn’t break in the first place.”
