“No, of course. W— I’ll be right there. I’ll locate Crue and bring him along too.”
“You do that.” The sheriff hung up.
I set the receiver in the cradle and turned to where Micah was lounging, gloriously naked, in my bedroom doorway. “The sheriff wants us to do our paperwork.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Not my top choice right now, but we want Chuck in jail, so we’d better go.”
“We can’t both fit in the tub, but my showerhead’s pretty feeble. Only one of us would get wet.”
“Seems like a problem a handyman might be able to do something about?” Micah grinned at me.
A vision came to me of fixing up the cabin to be shared. Of a big double bed and my twin moved into the storeroom to keep up appearances. Of a second showerhead, a better couch that didn’t sag in the middle, another big towel on the rail so Micah wasn’t limited to the small ones. That vision felt like a fantasy, but the way Micah’s grin softened to a gentle smile suggested he might be sharing that dream with me.
I said, “Your job, though.”
He tilted his head. “A shower ismyjob?”
“No. Sorry. Got ahead of myself. I meant, I want that. You and me here enough to be worth six showerheads over the tub.”
“Six? You planning an orgy?”
“I was exaggerating.” I frowned at him. “But you love your work, and that means traveling the country, maybe the world.” Almost every day, in the downtime between jobs and meals and all, Micah had taken his camera into the woods or up the hiking trail to the top of Cresent Butte. This little slice of Wyoming wouldn’t satisfy him long.
“Maybe we could set up a darkroom here. A bunch of my time is spent developing and printing, cropping and choosing which photos to submit. Packing up prints and negatives to mail.” He looked around. “The storeroom isn’t in much use.”
“We’d need to keep a bedroom for you, not to look suspicious.”
“Ah, sure. An outbuilding then? That’d keep the smell of the chemicals out of the house. We’d need to heat it so the liquids didn’t freeze.”
Micah talking practical solutions made me shiver with hope. “You really want this? Staying here, with me?”
“I really do.” He started to come toward me, then glanced at my uncurtained front windows. “Hang on. I’m not doing this naked.”
“I like you naked.” I couldn’t believe my own boldness. Except I’d had his dick in my mouth, and he’d had mine. Avoiding boldness had gone right out the window.
“And you shall have me. But not when the sheriff’s waiting for us and you could have a customer show up. You shower, I’ll wash, and then we can talk on the drive.”
I wanted to argue, to make sure we had all the important words said, right now. But Micah made a lot of sense.
So I took the fastest shower known to man, the water temperature going up and down as Micah washed himself right on the other side of the shower curtain. We dressed in my bedroom in silence and then walked out to the truck. Micah had left the keys in the ignition and he got into the passenger side, leaning over to touch the keyring. “Hope that was okay. I’ve been places where leaving the keys in a car would get it stolen in thirty seconds flat.”
“I guess you’ve seen more of the world than I have. In peacetime, anyhow.”
“Probably. Would you ever want to travel with me?”
I thought about travel as I steered down the drive and onto the road. Part of me found the idea exciting, but more of me was settled in this place, my home, my territory. For all that I had no pack, I felt protective of this pretty valley and the foothills and mountains around it. Hedging, I asked, “What would you want to show me if we did?”
“Africa, maybe? Did your war take you there?”
“Rabat. Guarding POWs. Didn’t see much of Morocco before we were shipped out, though.”
“I’d take you on a safari, a lot farther south. Elephant, leopards, lions.” He laughed. “Somewhere back in my storage unit, I have rolls of film of two very homosexual male lions. Had to stay well downwind but I got the pictures.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. Big pride, and those two were obsessed with each other. There was an Alpha lion— or whatever they’re called— a male who mated most of the females. And one of the two queer males would go after a female in heat now and then, though the Alpha sometimes warned him off. But the other male, the one who topped, he only wanted this blond-maned buddy of his. I took pics, but I never tried to sell them anywhere.” He glancedat me. “Shows how natural this is, though, right? One male like you, one like me, having sex.”
“And the top lion didn’t want females.” I gripped the wheel tighter, wanting to ask… not wanting to ask… “Have you ever thought about… that?”
